From the corner of his eye, Shoe glimpses a figure in blue at the ballroom doors. He shakes his head. “Not here.”
The figure steps outside, her skirts swirling. The Godmother.
Shoe lowers his head. “I’ll tell you everything,” he promises, knowing himself for a coward, hating the feel of the words in his mouth. “Just don’t let her have me.”
A frown creases the prince’s forehead. “What?”
“Did she leave her shoe behind?” the Godmother asks as she approaches.
At the sound of her voice, Shoe shudders. “Please,” he grates out, and then she is there.
“Ah, I see she did. And you’ve got it. Well done!” The Godmother bestows a smile on the prince, who nods. She turns her ice-cold eyes on Shoe, and he reads triumph there. “And I see you’ve caught a thief, as well.” She reaches out to tap Shoe’s cheek with a finger as cold as marble; he flinches away from her touch. “Let me have him, will you, Your Highness?” she asks. “I think he needs to be made an example of.”
The prince frowns.
Shoe closes his eyes. It’s all over; he’s as good as dead.
“Lady Faye, I thank you for your offer of assistance,” the prince says politely. “But I don’t wish to trouble you. I will deal with this.”
Shoe’s eyes pop open. The Godmother is staring at him with icy hatred.
“Guardsman, if you would be sure Lady Faye returns safely to the ballroom?” the prince says. One of the guards bows and holds out his arm to the Godmother.
Her nostrils flare and then, ignoring the guard, she whirls and stalks back into the castle.
The guards haven’t let Shoe’s arms go; he’s not out of this yet.
“Talk,” the prince orders.
Shoe shakes his head. “Not here, I told you. Someplace quiet.”
One of the guards cuffs him on the side of the head. “You refer to your prince as ‘Your Highness,’ boy.”
“Someplace with no guards, Your Highness,” Shoe adds, shaking off the blow.
A hint of a smile lights the prince’s eyes. “Yes, all right,” he agrees. He is still holding Pin’s shoe; he taps it absently against his leg. He addresses the guards holding Shoe. “I have to be present until the ball ends. Take him to my chambers and stand guard outside the door until I get there.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” the guards holding Shoe say.
The prince goes back to the ball.
Shoe goes to stew for a few hours in the juices of his own self-loathing.
AS ORDERED, THE guards lock Shoe into the prince’s chambers.
It is a surprisingly nonprincely room, at least as Shoe thinks of princes. It is huge and cavernous, but there is no gilding in sight, no velvets or silks, just a massive four-poster bed made of some dark and heavy wood and hung with ancient-looking embroidered cloth. There are comfortable chairs and a low table stacked with books with scraps of paper left in them to mark where the prince has left off reading. The prince must be a sporting man as well as a scholarly one, because there are a pair of gaiters hung by the fire to dry and two long-eared hunting dogs by the hearth. Both dogs come to Shoe as he’s shoved into the room, their tails wagging.
He pets them absently. For a while he paces, working off the energy of his abandoned flight and the confrontation with the Godmother, and enumerating to himself his many faults and failures, starting with cowardice and including stupidity and blindness, not to mention cowardly blind stupidity. He can’t help think of Pin, too. The dress, yes, but even more the curve of her breasts, her quick, graceful movements. The silken skin of her shoulders. He’d longed to run his hands over that silk, and trace the line of her collarbone with his fingers, and kiss his way up her neck . . .
“Stop it,” he mutters roughly to himself. It wasn’t fair to her—she didn’t even know him anymore.
He paces some more, until a wave of exhaustion knocks him over and he takes off the pack and sprawls on one of the comfortable chairs.
When the prince comes in, he can barely muster the energy to sit up.
“Stay there,” the prince orders. The dogs wag over to him, and he greets them and sends them back to their bed on the hearth. He sighs and takes the golden circlet off his head and tosses it into a drawer in a massive wardrobe that takes up one full wall of the room.
Then he pulls off his boots—well made, Shoe notes, though he could do better—and tosses them into the wardrobe too, and unbuttons the top of his tunic. In his socks, he comes to stand before Shoe’s chair.
