Even in the dim light, I could see Janelia reach to the right and hug Herk close to her side. Then she reached for Tog and me. And I let Janelia draw me near. I let Janelia hug me just as tightly as she was hugging Herk. I hugged her back.
“You saved us,” she whispered.
“You were . . . brilliant,” Tog mumbled in agreement. “Fearless.”
I basked in their praise. I hadn’t been fearless. But it hadn’t mattered.
“And you saved me,” I whispered back. “Thank you. Thank you for not running away and leaving me behind.”
“Never,” Janelia whispered back.
“Didn’t even think of it,” Tog muttered.
“I would have come back for you, if they hadn’t,” Herk added drowsily, almost as if he was talking in his sleep.
The four of us huddled together for a long while. But my triumphant feeling began to slip away. Later, long after Tog had gone off to take the first watch of the night and Janelia and Herk had slipped off into sleep, I lay staring up at the dark branches blocking the starry sky. I wondered, How will we ever get to Fridesia now? How can we rescue my sister-princesses when it was all we could do to fight off poor, stupid villagers?
And I kept reliving the same moments over and over again: seeing Tog about to be strangled, throwing the pot of boiled rags at his attackers, clinging to Tog as he held on to me.
How was it that those moments that had made me feel so terrified also made me feel . . . brave? And—safe?
What those moments really made me was stranded. We were in a woods in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t walk, the stretcher was gone, and there was no way Tog could carry me all the way to Fridesia.
What did finding courage matter now?
24
“Here.”
I woke to see Tog standing over me, handing me something I couldn’t quite make out because of the contrast with the bright sunlight behind him.
I sat up woozily. He was holding out a pair of tied-together sticks.
No. Crutches, I corrected myself, noticing how the branches angled and curved and twisted together at the top. He’d wrapped swaths of fabric along each branch top, as if trying to add padding. I recognized the fabric—it was the bottom half of his shirt. He’d apparently tried to tuck what remained back in to his breeches, but as soon as he held out the crutches the shirt came untucked and I could see the muscles beneath the shirt.
And last night he held on to my bare knees, I remembered, blushing.
“I think these are the right length to fit under your arms,” Tog said. “I tried to measure while you were still sleeping, but luckily we do still have the knife. So I could cut them down if you wanted.”
“Oh, um, thank you,” I said, blinking in a way that I was pretty sure looked stupid.
“Even if both your feet aren’t healed yet, I remembered that the left one wasn’t cut up so bad, and I thought you could support your weight on it, with a little help,” Tog explained. “I thought, with crutches, you’d be good to go. Watch out, Fridesia, here we come!”
He grinned, and for a moment I wondered if he was making fun of me.
Yeah, watch out, Fridesia. Here comes Suala’s crippled princess, I thought mockingly. I wished I’d been kinder to poor, clumsy Princess Elzbethl.
Tog kept grinning. He wasn’t making fun of me.
I found I could alternate my stupid blinking with vapid staring. And stammering, “You . . . you still think we can go to Fridesia?”
“Sure,” Tog said, shrugging. “Isn’t that the plan?”
“Desmia, is that still what you want?” Janelia asked quietly. I saw that she was sitting nearby. “It isn’t going to be easy. And we might encounter more hostile villages. Especially once we get to Fridesia.”
I gulped.
“Tog and me, we think those villagers must have been doing something they weren’t supposed to,” Herk chimed in from beside Janelia. “Like selling weapons to the Fridesians during the war. Or smuggling food past the royal tax agents.”
I remembered Cecilia telling me that she had thought many times during her secret trip to the capital with Harper, Oh, how can people treat me this way? When they find out who I really am, they’re going to be sorry!
I understood that feeling completely. But I also thought, How could we have allowed there to be a village in our kingdom that treats beggars—or anyone!—so badly? And if they really are smuggling weapons or food or breaking the law some other way . . . I want to have royal agents investigate and stop them! It isn’t right! It isn’t fair!
But how could I do that if I just limped back to my own capital city without my rescued sister-princesses beside me? Without them, how could I stand up to the cruel villagers or the plotters who’d set the fire at the palace—or anyone?
How could I accomplish anything without going to Fridesia?
“I want to keep going,” I said. “I just didn’t think that the three of you . . .”
“We sure don’t want to stay around here!” Herk said. His voice came out in a chirp, making him sound as carefree as a bird. I wondered if he was really that calm, or if he was play-acting again for my benefit.
“I’m not sure we would want to go back to the capital right now, anyhow,” Janelia added. “Not if Terrence has been spreading rumors about us to your enemies.”
I glanced quickly at Tog, and he nodded.
“I’ve trapped you here,” I said, my voice anguished. I’d been the princess of Suala practically my entire life, but somehow I’d never felt so responsible before for any of my royal subjects’ lives.
“No—we chose to go to Fridesia with you,” Tog corrected. “We all made our own decisions.”
I thought about how simple everything had seemed to me back at the beginning of the trip. I’d told Janelia, Tog, and Herk I wanted them to carry me to Fridesia as if I had the right to order them around, to get them to do anything I wanted. Royalty did have that right with commoners.
