Palace of Mirrors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “I don’t think you’re lying,” he says impatiently. “Not on purpose, anyway. I think you’ve been lied to.”

  “Lied to?” I repeat. I’m having trouble understanding. My mind is creaky and stupid and numb. Then I grasp his meaning. “You think Sir Stephen and Nanny Gratine . . . oh, no, Harper, they weren’t lying to me. They wouldn’t. They were telling the truth.”

  In my mind’s eye I can see Nanny’s kindly wrinkled face, Sir Stephen’s piercingly honest blue eyes. I can’t imagine not trusting them. I can’t let any doubts creep into my mind.

  “What if someone lied to them?” Harper challenges. “Or what if somebody lied to whoever told them? Or—”

  “Harper, I am the true princess!” I wail again, trying to drown out his treacherous words. It has to be true, because it can’t not be true, because it is true, because . . . if I’m not the true princess, who am I?

  Nobody, a voice whispers in my head. I can hear Nanny’s bitter words from years ago echoing in my mind: Just an ordinary orphan child . . . plenty of orphans in the kingdom nowadays . . . That was my cover story, my pretense.

  But what if the pretense is actually the truth?

  It can’t be. It can’t be, it can’t be, it . . .

  A high keening hovers over us. The wails are coming from my own mouth. I flail about, sobbing, pounding my hands against the floor, against the door. I feel a burst of pain in one hand, and Harper gathers my hands together, holding them tight so I can’t hurt myself again.

  “Hush,” he says. “I don’t see as how it matters now, anyhow.”

  “What?” I say, shocked into some semblance of reason again. I stop struggling and sit up. Harper lets go of my hands.

  “Either way, we’re locked away in this tower,” he says, leaning back on his heels, slumping against the wall.

  “But, if I—I mean . . .,” I can’t come up with a complete sentence. “Treason,” I say. I finally put it all together. “Desmia locking me up is treason.”

  Harper winces.

  “And locking me up is . . . what? Perfectly all right?” he asks. “Because there’s no chance that I would be royal.”

  The bitterness in his voice is hard to take.

  “No, Harper, that’s ridiculous,” I say. My mind is clearing a little. Clearing enough that I can think, If Desmia were the real princess, she would have reason to lock up Harper and me. We would be the ones committing treason. . . .

  I shiver. I can’t stand that thought, can’t stand the look on Harper’s face, can’t stand the fact that I’m locked in this tower. And all of a sudden I’m ashamed of myself for collapsing and wailing and throwing a fit. I’m the princess, but Harper’s the one who’s responding to this crisis with aplomb and fortitude. To compensate, I stand up and walk toward the window. I will come up with a plan.

  “Maybe if we make a rope . . .,” I say.

  “With what?” Harper asks. That’s a good question. This tower room is absolutely bare: stones and mortar and nothing else. Its sole amenity is a small hole inside the wall, which could probably be used as a privy. No help there. And Harper and I carried nothing into this room except the harp and the clothes on our back. Even if we strip down to bare skin and tie my dress and his shirt and pants together (and the already ripped fabric miraculously holds), that would only carry us down a yard or two. And—I peer out the window—the ground looks miles away.

  “Maybe if we yell for help?” I say.

  “He-e-lp!” Harper screams, in his loudest voice. “Up here! Somebody save us!”

  The words whip away in the wind. Nobody down on the ground looks up. It’s too far away. The only thing Harper’s screams have accomplished is to rile up the birds again.

  “Bawk! Careful! Bawk! Watch it!”

  I wait until their squawks die down.

  “Maybe we could just climb down, holding onto the stones of the tower . . .,” I suggest.

  Harper doesn’t even bother answering that. He doesn’t have to. I can look out and see how few handholds we would have. I can calculate how quickly our hands or feet would slip and we’d go plunging to our deaths. I lean out as far as I dare. Now I can see the balcony where Desmia stood the day before, and even that is far below us. Yesterday it seemed impossibly high, practically in the clouds.

  I draw my head back in through the window.

  “Maybe Desmia will come to her senses and come back for us,” I say.

