The Princess Curse

by Merrie Haskell

  Eavesdropper! I stared at her with big eyes, uncertain what to say, or if I should say anything at all. Marjit, the root of the castle’s grapevine, apparently gathered her information from illicit eavesdropping. People thought they were alone in the baths, but she was really on the other side of the door with her ear pressed to it.

  The princesses were talking about the crows in the courtyard. “It’s an omen,” one of them said decisively. “The Hungarians are coming.”

  “At least there won’t be more Saxons.” This was Ruxandra’s voice, sounding disgusted. Her tavern wench’s accent was unmistakable. “Every single Saxon, insisting on dancing with every single one of us, for every single dance. Like we don’t already get enough of that.”

  “The worst of the dancing Saxons learned his lesson,” someone else—Maricara, I think—added with grim humor.

  “His name is Iosif,” someone else put in quietly. “And if Corvinus is coming, Iosif’s the reason why, so maybe we should remember that name.”

  “What’s Corvinus going to do?” another voice asked. “It’s the Wallachians we should worry about.”

  “Oh, la, Wallachians. They’ve no bite without the Impaler.”

  “Oh, la, Wallachians!” This new voice was mocking, harsh. I imagined it belonged to Lacrimora. “If your precious papa doesn’t produce an heir soon, the Wallachian Prince is going to insist on being named the heir to Sylvania. And if Vasile agrees, the Hungarians will attack. And if Vasile doesn’t agree, the Wallachians will attack.”

  “Then Papa had just better get busy with his little bride, hadn’t he!”

  I wanted to hear more, but Marjit flapped her hands like the wings of an excited chicken, motioning me to open and close the far antechamber door. We tromped loudly back to the bathing chamber, and when we came in, the princesses were silent, their faces as smooth as peaches.

  After this, Marjit had me help with the scrubbing and sponging and hair washing. The time went quickly.

  When the princesses were gone, I turned to Marjit. “What was that all about?”

  Marjit shook out her towels with a snap. “One of the Saxons, Tereza’s betrothed, went missing just last night. The one called Iosif.”

  “But why . . . what’s that have to do with crows?”

  “The crows are probably sent by Corvinus, the Hungarian king, to spy.”

  “Well, how do you know that?” I asked, astonished.

  “Corvinus means ‘crow,’ doesn’t it? And he’s the one who supports the Saxons who live in Transylvania and fight the Turks. Which the Transylvanians are not so fond of, I might add, except for when the Turks invade.” I knew this. I’d grown up with Saxon nuns in Transylvania. “The Saxons sent a delegation to us, including this Iosif, who was minor nobility of sorts, to lobby Prince Vasile for the Hungarian cause. But now Iosif is missing, the latest victim of the curse, and Corvinus is going to be angry.”

  “That’s silly! Corvinus must know there’s a curse. How can he get mad when someone gets caught up in it?”

  “Corvinus doesn’t actually believe the curse is real. Corvinus thinks that Prince Vasile is just imprisoning everyone who disappears, and is working dark magic on the ones who fall to the sleeping curse.”

  I stared at Marjit. It had never occurred to me that people would think the curse wasn’t real. Or that they would think it was all part of a political machination on Vasile’s part.

  “The only thing that has saved Sylvania to this point,” Marjit said, “is that whenever we tried to send the princesses away, storms and earthquakes rose up to chase them—and we had to bring the princesses right back to make it all stop. So Corvinus may not believe in the curse, but everyone in this region believes that Vasile controls a great magic. That’s protected us more than anything else. They think, If this is what he’ll do to keep his daughters at home, imagine what he’d do to an invader!”

  “I see,” I said, though it wasn’t true; I was just barely beginning to see. “It was . . . nice of you to let me overhear the princesses with you.”

  Marjit snorted, spreading out her towels to dry. “It en’t kindness. I need a second witness if the princesses spill one of their secrets. I thought this morning, with Tereza’s betrothed disappearing and all, we’d hear sommat useful.”

  “We did! They said the dancing Saxon learned his lesson.”

