The Princess Curse (10 page)

“Good night,” I said finally.

“I hope you don’t fall ill from the water,” he said.

“Hm,” I said. Not “Thank you,” not “Go away!” Just “Hm.” My face grew hot. “Good night,” I repeated, and scurried off to the herbary and slammed the door behind me.

Chapter 13

I
dreamed again.

I stood on a mountaintop at night. The only light came from a few faint stars that disappeared if I looked directly at them.

A man stood beside me in the dream darkness. “All my lands,” he said, “now bow to you.”

I shivered, and the figure beside me flung his cloak over my shoulders and wrapped an arm around me so that we stood side to side, letting his warmth and the cloak’s suffuse my body.

I woke feeling both comforted and uneasy. Throughout the next day, at odd moments while I was concentrating on other things, like copying passages from
Physica
or measuring out toadflax, I could feel the warmth and the pressure of the cloak. But as soon as I thought about the feeling, it disappeared.

Strange, I thought that morning, that I should dream so intensely. I’d dreamed the night before last, too, I remembered, and at first I thought the dreaming was a product of the poison wine I’d touched to my tongue—the faintest taste of what the sleepers in the tower must experience. But when I next tripped over Mihas the Stupid Cowherd, I remembered that I’d started dreaming after I’d stolen his cup and drunk from the forbidden well.

The Princess Consort was true to her word and sent to me a tiny horn and a red lizard skin.

I set to work right away, and in two days, the page where I’d begun recording my experiments in my herbal now read like this:

I
NVESTIGATION OF
P
LANTES
W
HICH
C
ONFER
I
NVISIBILITIE

T
EST
O
NE:
Wore a pig’s weed wreath. No effect. Later, tried around neck, and as a girdle. No effect. Also, twined with mistletoe. As per Didina’s previous experiment, no effect.

T
EST
T
WO
:
Placed turnsole (heliotrope) from the garden inside tiny horn, no effect. Reported to Princess; she will send away for Egyptian heliotrope. Better quality may yield better results.

T
EST
T
HREE
:
Mistletoe: no effect, and fell out of tree while retrieving it.

T
EST
F
OUR
:
Began soaking nepenthe seeds.

T
EST
F
IVE
:
Lizard skin and wolf’s bane, no effect on first effort. Will try different configuration.

T
EST
S
IX
:
Cannot find fern seeds.

In the following days, I tried everything that I could think of, ten different ways, except for the succory, which had to be collected at Midsummer or Midwinter, and the nepenthe wine, which was still soaking. And I didn’t try the fern seeds either. I spent half a day shaking fern leaves out over a white cloth, getting nothing but some brown pollen for my efforts. I finally buried my pride and asked Brother Cosmin how to collect fern seeds.

He snorted. “Good luck. Fern seeds are invisible. Which is why they confer invisibility, I suppose. . . .”

I cannot guess how the expression on my face looked at that moment, but fortunately, Brother Cosmin had his nose buried in a preparation for Prince Vasile’s aged mother. “In—visibility?” I asked, almost choking in the middle of the word.

Brother Cosmin shrugged. “So the stories say. They also say you can collect fern seeds only on Saint John’s Eve—your birthday, no?—and only by placing twelve pewter plates beneath the fern. The seed will fall through eleven plates, but will be stopped by the twelfth.” He stopped peering at his measurement of powdered cat’s wort and dumped it into a bowl with flour, water, lard, and vandal root, then looked at me. “That is, if fairies don’t snatch the seed from the air as it falls.”

I must have looked dubious, because Brother Cosmin opened up one of his herbals and found the passage for me. I read it carefully and sighed, frustrated. If it was in a book, it must be true. . . .

There were just no breaks for invisibility seekers, I guessed. I added to the Test Six entry: “Abandoning fern seeds, as they are invisible.”

It looked like the nepenthe seeds would soon be my only hope.

My work in the herbary suffered without Didina to compete with. I found myself powdering herbs that only needed to be crushed, or overlooking bits of mold on the herbs in the drying racks. I often fell into daydreams over what it would be like to be invisible, or reveries pondering the secondary issues of invisibility. I thought about chewing strong mints so that neither stinking breath nor heavy breathing would give me away. But too much mint might give me away just as easily—

“Reveka,” Brother Cosmin said, thumping the table in front of me. “Reveka!”

Startled, I glanced up.

“I’ve asked you three times to go out and transplant the rue,” Brother Cosmin said.

“Oh. Sorry.” I got down off my stool and wandered distractedly into the garden, still thinking furiously about how to be invisible scentwise, as well as to sight. I knelt down in the dirt and dug eight small holes to put the rue transplants into—and was well into the ninth hole when I realized someone was calling my name.

It was Otilia, appearing distressed. She glanced around and ran over to me, grabbing my wrists. Astonished, I just stood there. She pressed a knotted handkerchief into my hands.

“These are for the girl,” she said.

“The girl,” I repeated.

“The other apprentice, the one who . . . who fell asleep.”

I was frozen into silence by this absurd claim. Didina
fell asleep
, did she? Just like the apple “fell” into Eve’s hand.
No one
helped either of them along?

When I made no move, Otilia worked at the knot of the handkerchief to reveal a handful of stones, white-clear, tiny, imperfect. Uncut diamonds?

“Her parents can sell these for a lot of money,” Otilia said. There were twelve diamonds. I stared at them with wide eyes. “They can take her away, try to cure her elsewhere.”

I cupped the stones, weighing them against each other. They were light, not heavy as I’d expected gemstones to be. “Didina is an orphan,” I said. Otilia’s face fell, and she reached to take the gems back. “But her grandmother might find a use for them,” I added.
Might
. Adina could take just
one
diamond and be able to seek the best physicians to try to cure her family.

You could leave tomorrow with all but one of those diamonds in your pocket
, a sneaky and mean little voice said inside of me. Almost immediately, my face grew hot for even thinking that.

“Definitely, give them to your friend’s grandmother!” Otilia was nodding enthusiastically, happy that someone would care for Didina.

Any convent in the world would take you with eleven of those—make you herbalist, if you wanted, make you
abbess
, if you wanted that instead,
the voice went on. Truly, Didina and all the sleepers needed only one diamond. My fingers curled around the stones. Unbidden, a vision rose before me of whitewashed walls hung with drying racks and shelves arranged just so. Could I really be so close to realizing my dream?