The False Princess

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I woke before dawn, while stars still spotted the sky and the others still slept. It was too early to attempt the spells of disguise and the gate into the city. My eyes squeezed shut, I tried to force myself back to sleep to no avail. So I finally hauled myself up and, treading quietly so that I wouldn’t wake Kiernan and Mika from their places in the hay barn, crept outside to watch the dawn come.
It’s already so warm, I thought as I sat with my back against the barn, my knees drawn up to my chest. If the king hadn’t fallen ill, the entire court might have journeyed to the lake country for a few weeks to escape the coming summer heat of the city. I imagined what went on at the palace instead. The lower halls would be already bustling as fleets of cooks, maids, and butlers hurried to arrange the last-minute details of the coronation. The nobles would still be asleep, but not for long, as serving men and women came to help them into their finery for the day.
Kiernan would have been among them, if he hadn’t come looking for me. I shot a glance toward the door of the barn, as if I could see him through it. I didn’t know what to do about him. One kiss, one declaration of love. Maybe it hadn’t been enough to survive how I had pushed him away, used magic against him, chosen Thorvaldor over him. He had come to find me, yes, had said he had been wrong. But he hadn’t done anything else, regardless of what Mika said. Maybe he had realized how futile it would be to love me. Though I tried to push it from my mind, I fairly hummed with the knowledge that I might die today. He wouldn’t have forgotten. It might be too much, the fear of losing me, so much that he had withdrawn his heart to protect it.
Of course, even if I lived, he must know that we couldn’t marry, must know what I would have to tell him. The Earl of Rithia would never let his son marry a commoner, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let him throw off his titles, walk away from his family, for me. Even Melaina had known that well enough to toss it in my face.
I wondered if Melaina was asleep, there in the palace. I doubted it. I had no hope at all that she wouldn’t know of my escape. Somehow she would know—be it a message by courier or a spell to let her know if I crossed House Sare’s gate. She would be planning, watching, waiting. This was the moment of her triumph, and she wasn’t going to let me take it from her easily. My only saving grace was, strangely, the strength of her desire to place Orianne on the throne. She would have to move carefully; it wouldn’t do to have any suspicion fall on Orianne now. Perhaps that would be her weakness. Or perhaps she would abandon her careful measures, the covering of her own tracks, in her desperation.
Orianne. Was she asleep? Again, I doubted it. She had lost the man she thought her newly discovered father. And in a few hours, she would be crowned queen. She had had only a few months to become used to the idea of being the princess. I imagined her standing by the window of my old rooms, tall and serene, watching the same dawn I watched. The two of us, the false princesses. What would become of either of us after today?
Mika. What would become of her? Even assuming that we triumphed, her road would be hard, perhaps harder than Orianne’s or mine. Her world was about to change, to expand far past the boundaries that she knew. She hadn’t shown it, but she must be scared.
I was scared. I might have escaped death at Melaina’s hands, but the oracle’s prophecy still loomed in my mind. If I continued on this course, it seemed likely that someone would die. Today, perhaps. I picked at a weed growing in the grass. If only I knew which of us was in danger, which side of the triangle needed protecting most. I could prepare better then, take precautions. But as it was, there were no precautions to take, nothing to do but rush into the fray.
But was I doing the right thing? I thought I was doing it for the good of the country, but maybe Kiernan was right. Maybe it was really just for me, to prove to myself that I wasn’t a nobody. Was it my sense of duty pushing me on, or my own vanity?
The oracle had seen my path branching away in choices and chances. Was I taking the right way? If Mika died, everything, all of it, would have been for nothing. But would it be worth it if I died? If I bled to death, knowing I had put her on the throne, would I feel it had been a price worth paying?
Nameless God, I prayed, I know that it matters not to you who sits upon the throne. But it was your oracle who helped me on this path. So you must be watching us, if only out of the corner of your eye. Please, hold us in your hands today.
I barely heard her footsteps before she settled herself down beside me, and it startled me into jumping. “Sorry,” Mika said. “Living in the woods, you know. Gran always said I should pretend to be a deer so no one could hear me coming.”
Her voice sounded light, but when I turned to look at her, I saw that her face looked tight around her eyes and paler than usual. “Is Kiernan still asleep?” I asked.
“Snoring like a bear. I think I could’ve danced on his head and it wouldn’t have woken him.”
We sat silently for a while, and then she said, “So this prophecy of yours. It says that one of us will die today.”
The eastern sky was turning gray, tinted with the barest hint of rose. “They don’t come true, sometimes.”
