Glass Slipper Scandal

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Glass Slipper Scandal

  Castle Charming #1

  Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Copyright © 2016 by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Cover art © 2017 by Katy Shuttleworth

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Originally published as a serial on the Sheep Might Fly podcast.

  ISBN: 978-0-9953651-1-7

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! (WHO WILL MARRY OUR PRINCES GONE WILD?)

  2. ENTER THE DOGHOUSE

  3. SMASHING PRINCESSES PARADE IN PUMPKINS! THE INSIDE STORY

  4. REPORTING LIVE FROM CASTLE CHARMING

  5. THE CARE AND MAINTENANCE OF PRINCESS HAIR

  6. DRUNK PRINCE IN GAZEBO SHOCK!

  7. BREAKFAST OF QUILLS

  8. LIVING THE FAIRY TALE

  9. WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT PRINCESS? YOUR MOST POPULAR GUESSES, INSIDE

  10. THE FIRST RULE OF GLASS SLIPPERS IS YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT GLASS SLIPPERS

  11. PROWLING WITH HOUNDS

  12. SPITTING WITH PRINCESSES

  13. HUNTING WITH QUILLS

  14. MIDNIGHT PRINCESS EXPOSED!

  15. FAIRY GODMOTHERS FIGHT DIRTY

  16. A RIGHT ROYAL TEA PARTY

  17. LET SLEEPING QUEENS LIE

  18. TOMORROW’S HEADLINES

  19. WAR AVERTED: CRUMPETS IMPLICATED

  20. MIDNIGHT PRINCESS REVEALS ALL

  Buy Next: Dance, Princes, Dance

  Coming Soon: Let Sleeping Princes Lie

  Fake Geek Girl

  Also by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  One

  CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! (WHO WILL MARRY OUR PRINCES GONEWILD?)

  “The best thing about magical ink,” said Amira, “is that it smells different to everyone. They say that if you ever find a person who smells the same thing that you do in the ink, that person is your soulmate.”

  Kai craned his neck around the Charming Herald printer room, taking in the swoops of paper overhead, the scratching of quills, the splashes of black ink in courier font, all crashing together in mid-air to make the news and gossip of the day into a tangible, readable object.

  He had always had an affinity to ink, something deep and primal that bubbled under his skin, but he had never given any thought to what it smelled like. He inhaled, and caught a scent of wet feathers with a touch of vanilla, along with the raw weave of the paper itself. “That’s not actually true, is it?” he asked.

  Amira laughed at him. “Sure it’s true. Also, if you sleep with a violet under your bed, you’ll dream of your best love, and if you find a stray glass slipper on a staircase, you should either marry or murder its owner within 24 hours.”

  Kai blinked up at the grand floating wheels of paper, and the day’s headline - CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! It made a change, at least, from the variations on PRINCES BEHAVING BADLY that had dominated the Herald’s front page over the summer. “You don’t actually believe all of that gossip bullshit the paper publishes about the royal family?”

  “Hey,” said Amira. “I write the horoscopes. You’d be amazed the level of bullshit I can stomach on a daily basis.”

  “So what does magical ink smell like to you?” he ventured. He had been here a few hours, and she was the only one who thought he was worth talking to. It was a good idea to get a measure of what kind of person shewas.

  Amira turned her pretty, round face up to his. Possibly she was flirting. It was hard to tell, with girls. “Vanilla and wet feathers,” she breathed.

  Kai hesitated, not sure whether to be horrified or suspicious. As ever, his default was awkward.

  Amira fell apart in a heap of giggles. “Oh, Kai. The look on yourface!”

  “I can’t help myface.”

  “You totally fell forit.”

  “I didn’t fall for anything, you were super obvious.” He couldn’t help grinning, though. A prankster. He’d much rather work alongside a prankster than a flirt. “Everyone smells vanilla and wet feathers, then?”

