Palace of Mirrors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Palace of Mirrors

  Also by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  THE MISSING SERIES

  Book 1: Found

  Book 2: Sent

  Book 3: Sabotaged

  THE SHADOW CHILDREN SERIES

  Among the Hidden

  Among the Impostors

  Among the Betrayed

  Among the Barons

  Among the Brave

  Among the Enemy

  Among the Free

  Dexter the Tough

  Say What?

  Because of Anya

  The Girl with 500 Middle Names

  Claim to Fame

  Uprising

  Escape From Memory

  Takeoffs and Landings

  Turnabout

  Just Ella

  Leaving Fishers

  Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey

  Double Identity

  The House on the Gulf

  Running Out of Time

  Palace of Mirrors

  By

  Margaret Peterson Haddix

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is

  stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither

  the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real

  locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products

  of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or

  locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  Book design by Chloë Foglia • The text for this book is set in Cremona.

  Manufactured in the United States of America • OFF 0110

  First Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers paperback edition February 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Haddix, Margaret Peterson.

  Palace of Mirrors / by Margaret Peterson Haddix.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Cecilia has always known she is the true princess of

  Suala, but when she and her best friend, Harper, decide to speed up her ascendancy

  to the throne, they find danger and many imposters who challenge her claim.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-3915-3 (hc)

  [1. Princesses—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction.

  4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Orphans—Fiction. 6. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H1164 Pal 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007034090

  ISBN 978-1-4424-0667-4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-0250-8 (eBook)

  For

  Hannah, Jenna, and Megan

  1

  Somewhere in the world I have a tiara in a little box. It is not safe for me to wear it. It is not safe for me to know where it is. It is not safe for me even to tell anyone who I really am.

  But I know—I have always known. Perhaps Nanny Gratine sang my secret to me in hushed lullabies when I was a tiny, squalling creature. Perhaps Sir Stephen began his weekly visits even in my first months, and whispered into my ear when it was no bigger than an acorn, “You are the true princess. We will protect you. We will keep you safe until the evil ones are vanquished and the truth can be revealed. . . .”

  I can almost picture him kneeling before my cradle, his white beard gleaming in the candlelight, his noble face almost completely hidden by the folds of a peasant’s rough, hooded cloak. This is how he always comes to visit us—in disguise.

  I am in disguise too. I think if I had not known the truth about myself from the beginning, it would be hard to believe. To everyone else in the village I am just another barefoot girl who carries buckets of water from the village well, hangs her laundry on the bushes, hunts berries and mushrooms and greens in the woods. Nobody knows how I study at night, turning over the thin pages of Latin and Greek, examining the gilded pictures of kings and queens—my ancestors—as if staring could carry me into the pictures too. Sometimes, looking at the pictures, I can almost feel the silk gowns rustling around my ankles, the velvet cloaks wrapped around my shoulders, the gleaming crown perched upon my head. It is good that Nanny Gratine has no mirror in her cottage, because then I would be forced to see that none of that is real. I have patches on my dress, a holey shawl clutched over the dress, a threadbare kerchief tying back my hair. This is strange. This is wrong. What kind of princess wears rags? What kind of kingdom has to keep its own royalty hidden?

  I don’t know why, but ever since I turned fourteen, questions like that have been multiplying in my mind, teeming like water bugs in the pond after a strong rain. Last night, as Sir Stephen was giving me my next reading assignment in Duties and Obligations of Royal Personages, a thought occurred to me that was so stunning and bizarre I nearly fell off my stool.

  I gasped, and the words were out of my mouth before I had time to remember Rule Three of the Royal Code. (“One must consider one’s utterances carefully, as great importance is attached to every syllable that rolls from a royal’s tongue.”) Even though I know that the Great Zedronian War was started by a king who said, “Dost thou take me for a fool? Art thou a fool thyself?” when he should have hemmed and hawed and waited to speak until he could find a wiser way of expressing himself, I still blurted out without thinking, “Great galleons and grindelsporks! Are you her teacher, too?”

  Sir Stephen scratched thoughtfully at his chin, setting off tremors in the lustrous curls of his beard.

  “Eh? What’s that?” he said, blinking his wise old eyes at me several times before finally adding, “Whose teacher?”

  Sir Stephen is entirely too good at following Rule Three of the Royal Code, even though he’s only a knight, not royalty.

  But then I hesitated myself, because I’m always loath to speak the name. I stared down at my hands folded in my lap and whispered, “Desmia’s.”

  Desmia is the fake princess, the one who wears my royal gowns, the one who sits on my royal throne—the one who’s saving my royal life.

  Sir Stephen did not reply until I gathered the nerve to raise my head and peer back up at him again.

