The False Princess

CHAPTER FOUR

Not everyone was as happy about Tyr as I was, however. When I returned from our walk later that night, I found Aunt Varil sitting in the main room, a lamp beside her and a pile of clothes to be mended on the table in front of her, but the needle still in her hand. She watched me close the door, her eyes bright and hawklike.
We gazed at each other for a minute, and then I said carefully, “If you don’t need me for anything, I think I’ll go to bed.”
Full dark had fallen outside, and the flickering of the fire in the hearth made shadows dance around the room. Aunt Varil’s mouth worked, like she was sucking on a piece of sour fruit, and then she said, “Tyr Varanday is trouble.”
I had felt light and airy, happy for the first time in weeks, but I was on the ground in a flash.
“His mother’s never liked living here. She’s from Vivaskari and thinks she’s too good for a little town like this. She’s given him ideas. And those relatives she’s got in the city give him more when he’s there. That he’s better than other people, that he deserves things they don’t. He likes to push things. Likes to get his own way, too.”
Most of the warmth Tyr had brought had been blown out of me, but a stubborn bit remained. “Just because someone’s from Vivaskari doesn’t mean they’re trouble,” I said.
Aunt Varil sniffed, then exhaled loudly. “Didn’t say it did. But being above yourself often does. And Tyr Varanday is above himself—always has been.”
This is what she thinks of me, I realized. As someone who was “above herself.” A common girl with a princess’s airs. Well, I was trying to get rid of them, to learn how to be a normal person. I was trying my best, but it was hard to undo sixteen years of thinking you were someone—something—else.
“It makes him restless,” she continued, “and that’s led to—”
I was suddenly angry, tired of listening to her, and I flung out my hand. “Enough,” I snapped. “He wants to be my friend. He’s the only person in this town who’s even cared to try and get to know me instead of whispering about me behind my back or telling me I’m not good enough.” Aunt Varil opened her mouth, the line between her eyes long and deep, but I only said, “I’m going to bed. Good night, Aunt.”
I stalked from the room, simmering with indignation. Was this just another way to show how much she disapproved of me? A way to make sure that my life here was as dull and cold as hers? I flung myself down on my narrow bed, which was squeezed in between the window and Aunt Varil’s. For some reason, I had an almost overwhelming urge to go over to my chest and take out one of my dresses. I hadn’t even opened the chest in weeks, hadn’t worn anything but Alva’s daughter’s left-behind things since I arrived here. But now I wanted, desperately, to hold something from a time when I had been happy, when I had had a friend, when I had known who I was.
The urge beat at me, but I clenched my jaw and shut my eyes so tightly my eyelids hurt. No. There was no use holding on to the past. Kiernan’s face wafted in front of my closed eyes, but I deliberately replaced it with Tyr’s. Grabbing a handful of the blanket upon which I lay, I pinched it between my fingers. This was what I had now. Just this.
I had to make it enough.
After that, Aunt Varil didn’t say anything else about my friendship with Tyr. She allowed me to go walking with him, let us sit in the garden, and even, on rainy nights, let him come inside and set up a chessboard for us to play. She was polite to him, but I knew from the set of her mouth that she was no happier with the situation than she had been that first night.
I, on the other hand, was happier than I had been since I came to Treb. It might not have been much of a measure, considering the loneliness I had been enduring, but at least it was progress. A week passed, then two, and I saw Tyr almost every day. I hurried through my chores so that I could present myself to Aunt Varil at the end of the day, skeins of wool dyed, shirt mended as best I could, garden weeded, and be allowed to go and find my friend.