“That’s not a lot of help, from where I’m sitting.”
“No,” I agreed. “Not a lot. But at least it didn’t say we’d lose.”
“Winning doesn’t mean much if you’re dead, Sinda.”
Soon there wouldn’t be any stars out at all. “This time it might,” I said softly.
Mika didn’t answer. Instead we sat in silence, our chins in our hands and knees pulled up against our chests, waiting for dawn to come.
A few hours later, I rode toward the city, my back as straight as a sword and my stomach as knotted as an old fishnet. The road leading to the Guildhall district gate was crowded with people trying to get into the city. Few would be allowed into the actual coronation, but all wanted be able to say that they had been in Vivaskari when the princess became the queen. So I had to work to keep my horse under control as people—horsed and unhorsed—pressed around it. I tried to keep my eye on Kiernan, who had gone ahead of me, but I kept losing him in the crowd. Mika was somewhere behind me; we had thought it best to enter one by one, in case the guards were looking for a group of two girls and a young man.
I had managed three spells that, though they didn’t transform us entirely, altered our features enough to fool someone who didn’t know us well. Working the spells had left me jittery, though; I had accidentally charred a section of grass around my feet before I managed to wrangle the magic back down. But we should be able to enter the city undetected, I thought, and reach Philantha’s to retrieve the map.
Never mind that I still had no plan for afterward, when we reached the palace.
I pushed the thought away—it made my stomach tighten even more to think of it—as Kiernan approached the guard at the gate. The man, a tall and burly fellow, looked harried by the sheer number of people trying to enter the city, and, even though Kiernan’s sword hung from his belt, he gave Kiernan only the most cursory of glances before waving him inside.
One down, I thought, while resisting the impulse to look over my shoulder for Mika.
I expected the guard would surely notice that something was wrong with me. I felt so weak and nervous that I had to grip the saddle with one hand as the family in front of me was examined. But the guard merely flicked his eyes over me. If the spell still held, he would see a young girl with dark blonde hair, wearing a dress with the emblem of the shoemakers’ guild. I didn’t have the skill to make them last very long. An hour maybe, from the time I cast them. Mine must have still held, though, because he let me pass.
Inside, Kiernan had waited for me a short distance from the gate, though close enough that we could still reach it quickly if we had to. We both turned our horses to watch, hands clenched on the reins, as Mika neared the gate.
Mika was having some trouble controlling her animal; a screaming baby behind her made it prance nervously, but she managed to calm it as she reach the guard. He looked at her, then nodded, and I heard Kiernan’s sigh of relief.
Her horse had taken only a few steps past the gate when the guard whipped around, raising his hand. “You!” he cried. “Stop!”
Kiernan kneed his horse forward just as I swung from my saddle. If I had to do magic, better that I didn’t have to control a horse at the same time. As I dropped to the ground, I heard Kiernan swear as a cart pulled in front of him, its driver peering at the cross street in confusion, as if he didn’t quite know where he was going. Kiernan wouldn’t reach Mika in time.
Mika turned slowly, her face revealing nothing. The guard strode toward her, reaching up to take hold of her reins. He said something to her, then handed her something. She nodded and the man wheeled around to return to the gate.
“An apple,” she said when she reached us. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on her forehead. “Fell out of my saddlebag.”
“An apple,” Kiernan repeated, then let out a whoosh of breath that turned into a frantic laugh.
“Enough,” I interrupted. “The coronation starts in two hours. We have to get to Philantha’s.”
It took longer than usual to thread our way through Guildhall into Goldhorn. The city had swelled with outsiders, and it seemed that every city resident had decided to go out into the streets. I considered abandoning the horses and continuing on foot, but Kiernan’s mount was his own, and I doubted that he would want to leave it in the street. By the time we reached Philantha’s stable, though, I almost threw myself from the saddle in my haste to get down.
I had taken only a few steps toward the door when I slowed in confusion. It was quiet in the tiny stable yard behind the house, even considering the noise in the street. Where was the sound of Gemalind humming through the kitchen window? Where was Tarion, who usually would have scrambled out to take our horses?
I heard Mika and Kiernan slide off their horses and then hurry toward me. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
Kiernan surveyed the silent house. “Could she have given them the day off? Gone to the coronation herself?”
I licked my lips. “The first—maybe. The second—” I shrugged. “She doesn’t like spectacle. She might go, as a college wizard, but not so early. She’d wait until the last minute, then slip in the back. Kiernan …” I trailed off. There was no need to put my worry into words; I could see the same thoughts on their faces.
