The False Princess

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Six days later, in the early afternoon, we rode back into Vivaskari. I hunched in the saddle as we approached South Gate, but the guards at the city walls gave us only the briefest of looks before allowing us to ride in. I had been half expecting to be met with guards bent on taking us into custody for our escapades in Isidros, so I breathed a sigh of relief as we rode away from the gate.
“I have to go back to Philantha’s,” I told Kiernan after we had returned our horses to the stable in Flower Basket. “It might be a few days before I can come to the palace.”
He nodded. “I’d go through the records myself, except that I don’t even know where to start. When you want to come, send me a message.”
“Look for it in a few days,” I said, then paused. I wanted to hug him, to thank him for going to Isidros with me. A few months ago, I would have done it without hesitating. But something was changing between us, something I couldn’t name. He was clearly ill at ease, too; a faint line had worked its way between his eyebrows, and he shuffled from one foot to the other.
“Thank you, Kiernan,” I said finally, wrapping my arms around myself.
The frown deepened momentarily, and my stomach flipped. But then the frown had vanished, and Kiernan was saying brightly, “You could have done it on your own. I only lent a certain foolishness to the enterprise.”
Once, I might have slapped him on the arm or tugged his hair for the lie. Now, I only scowled and said quietly, “That’s not true, and you know it. I couldn’t have managed without you. You’re my best friend, Keirnan.”
He swallowed, suddenly serious. “I know. Listen, Sinda, I—”
Whatever he was going to say, he didn’t get the chance. A passing chicken cart suddenly lost a wheel, spilling its load into the street. Several of the coops burst open, filling the air with squawking chickens and white feathers. We both clapped our hands over our ears, and Kiernan finally shouted, “Should I walk you back?”
“No,” I yelled over the commotion. “I told Philantha I was going to Treb. She’ll know better if she sees you.”
“Until I hear from you then,” he called, and we each hurried away alone.
Philantha spared only a cursory question for the state of Aunt Varil’s health before pulling me into her study to examine her latest experiment. I was tired from the road, but somehow, being among the bottles and bubbling potions of Philantha’s work made me feel more relaxed instead of more exhausted. Philantha’s house had become my house, I realized, something like a home.
For several hours we stirred pots, shredded herbs, and generally tried not to blow ourselves up. When Philantha finally felt that the mixtures were simmering in just the right state of thickness, she turned to me and asked, “So, did you have a chance to practice your magic at all?”
“I did,” I acknowledged. Then I thought about the lock that I hadn’t been able to open without blasting it apart, the failed spell that would have made us hard to notice. Maybe the monk wouldn’t have come searching for intruders if I had been able to work them properly.
My shoulders drooped. If only I could rely on my magic. I was going to need it to find Nalia and restore her to the throne. I felt sure about that. But it worked only in fits and starts, nothing I could count on.
And if it failed me, if I failed, someone might die.
“It didn’t always work, though,” I admitted sadly. “It never does.”
Philantha looked up from the pile of discarded stems that she had been sweeping into her hand. Letting them fall to the ground, she came to stand in front of me.
“Listen,” she said, pushing her flyaway hair back behind her ears, “because I probably won’t remember to tell you again for a good long time—Nameless God knows I can barely remember what lessons I’ve taught you, much less to give you praise. You have power, Sinda, and it’s not your fault that it lay dormant for so many years. If you had been like any normal wizard and discovered your talent as a child, I have no doubt you would be working your way through the ranks right now.”
I sat silently while she turned away and bustled about with pots for a moment. I had almost decided to ask if there was anything else she needed me for, when she gave one of her little bird shakes and fixed her eyes on me. “I don’t know if I told you, but the last time I had an apprentice was fifteen years ago. He was a good lad, nice and solid, but then his family had some Farvaseean blood, and I’ve never met a truly reckless Farvaseean. Makes them boring, really. But he’d do any spell you asked—like a good dog, he was, very well trained.”
“I’m not much like that, I guess,” I mumbled.
“I let him go,” Philantha said. “No less than four college wizards on my door the next day, begging me to change my mind. But I wouldn’t. There was no real potential there, no room for imagination.
“I don’t care how long it takes you to get control of your magic, Sinda.” She grinned and cocked her head, looking off into the distance. “Because I want to be there when you do. I think—and I’m rarely wrong about these things, you know—that it will be something to see.”
