Just Ella

  Delicate? I’d like to see Madame Bisset try to carry the sixteen buckets of water it always took to fill Corimunde and Griselda’s bathing tub. I’d like to see her haul fifty-pound bags of potatoes home from the market, without stopping once to rest. I’d like to see her scrub and clean from dawn until midnight with no food but a bowl of porridge. I was so busy trying to think of the exact right example to prove that delicacy was not my problem that I almost missed her next words.

  “We—your beloved prince, Sir Twelling, and I—we want to ensure that you return to your former health and vigor. When you do, I’m sure you’ll realize the error of your ways, and thank us for not indulging your foolishness. . . .”

  She patted my arm. Something stung my skin, and for a second I was distracted, puzzling whether I’d been pinched by her ring or—surely not!—a less-than-perfectly manicured nail. I couldn’t focus on her next words. Then I couldn’t focus on her face.

  But I did catch one last glimpse of her malicious smile before I slid into darkness.

  19

  I woke feeling woozy-headed, stiff, cold, and sore. I had a moment of wondering if I’d merely had a strange dream about living in a castle—I always woke stiff and cold and sore back home. But then I opened my eyes and saw the uneven stone of the castle, instead of the plaster walls of home. No, the dream was true. Only it had become a nightmare.

  I sat up slowly, fighting waves of dizziness. When I finally reached an upright position, I leaned my head against the wall behind me and surveyed my surroundings. I was alone. But I was not in my usual room. This place was nothing but stone walls, dirt floor, and the narrow wooden bench I’d been lying on. The only window was high over my head. It held no glass to keep out the chill—only a crisscross of bars. The heavy wooden door across from me also was barred, and lined with heavy rods of iron.

  Though I’d never been here before, I knew where I was.

  The dungeon.

  I blinked several times, as if hoping the view would change if I only looked again.

  “I don’t understand,” I murmured. “Why am I here?”

  I thought back over everything that had happened, wondering if I’d missed some important clue. The prince had pushed me around and tied me up, certainly, but I didn’t take him for a sadist. Just a dullard who’d never been told no before. As for Twelling and Madame Bisset, they were diabolical, but not crazy.

  “How is this supposed to make me love the prince?” I asked out loud.

  I raised my head, weakly, as though I could look out the prison bars for an answer. But the effort was a little too much for me, and my head clunked back against the wall. Pain shot through my whole body, and tears sprang to my eyes. And suddenly I understood. They didn’t care about making me love the prince. They just wanted to break my spirit.

  I drew my legs in and huddled on the bench, weeping silently. When I had to, I wiped my nose on my sleeve, because there was nothing else.

  What a fool I’d been. What had I expected the prince to say? “Oh, that’s okay, El. I understand. You go on with your life, and I’ll go on with mine. No hard feelings.” I knew better than that. Hadn’t I seen love affairs go sour in the village? When the wife of Rosten, the pig-tender, got mad at him, she’d burned every one of his leather vests and cursed him by sticking pins in a dozen pigs’ eyes. For all their prissy manners and French accents, the people in the castle were no better than a pig-tender’s wife. Just better dressed.

  And more powerful. I shivered, remembering something I’d read in a book of my father’s, long ago. It was about a king in another land and another time, who’d had his wives beheaded when he lost interest in them.

  Why hadn’t I remembered that sooner?

  Had I gotten too accustomed to having people fawn over me? “Oh, Princess, you’re so beautiful.” “Oh, Princess, your hair curls so perfectly.” “Oh, Princess, you’ll make the loveliest bride. . . .” Had I actually believed all that? Could I think of a single person in the whole castle who truly liked me, who wasn’t just kissing up because they thought I would someday be queen?

  Yes, I could. I could even think of two. Mary and Jed.

