The Princess Curse

by Merrie Haskell

  “Of course I care about my soul! But is my soul any more important than all the souls in this realm?”

  “The . . . souls in this realm?” she repeated.

  I waved my hand at the Darkness around us. “This isn’t an empty land, Princess! This is the Underworld.” I found myself explaining, briefly, what I understood of the disappearing souls, which honestly wasn’t much.

  “Well,” she said, dismissing them piously, “they aren’t Christian souls.”

  “What does that matter? A soul is a soul. I wouldn’t refuse to treat a body because it was a Turk! I’ll do my best for these souls.” I felt fierce and strong.

  A light burst and faded on the mountainside—a door of the castle opening and closing. Mihas, playing lookout to see if my father would signal him? “I have to go,” I said. “Tell my father—”

  “If you’re lucky, I won’t tell him half the nonsense you’ve spouted tonight,” Lacrimora said. “God bless your soul, Reveka! I hope he keeps you from foolishness.”

  Rather than argue with her further, I turned away. At the last moment, I remembered. “Lacrimora!” I called. “What was in your potion?” I rattled off the half dozen ingredients I had suspected, like the narcissus and sticklewort.

  “You got all of those correct,” she said. “Also, water from the lake. Scrapings from a gravestone. And a mushroom from this forest.” She bit her lip. “Will that help you?” she asked. “Can you wake them, knowing that?”

  It was the first time that she’d shown concern for the sleepers. I wondered: Did she really sleep at night?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What did the mushroom look like?”

  She described it, nodded dismissively to me, and turned to leave.

  I put my invisibility cap on as soon as her back was turned and followed her until she left the path to stride through the autumn forest. She came, in time, to a cliff face and wriggled through a narrow crack there. Pa’s tunnel!

  When she was truly gone, I turned back to the forest. I searched for Lacrimora’s mushroom, nibbling bread as I went, until I found a few samples of fungus deep in the summer forest. I had no idea which was the one she had used, or if it was even important that she’d used a mushroom.

  I was in a pretty little glade I didn’t recognize; and though I hadn’t marked my path in or out, I wasn’t worried about getting lost. It was a relatively small forest, and it was easily my favorite place in Thonos. I soaked in the weak, false sunlight. I wished the nymph would visit me again.

  I took off my cap and lifted my face to the light. “O nymph Alethe!” I called. “It is I, Reveka, herbalist’s apprentice, gardener’s daughter, bride of Thonos, and I have questions for you!”

  Nothing.

  I chuckled at my brashness but waited just a moment longer in case she had heard. Still nothing.

  I left the glade, and as I did so, I nearly stumbled. I saw something, something that I hadn’t seen before. On a withered tree branch, tiny emerald leaf buds sprouted.

  Perplexed, I stared at this for a long moment.

  Surely this wasn’t a sign of new growth. Surely it was not!

  I looked for more evidence of this new life. Scattered here and there around the forest, green sprouts pushed from the crevices between stones and tarnish flaked from tree trunks, exposing bright silver underneath. These signs weren’t everywhere—they weren’t even to be seen in very many places—but there were changes in every season’s woods.

  How new was all of this? I hurried to the edge of the spring forest where I’d argued with Lacrimora. There, I found the patch of dead dried moss I’d collected from while waiting for her. It was, without a doubt, much greener and springier than before.

  I sat back on my heels.

  Something had changed. But what?

  I gathered my things and returned to the lakeshore.

  I put my socks on my hands and clambered into my boat. Lacrimora’s dark words returned to me: I know how to kill a zmeu.

  I shivered and willed her never to return to Thonos again.

  Chapter 33

  I fell asleep that night with a full stomach and a sick heart. With regard to my stomach, even though I had vowed to portion the food out carefully so that it would last, I couldn’t stop eating until sated. As for my heart, the thought of Didina and her dying mother lying still and silent in the western tower nearly broke it. And the thought of the disappearing souls—each soul was like a chain locked around my heart, holding it together.

  And the thought of Pa fighting Dragos?