Our activities varied. Sometimes we simply sat outside Aunt Varil’s house or in the garden behind this parents’ shop and talked. He told me about his relatives in the city, and the various plays and musical performances he attended when he visited them. I had sometimes seen the troupes he spoke of, and though I felt a twinge of homesickness when he mentioned them, I found that I could talk about them without too much unhappiness. Our chess matches sometimes went on long enough that we had to declare a truce because of the hour. I showed him the tiny pond I had found in the woods behind our cottage, where, if you waited at dusk, you could nearly always see deer coming down to drink. We walked up and down the main street of Treb, sometimes stopping at the Hollyhock to sit and drink a mug of last year’s cider. Occasionally some of the other girls or boys our age would try to join us, but Tyr always managed to steer them away without making it look like he was being unsociable. Sometimes I wished that he was not so apt at it; it would have been nice to get to know them, and I was too shy to approach them on my own. But mostly I simply reveled in having one friend, one bit of happiness.
I thought about telling Tyr about the strange feeling inside me, the feeling of something trapped and trying to get out. The sensation had worsened with time, until I sometimes imagined I could see heat radiating off my skin. When Tyr looked at me with his clear eyes and smiled, I thought he might understand.
But I hesitated, unwilling to weigh down our time together with fears about something that might or might not be real. Whatever the feeling was, it seemed to do me no harm, except for causing worry, and so I kept silent.
I tried not to think about what Aunt Varil had said about him. She never stopped me from going with him, but her glower couldn’t help but give me pause whenever I asked permission to leave the house. It was that expression that came back to me whenever Tyr made a snide joke about some aspect of Treb, or when he tried to get Tabithan to lower the price of our ciders at the Hollyhock. It haunted me whenever Calla threw an especially hurt look at Tyr when she saw him with me, a look that seemed to speak of something torn away without warning. But I usually managed to shake off those momentary flashes of disquiet, because in just the next moment Tyr would look at me with such a friendly smile that I thought surely I had imagined the supercilious tone in his voice.
I tried not to think about Kiernan. I tried not to compare his easy, jovial wit to Tyr’s unruffled smoothness and silky smile. I tried not to wish, sometimes, that it was Kiernan sitting across from me at the table. I forced myself not to imagine the way he would have had everyone, from Ardin, the taciturn blacksmith, to Tabithan, the jolly red-cheeked innkeeper, under his spell. I hummed to myself or tried to recount the steps needed to ready tansy for dyeing whenever I began to think about the jokes he would have made about the village animals or the conversations we would have about Aunt Varil. I told myself I did not miss him.
And then came the day when Tyr kissed me, and everything else was pushed out of my head.
We were out in the forest when it happened. I wasn’t supposed to have Tyr with me when I gathered plants for Aunt Varil, but he had spotted me trudging up into the woods that afternoon and followed. I had thought about telling him that he should go, just in case Aunt Varil came looking for me, but when I started to suggest it, such a long look came over his face that I let the matter drop.
“Well, you’ll have to work then,” I had laughed. “You can help me look for the meadowsweet.”
The frothy plant tops filled my basket by the time the shadows of the forest had lengthened. We walked back toward the village slowly. I knew that Aunt Varil would be wondering where I was, perhaps even holding supper for me, but I couldn’t seem to make myself go any faster. As we reached the tree line, however, I turned to Tyr with a sigh.
“You’d better not come out of the woods with me,” I said. “Aunt Varil wouldn’t like it if she saw. She’d think we were doing something we shouldn’t.”
Tyr was gazing at me with an odd, sleepy look in his eyes. “Really?” he asked. “Well, if she frets about it that much, maybe we ought to give her a reason for her worries.”
And in one effortless motion, he leaned forward and kissed me.
I had never been kissed before. As a princess, it was simply not part of my experience. I knew some of the other girls at court, and many of the boys, had kissed or been kissed. Kiernan used to regale me with tales of kisses that he had stolen or tried to steal in the dark corners of various palace rooms. But no one had ever tried to kiss me, not even the Wenthi archduke’s very forward son, the one with the hand that had always roamed a bit too low during our dances.