  I felt the first stirring of hope, but it died quickly. Okay, so not everybody hated me. So what? What could Mary or Jed do? Mary was just a servant girl, and Jed—I swallowed hard, forcing myself to evaluate Jed as harshly as I’d evaluated myself. Jed wasn’t a doer. He was a thinker, someone who cared about ideas and cared about doing right, but spent all his time pondering concepts like good and evil, instead of taking action. If I’d been him, caring as passionately as he did about the Sualan War victims, I would have found some way to help them. But Jed just sat and waited, wringing his hands and bemoaning the palace indifference.

  He wouldn’t be able to help me either.

  I buried my face in my hands, not able to bear looking at the dungeon around me a second longer. Why hadn’t I just run away when I’d had the chance? If I’d been so concerned about not hurting the prince, I could have left a note.

  “Princess?”

  It was Madame Bisset. I evaluated my chances based on her one word. If she was still calling me “Princess,” that was a good sign. They must still have hopes that I would consent to marry the prince. Or that I could be forced to. They weren’t going to kill me.

  I deliberately did not raise my head. If Madame Bisset thought I was still unconscious, perhaps I could overpower her when she came into my cell. She was taller and heavier than me, but she led a soft life in the palace, and I still had some muscles left from all those years of carrying cinders.

  Madame Bisset didn’t open the door.

  “Princess, I know you’re awake, so there’s no use pretending,” she said from the other side of the bars. “Just listen.”

  Her words were blunter and rougher than I’d ever heard from her before. Perhaps even she realized how ridiculous her faky, Frenchified, decorous talk would sound in the dungeon.

  “You’re going to stay here until you realize you have only one choice,” she said. “And then you’ll marry the prince.”

  I raised my head and yelled as forcefully as I could, “Never!”

  I’d intended to keep giving her the silent treatment, which had always been so effective at infuriating Lucille. But, really, defiance was much more my style.

  Madame Bisset wasn’t fazed.

  “Oh, yes. We’ll keep you in the dungeon until the wedding day, if necessary.”

  I laughed, to show that she didn’t scare me. But it was hard keeping my laughter from sliding into hysteria.

  “Sure,” I said sarcastically. “Prison pallor will look great with that beautiful gown.”

  Madame Bisset smiled.

  “You’ll look radiant,” she said, almost reverently. “So thin, so pale.”

  She was right, I thought—they really did want me to look as if I’d spent my life in prison. Maybe that was how I’d won the prince in the first place, because I was so pale from staying in the house all day being Lucille’s slave, so thin from never getting enough to eat. If it didn’t affect me, I could feel plenty amused by the palace ideal of female beauty.

  But it did affect me. It was the reason I was in the dungeon.

  “Fine. I’m stuck here. I guess someone will bring me something to eat. Every once in a while,” I said wildly. “I guess the only other thing I need to know is—where do I pee?”

  I meant to shock her, using the common term for a bodily function that was too base to mention even with a euphemism. But Madame Bisset didn’t flinch.

  “There’s a hole in the corner,” she said. “You may squat.”

  She pointed through the bars, and for the first time I saw the dark depression beyond the other end of my bench. I peered over at it until the smell overwhelmed me. Obviously I wasn’t the first prisoner who’d been held in this cell. Evidently the Charmings weren’t as charming as they’d like their subjects to believe.

  “Lucky me,” I said. “I have all the ame
nities.”

  Madame Bisset sniffed.

  “You,” she said, “are a fool. Don’t you know what you’re throwing away? Maybe you think I’m like everyone else, castle born and castle bred. You’ve had no reason to think otherwise. But no—I’m like you. I was not born to nobility. I had to fight for everything I’ve gotten. I had to work. And I don’t have a single regret about anything I had to do.”

  I regarded Madame Bisset for the first time as a potentially interesting person. What exactly had she had to do? Somehow, I didn’t think she would tell me.

  “What is wrong with you?” she ranted. “You know what it’s like to be a commoner. They live in manure. They are manure! Why would you want to go back to that?”

  “I just want to be free,” I whispered.