But that wasn’t why they’d come. That wasn’t why they were still by my side right now.
I used the crutches Tog had made for me to prop myself up—first onto my knees, then into a standing position. My left foot, the less injured one, sent back a stab of pain at temporarily bearing all my weight. My head was woozy, probably from not eating the night before. And the patch of open sky I could see through a clearing in the trees worried me.
What if I lose control of myself and simply start screaming again? I wondered. What if I can’t walk even with Tog’s crutches?
Annoyed with myself, I inched the crutches forward, leaned against them, and swung my right foot up and over a log that lay in my path.
There, I told myself. I took one step.
“Let’s go,” I told the others. “I know I’ll slow us down—we might as well get started.”
Herk clapped. Tog’s grin grew even wider. Janelia put out her hands to steady me on the crutches.
“Actually,” Janelia said, “you can have breakfast first. Herk found some berries over in that clearing. The rest of us already ate.”
If I sat back down, would I have the gumption to get back up again?
“No,” I decided. “I can eat while I walk. Er—hobble. Let’s go.”
And I took another leap forward.
That first day on the crutches was rough. Even with the remnants of Tog’s shirt as padding, the skin under my arms was chafed raw by mid morning. Tog and Janelia took turns letting me lean on them for a while instead—Herk offered as well, but he was a foot shorter than me, and leaning down to hold on to his shoulder threw me off balance. By noon, when we all stopped to take a break and share the last of the berries, every muscle in my body ached.
“Seeing the sky doesn’t bother you anymore?” Tog asked, handing me what I guessed might be more than my portion of berries.
“I’ve been so busy trying not to trip, I haven’t even noticed the sky!” I admitted. “I only look at the ground.”
“Well, that??
?s good, then,” Tog said, as if he was trying too hard to keep my spirits up.
My eyes met his, and both of us quickly looked away. I began to regret the fact that Herk and Janelia had gone to look for more food and left Tog alone with me as a guard against danger. What was I supposed to say to him? How was I supposed to act? To cover my embarrassment, I let myself fall back flat on the grass behind me. This time I did look straight at the sky. Ominous dark clouds hovered to the west. I had to struggle to keep my breathing normal and even.
“Now, see, that’s a kind sky,” Tog said gently beside me. “See those clouds? That means we’re going to get a refreshing rain this afternoon. That’s going to cool us off after all this heat.”
How could two people look at the same sky and see such different things?
But Tog’s words made it possible for me to keep staring at the sky without screaming.
A moment later, Herk and Janelia came back, Herk holding three dead animals by their tails. Were they more weasels? Squirrels? Rats? I really didn’t know. I fought against gagging. But Herk was chanting, “We’ve got fo-oo-od! We’ve got fo-oo-od!”
And Janelia held up four gourds and proclaimed, “We’ve got something to carry more water again, as soon as we can dry them! And we found a river and I cut down more reeds—we will be more careful about selling our baskets the next time. . . .”
“It’s our lucky day!” Tog cried.
His eyes lingered on my face as he said this.
This time I didn’t look away. I smiled back instead.
25
We’d been on the road for two weeks when we reached the Fridesian border. I could walk on both feet now, but I’d discarded only one of the crutches. Tog had cut down the other one to make it into a cane for me to use in the afternoons when the last stubborn wound on my right foot began to ache. When I wasn’t using the cane, Herk used it as a prop for an entire skit he’d made up, pretending to be an old man. He’d kept the rest of us laughing at his nonsense.
Or is that really how old men act? I wondered. Old men who aren’t Lord Throckmorton or the other bitter, cruel palace advisers?
There was so much I hadn’t known, living in the palace. I saw fields of grain and amused the others by asking, “What kind of trees are those?” I learned how to use the knife, first to cut the reeds for making baskets, and then—wincing—to skin the random animals that Herk kept bringing back for meals. I hadn’t looked in a mirror since my last night in the palace, but I knew from glancing down at my arms and hands that the skin of my face had probably turned as brown and tough-looking as Tog’s, Herk’s, and Janelia’s.
I hadn’t even known that would happen, being out in the sun all day.
For the last several miles before the Fridesian border, we traveled through a strange landscape where trees were broken off and dying, and the grasses were just green sprouts barely poking up through acres of scorched earth.
“Was there a fire?” I asked hesitantly as dead leaves crumbled like ash beneath my feet.
“It’s the battlefield,” Tog said.
“This?” I asked. “This is what war looks like?”
“No,” Tog said curtly. “This is what the land looks like after a battle. The people . . . well, even if they don’t have scars you can see, they’re carrying this inside.”
I thought of the military officials I’d met at the castle, droning on about strategy and advantages and territory gained and lost. I’d only met generals and other commanders, I realized. The ones who sat in tents far from the battlefield and gave orders for other men to die.
“I wanted to end the war,” I told Tog. “I stood up to Lord Throckmorton about that. Even before Cecilia and the other princesses came to power. That was how everything started to change.”
“I know,” Tog said. And then he surprised me by falling to one knee before me, and kissing my hand. “In the name of my dead father, I thank you.”