So while I had at least some theoretical idea of what a kiss should be like, I had absolutely no practical knowledge. In the last second before his lips touched mine, I saw that his eyes were closed, so I hastily closed mine as well. His lips moved, carefully and gently, and it felt warm, and soft, and nice. He pulled back for a moment, and I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t done it right, but then he was kissing me again, one arm going around my waist and pulling me closer to him. My basket was still propped up against one hip, though I put my free hand gingerly against his arm. I could taste something sweet in his mouth, maybe the lingering flavor of the tiny wild strawberries we had found and eaten earlier that day.
The kiss went on for what seemed like a long time, until I felt dizzy behind my eyes. I stepped back, and the cool evening air washed between the space where our bodies had been pressed together.
“Is that all right?” Tyr asked. He was looking at me with a glimmer in his eyes, and his face seemed a little feverish.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. Myriad thoughts jostled for attention inside me. How I liked Tyr, liked the way my stomach knotted up a little whenever I saw him approaching. How, though I had never been kissed, I had somehow imagined it feeling different, less simply nice and more … rapturous. How I was scared that, if I let Tyr kiss me again, or if I didn’t, I might lose the one friend I had in Treb. How, for just an instant, Kiernan’s face had swum before my closed eyes, his brows pinched with something like disappointment.
I felt all these things at once, so that I hardly knew what to say. But I nodded, a little hesitantly, and when his face flushed with pleasure, I knew I had made the right answer.
“I think I can see your aunt standing in front of your cottage,” he said. “You go and I’ll wait until you’ve gone inside.” He caught me by the arm. “I’m going into the city for my cousin’s wedding tomorrow. I’ll be gone three days, but I’ll come to see you as soon as I get back. I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you,” I repeated. Then I turned, my heart racing, and hurried down out of the forest to where Aunt Varil was waiting for me.
The next few days passed in a blur. Aunt Varil chastised me continually for woolgathering, and I almost stepped out in front of a cart full of chicken coops going down the main street of town.
I wasn’t dreaming about Tyr, though, not in the fanciful ways I knew that girls dreamed about boys they liked. No, I was worrying about him, and about me. What would it mean, to be with him like this? Was it what I wanted? Would people talk, like Aunt Varil seemed to think they would? Did it matter if they did? What if it ruined our friendship?
Why, why had I thought of Kiernan in the moment when Tyr had kissed me?
Thoughts like this swirled around in my head, making me so clumsy that I soon had bruises up and down my legs. When I broke three plates in two days, Aunt Varil snapped at me and then banned me from helping with supper until I could do it without mishap. None of this helped my mood, which became blacker and more anxiety-filled by the day.
On the third day since the kiss, I was in the yard behind the house, trying desperately to salvage a vat of purple dye. Aunt Varil had gone looking for willow bark in the woods and left me in charge of the dye bath. “You’ve helped me enough now,” she said as she stomped off, basket on her hip. “It’s time you learned to manage it by yourself.”
It had been going well until, for some inexplicable reason, the waters turned from a pale violet to a muddy, dark brown. I was frantic, trying desperately to remember a way to correct the problem and simultaneously wondering if I could run fast enough to find Aunt Varil before the dye became irretrievable. Finally, I decided to remove the plants from the water early and, in my muddled state, plunged my hands directly into the dye bath instead of reaching for the strainer. Grabbing at the floating bits of leaves, I was flinging them out into the ground when I heard someone rap loudly on the door to the house and call, “Hello? Is anyone here?”
I froze with my arms in the vat up to my elbows. I knew that voice so well it might have been my own.
“Hello?” The person had given up on anyone answering the door and was coming closer.
I lurched up, flinging brown water into the air and onto myself, just in time to see Kiernan come around the side of the cottage.
He was dressed in a fine blue tunic and dark riding breeches. His dark blond hair had been swept back from his face and tangled by the wind. He looked hesitant as he peered around the corner of the cottage, but as he caught sight of me his face lit up so brightly I thought it might catch fire. Then he was bounding forward, his long legs carrying him across the distance between us in a few steps. He caught me up in a hug as fierce as the grin on his face and twirled me around, heedless of the dye on my arms or the water that had slopped down the front of my dress. He was laughing in my ear, and I felt a smile burn across my own face.
