It’s different now. This time he’s lying. I am so sure of myself. I just don’t understand what’s changed.
“It’s not like I’m royalty or anything,” Harper adds, still in that harsh, unfamiliar voice. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”
I want to say, Of course it does, or Don’t you know that you matter to me ? But couldn’t he tell that from the way I flung myself at him just a few moments ago?
I don’t know how I can feel so sure of myself and so confused, all at the same time. I draw in a shaky breath.
“If you want to go off and join up and fight in the war tomorrow afternoon or—or the next day . . . if that’s what you really want, then that’s your choice,” I say. I have to struggle to keep my voice steady, because I really don’t want Harper to ever go off to the war. “It’s just, right now—”
“I know, I know. Right now you need me,” Harper says, and now he sounds angry. “You need me to earn money for shoes, and you need me to teach you how to play a harp in one evening, and you need me to get you into the competition tomorrow, and—”
“Harper, it’s not like that,” I say pleadingly.
He just looks at me, and everything in his face says, Yes, it is. Today you need me. But tomorrow afternoon or the day after tomorrow you’ll be a princess in your palace, and you can throw me out in the weeds like all the other peasants. I bet by next week you won’t even remember my name. I stare back at him, and I hope everything in my face says, Okay, you’re half right—today I need you for very practical things. But I’m still going to need you tomorrow and the day after that and long, long after that, because you’re my best friend and always have been and always will be, and Harper, I am terrified of going into that palace. You’re the only one who’s giving me the courage to do the right thing, so you have to stay with me, you have to help me . . . please don’t go off to war. Even if I didn’t need you, I wouldn’t want you to go off and die in the war. But I just can’t open my mouth and say any of that, because if I do, I’ll be throwing myself at him again and blubbering like a little baby.
Between all this looking at each other and trying to say everything with our faces and not moving at all, we’re creating a bit of a roadblock. People keep ramming into me. At first I think it’s all by accident, but then I hear a woman say, “Beggars should know to get out of the way of their betters!” and then—clearly on purpose—she brings down the heel of her shoe right on my bare foot.
“Ow! Oh!” I start jumping up and down, making more of a scene and—coincidentally—making it even harder for her to get past me.
“Do you mind?” she says, in a voice that could turn boiling water to solid ice in an instant. I let her pass, but not before I’ve gotten a really, really good look at her. Whoever she is, if she ever shows up at the palace, I’m going to have the guards escort her out the door immediately.
“Anyhow,” Harper says.
Now it’s completely impossible to say any of those things I was thinking. So instead, I say “Harper, you could sit here playing music for the next ten years, and we still wouldn’t have enough money for shoes.”
Something in his face shuts down, shuts me out.
“Oh,” he says. “Then . . . we can’t go to the competition.”
“Of course we can,” I snap. “We’ll just have to make our own shoes.” I think about the thick cloak I wore from our village. “Do you think we could start a new fashion—shoes made out of felt? That way we just need to buy a needle and thread. And I’ll do the buying. You can go hide somewhere safe.”
I expect Harper to argue with me, but he just shrugs and stands up.
“Whatever you say.”
He stands there looking at me for a moment longer then he needs to. For a split second his expression seems transparent again; I could swear I can see him thinking, I wish . . .
And then he turns away from me, hiding his face.
“I’ll be outside the city,” he says. “Where we were before.”
“All right,” I say. “I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
“Good,” he says, and he sounds like the old Harper now, the one who always makes fun of me. “Because you have one night to learn fourteen years’ worth of harp lessons.”
14
I don’t sleep much that night. First there are the harp lessons, and then I sit up late sewing, pushing the cheapest, flimsiest needle in all of Cortona through the thick felt of my former cloak. After the sun goes down, I do this in the dark, so it’s hard to know what the “shoes” are going to look like. And I prick my fingers so many times that I’m sure it will be pure agony touching the harp strings in the morning.
