The False Princess

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I woke on a pallet in a small dark room with every inch of my body aching. Raising my head, I had to clench my teeth to keep from moaning. Something had happened, something bad, and I couldn’t remember—
In my head, a voice as dark as night said: Hello, Sinda.
I sat up so quickly that the blood rushed to my head, and it took a moment before I could see again. When I could, sweat broke out along my back as I gazed at my surroundings.
A room no more than five paces across. Stone walls. No windows to the outside, only a single door with a small, barred window set into it, through which a broken square of torchlight fell onto the floor of the room.
“Hello?” I said tentatively.
No one answered.
“Hello?” I called more loudly. “Please, anyone—I’m trapped! Someone, please, help me!”
Again, nothing. Standing up, I staggered over to the door, only to find that it had no latch on this side. I laid my hands against it, reaching for a spell similar to the one I had used to open the mausoleum’s door in Isidros. But my magic caught inside me, blocked by something not of my making. I reached again, trembling, and still I couldn’t bring it to the surface. So I banged on the door until my hands hurt from hitting it, without budging it in the slightest. The barred window offered no help. By standing on my tiptoes, I could press the side of my face to it and see a tiny sliver of hallway, but nothing else.
My heart, which had been beating faster than a hummingbird’s wings, fell toward my feet. A line of sweat trickled down the side of my face, but I felt cold enough to shiver. There was no way out, no one to hear me.
“Please,” I whispered as I slid weakly down the door and landed in a heap on the floor. “Please.”
Not even a mouse answered.
I had no idea how long I waited in that tiny room. Six times men in gray uniforms, swords hanging from their belts, opened the door and entered. They left a tray of food each time, emptied the chamber pot in the corner. They didn’t speak to me, not even when I barraged them with questions, and eventually I merely huddled on the pallet, watching them. I didn’t even attempt any spells; my magic was well and truly blocked, as inaccessible to me as the other side of the door.
At first, my mind ran circles around itself. Had that really been Kiernan I had heard calling from the forest? It had sounded like him, and I would have known his voice anywhere. But he had said he wouldn’t help me, had feared that something just like this would happen to me, and hadn’t wanted to watch it. And surely he was angry with me because of the spell I had laid on him, too angry to forgive me so easily. I had seen the look in his eyes when he realized what I had done, and it had been one of betrayal. And yet, through it all, had he had a change of heart and come after me anyway?
Had Mika escaped, with or without Kiernan? She would know the woods, might know a place to hide from Melaina and her men. If Kiernan was with her, would he try to take her back to the city? The spell I had cast would have broken the moment I found Mika, so he would be able to tell the king and queen what had happened. Or were they both trapped like I was? Should I knock against the walls, as people did in stories, and hope that one of them knocked back?
Was the king alive or dead? Was Orianne still princess, or mere days away from becoming queen?
I explored the scant space in the room, looking for any way out. But it was as tight a cell as any dungeon. There would be no escape from here except by magic, and, try as I might, I couldn’t reach mine. Perhaps the room itself was spelled, or maybe Melaina had cast one on me after I fainted outside Mika’s house.
For the first two days—or what I took to be days—I lived in a state of constant fear. Fear for myself, for Kiernan and Mika. I vibrated with it, felt it hugging me from the moment I woke up until I fell asleep. Would she kill me, or torture me, or merely keep me in this cell until I was a tottering old woman? I didn’t know, and the not knowing was worst of all.
But even fear has its limits. Gradually, though, when nothing changed, I felt myself settling down to wait. Melaina could have killed me as I lay on the ground outside Mika’s house. She had sickened Neomar, had killed her own sister. She would not leave me alive if she could help it. She was a careful plotter, concerned about leaving no trace of her sedition. The only time in sixteen years that she had acted rashly had been when she sent the storm against me. She had plotted this coup to the last detail. But even her caution would not keep her from killing me now, because I knew too much.
That was, unless she wanted something. Since I was still alive, I decided, she must need something from me. And that gave me the slenderest strand of hope to cling to, the only thing keeping me from deepest despair.
So I waited.
And finally, after two days or four, Melaina Harandron came to see me.
“I apologize for the way I’ve kept you, Sinda,” she said. “Even your aunt’s house in Treb was, I expect, more luxurious than this.”
I said nothing from my seat on the pallet. She had come alone, though I did not doubt a whole troop of guards stood in the hallway, ready to fling open the door if she so much as raised her voice.
