Palace of Mirrors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Desmia!” I hiss. “You’re the princess! These men”—I wave my arm toward the soldiers, the guards—“they’re sworn to protect you, to follow your every command! This is your decision! Not his!”

  Lord Throckmorton does not even look at me. I am beneath his notice, with my stained, ripped dress, my muddy feet, my bandaged head. I am no one.

  “Give the order!” Lord Throckmorton tells Desmia again. “Command your men to execute these traitors!”

  Desmia looks at me. She shoots a glance over her shoulder at the feeble knights propped up by the crying girls.

  “No,” she says.

  Lord Throckmorton blinks. But in a second he has his composure back.

  “So,” he says mockingly, “the princess is too stupid to understand what’s best for her, what’s best for her kingdom. She is only a pretty face, after all. Only a figurehead. Only a child. As her adviser it falls to me to make the important decisions. And I say”—now he is looking only at the soldiers, as if Desmia has proved herself to be beneath his notice as well—“the traitors must be executed.”

  I gasp—is he allowed to insult Desmia like that? To ignore her, and order the soldiers to ignore her, too? And she won’t even argue?

  But Desmia is stepping forward; evidently she no longer needs the wall for support. She’s found her spine.

  “Yes,” she says, “traitors deserve to be executed.”

  My heart plunges. How could she? I begin glancing around frantically for a weapon—I can’t let Harper go without a fight. Anyone who tries to kill Harper or Sir Stephen or Nanny is going to have to kill me first, I vow. And Ella! This is not fair to Ella. . . .

  But Desmia is still talking.

  “It’s just that . . .” Her voice squeaks a little. She pauses to steady it. “These people are not traitors. They are loyal Sualan citizens, and one Fridesian friend.” She puts a slight emphasis on the word “friend.” Ella nods, and that seems to give Desmia even more courage. She peers directly at the man who appears to be the captain of the royal guard, a man old enough to be her father, with graying hair at his temples.

  “You need to arrest the true conspirators,” Desmia says. She’s standing up very straight now. “Arrest this man, Lord Throckmorton, for the murder of my parents, the king and queen, fourteen years ago.”

  30

  For a long moment no one seems to know what to do. None of the soldiers dash forward to replace Lord Throckmorton’s ermine robe with chains and cuffs. But none of them run their swords through my friends, either. They just freeze, as still and uncertain as everyone else.

  Then Lord Throckmorton grabs Desmia by the shoulders. I am close enough to hear what he whispers in her ear: “Fool!” He slides his arm around her neck, manhandling her. Silencing her.

  “The princess knows not of what she speaks,” he says. “She was only a baby then—how could she know? How dare she accuse me, her loyal adviser . . .” He stares down at her, narrowing his eyes. “Perhaps she is not even the true princess, after all.”

  The captain of the royal guard lowers his sword, then lifts it again in a slightly different direction. It’s no longer pointed at my friends. Now it’s pointed at Lord Throckmorton.

  “Were I you, I would consider my words very carefully before making such an allegation,” the captain says. Behind him all the other soldiers seem to be hanging on to his every word. He clears his throat and continues. “As I recall, Lord Throckmorton, your claim to power, your claim to becoming the princess’s adviser fourteen years ago, was that child herself. Did you not come to the royal guard holding the baby, telling us that the queen herself placed her in your arms for safekeeping—that the queen herself, as she lay dying, said she trusted only you to raise her child, to rule the kingdom until this child was grown?”

  Good grief, I think. Not that story again. Still, all those years of poring over literary texts with Sir Stephen keeps me from dismissing it instantly. Notice how Lord Throckmorton’s story is just a little bit different from all the others, I hear in my mind, like an echo of Sir Stephen’s teachings. Notice how rescuing a baby helped Lord Throckmorton—helped him immensely—while it sent all the knights into exile. . . .

  “Ah, yes,” Lord Throckmorton says, as though he is not discomfited in the least by the soldier’s veiled accusation. “But perhaps I was tricked. Perhaps the queen herself was tricked, in her dying moments. . . . One baby looks much the same as another, does she not? Evidence has come to my attention recently that discredits Desmia’s claim completely, and points to another girl as the actual princess—Suala’s true princess. . . .”