“We still need the map,” Kiernan said. “And some different clothes wouldn’t be bad. Something to make it look a little more like you two belong at the coronation.” Kiernan himself, though not dressed as he normally would be for a coronation, had at least changed into clean clothes from his saddlebags that morning. My own change of clothes had been lost, along with the nag I rented, in March Holdings. “Mika’s smaller than you, but not by much.”
“They kept most of my nice dresses, but anything’s better than this,” I said, grabbing my travel- and prison-dirtied clothes. We wouldn’t fit in, even in my best, but we wouldn’t look like street urchins either.
My neck prickled as I stared up at the house, but then I shook my head. We couldn’t afford to delay any longer. “We have to go.”
The house was even quieter inside. I shivered as we made our way to the grand staircase without seeing anyone. Though my shoulders ached with tension, I tried to tell myself that nothing was wrong, that the feeling of eyes on my back was my own imagination. I had almost convinced myself when we reached the second floor, and I heard the moan.
The three of us froze for an instant, and then I dashed down the hall toward the crumpled form lying two doors down from Philantha’s study.
It was Gemalind, the cook. Swallowing hard, I rolled her over as gently as I could, only to find a massive black-and-purple bruise spreading across the side of her face. I raised a trembling hand toward her nose, and felt a faint breath stir against my fingers.
“Philantha,” I gasped as I staggered upright. “Her study.” I stumbled the few feet toward the door, blood rushing in my ears. The door to the study was slightly ajar, and I flung it the rest of the way open so violently that it banged against the inside wall.
Most of the room was undisturbed. The table covered with open bottles of liquid, none so much as overturned, still stood near the door. The snakeskins, feathers, bird nests, and animal claws lay in the corner where Philantha kept them. Books lay scattered across the room, but only in a laid-down-while-reading-them sort of way. At first glance, nothing was wrong.
I took a step into the room, and glass crunched under my boot. I looked down to see a line of broken shards, as if someone had thrown several of the glass scrying balls toward someone near the door. As my eyes followed the trail, I saw one of the tables lying on its side, a puddle of blue potion mixed with wet sand spreading around it.
I rushed forward, and on the other side of the overturned table lay Philantha.
She was pale, so pale that the lines of blood that had trickled from her nose and mouth stood out like red spiderwebs. She lay on her side, one arm bent up under her, as if someone had pushed her down and then left her. I could see the dark bruises that hands had left around her neck.
“No,” I whispered as I dropped to her side. I reached out to grasp her shoulders, unhook her arm from behind her back. I couldn’t bring myself to check for her breath, as I had for Gemalind.
“I should have told you.” I had stood in this very room before I left and had almost, almost told her where I was going. But I had been blinded by my own protestations that there wasn’t enough proof. I had convinced myself that I would put her in danger by telling her. But those weren’t the real, final reason. As Kiernan had said, I had wanted, secretly, in my heart of hearts, to find Mika myself. So I had left in silence. Instead of protecting her, I had left her vulnerable to the very thing I had feared. She would have had no warning, no idea that someone might come to hurt her.
Tears were forming in my eyes, and my shoulders had started shaking. “This is all my fault,” I mumbled. “I should have told you.”
I reached out to brush a strand of her hair off her forehead, and as I touched her face, she coughed.
“Philantha,” I breathed. Then, over my shoulder, “Kiernan, Mika! In here!” Turning back to her, I grasped her hand in mine. “Philantha, can you hear me?”
Her eyelids fluttered, then opened to pained slits. “Sinda?” she rasped.
“It’s me,” I confirmed. “Are you—” It seemed absurd to ask if she was all right. “What happened?”
“Men,” she said weakly. “Two of them. They had … wards. My spells just glanced off them.” She closed her eyes as a wave of pain seemed to grip her. “Gemalind?” she said through gritted teeth. “I heard her … in the hall.”
“Alive,” I said. “Hurt—not so badly as you—but alive. Where are the others?”
“Told them to go, enjoy the day. They all left early. All but her.” She forced her eyes open. “They wanted you, Sinda. Kept asking where you were, if you’d come back.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have …” I heard Kiernan and Mika behind me. “We need to call a healer,” I told them.
“I’ll find someone to send,” Kiernan said before hurrying out of the room.
“I don’t have much time,” I told Philantha. “I can’t explain now, but we have to get to the palace before the coronation.”
