Palace of Lies

  And I’d managed not to scream.

  I also noticed, in that glimpse, that Herk and Tog were working incredibly hard to erase every trace of the fire, every sign that four people had camped there.

  Of course, I thought. They don’t want anyone following us. They don’t want anyone knowing which way we went . . . or that I’m going to Fridesia at all.

  It was so boring lying flat on the stretcher for hours on end, unable to see a thing. When the others took their first break, I asked hesitantly, “Do you suppose I could weave my basket sitting under the sheet, while we travel?”

  “Of course,” Janelia replied, her voice seeming to come from so far away, just from the other side of the sheet. “Why would that be a problem?”

  “I don’t want to make the stretcher any harder to carry,” I replied.

  “Having you sit up and work won’t matter for that,” Tog said, almost brusquely. I could hear the weariness in his voice.

  At least if I weave baskets, I’m doing something, I thought.

  I was able to finish not one, but two baskets by the end of that day of walking.

  “But—they’re exquisite, Desmia,” Janelia said, examining them that evening.

  This night we were all camped out in a cave together. They’d given me a section off to the side, which Herk kept calling the palace room.

  “So we’ve got three baskets to sell?” Tog said, coming into the cave with a pile of firewood on his shoulder. “It looks like there’s a village just a mile or so to the east, and it’s still light out—do you want Herk and me to go into the village and see if we can trade the baskets for food?”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Janelia said. “You should go right now—I’ll start the fire.”

  After the boys left, I shyly watched Janelia stacking the firewood beneath a hole in the ceiling that I guessed was the cave version of a chimney. Janelia tucked twigs and dried leaves between the larger branches, then began rubbing what looked like stones together.

  “What does that—” I began. A spark leaped from the stones to the wispiest, driest leaves. “Ooh. How did you know how to do that?”

  “Start a fire, you mean?” Janelia asked. “Didn’t you ever notice who lit the fireplaces at the palace?”

  I hadn’t ever paid attention. But I could guess where Janelia was going with this.

  “The maidservants?” I asked. “So you learned how to start fires when you were attending the queen?”

  Janelia laughed.

  “No, I learned how when I was a small child helping my mam,” Janelia said. “But I got a lot of practice serving the queen. Of course, the idea was to never let the fire go out so you didn’t have to go to all this effort, but . . .”

  But it’s not like we can carry fire along with us, traveling, I thought.

  Janelia put a pot of water on the fire to boil. Then she went over to the mouth of the cave and peered off into the distance.

  “I hope the boys are all right, going to that village so late in the day,” she murmured, clutching at her apron.

  “There’s nothing else left to eat, is there?” I asked. I’d noticed when we stopped for lunch that we were down to only crumbs.

  Janelia bit her lip, as if trying to decide whether to tell the truth. A moment passed before she finally said, bluntly, “No.”

  Some of the panic I’d felt the day before threatened to come back, but I tamped it down.

  “Oh, I’m sure when we get back into a wooded area, Herk can hunt more,” Janelia said. “But we were walking through such scruffy areas today—there were barely any plants, let alone animals.”

  Janelia was kneading pleats into her apron. For all that I’d never thought much about money in the palace, I could see what a constant worry it was for Janelia.

  “How did you have money for food in the first place?” I asked.

  “Oh, you heard us talking about this—we sold all but one of our spoons, and we sold that fancy nightgown you were wearing. . . . Terrence was the one who handled that, and I worry now that he made contacts with bad men doing that, because what honest tradesman would buy a royal-looking nightgown from a beggar boy?” Janelia fretted. “Without suspecting it was stolen? We’re lucky no one called the magistrate on him, but . . .”

  “Maybe our luck would have been if someone had called the magistrate on him,” I said sharply. “Then we wouldn’t have had to worry about him carrying news to my enemies, and we would have brought a more reliable third boy with us.”

  Janelia seemed almost ready to bite clear through her lip.

