Palace of Mirrors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I remember a long, long time ago when Nanny and Sir Stephen had an argument about me. I can close my eyes and relive the awful feeling of listening to the two most important adults in my life fighting above my head. It all began because Sir Stephen arrived early for his weekly visit, and Nanny and I weren’t waiting at our cottage.

  “Where have you been?” Sir Stephen demanded, as soon as we stepped through the door. “I was beginning to believe that our enemies had found the princess, found her and carried her away. . . .”

  “We were in the village, buying flour,” Nanny said, giving him a glare that even I, a little child, could read: Don’t go talking about Cecilia being carried away when she’s standing right here listening! Do you want to give the girl nightmares? Nanny plopped the sack of flour onto the table, and it sent up a puff of white, which then settled back over the sack and the table and Nanny’s skirt like snow.

  I wanted to say that I wouldn’t have nightmares—that I knew they would keep me safe. But I was distracted by Sir Stephen’s reaction. He was clutching his heart in alarm.

  “You took the princess with you?” he asked in such a horrified voice that I wondered if there were some rule about princesses avoiding flour, just like there was about princesses not being allowed to fidget or twirl their hair around their fingers or yawn without covering their mouths. Back then Sir Stephen had only begun teaching me about what it meant to be royal.

  “You let the villagers know the princess is here?” he raged. “You let them see her?”

  “What would you have me do?” Nanny shot back, her voice nearly as sharp as his. “Leave her alone in the cottage while I’m out? A young girl like her, curious about fire, curious about the bottles on my shelves?” It was true—I was curious about everything, especially the bottles of herb potions and tonics and cures lined up around the cottage like jewels behind glass.

  “I know not to touch your bottles!” I defended myself shrilly. Both of the adults ignored me.

  “Can’t you just stay home?” Sir Stephen asked, almost pleadingly.

  “Aye, if you hire me a man to bring me foodstuffs and other goods from the village, to bring in the cow from the pasture and such like—surely there’s a knight you can spare for that,” Nanny Gratine replied, her tone cutting even though this was a funny thought. A knight couldn’t go after the cow, I thought. He might step in a cowpat! Wouldn’t that make his armor rusty?

  Sir Stephen furrowed his caterpillar eyebrows together, missing the humor.

  “Of course we don’t have a knight to spare for that. Knights don’t do chores for peasant women.” He shook his head disdainfully. “That’d be like hanging a sign on your door: ‘This place isn’t what it seems. The princess is here.’ It’s the same reason we can’t risk posting a guard here, because people would notice. I thought you could keep Cecilia safe and out of sight—your cottage is so perfectly remote, apart from every other human habitation. That’s why we chose you.”

  “And was that the only reason?” Nanny asked, with a fury I didn’t understand. “Would you have let any slattern raise the princess, as long as her cottage was isolated? Do you care how Cecilia turns out, as long as she can stay alive and look the part and curtsy properly and spout the right genteel phrases?”

  “I—,” Sir Stephen tried to interrupt, but Nanny wasn’t finished.

  “You would have a princess sit upon the throne who doesn’t know anything about her kingdom? Who doesn’t know her own people? Who’s never had a friend—or been a friend? Who doesn’t care about anyone but herself?” Nanny asked. “Is that what you want?”

  Sir Stephen blinked.

  “What do the villagers know about Cecilia?” he asked, sidestepping her questions. “Who do they think she is?”

  “They think she’s just an ordinary orphan child I’ve taken in,” Nanny said. “Plenty of orphans in the kingdom nowadays.”

  Her dark blue eyes dared Sir Stephen to argue with that. But he backed away.

  “Well, then,” he mumbled, looking down at the dirt floor of our cottage. “No harm in that, then, I suppose.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of harm in children growing up without their parents,” Nanny said, still angry. “Plenty of harm in all your murderous wars, leaving widows and orphans in their wake—”

  “That’s enough,” Sir Stephen said sharply. “Princess Cecilia, you will open your book and begin reviewing your letters. Now.”

