He reached the point where he needed to turn back if he was to return to the village by sunset. He kept walking. He kept walking for days.
At some point he raided a farmer’s clothes line. This far from the front, the only people in uniform were messengers and deserters. Back in the trenches he had heard tales of men that had gone mad. They’d run from the frontline screaming and foaming at the mouth. The good citizens of the countryside were said to be terrified of deserters and the havoc they brought. He didn’t think he fit that description exactly, but he didn’t feel like being shot on sight. He threw his uniform in the farmer’s refuse heap. He buried the little metal disks he had worn around his neck, the ones that had been meant for identification should he have found himself too close to an exploding grenade.
He walked through the wood with no real destination in mind other than away. Away from the war and his friends, dead from a bullet or sick from the gas. Away from his family and village where he had proven their worst fears of his cowardice. Away from the Brotherland where only a noose awaited a boy that left his duty without leave.
He stuck to the woods and the forest and followed streams uphill towards their sources. During the summer and fall there was no shortage of food he could forage, and he created a makeshift pack to carry excess supplies. He continued to hike through the woods that now carpeted the edges of mountains. He continued on his quest for up and away.
When winter began to set in, he started to worry for the first time. In the evenings his shivering could no longer be ignored. His two wool shirts were not enough to protect him from the morning frosts, and he wondered what he would do when the first snows came. The plants with the berries had died off, and the trees with the fruit had lost their leaves and begun their long season of hibernation. There were still a few nuts on the ground, overlooked by the more enterprising animals, but he couldn’t depend on the random nut or two to get him through the winter.
Worried as he sorted through the remaining supplies in his pack, he lost his footing and tumbled to the ground.
A low cackling laugh seemed to appreciate his fall. He rolled until he could sit up and found himself on some sort of forest track. This one seemed a bit more intentional than the wandering game paths he had followed through the forest during his journey. At the base of what might have once been a well sat a hunched old woman half-way hidden by her thick cloak and nearly doubled over in her enjoyment at his expense.
He frowned. His ego had been slightly bruised by the fall, but that would only take moments to mend. A woman as old and infirm as the one next to the rocks would not have been able to hobble far from her home, even with the walking stick she clutched in one of her shaking hands. That meant he must be closer to some village than he had anticipated. Although he had no idea where exactly he was after his months of ambling through the woods and the foothills of the mountains, he did assume he was still either in the Brotherland or one of its allies. Avoiding villages seemed like the safest recourse.
“Good morning, Grandmother,” the soldier said in a polite tone while he pulled himself up to his feet. He might be a coward and a deserter, but he could still be unfailingly polite. He gave her a small bow as well.
“And to you, child,” she said back. Her cackles subsided down into small chuckles. “That was quite the fall.”
“A mere misstep.”
“Hmm.” The old woman stared at him through the milky film of old age that covered her eyes. “If you say so.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable from her stare and unsure if they still spoke of his stumble.
“May I be of service, Grandmother?” he asked in an effort to turn the conversation. “Are you in need of help to your home?” He didn’t want to enter a village. Even without the telltale uniform, the soldier felt that with just a glance any person he met (at least someone not half blind) would be able to see his cowardice as if a yellow C had been emblazoned on his forehead. If he was lucky, villagers would merely run him out of town. Most likely they would capture him and return him to the capital to the army and the noose.
“Brave one, aren’t you?” the woman asked as if she had read his thoughts and was now mocking them.
His muscles stiffened as if he’d been hit by the rigidity that strikes the body some hours after death. “I would not call myself that.”
“I don’t suppose you would.” The old woman sighed and shifted as if to make her spot on the ground more comfortable. “No, child, I do not need help home. My home is just over there.” She pointed with her stick at a thicket so dense, he couldn’t see what lay behind. He supposed she might have a hut of some sort hidden within the brambles.
She stared at him again in that disconcerting way although he could not fathom how she could make out much with such cloudy eyes. “I do require aid,” she said just when he had decided to make his excuses and be on his way.
“How may I assist?” he asked. He wanted to tell her to get on with it, but that would be rude. He might be a gutless milksop, but he wasn’t rude.
“I find myself short of food for my mid-day meal. Do you have any sustenance to share?”
Both of them turned to the small pack held in his hand.
For a second his self-preservation had him almost clutching his pack to his chest. The soldier had very little food as it was, and he was already worried over his dwindling supplies. Then he relaxed a bit and nearly shook his head at his foolishness. Even with careful hoarding, his food would only last a day at the most. It wasn’t enough for him to live on, but it would make a decent meal for the old woman. Besides, he was young and strong, even if he wasn’t as strong as he’d been before his days in the trenches. He could find more food if needed. The old woman most likely could not. Perhaps when he saw her settled back home she would be able to point him to a town where he might find people who needed workers and who didn’t ask questions.
“It’s not much.” He knelt beside her and placed the pack in her lap. “There’s an older apple and some nuts and some berries dried by the sun.”
