The False Princess

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

She stared at me, one hand going to her chest and a look of discomfort flashing across her face. A dented pot hung from her other hand; she had obviously been coming to see the tinker. But she could feel the same pulling sensation I did—that much was clear by the way she stared at me in confusion.
The sensation was much stronger now, as I gazed at the real Nalia, than it had been with Orianne; instead of a tiny bit of soul calling to the bit left in me, I was confronted with the entire thing. But it seemed to dwindle a little the longer I looked at her, as if the magic of the spell were satisfied that I had noticed it and settled back down. I shook off the man who had caught me and raised a hand toward the princess.
Instantly, a wary foxlike look gripped her face. She glared at me, her eyes narrowing to slits, and then she spun on one heel and hurried back the way she had come.
I stood dumbly for a moment. “Miss?” the man said again.
“Thank you,” I mumbled. “I was just dizzy.” Then I picked up my skirts and dashed after the fleeing princess, heedless of the murmuring that I left in my wake.
She had turned between two houses and started jogging once she was off the main road. A small dirt track led away from the village into the forest, and I could just make out her small figure in the deepening shadow. I followed, but more slowly now, until the track ended at a tiny house. At the door, she darted a look behind her and, seeing me, whirled around to face me, her hands on her hips.
“Well,” she demanded, “what d’you want?”
She was small, even smaller than me; I could see that as I approached. Naturally fine-boned, she was not at all tall like Orianne. Still, even in the forest gloom, I could see that she was a shade too thin even for a naturally tiny person. There was a sharp, hungry look to her mouth and eyes, which made her seem only more like a fox.
Even so, she looked like the queen, if you knew what to look for. And I, having spent my entire childhood thinking the queen was my mother, did.
“I—I’ve been looking for you—” I fumbled. Suddenly words seemed to flee from me; I couldn’t figure out where to start, what to say. I had found the princess, I was sure of it, and I couldn’t string two words together with a needle.
“It’s your doing this, isn’t it?” She gestured to her chest, where she must still feel the spell pulling us together. “Some sort of trick? If Porter Handover put you up to this, Nameless God’s teeth I’ll, I’ll—” Her face flamed and she tossed her head, throwing back her hair in anger. “You tell him, I know what he thinks of me, what he thought of my gran, but he’s no right to send some hedge witch out to spell me just for coming into town.”
“I’m not doing this,” I said, shaking my head vehemently. “It’s a spell, but I didn’t cast it.”
“Right. And that’s why I didn’t feel it till I saw you staring at me in the street. That’s why you chased me through the woods.” Her fists were balled at her sides, the knuckles white. “I haven’t forgotten what Porter did last time he saw me—my house still smells up and down of pond scum. And now if he’s got some frog charmer working for him—”
“I didn’t cast it,” I insisted. “I swear I didn’t. But maybe … maybe I can shield you from it.”
She glared at me, chin high. She looked like she was a minute away from either slamming her door in my face or striking me with her bare hands. I felt shaky and unsure, completely unprepared to try a spell. The magic raged inside me, fanned to leaping by the feel of the spell that bound us together and my own nerves.
Be calm, I thought desperately. I could see the spell that might protect us from the pulling sensation—a simple, low-level shield. But if I botched it, put too much power it, the shield could send us both flying across the forest with its force. Please, be calm. I raised my trembling hands, but it was no good. I was too anxious, too scared of letting loose and hurting her. I lifted my face toward the sky, trying to hold back tears.
You can do it, someone seemed to whisper in my ear. That voice, as familiar as my own. I jerked, expecting almost to see Kiernan come stepping out of the woods. But it was my own head that had produced his voice. Still, that momentary calmness, the sense of rightness that had come with the memory, was enough. In my mind, I imagined a gentle blanket falling over Nalia and myself, one that blocked the feel of the spell pulling us together.
I heard her intake of breath as the spell settled. Her eyes were narrowed at me as I dropped my gaze to her, but more consideringly than suspiciously. “Did you do that?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You swear it?”
“I swear.”
She pursed her lips, then said, “I’m Mika Varish.”
“I’m Sinda Azaway. And like I said, I’ve been looking for you.”
It was a tiny house, much smaller than Aunt Varil’s—just one room with dirt floors, a small cot, and a few pieces of hard-used furniture. Inside, Mika heated some water on the hearth, crumbling a few leaves into it, and handed me the mug of weak tea. Then, her own cup in her hands, she sat down on one of the two chairs and waved a hand at the other. She regarded me over the lip of the mug as I sat down, then said bluntly, “You talk like a lady. And I’ve heard your name. They talked about you when they found the real princess. Everyone else forgot it, but it stuck with me. Why would you come looking for me?”
My tongue felt thick and dry, so I gulped down a swallow of tea, then almost spit it out when it burned me. “Can I see your left arm?” I asked when I could speak.
“Why?”
“Can I just see it?”
Another of those crafty looks came my way, but Mika finally held out her arm. Carefully, like I would approach an injured animal, I turned it over so that her palm faced upward. She wore a patched brown dress, the sleeves a little too short. Hardly breathing, I pushed up the sleeve covering her left arm.