“Thank you,” Shoe says, getting wearily to his feet.
The prince raises his eyebrows.
“For not letting her have me,” Shoe explains.
“I didn’t do it for you,” the prince says briefly. “I don’t like the post.”
“I don’t either,” Shoe agrees wholeheartedly. “Why don’t you have it taken down?”
The prince rubs his forehead as if it aches. “I—I don’t know.” Then he frowns at Shoe. “Who are you?”
“I’m a shoemaker. My name is Shoe.”
“A shoemaker. Named . . . Shoe,” the prince repeats slowly, and shakes his head. “What exactly is going on, Shoe? And no more delays or deals. Just the truth.” He looks tired, but there is steel in his voice.
Shoe can tell from the room that the prince is no idiot and has figured out that this is not just about him and Pin. “How much of it do you want to know?” he asks.
“From the beginning.” The prince goes to lean against the mantel by the hearth. “Speak,” he orders.
Shoe sits and puts his elbows on his knees. “Pin and I—”
“Pin is her name?” the prince interrupts.
“Yes,” Shoe answers. “Well, no. Not really. We were slaves in the Godmother’s fortress. You know her as Lady Faye,” he adds. The prince raises his eyebrows, and Shoe goes on. “Pin was a Seamstress and I was the Shoemaker.”
He tells the whole story, describing the fortress and the slaves, and his escape with Pin over the wall and into the forest, and her thimble—skipping the part about their kiss. Then he goes on to explain about Pin’s capture by the Godmother and his by the Huntsman—not mentioning the Huntsman’s rebels hiding in the forest—and his journey to the city and attempts to find Pin and help her escape. “She doesn’t remember any of it,” Shoe says bleakly. “The Godmother took it all away.” Then he tells about Pin’s role in Story, about her awful stepmother and stepsisters and how he’d gone with Natters to get into the house—skipping the part about the second kiss—and how he’d come to the castle to ask Pin to leave the city with him.
“You’re in love with Pin,” the prince observes.
Shoe’s voice is hoarse from the telling. “Yes,” he says shortly.
“But she doesn’t remember you. And I seem to be falling in love with her myself.” The prince half smiles, as if thinking of Pin. “She is quite extraordinary, isn’t she? She sees right inside you. What is her name now?”
“Penelope,” Shoe says, giving it all away. After all this, he feels certain the prince isn’t going to hand him over to the Godmother, not if he can help it. “Lady Penelope. She lives in a house two streets away from here. That’s probably where she’s gone.”
“Thank you,” the prince says.
Shoe puts his head in his hands. “I shouldn’t have told you,” he confesses. “It’s the worst kind of betrayal of her. I did it because I’m afraid of the post.”
“You’ve experienced it before?” the prince asks. “At the fortress you told me about?”
Shoe can’t find the words. He nods.
“Don’t blame yourself too much,” the prince says morosely. “I behaved just as badly.”
Shoe looks up. Standing there in his socks, without his crown and without his mask of formal nobility in place, the prince looks like a much more ordinary person, one who might make the same mistakes as a shoemaker.
“I tried to charm her when I should have been getting to know her better,”
the prince explains. He looks down at his hands, and Shoe realizes that the prince isn’t that much older than he himself seems to be, maybe twenty or twenty-one. “Trying to force her to stay. She ran away from me.”
“From me too,” Shoe puts in.
The prince gives a wry smile. “Yes, from both of us.” He moves from the mantel and settles into one of the other comfortable chairs. One of the dogs comes over and puts its head on his knee, and he strokes its long ears. “Now, tell me about Story,” he orders.
Shoe tells him what he knows, how the workers in the Godmother’s fortress are slaves to Story, and then what Natters and the Missus told him about the relentless turn of the gears and wheels of Story, how it is impossible to escape, that they are all about to be ground up and reshaped and forced into an ending that none of them—except the Godmother—wants.
The prince nods and rubs his forehead again. “Yes,” he says, as if approving of Shoe’s recitation. “It’s not anything I could put my finger on, but I have long suspected that something in this city was not right.”
