“I told you,” I said with some asperity. “I’m not going to be the queen.”
“You already are,” she said, completely unperturbed. “You did not eat just any fruit in this world—you ate the pomegranate, the fruit that makes indissoluble marriage, and the fruit that the dead consume in order to be reborn. You became the Intercessor of Souls in that moment, the true Queen of Thonos.”
“I—” I paused. “I did? Does the King of Thonos know this?”
“I’m sure he’ll figure it out.” She waved a hand at the path. “Now. Go to work. You and you alone possess the power of rebirth in this country. There is no one better suited to the task of awakening those trapped between life and death.”
“And . . . all because I ate a pomegranate, instead of . . . a fig?”
The nymph smiled. “If you choose to believe that, certainly; some would argue that it was your fate.”
“Fate is for people too lazy to make choices,” I said.
Her smile grew. “Maybe that’s true. In another life, I made my choices and did not wait for fate—though that’s not how they tell it in the stories.”
“Wait—in another life? What other life?”
She laughed. “I will tell you the next time we meet. Safe journey to you, sister,” she said, stepping backward into the trees.
“Wait! Who were you? Alethe!”
She was gone, and I had no notion of what to do now. My hands were full, and I was reluctant to let go of the chalices. Pa and the others stood still, staring into the middle distance. I contemplated them for a long moment and decided to try the obvious thing first. “Wake up!”
They came alert instantly. Pa stared at me and what I held. “Where did you go? And what are you carrying?”
“I have been given a gift,” I said. “And it will wake the sleepers.”
Princess Lacrimora waited at the tunnel entrance to greet us when we came up from the Underworld. Well, really, she was there to greet Pa, throwing her arms around him and giving him a big kiss, from which I averted my eyes. Then she gave me a sort of perfunctory hug, too, which I returned stiffly. Armas she also embraced; Mihas she ignored, which suddenly made me irate. Mihas had been the one who gave up his freedom to come help me—Mihas had been the one to pass me food from the World Above, and now she acted like he didn’t matter?
Soon after, Princess Otilia came at a run, heading straight into Armas’s embrace. She untied his bonds and murmured to him in undertones by turns desperate and loving. It was clear that their courtship was no longer secret, nor troubled. They had probably used the time I was in the Underworld to their advantage.
Then Lacrimora and Otilia took Mihas and Armas off to who knows where. Lacrimora gave Pa a significant look on her way out, and said to me, “You must be hungry.” She departed, leaving Pa and me alone.
“Well?” Pa asked in a quiet voice.
“Well what?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
“What does that matter? You have to live with her.”
“And you, too. She’ll be your mother.”
“Stepmother,” I hissed. Pa winced. “Oh, Pa! Why Lacrimora?”
“She saved your life—several times—you know,” Pa said.
“She did not! And she poisoned Didina!”
Pa sighed. “Think back on it.”
“I’ve thought back on it,” I said. “I had days and days to think back on it. My conclusion is that any time she did me a favor, it had nothing to do with me.”
“Well,” Pa said, after a pause. “Maybe I won’t marry her, then.”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t believe my father had snatched me from the bowels of the Underworld, that I was for all intents and purposes married to a dragon-demon, and I was even now a queen—and Pa and I were squabbling like this. And not over anything interesting, but rather over whether or not he was going to marry Lacrimora. “Marry her! She’s a princess. You won’t get another shot at a princess.”
Pa said, “She’s the one I want, Reveka, and I knew it as soon as I saw you didn’t like her.”
“Contrary, obstinate man,” I grumbled.
“She poisoned Didina to save her soul—you do realize that?”
I did realize that, or realized that Lacrimora believed it. But that didn’t mean I was going to start naming herbs after her. “Do what you want,” I said. “I don’t see how you can love her, but do what you want.”
