The False Princess

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Melaina,” I said dumbly. For a moment, I felt like I was wrapped in a thick blanket, and then my nerves exploded in a riot of sensation. Run! Get the papers! Stay still! Don’t let her see anything’s wrong! All contradictory, and none of it helpful. “I mean … Baroness. I apologize.”
She laughed, a sound like low bells, and shook her head. She wore her long dark hair pulled away from her face and secured with a silver clip that still allowed half of it to spill down her back. Her green eyes were sharp as pine needles and rimmed with heavy lashes. Her skin was creamy and soft looking, her lips full. No wizard’s robes today, but a long gown of crimson silk. Still, you would never mistake her for someone other than a wizard. Power emanated from her; you couldn’t help but look at her and want her to smile at you.
Except that I didn’t want her to smile at me. I wanted only to run away.
“Please, don’t,” she said. “We’ve known each other too long for such formality. Please, call me Melaina, and I will call you Sinda. Though I have to say, I did not expect to see you roaming the palace again.” Her gaze flicked to Kiernan behind me. “But I can see that even the maneuverings of kings and wizards were not enough to keep you from your friends.”
“Yes,” I said in what I hoped was a light voice, though it sounded more strangled to me. “There’s very little that could keep me away from Kiernan.” Please, I prayed, don’t let her notice the pages. They were still lying on the floor at my feet. Was there some way for Kiernan to grab them without letting her see what was written on them?
Melaina raised one hand to her chin and tilted her head, a quizzical look her on face. “Ah, yes. I suppose that playing scribe to Philantha leaves you time for wandering. She is not, I suppose, the most demanding of mistresses.”
That threw me off balance. I had not expected her to know where I lived or what I did there. But I only smiled tightly and said, “I do have some time to myself.”
Melaina didn’t nod. Instead, her eyes flicked downward to the floor, and, before either of us could stop her, she had stooped and then straightened up, the pages in her hand. Her eyes sped back and forth across the names, and then she was staring at me. Her face, so smooth and cool a moment ago, had hardened like ice on a pond.
“A lot of time, I see. Digging into the past, Sinda?” she asked. Her voice was still calm and light, but with an underlying sharpness now, like a knife wrapped in velvet. “Again, I am surprised.”
“A project,” I squeaked. “For Philantha.”
“Really? It looks quite revolutionary.” She held the page showing her daughter’s birth out in front of her, her thumb resting just below the day of birth and death. “Perhaps you can ask her to tell me about it, next time I see her.”
“I—” I started, but then took a step back. Power was building in the hall, roiling out of Melaina. I glanced down and saw her free hand flashing through signs, stoking her magic, and I swallowed hard as I recognized one of them. A spell of forgetting, one so powerful it might make a person forget their own name. “No,” I breathed. “Kiernan—”
“Lord Cavish,” Kiernan called, waving frantically down the hall. Melaina whipped around to see a minor lord exiting one of the rooms that led into the hall. He smiled and hurried toward us, oblivious to the magic permeating the air around us. Melaina’s free hand dropped and the power evaporated, though her grip on the papers tightened so much that they crackled.
“Kiernan,” Lord Cavish said jovially as he neared. “I hope you’ve called me over to pay that little gambling debt you still owe me?”
“Yes, yes, that’s just it,” Kiernan rambled. Producing several gold coins from his pocket, he said, “Sorry I can’t stay and chat, Cavish, but I have an appointment. It was good to see you, Baroness.”
He reached out a hand, and Melaina had no choice but to hand the pages to him. “Of course,” she said, no trace of anything but pleasantness in her voice. “We’ll talk again soon. Stay out of trouble now, Sinda.”
It was all I could do to keep myself upright as we strode down the hall and out toward the gate. Once we reached the city streets, however, my bravery fled and I started to run, Kiernan at my heels.


“She knows,” I said when we finally reached Philantha’s house. We had raced into the garden behind the house, and from there we had snuck into my room. “She knows, Kiernan.”