  Eleven girlish voices call out at once behind me, “Yes, me! I’m the true princess!” joined by deeper, raspier, more ancient voices: “Yes, it’s Princess Rosemary!” “Sophia!” “Porfinia!” “Ganelia!” “Fidelia!” “Lydia!” . . .

  I do not listen or look to see if Sir Stephen is also shouting, shouting out his support for me. I do not yell, myself. I am watching Desmia’s face, which has turned a frightening shade of purple. Lord Throckmorton is holding her off to the side, out of sight of the royal guard. She’s opening her mouth silently, as if she’s trying desperately to cry for help, but is unable to force any sound past the barrier of Lord Throckmorton’s arm pressed too tightly against her throat.

  He’s strangling her, I think. She could die while all of us are standing here arguing about who truly has the royal lineage. . . .

  I didn’t finish looking around for a weapon earlier, when I thought I was going to have to defend Harper. I look again. The fireplace poker that Desmia might have used to defend me is too far away, behind the huge cluster of soldiers. I have no time to run for it. The only weapon-like object even remotely near me is the harp, lying a few paces away, where Lord Throckmorton cast it aside.

  I’d protect you. . . .

  With what? Your harp?

  My nasty, mocking words to Harper echo in my mind, mocking me now. But I’m already rushing forward, closing the distance to the harp. I scoop it up in my hands, first raising it by the strings, then transferring my grip to the solid wood frame. I lift the harp high, then bring it down hard on Lord Throckmorton’s head.

  He crumples to the floor, losing his grip on Desmia.

  31

  Silence. Utter silence.

  And then Harper says admiringly, “Wow. That worked really well.” As if I’ve just cast my fishing line particularly far; as if I’ve managed to skip a stone on the pond more times than he.

  But Harper’s words break everyone else’s paralysis. Everyone begins to talk at once.

  “Did you see . . .”

  “Can you believe . . .”

  “Does this mean . . .”

  “Thank you,” Desmia whispers as she gasps for air.

  The captain of the royal guard rushes to her side.

  “Princess!” he exclaims. “Did he hurt you?” He seems to take in the extreme coloring of her face, though the purple is beginning to fade. “Was he . . . trying to kill you?”

  “I don’t know,” Desmia whispers.

  The captain glares down at Throckmorton’s unconscious form sprawling in his pool of ermine cape.

  “He would have passed it off as ‘She died of fright, at the terror of being discovered as a fake,’” the captain mutters, almost to himself. “Or ‘Her sins caught up with her when her deception failed.’”

  “I—I—,” Desmia stammers.

  “He’s done that kind of thing before, I think,” the captain says darkly. “It’s always been so convenient, how so many of his enemies have died, and he’s managed to avoid any blame. . . . We always thought we had to believe him, because he was the princess’s own adviser. . . .” He motions the other soldiers forward. “Men! Carry this traitor away!”

  They jump to obey him immediately. It takes five men to lift Lord Throckmorton.

  “I—I’m not actually completely certain that he killed my parents,” Desmia says. “That just came to me—all the pieces
seemed to fit.”

  The captain nods at her abruptly.

  “Then we will find the proof, if there’s proof to be had,” he says. He begins pointing to one soldier after another. “You, go interview Lord Suprien; you, go interview Lord Tyfolieu; you, round up all the palace workers who were here at the time of the king and queen’s deaths, and ask them what they saw. . . .” He bends down on his knee, bowing before Desmia. “I promise you, Princess, we will have the investigation that we should have had fourteen years ago, instead of the one Lord Throckmorton oversaw. . . .”

  I don’t hear the rest of this exchange, because Nanny is folding me into a hug.

  “Cecilia! You were so brave! But”—still holding on to me, she leans back, studying me carefully—“what happened to you? Your head in that bandage . . . your dress in tatters . . .”