  Marjit shook her head. “Not enough to go to the Prince about.” She sighed. “Trust me.”

  I considered. “If we did overhear something useful . . .”

  “We’d split the dowry, of course.” She examined my face. “Why, do you have plans for the whole of it?”

  “Of course,” I said, blushing like I wasn’t planning to use the dowry to join a convent.

  “I knew it,” Marjit gloated. I refrained from asking her what she thought she knew. Instead, I thanked her and left.

  I scurried off to the herbary, passing Armas and Pa and several other men loading harquebuses. Their volleys of gunfire echoed through the courtyard, scaring the crows away and awakening Brother Cosmin early, so he came to set us many tasks in the herbary long before noon.

  Didina didn’t come back from the midday meal. Brother Cosmin kept forgetting she wasn’t in the room with us—she was much quieter than me, so perhaps it was easy to forget, especially with me there. When he called for her the third time, only to look up in puzzlement when she didn’t answer, he said, “Reveka, go find Didina, please!”

  I went, and gladly. The herbary was stuffy, with the shutters drawn to keep out the sunlight.

  I was arrested right outside the door by the sight of a golden-haired boy near my age seated on the edge of the Little Well, pulling up a bucket of water.

  Now, there were three wells inside Prince Vasile’s walls: the main well by the kitchen, the sour well down past the stables—which gave perfectly healthful water that reeked of rotten eggs—and the Little Well near the herbary. I was told no one ever drank from the Little Well. I’d believed it had run dry long ago.

  The boy, who was prettier than any boy had a right to be, with forget-me-not eyes and a rosebud mouth, scooped a wooden cup full of water from his dripping bucket. He paused, the cup held halfway to his perfect lips, and stared at me, slack-jawed.

  I knew I wasn’t anywhere near pretty enough to receive this kind of reaction—but neither was I ugly enough. I frowned at him—and still he stared. I felt the blood rise in my cheeks, and I grew angry. He stared like I was wearing a duck on my head. I didn’t like it. It was rude.

  I don’t know what came over me then, other than that I was parched from working in the hot herbary and annoyed beyond belief. I marched right up to the boy, snatched the cup from his hands, and gulped down his water.

  He was so astonished that his fingers didn’t even fight to keep the cup. He just gawped at me. I glared back over the brim. “Close your mouth,” I told him when I’d swallowed. “You’ll catch flies.”

  I handed him the cup and turned toward the archway leading from our tiny walled garden into the rest of the castle. I glanced back at the boy: He held the wooden cup limply in his hands, his mouth open so far that his chin practically touched his chest.

  The door of the herbary slammed open. I thought Brother Cosmin was coming to chastise me for lollygagging, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He bolted for the Little Well, shouting at the boy. He punched the wooden cup out of the boy’s hand, knocking it into the well. Then he sent the bucket and rope tumbling after.

  The rope hissed away in the silence, until there came the distant splash of the bucket hitting the water.

  Now it wasn’t just the boy who stared with an open mouth.

  “Never drink from that well,” Brother Cosmin said, as though scolding a small child. He looked over at me; I tried to shrink around the corner, but it was too late. “Reveka! You hear this, too! Never, ever drink from here! It’s contaminated.”

  I was going to die from drinking poisoned water! I clutched my belly, preparing for
spasms. But nothing happened.

  The water hadn’t tasted bad. In fact, it had been very, very good. A little bit sweet but with the tang of stone and . . . almonds? And it had been oh so cold.

  “Contaminated how?” I asked, afraid now of a more spiritual than physical contamination. Perhaps someone had drowned themselves in the well. Everyone knew better than to drink from a suicide well.

  “It’s . . . just no good,” Brother Cosmin said.

  “Fairies,” the boy suggested.

  “No, not fairies.” Brother Cosmin stooped and scraped a bit of moss off one of the stones, revealing an inscription written in a language I didn’t know. “Two Turkish prisoners dug this well, and when it was finished, they cursed it with this carving.”

  Another curse? I craned my head, even though I couldn’t read Turkish. “What’s it say?”