  “I do still worry about Terrence,” she murmured. “He’s not a bad boy, just . . . easily misled.”

  I remembered Tog and Janelia arguing about Terrence from the very start. Janelia probably wasn’t the right person to talk with about Terrence.

  I shook my head.

  “I know all that about how you got money for this trip,” I said. “I actually meant, years ago, after you left the palace, how did you have money to take in and raise all those boys?”

  Something changed in Janelia’s face—was she shocked that I asked that?

  Too late, I realized that just as asking about someone’s wealth was rude in the palace, asking about someone’s poverty was probably an improper question outside.

  The problem was, I was truly curious. It was much easier to avoid rudeness when you weren’t curious.

  “I should have told you the rest of the story already,” Janelia said. “It’s just . . . it’s sad. You have enough sad things to deal with right now.”

  “My sister-princesses aren’t dead!” I said. “I’m going to find them!”

  Janelia gave me a look that I couldn’t quite read.

  “We’ll help you as much as we can, doing that,” Janelia said. She came away from the mouth of the cave and checked the pot of water on the fire. I could see steam starting to rise.

  “You’re showing a lot of faith that Herk and Tog are going to come back with food soon, if you’re already boiling water to cook it,” I said.

  “This water is for boiling rags, to clean your wounds again,” Janelia said. She pulled the pot off the fire. “But we need to let this cool a little now.”

  She seemed a bit at a loss about what to do next.

  “Tell me the story while we wait, then,” I suggested.

  Janelia winced, then nodded and sat down beside me.

  “I got fired from my job at the palace when you were four,” she said.

  Ten years ago, I thought. I couldn’t think of any memory I could definitely identify as being from that long ago. I hoped Janelia would move quickly to talking about events that had nothing to do with me.

  “It was . . . It was awful,” Janelia said, staring down at the cave floor. “A footman accused me of stealing a silver vase. A lady-in-waiting said I’d been rude to her. And that was just the beginning of the accusations. They kept coming, one after the other. None of it was true, and nobody had ever accused me of anything before that, but . . . it was like suddenly I was the worst person in the palace!”

  I stirred uncomfortably. This sounded like regular palace life to me. Someone fell out of favor, and instantly everyone piled on, listing all the misdeeds that person might be guilty of. But I had always stayed above the fray. I’d never had to wonder what it would be like to be the target of such false allegations.

  At least, not until rumors started flying that I had supposedly killed my sister-princesses.

  Nobody could believe that! I thought. Surely . . .

  I made myself concentrate on Janelia’s story.

  “Someone just wanted to get rid of you,” I said. “They didn’t come up with any solid proof, did they? They were probably hoping the accusations would scare you, and you’d leave the palace on your own. And then they wouldn’t have to bother disposing of you.”

  “I wouldn’t have ever left, if I’d had a choice,” Janelia said, and her voice still carried the despair of a decade earlier. “Not when it
meant leaving you behind.”

  “But you did leave me,” I said, and even though I didn’t mean them to, the words came out sounding accusatory.

  “I stayed as long as I could!” Janelia said. “I tried to fight the accusations—I told anyone who would listen that I was innocent, that I’d never done anything wrong. But then I was summoned before Lord Throckmorton.”

  I could picture this: Janelia, ten years younger and wearing a maid’s simple dress, cowering in the entryway to Lord Throckmorton’s imposing suite; Lord Throckmorton’s corpulent frame towering over her, his eyes narrowed in disapproval; the cold eyes of the kings and queens and lords and ladies in the portraits behind him seeming to glare down on Janelia as if they, too, disapproved of everything about her.

  I could picture all this because of the times I’d been summoned by Lord Throckmorton. I always felt scorned and guilty, thoroughly guilty, even as I racked my brain to think of a single thing I might have done wrong.