Shoe knows the prince isn’t going to like this next bit. “You’re caught up in it too,” he explains. “You’re meant to be Pin’s ending. But Story hasn’t given her any choice about it, or you either. It wants to force you together.”
When he stops speaking, the prince gets up and crosses to another table, where he pours something into a cup and brings it to Shoe.
Shoe takes a sip. It’s wine, which he doesn’t remember ever tasting before. It is rich and heavy on his tongue, and it soothes his raw throat as he swallows it down.
The prince has poured his own cup and settles in his chair again. “You’ve admitted that Penelope doesn’t love you.” His finger rubs the side of the glass. “And you presume that I don’t really love her either, that all I feel for her is due to us being caught up in Story.”
Shoe feels a flush prickle on his cheeks. “It probably is,” he says stubbornly.
So far the prince has been surprisingly open. But now the walls go up. “Maybe it is,” he says with some coldness. “And maybe it isn’t.”
They immediately fall silent. Shoe drinks more wine and begins to feel sleep creeping over him.
On the other chair, the prince eyes him closely, and pronounces, “You’ll take me to Penelope in the morning.”
Shoe considers the possibility of saying no. He doesn’t really have much choice. “All right,” he agrees. “I will. But we can’t tell her what to do. She must decide for herself.”
CHAPTER
27
THE PRINCE’S BALL HAS CHANGED EVERYTHING.
In the morning I wake up in my stepmama’s house—my house—in one of the many guest bedrooms on the second floor. I claimed the room last night when I came home all flustered from the ball. I didn’t see my stepmother or stepsisters, I simply found the room, took off my ragged ball dress, climbed into the chilly bed, and went to sleep with the thimble under my pillow. I didn’t want to think about the clock striking or how handsome Prince Cornelius had looked in the dim light of the terrace or how his kiss hadn’t been quite the same as . . .
Well, as the only other kiss I can remember.
I reach under my pillow and pull out the thimble. It is the only thing I do remember clearly. It is simple, silver, entwined with roses and brambles, without a fleck of tarnish. It feels heavier than it should, as if it’s more solid than anything in this city. It’s a rock of security in the midst of a roaring river. I fold my fingers around it.
Shoe had it.
I’m not sure what to think about him.
As the castle clock struck midnight, he’d told me . . .
. . . things I didn’t want to believe.
I turn my wrist, examining the scar there. It is jagged, pale; it looks as if I might have been stabbed by a thorn, as he said.
If I am this Pin—if I was this Pin, before—maybe that explains all the holes in my memory. But who was I before that? Who am I now? The questions threaten to sweep me away. Darkness edges my vision; nothingness looms behind me.
“It’s all right,” I tell myself in a trembling whisper. “It’ll be all right.” My voice sounds tiny and frightened. The Nothing threatens to overwhelm me.
I wrap both hands around the thimble, and hold on.
The thimble is heavy and solid, and the room becomes real around me again. Its walls are painted blue. The coverlet on the bed is edged with lace. There’s a fire in the hearth—this is an excellent sign; it means the servants have been told I am here. It means Stepmama knows I’m here and hasn’t had me dragged in disgrace up to my attic prison. I take a deep breath, steadying myself. I expect they don’t know what to do with me.
I push back the covers and climb out of the bed and see an even better sign. While I was sleeping, a maid has brought me something to wear. They’ve unpacked a box of my clothes from the attic, because there is a clean black silk dress and underclothes and stockings. But there are no shoes. I left my other toe-pinching ones at Lady Faye’s house last night, I remember.
Lukewarm water is in a bowl, and there’s a fresh towel, so I have a quick wash and put on the dress and stockings and put the thimble into my pocket. The dress doesn’t fit me quite properly. I’m thinner than I used to be thanks to the usual punishments. A good breakfast will help with that.
Before going down to the breakfast room, though, I go upstairs to the long portrait gallery. Its windows only face the afternoon sun, and it is morning, so the room is dim, like a cave, and dusty. I pad along in my stockinged feet to the end, to the picture of my mother.