  “Are you sure they were Turks and not fairies?” the boy asked.

  “Who are you?” Brother Cosmin snapped.

  “I’m Mihas,” the boy said. “I came to the castle just yesterday to sell a cow, and they gave me work in the gardens.”

  “Get back to your work, Mihas.” Brother Cosmin turned to me. “And you, Reveka: Go find Didina!”

  Mihas slouched after me out of the courtyard. “He didn’t have to throw the bucket down the well,” he said. “That was Master Konstantin’s bucket. He’s going to be angry.”

  “Yes, well, don’t lie to him about it, whatever you do. Master Konstantin can’t abide liars.”

  “Why would I lie, when that monk is the one who threw it into the well?”

  I half shrugged. When I was very young, I might have made up a story about forgetting the bucket, to put off getting beaten for losing it. Of course, when I was a little older and the Abbess eagerly noticed my every transgression, I would have lied and said I never borrowed the bucket in the first place, or whatever I thought I could get away with to avoid trouble. Later, once my reputation was firmly established with the Abbess, I could have told the truth entirely about a monk throwing the pail down the well, and no one would have believed me—and I would have had to go a week without wearing a shift between my wool clothes and my skin, fast for three days on bread and water, and recite extra psalms for the dead, as well as endure a beating. I could almost feel the sting of alder sticks smacking my thighs.

  I came back to the present with a shiver. Mihas was staring at me, mouth open.

  “What? Why are you staring?”

  He licked his overpink lips. “I hope the fairies didn’t curse you,” he said earnestly.

  The boy was an idiot. Brother Cosmin had told him that there was a Turkish curse on the well, and he still thought it was fairies. I couldn’t believe Pa had hired him.

  I turned on my heel and went looking for Didina.

  Chapter 9

  After checking the kitchens and the privy, I went to look for Didina in the western tower, where her mother slept and her grandmother watched.

  I climbed the tower, assessing the whole time whether I felt sick from drinking at the Little Well, but . . . nothing came of it. I had a small ill feeling in my midsection, but that was because I was a little bit afraid of why Didina hadn’t come to work in the herbary that afternoon.

  When I opened the door to the tower, my worst fears were realized. Didina huddled in Mistress Adina’s arms, crying.

  My throat went dry. “Is it . . . is it your mother?”

  Adina looked up over Didina’s scarf-covered head, eyes sad and red. “Yes. My daughter is—slipping away.”

  I sat down hard on a stool and stared in shock at my fellow apprentice.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I couldn’t even imagine what I would do if Pa were lying cursed before me—could imagine even less what I would do if he were dying. We hadn’t gotten along perfectly—he was too quick to believe the worst about me—but he was all I had, and he’d done more for me than many fathers might.

  “There has to be something you can do, Grandma,” Didina pleaded.

  Adina looked helplessly at the girl. We all knew there was nothing anyone could do. I had talked it over with Adina. When any of the sleepers started to fade, in a matter of weeks they wasted down to skin and bones and simply . . . died.

  Since it was better than sitting there, crying, Adina got us up and moving, to help her with the caretaking of the cursed sleepers. We washed their bodies, we fed them, we moved their limbs. We checked for sores and lice and fleas.

  I moved in dumb silence, berating myself for my selfishness, swearing to do better. I’d jumped headlong into the puzzle of curse breaking, so pleased about the dowry and the opportunities it represented that I hadn’t bothered to discover the truth of what the curse really meant.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, staring at Didina’s calm, strong hands combing out her mother’s hair.

  “Sorry for what?” she asked. “You didn’t do this to her. To any of them. It was all set in motion long before you arrived.”

  I gave Didina a regretful smile. “If my ma weren’t dead, but just asleep, I’d steal the sun and stars to try and wake her.”

  “If you knew how,” Didina said coldly, and I realized it sounded like I blamed her for just not trying hard enough.

  “No—no, that’s not what I meant. I meant . . . thank you for being so kind to me, Didina.”

  The cold anger melted from her face, leaving behind a puzzled expression. “How do you mean? I’ve not . . . I’ve not been particularly kind to you, Reveka.”