  “Free!” Madame Bisset practically spat out the word. “What’s that? There’s no such thing! Everything has a price. And I’m not paying the price for you. I’m not going to have everything I’ve worked for taken away by a ninny like you!”

  I squinted, puzzled. Did she mean that her fate was somehow tied up with mine? Would she be blamed if I didn’t shape up, marry the prince, and act like a proper princess? I didn’t know what to think about those possibilities.

  “I will come and see you every day,” Madame Bisset said, a little more calmly. “And when you are ready, I will tell the guards to release you. Until then—”

  She thrust a bowl through the bars and waited until I stumbled across the floor to take it. It was filled with a thin gruel. I thought at first that there were small chunks of meat floating on the surface, but they turned out to be weevils.

  Madame Bisset was watching my reaction, so I was careful to keep my face expressionless.

  “Good day,” Madame Bisset said as she turned to leave.

  “Good day to you as well,” I said stiffly.

  I watched through the bars until she was out of sight. Then I sat down and ate the gruel. I forced myself not to gag on the weevils.

  “You can go ask Lucille,” I whispered, though Madame Bisset was long gone. “It takes more than this to break me.”

  I hoped.

  20

  I had fallen into a fitful sleep on the bench that night when I heard the scratching at my door. Mice, I thought. Or rats. It figures. But then there was a whisper. “Princess? Are you in there?”

  Gratefully I sprang to the door. “Mary? Is that you?”

  “Aye. I followed Madame Bisset to find you, and I couldn’t believe . . . Why are you here?”

  “Take your pick of reasons. Either I’m testing the effect of cold, clammy dungeons on princesses’ complexions, or I told the prince I didn’t want to marry him.”

  Mary gasped, unaffected by my attempt at humor.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “Didn’t you know—I mean, why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that? I could have—I mean—”

  “Go ahead and say it,” I said glumly. “You could have told me it’d land me here.”

  So I’d been a fool too for not confiding in anyone. Mary and Jed both would have told me the right way to break up with a prince: run like crazy. Well, there was still time for that.

  “Mary, can you find Jed and get him to help me? Maybe you two can figure out some way to smuggle me out of here. Or maybe he can talk to the prince and everyone and convince them to set me free. He’ll know. He’ll know the best thing to do.”

  There was a long silence on the other side of the door. Then Mary spoke hesitantly.

  “Princess, Master Reston is . . . is gone.” For a minute, I feared that Jed had been punished somehow because of what I’d done. Surely no one realized that I was closer to him than any of my other instructors. Did they?

  Mary went on.

  “He left for the Sualan front today. I listened at a couple of doors—something about helping some folks who used to live where the battlefields are now. He had to leave in a big hurry.”

  So they’d given him his dearest wish. Somehow I had to think it was connected to me. Did they realize that he, at least, wouldn’t advise the prince to keep me locked in a dungeon? I felt a little hurt that he hadn’t tried to see me, to say good-bye. He’d gotten what he wanted, thanks to me. I guess that was all he cared about.

  “But I can try to help you,” Mary said in a quavery voice.

  Her words echoed a little off the stone walls. In the dark, unable to see her face, I somehow understood the depths of her loyalty as I hadn’t before. She was taking enormous risks, just coming to see me. I didn’t feel worthy of her devotion. I tried to think of a gentle way to tell her there was nothing she could do for me.

  “Mary, I appreciate your offer. Believe me,” I said. “But—”

  “But your fairy godmother’s coming to get you?” she asked eagerly.

  I bit my lip to hold back a sarcastic retort. Wouldn’t the old lady have shown up before now if she existed?

  “Mary, I don’t have a fairy godmother,” I said. “All those stories you heard were just made up.”

  “Then how did you get to be a princess?” Mary asked, puzzled.

  “It was all my own foolishness,” I said. “My own fault.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, Mary apparently trying to understand my magicless life, me feeling torn between wanting to send her away—for her own good—and wanting to stall her some more so that at least I wouldn’t be left alone again. I kicked idly at a pebble on the ground. It skittered across the floor and landed with a plop, far down in the hole I’d been using in lieu of a chamber pot. I gasped, suddenly struck by an idea.

