The False Princess

The False Princess By Eilis O'Neal


CHAPTER ONE

The day they came to tell me, I was in one of the gardens with Kiernan, trying to decipher a three-hundred-year-old map of the palace grounds. We were sitting on a stone bench, the delicate roll of fabric lying between us. Instead of looking toward the gardens, however, we faced the gray wall that separated the northernmost edge of the palace grounds from the streets of Vivaskari.
“It can’t be there,” he was saying. “Look, Nalia.”
I glanced up from the map to follow Kiernan’s finger, which pointed at the expanse of wall in front of us. Once he had my attention, he jumped up from his seat on the bench and strode toward the wall. He rapped his fist against it, then winced comically. I rolled my eyes. “See?” he said. “There’s nothing here. Are you sure, oh princess wise and stubborn, that you’re reading it properly?”
I sighed in frustration. He was right. We had examined this section of wall for over an hour, searching for any cracks or indentions that might indicate a secret door, all without success.
“We’re where it says we should be. At least, where the part that I can read says we should be.” I tugged a hand through my hair, pulling a few of the dark brown strands loose so that they trailed against my neck. “It’s those markings along the bottom. I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but I can’t find anything that even comes close to them. They aren’t any modern language I know, or even any ancient one.” Which was irritating, since I knew four modern languages well, bits and pieces of six others, and enough of five ancient tongues to at least recognize them. But these … runes—I could think of no better word to describe the scratchy markings—were completely baffling. Not that I had asked anyone else about them, not even the librarians who should have been the map’s keepers. It was a mystery, one Kiernan and I had discovered, and we were determined to figure out the answer by ourselves.
“They could say anything,” I continued. “They could say, ‘Do the opposite of everything you’ve just read.’ After all, the location of the King Kelman’s Door is supposed to be secret.”
We had been trying to find King Kelman’s Door since the snowstorm last winter that had trapped the entire city indoors for days. Though I would have enjoyed sitting in front of a fire in one of the palace halls with a good book, Kiernan chafed at being kept inside. And since I was his best friend, finding ways to help him expend his boundless energy had generally fallen onto me.
So we had spent most of the four snowbound days exploring the palace, which, being more than six hundred years old, had enough interesting places to keep us busy for forty days. Kiernan liked the armory best, where he could examine the weapons of deceased kings and queens, and where we found a tiny hidden recess in the wall behind the shield of my great-great-grandfather. Inside the recess had lain a dagger, no longer than my hand from wrist to fingertip. It was quite plain and, since we couldn’t imagine that anyone had missed it during the past hundred years, Kiernan had kept it.
It was in the library, though, that we made our most exciting discovery. After two days of exploring, I had felt a strong, almost overwhelming need to read something, anything, and I had been determined to spend at least an hour in the palace library. Kiernan, though able enough when it came to books and learning, had little true patience for sitting and reading. Still, he had followed me, protesting all the while. When I told him that he didn’t have to come, he only shrugged and came after me anyway. That wasn’t strange, though. We were best friends; we did everything together. He dragged me into scrapes that I would never have considered getting into otherwise, pulled me from my shell of shyness and reserve, and for my part, I made sure that he read a book every once in a while.
I had wanted to look at a book on the history of Thorvaldian magic. The particular volume I wanted, which covered a span of some five hundred years but contained magical theories now considered out of date, was shelved in a tiny room in the very back of the library, tossed amid a collection of moldering scrolls and maps. Even though I lacked any magic myself—no member of the royal family had possessed magic for four hundred years—I had always been fascinated with it anyway. Not that I had as much time as I would have liked to devote to it; there were always more pressing things that a princess needed to study. But I read what I could, even when I didn’t understand some of it.
I was sitting at a low table placed beneath a window, trying to make out some of the more arcane phrases, when I heard a sudden crash and looked up in time to see a shower of dust waft out of the small room where I had found the book. I glanced around, sure that a librarian would come running to investigate, but none did. So I hurried into the room to see Kiernan standing ankle-deep in a pile of scrolls and books.
“I was just looking,” he protested before I could say anything. “They fell on their own!”
Scowling at him, I gestured to the pile. “Help me clean this up before Torvoll gets here.” Torvoll was the palace’s head librarian, and a man with very particular ideas about the treatment of books, even those no one had touched in years.