  “Everyone who hasn’t been snorting pixie dust, yeah.” She looked terribly pleased with herself.

  “You almost had me,” Kai said generously. It wasn’t true but hey, he was on the verge of making a friend here, and it was his first day. You took what you couldget.

  “You’re a good sport,” Amira decided. “You can eat lunch with me, and I’ll only prank you once or twice aweek.”

  “Thank you?” he ventured.

  She patted him on the shoulder. “Believe me, pet, you’re getting off lightly. Now, let’s get you a desk before they send you out on the rookierun.”

  That sounded like something to be alarmed about. “What does a rookie run involve?”

  “Throwing you into the lion’s den, dressed as a lamb chop.” Amira smiled at him from under her very dark eyelashes. “Oh, and I wouldn’t talk too loudly about the bullshit nature of gossip around here, if I were you. This is a kingdom built on a fairytale. Stories are important to us, even the silly stories about who’s snogging whom, and whether an engagement is forthcoming. Spoiler: an engagement is alwaysforthcoming.”

  Two

  ENTER THE DOGHOUSE

  “Welcome to the Doghouse,” said Corporal Jack, leading the way. She was tall, a solidly built wall of muscle and judgment with amazing hair. It was a rare thing for Dennis to look at a woman not much older than him and think ‘yep, she could totally crack my skull with her thighs.’

  “I hope you don’t mean that literally,” Dennis joked as he followed her into the stone building — a former stable, by the look of it, still pungent with old straw.

  Jack gave him a sideways look. “How else do you think I meanit?”

  That was the other thing. Corporal Jack had no sense of humour. Dennis had been trying to get a laugh out of her for the last half hour, and nothing. Maybe she was made out of the same granite they’d used to build the castle. It would explain alot.

  Sure, he wasn’t here to joke around. He took himself and this job very seriously. Getting a promotion out of the general guards to the royal family’s personal service was an amazing opportunity. But… was it too much to ask for a partner who didn’t get a pained crease between her eyes when he said something funny?

  “What’s the boss like?” he asked, since they were there before everyone else. There was little contact between the castle guards and the Royal Hounds, so he had nothing but rumour to go on (and the rumours were… kind of terrifying).

  “Sarge?” Jack shrugged. “He’s a broken down hack with a drinking problem, but he knows his shit, and he’s not an arsehole most of thetime.”

  Wow. She didn’t mess around. Dennis had barely managed to close his mouth after this revelation of brutal honesty before a voice like a rusty nail broke into his silence.

  “He’s also standing right behind you, Corporal.”

  Corporal Jack didn’t twitch, but Dennis was about ready to crawl under the floor from embarrassment. Seriously. Time to revisit the theory that she was entirely made out of granite.

  “I knew you were there, Sarge,” Jack said calmly.

  The Sarge circled them both. He was about an inch shorter than Jack: sandy hair and wiry muscle, and while his uniform was crisp and pressed almost as sharply as theirs, he clearly hadn’t shaved that morning. He was somewhere between 30 and 40 if Dennis had to guess, but his eyes were cy
nical enough for a man twicethat.

  “That,” said the Sarge in a low growl. “That is why you’re my favourite, kid.”

  Jack smiled — a businesslike, brief flash of a smile. “Iknow.”

  “You must be one of the new pups. I’ve seen you around the castle. You do good work.” Dennis had been expecting military formality, but the Sarge shook his hand with a boyish enthusiasm. “Welcome to the Doghouse.”

  “I already said that,” Jack added. “I did the slow walk and the dramatic flourish and everything.”

  Sarge pointed a finger at her. “You don’t get to say that part. I get to say that part. Because I am the boss. You have at least another five years before you get to challenge me for the top spot, kid.”

  “Give me four,” she replied, cool as youlike.

  Dennis was busy having a heart attack. So it wasn’t that Corporal Made-of-Stone didn’t have a sense of humour. It was that he hadn’t been plumbing a deep and dark enoughwell.