  Harper doesn’t answer that, either, but I can see by his face what he’s thinking: Don’t count on it.

  “I’m sorry, Harper,” I whisper.

  He looks away from me, staring out into empty sky.

  “You didn’t even have breakfast,” he says.

  I shrug. Breakfast is the least of my worries right now. Or, no—maybe it should be my biggest worry. I see what Harper means. If Desmia doesn’t come back, and we can’t escape, I will soon be thinking of nothing but breakfast. Breakfast, dinner, supper—any kind of food. I think about the food sack we left outside the city walls, with its remnants of rotting figs and molding crumbs—the food that I so grandly refused because I thought I would soon be ordering a feast. I remember how carefully Nanny packed that sack for us, her hands lingering over the burlap as if she were wrapping up her love and care, not just oat cakes and jerky.

  Something like a sob catches in the back of my throat.

  “Nanny thought she was sending me off to safety,” I say.

  Harper sinks to the floor, his back against the unrelenting stone walls.

  “This is all my fault,” he says. “You wanted to go to Wedgewede like you were supposed to, but I started off toward Cortona. I said, ‘Isn’t that the capital? Isn’t that where the palace is? Where you wanted to go?’ like I was making fun of you for being afraid. . . .”

  “No, it’s my fault,” I say. “I should have known that Desmia . . . that she . . . I should have known we’d be playing chess.”

  Harper doesn’t tell me that this makes no sense, so I don’t have to explain. But I know that I’ve failed another one of Sir Stephen’s chess lessons. “You can’t expect your opponents to think the same way you do,” he always told me. “You have to study their moves, look for the pattern of their thoughts, their strategy, their desires. . . .” But I didn’t know that Desmia was my opponent. I studied nothing about her, except for her waving style and her taste in dresses.

  Harper is staring at the door.

  “Wish we had some gunpowder,” he says. “Toss a little bit on the hinges, and—pow!—we could blow that door to bits.”

  “You’d know how to do that?” I ask, a little awed. There’s a lot I didn’t know about Harper, either.

  Harper looks down.

  “No,” he admits. He gives a harsh laugh and kicks at his harp. “I don’t know why Mam never let me learn anything useful.”

  “You are a good harpist,” I say.

  Harper shrugs. It doesn’t matter now.

  “I know the top thirty exports of Suala, in order,” I say. “I know the dates of every war we’ve fought in the past three hundred years. I know the order of courses at a royal feast, and which silverware to use for which course. Why didn’t I know that Desmia wouldn’t listen to me? Why didn’t I know she’d lock us up?”

  “Because,” Harper says, “you don’t think that way. You wouldn’t be that kind of princess.”

  It’s not much comfort, but that’s probably the nicest thing Harper has ever said to me.

  18

  Eventually I fall asleep. There’s nothing else to do, and at least when I’m asleep I can forget the twisting in my stomach, its utter emptiness. When I wake up, the sun is high in the sky, its rays streaming in through the windows. And I can hear music—harp music?—like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The song is soft but fast, the notes zooming around each other like bees dancing over a meadow of flowers. It’s wild and joyous and unbelievably beautiful.

  I bolt upright.

  “Harper!” I exclaim. �
��You’re playing music? On purpose? By choice? When your mam’s not even here to make you practice?”

  Harper gives the strings one last strum to finish with a cascade of sound, like every bee is racing away happy and full of nectar. He grins sheepishly.

  “Oh, Mam would hate this,” he says. “She’d say it was irreverent—a fine instrument like the harp must be played with respect, you know.” He’s caught the drag of his mother’s voice, the way grief weighs down every word. Then he sounds like himself again: “It’s just, you were asleep, and I was getting sick of thinking the same things over and over again, ‘How are we going to escape? No, that won’t work . . . that won’t work. . . . How are we going to escape?’ And then I started wondering about how we played this morning, about whether I could play a whole song that fast, on purpose, all by myself, and then . . . well, I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  “You didn’t wake me up,” I say. “The sun did. But Harper, that song, it was . . . incredible. It was perfect. It was the best music I’ve ever heard anyone play.”