It was like breathing again after almost drowning, like being given water after crawling through a desert. All the worries that had assailed me had vanished, so that I felt loose-limbed and truly alive for the first time since I had stepped into the carriage beside the stables and ridden away from the palace. He was my best friend, and he had come to find me.
Finally, he set me down and put his hands on my shoulders, holding me back to look at me. “Nameless God, I’ve missed you, Nalia,” he breathed.
And my heart, which had shot toward the sky, which had been as light and dancing as a leaf flying on the wind, suddenly plunged toward my stomach.
Kiernan heard his mistake right away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry—I just—I forgot. Seeing you, I just forgot. Sinda. It’s Sinda now, right?”
Slowly, my head so heavy it felt like a boulder on my shoulders, I nodded. I looked down, away, anywhere but at Kiernan. My arms, I noticed, were completely covered in the mucky brown color of the ruined dye, so that I looked like I had been playing in mud. The front of my dress—no, Alva’s daughter’s dress—was dark with the water I had managed to get on it, but that didn’t disguise how old the faded, thinning material was. A bug flew past and I swatted at it with my hand, grazing my cheek with my thumb as I did so. I could feel the wetness on my face and knew I had probably just wiped a brown stain across my cheek.
And somehow, standing there, all the joy that had been held inside me so long with no reason to come out, that had bubbled to the surface at seeing Kiernan, suddenly turned sour and dark. I was ashamed, of how I looked and what I was doing and how I had made a mess of it. In a flash, I hated him for seeing me like this, for coming in and reminding me of who I no longer was. And I knew that, as soon as I opened my mouth, whatever came out of it would be horrible, as mean and sharp as I could make it. I even knew that I should stop myself, that I would regret it later, but in that moment, with my dirty cheeks flaming, I didn’t care.
“What are you doing here, Kiernan?” I asked dully.
His eyes crinkled up for a second in surprise at my tone. “I came to see you. I know it’s been too long, that I took too long, but …” Two spots of color blossomed on his cheeks, like he didn’t want to go on, but then he forged ahead. “But there were all sorts of ceremonies and things, to welcome her. Everyone was called to court. They even made sure that the Baroness of Mossfeld came,” he added with a puff of laughter and a hopeful glance at me. The holdings of Mossfeld were in the most northern reaches of Thorvaldor and the woman who held them was so eccentric that she had not been seen in court since the crowning of the king. Kiernan and I had spent many hours lying on the grass of the palace gardens, wondering exactly what she was like and what she did with herself stuck out on the boggy, sodden land that was Mossfeld.
But I didn’t smile, and I saw Kiernan swallow before he continued. “Anyway, I couldn’t leave. My father, he said that it would be an insult to—to Nalia—if I left to find you while they were still welcoming her. He finally gave me permission yesterday, and I started out this morning.”
“I see that. But why?” I asked. There was a tone in my voice I didn’t recognize, as two-edged and keen as a sword blade. It would cut Kiernan, yes, but it would also cut me where I held it.
I didn’t care.
“This,” I said, throwing my arm out to indicate the cottage and the tub of dye, “isn’t exactly what you’re used to.” He glanced to where I had gestured, blinking and off balance. I shook my head. “No. You’re all fun, all froth and silliness and jokes.” He blanched, hurt, and I almost did myself. It wasn’t true; there was more to Kiernan than that, and we both knew it. Still, I didn’t stop.
“There aren’t any pretty women to kiss here, Kiernan, or games to play or pranks to set. No plays to see, no music halls to go to. There aren’t even any libraries for you to run away from.” I laughed, and it was a high, shrill sound, one I didn’t recognize. “Oh, don’t worry. It’s not just you. Look around. There’s nothing here anyone sane would want anything to do with.”
