The False Princess

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The mausoleum had been built with the centuries in mind. It was a large building, made to hold the remains of oracles throughout the years, and it had not yet been filled. At least whoever had designed it had not thought to house each oracle’s body in its own stone coffin. Instead, open niches lined the walls, each with intricate designs carved around the dates of the oracle’s life. The light from the torches flickered around us as we peered into the niches, searching for the most recent. Little remained in the nearest ones, nothing but scraps of the fabric wrapped around bones. The sights, combined with the coldness and stale air of the tomb, made me shiver. Not finding the oracle we needed, we plunged farther into the gloomy tomb.
“What will they do when they run out of space?” Kiernan asked as he squinted at the numbers above one niche. “Not this one.”
“Build another mausoleum?” I suggested. The oracles had not been placed sequentially, I found, which meant we had to examine each niche individually. My skin crawled as I tried to push away the thought that real bodies lay inside the shrouds.
We were near the back of the occupied niches when Kiernan called my name. “Sinda! I think I’ve found her.”
Hurrying over, I raised the torch to view the year of death, then shivered with excitement and fear. A pure white shroud wrapped around the oracle’s body from head to foot. Some dust and cobwebs marred its blankness, but it was fully intact.
“This is it. She said it was in a container, so let’s look for it.” A moment of searching around the niche, however, yielded nothing. “I think we’ll have to take her shroud off,” I said reluctantly.
Kiernan’s shoulders twitched, but he laid his hands on the fabric and pulled. The fifteen-year-old shroud fell open to reveal the last oracle.
She had not decayed as much as I would have thought, and I realized belatedly that the monks must embalm the bodies, or ask a wizard to cast spells over them, before bringing them to the tomb. Dark hair clung to the skull, I saw before I forced my gaze away from the face. It seemed rude, somehow, to stare at her. Instead, I concentrated on the rest of her, a task made more difficult by the guttering light from the torch. Her hands had been folded serenely across her stomach, but nothing lay in them. Finally, however, I noticed a small metal container lying on the crook of her right arm. Holding my breath, I reached in, trying to avoid touching the oracle, and pulled it out.
Copper, with a tight lid fitted over the top, so that I had to bang it against the wall to loosen it. Finally, however, I pulled the lid off and reached inside, coming out with a rolled piece of paper. My voice trembling slightly with nerves, I read the words aloud.
“ ‘I find, in these last, clouded hours, that I cannot go to the God with this unsaid. I have hidden it, all these years, but the God knows all, and I must acknowledge it before I meet him. All the prophecies I made, I made for the God. I made them truly. Save one. Of that, I will write now, and hope the God will forgive me.
“ ‘In the year of the crown princess’s birth, the God sent his prophecy for her. I did not relay it to the king and queen. Instead, I gave them a false prophecy, one that would make them think the princess would die unless they hid her away. I was not alone in this, but even now, with the God’s judgment coming, I cannot find it inside myself to name that other.
“ ‘The true prophecy, unacknowledged until now, I will give. I saw a girl, alone, who did not know herself. She stood at the walls of a palace, looking up at it from the outside, her hand inside her shadow’s.’ ”
That was all. I turned the paper over, hoping for more, but found nothing. Slowly, I raised my eyes to Kiernan’s face, just as a voice cut through the dark tomb.
“Who’s there?”
We both froze, our eyes locked on each other. Kiernan made a “what now?” face, but I could give only the smallest shake of my head. We had no reason for being down here, no excuse that could get us out of this.
“Who’s there?” the voice insisted again. Steps echoed in the dry air of the mausoleum, but they sounded tentative, as if the person didn’t know whether or not he wanted to investigate on his own.
A mixed wave of horror and relief crashed through me as Kiernan handed his torch off to me and silently freed the sword that hung at his waist. I knew from watching him in the training yards that he knew how to use it. Still, I shook my head more vehemently, and he nodded. He wouldn’t hurt the intruder, just scare him if needed.
We didn’t have any more time to figure out our plan, for just then the figure, dressed in the long robes of the monks, reached the edge of the torchlight. He was a paunchy man with a squishy-looking face. And, for all that he may not have wanted to enter the tomb alone, he hefted a staff in his right hand, looking poised to use it.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing in here?” He glared at us, but then he noticed the torn shroud lying in disarray over the body of the last oracle. His face went purple as rage seemed to seize him. “Grave robbing! Disturbing the oracle! Come with me, or I’ll—”
With a cry, Kiernan leaped forward, his sword out. The monk jumped backward, raising his staff to block the blow. Except that Kiernan didn’t try to strike the monk. Instead, he feinted suddenly to the side and shoved him with his free hand. The monk’s staff slashed through the air as he stumbled sideways, but he missed Kiernan. The monk crashed into the wall, and Kiernan followed, knocking the staff aside with his sword. It clattered across the floor to land at my feet, and I kicked it away into the darkness.