  “And why would I be Desmia’s teacher?” he asked, raising one grizzled eyebrow. He wasn’t going to make this any easier for me than conjugating Latin verbs, solving geometry proofs, or memorizing the principle exports of Xeneton.

  “Because you know how to train royalty, and—”

  “She’s not royalty,” Sir Stephen said patiently.

  “But she’s pretending to be, and if she has to keep up appearances, to throw
off and confuse the enemy—then doesn’t she have a tutor too?”

  I cannot remember when I found out about Desmia, any more than I can remember when I found out about myself. Perhaps, by my cradleside, Sir Stephen also crooned, “And don’t worry that your enemies will ever find you. They won’t even look because we’ve placed a decoy on the throne, a fake, a fraud, an impostor. If the evil ones ever try to harm Desmia, we will find them out; we will roust them. And then we can reveal your existence, and the kingdom will ring with gladness, to have its true princess back, safe and unscathed. . . .”

  When I was younger I used to playact the ceremony I planned to have for the girl Desmia when the enemy was gone and the truth came to light. I’d play both roles, out in the cow pasture: kneeling and humble as Desmia, standing on the wooden fence to attain proper royal stature when I switched to playing myself.

  “I, Princess Cecilia Aurora Serindia Marie, do hereby proclaim my gratitude to the commoner Desmia, for all the kingdom to see,” I’d intone solemnly, balanced on the fence rails.

  Then I’d scramble down and bow low (though keeping a watch out so that neither my knees nor my forehead landed in a cowpat).

  “Oh, Princess,” I’d squeak out, as Desmia. “It is I who ought to be thanking you, for allowing me the chance to serve my kingdom, to ensure your safety. I have wanted nothing more than your safe return to the throne.”

  Back to the fence rail. Back to my royal proclamation voice.

  “It is a fortunate ruler who has such loyal subjects. In honor of your service, I grant you a tenth of the royal treasury,” I’d say. Sometimes the reward was “land on the Calbrenian coast” or “my best knight’s hand in marriage” or “the services of your favorite dressmaker for a year.” But somehow it never sounded right. What was the proper reward for someone who had risked her life to save mine? What was the proper reward for someone who’d already gotten to wear silks and satins while I wore rags, who’d gotten to feast on every delicacy in the kingdom while I ate porridge and gruel, who’d slept in a castle while I slept on a mat on the floor? Wasn’t it reward enough that she’d gotten to live the life that was rightfully mine?

  Last night, when I asked Sir Stephen if he was Desmia’s tutor too, he finally shook his head and said, “Of course I’m not Desmia’s tutor. She doesn’t need to learn the same lessons as you.”

  It was a perfectly clear answer—straightforward and to the point. But it left me wanting more. Long after Sir Stephen had shifted into a lecture on the Eight Principles of Royal Governance, I was still thinking of more questions. Then who is her tutor? What lessons does she learn? And, most of all, When? When will we trade lives? When will I ever get to use all this nonsense I’m learning?

  When will my real life begin?

  2

  I’m awakened by a cry down the lane: “Cecilia! Eely-eel-yuh! Time to go!”

  Even yanked from deepest sleep, I know instantly that it’s Harper calling for me—Harper, my best friend. I’d like to say that he’s the only person who calls me Eely-eel-yuh (or Eels, Eelsy, or the Eel-Eyed Wonder) but alas, the nickname has caught on in the village. And no, I don’t look anything like an eel. I don’t think.

  When I don’t rush out of the cottage instantly, Harper takes to pounding on the door.

  “Eelsy, come on! Sun’s almost up. The fish are biting now!”

  Laughing, Nanny Gratine slides my fishing pole into my hand.

  “Best go on,” she says. “Before he wakes the entire kingdom.”

  “But—”

  I’m thinking breakfast would be a good idea, maybe along with a good long spell sitting at the table over a mug of Nanny’s herb tea. As if she’s read my mind, she bustles over to the kitchen table and begins bundling chunks of oat bread into a kerchief. She ties it firmly and slips the knot over the end of my fishing pole.

  “There,” she says. “Everything you need.”

  Harper’s still pounding at the door.

  “Can’t you wait a blessed moment, until I’m dressed?” I holler. And then I blush. A year ago—maybe even a month ago—I could have yelled that at Harper and neither of us would have thought a thing of it. But now . . . well, at times like this, sometimes I actually remember that he’s a boy and I’m a girl and those are different things. I don’t need Sir Stephen around to tell me that a true princess shouldn’t be discussing her state of undressedness with a peasant boy.

  I spring out of bed and lean the fishing pole against the wall long enough to exchange my nightgown for the simple shift and apron that pass for my day clothes. I grab the fishing pole again, accept a good-bye kiss from Nanny, and jerk the door open fast enough to surprise Harper mid-knock.

  “Took you long enough!” he growls. “I could have caught fifty fish in the time it took you to put on that dress.”