Philantha’s eyes, hazy with shock and hurt, had been flicking between Mika and me. “Spell. I feel it … between you two. Strong. Something connecting …”
I nodded. “She’s the princess, Philantha. The real princess. And they’re about to crown the wrong girl. We have to stop them, but we have to get there first, and then …” I floundered again, still unsure of what I would do once we got there.
Philantha laid her head back against the floor. “Like I thought,” she murmured. “Her essence, still in you. Almost see it. That’s … connection.”
“You were right,” I said. The door creaked as Kiernan entered.
“I paid a boy to run to the college,” he said. “There should be some healers still there.”
I squeezed Philantha’s hand. “I have to go. We have to get something from my room, and then we have to go. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes had closed; she seemed to be falling back into sleep. “In both of you,” she mumbled, and lay still.
“Can you stay with her for a moment?” I asked Kiernan, who immediately came around the table and knelt down by Philantha. “Come on,” I said to Mika. “We can change clothes in my room, and get the map.”
Kiernan and Mika had arranged Gemalind more comfortably, I saw as we hurried down the hall. I didn’t stop to look at her again; the healer would help her when one arrived. In my room, Mika and I pulled off our clothes, with no thought of modesty, to don two of my best dresses. Mika’s was a bit too large, and neither was nearly grand enough for a coronation, but they would do.
“Which board was it?” I muttered to myself as soon as I was dressed. Mika flashed me an inquiring look, so I explained. “Before I left, I hid King Kelman’s map under one of the floorboards. I didn’t want anyone to find it, but I couldn’t think of a better place. Ah!” That one, half hidden under the bed, with a dark knot at its end. “There a comb on the table,” I said. “Toss it to me.”
The handle of the comb was just thin enough to slip between the boards, which creaked as I wrenched between them. But the loose one came up and under it, safe and undamaged, I found the gently rolled-up map. The genealogies and the oracle’s confession, also there under the floorboard, I stuffed into the pocket of my dress.
“Let’s go,” I said. “The coronation will be starting soon.”
Mika nodded and followed me out the door and down the stairs. As we entered the second-floor hall, however, I ran headlong into Kiernan, who grabbed my shoulders to keep me upright.
“Shh!” he hissed, a finger over his lips. “I heard something downstairs.”
Creeping across the floor, we snuck to the railing that looked out over the entrance hall. Sure enough, two men armed with long daggers were slowly soft-footing it up the stairs. Melaina’s men may have left Philantha for dead in the study, but they had been watching the house from outside, waiting for anyone to come back.
We flattened our backs against the wall so that they wouldn’t see us. “Is there another way out?” Mika whispered.
I pointed. “Down the servants’ stairs. We could make it to the door to the garden, and out from there. Unless they’ve left more men outside.”
“We have to try,” Kiernan agreed, his hand hovering over his own sword. “But we have to go now.”
“But Philantha,” I said. “And Gemalind. They might hurt them more. And the healer’s coming.”
Kiernan’s expression was stricken, and Mika had balled her fists up so tightly that her knuckles were white. But he shook his head. “If they catch us, that’ll be it, Sinda. No more chances. Orianne crowned queen.”
“I can’t leave her! It’s my fault that she got hurt!” I should go, I knew it. The coronation would be starting soon, and if we were to be in the Hall of Thorvaldor to get everyone’s attention—somehow—we had to leave now. But I couldn’t seem to move; I felt like my legs were locked to the floor by manacles.
I had sacrificed so much to find Mika, had walked through danger I hadn’t known I could face. I had put her and Kiernan in danger and we had only narrowly escaped. To be caught now, to let it all be for nothing … the idea was unendurable. But Philantha had taken me in when I had been alone. She had believed in me when the wizards’ college turned me away. She was my friend, and hurt, and I couldn’t go.
“She’d want us to go!” Kiernan was arguing.
“I can’t—” I cried, but it was too late. The men stepped onto the second-floor hallway and saw us.
“Seems you were right,” the taller one said to the other. “Two little sparrows, and a popinjay with a sword to protect them.”
The second man smiled, a leering, ugly thing. “Come here, sparrows,” he called. “We won’t hurt you—much.”
“Stay back!” I yelled, and then, reaching deep for the magic, tried a spell that would let me toss a ball of fire to the floor at their feet.
I couldn’t do it. The ball sputtered in my hands, then died.
“Not very good at that, are you, sparrow?” The first man waggled his knife at us as he stalked down the hall.
Sucking in a breath, I tried again, and this time the ball of fire glowed between my hands. I lobbed it toward them, then flung out my arms, trying to push Kiernan and Mika back away from the blast.