  I rose as soon as I was rested and went to work.

  My pace was frantic but not as fast as it could have been. I took careful notes as I went. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than succeeding at waking one of the sleepers, or saving one of the souls, and being unable to replicate my success because I couldn’t remember if I’d pulverized an herb or merely chopped it.

  I lost track of the passage of time, and when Dragos came into the herbary, I blinked at him as though I hadn’t seen him in ten years. His appearance caused my stomach to twist in knots of fear, but for a moment, I couldn’t think why. Then I remembered: Pa is coming to kill him, and I was afraid for both of them.

  Almost immediately, though, the fear was overcome by anger. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re the one who controls the passage of time?” I asked.

  “That’s not quite true,” he said. “I can control whether this world follows the day and night cycle of the World Above, but it takes a great deal of concentration and attention. It is better for me and for Thonos to let it go along as it wills.”

  Oh. I was about to ask if controlling the time in Thonos meant controlling the time in all the Underworld when I realized then that he might now be curious to know how I’d learned as much as I had. I was an idiot! A double idiot, too, for being upset that Lacrimora knew something I didn’t.

  My hands shook as I held up a bowl of rose petals to the flickering candle, pretending to inspect them closely for mold and hoping that this action covered up the expression on my face.

  “Why are you so upset?” Dragos asked.

  I huffed. “I can’t see very well in this candlelight. In the World Above, we worked by sunlight for a reason. Mold is insidious.”

  The most astonishing thing happened then: Dragos hummed low in his throat, and a jeweled third eye opened high on his forehead. A beam of light shot forth, which he then directed at my bowl of petals.

  There are a thousand stories of zmei in the world, and so many of them mention the third, blazing eye of the dragon that I had been a little surprised that Dragos did not seem to possess one. Now I was surprised that he did have one.

  “Is this not bright enough?” he asked.

  I nodded, too dry throated with wonder to attempt speech. When I had thoroughly determined that the roses contained no mold, he closed the eye, and his forehead became seamless once more. I wanted to touch his head and discover if I could feel the eyeball beneath his skin, but good manners kept me from asking.

  Good manners—and a little fear.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” Dragos asked.

  I nodded. “I—” I fell silent, but his look was encouraging, so I tried again. “I have a few potions I want to test. On the river.”

  “Why?”

  “When I met the nymph of Alethe, she told me that she was not as strong as she once was. She said she suffers—the river suffers—just like the souls.”

  Dragos was silent.

  “Dragos?” I asked.

  “I had thought—” He stopped, then said, “I had wondered if Alethe’s waters were not as effective as they once were.”

  “Would you take me to the source of the Alethe?”

  He wasted no time.

  I knelt on the mossy bank where the river Alethe bubbled forth from the darkness beneath a half-ruined shrine. A cracked stone altar, dimpled with dead moss, was overlooked by a small statue of the nymph Alethe. The statue’s paint
had flaked away, and the face was worn to nothing.

  I uncorked a potion I’d made of Underworld iris, rose, and mallow. I paused before pouring it into the water.

  “This reminds me of when I first met you in the forest, except now I am the one casting things into the stream, not you,” I said.

  Dragos said nothing. He stared at the shrine and the statue of the nymph. I lowered the potion bottle to my lap, watching him.

  “I guess you must have brought the plum blossoms from here,” I said. “What were you doing, exactly?”

  To my surprise, he answered. “I was honoring a memory.”

  “Whose memory?”

  “Many years ago,” he began, staring into the current as though looking into another world, “on exactly the day I met you, a woman. . . . No, not just ‘a woman.’ She was a sister to me. She threw herself into a river from a high place and drowned.”

  His stark words conjured a vivid picture. Too vivid. I also thought I had heard this story before. But the tale slipped away from my memory, like dawn’s dreaming in the late afternoon.

  “It was my fault,” he added.

  My mouth was dry. I licked my lips and looked away. I wanted to ask about his life before he became King of Thonos but didn’t know how to begin.