He had started pacing the minute we closed the door, but now he stopped. “Then we need to tell the king and queen. We can’t keep this a secret anymore, Sinda.”
I wanted to agree with him. I wanted to nod and say, “Of course. We’ll go right now.” But I looked at my bed, where the two ripped-out pages from the library lay beside the tiny scrap of paper that held the oracle’s final confession, and I remembered Melaina’s beautiful face. A face you wanted to believe. The face of a woman whom the king and queen trusted above all others.
“It’s not enough,” I said. “It’s not proof. They won’t believe us, and even if they did, we still don’t know where the princess is. Do you think she’ll tell them, just for the asking, after all this time, after all her plans?”
“There are ways to make people tell secrets,” Kiernan answered grimly, but I shook my head.
“Nothing they do to her will make her tell. She’s worked too long for this. She’s strong, Kiernan. And clever. She might even have some plan in place to have the princess killed if it looks like the king and queen know what happened.”
“I thought you said she needed the princess alive,” Kiernan shot back.
“She does, as long as no one knows that Orianne isn’t the real princess. But if they did, she might have Nalia killed, so there wouldn’t be any heir left but Orianne. She is royal, Kiernan, or her four-times great-grandfather was. She’s the best they’ve got, if Nalia dies.”
“Then why not kill Nalia now?”
I rubbed my neck with my hand. An ache had started there and was spreading throughout my body. “It’s better if she doesn’t have to. Then there’s no one calling for deposing Orianne, no one saying she’s not worthy to be the heir. She’s just the princess, no questions asked. But if she thinks it’s all coming down around her …”
Kiernan dropped to his knees in front of me where I sat on the bed, taking my hands in his. “Please, Sinda. I know it’s dangerous, but we have to tell someone. I’m—” He pursed his lips. “I’m worried that she’ll try to hurt you. She almost blasted us in the middle of a public hall. She won’t quibble about sending someone after you.”
Like lightning flashing in a dark room, his words suddenly illuminated something I had forgotten. Ice formed on my spine, and I breathed in sharply before I could stop myself.
“What?” Kiernan demanded.
Nausea grappled with my stomach. “I think she already sent someone.”
Kiernan’s grip on my hands grew so hard that I would have yanked them from him if I could have. “What do you mean? When?”
“The day I met Orianne. There was a man who followed me. He was waiting outside the house.”
A vein pulsed in Kiernan’s forehead. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I was going to tell you, but I forgot, what with meeting Orianne and the map and seeing Melaina renewing the spell and going to Isidros. I didn’t remember until right now!”
“Is he out there now?” Kiernan asked.
I shook my head, unsure. We stood up together, creeping across the hallway to a window that looked out onto the street. I didn’t see anyone at first, but then I noticed a drab-looking man trimming the hedge in front of the house two doors down. I squinted—the sky had darkened since we’d been inside, gray clouds building up above the city—but finally had to nod. “I think that’s him,” I said.
Kiernan scowled fiercely down at the man, his normally happy features locked in tension. Then he stomped back into my room and rounded on me when I had followed him and closed the door.
“Don’t you see? We have to tell someone now. If she was having you followed before you’d even found out about any of this, if she was worried about you then—”
“This is more important than me!” I shouted at him. Lightning cracked outside, covering my yell. Rain dashed against the window in a sudden fit of storm. “Don’t you see, Kiernan? This is about Thorvaldor, about making sure the right person is on the throne. If I can’t do this, then none of it …” I faltered, shaking. “None of it—my whole life, all the lies—none of it will have been for anything. I have to find her.”
Kiernan gazed at me, eyes narrowed. “You think you know where she is.”
I nodded. That morning, I would have said I didn’t have the faintest idea of where to start looking for Naila. But now, now I knew who had hidden her, and I knew where to look. “Where would you keep something, if you wanted to be able to lay your hand on it in a moment but didn’t want anyone else to find it?”