We worked quickly, eyes on the door, and had replaced all but three items when I paused. One of the scrolls had fallen open, the brittle string that had held it snapped in its crash to the floor, to reveal a drawing of the palace grounds. At first, I only glanced at the writing surrounding the image, but something in it snagged my eye, and when I looked more closely, I had to gulp to swallow my gasp.
“Put those up,” I ordered.
Kiernan, who was holding the last two books, shoved them onto the shelf. “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” I murmured. My legs felt shaky with the discovery, and I hoped that I’d be able to make it out of the library without falling down or tripping on anything. “Just hurry.” Then I tucked the map—drawn on a roll of fabric rather than paper—under my arm and darted out of the tiny room.
“Aren’t you going to put that back?” Kiernan asked as we passed the table where I had been reading, my book still lying on it, but he went silent when I glared at him. We paused behind a shelf near the entrance to let a librarian shuffle past, and then slipped from the room. Kiernan’s eyes never left me; unlike me, he hardly even had to concentrate at walking unobtrusively, what with all the tricks he pulled. Finally, when we were three corridors away, he said drolly, “I’d heard that even princesses weren’t allowed to take books from the library without Torvoll’s permission.”
“You’re really going to bother me about rule breaking?” I asked. My heart was beating fast, both with the excitement of the find and the daring of my actions. He was right, though; I had never instigated something like this. It was always Kiernan who dragged me into mischief. I was a good, quiet, and rule-following girl. The perfect princess, if not for my clumsiness and sometimes painful shyness.
Kiernan grinned, his eyes bright. “So what is it?”
I couldn’t help the matching grin that gripped my own face. “I think it’s a map of King Kelman’s Door.”
And so the search had begun. King Kelman, I had explained to Kiernan, had ruled during a tumultuous time in Thorvaldor’s history, an era when plots to overthrow his rule had abounded. So he had instructed his best wizard to create a magically hidden door in the palace’s outer walls so that he could escape if he was attacked. According to the cryptic writings of that wizard, however, peace had come soon after the door was completed and it had never been used. Still, Kelman remained a suspicious man, and he told few people about the door. After his death, its location had been forgotten.
Now that map, also forgotten for centuries in the stacks of unwanted library materials, was giving me a headache. I closed my eyes against the brightness of the sun. “It’s a really good secret,” I grumbled. “No wonder Kelman didn’t mind one of his wizards making a map of it, if he even knew about it. No one can read it, so what’s the harm?”
“Maybe it’s a code. Or a magic language,” Kiernan suggested as he plucked a newly greening blade of grass and twirled it between his fingers. He leaned nonchalantly against the trunk of the huge tree that shaded us, his dark blond hair falling across his face, the very picture of idle nobility.
“Maybe,” I conceded.
Kiernan puffed out his cheeks with a breath. “And you’re sure we’re in the right place? Because there’s just a city street on the other side of this wall. What’s the point of making a magical escape route if you’re still going to be inside the city once you go through it?”
“Well, the city was smaller when Kelman was king. There used to be open forest on the other side of this wall. But there was this great expansion effort during the reign of—”
I would have gone on, but I didn’t have time to explain it further, because the sound of feet crunching the tiny stones on one of the garden’s paths caught my attention.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Cornalus, the steward, coming across the garden toward us. Cornalus was an old man, his gray hair trimmed so that it brushed his shoulders in an old-fashioned style. He had been my grandmother’s steward as well as my father’s. He had always been very kind to me, and one of my earliest memories was of his sneaking me a sweet with a wink during a very dull ceremony.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” he said formally when he reached us.
I smiled at him. It was a small smile, my lips closed together, not because I didn’t like him, but because there were few people other than Kiernan who could elicit a full, toothy grin from me. “Good morning, Cornalus.” As I spoke, I casually slid the map until it was hidden behind me so that he wouldn’t see what it contained. It was our secret, after all, mine and Kiernan’s.
“Your parents are requesting your presence in the Hall of Thorvaldor,” he continued. “They’ve asked that you come immediately.”
I frowned, my eyes going to my lap. The sun was warm on my shoulders, I would remember later, the stone bench hard beneath me. A striped insect crawled across the grass, pausing in confusion when it found its path blocked by my left foot.