  But I’d been infected with some of Nanny’s fury. I didn’t understand everything they were saying—I’m not even sure I remember it all correctly now, or if I’ve melded this argument in my mind with other opinions they’ve expressed, other times. But I understood enough. I knew what Sir Stephen wanted to take away from me.

  I pushed back the book he handed me, and it skidded across the table, coming to rest against the flour sack, getting showered with its own dusting of white.

  “If I don’t go to the village, I can’t see Harper!” I said stoutly. “And he’s my friend! You can’t stop me from being friends with Harper!”

  Back then our friendship consisted of dropping pebbles in puddles together, scratching out pictures in the frost on the village store window, making faces at each other while Harper’s mam and Nanny shopped. But I already knew Harper was worth fighting for.

  Nanny and Sir Stephen laughed off my defiance.

  “Aye, she’s a true princess, all right,” Nanny said, her own anger gone. “Already trying to boss us around!”

  Now, as I bite down on an unyielding sliver of fish—oops, left some scales on that one—I turn over a new question in my mind. If I was willing to defy Sir Stephen when I was five, just for the chance to drop pebbles into puddles with Harper, what am I willing to do to save our friendship now?

  Am I willing to tell him the truth?

  I carefully remove the fish scales from my mouth and glance across the table to see if Nanny has somehow noticed that I’m contemplating the ultimate disobedience. But Nanny isn’t watching me. She’s watching the door, then the window, then the door again, her eyes darting back and forth. There’s a faint rustle outside—a squirrel stepping on a twig, maybe, or the wind blowing branches against the thatch of the roof—and she leans forward, her eyes narrowed, her hand cupped against her ear. She sees me watching her, and puts her hand down. She attempts a laugh.

  “I’m an easily spooked old woman tonight,” she says. “I’m sure that was just Dancer brushing up against the wall.”

  Dancer’s “barn” is just a little shed attached to our cottage, so that’s certainly another explanation.

  “Why?” I ask. “Why are you easily spooked tonight?”

  For a moment I think she’s going to tell me. Her eyes meet mine, and they’re so deep and wise and kind that I can tell she regrets keeping secrets from me. But she shakes her head.

  “You’ll understand when you’re my age,” she says. “Old women like me—we’ve seen too much. We worry too much.”

  “But what if I want to understand now?” I ask. “What if I need to understand now, for my own safety?”

  I am proud that I’ve managed to keep my voice level. I may not sound imperial and queenly, but I think maybe I sound like an adult, calm and rational.

  Nanny rewards me with a half smile.

  “If you needed to know, I’d tell you,” she says. “But you don’t, so . . .” She reaches across the table, clasps my hands between her own. “Stay a child. Enjoy your daydreams and wishes, your fun and games . . . Sir Stephen and I can do the worrying about your safety.”

  Nanny’s hands are soft and warm and comforting. I can remember a thousand times she’s soothed away my fevers with those hands, wiped away my tears, held me and hugged me and calmed me. But right now her hands feel like a cage, overly confining. I jerk mine back, and I’m ready to scream out angrily, But I’m not a child anymore! Stop treating me like a little girl!

  Just then something else happens. The door bursts open, shoved so hard that it sl
ams back against the wall. Both Nanny and I jump up. I’m casting about for a suitable weapon to use to defend myself—the fish knife’s too far away; would the stew pot do in a pinch, slammed down over somebody’s head? Then I hear Nanny say, in a puzzled voice, “Nobody’s there. It was just the wind.”

  Both of us rush over to stand in the doorway. A strong breeze tugs at us, teasing my hair loose from my kerchief, sending Nanny’s apron strings dancing behind her. But this isn’t exactly a gale-force wind. The door has withstood much stronger gusts before; it’s held tight against storms when the rain slashed sideways, beating ceaselessly against the wood.

  Nanny seems to be thinking along the same lines.

  “But why . . . ?” she murmurs. She reaches up for the leather latch we’ve always used to fasten the door at night. It fits tightly over a wooden peg near the top of the door. I remember feeling very proud when I was first tall enough to reach the peg, when Nanny trusted me enough to fasten the door at night all by myself. Now Nanny yanks the leather latch away from the wall.