  I noticed the bottle in my hand and remembered what we had come here to do. I poured the remedy into the stream, where it was swallowed immediately.

  I’m so very wrong about this, I thought. If this is even the right tactic, a river and a whole land must need so much more than this tiny bottle to heal it.

  “Reveka?” Dragos asked. “Is there something I should be looking for?”

  I wanted to cry out that I didn’t know, that I had no idea what to look for, and why didn’t he understand better what was going on with his own land? I almost threw the bottle into the stream but checked my motion at the last moment.

  Chagrined, I stoppered the bottle and slid it back into the basket. I was throwing a tantrum, or nearly. Dragos did know what would save Thonos. It was I who stood in his way.

  I got to my feet. “I need to rethink this. Let’s try giving a remedy to a disappearing soul—if we can find one after it starts to thin but before it evaporates altogether?”

  “We can but try,” Dragos said.

  On the flight back to the castle, I tapped his arm, which was wrapped securely around my waist. “I want to stop in the Queen’s Forest,” I said. “I want to gather more materials.”

  Wordlessly, he changed direction just a little, and moments later, he landed me in the spring forest.

  And that’s when I saw Didina.

  She was standing on the path through the forest, running flat hands over the tops of the ferns, staring in minute concentration at the plants. She was dressed as always: short black and red striped skirt under a rectangular black apron; black leg wrappings over her stockings; leather shoes; and a white chemise embroidered by Adina.

  I ran toward her, calling her name: “Didina! Didina, you’re awake!”

  But she didn’t turn to me, didn’t even look at me.

  I stopped just short of touching her and stared. The light passed through her. She was a soul.

  I screamed and clutched my head. “She’s dead! Lacrimora has killed her! And now she’s disappearing!”

  “No.” Dragos’s voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as though I were not bawling like a newborn calf. “She’s not dead. She’s not one of mine at all—not even an eidolon.”

  “I— What?” I was jolted out of my tears and my rage and my wailing. “She’s not . . . dead?”

  “No.” He waved his clawed hand in front of her, and she did not blink. She continued feeling the feathers of the ferns with her palms. “She’s lost. But still very much attached to her body.”

  Now I was laughing with relief. “Oh, thank goodness. Thank God. She’s fine, then. She’s all right.”

  Dragos shook his head gravely. “Her body is alive, but she’s trapped, wandering the Underworld. If she goes too far, the body will die.”

  I was silent for a long moment, absorbing this. Was this true of all the sleepers—were their souls in the Underworld? And the ones who slipped away from Adina’s care, had they wandered too far?

  I wiped my nose while Dragos politely watched Didina’s face and not mine; he only turned to me when I said in a small voice, “Could you take me back to the castle, please?”

  “I have a question,” I said when Dragos set me down in the dark courtyard. “You said that your power does not extend where the sun shines. . . . Does that mean you cannot step into sunlight?”

  “I cannot,” Dragos said. “In a sense, I am a prisoner of my own kingdom, for I can never truly leave it. I cannot journey beyond the shadows at the edges of my land.” Then, so low I almost didn’t hear, “I miss the sun.”

  “You miss it?” I pounced on the phrase, turning my face up toward his voice. It was too dark to see him. “Were you ever able to go into the sun, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? Why can’t you now?”

  “Before I became King here, I was freer.”

  “Then why become King at all?”

  “It’s a long story, Reveka,” he said, leading me into the castle.

  “Oh,” I said meekly, as though that settled it. “Of course.” Then I added, “I can see why you think I don’t have time to hear it.”

  He gusted a sigh. “It was much like your decision to become my wife, Reveka; quickly made, to save another, and just as painful to me as your choice is to you.”

  I bit my lip to keep from saying something I’d regret.

  I could make out the sounds of footsteps in the distance, and then a light. Mihas emerged from the castle, bearing a lantern. I was grateful for the light and smiled widely at Mihas.

  I glanced at Dragos, saw him watching me, watching Mihas. Puzzled, I tried to read his expression—and of course, that was when the Darkness returned and swallowed me whole. I didn’t even have a chance to fight it. I fell into nightmares.