It was strange, I thought, that my parents should want to see me in the Hall of Thorvaldor before noon, and strange that they should send Cornalus to find me. My parents were usually so busy that I sometimes went several days without seeing them at all, and they rarely asked for me during the middle of the day. They reserved that time for the business of the ruling Thorvaldor, not for chatting with their only daughter.
As I raised my eyes, I realized that both Kiernan and Cornalus were watching me. So I smiled, a little tightly this time, and rose. A quick glance at Kiernan and he was beside the bench, casually rolling the map up. “I don’t know how long they’ll want me,” I said to him. “But I’ll find you when we’re through.”
Kiernan shrugged, grinning. “Don’t worry about me,” he said, then walked off, a whistled tune floating through the air behind him. He would have no trouble amusing himself during my absence, I knew, whether it took two hours or two days. With his ready smile and quick wit, the Earl of Rithia’s son was a palace favorite. No matter the amusement, he was eager to participate and prepared to laugh at himself if he failed, and even his many tricks and practical jokes didn’t hurt his reputation. Many of the palace residents, I knew, considered it his greatest feat that he was able to get me, the reclusive princess, to relax in his presence.
I followed Cornalus through the garden, making myself match his slow pace. Before us loomed the palace. The windows on the upper floors glinted in the morning sun. The seat of the Thorvaldian royal family hadn’t changed much over the centuries, adding a wing here or a tower there with reluctance. The lack of change had always simultaneously comforted and disturbed me. On one hand, it was nice to think that my ancestors had once slept in the very room I slept in; on the other, couldn’t one of them have figured out a way to keep my sitting room a bit warmer in the winter? Still, it was a grand building, one I rarely tired of, and my home.
“Do we have time for me to stop in my rooms?” I asked once we were inside. My hair probably looked like birds had nested in it, since it took only a few minutes of wind to mess it up and I’d been outdoors all morning.
Cornalus looked doubtful. “They mentioned that they wanted you as soon as possible, Your Highness.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, then nodded. “All right.” After a moment, I let myself fall a few steps behind Cornalus, then ran my hands through my hair when he wasn’t looking. Without a mirror, I had no way of knowing if I had made it better or worse; I could only hope that it was lying flat instead of standing out like a nimbus around my head.
“Wait, please,” I said softly when we reached the huge oaken doors that led to the Hall of Thorvaldor. Taking a deep breath, I smoothed my hands down the front of my dress, adjusted the belt made from silver links against my narrow hips, and patted my hair down one last time. The Hall of Thorvaldor was the hall of state, where coronations and public hearings and all sorts of official business took place. It was large enough to hold hundreds of people on the ground floor, and it had a balcony as well. If my parents wanted to see me there, it must be something important. Maybe some diplomat from Farvasee or Wenth had unexpectedly brought a son or daughter who needed entertaining, or maybe it had to do with the current feud between two noble houses over who owned the rights to several northern mines. More than ever, I wished I had been able to stop to make myself presentable.
I blew out the breath I had been holding. No matter. I couldn’t do anything about my appearance now, so I would just have to make sure I didn’t trip walking across the long, smooth floor that led to the two thrones at the end of the hall. I nodded to the guards standing on either side of the great doors, and they reached forward at precisely the same time to reveal the hall.
The Hall of Thorvaldor was long, high-ceilinged, and lined with tall windows. Unlike the Great Hall, where feasts took place, or the Hall of Fires, where the palace residents might go to read or listen to the latest songs or poems, the Hall of Thorvaldor rarely felt warm. White columns set at intervals created a wide pathway that led across the marble floor to a dais, where two large thrones sat. Without waiting, I raised my chin and walked toward them. Behind me, I heard the doors shut with a thud, and then the slow steps of Cornalus following.
The prickles on my neck started as soon as the doors shut. At the end of the hall, my parents sat on their thrones, wearing their heavy crowns of state. Two other people stood at the base of the dais. There was no one else in the room.
I swallowed. Something was going on.
I recognized the others as I neared the dais. The older man was Neomar Ostralus, the head of the wizards’ college in Vivaskari and my father’s chief advisor in magical matters. He looked exactly as you would expect one of the most powerful wizards in the country to look, with his white-flecked beard; sharp, dark eyes; and haughty movements. Beside him, tall and straight-backed, her dark, lustrous hair swept up and pinned like a crown on her head, was Melaina Harandron. Melaina was considered to be Neomar’s most probable successor, both as the college’s head and as my father’s wizardly councillor. She was also a noblewoman, the Baroness of Saremarch, and very beautiful. Both wore black robes, the indicators of master wizards.
