The False Princess

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When it was all over, I went home to Philantha.
They would have made room for me at the palace, given me a whole wing if I had asked for it, but it didn’t feel right to stay. I wanted to make sure the healer had come, to explain to my teacher what had happened. Besides, in the hubbub that followed the almost-coronation, only a few people really noticed that I had gone. The queen, who pressed my hand without speaking. Mika, who broke away from the wizards and nobles and councillors to stand in front of me.
“Didn’t say you were going to spell me,” she huffed.
“I didn’t know I was. I didn’t know I could, until right then.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Big magic, for someone who could barely disguise us this morning.”
I shrugged tiredly. Having spent so much magic, I felt ready to drop. “It was in me. That piece of your soul. So it was me. And that means that in some ways, you and—” I swallowed. “You and Orianne, you were both me, too. We were all the same. It would have been almost impossible for anyone else, anyone besides Melaina or Neomar. But it’s always easiest to work a spell on yourself. And I thought … well, I thought I had nothing to lose.”
We looked at each other, consciously not looking at the dais where Orianne had fallen. Neither of us said that I had been wrong, that there had been something to lose.
“I’ll come for you,” she said before she was called away. “Don’t think I won’t.”
No one else noticed me leaving. Only Kiernan, who hugged me close in silence, and then let me go. He had always known what I needed, even more than I had.
Back at Philantha’s house, I found her ensconced in her bed, layered in healing salves and spells. Gemalind had received similar but less intensive treatment, and she was recounting the events to the maids and butler, who had returned to the house. I checked on both of them, told the butler to alert the city guard to the presence of two toughs who might still be watching the house, and went to bed.
A day passed, then two, then several. No one from the palace came to seek me out. I had told the story, given them the genealogies and the oracle’s confession from my pocket, told them where to look to find more evidence. Not that anyone really felt the need to go looking, not after what had happened. There had been talk of a reward, for my service, but I had only shaken my head. It felt too much like blood money, and I had tasted enough blood to last a lifetime.
Philantha, in her true, stubborn form, was up after the second day, swaddled in blankets in one of her study’s chairs and directing the cleaning of the room. She had sniffed when she first saw me, then smiled.
“Something’s changed,” she had said. “I can feel it, and I’m never wrong about such things, you know.”
“I know,” I replied with a small smile. “And it has.”
“Good,” was all she said. Then she made me help clean the study with magic, and not my hands.
She was right. Something had changed. I felt … looser, more at ease in my own skin. The magic that I had tried to hold in for so long, only to have it come bubbling out in frantic ways, seemed to settle inside me. It was there, and sometimes insistent to be used, but more peaceful. Or maybe I was more peaceful, at least with it. I didn’t feel scared before I started a spell anymore; I just tried it, and if it worked it worked, and if it didn’t, at least nothing exploded. The control I had sought I relinquished, in favor of a sort of joining, an acceptance between the magic and me.
Other things, though, weren’t as easy.
I spent a lot of time wandering the city. For days, all the talk was of what had occurred at the coronation, though less and less of it resembled the truth as the stories spun wilder. People also talked of what had occurred afterward, which I heard with some skepticism. Some things, though, I took to be true.
They had interred Orianne in the Harandron tombs at Saremarch. She had, after all, been the baron’s daughter, and innocent in this, no matter what her mother had been. The caravan that moved her body had been seen off by the old queen and the new princess, who stood watching it from the palace gates until it could no longer be seen.
Melaina had been buried on a hillside outside the city, a point called Traitor’s End. No one but the grave digger had seen her laid into the ground.
The wizards’ college was in an uproar, it seemed, to have had one of their own turn so violently against the crown. Luckily, they were no longer without a leader. The fever that had stricken Neomar had lifted the very day of the coronation, and he had returned, weaker but still sharp, to his duties.
I heard about myself, too. This time, my name didn’t fade away into distant memory but remained clear in people’s minds. I was described as clever, brave, sacrificing, even beautiful. Luckily, with such words being bandied about, no one looked twice at the scribe girl pacing the streets of Vivaskari at all hours.
I had a lot to think about.