Three small reddish dots, arranged to form a crude triangle, lay just below the crook of her elbow.
I let her arm drop, resisting the urge to rub the same spot on my own arm, and thought frantically.
My plan, conceived when I was sitting on the bench outside the tavern, waiting for a girl like Orianne to show up, now seemed ludicrous. Worse than that, I knew without a breath of doubt that if I lied to Mika, if I told her anything but the absolute truth, we would never have a chance. If I told my story about a relative and an inheritance back in Vivaskari, the moment she learned the real truth, she would cease to trust me forever. I had only been with Mika for mere moments, but I already knew that this girl had been treated more harshly than I had ever considered. Her eyes told it, the sharp little motions she made when startled told it, and the bluster she summoned when cornered told it. She had been deceived and harried too many times in her life, and if I lied to her, I would lose her.
I had trained myself, in the time since I had seen Orianne being spelled through that palace window, to silence. Only two other people alive knew anything resembling the truth of what had happened sixteen years ago—Kiernan, whom I trusted more than I trusted myself, and the oracle of the Nameless God, who had sworn herself to her own silence. Those long, long days of secrecy made me quake to think of telling anyone else, even the true princess, around whom it all circled.
But there was no other way. Not if I wanted to gain her trust, not if I wanted to save Thorvaldor.
“Mika,” I said slowly, “what I’m going to tell you, it’ll sound crazy. But you have to believe me.” She waited without speaking, and I swallowed. There was no easy way to put this; I just had to say it. “Until I was sixteen, I had that same birthmark. Or it looked like I did. Really, it was part of the spell that made me seem to be the princess.” Again, she waited. “Right now, the girl in the palace has those same marks, but hers aren’t real either. Because she’s not the real princess any more than I was. Someone tricked the king and queen, double-crossed them by switching the princess not once, but twice.”
I set the mug of tea down on the rickety table beside me. “Mika, there’s only one girl who has the real birthmark. You. You’re the real princess. You’re Nalia.”
She sat still for so long that I thought she hadn’t heard me. Just as I was about to repeat myself, though, she pushed herself out of her chair. “You’re right,” she said flatly. “I think you’re crazy. Or better yet, I think that you’re playing a trick on me, the crazy wood woman’s granddaughter. So strange, so poor, out there in her hut. Funny, wouldn’t it be, to make her think she was the princess?
“I’m not stupid!” she snapped, stepping toward me so quickly that I scrambled backward out of my chair. “And you can tell Porter Handover so! Get out!”
“I’m telling the truth,” I insisted. I forced myself not to take another step back, though I wanted to cringe or flee from her anger. Even being so small, so wary, she radiated a kind of furious power in her indignation. “Please, you have to listen! I don’t know Porter Handover—I don’t know anyone in March Holdings. I am who I say I am.”
She shook her head, her sharp face tight. “Don’t believe you.”
“Then how did I know about your birthmark, unless you go showing it off to everyone? I bet that hardly anyone knows about it. And that spell that you felt, I can explain it. When they switched us—all three of us—they had to put a little of your … essence, your soul, into Orianne and me so that the spells that make us appear to be you would stick. That’s what draws us together, because there’s a little of you in me.” She had stopped coming toward me, but with a snarl still on her face. I cast around wildly for something that would persuade her to hear my story. “I bet your parents are dead, or you thought they were. And I bet that they weren’t from around here, that someone brought you here when you were just a baby. You said you live with your grandmother—”
I had wanted her to listen, but I wasn’t prepared for the look of pain my words caused. Her arms dropped to her sides as she lowered her head, her dark hair falling in front of her face. “Lived,” she said softly. “I lived with my gran. She’s dead now.”
A picture of the king dying in the palace flashed through my mind, and I wrapped my arms around myself. “I’m sorry.”
Mika shrugged, a small motion. “She was sick for a long time. A cough got into her chest. Wouldn’t come out. We tried all the remedies she knew, but it was just forest lore, not proper medicine. Didn’t have the money for that. See, Sinda,” she said, plopping back down in her chair and waving a hand around the room, “that’s what makes me doubt you. Look around. I’m no princess. I can barely get enough to eat—I’m hungry half the time. Half the people in town won’t even talk to me, on account of us being so odd and poor. I think about leaving, but I can’t even scrape together enough to move down to Hol’s Landing. How can I possibly be the princess?”
“It’s the person who did this,” I insisted. “She must have had you sent here, where she’d know where you were. But she wouldn’t have wanted you to have any power, not even a little, so she—I don’t know—told the villagers not to help you and your gran, or put a spell on them to stop them from liking you. Something to keep you here, but so far down you’d never be able to leave.”
Mika smirked as she shook her head. “And who’d have that sort of power?”
Something made me not want to say her name; it was as if I feared that, by naming her, I would call her down on us. But if I were going to make Mika believe me, I would have to. “Melaina Harandron,” I whispered.