  “I’m fine,” I say. I swallow a lump in my throat. “But I don’t think I’m really the true princess, after all.” I can barely whisper this. Somehow it shames me to admit this to Nanny, as if it lessens what she did in raising me, as if it reflects badly on her.

  “Of course you are,” Nanny says. She glances over her shoulder, where Sir Stephen is leaning forward to pat my shoulder. “Sir Stephen—”

  “I believe everything can now be told,” Sir Stephen says gently. “That awful night fourteen years ago, when the assassins came, the king died instantly. But the queen . . . lingered. As one of the king’s royal knights I was appalled that we had failed to protect our monarch. But I wanted to do everything I could to protect his wife and child. I went to the queen, secretly, and she told me there was no longer any hope for her. But she laid you in my arms—you! Her child . . .”

  I groan.

  “Sir Stephen, I mean no disrespect, but that’s what all the knights say.”

  “Eh?” Sir Stephen seems jolted to be stopped in the midst of his story. “What’s that?”

  “Weren’t you listening a few moments ago when all the knights were shouting out the names of the other girls as the true princess?” I ask. “Lydia, Sophia, Ganelia, Fidelia, Porfinia, Rosemary . . .” I know I’m leaving out several of them, but I think I’ve made my point.

  Sir Stephen glances toward his fellow knights, all sitting up and staring toward us. They’re listening too.

  “Why, yes,” Sir Stephen says. “Of course I heard them. But they were only pretending, doing an admirable job of shifting eyes away from you in a dangerous moment.” He bends down rather stiffly, until he’s on one knee, his head bowed. “My brother knights, I honor your service to the true princess, your bravery, and the courage, too, of these fine maidens. . . .” He gestures toward all the other would-be princesses.

  “Get up, Stephen,” Sir Roget mutters. “We have a bit of a problem we need to work out before anyone starts with the proclamations.”

  Sir Stephen blinks confusedly at the other knights. Harper’s mam appears silently at his side, and the two of us help him back into a standing position.

  “It would seem that our zeal for secrecy went a bit too far,” Sir Roget explains. Now he’s addressing the other girls and me, even more than Sir Stephen. “We were the Order of the Crown, the king’s own knights, and after the king’s death we told everyone we’d disbanded. But we kept meeting, secretly, to discuss the future of the kingdom and our plans for reinstalling the true princess when it was safe.”

  “But you couldn’t even agree on the true princess’s name?” I can’t help asking incredulously.

  Sir Roget looks at me sadly.

  “We were so terrified—you have to understand, we’d just seen our monarch slaughtered—and some of us suspected that there might be a traitor in our midst,” he continues. “So during our meetings and in our messages to one another we never said where the true princess was, we never discussed who had her in his care, we never called her anything but the true princess. . . . Even when we were hanging in the torture chamber, we were so careful to speak no names, for fear of being overheard. Until you came to rescue us . . .”

  I’m beginning to see what happened. The knights were brave and loyal and true, but they were also idiots.

  Behind me Harper begins to laugh.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he says. “Each one of you thought you knew where the true princess was, and you were teaching her about being royal and everything, but what, eleven of you were dead wrong?”

  Sir Roget regards Harper with an air of injured dignity.

  “I’ll have you know, young man, that our suspicions were not unfounded,” he says, with a strict, scolding tone in his voice. “That man—the so-called Lord Throckmorton—was one of our number. We knew him as Sir Eldridge, and I think he sent spies after us after our last meeting, because it was then that the men appeared to carry my dear Lucia away. . . .” He pats the hand of the young lady sitting next to him and wipes away a tear before turning to Sir Stephen. “As I was being captured, I tried to get word to my fellow knights, to call for help, not knowing that they were also being taken from their hiding places across the land, they and their . . . maidens.” He glances a little disdainfully at the cluster of other alleged princesses.

  Sir Stephen blinks.

