The Princess Curse

by Merrie Haskell

  By the time I entered the room, Dragos was already seated on his throne, one hand resting on the shaft of his trident. The throne was large for a human but small for a zmeu. Dragos dominated the room and the throne, his hooves trailing halfway down the dais steps.

  “Over here, Reveka,” he said, patting the seat of the smaller throne. “He must see what you might become.” Mihas tried to sidle into the room after me, but Dragos ordered him off with one word: “Go.” The boy disappeared, and I felt bereft. I could have used a friendly face.

  I climbed up the steps and settled myself on the edge of the seat, my stomach in knots. I felt the cold prickle of the Darkness catching up to me.

  Lord Dragos inhaled deeply and sent a jet of flame out across the room. A thousand thousand candles lit, most so high above us that I hadn’t known that they were there. The room blazed bright as day. No, brighter, for inset in the walls behind the candles were a myriad of faceted jewels. The Darkness should have skittered to unseen corners, but instead, it seemed to take up residence around my throat.

  “Bring him in,” Dragos called, his voice a low, rolling roar.

  Doors opened at the far end of the room, and Pa was there, tiny and indistinct between two red-liveried guards, whose faces seemed made of bone.

  The guards marched Pa to us at a slow pace. I nearly twitched, so nerve-racking was this, but both Pa and Dragos appeared unmoved. When Pa was brought to a stop before us, I saw that his hands were bound. I shrieked and ran down the dais steps to him. I embraced him, then turned angrily to Dragos. “Unbind him!” I cried.

  Dragos lifted one black claw, and a guard stepped forward and slashed Pa’s bonds.

  “Well?” Dragos said. “What will you offer me for her? Money? Jewels? As you can see”—he waved a set of claws at the jewels on the walls—“we are in no need of such here.”

  “I offer only myself,” Pa said.

  “What?” I cried. “That’s no good, Pa! You can’t be Queen of Thonos.”

  Dragos ignored me. So did Pa. Dragos leaned his spiny chin on one hand and regarded my father. “You come here armed only with that?”

  “I was a soldier. A talented one, at that,” Pa said. “I’ve fought for every prince in the land. I was in the Black Legion. I was field marshal for Vlad Ţepeş.”

  “If I need a general,” Dragos said, “I have my own skills in that area.”

  Pa was silent for a moment, assessing. He glanced at me, then back at Dragos. “It’s all I have to offer,” he said quietly. “Please. She’s just a child.”

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t think I should jump in to argue with Pa.

  “When Demeter came to the Underworld to claim Persephone, she threatened the world with eternal winter if Hades did not comply,” Dragos said. “That was a compelling argument. Yours is not.”

  “A threat to the world would move you?” Pa asked, furrowing his brow. “I can threaten the world. I could brush aside the names of Vlad and Attila and rain down hell on this earth if it meant freeing my daughter. I could make the Battle of Poienari look like a Christmas feast. I could tear open the throat of Corvinus’s country and leave his blood for the Turks to drink. I could slash the flank of the Turkish Empire and lure in the Polish, and let them fight until Doomsday. I’ve always been a man who fought to create peace, but I could become a man who fights to create chaos. Tell me, Prince Frumos, is that what it would take?”

  I stared at Pa. I’d never seen him like this. I’d never imagined him like this.

  And why had Pa called my zmeu Prince Frumos?

  Dragos leaned against the back of his throne. “I’d rather not see that,” he said mildly. I almost thought he might be laughing at Pa, but his voice sounded serious. “I cannot take an unwilling bride, Doamnule Konstantin. I would not want one, and neither would my kingdom. She’ll not take my food, so I’ll not have her.

  “Go now with my guards to my kitchens, and gather up that wretch Mihas, too. He has conspired to help her avoid eating my food, which is of course why I have no claim to her now. I want him gone with you when you two leave.”

  Pa didn’t look triumphant. I didn’t feel triumphant either, so at least we matched. Pa just gave a little bow, looked hard at me, and walked off with the guards. I watched them go, astonished.