Four days passed before I felt caught up enough to send a message spell to Kiernan. In my absence, Philantha had purchased a boxful of crumbling books from a tinker who promised that they held rare and forgotten spells. So far, I had found only some recipes, a history of the founding of the Wenthi capital, and what looked like half of a very melodramatic play, which might have made me laugh, except that I was strung out with nerves. Part of me wanted to dash up to the palace that minute so that I would finally know the name of the person I was fighting against. The other part, however, wanted nothing more than to stay in Philantha’s house forever, to keep everyone—Orianne, myself, and Nalia—alive.
But I had never been one to put off duty for too long; it had been imprinted in my bones as the princess, and it seemed unwilling to go away as a scribe. So, when I had at least glanced into all of the new books and decided it unlikely that any of them held powerful spells, I begged an afternoon off from Philantha and sent my message to Kiernan.
He met me outside the gates, a long cloak in his hands. “I thought it would be better if fewer people saw you wandering around here,” he said with a shrug. “If it’s Melaina, she’s likely to be at court, and if it’s Neomar, he might have left a spy.”
I took the cloak and settled it over my shoulders, pulling the hood up around my face. It was hot, too hot for the warm weather, and I thought I must look very peculiar. But the guards barely glanced at me as I trailed behind Kiernan—a perk of coming through the gates with the Earl of Rithia’s son.
The library was located in the main part of the palace, rather than the wings reserved for minor nobility. I hadn’t been back there since the day my true identity had been revealed. It felt strange to walk the halls toward the library, as if I were wandering through a dream or a ghostly palace. Or as if I were the ghost, the unreal one. I felt light, insubstantial, like a strong wind might pick me up and carry me away.
I must have looked it, too, because halfway to the library, Kiernan reached over and linked his arm through mine. We had often walked that way, before, though it had never made my heart thump against my ribs as it did now. But it was a comfort, too, and in this way we entered the library.
We glanced around and, seeing that no one had noticed us, went quickly to a table in a corner that I knew few people wandered past. “You’ll have to ask one of the librarians for the genealogies,” I whispered. “Here, I made of list of the years I want.” I slid it toward him across table. I had gone back at least twenty years further than I thought really necessary, just to be safe. “If they ask why you want them, tell them that you’re—I don’t know—researching the bloodlines of a girl you like or something.”
Kiernan flushed at my words, looking ready to argue, but I only flicked a hand at him. “Go!”
It didn’t take long for him to return with the huge volumes. They were tall and wide, big enough for a scribe to have drawn family trees on each page. “Let’s try Neomar first,” I said. That book was bound in dark green, the writing in it not yet faint with age. Neomar’s family, along with all the other families in the book, were new nobles, only recently titled. Still, I turned the pages carefully, until the name Ostralus caught my eye.
“Here he is.” I jabbed his name with my finger, but then paused. “But there’s nothing …” I shook my head. “Look, it says that he was an only child, and his parents are dead. And his father’s only brother died without any heirs—all before Neomar was thirty. He hasn’t had any close family for years and years, long before the oracle was instated. But I thought—I mean, I thought it really might be him. He wouldn’t tell Philantha about the spell they put on me, and he didn’t want her teaching me. He said he wanted her to report on my progress, like he knew I was a threat. And he left the city right after what I saw in the garden.”
“The oracle might have worked with him without being related to him,” Kiernan offered. “That was just a guess on our part. She could have been coerced, or was maybe just a friend.”
“Maybe,” I conceded, but without much feeling. What if we were chasing moonbeams here? What if this wasn’t the way to find out who the oracle had been working with? I didn’t have any other ideas, at least not any safe ones.
Laying the green book aside, my stomach tight, I reached for the most recent of the other volumes. The older nobility’s records took up much more space, and Kiernan had brought me three red-bound books.
The listing for the Harandrons took up four pages on its own. I scanned the names, finally coming to the one I wanted. “Look,” I said, pointing, “she wasn’t a noble herself. She married Theodrin Harandron, the Baron of Saremarch. He died before I was born.”
“Just by a little,” Kiernan said. “See? Only a few months.”
I barely glanced at it, though. “There should still be a page about her family, since she married a noble. Ah, here.” I flipped the page, though Kiernan caught it to hold it upright between us, to keep looking at the previous entry. “Kiernan,” I said, my heart thumping, “she had a sister. Alethea. She died of … redvein fever. And she died—Kiernan, the date’s the same as the one carved over the oracle.”