  “Right,” said Sarge, with a cheerful smack to Dennis’ shoulder. “You’re in good hands with our Jack. The newbies who make it through as her partner have a higher survival rate than the others. Come to me if she makes you cry. I’ve got a handkerchief somewhere.”

  Other Hounds were beginning to mill into the Doghouse now, and Dennis hoped that meant that they were done with this strange initiationrite.

  Like him, the Hounds wore the formal dress tabard of Castle Charming — red hearts and black spades against blinding white cotton, with red linens underneath. Dennis spotted several other new recruits in the crowd, in tabards so new they squeaked.

  It was a far cry from the plain grey uniform he had worn as a castle guard. He was a Royal Houndnow.

  “All right, sweethearts,” barked Sarge, standing on an upturned apple crate. “Let’s leave the gossip for the bastards in the press gallery. It’s the start of the Season and you know what that means — tonight’s Autumnal Fling is the first in a parade of butt-scratching, dull as dog-shit fancy events bringing hundreds of well-dressed strangers into the castle and making trouble for us. Unlike the rest of the year, our Princes Gone Wild are expected to behave themselves in public, and we all know what that means.”

  There was some muttering in the crowd. Dennis could take a guess — he read the Herald as much as any other kid his age, and the outrageous antics of the royal twins were a matter of public record, not to mention castle gossip. The platinum-haired, silver-eyed Princes Chase and Cyrus Charming were in some kind of screwy contest over which of them could fuck themselves up worse before their twentieth birthday.

  Everyone knew that the royal family was a goddamned tragedy — what with the king in a haze of endless melancholy, the queen still buried in an enchanted sleep, and the princess hidden from public view since childhood with some mystery illness. It was down to those two beautiful, broken princes to stand as the public face of Castle Charming.

  Dennis had guessed when he signed up for this that keeping those reckless boys alive and in one piece was one hell of a job. It was only just starting to sink in that it was up to the Royal Hounds to keep the boys from drunkenness and debauchery as well as protecting them from gold-diggers and assassination attempts.

  Huh. And here he had been thinking the worst shit he’d have to deal with was a crossbow bolt to theback.

  Sarge was finishing up his speech. “As ever, we have some new muscle joining us the Season — six shiny recruits, hand-picked from the trough to join the family’s personal service. There are only two permanent positions available in the Hounds once the Season closes but let’s face it, most of these newbies will fall by the wayside when they realise how bloody thankless this jobis.”

  Sarge’s second in command, a senior Corporal called Marie, took his place on the crate and started yelling out duty rosters. It was gobbledegook to Dennis, but he took it from the groans and cheerful fist-pumps that corridor and roof duty were far more prized than positions inside the ballroom.

  Their names hadn’t been called, and Corporal Jack’s impressive musculature was beginning to slump. “I can’t believe they’re doing this to me again,” she muttered.

  Dennis nudged her hip with a question in his eye but she shrugged him off, not giving him aclue.

  “And finally,” said Marie with a vengeful tilt of her head. “Personal prince detail, eight till two. Fergus and Dante are on Cyrus, Jack and Dennis on Chase.”

  “Sonofabitch,” swore Corporal Fergus. His partner, another newbie, looked alarmed.

  “Best of Kingdom luck to you,” said the Sarge cheerfully, blowing a kiss to the Hounds as a unit. “Two years since a ballroom fatality in this castle! Let’s try to make it three.”

  Three

  SMASHING PRINCESSES PARADE IN PUMPKINS! THE INSIDE STORY

  “So they weren’t kidding about the pumpkins,” said Ziyi of Xix. She wasn’t sure what smelled worse, the princesses or the carriage they rode inon.

  At the kingdom border, they had each alighted from their own intricate (and well-ventilated) carriages in the drizzling rain to be crammed four apiece into the official Charming Pumpkins.