  “Ah,” she says, sounding artificially cheerful. “It’s just that the latch broke. I should have known it was getting too old and worn.”

  She crumples the leather in her hand, but not before I’ve gotten a good look at it. The latch isn’t stretched and worn at all. It’s shiny and fairly new, and the tear is as straight and clean as a knife’s slash.

  As a knife’s slash . . .

  Whatever Nanny wants to pretend, I know the truth. That latch didn’t break. Somebody cut it.

  6

  Nanny bustles about, cleaning up our supper things, then fashioning a hasty replacement for the latch. She insists that I follow my usual evening routine, So I pull out the books hidden behind my sleep mat, spread them across the table, prepare to stare at them until the candle sputters out. But I can’t concentrate on verb conjugations or the geographic features of countries halfway across the globe.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that the latch could just snap like that?” I begin. “With no warning? Maybe—”

  “The world is full of odd occurrences,” Nanny says, in a tone that discourages further speculation.

  “But—”

  “Cecilia. This is your study time. Sir Stephen will be quite upset if you don’t have that royal genealogy memorized by the time of his next visit. Or those geometric theorems. Or those Latin verbs.”

  I’m a little startled that Nanny knows so precisely what I’m supposed to be studying, but she is always sitting right there in the cottage during my lessons.

  “But don’t you think—”

  “Study!” Nanny points sternly at my pile of books. I give up and bend my head over the books.

  I can’t shut out the questions from my own mind, though. Why would someone cut the latch? How did they do it? Did they slip the knife in through the crack between the door and the wall while Nanny and I were eating supper, and then run away as soon as the door swung open? That didn’t make sense. If that was the plan, why didn’t they just rush on in and attack us?

  I take time to read one Latin word—occultus, “secretly”—and then I think of a different scenario. What if someone had sneaked in and cut the latch only partway through—not enough that Nanny and I would notice, but enough that my enemies could come back later tonight, easily open the door, and steal me away? What if no one had intended the door to come open during supper, but the breeze just gave us an unexpected warning?

  I shiver. And then I can’t stop shivering. Nanny sees this, and in no time at all she’s crouched beside me, wrapping her own shawl around my shoulders.

  “There, there,” she says, patting my back. “No need to worry. I had some extra leather and fixed us a new latch. We’re shut up tight for the night now. You’re safe.” She gently shuts the book on the table before me. “Maybe just this once, it’d be all right to go on to bed without studying.”

  “Will you send for Sir Stephen?” I ask. “Will you let him know . . . ?”

  “That the wind blew our door in?” She scoffs. “He’d laugh himself silly if I acted like that much of a ninnyhead.”

  Once again I want to scream, Stop treating me like a little girl! Tell me the truth! I know Nanny is pretending. Maybe she even knows I know. But I let her lead me over to my sleeping mat, pull my quilt up to my chin.

  She’s so rattled she doesn’t even realize I still have my dress and apron on. Her shawl is still on my shoulders. I don’t remind her.

  “Good night,” she calls, blowing out the candle. “May the Lord bless you and keep you, this night and every other.”

  “You too,” I say, because that’s our bedtime routine. We’ve said those words to each other every night since I was old enough to talk.

  But I don’t plunge into sleep immediately. I lie there, wide awake, and it’s like I can feel Nanny’s wakefulness—her watchfulness—on the other side of the room.

  She wanted the light out, I think. So nobody could see in our windows, see that I was studying. . . .

  Or was she just trying to calm me down, so I’d stop thinking of all the worst possibilities? Surely she really is planning to get word to Sir Stephen somehow. Isn’t she? Isn’t that what she’d do?

  A new thought strikes me, one that makes my entire body stiffen under my quilt. If Sir Stephen finds out that I’m in danger here in our village, he’ll whisk me away. He’ll take Nanny and me off to some other village, maybe on the other side of the kingdom, some place that shows up on even fewer maps.