  When they were quit of the chamber, I turned to Dragos, who now stalked in circles around the throne room. He stopped beside a bowl of fruit and picked up a pomegranate, tossing it from hand to hand as he flopped back onto his throne.

  “I don’t understand!” I cried. “I promised to marry you to save him. To save all of them. How can you just let me go now?”

  “It’s as I said,” Dragos replied. “I don’t want an unwilling bride.” He dug his claws into the pomegranate’s tender flesh, splitting it open.

  “So it has nothing to do with Pa’s threat?”

  “I egged him into that threat,” Dragos said. “Even though I think he did mean it. Enough to try, and trying would be enough to make countries fall—Sylvania, at least.” He ripped off a chunk of the pomegranate and tossed it down his gullet. The Darkness pressed against me, making it hard to think.

  “No. No, it doesn’t make sense. He knows something, and you know he knows it! I never told him about meeting you in the forest or beside the Little Well. I never once mentioned that I knew you as Prince Frumos. How did he know to call you that?”

  “He has an invisibility cap; perhaps he overheard something.”

  “No, that’s not it,” I said, frustrated. He wasn’t telling the truth! “It takes a liar to spot a liar, and you, Dragos, are lying.” Annoyed with watching him nibble more pomegranate seeds, I picked up the fruit and threw it against the wall. It split into two parts. The Darkness hissed.

  Dragos sighed. “I once lived in the world, Reveka. I was a prince once, and worshipped God, and walked in sunlight. Perhaps your father recognizes me.”

  I scowled, racking my brains for the name of a prince who’d passed from the world fourteen years before. “Ew. You’re not Vlad Ţepeş, are you?”

  He laughed bleakly. “No. It’s part of that long story I’ve not told you, Reveka. And now there is no time to tell it.”

  “No. There’s plenty of time. I’m not leaving.” I climbed off my throne, intending to pace the chamber, but the Darkness pushed me down. I sank to the steps before my throne.

  “You will leave,” Dragos was saying. “I release you. Don’t you understand?”

  “No!” I said, struggling under the weight of the Darkness. “I don’t understand anything! How can you release me? Think of Thonos, and the souls.” Think of yourself, I wanted to add. I can barely stand it here, with both you and Mihas. How can you stand it alone?

  He stared down at me. “I could force you to dance with me every night, too,” he said at last. “But I found that sort of thing really wasn’t to my taste, in the end.”

  I pounded my fist against my leg. “You’re an idiot, then! A betrothal is a promise. Hold me to it! If I hadn’t interfered, maybe you would have had a bride, in time, from among the twelve princesses.”

  He ignored that. “You’re too young to marry. I was . . . overcome by the thought of the youth and life that you bring with you. And your love. Oh, not for me. But that you loved your father enough to give up your life for him. None of the princesses loved any of their sisters enough to do that.”

  “They were only half sisters to each other,” I said, as if that were the important thing to consider. “And they would say that they loved each other too much to let any one of them sacrifice herself.”

  “Perhaps that’s true. But you are not for this world.”

  I’m a little bit for this world, I thought, though I didn’t know where the thought came from. I loved my herbary, rough and unsettled. I loved my forest, blighted but growing.

  And really, in a way, I loved Dragos, too. Enough to wish him a better life than the lonely stewardship of a dying and vulnerable kingdom. />
  I bit my lip. I glanced at the torn pomegranate lying against the wall, its juices trickling like blood. I thought of the sleepers in the World Above slipping away beneath Adina’s watchful eye, of Didina’s mother and the Duke of Styria dying in their towers, of the disappearing souls, of Didina, poisoned for trying to save her mother. I thought of the nymph Alethe, and how she had seemed so certain that an herbalist in Thonos would end the blight on the kingdom. How I’d come to hope for this myself.

  Maybe in a thousand years I could save the sleepers, but I didn’t know how right then. I had to choose: heal the land that I knew I could heal so simply, or stick like a leech to dwindling hope and lose both the sleepers and Thonos.

  I plucked the seeping half pomegranate from the floor. A small piece of flesh dangled from it, five seeds attached to one other, shimmering darkly. I snagged them and tossed them into my mouth.