  So here they were, all damp antique lace and slow-drying wool capes, their hair brittle with unguents from four different kingdoms, their faces smeared with powder and polish that should have been washed off and reapplied three rest stops ago, trundling along inside a gilded, horse-drawn… well.

  It was a bloody pumpkin, wasn’tit?

  Everyone knew that the kingdom of Charming was proud of its fairy tale heritage - just like Ziyi’s own kingdom was unreasonably proud of the things its citizens could do with tea leaves - but this was ridiculous. Did the farmers grow the pumpkins this large deliberately? Was magic involved? Whose idea had it been to grow giant pumpkins to use as coaches, instead of sensibly building a simulacrum out of wood and steel?

  In any case, Ziyi considered herself lucky that she had scored a place by the door, so she could inhale occasional mouthfuls of dusty air through the small latched gap instead of the heady cocktail of royal musk and dried squash.

  The rain hadn’t helped matters. Princesses always smelled terrible in packs. On their own, they would not be too rank, their scent belonging to the whole package of clothes and hair and manners that were so carefully designed to attract a mate, and/or impress his elderly relatives.

  But en masse, and damp? Ugh. Every perfume of the known world, jumbled together in a single carriage, warring for attention. It was like sitting a cosmetics factory that had been unexpectedly invaded by marigolds and pollen monsters.

  Apart from herself, Ziyi’s coach contained one veteran princess - Laurana of Thalm, a long-necked blonde who had been hardened, like Ziyi herself, by multiple campaigns across multiple social seasons in multiple foreign kingdoms - and two newly ‘out’ young princesses whom Ziyi had mentally named Ninny 1 and Ninny2.

  Laurana and Ziyi had never met before, but they shared a curt nod of mutual understanding upon first introductions. Thalm was almost as far away as Xix. You didn’t hunt for a marriage over such a distance if you were considered a good prospect in your own territory.

  Finally, the coach rattled to a stop. Ziyi and Laurana immediately acquired a lapful of Ninny each, as the younger girls clambered forth to peer through the window.

  “Are they reporters?” Ninny #1 squealed. “Will there be monochromes?”

  Ninny #2, not quite as aptly named as her companion, realised the ramifications of this and hurled herself back on to her own half of the bench, rummaging for what cosmetic charms she had left in her vanity pouch. “This is awful. They can’t monochrome us like this. I’m a wreck!”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Laurana said dryly. “They’ll only use images from this scene if nothing of any import happens tonight at the ball… or if one of you manages to flash her knickerbockers while alighting from the pumpkin.”

  Ziyi ignored them all. This was it. Had to be. She wasn’t going through it again. Charming would be
her final kingdom, and her last season.

  She had to catch a prince or die trying.

  Even thinking that made part of her soul die a little inside. Her life was so embarrassing.

  Four

  REPORTING LIVE FROM CASTLE CHARMING

  Kai felt like a seagull pecking at crumbs on the shore as he stood with the press gaggle on the steps of the Palace. “Will they even want to speak to us?” He couldn’t imagine wanting to talk to strange reporters after travelling for several hours — in some cases, several days — to reach Castle Charming.

  “It doesn’t matter whether they do or not,” said Amira impatiently, rising and falling on her feet beside him. She was shorter than Kai, despite her alarmingly high heeled boots, and he could see her calculating whether it was better to stand up on the steps from the carriageway — thus being higher and having a better view — or to be down and close as the pumpkins approached. “The important thing is that we are here, witnessing their arrival, reporting live from Castle Charming. We catch the quotes, describe the frocks and styles and excitement, and we move on to the big event tonight.”

  He nodded, quill pen hovering over his notebook. “Gotit.”

  “Stick to positive flattery for the most part,” she added. “Unless something hilarious happens, like a knickerbocker flash. Word is the princes aren’t going to be allowed to escape this season without mating, which means that one of these girls will be our future queen. No reason to put the poor peahens offside right from the start.”