He went still, his face suddenly even paler. “Oh no,” he whispered. “You are not going to Saremarch. That would be like—like walking into a trap. Melaina could catch you there and no one would ever see you again.”
“That’s where she is,” I argued. “Melaina must have her there somewhere. Right on her own land, where she could get to her if she needed to.”
“You aren’t going. It’s too dangerous. I won’t lose you again.”
“It’s not your choice!”
“I’ll tell them myself,” he threatened. “The king and queen. I’ll tell them, Sinda, if you won’t.”
“Kiernan,” I started, “please—”
I didn’t get any further, though, because just then the world exploded.
“Sinda, get down!” Kiernan shouted, but I barely had time to turn away as my window, the one looking out over the garden, burst into a thousand flying pieces. The glass shattered inward, exploding over us in a rain of shards. I felt some of them slice my skin just before Kiernan collided with me to knock me down below the near side of the bed. A second later, limbs from the tree that shaded the garden flew into the room. They smashed against the walls, and I felt Kiernan wrapping his arms over my head. Wind howled outside and rain washed through the broken window like a tidal wave.
This isn’t a real storm, I thought as something heavy crashed into my trunk. It had come on too quickly, too strongly. Rain and glass and limbs whirled overhead, falling where they would, but I could see none of it. All I could see was Kiernan’s face over my own, the thought I had just had reflected in it.
The storm raged for what seemed like hours, but I knew that it really lasted for only a few minutes. Slowly, the wind abated, and the rain began to fall more softly. When no other debris had blown into the room for a long count of heartbeats, Kiernan finally pushed himself up off of me. At first it seemed quiet after the noise of the storm, and then I made out the sounds of feet running through the house, the maids’ voices calling out, trying to find everyone.
“Are you hurt?” Kiernan asked.
I moved my head in a motion that might have been a yes or a no. Kiernan himself was covered in tiny cuts wherever his skin had been exposed, and I knew I couldn’t look much better. “Scratched,” I managed. “And my back hurts from falling. But nothing serious, I think.”
Now Philantha’s voice rose above the others. “We have to go out to her,” I said.
Kiernan nodded before lurching to his feet and holding out a hand to help me up. Glass crunched under our feet as we turned to survey the room.
My window had been completely demolished, so I now had a great gaping hole to the outdoors on one wall. Limbs, leaves, and what looked like a piece of shuttering from a nearby house lay helter-skelter across the room. Something had knocked my trunk onto its side; its contents were spilled in a pool before it. Rain had drenched everything on the window’s half of the room, including the bed. My own hair, I realized, was dripping, and Kiernan wiped a hand across his face to rid it of water, leaving a bloody trail.
I licked my lips and tasted coppery blood. “We were lucky, I think.”
“Lucky,” Kiernan repeated, but his eyes were dark.
We stumbled out of the room and down the stairs into the main entrance to the house. There gathered Philantha’s household, shivering together in a tiny knot. Philantha knelt on the floor, her hands working quickly to tie a bandage on Tarion’s arm. She muttered a few words and light sprang up around her hands to coat the bandage.
“There,” she said briskly. “That will hold you until I can take another look.” She straightened as she saw us coming down the stairs, and her eyes widened. “Sinda!” she barked. “Come here! Are you injured?”
I waved a hand toward my face and arms. “What you see. The window exploded. I think a limb might have come through it.” I wasn’t going to mention that the window had exploded before the first limb flew into the room. “But we’re all right.”
She shook her head, lips tight. “Never in my life. Such a storm. Luckily only one pane of glass in my study broke, or there might be a crater where the house used to stand.”
I swayed against Kiernan, then glanced up at him as he put his hands on my shoulders to steady me. I hadn’t considered what would have happened if the storm had hit Philantha’s study like it had my bedroom. A crater, I thought, would have been getting off easy.
“Philantha,” Kiernan began, “do you think that the storm—”
I elbowed him sharply enough that he let out a whoof. “Was the worst you’ve ever seen?” I finished for him.
