Palace of Lies

  “Shh,” Janelia and Tog said together.

  “Watch,” I said. I took an apple from the bag of food Mrs. Smeal had given us back at the refugee camp. “See that rock in the wall up there, the one that’s a little different color than all the others?”

  “Yeah,” Herk said.

  “Let’s see what happens if I hit it,” I said.

  I reared back my arm. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thrown anything, even a ball—why would I, a princess, have ever thrown a ball? But I remembered this motion. And either my muscles remembered it too, or I simply got lucky: the apple hit the stone exactly, with such a soft thud that I didn’t worry about anyone hearing it.

  I didn’t worry much, anyway.

  For a moment nothing happened, and I wondered if I’d imagined everything—not just about the Fridesian palace, but in my memories of the Palace of Mirrors back in Suala as well.

  And then, just above my head, a door in the wall swung open.

  “How did you know that was there?” Tog asked incredulously.

  “I started thinking maybe the same person who designed the Palace of Mirrors had designed this palace, too,” I said. “And designed it the same way. With secret entrances and exits and passageways.”

  Tog was still shaking his head in disbelief.

  “But—”

  “Hush,” Janelia hissed at us. “Let’s move fast—that door is like a beacon, as long as we leave it open. Herk, go look past those trees and make sure no guards start patrolling in this direction. Tog, you go up first and make sure it’s safe.”

  She put out her hands, cupped like a stirrup, and Tog stepped into them. The doorway was high enough up that he still had to prop himself on his arms and shimmy in across the threshold. He disappeared into the darkness. A moment later, he looked back out.

  “I don’t know if it’s safe or not,” he complained. “I can’t see anything in here.”

  “Put me up next,” I asked.

  “Desmia—” Janelia began.

  “I know what the secret passageways are like back in Suala,” I said. “Or—what they were like. I won’t need a light.”

  Janelia still looked doubtful, but she cupped her hands again. They were trembling.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said, hitching up my skirt and putting my foot against Janelia’s hands.

  Janelia lifted me, and Tog reached down and pulled up on my arms. Something flashed in my memory.

  I was so little then that Janelia could boost me up to stand on her shoulders so I could see inside the secret door we found. And then I crawled inside. . . .

  As soon as I was safely inside the doorway, I whirled back around and hissed at Janelia.

  “Janelia! I remember!” I whispered. “The two of us found the secret passageways back at the Palace of Mirrors together. When we were playing ball and the ball hit the stone just by accident. . . .”

  Even in the dim light, I could see Janelia beaming at me.

  “Yes, that’s right!” Janelia whispered back. “I thought, of all the things we did together when we were little, that might be something you remembered on your own.”

  An owl hooted over by the tree where Herk was watching. Tog pulled me back from the door.

  “That’s Herk’s signal!” he hissed. “Janelia, shut the door and hide!”

  “Try to meet us back here at midnight,” Janelia said. “Stay safe!”

  And then the door shut and I heard the faintest sound of footsteps, walking away.

  Tog and I were in total darkness. I fought the impulse to reach for his hand. Somehow it would mean something different if I reached for his hand than if he reached for mine. It would be . . . cruel.

  “Put your hand on my shoulder,” I said, speaking as quietly as I could, directly into his ear. “I’ll lead the way. But we need to be quiet. If this secret passageway is like the ones back at the Palace of Mirrors—well, the way they used to be—then we might be just a few feet away from someone on the other side of a wall.”

  “Right,” Tog whispered back. Somehow in the darkness I thought I could hear something extra in his voice.

  Fear, I thought. He’s afraid too.

  His hand landed on my shoulder. I didn’t know how much it helped him, but it gave me the courage to start moving away from the door. I ran my fingers along the wall to guide myself.

  “When we get to any occupied rooms—the ones that are brightly lit, anyway—we’ll probably see glimmers of light where there are peepholes,” I said, trying to sound brisk and unafraid. “That will help.”

  Tog was so close behind me that I could feel the movement when he nodded his head.

