Jed! I thought hopefully. But I wasn’t sure if the prince meant that Jed wasn’t in the ballroom, or wasn’t in the palace, or wasn’t in Charmeil at all.
Watch Lord Twelling’s reaction carefully, I told myself. Was it possible that Jed was the prisoner the prince didn’t know about down in the dungeon? Was Lord Twelling maybe the one keeping that secret from the prince?
But Lord Twelling didn’t have a chance to reply. Trumpet blasts sounded from behind the two men, and both Lord Twelling and Prince Charming turned away from the wall. They both stepped toward the center of the ballroom. The dancers parted before the prince.
“Do you know what that was all about?” Tog whispered.
“I’m not sure,” I whispered back. “But—”
Out in the ballroom, the trumpet blasts sounded again, eerily reminiscent of the trumpet blasts that had always welcomed me into court occasions back at the Palace of Mirrors.
Are they trying to imitate the Sualan Royal Anthem, or is it just a coincidence? I wondered.
“King Charming, Queen Gertrude, Prince Charming,” a herald announced from across the room. “Lords and ladies of the Fridesian court. Allow me to present our royal guests, the princesses of Suala!”
I thought my heart would stop. Tog clutched my arm.
“It’s true!” he hissed. “They did come to Fridesia! You’ve found them after all. Look!”
A bevy of shimmering beauties came into the room, seeming that much more stunningly gorgeous after my weeks away from the palace and royal clothing and royal servants to make me beautiful. There was the lovely russet hair that glowed from the top of Princess Ganelia’s head, the statuesque height that made Princess Porfinia the envy of all the others, the same kind of creamy white skin that I had seen against an aquamarine gown when Princess Fidelia had fallen on the dance floor.
“You want to find a door so you can go be reunited with them right now?” Tog whispered. “So they know you survived the fire too? So they’ll stop worrying about you?”
I stood frozen.
“Desmia?” Tog asked.
“It’s all wrong,” I moaned. “Wrong!”
“What are you talking about?” Tog asked. “This is what we came for. Your sisters!”
I turned to him, my eyes burning.
“Those aren’t my sister-princesses,” I hissed. “They’re impostors, every single one!”
34
“Are you sure?” Tog asked, squinting harder into the peephole.
“You think I don’t remember what they look like?” I asked.
Out in the ballroom, the herald began to introduce each one individually.
“Princess Adoriana . . . Princess Cecilia . . .”
“That’s not her?” Tog whispered. “The one you saved . . .”
The girl who stepped forward did look like Cecilia, with similar long dark hair and the same kind of silky lilac dress that Cecilia herself might have chosen. But this girl lacked the flash of the real Cecilia’s eyes; she moved too smoothly, without Cecilia’s usual awkward enthusiasm.
This Cecilia didn’t look like the type of girl who would ever jostle my shoulder with hers.
“No,” I whispered back.
“Are you sure?” Tog asked. “They’re kind of far away, over on the other side of the ballroom. Maybe you just can’t see—”
“Princess Desmia,” the herald announced, and another girl stepped forward.
“Oh,” Tog whispered, as if the situation had finally sunk in. “They even have a fake version of you.”
The fake Desmia curtsied, first for the king and queen on their thrones, and then for Prince Charming, standing alone on the dance floor.
“At least they chose the prettiest girl to pretend to be you,” Tog whispered, as if that would be any consolation.
“Why?” I asked. “Why are they using fakes? What are they trying to accomplish? Who set this up?”
My voice rose with each question. Tog put his hand on my arm, a clear reminder that the nearest Fridesian out in the ballroom was barely three feet away.
I pinched my lips together and went back to watching the rest of the introductions.
Then Madame Bisset stepped out from behind the row of fake princesses. Even in the ballroom she wore a more severe dress than the other ladies. It was a silvery gray once again, and unadorned, without a single frill or flounce. She regarded the prince with a confident gaze.
“And which of the lovely princesses of Suala would the prince like to dance with first?” she asked. “It is so fortunate that none of them are yet betrothed. You have your choice!”
My stomach twisted.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Oh, no . . .”
“Did you figure something out?” Tog asked.
“The Fridesians like their beauty contests,” I said. For a moment, I was too horrified to go on. “Now that the war is over . . . if the Fridesian prince is truly widowed . . . if he chooses a Sualan princess for his second wife . . .”
“It’d be good, right?” Tog asked. “If the Fridesian prince had a Sualan princess for a wife, he wouldn’t want to go back to war with Suala!”
What was wrong with Tog, that he saw only the happiest outcome?
He hadn’t had the palace childhood that I had. He didn’t see that everything in a palace was about power, not love; conquest, not conciliation.
“No,” I moaned. “No. It would mean Fridesia won the war. They’d take over Suala completely!”
“I don’t know how that could happen,” Tog said. “Even if he marries one Sualan princess—fake or not—there’d still be twelve other princesses running Suala.”
I watched Lord Twelling nudge Prince Charming toward the nearest fake princess. I guessed it was supposed to be Lucia, with her light brown hair and a maroon dress.