She wore a simple gown of deep blue, her dark hair coiled around her head like a crown. Even the gown, though, did not seem as out of place in the cell as her voice. It was like velvet, so dark and melodious you wanted to fall into it and never come out. I held myself still, striving not to fall under its spell.
She shrugged, a delicate motion that belied the steel beneath her skin. “Still, it is the only room in House Sare that can keep you from using magic to escape, so what can we do?”
I breathed out sharply. “House Sare? Shouldn’t you call it House Feidhelm?”
I saw her throat flash as she swallowed, but otherwise she seemed not to have heard me. She surveyed me and I, knowing that I must look a wreck from the God knew how many days and nights I’d spent in here, had to resist the urge to sit up straighter. “Sinda, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Like what?” I spat. I had imagined, while I waited, what I would say when she came to see me, but all my carefully prepared words seemed dim and far away. I felt a little giddy, reckless, with nothing to lose. “You betrayed Thorvaldor—you betrayed the king and queen!”
Again, that shrug, a tiny lowering of her head. “Betrayal is a harsh word. Rather, I like to think that I am righting old wrongs.”
“No, you’re just doing what your family’s good at. Your ancestor betrayed his sister all those years ago. He tried to take her throne, just like you’re doing now.”
“But was he wrong?” she countered. “They were twins, after all. And by all accounts, Aisling was a weak queen, a bit stupid, really.”
“It was her throne,” I insisted. “If he thought she wouldn’t rule well, he could have offered her counsel, helped her become a better queen. Not tried to depose her.”
“As I should have done? Offered counsel to the king and let my daughter inherit a tiny barony when she has as much royal blood as your Nalia?”
“Yes,” I growled, my hands in fists in my lap. “Yes, rather than what you did.” I felt my face twist up as I stared at her. “You subverted the oracle at Isidros, then killed your own sister after she helped you. You sent redvein fever to Neomar and the king to kill them, too. You might have killed your husband, I don’t know. You gave up your own daughter, switched her with me and the princess. You left Mika poor and alone. You made me think I was the princess. You ruined all those lives, and none of it has even touched you.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, and, for the first time, I heard a raggedness on the edge of her voice. “As you say, I gave up my sister, my friend in the college. I gave up my daughter. I saw her only three times before she came to live at the palace, when I went to renew the spell on her. You will never know what those things cost me.” He face had gone so white that it stood out in the dark room, and her hand shook as she raised it to her neck. “Do not say that none of it has touched me.”
She stood in silence for a long time, her eyes on some distant point only she could see. Finally, she turned her gaze back to me. “But it has cost you, too. Has it not, Sinda?”
I watched her warily, nerves prickling along my back. She might have come to see me, but I didn’t know what she wanted of me. Now, though, I thought we were getting closer to it.
“It cost you your place in the world, your very sense of who you were. Your entire life—a lie. The people you loved, so eager to get rid of you once they no longer needed you. And what did you have to look forward to when you left the palace? An aunt who didn’t want you and let you go without a word of protest? A dotty old wizard when the college wouldn’t accept you? Love from Kiernan, whose family will never allow you to have him now?”
I had stiffened with each sentence, the sliver of truth in each like a piece of glass rubbing against my heart.
“I’ve watched you, Sinda, especially after you came back to the city. I’ve kept track of you. But what I’ve seen, it has not been encouraging, has it?”
“Because of you,” I managed, more weakly than I had meant. Her words were traps, briars meant to snare me, and I could feel them digging under my skin.
She shook her head, the light from the window catching the pins in her hair so they winked like stars. “Because of them. The crown used you and tossed you aside when it was finished with you. But they didn’t have to. They could have helped you, rather than shipping you off to a backward village the same day they told you who you were. Is that why you want to restore Nalia to the throne? For all the goodness her family did you?”
The giddiness in me fell away as I scrabbled to keep up with her, to refute her. “No, they were right. I might have been a danger—”
“A danger?” Melaina laughed. “You? Poor, awkward Sinda, never anyone’s idea of a true princess. Sinda, who left without so much as a fight, without asking for anything at all for the life they had stolen? So timid, so good at following rules.” Her face hardened. “They wanted you out of the way, and they never thought about you again once you were gone.”
I didn’t answer. I tried to shake my head, but all I wanted was to wrap my arms around my knees and curl into a ball of misery. True enough, part of me whispered. What she’s saying is true enough.