  “Mary,” I said urgently. “How close is the dungeon to the castle walls?”

  I heard the rustle of her shrugging. “Couple of feet, give or take,” she said. “Are you thinking of climbing out? You couldn’t fit through the bars—”

  “No, no,” I said impatiently. “I want to dig. Can you get me a shovel? From the stable, maybe?”

  “From the stable?” Even in a whisper, her voice carried a full load of puzzlement. “I guess.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then do it. Please.”

  “Someone will see where you’ve dug,” she protested. “You can’t dig the whole way in one night, and then come day—”

  “They won’t see,” I said. “I’m going to dig my way out through the crap hole.”

  21

  Mary wasted a lot of time protesting that, as a princess, I couldn’t go near a spot where anyone else had performed bodily eliminations. I tried to explain how many chamber pots I’d carried out and cleaned for Corimunde and Griselda and Lucille, but Mary was still too stunned by my lack of a fairy godmother to absorb what I was saying.

  All the same, she was an obedient soul, and by the time the palace clock rang midnight—the fateful hour once again!—she had left and returned with a heavy shovel. Even with the smell of the crap hole, I still recoiled from the odor of the shovel as Mary handed it through the barred window in the door. I knew the dried mud I knocked off the handle had to be manure.

  I reminded myself this was no time for all that delicacy training to kick in.

  “It’s stolen,” Mary said hesitantly.

  I took her meaning.

  “I’ll hide it by daylight,” I promised. “I won’t get you in trouble.”

  “I wish I could do the digging for you,” she said wistfully.

  “So do I,” I joked. Mary didn’t laugh. “But it’s fitting—I got myself into this mess, so I’ve got to get myself out. Now, I’d love the company, but it’s not safe for you to stay. And don’t you need sleep?”

  “Aye,” she murmured. “I’ll come back when I can.”

  As soon as I’d sent Mary away, I took a deep breath of relatively fresh air and lowered myself into the hole. I left the shovel on the dirt floor until I was down several feet, my knees braced against the sides of the hole. The stench was overwhelming. At first I held my breath, but I started feeling light-headed even as I reached back for the shovel
. That wouldn’t do. I gave up and inhaled deeply. After a few moments—when I figured I had become one with the smell—it stopped bothering me.

  Awkwardly, I pulled the shovel down into the hole with me. The trick would be to dig far down enough on the side of the hole that the floor wouldn’t collapse on my tunnel, but not so low that I’d lose a lot of time digging up to the surface once I reached the other side of the castle walls. I picked a spot about three feet down and poked the tip of the shovel into the packed earth. The shovel’s handle was too long to fit straight across the hole, so I had to hold it at an awkward angle. Pushing with all my might, I managed to dislodge two pebbles and a sprinkling of dust. That wouldn’t do.

  I tried every other angle possible—even shimmying up the hole and bending over with the shovel below my feet. But all I accomplished was to give myself severe back cramps. I climbed out of the hole to recover and think.

  Me and my bright ideas. I heard the clock strike one, and I wondered if I might be better served by trying to get a good night’s sleep so I’d have my wits about me when I saw Madame Bisset the next day. Could I somehow make her an ally, talk her into helping me escape? In the dark I pictured her face, the prim set of her lips, the upward tilt of her nose, the coldness of her eyes. No, she’d never be on my side. I’d do better pretending to cave in, just so they’d let me out of the dungeon. And then I could escape, once they no longer watched me so carefully.

  Except they’d probably never stop watching me so carefully. I tried to imagine the rest of my life, always under guard, like a bird in a gilded cage. I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t even pretend to want to live like that. The shovel was my only hope. If only the handle weren’t so long—

  With the speed of tinder catching fire, I realized my stupidity. Okay, Ella, the handle’s too long? So break it!

  I slammed it against my knee, and it split in two with a satisfying clunk.