  I’m expecting Harper to laugh at me, to shove the harp away, maybe to shove me away too. But he just sits there, hugging the harp to his chest.

  “Really?” he says.

  “Absolutely,” I say. “If . . .” I have to swallow a lump in my throat to go on. “It doesn’t look like this is ever going to happen now, but if I ever do get to sit on my throne, I’m sorry, I couldn’t outlaw harps. I couldn’t make you Lord High Chancellor of Fishing Ponds. I’d have to have you as my royal harpist, playing like that!”

  Harper’s grin fades. He carefully puts the harp on the ground and stands up. He stares out the window.

  “I don’t think I could play like that if it was someone forcing me to, ordering me around,” he says. “It wouldn’t be fun, then.”

  I’ve ruined things again.

  “Okay, okay!” I say. “I didn’t mean it like that! You can still be Lord High Minister of Fishing Ponds. It’s just, whenever you felt like playing, I’d want—I mean—it’d be really nice if you let me listen!”

  Harper pushes his hair back, erasing all evidence of the careful patting-down he gave it this morning.

  “You don’t have to be the princess on the throne for that,” he says softly. “I’ll play more later. It . . . it makes me forget where we are.”

  I’m glad he seems to have forgiven me. But I didn’t want to be reminded that we’re locked in the tower. I’m stiff from sleeping on the hard stone floor, and my stomach feels emptier than ever. And now my throat is beginning to ache too, because it’s so dry. I don’t know how I can be so high up in the sky and yet still feel like I’m swallowing dust.

  “Harper,” I say. “What are we going to do?”

  He lifts his hands, palms outstretched—a helpless, hopeless gesture.

  “What can we do?” he says.

  Just then, there’s a thud behind us. I whirl around and see a rope dangling down from the barred window in the wooden door. I rush over and grab the knotted end of the rope—it was the knot hitting the door that made the noise.

  “Hey!” I yell. “Wait!”

  I’ve reasoned things out—for the rope to hit the door like that, someone had to have tossed the rope in. I peer out between the bars; I’m just in time to see a figure in a pale dress disappear around the curve of the spiral stairs.

  “Desmia?” I call cautiously. I’m not sure it’s Desmia. It could have been a maid or a serving girl. “Someone?” I add. “Please, come back! Please—”

  But my call has roused the birds again, and I’m treated to another round of “Bawk! Careful!” “Bawk! Watch out!”—words I should have paid attention to the first time around. The birds are so loud I can’t listen for the footsteps retreating down the stairs.

  “Bawk! I am the true princess!” one of the birds screeches.

  “What?” I cry.

  “Bawk! True princess! True princess! Bawk!”

  I’m outraged.

  “Stop it!” I command. “Shut up, you stupid bird!”

  “Bawk! True princess!’

  Harper is standing at the door beside me now, and, heartlessly, he’s laughing. I whirl on him.

  “How dare you laugh at that!”

  “Don’t you get it?” Harper says, between snorts and giggles. “The bird learned that from you—you said it so often. ‘True princess, I’m the true princess,’” he imitates.

  “True princess,” the bird agrees from just below us on the spiral stairs. “Bawk.”

  “Well, it’s not funny,” I say huffily. I frown, forcing the corners of my mouth down. Anytime Harper laughs, it’s really, really hard not to laugh with him. And I can see how, if this had happened to one of my stuffy, long-dead royal ancestors, I would have laughed just as much as I laughed at Queen Rexalia’s amazing fertilizer discoveries. But this is happening to me.

  “Anyway,” I say, “how can you laugh when we’re trapped in here and we’re going to starve to death? Or no, we’ll probably die of thirst first. Yeah, that’s hilarious.”

  Harper laughs harder.

  “You don’t see very well, do you?” he says. “We’re not going to starve.”

  “What do you mean? Of course we are.” I almost sound smug, like that’s what I want if it’ll prove Harper wrong. But then I look down, my eyes following the path of the rope from the knot in my hand, over the rim of the barred window, down toward the stone floor on the other side of the door. Maybe the rope’s long enough to . . . no, it stops before it even reaches the floor. But it stops because it’s tied to the handle of a basket out there on the other side of the door. And in the basket I can see a jug, a long loaf of bread, a wheel of cheese, a cluster of grapes, and apples, pears, peaches, and berries.