“There’s you,” he said quietly. “I came here to find you. I would have gone anywhere,” he added more stridently. “To Two Copper district in Vivaskari or the boggy reaches of Mossfeld or the Nameless God’s frozen hell. You’re my friend. I came to find you.”
Part of me wanted to grab his arm and beg him to forgive me for the things I’d said. Part of me wanted to close my eyes and pretend that we were standing in the gardens of the palace, that nothing had changed. Part of me wanted to sit down on the ground with him and talk until my lips went numb, to tell him about my life here. The deer at the pond, my confusion about Tyr, the strain in my relationship with Aunt Varil, my fears about the bizarre, something-trapped-inside-me feeling that had dogged me since I arrived.
Part of me wanted it. But the rest of me was too ashamed at being caught unawares, all dirty and wet and poor. And I was too proud to take my words back.
“I’m not Nalia anymore,” I said, so coldly that Kiernan rocked back on his heels. Taking a handful of my skirts in my fist, I shook them at him. “Look at me, Kiernan. Take a good look. This is what I am now. I’m the niece of a dyer in a backward little town, one who doesn’t even have any clothes to call her own. I clean house and I make supper and I dye things. And I’m not even any good at it.”
“I don’t care,” he growled. His eyes were flashing and his fists were clenched white with the fervor in those words. “I wouldn’t care if you were the princess or a fishmonger’s daughter or a traveling gypsy. That’s not why I’m your friend.”
Almost, almost it swayed me. But I had gone too far already. I heard myself insisting, “You were friends with Nalia. Well, the real Nalia’s back at the palace. Maybe your father was right. You should make friends with her.”
Kiernan shook his head so strongly it must have hurt. “No. Sinda, listen to me—”
It was hearing him call me by my name—the name I didn’t want—that broke me. “Stop it,” I hissed. “You’ve come, you’ve checked up on me. You’ve done your duty. It’s no good, Kiernan. Just go away.”
With that, I turned away, my back as straight as Aunt Varil’s. I could feel hot, prickly tears gathering in my eyes, but I couldn’t make myself face him. There was a long silence and then he said, “I brought you something. King Kelman’s map. You—You left it with me, that day. I thought you might, well, be able to work on it. Decipher it.”
“And what library would I use?” I asked bitterly. “What books would I scour to find the answers to a puzzle no one’s cared about in three hundred years?”
“I just thought you’d like it,” he said. I had never heard Kiernan sound so quiet, so defeated.
“Well, you thought wrong,” I said recklessly, my back still turned. “I have friends here, Kiernan. They keep me busy. I don’t need your pity or your gifts.”
Another long pause. Whole civilizations could have risen up and died back to the ground during that pause. Then he said, with all the stiff courtesy of an earl’s son, “I’ll go then. I’m sorry to have troubled you. Good-bye, Sinda.”
I was truly crying then, huge fat tears dripping down my face while I ground my teeth together so hard my jaw ached. If I had opened my mouth, I would have wailed, so I didn’t say anything. A moment later, I heard the sounds of a horse galloping out of Treb as fast as its rider could make it go.
It was only then that I turned around. Lying there, on the stump I sometimes sat on while I stirred the dye bath, was a roll of ancient fabric tied with a blue ribbon. With trembling fingers, I pulled the knot apart and gently smoothed the fabric out to reveal a map of the palace grounds. How carefully must he have carried it to get it here unscathed?
I was moaning, I realized, a keening sound like the kind animals make when they’re hurt. I let the map go; it hung over the stump, the ribbon beneath it trailing limply downward. Then I was on the ground, my knees up against my chest and my arms wrapped around them.
I had hurt him intentionally, sliced into the core of our friendship with my words. I had known I was doing it, and, in my pride, I had done it anyway.
I lowered my forehead to rest against my knees, my sobs coming harder. I would never see him again. I had forced away my one true friend, my best companion in the world.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please, come back.”
There was no one there to hear me.