“Did I never explain to you about love, Reva?” Pa asked. I gave him a look, and he laughed uncomfortably. “I guess not. Let me put it in a way you’ll understand. Love is like stinging nettles. Only they prick from the inside out, starting at your heart and bursting on around. It’s worst when it gets here”—he rubbed the bridge of his nose—“then your vision goes a little strange. But eventually the nettles stop stinging—once she agrees to kiss you. But they start right back up again when she agrees to marry you—”
“Pa,” I interrupted, “that’s not love, that’s fear.”
Pa shook his head, looking off admiringly in the direction where Lacrimora had disappeared. “Same thing, in my case.”
Pa wanted me to eat, sleep, bathe, and sleep again, in that order, but I could think only of the sleepers in the western tower. “I have to do this, Pa,” I said, shaking off his guiding hand for the third time as he tried to divert me to the kitchens.
“Well, let me come with you, at least,” Pa said, when he saw I couldn’t be dissuaded.
When I entered the tower, Adina was overjoyed to see me, but I had a purpose. Reunions could wait.
I took a spoon and dipped it into the iron chalice. “What’s that?” Adina asked, as I dripped the Water of Death into Didina’s mouth. I didn’t tell her. I could barely believe I was doing this.
I stroked Didina’s throat gently, so that she swallowed. I waited for something dramatic, but nothing happened. I couldn’t even tell if she stopped breathing. I took a breath of my own, then grabbed a clean spoon to avoid cross-contamination and dipped it into the Water of Life. I dripped several spoonfuls into her mouth and again massaged her throat.
Nothing happened. She didn’t even swallow. I wondered how I was going to explain to Adina that I’d killed her granddaughter. I pushed despair back for a moment, calling, “Wake up, Didina,” in a gentle voice. “You and I, we have much work to do. But you have to wake up.”
She swallowed convulsively. Air rushed into her lungs.
Her brown eyes opened.
She struggled to sit up, but she was too weak to do so. She turned her head on her pillow. “Grandma?” she croaked, catching sight of Adina.
Adina froze, staring down at Didina; then her shriek of joy pierced my eardrums as the old woman got down on the floor with her granddaughter and held her and cried and whooped, while the poor girl stared around her in dazed shock. Pa, though, immediately drew me on to Didina’s ma, and hovered over me while I gave first the Water of Death, and then the Water of Life, and urged the dying woman to wake.
And she did.
The following shrieks of joy were even louder, and I confess my own eyes clouded with tears when Didina saw her mother move and talk; but Pa and I had to ignore them. We had to move on, to Sfetnic, to Iulia, to all the rest.
And that’s how we woke the sleeping dead of Castle Sylvian.
Chapter 36
Somehow, Pa got most of the public credit for breaking the curse.
Prince Vasile made him the count of some obscure hamlet in the hill country, and only reluctantly. Prince Vasile, I learned, was unconvinced that my father had done anything important toward breaking the curse. Vasile wanted to credit the iron shoes with the end of the dancing. But Pa was the one who was known to have gone down into the Underworld with an invisibility cap and to have come back up with twelve princesses and thirty lost men, so Pa got the credit and the right to marry one of Vasile’s daughters. Even though all the princesses knew very well that it was my promise to marry Lord Dragos that had freed them.
I might have taken umbrage at this, but the fact that I could hear the worms crawling in the earth, and seeds growing, and that I could now read in the dark and smell the rain coming from miles away, and could put Mihas or anyone I liked to sleep with a wave of one hand—these things more than made up for credit. The secret of my new identity and my growing powers lay in my chest like a second heart, thumping slowly beneath my skin.
It wasn’t as if I could have used the dowry to join a convent now anyway, not when I’d become, essentially, a pagan goddess.
Well, I didn’t know if I was a goddess. I tried consulting with Brother Cosmin about the situation obliquely, but that sort of thing can’t really get answered in the hypothetical. I tried not to let it keep me awake at night.