“Don’t you see?” I whispered back. “If they can just make up thirteen fake princesses, they can easily make twelve of them go away. Their carriage will be lost in a raging river, traveling back to Suala. Or they’ll all sicken and die from some mysterious fever. Or . . .”
I slumped down to the floor. I couldn’t go on watching the prince and the fake princesses play out their roles. I couldn’t go on listing ways princesses could die. For the first time since the fire at the Palace of Mirrors, I stopped wondering if my sister-princesses were alive or dead. What did it matter? Even if the other girls had survived the fire, Madame Bisset and whoever else was orchestrating this would make sure they were dead after Prince Charming chose a fake princess for his bride.
Even if the princesses were right now down in the Fridesian palace dungeon, I couldn’t think of a single way to creep down through a different secret passageway, sneak past the jailer, and rescue them before they were killed.
So did I condemn my sister-princesses to death when I first acknowledged them as equals? I wondered in despair. Was Queen Charlotte Aurora actually signing death certificates when she wrote those letters designating orphan girls as her heirs? Were we all doomed from the very beginning?
“It’s hopeless,” I whispered.
I was stunned when something hit me in the leg. No—it was Tog kicking me.
“Aren’t you going to stop this?” he asked. “Or did we come all this way for you to just give up?”
35
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
Tog pointed out toward the ballroom.
“Get out there and tell those Fridesians the truth!” he said. “Get them to help you find the real princesses!”
This never would have occurred to me. Truth? In a palace?
“Why would they care about helping me?” I asked. “You don’t know what royalty and courtiers are like.”
“I know what you’re like,” Tog said. “You’d help.”
I blinked. Would I? If the situation were reversed, would I do anything to help missing Fridesian princesses?
I’d want to, anyway, I thought. I’d just need to see how it was possible. . . .
/>
After all, back in Suala I had helped Cecilia and the other eleven sister-princesses when they showed up at the palace and I came to understand their plight. Even when it meant sharing my power and prestige.
“I’m . . . kind of not like most people in a palace,” I said. “I was lonelier, I guess, and that made me do things differently. Most people in a palace are selfish and obsessed with power. And to get them to do anything, you have to get them to think they’re going to get something out of it.”
“Oh right, I’m just a stupid beggar boy, so I wouldn’t understand any of that,” Tog said bitterly. “Outside of palaces there aren’t ever any mean people who do things just for their own reasons. No one like Terrence, who runs away from an injured princess. No one like those villagers with torches driving beggars away. No one like that constable outside the palace, who yelled at us just because we looked poor.”
I gaped at Tog.
“Oh,” I whispered. “I never thought of it that way.”
“Royalty and courtiers and normal people aren’t that different,” Tog argued. “There are bad people inside and outside of palaces. And . . . there are good people inside and out of palaces, too. Like Janelia, who was good in both places.”
I thought about how Janelia had watched over me inside the palace, and then all the way to Fridesia.
“I suppose I could try to make the Fridesians think it helps them to help us,” I said thoughtfully. Then I looked down at my plain cotton dress. I could see cobwebs hanging from the hem. “At least, I could if I had the right clothes. If I looked like a princess again.”
“Desmia, you always look like a princess,” Tog said. “You sound like a princess, you act like a princess—you’ll convince them.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Believe me, the most royal thing I’ve seen you do was throw that pot of boiled rags at the villagers to save me and Herk and Janelia,” Tog said. “And you were wearing rags and bandages then.”
Tog thought that was royal? I marveled. But something shifted in my brain. I stood up and put my eye back against one of the peepholes out into the ballroom. Everyone was looking in the other direction, toward the fake princesses.
“You’re right,” I whispered. “I have to stop this. I have to try, anyway.”
I owed it to my kingdom and to my sister-princesses, regardless of whether they were alive or dead. I owed it to Tog and Herk and Janelia, who had worked so hard to get me to Fridesia.
And I owed it to myself. Because I couldn’t live with myself if I once again stood back and stayed silent and did nothing.
I walked over to the point in the wall where, back at the Palace of Mirrors in Suala, a hidden door had stood between the secret passageways and the ballroom.
The door I sent Cecilia and Harper through, trying to save them, I thought.
I felt along the wall—yes, there was a release hidden in one of the stones, just like in Suala. I turned back to Tog.
“If anything . . . bad . . . happens to me, take care of Janelia and Herk,” I said. “Make sure they get back to Suala safely.”
Then, quickly, before I could change my mind, I pressed the release, and the door in the wall swung open.
36
At first nobody saw me.
You could still change your mind. You could still go back into hiding . . . I told myself.
But I pushed the door shut behind me. It made a soft click, causing a young pageboy holding a silver tray of something orange—salmon chunks speared between melon slices, perhaps?—glance my way. He blinked and looked puzzled, and started to open his mouth as if he was considering screaming. But then he closed it, putting on the bland servant’s expression that seemed to say, You know, I don’t actually get paid to think or make decisions. So I’ll pretend I didn’t notice anything. I’ll go on pretending to be just another piece of furniture.
I was not even dressed well enough to pretend to be a palace servant. But maybe I could take on that same blank expression. Maybe I could just blend in and go around unnoticed for a while eavesdropping and spying on people.