Had it been worth it? I thought, standing outside the palace wall in the spot where, should Mika decide to stroll, a door would open for her. We had won, yes, but at what cost? Philantha would walk with a limp for the rest of her life because I had been too prideful to tell her what I knew, and Gemalind still spooked if you entered the kitchen too quickly. The house of Harandron had fallen, with no heir to assume its mantle. The king had died long before he ought to have, leaving the queen alone and, if the rumors were true, frail.
Orianne had died, just as the oracle had prophesied.
She had given up her life herself, I tried to tell myself as I wandered the streets or practiced spells for Philantha. In that split second, she had chosen. I told myself that, but it didn’t help. She had been kind, and gentle, and unaware of the mechanisms that had ordered her life. As Kiernan had once said, she would have made a fine queen. Just not the rightful one.
Without me, she would have been alive.
It was a weight that made my steps heavy, a thought that haunted me when I tried to sleep at night. When I had thought of the oracle’s prophecy, I had, somehow, always assumed it would be me dying, or Mika. I had considered Orianne only as an afterthought. But she had been the one to pay the price of the events I set in motion.
Would things have been different if I had acted differently? If I had told someone, as Kiernan had wanted? Would Philantha have been prepared for the attack? Would the wizards and healers attending the king have known his fever was brought on by magic and been able to save him? Would Orianne be alive? I didn’t know; I would never know. Maybe everything would have played out as it had, and maybe not. Whatever might have been, I kept telling myself, I am the one who helped set these events in motion, and I have to accept the consequences of my own actions.
But had it been worth it? I wasn’t sure.
I was sitting in the garden the day she came, my fingers idling in the little fountain. It was a bright day, and I had almost decided to go inside when the gate in the back opened, and Mika walked in.
“Told you I would come for you,” she said at my surprised look. “You think I’d forget?”
She sat down beside me on the fountain’s rim. She wore a long dress of dark green, and her hair looked as if it had been pinned neatly around her head that morning. But she kept pulling at the neckline of the dress, stretching it away from her skin, and several strands of hair had fallen loose around her face. Her eyes flicked back and forth a few times as she looked around the garden, a fox still.
“They keep calling me Nalia,” she said finally. “I can’t get used to it.”
“You may not,” I said.
She shrugged. “At least Kiernan doesn’t. And they have so many things I’m supposed to learn, and double-quick, like my gran used to say. Places and people and treaties and … everything. I fall asleep with it running in my head.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to learn it all,” I started, but she raised a hand to interrupt.
“What are you going to do, Sinda?”
I scrunched my face in confusion. “What? When?”
“For your life. What’re you planning to do?”
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “I … I don’t know, exactly. I’m going to keep learning from Philantha. I want to visit my aunt in Treb, to see if … if we can get along better. I think I’ll …” I faltered, unsure. I had spent so much time thinking about getting Mika on the throne that I had never thought much about afterward. Though I had finally had the time to think about my own life in the long days that had passed since the aborted coronation, my mind had been filled with other things. Now, though, reality seemed to press on me with Mika’s words. What was I going to do, now that I no longer had a country to save? Now that I knew myself a little more, knew what I was capable of. My life, I realized, had gone still, like an unfinished painting. It was as if I hovered above it with a brush, unsure where to go from here. I had achieved my goal, completed my quest, and I had no idea of what to do with myself.
“Thought you wouldn’t have much of a plan. Which is good, because I need you,” Mika said shortly.
It was not what I had been expecting. “What?”
She turned to face me fully, a line of tension appearing between her eyebrows. “You know it all, Sinda. All the things they want me to learn. You could be my … my chief councillor. You could come live in the palace, or you could stay here, keep learning from Philantha. It’d be good to have a wizard I knew I could trust. I just …” For a moment she lost the wary, tough expression that was always on her face. She looked young, and scared. “They keep calling me the princess—they want to crown me queen sometime soon. She exhaled through her nose. “Well, most of them. There are a few who keep grumbling about my ‘upbringing,’ and whispering about whether or not I can read. I guess they’re not sure if someone who grew up in a hut in the woods is really fit to be queen.”