  “I—I didn’t know,” he murmurs. “And all this time I was wondering why none of you responded to my calls for help, when the soldiers searched my house, when Cecilia vanished. . . .” His eyes narrow, and I can almost see him applying Rule One of How to Handle Vast Quantities of Surprising Information in a Crisis Situation. (“Hold back your emotions. Focus on getting facts and deriving logical connections.”) “But why?” he asks. “Why did Lord Throckmorton strike now, when it’s fourteen years since the king and queen died, since the true princess went into hiding . . . ?”

  He squeezes my hand, and everyone is silent for a long moment, presumably all wondering the same thing. Then Desmia clears her throat.

  “Because I challenged him, I think,” she whispers. “The peace delegation arrived from Fridesia, and Lord Throckmorton wanted to kill them all—”

  Behind me, Ella gasps in horror.

  “—but I said no, we would listen. And I did this in front of all sorts of other advisers and lords, so—I couldn’t believe it—what I said happened.” Desmia is shaking her head as if she’s still amazed at her own bravery and the results. Then she looks down at her hands, going pale again. “But after that he began threatening me.”

  So Desmia did have a knight of her own, along with the palace and the beautiful dresses and the throne. But her knight was Lord Throckmorton, an evil, plotting man. I decide I’m not jealous at all. I put my arm around Sir Stephen’s stooped-over shoulders and give him a gentle hug.

  “So who really is the true princess?” asks one of the other girls—Sophia, I think—as if that’s all she cares about. And as if, somehow, she’s still absolutely certain it’s her. “Maybe if we all brought in our royal objects, our proof, and had an expert look at them to determine . . .”

  I swallow a lump in my throat.

  “Then it’s not me.” I force the words out. “I don’t have any royal object.”

  I look around at all the other girls. They’ve been in a dungeon, and they’re all dressed in simple, peasant clothes, just like I always was. But none of them have the stains and the rips in their clothes that I have; none of them have bandaged heads. Somehow they’ve all still managed to look regal and haughty and proud. Any of them could switch dresses with Desmia and instantly look like a princess.

  I’d need to scrub the mud from my legs and the cobwebs from my hair and the dried blood from my hands—and even then I’m not sure I could carry it off.

  “Eh? What’s that you say?” Sir Stephen mutters. I think his deafness has gotten worse since the last time I saw him, at Nanny’s cottage. Or maybe he’s just following Rule Three of Ways to Deal with Delicate Situations. (“Play for time if you have to. Do anything to delay the moment of decision until you have all the information you need.”) He clears his throat. “Royal o
bject? Why, Princess Cecilia, of course you have one!”

  “I do?” I say.

  “Naturally!”

  I think about all the objects in Nanny’s cottage: the glass bottles, the spoons, the wooden table, the threadbare blankets, the kettle, the pot . . . the fish-scaling knife? No, everything at Nanny’s was ordinary peasant ware. Except . . .

  “You mean my books?” I ask, remembering the elegance of the gold leaf, the delicacy of the vellum pages.

  “We all had books,” one of the other girls sneers.

  “Until they were taken away,” Ganelia says sadly. I decide I like her best of all the other girls. I don’t care if she has leadership skills or not.

  “No, no,” Sir Stephen says impatiently. “Not those.” He seems surprised that I haven’t figured this out. “You had the royal harp.”

  The royal harp? What? Has Sir Stephen gone senile as well as deaf?

  “Uh, Sir Stephen? I never had a harp,” I say cautiously. “I think I would have noticed something that big sitting around Nanny’s cottage. . . .”

  “Exactly,” Sir Stephen says, as if I’ve made some incredibly astute observation. “I knew I could never leave something that conspicuous with you, because I was afraid the local villagers might guess who you were. For three days and nights as I rode my horse away from Cortona, with you and the harp tucked into my saddlebags—desperate, terrified, always in fear that your identity might be discovered—I was also racking my brain about what to do. I couldn’t store the harp in my home, because it might be seen there, too, and link me to the true princess. I couldn’t simply discard the harp, because it was the last reminder you’d have of your mother’s love, and”—he glares a bit at his fellow knights—“I feared someday you would need it as proof. And then, out of the night, as if by providence, a woman appeared, begging me, ‘Please, kind sir, do you know music? Can you give my son music lessons as he grows?’”