Becoming a count gave Pa an income and some land. It also made me a lady, which meant that I continued wearing stupid overlong dresses and padded slippers. Actually, things were worse than that: They plucked my forehead and made me wear a butterfly hennin, and the Princess Consort tried to teach me needlework. This was all supposed to be a thank-you for waking the sleepers—which I did get the credit for—and most especially for sending vials containing the Waters of Death and Life to the Duke of Styria and averting a Hungarian war, at least through that particular avenue.
I didn’t see how plucking and needlework were supposed to feel like gratitude.
The needlework I got out of by saying I was writing an herbal instead. This was fine; no one tried to consult me on silks if I scratched diligently enough at my vellums. The plucking—that I had to live with.
One of the only good things about ladyhood was that it meant that I had a lady’s maid, and I used her to pass messages between me and Didina. Since I was a lady, I couldn’t be Brother Cosmin’s direct apprentice anymore, though I did still study with him daily. I just didn’t have to do as much work.
Didina proved a good friend in the days that followed and became my faithful ally against Lacrimora, too—not that my stepmother was irredeemably wicked. But even if you poison people for their own good, you’re still a poisoner. And maybe just a little bit wicked.
The other good thing was that I had enough rank to strong-arm Marjit into confessing that she’d been the one who’d told everything to Pa about my first invisibility cap, which was how Pa knew to come steal it. Unfortunately, since my rank in the surface world hung off Pa’s, I did not have enough rank to take him to task for stealing my cap. So I just put him to sleep during a fancy dinner, so that he went facedown into the sour soup. Just the once. It eased my ire terrifically.
Otilia married Armas, in spite of the fact that he’d gone into the Underworld when she had made him promise not to. Since he had given his promise when he was only seventeen or so, he didn’t think he had to abide by it, and that’s what they’d been fighting about, on and off, for years.
I wanted to be mad at Armas for trying to kill Dragos, but in the end, I couldn’t stay angry. For one thing, he was grateful to me for saving him. For another, he was the one person who understood the most about what I had become in the Underworld—he’d overheard so much, and then I’d interceded for his soul. And for a third thing, I still had to match wits with Lacrimora, and I had no time to be angry at anyone else.
Lacrimora married Pa in a double ceremony, when Otilia married Armas. Only half of the princesses attended the wedding, since the other half were already on their way to marry various princes around the region. Including Maricara, who was finally packed off to the Duke of Styria, and Tereza, who went home with Iosif the Saxon, even though she protested that now that the curse was over, she could do better.
Too bad. I rather thought Lacrimora and Iosif deserved each other.
I enjoyed the marriage festivities well enough, all through the day of feasting and into the night, right until Mihas asked me to dance with him. He’d been ridiculously calf-eyed toward me since our return, and I was smart enough to realize that he thought that we were going to end up married, just because Pa didn’t seem to glower at him anymore.
And the problem with that was that Mihas had turned out to be a brave and stalwart fellow, and after what we’d been through together in the Underworld, I might have come around to his handsomeness. And while I couldn’t lead him on, I couldn’t tell him I was planning to go back to Thonos in five years, either, even though if anyone could understand what had really happened once Pa had left the throne room, it was probably Mihas.
But after he’d spent all that time helping me keep free of the Underworld, would he understand why I had eaten the pomegranate?
I turned Mihas down cold for the dance, and when he tried to follow me, I ducked behind a pillar and put on my invisibility cap, which I always carried with me lest someone else try to steal it. I sneaked out to the courtyard of the Little Well, where I leaned over the lip of the well, staining my dress with moss and dirt, and breathed in the sharp, stony scent of the river Alethe.
“I’d dance with you if you were here,” I called down the well shaft.
I imagined his zmeu ears picking up the sound of my voice in the darkness.
“Reveka?” Pa was calling. I slid the invisibility cap off my hennin so he could see me. My veil was now a wrinkled mess, no doubt, and I’d definitely bent the wires into some strange shape, but it had been worth it to escape Mihas. “You could give the cowherd a chance,” Pa said. Pa appreciated what Mihas had done as much as I did.