  Harper . . . I think, and it’s like a sob in my head, a sob or a wail or a prayer. I couldn’t leave Harper without saying good-bye. I couldn’t let this be our last day together, not when I mocked him this morning and snubbed him this afternoon. I’d have to apologize first, apologize and explain.

  Am I willing to tell him the truth?

  That question has been hanging around at the back of my mind since before the door blew open, jolting me to think of other things. Somehow all the questions in my mind are jumbled together. Am I really in danger—more danger than usual, I mean? What’s Nanny planning to do? How much should I tell Harper? What would be the problem with telling him everything, anyway? He’d never betray me, and he could help me watch out for my enemies. . . .

  I try to untangle my thoughts the way Sir Stephen has taught me to plan my strategy playing chess. Sir Stephen began teaching me the game years ago, about the same time he began teaching me to read. I can still remember my awe the first time he pulled the carved ivory pieces out of his sack, unwrapping them and naming each one in turn.

  “Rook, knight, bishop, king, queen, pawn . . .”

  “Where’s the princess?” I asked when the pieces were all lined up on their squares.

  Sir Stephen pointed to the queen.

  “This is the princess, all grown-up,” he said. “This is what princesses become. She’s the most powerful piece on the board.”

  I liked that, and so I liked chess right away. But it took me a while to understand Sir Stephen’s explanations.

  “The trick to chess—the trick to strategy—is to keep track of each piece individually, and also in relationship to every other piece. You have to see the board as a whole, and each individual piece alone, all at the same time.” He talked about trees and forests, drops of waters and rivers, soldiers and entire armies. I said I thought forests were made up of trees and rivers were made up of water and armies were made up of soldiers, so what was the difference? And anyhow, weren’t these chess pieces made of ivory, not wood or water or real people? I drove him to tug on his beard in exasperation and threaten to put the game away until I was older. But I was hooked, and eventually I understood well enough that he stopped both the tugging and the threats. And now I see how everything is connected, how a chess queen’s fate can depend on a pawn, how the questions in my head are all related. The danger I’m in, Nanny’s pretense, Sir Stephen’s response, Harper’s outrage—I can’t do anything about any of those situations without affect
ing all the others.

  So I lie there, wide awake, without saying or doing a thing. I feel like Sir Stephen playing chess: When he’s thinking about his own strategy, he can sit there for ages without taking any action at all. “Move something!” I urge him. “Anything!”

  “Nothing before its time,” he always says, and then seems to deliberate even longer, just to prove his point. When he finally takes his turn, I’m so frustrated that sometimes I grab the first piece I lay my hand on, sending my bishop dashing across the entire board, or shoving my knight forward without counting spaces or gauging risks. And then he swoops in to defeat me, chiding, “This is why one must not act too hastily. . . .”

  I cannot act hastily tonight, because Nanny is wide awake over on her side of the room. Just as nobody could sneak into our cottage without her knowing, I could not sneak out undetected.

  But that is the plan that’s growing in my mind now, cobbled together out of worry and fear and regret and some of the same rashness that always endangers my chess pieces. If there’s even a chance that Sir Stephen will carry me away from our village tomorrow, or the next day or the day after that . . . if there’s a possibility that Nanny will confine me to our cottage until she thinks it’s safe to let me out of her sight (which might be never) . . . if it’s likely that my enemies know where I am and they’re planning to murder me in my sleep . . . then of course I need to go to Harper now, tonight, and tell him everything, so that I can go in peace to my new home or my confined exile or my death. I get a little sniffly thinking about my death—Poor thing, people will say. She never even got to wear her own crown. . . . Then I realize that I am sniffling so loudly that surely Nanny will hear me and rush across the room to comfort me once more.

  I stop sniffling and listen. Nothing. Nothing except the thin edge of a snore coming from across the room.

  Nanny’s asleep after all.

  Finally, I think. We can’t be in such great danger if Nanny went to sleep so fast. Can we? I wonder. But I’m not sure how long I’ve been lying there, plotting and planning.