  We took several steps forward before Tog whispered in my ear, “If Janelia knew about a secret doorway into your palace, why didn’t she use it to get back to see you after Lord Throckmorton sent her away?”

  “Because . . . ,” I began, thinking hard.

  Had Janelia maybe not cared as much as she pretended? Was this proof that part of her story wasn’t true, after all?

  Then I realized the actual reason.

  “Back at the Palace of Mirrors, there were always guards along the wall,” I said, still walking forward in the darkness. Somehow the darkness made it easier to remember. “It was the only place I was allowed to go outside to play, and so it had to be guarded. And then Lady Throckmorton heard that the Domulians had a giant lily pond at their palace, and so Lord Throckmorton had a lily pond put in where Janelia and I used to play. . . . Honestly, I was afraid we were going to have to swim to find the door here. I thought the Fridesians might have gone in for a lily pond too.”

  Things were getting confused in my mind—or maybe they were straightening out. Maybe the story about Lady Throckmorton and the Domulian lily pond had been another lie, and Lord Throckmorton had really just wanted to end my playing outside. It probably wasn’t just to keep me away from Janelia. Once he learned I had no royal blood, he wanted to hide me so no one outside the palace would recognize a substitute princess if he got rid of me.

  I had a memory of standing in the secret doorway, peeking out through a crack at workers digging deep into the ground, then building high walls around a pond. It had been the autumn—I could remember because of the dying leaves on the trees the men chopped down. Janelia wasn’t with me, and neither was anyone else. So how had I gotten up to the doorway?

  By then I’d found entrances to the secret passageways from inside the castle, I thought. Was I . . . was I saying good-bye to that secret doorway and the special yard where I’d played with Janelia?

  I could picture myself as a little girl standing in the doorway whispering, Don’t think about her ever again. She left you. You shouldn’t even remember her name.

  “I think I forgot Janelia on purpose,” I whispered to Tog. “Because it hurt too much to remember.”

  “She didn’t forget you,” Tog whispered back.

  “I know,” I said. “We’ll have to make sure we get out of here alive so I can apologize.”

  Tog didn’t answer right away, and I was afraid I’d violated some rule of bravery. Maybe it was best not to even mention the possibility of death?

  But then Tog whispered in a husky voice, “Janelia would like that. She would especially like us staying alive.”

  We inched forward until my foot struck a step. I stopped, then slid my foot to the right, where the floor dropped away.

  “This is like the Palace of Mirrors!” I hissed back to Tog. “This is the exact right place for a stairway. We can go up to the main level of the palace or . . .”

  Or climb down toward the dungeon.

  I had a flash of remembering how I’d found all my sister-princesses except Cecilia in the dungeon of the Palace of Mirrors. I thought about the strange letter that Mrs. Smeal had received back at the refugee camp; I thought about the palace guards saying Jed had never returned from Suala, when Mrs. Smeal said he and Ella were in Charmeil.

  “Maybe this is foolish, but I want to
check the dungeon first,” I whispered to Tog.

  “Lead the way,” he whispered back.

  I began to climb down the stairs, with Tog right behind me.

  Was it this dark in the secret passageways back at the Palace of Mirrors when Cecilia and Harper were escaping? I wondered. They knew the secret passageways—they could have escaped anyhow. Right?

  Before the fire, Cecilia and Harper had been in the secret passageways only during the dangerous time when Lord Throckmorton was still in power; only when Cecilia, Harper, Ella, and I were trying to figure out what was going on and why there were extra princesses down in the dungeon and knights trapped in the torture chamber. Once the secrets came out, Cecilia and Harper were more interested in exploring the open areas of the palace and working with everyone together. Not skulking around still hiding.

  I was the only one who couldn’t make the transition to doing everything out in the open.

  I clutched the railing of this stairway and kept going.

  The floor leveled out, and I ran my hand along the wall.

  “There should be a door right over here,” I whispered back to Tog.