There she is, hiding away in the shadowed forest, smiling her secret smile, the thimble bright against her dark skirt.
“I found the thimble,” I tell her. “Even though it seems I’ve lost everything else.”
As I stand there in the dim room with sparkling motes of dust floating around me, looking into my mother’s painted face, I slip the thimble onto my finger.
A flash of memory slams into me.
My mother—her real self, not a painting—in a hurry, tying her hair back into a long braid. She is dressed all in black and her face is sharp and pale with worry. Snow whirls around us. My hands are cold—I remember the bite of frost and feel again the searing warmth of the thimble as she places it in my palm and curls my fingers around it.
Never lose this, she says.
Then she looks over her shoulder and turns away.
I reach after the memory with trembling fingers—Mother!—but it is gone. I blink and I am standing on shaking legs in the picture gallery.
My mother’s painted face regards me with the same ironic smile.
“I didn’t lose it,” I tell her. “I only lost myself. And you.”
My mother. What was it that Lady Faye had said about her?
. . . we were good friends at one time, your mother and I.
But then my mother had . . . thwarted her, Lady Faye had said. Who was my mother?
I gaze at the thimble in my palm. It’s such a strange thing for me to have, really. A strange thing for my mother to give me. A thimble represents all that is ladylike and pure and unspotted with blood, unmarked by the painful pricks of a needle. If I think of a perfect lady, she has her head demurely bent over an embroidery frame, with the thimble on her finger, maybe biting her lip with concentration as she stitches. I am nothing like that; I am no seamstress. Neither, I am certain, was my mother. Yet the thimble she gave me is a thing of power.
I think it means that I must try to be like her. I don’t know who I was, or who I am, but I can try to thwart whatever Lady Faye is trying to achieve.
Of course, I haven’t any idea how to go about doing that. All I know is that she wants me for something, and I cannot let her have me.
Pondering what I’m going to do next, I head for the breakfast room. On the way, I pass a maid, who bobs a curtsy. Oh yes, things have changed. All because of a pretty dress and three dances with a handsome prince.
 
; I pause outside the door. Time to face the wild animals.
I go in. It is past eight o’clock, so Stepmama, Dulcet, and Precious are already at the table. Clearly they’ve been staring at the door waiting for me, because as I come in they paste wide and welcoming smiles on their faces.
“Good morning,” I say, and go to the sideboard. I am famished, and there is poached egg and toast with a delicious-smelling herbed butter sauce that a kitchen maid probably had to stir over the stove for an hour, and bacon and more toast. My plate loaded, I go to the table.
“Pass the jam, would you, Dulcie?” I ask through a mouthful of egg.
With a clatter, Dulcet drops her fork and grabs for the jam pot.
“Ta,” I say. In stunned silence, they let me eat for a while. I enjoy every bite of my breakfast.
“Well!” my stepmama exclaims after the sight of me eating has obviously gotten to be too much for her. “Girls!” She means me, too. “The ball last night. Quite an affair. Dulcet and Precious, you acquitted yourselves well enough.” She turns a gimlet gaze on me. “But you, Penelope. To have earned such favor from Lady Faye. It is no wonder the prince paid you such marked attention.”
“The dress was magnificent,” Precious puts in, envy dripping from her voice.
“Precious!” Stepmama scolds.
“Well, it was,” Precious says with an elegant shrug.
“None of it had anything to do with the dress,” I say, and eat another bite of toast piled with jam. “The prince would have danced with me if I’d been wearing rags and no mask.” I wash down the toast with a drink of tea. “It’s almost as if we were meant to be together.”
Stepmama’s eyes widen. I can see that she’s contemplating having to call me Your Highness or Princess Penelope.
I take pity on her. “The prince doesn’t know my name, and he doesn’t know where I live.”
My stepmama blinks. “Doesn’t he?”
Suddenly I feel adrift, and grip the edge of the table to steady myself. I long for my connection to the prince to be real, not because he is handsome or because of his deep, molten-chocolate voice, but because I caught a glimpse of him—the true him—when I looked into his eyes.