“Certainly was one of the worst, though I was once on the coast during a hurricane, and that tops this by a wizard’s leap,” she said.
Kiernan glared at me, but he didn’t ask any more questions. I knew what he had been going to say, however. But if Philantha thought the storm was natural, I wasn’t going to let him persuade her otherwise.
“Well, we’re all here.” Philantha surveyed us, hands on her hips. “We should go out and see if anyone else on the street is hurt. Gemalind, come with me. We’ll get supplies. Kiernan, Sinda, you stay here and clean yourselves off before you come help. No use scaring the neighborhood any more than it’s already frightened, and you two look like you were rolling in glass.”
Several hours later, Kiernan and I sat in one of the empty bedrooms, one that had been untouched by the storm. Both of us sported a multitude of bandages; Kiernan kept picking at his. My things lay in piles on the floor or spread out to dry; I had been too tired to organize them in the new room. The two pages from the library, which had been blown about and crumpled by the wind and rain, sat on a low table with four books covering their corners to try to flatten them back into shape.
“That was Melaina,” Kiernan growled. “You know it, and I know it. This was the only house on the street to be hit like that, and your room was the worst of all. We should have told Philantha.”
“No.” I folded my arms, trying not to wince as the motion pulled at the cuts on my skin. “She didn’t seem to think it was strange, and no one else on the street did.”
“That was no normal storm!”
“I know. But we don’t have any proof, and if we tell her we think it was Melaina, we’ll have to tell her about everything else, too.”
“Which I’m all for doing,” Kiernan said. “There no reason not to now. We know it’s not Neomar, so Philantha won’t choose her friend over us. You’ve never said she’s close to Melaina.”
“I know, but …” I shook my head, feeling confused. He was right, we should tell Philantha, but something I couldn’t quite identify was stopping me. “It could put her in danger,” I said finally. “If Melaina finds out that she knows, too, she could try to … do something to her.”
“Like she tried to ‘do something’ to you?” He leaned forward on his chair and let out a breath. “Nameless God, Sinda! She tried to kill you.”
“She might not have been trying to kill me,” I insisted stubbornly, even though I knew that was unlikely. “She might just have been trying to scare me. Make me leave it all alone.”
Kiernan blew a derisive breath upward so that his hair flopped on his forehead. “It doesn’t really matter. You scared her into acting rashly today. If she’s scared, she’ll be even more dangerous. Once she realizes that she hasn’t stopped you, she’ll try again. And she won’t fail next time. The woman is at the end of a plan to steal the throne back for her family. She isn’t going to let one girl get in the way of that.”
Here we were. Back to where we had been before the storm turned my bedroom upside down. I gazed at Kiernan. His face was utterly earnest; I could see the worry and fear etched into it. He wasn’t going to give this up.
“We can tell now,” he insisted. “The king and queen. Philantha. Someone who can help us. Tell me why we can’t.”
I shook my head. “Please, Kiernan. We can’t tell anyone. Philantha—she could be hurt. And as for the others, we still don’t have enough proof. They won’t believe it; they won’t want to believe it. We should lie low, make her think that we’ve been scared into giving it up, and then, when she doesn’t expect it, we’ll slip away to Saremach and find—”
But Kiernan wouldn’t budge; he glared at me in the dim evening light, his face set. “It’s too risky. She’ll be watching you even harder now, if she doesn’t try to hurt you again. Either we tell, or we give it up for real, Sinda.”
I felt like he had kicked me hard in the gut; I actually hunched over, my arms around my middle. “Give it up?” I gasped. “What are you talking about?”
“What does it matter if Orianne or Nalia sits on the throne? They’re both royal, aren’t they? And Orianne is … good. She doesn’t know anything about this. She’d make a fine queen.”
I shook my head, pushing myself up out of my chair. I couldn’t believe this, couldn’t believe what he was saying. “We can’t—Melaina—They were renegades! Her family tried to depose the true queen.”