You knew this wasn’t going to be the easiest way to get to your throne, I tell myself to keep from crying with each stitch. Finally, the shoes are done, and I can lay my head down on the remains of my cloak, stretched out on the ground. But I don’t fall asleep right away, like I expect to. We are hiding outside the city, on the other side of a hillock from the city walls. Here the ground is hard and lumpy, and every time I shift position, I discover a new pebble lying beneath my spine.
Really, it’s not much worse than most of the places I’ve slept the past several nights—and it’s not like I was used to pure luxury at Nanny Gratine’s, anyhow. But these pebbles plague me, each one a reminder of some unpleasant thought.
Sure, tomorrow I’ll be sleeping on a princess’s bed instead . . . but how hard will the rest of my life be, as princess? What kind of danger will I be in? Will I be able to tell who’s on my side and who’s an enemy? Will I be able to trust anyone besides Harper and then Sir Stephen and Nanny when they come? Will Harper even stay around, or will he run off and join the army right away?
I reach out in the darkness, and my hand brushes Harper’s. Because he’s asleep, it’s safe to do this: I wrap my fingers around his palm. Harper fell asleep while I was still sewing, and I was too exhausted to remember the soldiers-guarding-each-other T-shaped formation. So he’s right there beside me. And this is how I feel safe, lying here clutching his hand.
The next thing I know, it’s morning. The sun is rising over the city spires, and Harper is leaning over me.
“Cecilia, it’s time,” he whispers in my ear. “The music competition—our performance—”
I sit up so quickly I almost clunk my head against Harper’s.
“We have to wash our faces,” I say. “We have to get ready. . . .”
We rush to a nearby stream. The water on my face wakes me up, sharpens my mind. I want to ask, Uh, Harper, when you woke up, was I holding your hand? But I don’t know what I would say after that, how I would explain it away. I stick to the basics: “Harper, wait, you missed a spot of dirt up by your eye. . . . I know we don’t have a comb, but maybe if you wet your hair down, you can pat it into place. . . .”
Finally, we’re done. When we get back to our hillock, Harper retrieves our food sack from the bush where he hid it while we were washing. I grandly wave him away when he offers me the first chance at it.
“Oh, no, none of that. We’ll be feasting at the palace right after we play,” I say. “Might as well keep our appetite for all those delicacies.”
“You think Desmia will give us a feast?” Harper asks.
“I shall order it,” I say. Then I giggle, because it’s still funny to think about, getting to order people around.
Harper looks down into the sack.
“Mam says it’s not good to play on an empty stomach,” he says sheepishly, and reaches in to pull out a fig that’s only slightly moldy.
I don’t tell him that I’m too nervous to eat anything. Even if we had tables before us spread with the finest food in the kingdom—pastries, breads, meats, cheeses, fruits—I’m not sure I could eat a bite.
When Harper’s done eating, we walk into the city and back to the courtyard where the guards ridiculed us yesterday. Only a few men stand by the palace doorway now—I guess they’re saving most of their troops for l
ater in the day.
“Let me do the talking,” Harper mutters as we approach the palace.
I try to stretch up tall, to stand regal and proud before the guards. Harper bows low.
“Esteemed sirs,” he says, speaking directly to the cobblestones, as if he’s too humble to raise his head. “We are here for the music competition. Harper and Cecilia Sutton. We should be on your list.”
The most decorated guard ruffles through papers. His face twitches, as if he’s trying hard not to laugh.
“Aye, you’re on the list,” he says. “Go on in.”
He steps aside to let us pass. Harper shoves at the heavy door, and I can hear the head guard explaining to the others, “They always put the worst acts on first, so nobody has to hear them.”
“Or see them,” somebody else mutters.
My cheeks flame red, and it’s all I can do to resist whirling around and scolding, Just wait until you find out who I really am! You’ll be sorry! To distract myself, I mutter to Harper, “Cecilia Sutton?”
“I didn’t think I should use your real name,” he mutters back. “You’re the one who said we could pretend to be brother and sister. Remember? Back in the cowshed?”