No, I told myself. Not all of it.
But enough. Enough of it is true.
She regarded me as the thoughts swirled in my head, stared at me for a long time. Then, slowly, Melaina’s face loosened, a smile curving her mouth.
“They were wrong, Sinda,” she said.
“What?” I choked.
“They were wrong to send you away. You did have power, didn’t you? It was just hidden by the spell that made you seem to be the princess. You have it now, all coiled inside you. I could teach you to use that power, much better than poor Philantha can. You could be powerful, Sinda, a force for good in Thorvaldor. That is what you wanted, isn’t it, when you were the princess? To do what’s right?”
She took a step closer to me, close enough that I could smell the sweet scent of her skin. “I want people like you around Orianne. People who can make her a strong queen, a good queen. And you, with all that magic inside you, with all the things a princess should know in your head, you could be her greatest ally. A wizard, a councillor.” She smiled gently. “Someone even the Earl of Rithia would think good enough for his son.”
She was painting a picture in my head, so vividly I could see it. Myself, no longer awkward and unwanted, but strong, striding through the palace in wizard’s robes. Content, with a place in the world at last. With no more strife between Kiernan and me, because I would be safe from harm. It was what I wanted, wasn’t it?
Yes, in my deepest heart, yes. I wanted to be respected, to be useful, to be loved. I closed my eyes, seeing it all.
And then I forced them open, the images in my mind scattering. “You can’t find her, can you?” I asked.
Melaina’s eyelids flickered in the dim light.
“You can’t find her,” I repeated. “She’s out there with Kiernan, and you can’t find them. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You want me to tell you where they’ve gone. Well, I don’t know. Kiernan’s probably taking her back to the city right now. He’s probably already there. They’ll tell the king and queen and—”
“The king is dead,” Melaina said, sharp as a blade. “He died the day after I left the city.”
If I had been standing I would have staggered. Sitting, I clutched my stomach with my hands. “No.” I shook my head. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not,” she said easily. “The coronation will be in four days. I managed to convince the queen of that before I left. After all, her daughter might have survived the prophecy given at her birth, but who knows if whoever was foiled then might not try now, while she is vulnerable and uncrowned. No one can see her, not until she is crowned—not you, not Kiernan, no one but her mother and her most trusted councillors.” She smiled again. “After that, she will have the entire army at her command, and every noble will have vowed loyalty to her. She will have been blessed and sanctioned by a priest of the Nameless God. She will be queen—the embodiment of Thorvaldor.” Melaina tilted her head, eyes shining at me. “You know how much harder it is to topple a monarch than a mere princess—your precious Aisling proved that a hundred years ago. Once Orianne is queen, your words won’t mean anything, even if you could find someone to listen to them. And then, then I can find your Mika at my leisure, and put her somewhere where no one will ever find her again.”
“I found her,” I said, “even with all your planning.”
She nodded gravely. “True. I’ve wondered how.”
“Your own spell.” But the taunt felt empty. I felt empty. Melaina had planned too well. Kiernan would not be able to get Mika to see the queen, and any story he told could be seen as a plot. Clever, Philantha would have said, very clever. “When I’m near her, I’m drawn to her. The same with Orianne. You didn’t get all her soul out of me when you removed that spell.”
“Ah.” Melaina’s mouth tightened. “I wondered if we had been able to get every last bit of Nalia that we put into you. I thought perhaps not. It worried me a little, but I had no idea that it would link you that way. A pity, then, that I didn’t. Still, it didn’t matter, did it? I was watching you before I saw you in the palace that day, and I’ve been watching you since then.”
“You were a little slow in stopping me, though,” I said. “I got here, didn’t I? I found her.”
Her cool eyes frosted a little more. “I had to make sure the king’s illness was sufficiently progressed before I came after you. It was quite helpful, though, for me not to be in the city when he died. Fewer ties back to me, that way. I have you to thank for that.”
“We’ll stop you,” I said roughly. “Somehow.”
Melaina had turned toward the door, but she looked around at my words. Her voice lost its velvet, going tight as a bowstring. “You’ve already lost. Don’t you see, Sinda? You’re nothing, a nobody. A fake, meant only to be replaced by the real thing.”
Breathing out sharply, she then smoothed her gown deliberately, brushed a bit of imaginary dust from it. “I won’t see you again,” she said more calmly. “I ride for the city today.” She laughed, and it sounded like bells.
“There’s a coronation, you see.”