  I closed my eyes. The juice burst on my tongue; the seeds crunched against my teeth. The Darkness drew back. I breathed deeply.

  When I opened my eyes, Dragos was giving me such a look, and I realized that the Darkness was still there, still all around, all-encompassing—but that the Darkness was now nothing of the sort. I could see, not just within the circles of candlelight but far into the hallway and out the windows.

  “It’s daylight?” I asked, bewildered. I climbed to my feet to look outside.

  “It is as it ever was,” Dragos said. “The dead and the immortals have always seen it thus. And those who have eaten here.”

  “Even Mihas?” I asked, and even as I asked, I realized that he had never carried candles or lanterns except for my sake.

  I stared outside. It was as if the world were lit by a thousand suns the size of dust motes, diffuse and tiny, by stars brighter than stars, bright enough to see color by. A wide valley spread below Castle Thonos; small figures roamed back and forth—distant souls.

  I breathed in deeply, and it was as if I could smell the grass of the valley, all the way up here. I breathed in again and caught the mineral tang of the lake, and the scent of the brass trees in the Queen’s Forest.

  My forest.

  The Darkness laughed, and there was no evil in it. It wrapped around me, and it was warm like a cloak, and I could breathe.

  I felt like the whole world—the whole of the Underworld, that is—had accepted me, in that moment. Though one glance at Dragos dispelled that illusion.

  He was angry.

  “You haven’t won the argument,” Dragos said. “Eating here merely puts you under my power, and I still wish you to leave.”

  I considered this. I didn’t feel any impulse to obey him. In fact, I mostly felt hunger roaring to life. I bit into the fruit and scrutinized him as I chewed, and offered him the other half of the fractured pomegranate. He stared at it.

  “I understand that you don’t want to marry me,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know why, since I’m simply delightful to be around. But to each his own taste. It’s just—for the good of your kingdom, I’d think you’d have me.” I joggled the pomegranate at him.

  “Don’t you understand?” he growled. “I’m releasing you for your own good. Take your soul back to the sunlight and give it to God while you can.”

  I ignored that. I had to. If I condemned my soul by being Queen of Thonos, I had probably already done the deed. “I ate five seeds with my first bite,” I told him.

  “So?”

  “So send me away for now. For a time. But then I’ll return for good,” I said. “In five years. One seed for each year.”

  “Five years,” he whispered.

  “I’ll come back,” I said. “I’ll go with my father as you want today, but when I’m older, I’ll come back.”

  He tilted his head slightly, thinking. “And then what?”

  “I’ll come back and marry you.” I waggled the pomegranate at him some more. “Give Thonos her willing bride.”

  Reluctantly, he took the fruit from my hand.

  “Now, say yes,” I said.

  I thought I had him. I didn’t. “No,” he said, crushing the fruit so the juice ran out between his fingers.

  I thought about simply plopping down on the throne beside him and promising to stay, here and now. I thought about chaining myself to something.

  My mind was in turmoil. Everything I thought I had wanted in the world—my own herbary, and the peace to practice my art—had paled when confronted by more simple needs, like sunlight and food. But now those barriers were gone, and the Underworld looked like a blessing. But . . . honestly, Dragos and Mihas and Thela were not enough company. I needed friendships. And a father. Could I really live in the dark-walled world, as the nymph had called it, when the sun-walled world was free to me?

  And my obligation was at an end. Dragos had said so himself. I could want to heal Thonos, but in the end, could I force him to marry me? Thonos probably needed a willing groom as well as a willing bride.

  And Dragos was most unwilling.

  I couldn’t talk around the lump of tears in my throat. I bobbed a pathetic curtsy and turned to leave.

  Only I caught the flicker of something blue out of the corner of my eye as I turned. Before I even realized what it was, I shouted a wordless shout.

  But Dragos was already in motion, pulling the gleaming trident from its notch on his throne and jabbing the butt of it into the blue flicker, then swinging his weapon around to strike from above.