“It is a feast fit for a queen,” the old woman said in a soft voice. She gave him a gentle pat on the arm.
He tried to smile, but his worry kept the smile from forming into anything more than a half-hearted grin.
“What would you ask in return for this generosity?”
“Directions if you would be so kind.” The soldier stood back up and stared down the forest track for a moment before turning back. “Do you know of a place where I might earn my keep? A place where my absence from the battlefields will not be noted?” He added the last bit in an undertone, positive a woman of her age would not hear.
She cocked her head at him with a bemused expression. “In return for giving me your last bit of food, you only seek directions?”
He nodded, unsure why that mattered.
She sighed again and shook her head. “And you think yourself a coward. Very well,” she added before he could respond in outrage for having labeled him so plainly. She sat up a bit straighter and seemed to be considering. “A place to earn your keep.” She stared into the distance, thinking. It must have been a trick of the light, but he could have sworn the film in her eyes faded away until they seemed as clear as his. A smile filled her face, erasing the wrinkles he’d sworn had crisscrossed her skin like a railroad map of the Brotherland.
“I have just the thing.” Her eyes sparkled in the sunlight, and he could not fathom how he had ever thought them the eyes of an old woman. “Not far from here, a man sits in his home worried over his dozen daughters. Each night he locks them in their suite with an army of guards, and each morning he finds them exhausted with the soles of their slippers worn through. No one knows what the ladies do each night, and none have been able to bring it to a halt. Some say they pace from their confinement, others that they dance the night away in a magical world of pleasure.”
He snorted at that. “It sounds like a fairy tale.” In this scientific
age of bombs and gases, everyone knew magic was not real and fairy tales did not exist. A world that was filled with trenches and places like the Southern Front had no room in it for happily ever afters. “You speak of the Helvetian king and his daughters. There have been rumors about them for years.” Even before the war he had heard the tales of the isolated king and his eccentric daughters. “They are just rumors.”
The woman shook her head and the hood of her cloak slid all the way down. From the wisps that had escaped before, he had assumed her hair was as snow white as his own grandmother’s locks, but this woman had yellow hair so light it was almost white.
“They are very real, and the distress to their father is acute. The princesses themselves would not mind an end to their nightly ordeals.” She cocked her head to the side considering him. He shifted slightly to avoid such a penetrating stare. “Yes.” Her head nodded up and down in a slow, almost hypnotic, motion. “I think you are just the one to save them.”
A laugh escaped from his throat, filled with all the anger and fear and self-loathing that had been festering in his heart since his first night in the woods. “If what you say is true, these princesses need a hero. I’m no hero. I’m not the one to save anyone.”
The woman (how could he have ever though her old?) began to smile. Her teeth were sharper than a normal woman’s, but even so her smile wasn’t malicious. Disconcerting, but not terrifying. She spoke in a casual tone that belied the seriousness of her words. “Perhaps, then, they will save you.”
* * *
By the time he reached the outskirts of Adventia, the capital of Helvetii, the soldier firmly believed in magic. Like in a fairy tale, the woman (although he now doubted she was something as pedestrian as a mortal woman) had gifted him three items before setting him on his path.
She had returned his pack, only his slim stores were gone, replaced by food truly fit for a Queen’s table. What’s more, it never ran out. For the first time since his train ride to the Southern Front, he had three full meals a day, and his form began to once again fill out.
She then handed him the cloak off her back, and he had discovered that the garment did more than keep a boy warm. It also seemed to turn his fellow travelers’ gazes away from him as if he had become invisible. This allowed him to avoid unwanted questions and hitch a ride on a number of unsuspecting farmers’ carts.
Finally, she gave him a small metal mug not unlike the cups they used on the frontline for their rations. “Do not drink from any other vessel,” she had warned. The soldier had taken her at her word, and he discovered that the cup turned even the vilest looking liquid into pure spring water. Just to be certain, he had siphoned off a small amount of fuel from an abandoned motorcycle near the Helvetti border. What should have been pure poison did not even give him a cramp.
Countless times on the road he had considered turning around, of disappearing back into the woods. With the witch’s gift he needn’t fear the coming of winter. Afraid to anger such a powerful being though, he had followed her directions to the capital, committed to his task to save the princesses.
The morning he arrived in Adventia, he traded some of the fine food in his pack for some fresher, better quality clothes. Although Helvetti had not joined the war like nearly every other country in the world, they were still affected by the food shortages now plaguing much of the continent. Shopkeepers that would have once turned their nose up at such barter were happy to outfit him in a suit and new shoes for pastries and fresh vegetables and steak and kidney pies. No one asked where he had acquired such rare items. He did not volunteer the information.
When the bells of the cathedral tolled out the mid-day hour, he joined the queue of citizens waiting for an audience with the king. Helvetti was a monarchy in the old classical sense with no parliament or congress constraining the king’s hand. The courts might hear the ordinary arguments of the day, but anyone from the highest Duchess to the lowest newsboy could air their grievances with the king, provided they were willing to wait.