  “Not particularly, no. But wouldn’t I just want to slap silly any girl who thought the dowry was more important than my mother, even for a moment?”

  Didina’s expression thawed further. “Reveka, you actually tried to wake the sleepers. I”—she clasped her hands over her heart—“I thank you that you tried.”

  I nodded. “And I thank you still, for not slapping me silly.”

  I stayed with them until the sleepers made their nightly cry, then took Didina down to the herbary loft, where we slept. I gave her valerian tea to help her rest while I stayed up for some hours combing through Physica in hopes that Saint Hildegard had performed a miracle and left the clues to a cure within the pages of her herbal.

  When finally I slept, I dreamed.

  Sunlight fell on my shoulders as I followed a road through wide, striped fields. The road rose slowly into the mountains—never steep, though. My feet carried me without effort. There was something at the top I had to see, something I had to know about.

  I climbed to the crumbling gate of a large palace hewn from a type of shining rock that I didn’t recognize. The whole edifice was a ruin, and the only truly intact piece was a doorless archway. Carved into the keystone was a sleeping human face, troubled in its repose.

  I started forward to examine the face, and its stone eyes opened. “Ruin is everywhere,” the mouth said. “A reminder that eternity exists.”

  My heart pounding in my ears woke me.

  I rose early, unable to sleep after the dream and not wishing to disturb Didina’s slumber. I lit a candle and studied the list of Plantes Which Confer Vpon the Wearer Invisibilitie.

  I copied the whole list to a tiny scrap of vellum, rolled it tightly, and tucked it behind my ear, underneath my cowl. Maybe if I carried it near my brain, it would make more sense. And if I studied it in leisure moments, that might help, too.

  At dawn, I went out to the herb garden, coating my bare feet with chilly dew, to smell the scents of earliness. In the convent, I would have been roused for Lauds at dawn to pray, but I hadn’t seen this hour since Pa came for me. I’d expected to have to keep the night watches for prayer again when I was apprenticed to a monk, but Brother Cosmin’s lax monkishness didn’t demand prayer even the night before an important saint’s feast.

  I had gathered great armfuls of mint and tansy and was headed to the baths when I caught a flash of red and black in the shadows near the Little Well. It was Frumos—the strange man from the woods.


  He was less handsome than I remembered, and he was younger than I remembered, too.

  “The herbalist’s apprentice,” Frumos said slowly. “Remind me of your name?”

  I tried not to mind that he’d forgotten me, even though I remembered every detail of him, from the ugly tusks on his cloak clasp to the way his eyes smiled more than his mouth.

  I said, “If you can’t remember my name, then I won’t remind you.”

  He cocked his head. “I didn’t think you were old enough to be so coy.”

  I shrugged and scrutinized him. His clothing was exactly the same as it had been in the woods. What did that mean? Did he not have another suit of clothes? Owning only one set of fancy clothing seemed like the sort of thing an impostor would do, but who was Frumos imposing on?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, thinking that the only reason I knew for random men to show up at Castle Sylvian was if they were going to try to break the curse.

  “I came to see if the Hungarians had arrived yet.”

  I pointed to the crows clustered on the eaves. They had returned in the night and now shuffled and eyed us with annoyance. “Just those ones. Do they count? Everyone says Corvinus sent them.”

  Frumos eyed the birds. “Not Corvinus himself, of course,” he said. “But someone close to him.”

  “What?” I asked, startled. “What does that mean?”

  “I mean, he has a . . . magician of sorts, a hultan on his side, who controls the crows and uses them as spies.”

  I shivered. Hultani were great wizards, powerful enough to harness a zmeu dragon and ride it.

  I wanted to ask Frumos how he knew that, about the hultan and the crows, but he was staring at the Little Well, tracing his fingers over the carving where Brother Cosmin had scraped away the moss. “Well,” I said, reluctantly hefting my basket of herbs, “I have work to do.” I bobbed about half a curtsy less than what a lord was due, turned, and marched out of the courtyard.