I blushed. I had had dozens of courtiers kiss my hand before, but somehow this was different. Somehow, even after he let go of my hand, I could still feel the touch of his fingers, the mark of his lips. I was glad that Janelia spoke next, so I didn’t have to react.
“In the name of our dead father, I thank you too,” Janelia said.
“And I don’t know how my father died or who he was—I don’t know anything about my mother, either—but I thank you too,” Herk said, putting on a comical expression. “Just in case.”
I appreciated him clowning around, because then I didn’t have to admit that I hadn’t known what I was doing, stopping the war. I mostly wanted to stop it just because Lord Throckmorton wanted it to go on and on.
“The war won’t start again, will it?” Herk asked, balancing on a burned log. “Even if no one from Suala shows up to sign the treaty?”
“Don’t worry—Cecilia will be there,” I said.
“And you,” Tog added. “We’re going to get you there in time.”
I walked a little faster.
There was no actual borderline for us to cross. We weren’t on any road, so of course there were no border guards. But we knew we were in Fridesia when we came across a crude sign that pointed only to Fridesian cities.
“We’re in enemy territory,” I whispered, staring at the sign. “I never thought I’d step foot in enemy territory.”
“It’s not enemy territory anymore,” Tog said.
“But, maybe, just in case, we shouldn’t tell anyone who we are,” Janelia said, glancing around. The territory around us was just as eerily empty and dead as the land we’d left behind in Suala. “And maybe try to talk with more of a Fridesian accent?”
“Loik dees?” Herk attempted. He sounded ridiculous.
“Ella always said we Sualans sounded like we were holding marbles under our tongues,” I said. “So maybe we should just try to talk with our tongues flat on the bottom of our mouths as much as possible. Like this?”
“Oh, that was good!” Janelia said. “You sounded totally different. We’re just lucky Fridesians and Sualans speak the same language. I heard they used to be part of the same country a long time ago, and that’s why we can understand each other.”
“I never knew that,” I said.
I thought about the Sualan history I’d learned at the palace—I’d had to memorize the names of every king and queen for sixteen generations. But of course, while Suala was at war with Fridesia, it probably would have been treason for my governess to claim even a long-past connection between Suala and Fridesia.
The empty landscape around me was starting to give me the panicky empty-sky feeling again. I quickly fastened my gaze on Janelia and Tog, walking in front of me.
“Look—everything’s green ahead of us,” Tog said, as if he knew I needed help. “And isn’t that the strangest tree you’ve ever seen?”
He pointed to an apple tree that grew at a diagonal slant from the ground.
“Do you suppose the ground tilted after the tree started growing?” Herk asked. “Or was it struck by lightning? Or are all the trees in Fridesia like this?”
I stopped in my tracks.
“Those are . . . those are apples on that tree, right?” I asked.
“Uh . . . yeah,” Tog said, as if he wanted to make fun of me but thought I sounded a little too serious to be mocked.
“And is that a path beside it?” I continued.
“Maybe it used to be,” Janelia concluded, gazing at a trail beyond the tree. It was overgrown with new grasses.
“Then I know this tree!” I exclaimed. I could feel a smile breaking over my face, stretching my sunburned skin. “This is the marker for the camp Ella and Jed built for the refugees from the war.” I grabbed the others’ hands and pulled them toward the overgrown trail. “Come on! If we’re lucky, they might even be there right now!”
26
A moment ago, my legs had ached and my feet had throbbed and I would have said I wasn’t capable of walking any faster than a slog. But now I ran down the overgrow
n trail, pulling the others along with me.
“What—?” Herk began.
“Could you—?” Janelia added.
“Explain?” Tog finished.
I laughed and told them everything even as I ran.
“I didn’t even think of this as a possibility before!” I cried. “See, this is what Jed cared about most when Ella met him—taking care of war refugees. And she told him, well, the best way to take care of them would be to end the war. And then they won’t be refugees. And—”
I paused long enough to leap over a gully in the path. I landed on my sore foot and didn’t even waver.
“And I know Jed and Ella were going to stop at the refugee camp on their way back from Suala, before they went to the Fridesian capital for their wedding and the treaty ceremony,” I went on. “I didn’t know how long they were going to stay before moving on, but maybe, maybe . . .”
Maybe all of this can be over today! I thought. If Ella and Jed are here, I can tell them everything that happened, and they’ll know what to do. They’ll find out what really happened to my sister-princesses, and they’ll take care of rescuing them for me. Ella and Jed will take care of everything!
I rounded a corner and caught my first glimpse of a long, low building ahead. No—there was a row of buildings, neatly tended and surrounded by tidy gardens. A little farther on, I could see a gate and, behind the gate, a small building with a carefully lettered sign that said, OFFICE.
I ran faster, closing the distance. With the others right behind me, I burst through the office door.
“Ella? Jed?” I called eagerly.
A plump, middle-aged woman turned around and dropped a stack of towels.
“Oh, no,” she moaned. “It’s started again, hasn’t it? Oh, you poor, poor dears.” She picked up four towels and held them out to me and the others. “Well, don’t you worry. You’re safe now. We’ll get you fixed right up. You can wash up, first thing.”
She reached out and brushed a smudge of dirt from Herk’s cheek.