  Just as my fingers brushed against an iron door handle, I heard a gravelly voice growl on the other side of the wall: “No, of course the prince doesn’t know you’re down here. More’s the pity for you!”

  33

  Tog tightened his grip on my shoulder, so I knew he’d heard too. Each of us pressed an ear against the stone wall, listening for some answer to the gravelly voice, some indication of who might be in the dungeon that the prince didn’t know about.

  I heard barely a mumble in response, as if the speaker was too weak or too fearful to speak loudly. Or simply too far away, on the opposite side of the dungeon. It could have been Ella or Jed or Cecilia or Harper or any of my other sister-princesses . . . or, really, anyone at all, for as much as I could tell.

  “Right,” the gravelly voice spoke again. “You can demand an audience with the prince all you want. Ain’t going to happen. Now, shut your yapper, lest I beat you for annoying your jailer.”

  Silence.

  Was the imprisoned person—or people?—too terrified to speak? Or could I just not hear what he or she—or they—was saying?

  I reached for the door handle, just as Tog put a cautioning hand on my arm.

  “I’m just going to open it a crack, just to see,” I whispered, shoving against the handle.

  The door didn’t budge. It was locked. And—I ran my fingers all along the edges—both the lock and the hinges were on the other side.

  I stood still, desperately trying to remember if there’d been more than one secret passageway leading down to the dungeon back at the Palace of Mirrors.

  “Desmia, that could be just some ordinary prisoner the jailer’s talking to,” Tog whispered in my ear. “Whoever that is may have nothing to do with you or Suala. From what we saw back in Suala, when Janelia had us watching the palace and trying to get a message to you . . . there could be all sorts of people imprisoned, for all sorts of reasons a prince or princess wouldn’t know about.”

  I winced, because back in Suala, I’d been the ignorant princess for so long. And then, even after the other sister-princesses and I ousted Lord Throckmorton, we’d acted like we could just paper over the past. None of us had wanted to investigate his crimes thoroughly. We’d just put him and his coconspirators into prison and pretended the past was over.

  I had known better, even if the others were all too innocent and naïve. But I had been too paralyzed to do or say anything.

  Just as I felt paralyzed right now.

  “Desmia?” Tog whispered. “Shouldn’t we find out what’s going on elsewhere in the palace and then come back here if there’s time?”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. I still wanted to know who was in that dungeon cell. I still wanted to be sure it wasn’t Ella or Jed or any of my fellow princesses.

  But Tog had a point. Maybe the answers we wanted lay in some other part of the palace.

  We turned and began climbing back up the stairway. Not long after we passed the hallway that would have led back to Janelia and Tog, the stairway curved around and broadened.

  “Light!” Tog whispered behind me.

  I felt his arm extend past me, pointing toward the top of the stairs. It was almost like he was starting to put his arm around me.

  Then he dropped it.

  “I told you we’d eventually see some light,” I whispered back. “That means there are peepholes.”

  We kept climbing, and the light transformed from a vague, distant glow to distinct pinpoints along the wall. Because I’d studied these things back at the Palace of Mirrors, I knew there were probably little eyeholes scraped out at intervals in the mortar between the stones in the ballroom we were approaching. But from this side, in the darkness, the glimmers of light looked as miraculous as the starry sky Tog and I had seen out in the mountains.

  We climbed higher, and I could hear dance music. A violin, perhaps, the brief blare of a horn . . . That song ended and another one started.

  “Oh,” I gasped, stopping in my tracks.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Tog asked.

  “No, it’s just . . . ,” I choked back the cry I wanted to give. “This is the galliard. The last dance the musicians played that night at the ball. Before the fire.”

  I sniffed as if I expected to smell smoke.

  “I’m sorry. But the music didn’t cause the fire,” Tog said soothingly. “It’s . . . just a song.”

  I still felt my stomach churning. I still had to force myself to keep climbing toward the music and lights.