  “Oh, yeah? And if you’re that good at fishing, how come you have to sit there all day, sometimes, just to catch one?” I spit back.

  Somehow, now that we’re face to face, that whole boy-girl thing doesn’t seem weird at all anymore. Harper is just Harper again. Even if I’d never touched a geometry book in my life (as everyone thinks I’ve never touched a geometry book in my life), I still would say that Harper is all angles: jutting cheekbones and ears, his pointy elbows and knees sticking out of his tattered sleeves and pants. And he’s got freckles sprinkled across his face, freckles the same sandy color as his hair, as if he dunked his whole head in the pond and the silt stuck everywhere.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice?” Harper says wistfully, as we start off down the overgrown, brambly path that leads from Nanny Gratine’s cottage down to the pond.

  “Wouldn’t what be nice?” I ask absentmindedly. We’re at the point in the path where there’s a break in the bushes, and I’m watching the mist rise over the meadow, a mysterious glow in the dim light of near dawn.

  “To spend a whole day doing nothing but fishing.”

  “Maybe we could do that sometime,” I offer. “I could ask Nanny to let me out of chores for one day.”

  “I couldn’t,” Harper says. He kicks angrily at a rock in the path. “You know. Mam would never let me miss harp practice.”

  Harper’s name isn’t just a name. It’s his destiny, his mother’s hopes for him, his one chance to live a long life. There’s a war on—there’s been some sort of war going on in our kingdom forever, it seems—and Harper’s father was called away for soldiering before Harper was even born. When the king’s men came to tell Harper’s mother that her husband was dead, she grabbed one of them by his velvet coat and demanded, “And how is it that you live? How can any man survive in this land of killing?”

  The story goes that the man sputtered out, “I—I’m just a court musician. They don’t send court musicians into battle.”

  So her plan was hatched. Nobody knows how she got the harp, or how she learned to play so she could teach Harper. I do know there is harp music at every soldier’s funeral in the village. And ever since Harper was old enough to stand, he’s had to practice every day. The older he gets, the longer his mother makes him play. Practice time for him is all afternoon nowadays, from the noon meal until it’s time to get the family cow from the meadow.

  And of course what Harper dreams of, what he longs for and plans for and aches for, is . . .

  To be a soldier.

  “Fish don’t bite well after noon anyhow,” I tell Harper helpfully, though I don’t really know this. By afternoon I’m always helping Nanny scrub out her pots or beating laundry on the rocks by the stream or gathering eggs from our chickens or doing one of the other million chores that make up my days.

  Harper gives me a little shove.

  “Fish would bite well for me,” he says. “You’re just not ever quiet enough.”

  “Am too!”

  “Are not!”

  I giggle and run ahead of him, splashing through puddles and ducking under branches.

  “See—that’s just what I mean!” Harper shouts behind me. �
�You’re going to scare every fish in the pond!”

  I stop suddenly, not because Harper’s yelling at me, but because there’s a shadow across the path, in the exact spot where there should be a clearing. The shadow darts away, mixing with other shadows, like someone dodging behind a tree.

  “What’s wrong?” Harper says, catching up with me. “Goose walk across your grave?”

  “Hush,” I whisper. I tiptoe over to the clump of trees, gather my nerve, and peek through the leaves. It’s dark and dusky behind the trees, so I have to creep farther from the path, farther into the woods, just to see anything. I’m looking for a different kind of shadow now, not like a man standing tall and proud, but one small and squat, a man crouching and hiding. . . .

  Suddenly a dog leaps out at me, three of his muddy paws skidding down my dress, the other one striking me square in the face. The dog whimpers and howls and runs off toward the village.

  Harper falls to the ground laughing.

  “That—was—so—funny! You—should—have—seen—your—face!” he manages to say, between guffaws.

  I spit out mud, snort mud from my nostrils.

  “I’ll get you for this!” I yell, whipping back branches, finally getting a good view behind the tree.

  There’s nobody there.

  “Eelsy!” Harper laughs, still rolling on the ground. “The dog went thataway. Better start running if you’re going to get him!”

  “I don’t mean the dog,” I say, with as much dignity as I can muster with mud caked on my nose and lips. “Somebody threw that dog out at me.”

  “You’re crazy,” Harper says. “Who’d throw a dog? That was Pugsy, Jasper Creech’s dog—you know, that big cowardly mutt? Pugsy probably just saw his own shadow, and got jumpy. Or, no—I know—maybe he saw a skunk, and now you’re going to get sprayed, and—”

  “It’s physically impossible for a dog to jump in that manner,” I say frostily. “He was thrown. Flung.”

  “But why?” Harper asks. “Why would anybody do that?”

  Because my enemies found out where I am. They’re lurking around, waiting to kill me. But the moment wasn’t right, so they just wanted to get away without being seen.