Kiernan snapped his eyes up to me. “There something else,” he said in a strangled voice. “You might not have noticed, but Melaina had a baby.”
I shook my head. “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t have an heir at all.”
“She died. According to this, she had a girl who died the day she was born. And that was just five days before Nalia was born.” He went white suddenly, even his lips turning pale. “But what if her baby didn’t die? What if she only pretended that she had? And instead of sending the princess to that convent, she made sure her own daughter went instead.”
“Orianne,” I whispered. I felt cold, so cold that I pulled the heavy cloak around me more tightly. “Orianne is Melaina’s daughter.”
It all fit—the sister who had been the oracle, who might have helped her sister subvert the throne if she asked. The baby born just a few days before the real princess.
The king’s words, suddenly remembered, echoed in my ears. Nalia has been raised in a convent some distance from here—Melaina took her there a few days after her birth. It would have been the perfect time to switch the babies. So easy, with no one the wiser.
I could imagine the scene in my head. Melaina, their trusted advisor, pale from childbirth and the apparent death of her baby, sitting before the king and queen. “No, please,” she would have said. “I can still take the princess. It will give me some comfort, to know that I am ensuring the survival of the Thorvaldian throne. And I have performed healing spells on myself—I am well enough to travel, though my heart is aching.”
Yes, I thought. Yes. That would have worked on a king and queen desperate to hide their child.
“But why?” Kiernan’s question jolted me out of my thoughts. “Just to place her own daughter on the throne?”
“It’s reason enough,” I began, but then stopped. Kiernan had let his page fall over the tree showing Melaina’s family, but I flipped it back with ice in my veins. The tree filled the page, with Melaina’s and Alethea’s entries at the very bottom. But it was the top that made me close my eyes with dread.
“Melaina is a Feidhelm,” I said. “This isn’t just about putting her own daughter on the throne. This is a vendetta.”
“I don’t understand,” Kiernan hissed.
I pressed my lips together, then drew them back and shook my head. “You never paid enough attention to the history master. Four generations ago, a twin girl and boy were born to the throne—Aisling and Angar. Aisling was the elder, but only by a few minutes. When the old king died, she inherited the throne. But her brother, Angar, thought that he was the better choice, and he led a rebellion against his sister. They fought for almost a year, but he was finally taken and executed as a traitor. His wife was killed, too, when she refused to surrender to Aisling even after Angar had died.”
I grimaced; it wasn’t my favorite story of Thorvaldian history, particularly because I had worried about Angar’s ghost for months after hearing it. “But there was a daughter,” I continued. “She was just a little girl, and Aisling wouldn’t hear of having her killed as well. But she did strike her from the royal family so she would have no claim on the throne. I think the daughter was just grateful to be alive by the time she grew up, and she married a wealthy merchant named Feidhelm. The Feidhelms have never caused any trouble—I doubt most people even remember who they are at all.”
“But Melaina remembered,” Kiernan said. “And she thinks that her family ought to be on the throne.”
Just then one of the librarians shuffled past, reading while she walked. She didn’t look our way, but it made me aware of how many people might overhear us. Standing abruptly, I ripped the pages out of the volumes, ignoring Kiernan’s shocked expression at my defacement of library property. “We’ll take these with us. Who knows? They’re the official records, and she might come and destroy them if she thinks someone’s found out about her. Let’s go back to Philantha’s. We can talk there.”
I waited in our corner while Kiernan replaced the books, and then, after peering around the shelves to make sure no one was watching, we slunk from the library. I flipped the hood up to cover my face as we stepped into the hall. My head was spinning so hard that I barely registered my route, though it didn’t matter; my feet knew the path anyway. Melaina was Orianne’s mother. She had used her sister’s position as the oracle to make a false prophecy, faked her baby’s death, and switched her with the real princess and me with Orianne. Did I have enough evidence to go to the king and queen now? I wanted so badly to tell them, to let someone else worry about saving the kingdom. But all we had as proof were a few scraps of paper, and she was their friend, the person they thought of as their child’s savior—
I collided with someone as I turned a corner, the genealogies falling from my hand as I fought to stay on my feet. “Pardon me,” I said as I reached down to pick them up.
I froze, however, as the person I had hit said, in a voice as dark as a winter night, “Sinda Azaway. What a surprise to see you here.”
I heard Kiernan inhale sharply and suddenly his hand was on my arm, pulling me back toward him a few inches. I straightened, my eyes locked on the face of Melaina Harandron.