  “Reveka,” a voice said, cutting through the Darkness. There was a huge, warm hand holding mine, and another such hand across my forehead. I was being cradled in warmth. My nose was filled with the scents of ash and stone, almond and cherry bark.

  I slit open an eye and saw Dragos’s hand enveloping mine. My fingers were so slender and tiny in comparison to his. I closed my eyes and enjoyed that his skin felt warm and smooth and human.

  We were not where I had fallen, in the courtyard. I had been moved. I lay on a thick carpet in front of the fire in Dragos’s hall while he knelt beside me.

  The Darkness seemed at bay for a moment, but I tasted the iron tang of blood on my lips. A nosebleed? Confirming my suspicion, Dragos dabbed a rag at my nostrils.

  For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to have Frumos here instead.

  Frumos is Dragos, I corrected myself, quashing the dreamy girl within who kept trying to place the human face over the zmeu. There is no Frumos. There never was.

  I sat up. Dragos left me the rag and retreated to his chair, where he watched me with shining dark eyes.

  “I have patience,” Dragos said, seemingly at random. “Or I thought I did.”

  “What?” I asked, standing up and holding the rag to my nose.

  “You are reluctant. I am reluctant! You’re barely more than a child, and— Anyway. I can see you are waiting—for escape, or for your father to come for you, or something. It doesn’t matter.” He spread his hands apart, bowed his head. He looked defeated. “Perhaps I should let you go.”

  “What?”

  “Mere mortals cannot survive in this place for long, Reveka. If you do not become my bride, you will waste away down here and die under the strain of the Darkness. Alethe’s waters alone cannot sustain you much longer. Do you see?”

  “N-no. I don’t see,” I lied. I strode away from the fire, trying to buy myself time to think, to discover how to answer him. I checked to see if
my nose had stopped bleeding. It had.

  Dragos said, “You’re blind, then.”

  I whirled to face him, as hurt and as angry as I’d ever been. Why was he doing this? He was the blind one! “Thonos needs a queen! So why don’t you just force me to marry you? Or why didn’t you force Lacrimora? Or Maricara, or any of the others?”

  “I can’t force it!” Dragos said. “I must have a willing bride. Do you think I would have danced around on my hooves for six years if I hadn’t needed a willing bride?”

  “The night I witnessed the dancing, the princesses didn’t seem that willing!”

  “Their father’s stupid interference, with those iron shoes,” he growled. “And if there had been any other way, don’t you think I would have taken it?”

  “Of course I do, Frumos!”

  We both stopped then—stopped talking, stopped arguing. I stopped moving. The air between us filled with silence.

  I’d called him Frumos.

  “I am not Frumos,” Dragos said, his voice so low I felt it more than heard it.

  The tone of his voice made gooseflesh run up my arms. “Then you shouldn’t have introduced yourself to me that way,” I snapped. “It’s your own fault, if you hate the name so much.”

  I thought I’d made him angrier, so I was surprised when he started to laugh. I started to laugh, too.

  I don’t know what we might have said next, but then Mihas came in at a dead run. “They—the guards—they’re bringing him!” Mihas panted.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Mihas’s face was white, his eyes panicked. “Your father!”

  Chapter 34

  With a swirl of his cloak, Dragos left the room.

  My knees wobbled, and the Darkness that I had believed was defeated threatened to press me flat. But I hoisted my skirts and ran after Dragos, though I couldn’t match his long stride. Mihas drew up the rear.

  “Where are they taking him?” I gasped at Mihas.

  “The throne room!”

  I lost sight of Dragos in the dark, and had to let Mihas guide me with his torch.

  The throne room was by far the most decorated place I’d seen in the castle. A variety of weaponry and armor hung on the walls, and a long trident with a stunted center prong was slotted upright into the arm of an ebonwood throne at the far end. Another, smaller throne sat beside the first. Between and behind the thrones rested a great iron scale.