  “I still don’t understand how it all happened,” Janelia said. “How could I, a mere maid, have done anything worth the attention of Lord Throckmorton? Even if any of the accusations were true, why would Lord Throckmorton get involved? I’ve been trying to figure that out for ten years!”

  I gasped and put my hand over my mouth.

  “What?” Janelia said. “Do you understand? Did he tell you anything about me?”

  I slid my hand back from my mouth.

  “I didn’t know anything about this at the time. I don’t even remember you being at the palace,” I said. “But if this happened when I was four . . . I think that was when Lord Throckmorton found out I wasn’t the true princess. That I was just an impostor. And—he wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to know.”

  I remembered everything my sister-princesses and I had pieced together about our own stories. Every other princess had had a royal item with a secret letter from the queen tucked inside. In Cecilia’s case, the royal object had been a harp; some of the other girls had had a pendant or a silver chalice or a bowl. By the time I met my sister-princesses, I had no special item—why should I, when I had a palace full of royal things? But I could remember a crystal globe that broke when I was little. Though of course Lord Throckmorton never confessed, I was certain that he’d found my letter from the queen, and discovered the secret about me that I hadn’t even known myself.

  But if I could remember the crystal globe, why couldn’t I remember Janelia?

  Janelia gaped at me.

  “If that was Lord Throckmorton’s reason, why didn’t he just have me killed?” Janelia asked. “Why didn’t he silence me once and for all?”

  I felt the danger in that question. I knew how Lord Throckmorton’s mind worked; he’d probably considered that possibility.

  “Did he ask any odd questions when he summoned you before him?” I asked. “Anything that seemed unrelated to the false accusations?”

  “Everything seemed odd and terrifying to me then!” Janelia said wryly. “But . . . he did dwell on exactly when I’d been the queen’s serving girl, and whether I was with her until her very last day.”

  “Because in the queen’s letters to her fake-princess daughters, she didn’t give the name of the servant who’d gotten the babies from the orphanage,” I said. “The queen probably did that to protect you, in case any of the letters fell into the wrong hands. Which they did.”

  I brooded on this a moment longer.

  “Lord Throckmorton must not have been certain you were the right girl,” I said. “He had to interrogate you to find out.”

  “But he never came right out and asked, Did you get babies from the orphanage for the queen? Did you substitute your own baby sister for the queen’s dead daughter?” Janelia objected.

  “Oh, Lord Throckmorton almost never asked a direct question,” I said. “He preferred playing cat and mouse. So you’d never know, answering him, if you were accidentally boxing yourself in or backing into one of his traps.”

  “That’s exactly how I felt!” Janelia said. “He had me so confused I felt like saying anything would be like confessing to a crime.”

  I had always assumed that everyone always felt like that at the palace, at least in the years before Lord Throckmorton was vanquished. But maybe Janelia, as a lowly serving girl, had been oblivious for most of her time in the palace. Maybe she’d been too focused on building fires and emptying chamber pots to see the palace intrigue around her.

  “You didn’t say anything about me, did you?” I asked. “You didn’t tell him I was really your sister, or—”

  “No, no—of course not!” Janelia said. “I wouldn’t endanger you like that!”

  “So you didn’t even speak my name to Lord Throckmorton,” I asked, and I winced at how much I sounded like Lord Throckmorton, drawing someone into one of his traps.

  Janelia’s eyes darted to the side.

  “Well . . . ,” she began. “I didn’t give away your identity, but . . . I begged to be allowed to stay in the palace, to take care of you.”

  “So he knew I was important to you,” I said, tapping my chin thoughtfully.

  “Was I supposed to lie?” Janelia asked, flashing me an uncertain smile.

  Yes, no, maybe, I thought.

  “Any action you chose had risks,” I said. “Lord Throckmorton was very good at telling when people lied.”

  “So what could I have done?” Janelia pleaded. Somehow the tables had turned, and it felt like Janelia was the younger girl and I was the older, wiser sister she was begging for advice.