  You were brave during the fire, I told myself. You can be brave now, too. You pushed Cecilia and Harper out of the ballroom. You went back for Fidelia and wanted to rescue her, too.

  But my view of the night of the fire had shifted like a kaleidoscope. I had done my best to save Cecilia and Harper. But had I really been that brave, going back for Fidelia? Or had I just used her as an excuse—even to myself—because I was terrified of leaving the palace, terrified of stepping outside?

  You weren’t afraid to go outside to get away from Madame Bisset, I told myself.

  But wasn’t that just because her news—that all my sister-princesses were dead—was even more terrifying than the thought of escape? Had I been brave or just a coward running away?

  How could I hope to figure out what was happening at the Fridesian palace when I couldn’t even see myself true? When I’d gone years without letting myself think of Janelia, the one true thing from my childhood?

  Think about now, not the past, I told myself. Don’t get paralyzed again.

  I reached the level of the first peephole and put my eye against it. I gazed out at the most highly decorated ballroom I could possibly imagine. Every wall, every cushion, every tapestry was covered with bows and frills.

  “It looks like a dress shop exploded,” Tog whispered beside me, putting his eye up to another hole.

  “This isn’t how Ella described the Fridesian ballroom,” I whispered back. “I wonder what—”

  I broke off because suddenly a man’s face appeared just inches from my eye. It was a handsome man’s face—maybe even the most handsome face I’d ever seen. This man had perfect blue eyes and perfect blond hair and a perfect angle to his jawline.

  Prince Charming? I wondered.

  I wasn’t sure. I knew the king and queen of Fridesia had one son; because the royal couple were old and decrepit and possibly even senile, Prince Charming was viewed as the true ruler of the land. Ella had always described him as unbelievably handsome but also too vacant and dim to think or feel anything deeply. And this man looked . . . well, I wouldn’t call his expression profound, but there was a certain fervency marring the beauty of his perfect face. Maybe even despair.

  “It’s too soon,” he murmured, so close to me that for a moment I feared he’d seen me and for some reason had decided to pour out his anguish
to me.

  “Your Highness.” The voice came from beyond the prince. “I know you are still mourning Princess Corimunde, but . . .”

  Mourning? I thought. I remembered the black bunting I’d seen at the front of the palace, and for the first time it made sense. Maybe that was a Fridesian custom at times of grief. And the person who’s dead, Corimunde, that was . . . his wife?

  I remembered the crazy story Ella had told about how Prince Charming ended up marrying Ella’s despised stepsister. So now Corimunde was dead?

  And apparently Prince Charming had truly loved her?

  “I am mourning my wife and my baby son,” Prince Charming snapped. He turned, and for the first time I could see the man standing behind the prince. It was an elderly gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard and a look of keen intelligence.

  Lord Twelling, I thought, remembering how Ella had described the prince’s main adviser.

  I knew exactly the look of advisers who thought they knew more than their royalty. Lord Twelling had been a bit of a villain in Ella’s tale of her time in the Fridesian palace. Just not as bad a villain as Madame Bisset.

  “I am aware that you have faced a loss,” Lord Twelling hissed to the prince. “But you are young, and you are the prince of the land, and you are currently unmarried.”

  “Widowed,” the prince corrected. “I am widowed. There’s a difference.”

  I was at the wrong angle to see the glare Prince Charming directed at Lord Twelling. But I could tell from his voice that it was intense.

  “Anyhow,” Lord Twelling continued, as if he hadn’t noticed. “Sulking won’t bring Corimunde—or the newborn infant Charming the twenty-fifth—back from the grave. The babe barely lived a few hours. It’s not as if he were someone you knew.”

  Now Prince Charming positively glowered at his adviser. Lord Twelling ignored this, too.

  “But in the meantime,” Lord Twelling continued, “you have a fabulous opportunity. And for the sake of your kingdom, you must at least pretend that you are over your heartbreak.”

  “Even when it seems as though it will never end?” the prince asked incredulously. “I wish Jed were here. He would understand.”