It should have exploded; I had seen Philantha set a straw doll aflame in seconds. But it seemed to bounce off them, sliding away as if a glass wall surrounded them, and then vanished into the air.
The second man grinned again. “Wards, my dear,” he said. “Powerful ones. Yon wizard”—he jerked his head in the direction of Philantha’s study—“her spells didn’t work either.”
“Run,” I whispered. And then more loudly: “Run!”
Mika and I turned in the same instant, pounding down the hall toward the servants’ stairs. I heard a gasp, the clatter of a dagger skidding down the hall, and looked back to see one of the toughs clutching at his arm while the other stared at him in horror. Kiernan wore a fierce grin as he whipped around to follow us.
He had surprised them; they looked like street fighters and hadn’t expected a noble like Kiernan to actually know how to fight. But they were professionals, and as we reached the stairs I heard them coming in pursuit. We nearly fell down the stairs, as we raced down the hall and burst through the back door into the walled garden. Kiernan slammed the door behind us as he came through, and I heard it knock into one of the men. We ran through the garden door and down the alley toward the street.
“The northeast wall,” I gasped to Kiernan. “What’s the fastest way there?”
“Follow me,” he yelled, and we plunged into the crowds moving toward the palace to await the announcement that the princess had been crowned.
I didn’t know how far behind us the men were, so we ran as if they were only a few steps away. My side ached before we had gone a few blocks, and I could hear Mika panting beside me. Sweat trickled down the side of my face, and I heard my gown’s hem rip at least once. While the crowds slowed us, they also hid us, disguising us in the mass of people milling in the streets. But we needed a good head start because, though I knew generally where we should go, I would need a moment with the map to locate the exact spot.
We had reached Sapphire when I reached out to yank Kiernan back. The crowds were thinner here; many of the residents of Sapphire would actually attend the coronation. So we huddled in the shadow of a huge tree, Mika watching for our pursuers as Kiernan and I studied the map.
“Look,” I said, touching the map gently. “It’s right where we thought it was.”
“We’ll be able to see that big tree over the wall, the one by the benches where we were sitting when … when they came for you,” Kiernan agreed. “You’re sure it’ll work?”
I nodded, ignoring the twinge of doubt inside me. “It has to.”
“Well, we’re about to find out,” Mika said suddenly. “They’re at the bottom of the hill.”
They had seen us but, thinking that there were few places for us to hide, they came more slowly, obviously as winded as we were. I grimaced at the thought of more running, but as Mika and Kiernan dashed from behind the tree, I followed, the map in my hand.
Up the road and around the corner, and we were there. The palace wall stretched in both directions, west toward the palace gate and east toward the spot where it would meet the city walls. We jogged, Kiernan and I glancing overhead to look for the tree inside the wall that would mark the door. I stumbled from looking up, almost going to my knees, but Mika grabbed my arm and pulled me onward. And then, suddenly, I saw it. Green leaves swayed in the breeze, visible even over the wall.
“There,” I wheezed, and we stumbled to a stop. Melaina’s men would be on us at any minute.
“Where is it?” Mika demanded.
“It should be here,” I cried, pulling the map open. Yes, we were standing just outside the place Kiernan and I had found so many months ago. “It should be here!”
“Maybe she has to touch the wall,” Kiernan said. Mika ran her hands over the wall, patting it down like a horse, but nothing happened.
“She’s here! It should appear for her,” I moaned, afraid to look back over my shoulder for the men. “See?” I ran my finger under the runes. “ ‘Take heed, all who would attempt the Door of the King. Let it be known that only for one with royal blood and royal words will the Door appear.’ ”
“What about that part at the end?” Kiernan asked.
I shook my head. “They’re just gibberish. The mapmaker’s name or something.”
“No, they’re not,” Mika said from over my shoulder in a odd, tight voice.
“What?” I gasped, just as Kiernan said, “You can read those?”
She nodded, eyes wide.
“But I couldn’t translate them,” I said. “Can you read ancient runes?”
She shook her head. “But I can read that.”
Royal blood, I thought. Royal blood and … royal words. Words spelled so that only someone of royal blood would be able to read them at all.
“Quick! What do they say?”
Mika stared at me, an unreadable expression on her face. “I am Thorvaldor,” she whispered.
Light flared from the palace wall, so bright that I had to put up a hand to shield my eyes before it died away.
As the light dimmed, I felt Kiernan grab my hand and squeeze it tight. Because there, set where a blank wall had stood only a moment before, was a small, wooden door.