I goggled at her. All that we went through, and still it wasn’t good enough for some of the nobles? “Who else do they think they’re going to get for the job?” I asked in confusion. “Your closest relatives are two third cousins—which means they both have an equal claim to the throne. It would be chaos if they tried to pick between them, never mind ridiculous. You’re the princess, the real thing.”
Mike lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “That’s what the queen—I mean”—she stumbled a bit on the words—“my mother keeps saying. That they’ll come around, because I’m the true princess and rightful queen. Honestly, though, I don’t feel like either of those things. But I might, I think, someday, if you helped me.”
“And afterward?” I asked ruefully. “You won’t need me like that forever. And then I’ll still be here, without a plan.”
A sly look stole across her face. “I’ve been thinking. It’s like we were saying, out there on the road. Something’s wrong here, in Thorvaldor, under all the things that are right. Lots of people who don’t have a wet cat’s chance at changing their lives. People like my gran, and us. And I’ve been thinking, maybe this, all this, maybe it happened so I’d know it. ’Cause I wouldn’t have, if I’d grown up like I was supposed to. Maybe it happened so I could start to change it.” She sneaked a glance at me then, her face caught between defensiveness and honest question. “Do you think that’s silly? That I’m just looking for ways to make sense of it?”
The God cares naught for such earthly things as thrones, and who sits upon them. The oracle’s words hovered in the back of my throat, but then stuck there. Perhaps, for once, the God had cared, at least a little.
“No,” I said, as I had on the road. “I don’t think it’s silly.”
Mika sighed, like a load had been lifted from her, before saying, “Anyway, it’s what I’ve been thinking. As for afterward, once I know what I ought to, I figure there must be other people like you. People too poor to get into the wizards’ college, but with magic inside them. They could use a school of their own. Course, there’d have to be someone to run it. If you learned enough from Philantha …”
A grin was spreading across my face. Yes, a voice inside me whispered. Whether it was my own, or someone else’s, I wasn’t sure. I looked at Mika, who was staring off into the distance at some future inside her head.
The cost had been high, and even higher for some than for me. But looking at Mika, I felt sure of one thing.
Whatever the cost, I had made the right choice.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Mika grinned back at me and hopped up. “Good. I have to go now, though. I had to threaten to demote the guards to get them to let me out of the gates alone. You’ll come tomorrow, then?”
I felt a little lightheaded. Strange, how quickly things could change. That morning I had felt conflicted, unsure about my course. But I had a path now, a way to do what I had been trained to do, to aid Thorvaldor. “I could come now,” I said. “Philantha doesn’t need me right now. I could tell her what we’ve talked about and—”
But Mika only shook her head. “No. You have something else to do now.”
I shook mine back at her, perplexed. “No, I don’t.”
Mika fixed me with a look that said, for all my knowing what a princess should know, I was really and truly stupid. “He’s been waiting for you,” she said.
My heart did a tiny flip. “Kiernan?”
“Who else?” Mika snorted.
I had been thinking about him constantly; he intruded into every other thought, even my sadness over Orianne. But I hadn’t seen him, not since the coronation. Maybe I had been right, I had begun to think when he never appeared on Philantha’s doorstep: he had given up on me.
“Are you still worried about what his parents will think? You’re the princess’s chief advisor now,” Mika scolded. “You can hold your head up in any room in the country. But if you’re worried about it, I suppose I could grant you a title.…”
I laughed without meaning to, shaking my head. “No, no,” I said. And then, more seriously: “I don’t think I’m worried about that anymore. I saved the country, didn’t I? Surely that counts for something.” But then, doubt crept in again. “But he hasn’t come,” I said plaintively.
Mika put a hand on the gate, as if she would leave, but then she turned and sighed. “He’s letting you make up your own mind, because that’s the only way you’ll ever really let him in. This time,” she said, “you’re going to have to go to him.”
I found him, with a little hint from Mika, in the gardens where we had met when I first came back to the city. “He goes there every day,” she had said. “Waiting.”
He was standing with his back to me, as if regarding a particularly elaborate section of flowers. But he didn’t move when I crunched across the gravel path, and I realized he wasn’t seeing the flowers at all.