  I shrugged.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Lord Throckmorton would have found you out, no matter what. If it served his purposes to banish you, he would have banished you from the palace no matter how much you lied or pleaded or pretended to have something to barter with.”

  But he left Janelia alive, I thought. Why did he do that?

  Either Janelia was lying now, or she’d left out some key portion of the story. Or I was missing something. Lord Throckmorton never left loose ends that might threaten his power.

  Unless . . .

  “Did Lord Throckmorton pay you?” I asked abruptly. “Did he give you money to keep my true identity secret?”

  “What? No!” Janelia said. “He didn’t know I knew your true identity! Er—not that he let me know about.”

  Janelia looked confused. Lord Throckmorton usually did have that effect on people.

  I slumped back against the rock wall of the cave.

  “But the money you used for raising Tog and Herk and the other boys . . . ,” I prompted.

  “I was getting to that,” Janelia said. “After Lord Throckmorton talked to me, he kicked me out of the palace once and for all. He said if I so much as showed my face at the palace door, I’d be executed. He said I was lucky he didn’t execute me on the spot for stealing that silver vase. And I pleaded with him—I said you’d gotten used to me. I said it would be devastating to you to lose your most familiar caregiver, when you’d already lost your parents.”

  “He wouldn’t care about that,” I interrupted. But I had to harden my heart to get the words out.

  I thought about the bitter old woman I remembered as my earliest nanny: Grechettine. She’d been the first to tell me that people wanted to kill me and steal my throne. She’d give me nightmares and beat me when I woke up screaming in the night.

  But had she really been part of my life from the very beginning? Was it possible she’d replaced Janelia when I was four?

  Was I maybe screaming for Janelia when I had those nightmares, and that was why Nanny Grechettine beat me so violently?

  I couldn’t remember. But my words made Janelia wince.

  “It’s true—Lord Throckmorton didn’t waver, no matter how much I pleaded,” she said. She had her back firmly against the rock wall too. “He didn’t even let me tell you good-bye. I was glad then that I’d at least told you about us being sisters as a kind of fairy tale, something to keep secret between the two of us.
I thought you’d figure it out as you got older, and come looking for me.”

  “But I didn’t even remember you, let alone—” I began.

  Janelia patted my arm.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I failed too, trying to send messages to you, or finding a way to visit you in secret. All I could do was have Tog and Herk and Terrence and the other boys watch over the palace for me, and keep their ears to the ground to hear any news or gossip about you. . . .”

  It was strange how comforting I found that, to think that for the past decade people I hadn’t even known were watching over me.

  I remembered that one of those people was Terrence, who had betrayed and abandoned me only yesterday.

  “Were you paying the boys to spy?” I asked hesitantly. “Paying them with—”

  Janelia held up her hand, as if to warn me about the rest of the story.

  “When Lord Throckmorton threw me out, I was hysterical,” Janelia said. “I was standing there in the courtyard, sobbing like crazy, hitting my fists against the door, and a man I’d never seen before pulled me aside.”

  “I knew it! One of Lord Throckmorton’s agents,” I muttered.

  Janelia’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “It couldn’t have been. He saved my life. He kept me from going so crazy that Lord Throckmorton just had the guards kill me.”

  “Oh, I’m sure this man said he was someone else—” I accused.

  “Desmia, listen,” Janelia insisted. “It wasn’t someone connected with Lord Throckmorton. It was the queen’s former physician.”

  I turned my head and stared at Janelia.

  “You mean—”

  “Right,” Janelia said. “The only person besides me who knew from the beginning that you weren’t the true princess.”

  22

  I rubbed my hand wearily across my forehead. Wasn’t it enough that I had to wonder if my sister-princesses were alive or dead? Wasn’t it enough that I was in the dark about who had set the palace on fire? Wasn’t it enough that I had to flee to Fridesia, the land of my former enemies, and that I was wounded and had only paupers to rely on?