  The blue flicker became Armas, with the tatters of my frail second invisibility cap slithering off his head over his ears. He bore down grimly on Dragos with a sword, aiming for the center of Dragos’s head, where the third eye resided.

  I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Lacrimora had sent him to kill Dragos.

  With one wave of his trident, Dragos disarmed Armas; with another, he slipped Armas’s feet out from under him; another motion and Armas was on the floor, with the two long prongs of the trident around his neck and the short center prong pressed to his windpipe.

  “I was letting her go,” Dragos said.

  “I was doing my duty to God, zmeu,” Armas replied.

  Without turning his head, Dragos said, “Reveka, leave.”

  I had been frozen in terror until then, but now a calm stole over me, and I walked forward and put my hand on the trident. “Mercy,” I said.

  “For him? Why?”

  I shrugged. “Is there a reason good enough to spare one man over another, when simple mercy is requested? I could lie and say that he has two small children—”

  “I do,” Armas said.

  “Hush. No, you don’t.” I was pretty sure. “I could say that it will hurt Otilia, and Sylvania, and me, if he dies. I could even suggest that you might fare better without the blight of his unnecessary death on your soul . . . but I simply cry mercy.”

  And I knew, then, that Dragos had to grant me the mercy I requested. I knew this, the same way that I knew I breathed—if I thought about it, I could count the breaths, but if I didn’t think about it, I kept on breathing. It was part of what I had gained when I’d eaten the pomegranate.

  Dragos’s voice was harsh. “Go, call for the guards. We will bind him. Swear to me that you will leave him bound until he passes the borders of the Underworld; swear to me that you will never make him another invisibility cap, or let one fall into his possession.”

  “I swear, to all of those things,” I said, almost laughing, exultant in my newfound power to grant mercy.

  I dashed into the hall and called for the guards.

  Chapter 35

  We were an odd procession, entering the Queen’s Forest: me in royal clothes but wearing peasant shoes and snacking on figs, Mihas looking dazed and carrying an armload of herbs from my herbary, and Pa nudging a bound Armas ahead of him.

  I was gaping at the changes in the forest. Every step I took sent out a new wave of invigoration. Flowers unwilted at my passing, and tarnish vanished from tree trunks before my eyes. I was so enthralled, I didn’t notice at
first that no one was following me anymore. When I turned back, Mihas, Armas, and Pa were all standing stock-still on the path, staring straight ahead.

  “What—?”

  Then I saw her, the nymph Alethe, poised in the dappled shadows of the forest, looking much more substantial than when I first met her. She smiled and bowed, holding two chalices out to me: one plain, of dark iron; the other filigreed, and bright silver.

  “Hail the Queen of Thonos,” Alethe crowed.

  “But I’m not the Queen of Thonos,” I said. “Dragos doesn’t intend to marry me. This is my escort out of the Underworld.” I waved my hand in front of Pa’s eyes, but he didn’t blink.

  “He can’t hear you. I’ve . . . stilled him. All of them.”

  “Why?”

  “To give you this.” She held out the chalices, and unthinkingly, I took them. The cold of them made my arms ache to the elbows.

  “What are these?” I gasped. From the iron cup, the scent of forest loam caught in my nose, making me want to sneeze. From the silver one, a waft of spring pollen almost finished the job. I held in the sneeze, though, by thinking of the word cucumber. It always works.

  “You know the Water of Life, the Living Water, Alethe’s gift. That is always carried in silver or stone. What you do not know is the Water of Death, which kills but also heals the wounds of the dead. Living Water brings the dead to life. Your sleepers upstairs, the ones whose souls wander this realm, are not dead. And since you cannot bring to life that which is not dead . . . So first, death; then life, to wake the unwakeable sleepers.”

  “You want me to kill them?”

  The nymph tilted her head. “And bring them back to life.”

  “How did you know— No, wait. Why didn’t you tell me this when we met?”

  “I was not fully myself before,” she said. “The Water of Life could not have restored life when you and I met. And I myself could not remember such simple things.” She held up a hand, which looked as solid as my own. “With no queen in this realm, the powers of Alethe were fading.”