Still, he didn’t jump when I tapped his shoulder and said, “I’m here.”
Kiernan turned slowly, one arm twitching like he wanted to hug me. But he didn’t move.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” I said. “But I had so much to think about, and I didn’t … I didn’t know …”
Still, he waited.
I blew out an impatient breath. “She’s made me her councillor, you know. I’m to help her learn how to be queen, be the voice whispering advice behind her throne. And then she’s going to help me open a school for magic.”
He only gazed at me, not helping in the slightest.
I jigged up and down a little where I stood, scowling at him. Once, I might have given in to the worries that had plagued me since that first kiss. That he might have loved me once, but had decided it was too much trouble. That he was too angry over the spell I cast over him to forgive me. That our stations were so different that his family would never allow us to be together. I might have faltered when faced with the doubt that nettled me as he continued to stare at me so implacably. I might have turned red and slunk away, rather than stand firm before him. Once, back when I had left my life behind without a fight. But not now. I was stronger now, braver. I had faced my worst fears, and survived them.
“So I really think that your parents should let you marry me. Not right now—I have so much to do, with Mika and Philantha and the magic—but someday. Someday not too far away. I did save Thorvaldor, after all, and I expect that Mika will pay me well in exchange for my years of knowledge. She even threatened to title me—it would be just like her to want to rub everyone’s noses in my commonness. And I think that, if they have any objections, you should just—”
“Break with them?” he asked. He was trying to be serious, but one corner of his mouth kept twitching.
“Well, yes,” I admitted.
“I already did,” he said, and my mouth fell open. “Or at least, I threatened to, if they wouldn’t give me their blessing.” A thin line worked its way between his eyebrows, and his smile dimmed a little. “I think they knew it was coming, but it didn’t make my father happy. He stormed around shouting about duty, and for a while I thought I might really have to go through with it.”
The line deepened, and he glanced away from me. “That was frightening. It was my choice—is my choice—but practically it would have been … difficult. You aren’t the only person who was trained for just one thing; I don’t know if I know how to be anything but the future Earl of Rithia. I kept telling myself I could do it, become someone else if they disinherited me, but I didn’t want to break with them. I would have, but I didn’t want to.”
My heart clenched a little, seeing the glimmer of tension around his eyes.
Suddenly, the tiny grin flickered at his mouth again. “But then my father started thinking about the advantages of my marrying someone who had done the future queen such a service. After that, he was happy to give his blessing.”
I shook my head as if to clear it. I had come here asking him to do just that, but hearing it out loud seemed like something from a dream. “You really told them you wanted to marry me?” I asked.
The smile had taken over his whole face now. “I told you before: I fell under your spell before you even knew you had magic, before you saved a kingdom, back when there was no chance you would be allowed to marry me. Nothing’s really changed since then, except that now any children we have might be wizards themselves, and I’ll be hopelessly outnumbered.
“So, yes, I want to marry you. Someday. If you’ll have me,” he said modestly.
“Of course I will, you idiot,” I said with a shriek, and threw myself into his arms. Some things, though, never change, regardless of how many countries you save. I tripped at the last moment, and we both went down in a laughing heap. It didn’t stop me from kissing him for so long that we both were gasping by the time it ended.
“So what should I call you now?” he said when we had our breath back. “Savior of Thorvaldor? Soon-to-Be Master Wizard? Chief Councillor of Wise Words? My own love?”
“Sinda,” I said, without the slightest twinge of old memories, or something lost, or regret. “Just Sinda. Though I like that last one almost as much.”
Kiernan reached out and tucked a strand of escaping hair behind my ear. “I think I like Sinda best myself,” he said.
We hauled ourselves up and, still laughing, brushed grass and sticks from our clothes. Then, arms around each other, we began the walk back to Philantha’s house to tell her that her scribe had just gotten a new job and become engaged in the same afternoon. I looked back up the hill once, toward the palace, and then turned away. I would go there tomorrow, but right now, it didn’t matter. Today I only had to walk with Kiernan, to visit Philantha, to finally be just myself.
For once, for the first time, it was enough.