I don’t reply, because we’re stepping into a grand entranceway now, a huge hallway that towers over us like a cathedral. And practically from the floor level up to that ceiling, which hovers over us like clouds, there are mirrors on every wall—the mirrors that give the palace its name.
My acquaintance with mirrors has been very limited. Our village store sometimes had looking glasses for sale, and when the storekeeper, Mr. Leaven, wasn’t looking, it was possible to crouch down by the shelf holding the glasses and gaze at a tiny portion of my face: one greenish eye at a time, or my lips and just the tip of my nose. For a wider view there was only the pond, which always made me look vague and wavy. (But at least not jowly, like my ancestors.)
So it is incredibly jarring to suddenly see myself and Harper, as we really are, complete and clear, life-size and reflected from every angle. Everywhere I look, I see myself.
It is not a pretty picture.
Oh, my features are all right—I rush to assure myself of that. My nose is straight enough, my eyes are big enough, my chin dips just enough that a generous person might call my face heart-shaped. (And really, when I am on the throne, will not everyone want to be generous in their descriptions of me?) Give me a velvet ribbon to tie back my unruly brown hair, and from the neck up I might even be called pretty.
But I do not have a velvet ribbon for my hair. I don’t even have an old, frazzled piece of twine, so my hair hangs down into my face, curls leapfrogging over one another to mar the heart shape.
My eyes travel down from my reflected face, and this is where it really gets embarrassing. Last night Harper and I tried to scrub out the worst of the stained, dirty spots from our clothes. Laundry is difficult enough under the best of circumstances, and trying to wash clothes while wearing them hardly qualifies as the best of circumstances. I think we gave up much too quickly, our eyes deceived in the dim evening light. In this bright, mirrored room, I can see that our scrubbings only spread the stains. My simple cotton shift is covered in grass stains and ground-in dirt and dried fig juice—and those are just the stains I can identify.
Yesterday afternoon, in a fit of what I thought was inspiration, I used our last pennies to buy two small lengths of sash from a peddler on the street. They’re bright yellow—I suppose I was thinking of Desmia’s paler yellow dress. I thought sashes would transform my plain dress and Harper’s ordinary shirt and breeches into clothing fit for a palace. His clothes, I thought, would look like a courtier’s; mine like a royal ball gown.
We look ridiculous. I could only afford enough sash to wrap around our waists, not enough to tie and leave the ends dangling elegantly. So I had to sew the ends of the sashes onto the back of my dress and the back of Harper’s shirt. Somehow the splash of color around our waists emphasizes all the wrong details: the stains, the patches, the unraveling beginnings of holes, the bunchy clumps of felt on our feet that I thought would pass as shoes.
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” I mutter to Harper—one of those common sayings in our village that I never fully understood before.
We’re sow’s ears, both of us.
Harper looks jolted, and glances at our reflection for possibly the first time.
“You’re the true princess,” he whispers back to me.
And that helps. Clothes are only clothes. Sashes and shoes—even badly pinned, poorly sewn, ill-chosen ones—are meaningless compared with the knowledge in my head, the truth I’m about to reveal. I stop hunching over, stop attempting to hide my stained dress.
An infinity of mirrored images keeps flashing at us as we walk the length of the hall, but I train my eyes on the door at the other end. A man is standing there.
“Ye-es?” he says imperiously as we approach.
“We’re the first, uh, competitors,” Harper says.
The man nods condescendingly.
“Ah,” he says. “Wait here.”
It’s a long wait. I fiddle with the edge of my sash, wanting to tuck it differently, or maybe just rip it off completely. And the shoes! I shall have to tell Desmia that felt shoes were simply the fashion in my village. . . . Maybe Desmia and I have the same size feet, and she’ll loan me a pair of real shoes before we go to tell anyone else who I really am. Maybe she’ll loan me a dress, too.
“Cecilia?” Harper mumbles. “Remember, you play five C’s before the first time you move to the D string. . . .”