“He’s actually a sheepherder, Pa, and no, I couldn’t,” I said honestly.
He was silent for a moment, framing his next question. “Is it . . . is it that you . . . well. That devil didn’t hurt you, did he? I know it took some time to free you. But I wasn’t too late, was I?” Pa asked.
I stared down at the Little Well for a long moment, noticing the small patch of the Darkness that dwelled there. Sunlight never shone upon the well and never would. All through the day, the castle walls and towers would keep it in shadow.
He could visit me here anytime, if he wanted.
“Reveka?” Pa asked. “Was I too late?”
“No, Pa,” I lied softly. “You weren’t too late.”
“Good,” he said, relieved, and hugged me. I thought, Fine time to start trusting my word, Pa, but left it alone. I yearned to confess the full extent of what had happened in the Underworld, but there never was going to be a right time or a right way.
“I’m going to enjoy the night air a little longer,” I said, and sent him inside to his new wife. Quickly. For I heard soft footsteps at the other end of the courtyard, and the swish of a cape. I turned.
Dragos was there, wearing his handsome, human face. “I heard you call to me,” he said.
I couldn’t hide my smile, though I tried by stroking the moss growing beside the Little Well. I was shy to see him, shy to ask if he had noticed yet that I was actually the Queen of Thonos.
“And you came,” I said at last—and with that, we were easy with each other. Easier, anyway.
It had taken me a long time to see that he was cursed, as bad as Castle Sylvian or its princesses had been. He was an unhappy monarch, trapped in his zmeu shape in the Underworld, in his human shape in the World Above. A proper zmeu had control over these things, so clearly he was not a proper zmeu. His loneliness was palpable. His previous life must be the key to all of it. And I was sure the story didn’t start with plum blossoms floating on a stream.
I wondered what mixture of lies and truth I might use to persuade him to tell me the story of who he was, of who he had been in his life before the Underworld.
“How is Thonos?” I asked.
“Waiting for you,” he said.
“Oh? You noticed that, did you?”
“It was hard to miss. The souls have stopped disappearing, but the rest of it—the blight won’t be entirely erased until you come and gaze upon it.” He shook his head as though amazed. “But it can wait five years now.”
I couldn’t help the grin that stole over my face, and I hugged
myself a little. “Five years till I return forever,” I said. “But I never said I couldn’t come visit.” With that, the tiny Darkness around the well slunk and purred like a cat. “Five seeds. Five days? I could come to Thonos every five days, if Thonos needs me.”
“Five seeds, five days . . . why not?” Dragos perched on the edge of the well, tracing the prisoners’ inscription with his thin human fingertips.
“Why not?” I agreed. I was about to burst with hope and pleasure, so I changed the subject. “You know, the rumors about this well are very strange. That carving you’re touching is supposed to be a curse from the Turkish prisoners who dug it.”
“It’s not a curse, it’s a warning,” he said. “It says that this is a gate to the land of the Lord of the Dead.”
“I—oh, you can read that? Is it actually Turkish?”
He nodded. I tried to suppress a smile, but it slipped out. He couldn’t keep his identity a secret forever, not if I was coming to visit every five days. Each time we spoke, I would grow closer to learning who he was.
And in five years? Well, five years was a very long time. Plenty of time to unlock his secret and break his curse.
Considering what I’d done for Sylvania in the course of a single summer, I figured it would be easy.
Author’s Note
If you look for Sylvania on a map of fifteenth-century eastern Europe, you won’t find it. It’s a fictitious region of Romania that I wedged between Maramureş, Bucovina, and Transylvania, created because all the regions of Romania have a clear and fixed history that seemed wrong to tamper with. I needed a place that could be cursed by a zmeu, menaced by Hungary, and resigned to twelve unmarriageable princesses. Since Transylvania means “the land beyond the forest,“ I thought, “Then let’s make the land where the forest starts,“ and thus Sylvania was born.
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