No, I told myself. You need the element of surprise. Or they won’t listen to you at all.
I cleared my throat. For a moment I still felt paralyzed.
Look straight at what frightens you most, I told myself, starting to scan the crowd for Madame Bisset’s steadfast posture. But that technique had backfired for me out in the frightening empty-sky landscape.
Maybe it’s better to think about who’s rooting for you to succeed, who . . . loves you, I corrected myself. I could feel Tog’s concern for me radiating out from the wall behind me; I could feel Janelia and Herk waiting for us outside. I could even draw strength from remembering Cecilia and Ella and Harper and Jed. And all my real sister-princesses. Wherever they were.
This is for them, I thought. This is what I have to do.
I stepped forward, proclaiming in my loudest, most regal voice, “I should like to apologize to the royal family and courtiers of Fridesia.”
As I expected, every head in the ballroom turned my way. Every eye stared at me. The royal orchestra, which had been playing soft background music while Prince Charming looked over the lineup of fake princesses, screeched to an inelegant halt.
Silence.
I didn’t let myself look for Madame Bisset even now. I turned toward the king and queen and prince. I lowered my head and raised it again, a quick royalty-to-royalty acknowledgment of high status. I considered a curtsy for the queen—wasn’t that the Fridesian custom? But I decided against it. The dress I was wearing wasn’t made for curtsies. It was made for hours of standing beside a cooking pot, or tending to babies, or picking apples from a tree, or some other peasant work.
It would not do for me to begin by splitting my dress.
“I apologize,” I repeated, “because you have been lied to. We Sualans have faced unrest and instability because of secrets and lies dating back a generation. Perhaps more than a generation. I regret that some of the liars stirring up the trouble have spilled across your borders, threatening our fragile peace.”
The Fridesian king blanched at the words “unrest” and “instability,” two terms most monarchs didn’t ever want to think about. The queen seemed to be studying my clothing and hairstyle, with a dyspeptic expression on her face that made it clear she didn’t approve.
The prince merely looked confused. And—grief-stricken. He still looked grief-stricken.
Lord Twelling, who was standing at the prince’s elbow, whispered something into the prince’s ear.
“So . . . um, what are these lies you’re talking about?” the prince asked.
“Those are not the princesses of Suala,” I said, pointing at the bevy of silk and braids and flounces on the thirteen impostors. I purposely did not look directly at them, because I still didn’t want to see Madame Bisset’s reaction behind them. As long as she didn’t rush toward me to push me out of sight, that was enough for me. “They are merely pawns in a game of chess. The liars are trying to trick you into becoming their pawn too.”
The prince still looked confused. Too late, I remembered Ella’s low impression of his intellect. Perhaps the prince had never played chess? Perhaps he didn’t know what pawns were?
Lord Twelling started to whisper in the prince’s ear again, but the prince pushed him away.
This gave me hope.
“How do you know?” the prince asked. “Who are you, anyway?”
I drew myself up to my fullest height. The change in posture alone made me feel for a moment that it didn’t matter that I was wearing cotton instead of silk, that my hair was adorned with twigs and cobwebs instead of gold and gems.
“I am the true Princess Desmia,” I said.
The prince looked back and forth between me and all the fake, beautiful, royally dressed women behind him.
“Prove it,” he said.
I held back a gasp. I should have planned for this. I should have brought evidence. I sho
uld have found my crown after the fire. I should have at least found other allies to bring to Fridesia besides a former servant girl and beggar boys. As it was, I had nothing but my own wits to guide me now.
And my memories, I told myself. I have memories, too.
All my guidelines about dismissing the past and focusing on the present had not exactly been helpful. Right now I needed my past.
I thought about everything I knew and everything I’d guessed and suspected. I did not want to be the typical palace type spinning some grandiose story that was more fiction than truth, and constantly running the risk of getting caught in my own lies.
But I did actually have one bit of information that I was pretty sure would be news to the prince.
I held my regal pose and returned the prince’s challenging gaze with a steady one of my own.
“Perhaps the prince would care to accompany me to the palace dungeon?” I asked.
37
I was gambling. If I was lucky, we would find Ella or Jed or one or more of my sister-princesses down in the dungeon, where I’d heard the jailer taunting someone, Of course the prince doesn’t know you’re down here.
If I wasn’t quite so lucky, it’d be some other prisoner, maybe even somebody the prince didn’t care about.
But I can still say, “Look, this is almost proof. This proves your advisers lied to you. My advisers lied to me, too. Can’t you relate? Don’t you want to listen to my whole story before your advisers talk you into an even bigger mistake?”
That is, I could say that if the jailer himself hadn’t been lying about what the prince did or didn’t know.
I saw that the prince, even behind his glaze of grief, had the slightest glimmer of curiosity on his face. That was a good sign.
But it was Lord Twelling who stepped forward first.
“As you wish,” he said. “The two of us shall accompany you to the dungeon.” He favored me with a thin smile. “Of course, it would not be appropriate for the young prince of Fridesia and a young—er—possible princess of Suala to go anywhere alone together, unchaperoned.”