The name made Mika jerk in surprise. “The baroness? She’s the one who did it?”
I nodded earnestly. “Please, just let me tell you the story.”
For a moment, I thought she would refuse me. But then she stretched her legs out in front of herself. “Go ahead,” she said wryly. “I could use a good story.”
Night had descended fully by the time I finished, and I had gone through another mug of weak, forest-gathered tea. Mika sat picking at the small fire. Finally, she said without looking at me, “You’re a good storyteller, but it’s asking a lot for me to believe you. I mean, a sixteen-year-old plot that only you and your friend know about. Spells and baby switching and king killing. It sounds like the poems bards make up.”
“It’s true,” I said tiredly. “I saw the oracle’s confession myself. Melaina tried to kill me with a storm, or at least scare me into keeping silent. The king is sick and no one, not all the wizards and physicians in Vivaskari, can cure him. He’ll die soon, and then Orianne will be crowned queen. On your throne. By the Nameless God, Mika, I swear I’m telling the truth.”
One corner of her mouth lifted. “I wish you were. It’d be something, to think that I wasn’t really born to nothing. ’Cept that I don’t know anything about being a princess. Even if you took me back to the palace and showed me to them—if we didn’t get killed on the way—they wouldn’t believe you.”
“They would. You’re the last piece of the puzzle,” I insisted, though a little doubt had crept into my heart at her words. What if she was right? What if, even with the real princess beside me, no one believed me? After all, who was I? Just the false princess, a dead weaver’s daughter, and an eccentric wizard’s scribe.
“They’ll believe us,” I whispered. “They’ll have to.”
“I can’t—” Mika started, then froze. “Did you hear something?”
“What?” I asked.
She rose, the fire poker in her hand. “I thought I heard something outside.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I began, but just then I did. The clink of metal and the snort of a horse. Then the low rumble of a man’s voice, followed by the soft shuffling of a dozen feet moving forward.
“Mika,” I whispered. “That sounds like men—lots of them.”
“Maybe they aren’t here to hurt us,” she said, with her eyes on the door. But I could tell she didn’t believe that. She had the look of an animal being backed into a corner, ready to fight or to try to dart away. From the set of her body, I could tell that this was not the first time she had felt that way, though the wideness of her eyes might have meant this was the worst time.
We couldn’t just wait for them to come in and grab us. And there was no other way out, not even a small window in the back. “They might not be ready yet. We could break out of the door, try to run. We might surprise them.”
“Or they might skewer us like dinner,” Mika hissed.
I shook my head. “If you die, the spell on Orianne could fail. She needs you alive.”
“What about you?”
In my mind, the oracle said, I saw a triangle set in a storm. One of its sides crumbled and fell away, leaving only two.
“They’ll catch us for sure if we stay in here,” I insisted. “On three, we run. One, two, three!”
We burst through the door together and into a ring of armed men.
We had surprised them, and without that, we never would have had a chance. Perhaps ten men formed a semicircle near the door of Mika’s house, half horsed and half on foot, two holding torches. Two of the horses shied, forcing the unhorsed men to skitter out of their way and opening a chink in their wall.
“Run,” I screamed at Mika, who was still gripping the fire poker in her hand. She dashed toward the space the horses had created and had to swing the poker at the first man who approached her. Maybe they had been told not to harm her, because instead of reaching for his sword, he only ducked out of the way. That duck cost him as his foot slipped in the darkness and sent him to one knee.
I had tried to go the other way, to split their forces, but the men on my side of the circle regrouped more quickly than their comrades. Two advanced toward me, faces set. Magic flamed inside me, but too strongly, so I clenched down on it instinctively before letting out a thin, weak spell. The gust of power that should have frozen them in their tracks only slowed them, too tamped down to do any good.
I whirled, ready to follow Mika, and saw her grabbed by one of the men, her fire poker falling to the ground. He lifted her off her feet even as she twisted and fought like a wildcat; she drew blood on his face with her nails, and I saw her teeth clamp down on his hand. Still, he held on doggedly, only to suddenly cry out as a flash of silver spun through the air toward him from the forest. A second later he dropped her to the ground, a dagger protruding from his left shoulder. She rolled as she fell, then was on her feet and running toward the spot in the woods from which the dagger had flown. From the darkness, I heard a voice call, “This way!”
I might have made it, except that the sound of the voice made me stumble in surprise. Kiernan? I thought dumbly just as something pushed me and sent me sprawling on the ground. Then a second spell hit me, the real version of the one I had tried on the soldiers. My muscles locked in place so that I couldn’t even turn my head.
“Go,” I rasped, not knowing if Mika could hear me, just before my mouth froze shut.
“Find them,” snapped another familiar voice, one that I had heard in my nightmares all too frequently these last few days. “She knows the woods, so hurry, before they get very far.” A moment later, horse hooves thudded into my line of vision. I couldn’t look up, but I didn’t need to; even as my head swam and blackness edged my eyes, I knew who sat on that horse.
“Hello, Sinda,” said Melaina Harandron.