“Over a hundred years ago!” Kiernan lashed out. “So long ago that hardly anyone even remembers it.”
“No! It matters!” I was pacing now, my arms wrapped tight around myself. How could he say this? How could he think that I could just walk away from this? “It matters! If we don’t find her, if then all of it—my life—” My voice broke. I could hardly breathe; my lungs felt too small to draw the air I needed.
But Kiernan had curled his lips up and closed his eyes. “That’s what it really comes down to, doesn’t it? That’s why we can’t tell. This isn’t about having enough proof, or even about Philantha getting hurt. You have to find her yourself. This isn’t just about the country, or the throne. This is about you proving that you’re not nobody. If you can’t be the princess, you’ll be the savior of the princess.”
Another feeling of being kicked, but this one hit harder, right in a place I had been trying to shield. “No,” I whispered, but it came out low.
“You can’t be just a scribe, or a wizard. Nameless God,” he cried, raking a hand through his hair. “I wish they had never found you, never made you think you were the princess. Nothing else will ever be good enough, not now. You’ll never be happy. You’ll throw yourself into danger, take it all on yourself, just to prove that they were all wrong about you. And I just—I just—”
And without warning, he stepped in front of me, grabbed my shoulders to stop my pacing, and kissed me.
If I thought being kissed by Tyr had been what kissing was all about, I had been wrong. This kiss trampled Tyr’s kiss, threw it to the ground, and danced on its grave. It was like being kissed by sunlight, or joy. Kiernan’s arms wrapped around me, holding me so tight that I thought his hands might leave impressions on my back. But his lips were gentle, moving with mine as if they had done it for years, warm and soft. Little tingles of pleasure licked through my body, from my lips to my toes. I felt my own arms snake up around Kiernan’s neck, and I thought I might drown in sensation.
And then there was coldness as air swept between our bodies. Kiernan gave me one last graze of a kiss, and pulled away. I gasped, like a drowning woman who has just had the air snatched away from her by the waves.
“I love you, Sinda,” he said, not shakily but with certainty. “I have for—oh, years—before I even knew that I did. I loved you when you were the princess, and I love you now. I just want you to be happy. And I want you to be safe. I don’t care if you’re the Queen of Thorvaldor or a pig keeper in Mossfeld.” He brushed a hand down the side of my face, his thumb running over my lips. “But you do, don’t you?”
Kiernan was staring at me, his laughing face for once as serious as my own. I wanted more than anything to put my arms around him again, to let him, my best and only friend, kiss me until the world ended.
I couldn’t do it.
“I have to find her,” I whispered. “I have to.”
I took a step back, raising my shaking hands. The skin around his eyes crinkled as he frowned in confusion. Tears stood in my eyes as I called on my power, feeling it coil in me. This spell, I knew, my heart breaking, would work.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed.
White light flared from my palm, shooting toward Kiernan and bathing him in its brightness. He flinched and shut his eyes, his hands raised in front of his face, and then it was over. I let my own hands drop as my shoulders sagged.
“What was that?” he asked raggedly.
“A spell.” I could barely look at him. “To keep you from telling anyone about Nalia. You won’t be able to talk about it, or write it down, or even tell anyone about the spell. It’s a block, but just for this.”
He swallowed, his eyes glassy. “You won’t remove it?”
I shook my head. “Not until I find her. Once I do, the spell will end on its own.”
He closed his eyes. He looked like a starving man turning down a feast, or someone who has betrayed his heart’s desire. “I can’t help you,” he said finally. “With Melaina after you, and that prophecy … I can’t—I can’t watch you be hurt, Sinda.”
Not have him with me? Not have him there to watch my back, to make me laugh when I felt defeated? It was bitter, like ashes and blood on my tongue.
He stepped toward me and wrapped me in his arms. I had the feeling he was trying to memorize me, to imprint the feel of me against him in his mind. His lips moved against my ear. “I love you. I’m sorry. Please, be safe.”
And then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him, and my heart—rebellious and cruel—went with him.