I nod, but a moment later I can’t remember if he said five C’s or four. We worked out a simple song, where he plays the melody and I pluck a string every so often in harmony. I couldn’t master true harp-playing, the way he does it—flicking his fingernails against the strings, bringing out a clear bell-like sound—so my technique is more of a strumming.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. You only have to play well enough that no one kicks you and Harper out before you have a chance to talk to Desmia.
“Ready?” the man says.
I guess he went through the doorway and just now came back out—I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Now he holds the door open for us.
“You will walk to the center of the stage,” he says. “There’s a chair if you must use it.” He frowns, not in apology for having only one chair, but as if he already regrets offering it to us. “When you are finished, you will bow or”—he looks at me disdainfully—“you will curtsy in front of the judges. And then you will leave through the opposite door.” He sniffs. “Good luck,” he adds, as though he’s certain we will need it.
I sniff back, and toss my head.
“Thank you, good sir,” I say, trying to sound every bit as imperious as him.
Then the door shuts behind us. We’re in an even larger room now, one that’s mercifully a bit dimmer. And as far as I can tell, there are mirrors on only two of the four walls.
“There are stairs up to the stage,” Harper hisses at me. “Follow me.”
So far my eyes haven’t focused well enough to locate Desmia or the other judges. Only when we’re standing on the stage, peering out at rows and rows of cushioned, empty seats, do I realize that the judges are seated off to the left, near the door we’ll be leaving through.
So I can talk to Desmia on the way out. . . .
“I’ll have to take the chair, since I’ll be holding the harp,” Harper whispers to me.
“Fine,” I say.
I stand beside him, and we have a few moments of confusion, figuring out how my arms can stretch around the harp he’s holding. I hear someone laughing, and someone else muttering, “This one is billed as a musical act, not a comedy routine. . . .”
Lamps flare to life, and I am blinded glaring out at the judges.
Harper has to arrange my hands, so I’m ready to pluck the right strings.
“Harper and Cecilia Sutt
on,” someone announces.
I lean forward, prepared to play, and I feel something pulling at the back of my dress. In the silence, I even hear the first sound: ri-ip . . . I want to clutch the back of my dress, but that would mean taking my carefully placed hands off the harp.
“Now,” Harper whispers.
Dazedly, I pluck my first C, thinking, How much ripped back there? Was it just the sash or a huge swath of the dress? I’m supposed to wait for Harper to play ten more notes before it’s time for me to pluck my second C, but I’m so distracted, trying to listen for another ri-ip and watching for the sash to maybe go swinging down toward the floor, that Harper barely makes it through two notes before I pluck my harmony note again.
“Slow down!” Harper hisses at me.
“Speed up!” I hiss back. “My dress just ripped and I’m scared it’s going to fall off completely!”
Harper gives me one darting, startled glance and instantly shifts into double time. From there the rest of the song is like a race, Harper flicking frantically at the strings, desperate to catch up with my plucking. Flick, pluck, flick, pluck . . . Finally, I’m done with all the notes that my right hand is supposed to play and I reach around and clutch the back of my dress.
“We can slow down now,” I tell Harper, but I don’t think he hears me. So then it’s me plucking frantically, trying to keep up with him.
Finally, we run out of notes.
Harp music lingers. A properly appreciative crowd, I think, is supposed to wait until the last chiming note fades out of hearing. Our last notes fade into nothingness, and still there’s a shocked silence. I squint, trying to see past the bright lights trained on the stage. Harper, beside me, is dipping into a bow.
“You’re supposed to bow in front of the judges, right before the door,” I whisper.
Jolted, he stands up again. Still there’s no applause. We scramble down the stairs and stumble toward the judges. Now I can see that they’re staring at us—in awe and amazement, I hope, not complete disgust. The judges are a collection of distinguished-looking men in dark coats, and one girl in a pale pink dress, with a glistening crown nestled in her dark hair.
Palace of Mirrors Page 9