  “I knew there’d be a feast in the castle!” I tell Harper.

  “The ‘true princess’ bird must have ordered it!” he counters.

  We’re giddy hauling the basket up, hand over hand, so we can reach in for the bread and cheese and fruit. The jug proves to be too fat to bring in between the bars, so we take turns reaching out to tilt it back, letting the other person gulp down the sweet, cold lemonade as if from a fountain. We toss grapes in the air and catch them in our mouths; we let the juice from the peaches dribble down our chins. In our glee we almost forget that we’re still trapped, behind bars. At least we have food. At least Desmia’s not going to let us starve.

  At least we know now that she’s not that kind of princess.

  19

  Harper and I fall into an odd pattern over the next few days. We live for the sound of someone approaching on the stairs—we’re constantly listening for footsteps and birdcalls. But somehow the birds are always quiet until after our food appears; we never make it to the door in time to catch more than a glimpse of our food deliverer dashing away from us. Eventually I suggest that we take turns at guard duty, watching beside the door so that at the first sign of someone bringing food we can begin pleading our case: Oh, please, listen to us. We mean no one any harm. We were trying to do the right thing, coming here. . . .

  No one shows up for an entire day. We are hungry and thirsty and tired, and when we hear the clock tower far below us chiming midnight, we give up. In the morning the basket is waiting outside our door, full of food again, and there’s a note in elegant handwriting tucked between two apples:

  Do not watch for me. I cannot bring your food if you are watching.

  The note is not signed.

  “Couldn’t she have given us a few more details?” I ask, studying the note. “Reasons? Explanations? Maybe some indication of when she’s going to let us out?”

  Harper shoots me a sidelong glance.

  “I think maybe that was all she wanted to say.” He takes a bite of an apple, the skin crunching against his teeth. “Can you tell from the writing if it’s Desmia or someone else who wrote the note?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Would a princess leave a big blot of ink like that?
” He points to the tail of the g in “watching,” where, indeed, too much ink has pooled.

  I think about my own struggles with ink blots.

  “Quill pens aren’t that easy to use,” I say. “You’d have to be a professional scribe, practically, not to leave any blots at all.”

  “Well,” Harper says, patting my shoulder, “we know something, then. She didn’t hire out the writing of this note to the castle scribe.”

  He tosses me an apple, but I don’t lift it to my mouth.

  “What if she’s the only one who knows we’re here?” I ask slowly. “What if she’s keeping us secret?”

  “Why would she?” Harper asks. “If she’s going to have us executed for treason, don’t you think she’d lop off our heads in front of everyone and be done with it?”

  I don’t know how he can keep such a light tone in his voice, talking about that, like it’s all a joke.

  “We are not treasonous!” I yell out, between the bars of the window, just in case someone—Desmia?—is listening. “We don’t deserve to be executed! We deserve to be set free!” I stop short of adding, I deserve to be wearing your crown!

  “How many people do you know who get what they deserve out of life?” Harper asks.

  I bite into my apple then, and shrug, pretending my mouth’s too full to answer.

  But later on, after we’re full and Harper has wandered over to pluck at his harp, I’m still thinking about his question. Harper has an intense look on his face I’ve never seen before; he’s totally engrossed in the way his fingers speed across the strings. He looks . . . happy. Is Harper finally getting what he deserves from his music, after all those years of hated harp lessons? Doesn’t he deserve to have the whole world know how incredibly he can play, instead of being locked up in a tower?

  Did Nanny deserve to have me disobey her? Did Sir Stephen deserve to have me run away, after all his efforts to keep me safe?

  I decide that thinking about what people deserve is a stupid way of looking at the world. But I can’t stop myself.

  Don’t I deserve to rule as princess, after all the time I spent studying and preparing? After all my courage in coming here? I don’t deserve to be locked in a tower! I don’t deserve to be mocked by a parrot!