He waited four days. During that time, he willingly shared his food from his pack. He didn’t share so much that people became suspicious, but he shared enough to become popular with his fellow supplicants. When it was finally his turn before the throne, he announced in a loud, clear tone the words the witch had given him. “I am here to solve the mystery of the princesses.”
The hall went silent. The secretaries froze with their hands over the keys of their typewriters, and the hushed whispering cut off as if someone had flicked a switch on a wireless set.
“Are ye daft?” an old man muttered from behind him. Like a dam breaking during a flood, the room exploded with the roiling noise of conversation.
On one of the thrones before him, the Crown Princess narrowed her eyes at him. “Not another one,” she muttered to one of her younger sisters at her left. He couldn’t hear her over the roar of the crowd’s disbelief, but he could read her lips. The Crown Princess and heir to Helvetti’s throne was a good deal older than him, nearly thirty, but her sister looked closer to him in age. She smiled at him, but the smile held no warmth or joy. If she had burst into tears, she couldn’t have conveyed more sadness than that one little smile.
“He looks nice,” her lips said.
The king held up his hand and silence slowly fell over the room once more.
“It has been nearly a year since one has tried to discover the cause of my daughters’ exhaustion and why their new shoes are ruined in an evening. Nearly a year since I last executed the man who failed.”
The younger princess winced and looked away.
“How are they executed?” he asked the king, irritated that the witch had neglected this little detail. He had been safe enough from the hangman’s noose in Helvetti. Not only did they not care about the war raging beyond their borders, they didn’t have much interest in the deserters and other refugees trickling into their high mountain nation. The fact that the country was difficult to access with few mountain passes that would be clear come winter meant that the numbers trickling in were not large enough to worry the existing population.
“I have them executed by firing squad. Are you sure you still wish to solve the mystery?”
At least it wasn’t a noose. The soldier stared at the Crown Princess with the pursed lips and the younger princess who shook her head with a violence that caused her diadem to nearly fly off her head.
“If you do solve it,” continued the king, not actually waiting for an answer, “you will be elevated to the rank of duke and be given holdings in the Everfast region. You will also marry my oldest daughter, Louisa, and become her consort upon her ascension to the throne.”
Louisa’s lips pursed even further like she’d just sucked on a lemon of unsurpassed sourness. She looked how he felt at the prospect. The witch had neglected to mention this part as well. He had thought he would solve the mystery, be given some gold, and be on his way. He had come to please an old witch who had given him magical gifts not to earn a Duchy.
“Again, do you still wish to risk death to solve the mystery?”
When the king put it that way, the soldier rather thought he did not. For a second he considered turning and walking away from the castle and Helvetii. It was what his parents and the village back home would expect of him after all. He had walked away from the army and the frontline. He could leave, but then, what? Would the witch appear and reclaim her gifts? Would she denounce him for the coward that he was, ensuring no one else would offer him a job ever again?
He stood before the thrones and the princess with the sad eyes, the one with the irritated expression, and the king who had begun to look a bit mad.
He had promised the witch he would save the princesses, and he would keep his word. He might be a lily-livered skulker, but he wasn’t an oath-breaker.
Besides, he had a cloak that rendered him invisible. If he did not find the source of the princesses’ ruined shoes, he could always sneak away before daybreak.
“I
wish to stay,” he said in a quiet voice that seemed to ring out in the quieter room. The younger princess sighed and looked away.
“You have one night,” said the king.
* * *
The soldier spent the day meeting the twelve princesses from the heir, Princess Louisa, who at twenty-eight had very little time for a boy of nineteen, all the way down to the youngest, the Princess Elise, a mere ten years old. Princess Elise reminded him of his own dear sister before she succumbed to the ’flu that swept through their village seven long years before.
Most of the day though was spent in the company of the other princess who had attended court that morning, the seventh princess, Princess Mary. Only a year younger than him, he found that he had more in common with her than her sisters. Before he left school to spend a disastrous year on the Southern Front, he had been curious about all things chemical and the almost magical reactions unrelated substances could produce. A year wearing gas masks and ducking the deadly inventions created by the chemistry he had once admired had cured him of this fascination.
Although she had never been to school, Princess Mary and her sisters had shared some of the finest tutors the king could bring to his court. Her knowledge far surpassed his, and her enthusiasm and sincere admiration of the subject began to rekindle in him an interest he had long thought dead.
Too soon, though, the dining table in the Princesses’ apartment was laid with supper, and the soldier sat down with the twelve girls for a fine, if simple, meal. Although the fare was limited, the wine was not. After Princess Louisa pressed a third glass on him, he began to suspect the princess of trying to get him drunk. If the other fools had succumbed to the pretty girls’ smiles and the intoxicating effects of wine, then it was no wonder none had discovered their secrets.
He appeared to drink their wine in large amounts with good grace. He even pretended to become drunk and slur his words. However, since he insisted on using his own small metal cup given to him by the witch, he drank nothing but clear spring water the entire meal.
Perilous Princesses Page 13