The monk crouched against the wall but didn’t move, his eyes on Kiernan’s sword. “I’m sorry,” Kiernan said, and brought the pommel of his sword down on the man’s head. The monk’s eyes rolled up, and he slumped to the side in a faint.
“Are you all right?” Kiernan asked as he sheathed the weapon.
“Yes,” I croaked, my throat dry. My mind was racing. We had attacked a monk of the Nameless God.… The oracle had given a false prophecy to the king and queen.… If one monk had heard something strange, enough that he had come down to the cemetery to search the mausoleum, more might have heard us as well.… The oracle had been in league with Neomar or Melaina, but there was no telling which one.… We needed to leave, before the monk woke up.
“Sinda.” Kiernan had taken hold of one arm. “Can you do something, a spell, to make him forget that it was us down here?”
I was shaking, I realized, trembling like a sapling in a strong wind. But I took a deep breath and tried to focus on Kiernan. “Maybe,” I said finally. “Philantha, she was trying to teach me a confusion spell. But I never got it to work—I kept making her forget everything we were doing instead of just getting confused.”
“Can you try it anyway?”
Nodding and handing the paper and container to Kiernan, I squatted down in front of the monk to place my hands on either side of his head. I could feel the magic in me just as I had outside; it wanted to burst out of me, to run rampant through me. But I couldn’t just unleash it as I had out there, or I would risk hurting the monk beyond repair. So I concentrated, focusing on letting just a tiny stream of magic slip out of me. You don’t know why you came down here, I thought to him. You looked around and saw that the shroud had fallen open, but nothing else was wrong. You were tired, so you sat down for a moment and fell asleep.
I had no way of knowing if the spell had worked, but I finally had to drop my hands when the pressure of a building headache made black spots swim in my vision. No matter what the monk said, it wouldn’t fool the temple forever; eventually someone would notice that the lock had been blown apart. The monk himself might notice when he left. But it might give us enough time to leave, and hopefully our false names would confuse anyone searching for the culprits.
I took the oracle’s confession from Kiernan and rolled it back into the metal container. Then, slipping it into a pocket of my dress, I said, “Let’s get out of here.”
A day later, we sat in the mostly empty common room of the Brown Cat’s Tail, a rather dingier inn than those we had stayed in on our way to Isidros. Still, we had decided to avoid the places that a nobleman and his sister might choose, just in case my spell had failed and Isidros decided to send riders looking for their grave robbers.
“So,” Kiernan said after taking a bite of his dubious meat pie, “what did we learn on our grand adventure?”
His naturally buoyant spirits hadn’t taken long to reassert themselves once we were on the road with no sign of pursuit. He felt sure that the note we had left, claiming my sudden desire to research the cave where the original oracle had had her first vision as our reason for a night departure, wouldn’t attract any undue attention. “Scholars are like that,” he had said. “They won’t think anything of it.”
I, on the other hand, felt fretful on the road, glancing behind us often enough that Kiernan asked if I had a crick in my neck. I worried about the effects of my spell on the monk and about being caught by pursuing religious folk. I worried about the meaning of what we had discovered, and about the prophecy given to me by the current oracle.
Now, however, I spread my fingers on the table to tick off points. “We learned that the oracle gave a false prophecy to the king and queen, one that would make them want to hide the real Nalia away and put someone else in her place. There never was any chance of the princess being killed in the Hall of Thorvaldor. Which means that the oracle was either in league with or coerced by Neomar or Melaina. I think she was in on it, though, because of the guilt she felt. She knew what she was doing was wrong, and it haunted her until she died. We learned that one of the three of us—Nalia, Orianne, or me—will probably die if we attempt to find the real princess.”
“That’s still debatable,” Kiernan interrupted. “Not all prophecies come true.”
I shrugged. I had managed to keep from dwelling on that part of our discoveries, if only because I was so preoccupied with trying to figure out which of the two wizards was more likely to have persuaded the oracle to help them. But it hung at the edge of my thoughts, ready to pounce if I let my mind drift.
“Still,” I continued, “we don’t have to worry about that until we find the princess. And to do that, I think we need to know if it’s Neomar or Melaina we’re dealing with. She said that she wished her family had been able to attend her investiture. So maybe she’s related to one of them.”
“But how can we find that out, without walking up to them and asking, ‘So, your sister wasn’t the oracle who betrayed Thorvaldor, was she?’ I think, maybe, that might make them suspicious.”
I took a drink of my ale and smiled grimly. “The palace library keeps the records of every noble family in Thorvaldor—all the deaths and all the births, even of the minor lines. So that certainly includes the Harandrons of Saramarch.”
“But what about Neomar?”
“He’s an Ostralus. They were titled when he became the head of the college. He’ll be in there, too.”