I had never had much contact with either of them, though Melaina lived in the palace some of the year and Neomar visited it almost every day. Neomar stayed busy as the college’s head and my father’s advisor, which made him brisk in his dealings with nearly everyone. I always felt that I was taking too much of his time when I talked to him, as if, even though I was the princess, I wasn’t quite important enough for him. And Melaina had a way of looking at me that made me think she could see into my head, a steady, unblinking gaze that unnerved me a bit. She was lovely, her graceful movements so deceptively languid, which made me feel all the more clumsy in her presence. Still, they were important people, and seeing them there made the prickles on my neck sharpen.
I nodded to both of them as I passed and, out of the corner of my eye, saw that Cornalus had gone to stand with them, but then directed all my attention to my parents. “Your Highnesses,” I said formally as I stopped a few feet from the dais. Then: “Mother, Father.”
“Nalia,” my mother said. She didn’t smile as she said it, though, and I thought I heard a catch somewhere in the back of her throat, though it was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure. “We have something to tell you.”
She cast a glance at my father, a movement so sharp that it made me blink. My mother was light and a little winsome, not at all quick or hard. My father looked down, as if steeling himself for something, and when he looked up, he was wearing the face of the king, strong and steady, and cold.
“You know,” he said, “that when every son or daughter of the royal house is born, the oracle at Isidros makes a prophecy about that baby.”
I nodded slowly. Of course I knew—everyone knew. The oracle at Isidros was the conduit of foretelling from the Nameless God. People from across Thorvaldor and even beyond sought out the oracle for guidance; sometimes, if the God decreed it, they received an answer. But for a child of the royal family, the Nameless God always sent a prophecy before the baby’s birth. Sometimes they were specific, telling the manner of the child’s death or of a particular triumph of war, but usually they were very general so that the meaning was debated for years.
“Can you tell us the prophecy given for you?”
Again, I nodded; I knew the words by heart. “Long and well shall she rule. War shall not touch her, nor famine, nor plague.”
My father smiled, but it was a brittle smile, without even comfort in it. “A fine prophecy,” he said. “But it was a false one.”
“What?” My prophecy was false? Was this what they had called me to say?
I could hear the slightest of tremors in his voice now, but he continued without stopping. “Before the birth, when the queen was still well enough to travel, we journeyed to the oracle, and she gave us the God’s prophecy. But it was not the prophecy you just recited. The true prophecy was one of blood.”
My heart thumped in my chest, and I could barely hear my father over the rushing in my ears.
“According to the oracle, there was a chance the princess could die, murdered, before her sixteenth birthday. It was not certain, but the chance was great enough that, when she sought the foretelling, all the oracle saw was blood, and the princess dead in this room.”
But I am sixteen, I thought hazily, even though I couldn’t seem to speak. Is that what they want to tell me, that I’m safe now?
My father went on, gaining speed as he spoke. “It had been a … difficult conception, and an even more difficult birth. The physicians had told us that it was unlikely that the queen would bear another child. The princess was the only heir. We had to keep her safe, no matter what the cost. We formed a plan.”
I wanted to rub my head with my hand, but I managed to keep it at my side. Why did he keep saying that? The princess. As if I wasn’t there. And if I were safe now, why did he look so grim?
“After the birth, we put our plan into action. Only a few people had seen the baby, and one infant looks so much like another.”
He stopped short, his eyes fixed on mine. When he spoke again, he sounded tired, like a man at the end of a long journey. “We hid the princess away so that she would be safe until after her sixteenth birthday. And we replaced her with another baby, a false princess. You.”
I swayed. The Hall of Thorvaldor tilted, the light from the windows becoming hard and glittering, blinding me. I squinted against the sudden brightness, and as I did, the room seemed to change, its familiar shape shifting until I wasn’t sure I knew it anymore.
“What?” I gasped. My throat was too small, not enough air getting through it, and I couldn’t breathe. “How? I don’t—I don’t—”
The queen had hidden her face in her hands, and the king placed one hand on her shoulders. “We couldn’t just send the princess away, because then whatever malice had been foreseen could just go looking for her. We had to make it seem that she was here, living in the palace. There was a spell,” he explained, “to make you appear to be the princess to any eyes, magical or otherwise. You had been picked because it seemed likely that you would resemble her as you grew. But the spell gave you her birthmark, and a glamour that would make any probing wizard think you were of royal blood. Our daughter. It was strong magic, wrought by the strongest wizards living then. But now it is time for it to be removed.”
Neomar stepped forward, his hand upraised. He didn’t speak to me as he held his palm up over my forehead, his intense, black eyes fixed on my face.
Stop, I wanted to say, but Neomar was already muttering something under his breath. A spell, I realized, and a difficult one, for sweat had beaded on his wrinkled forehead.
A golden haze blossomed around me, making it hard to see. I tried to say no, but the word wouldn’t come. The golden haze brightened suddenly, and something inside me, something I hadn’t even known was there, fell away, like a cloak slipping onto the floor. Then the golden haze faded, and Neomar stepped back, his hands pressed against his chest.
Trembling, I held out my left arm, turning it so that my palm faced upward.
I had had the birthmark for as long as I could remember. Three small reddish dots shaped almost like a triangle on my inner arm, just below the bend of my elbow. As I watched, the marks faded, slowly dwindling until nothing but unblemished skin remained.
“It’s a trick,” I said, but faintly.
“Yes, it was,” said the king. “But a trick to fool the world. And so it had to fool you, too.” His face softened for a moment, and I had the urge to run to him, as I had as a child. But then it closed, became the king’s face, and not my father’s.
“Who knew?” I asked dully.
“As few people as possible.” He gestured to the two wizards. Neomar was still breathing heavily, Melaina holding his arm with concern, but he looked up at the king’s words. “We went to Neomar, but it was Melaina’s plan. She was a talent even then. They and Flavian, the college’s head librarian and a great wizard in his own right, created the spell and cast it. One of them renewed the spell every few years when it grew weaker, and then removed your memory of the renewal. Since Flavian died seven years ago, Neomar and Melaina are the only ones who knew, until now. Even Cornalus has found out just today.”
“And the—” I broke off, unable to finish the sentence, to utter the name that I had thought was mine.
The king seemed to know what I had been going say. “Nalia has been raised in a convent some distance from here—Melaina took her there a few days after her birth. She has believed that she is an orphan, but one with a noble patron. None of the sisters at the convent know any differently. She has been given a noble’s education, taught as well as a princess should be. She was told that one day she would come to court, as her patron wanted. It was safer for her not to know.”
“Have you seen her? Do you visit her?”
The king closed his eyes. “No. Melaina and Neomar, they have seen her a few times. Every few years, one of them had to go to the convent, disguised by magic, to renew the spell on her and then erase her memory. But we have not seen our daughter since her birth.”
Our daughter, I thought. And then: He called her Nalia.
I felt tired, more tired than I had ever been in my life, so it was hard to hold my head up and even harder to ask my next question. “Who am I? If I’m not her, then who am I?”
“Melaina found you. She scryed for a day, searching for the right baby. Your father was a weaver in the city. We summoned him, told him our plan. He gave you to us willingly, and then Neomar altered his memory, making it seem to him that his baby had died.” At my exhalation of shock, he said, a little defensively, “It was safer. The fewer people who knew …”
“And my mother?” The question was small and quiet. “Did she give me up as well?”
The king shook his head. “He did not mention his wife.”
I clenched my gown’s skirts in my hands. It was too much, too much to comprehend. “Is he still alive?”
Again, that flash of sadness across the king’s face. “No. He died some years ago, in his sister’s house in Treb.”
The light from the windows pressed against me, as bright and sharp as diamonds. I am alone, I thought as I gazed around the hall. All of this, all my life, it was a dream. And it is ending.
“What is my name?” I asked.
For the first time, the queen stirred, raising her head to looked at me. “Sinda,” she said, her voice thin. “He said your name was Sinda.”
“Sinda,” I whispered. I waited for the word to have some meaning, to fill the empty place left when the golden haze had receded.
But the name just faded away, filling nothing, lost in the high-ceilinged Hall of Thorvaldor.