The Princess Curse (2 page)

I glanced at Pa as I turned to follow Brother Cosmin out. I knew I should bolt with my collecting basket and spend the day conveniently absent while I gathered mushrooms and wild herbs. But we’d been at the castle for only a few weeks, so I didn’t really know the forest. Still, it would put me out of Pa’s way. The Princess Consort was holding him behind to talk, and I had time to clear out.

I was three steps ahead of Brother Cosmin when I heard my name. Pa and the Princess were talking about me? I checked my stride and stepped slower, letting Brother Cosmin pass. And when I reached the door of the solar, I didn’t follow him out into the great hall but slid behind the dragon-kidnaps-a-maiden tapestry.

I didn’t hear my name again. Pa and the Princess Consort were talking about ditches and earthworks. Pa is the castle’s head gardener, which makes it sound like he spends all his time with plants and trees; but gardeners are also in charge of dirt, and digging, and ditches, and earthworks, and ramparts, and everything involving dirt. Pa was known as a magician of fortification. Though it wasn’t magic; it was just understanding how geometry and dirt could best be used for aiming defensive cannons and deflecting the enemy’s fire.

Pa said, “The tunnel under the southern rampart collapsed again.”

“I believe that means we’re close,” the Princess said. “Try again, Konstantin. The Hungarians
suggest
that the succession be set by autumn, and if we don’t have the possibility of an heir by then, I’m sure Corvinus will march on us.”

“Corvinus has problems with his own succession,” Pa said. “He’d do well to turn his attention there.”

“Corvinus expanded his kingdom by interfering in the affairs of other princes. Dig faster. We have
no time
.”

If Pa answered that, it was with a nod or gesture, because then the Princess said, “And Reveka?”

Me?

Pa’s reply was flat. “No.”

No? No what?

The Princess sighed. “The cabbage incident tells me she wishes to help, Konstantin.”

“Highness, I beg you: Do not confuse her childish impulse with a calling.”

“This cannot be the great soldier Konstantin! I thought you seized any opportunity, and every opportunity.”

“We have better—wiser—options than my impetuous daughter.” I thought about taking offense at this, but then the Princess Consort dismissed Pa, and I panicked. Pa was going to catch me eavesdropping! While the tapestry hid me from the hall, he would see me standing in the gap between the cloth and the wall when he came out of the solar.

I sidled deeper into the shadows and squinched my eyes tight so he wouldn’t see their gleam, and maybe also hoping, just a little bit, that I’d be invisible to him.

A hand clamped down on my arm.

So much for willing myself invisible.

Chapter 2

P
a was very patient: He jerked me out from behind the tapestry and dragged me across the great hall, outside past the herb gardens, and through the castle gates into the plum orchard before yelling.

“Reveka!” he cried, shaking me a little. I stared at him with wide eyes, waiting for the verdict. Pa and I had been scraping along together for only a couple of years, since he’d retrieved me from the convent where Ma had left me when she died. Ofttimes, he didn’t seem to know what to do with me.

I didn’t know what to do with him, either, though I liked him well enough. Altogether, he beat me less than the Abbess had, and only then for breaking the eighth commandment. Lying, in Pa’s view, was much worse than killing. But maybe that was because Pa was a soldier before he became a gardener, so he couldn’t think too badly of killing.

“I told the Princess the truth, Pa,” I said. “I didn’t lie, even a little!”

“I know,” he said.

I frowned. Why was he so angry with me, if he knew I hadn’t broken my promise to him?

“And I’m—I’m very sorry I made the princesses smell like hill cottagers. I
am
. Very sorry.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“It’s just—the curse. Everyone talks about the curse, and no one
does
anything. And the dowry is just sitting there, waiting.” I needed that dowry, far more than the curse needed lifting.

I’d no idea how the curse had started, but the biggest problem with it was that Prince Vasile didn’t have a son. If his line didn’t produce a male heir before he died, the rule of the principality would be fought over by all his neighbors. Which was bad enough, but with the Turkish Empire on one doorstep and the Hungarians on the other, Sylvania would become no more than a tattered, puppet-ruled client state.

Even with three wives, the Prince had never gotten a son. The first wife had produced a couple of daughters, the Princesses Maricara and Tereza, then promptly died. The second had died before doing that much. And the third Princess Consort wasn’t a mother yet after two years.

However, Prince Vasile had managed to have ten additional daughters by eight different women outside of consecrated wedlock. This shocked me when I first learned of it. I’d thought that God would not so bless women who had not received the sacrament of marriage—but Brother Cosmin said, “No, by Easter, what did those nuns teach you?” Brother Cosmin, like monks everywhere, didn’t respect nuns much.

At some point, years ago, Prince Vasile had brought all his daughters to live with him at Castle Sylvian, so that he could marry them off and get grandsons to keep the principality safe. He even ennobled the illegitimate daughters, no matter how common their mothers, including Ruxandra and Rada, daughters of a tavern wench, and Otilia, who’d grown up in a mill.

But shortly after the princesses started living together in the castle, the curse came upon them. And nobody wanted to marry women, even princesses, who lived under the effects of a curse, even a silly one.

And it
was
a silly curse, wasn’t it? Every morning, the princesses left their tower bedroom, exhausted, with their shoes in tatters. It was inexplicable, and it scared away all the nobles and aristocrats and royals and knights and squires—in short, everyone of gentle birth who would be even a tiny bit worthy of marrying a princess.

The curse so vexed Prince Vasile that he issued a decree: The first man who could solve the problem of the shoes would be married to the princess of his choice, no matter what his birth, age, or rank. Even if the chosen princess was one of Vasile’s royal and legitimate daughters. Even if the curse breaker was a humble cowherd.

And if the curse breaker was a woman? For her, a fabulous dowry awaited, to allow her to marry whoever she wanted. Or, I hoped, to join whichever convent she liked. It cost a lot of money to join a convent, unless one was “a highly promising candidate.” I’d been raised by nuns, who had made it clear to me that I
wasn’t
promising. But I
could
become rich.

“The curse is dangerous,” Pa said, “and I don’t want you mucking about with it.”

“But Pa, it’s the stupidest curse in existence! So what if the princesses are sleepy during the day and their slippers are holey in the morning? It’s a curse of
shoes and naps
. It’s a mystery, I’ll grant you—Marjit the Bathwoman says that no one ever hears anything when they listen at the princesses’ door, and that anyone who spends the night in the princesses’ chamber falls right asleep and doesn’t wake up.”

“Marjit is correct.”

“I wouldn’t fall asleep,” I boasted. “If you left me in there overnight, I’d figure it all out and save all the shoes.”

“No, Reveka!” Pa threw up his hands. “No one cares about the shoes! That’s not why people call it a curse. Did you not understand what Marjit said? They
never waken
.”

“She meant they never waken through the night and see what happens to the shoes . . . right?”

“No!” Pa closed his eyes, sucking in a deep breath before opening them again, whirling me around, and steering me toward the castle. “Come along.”

Pa marched me double time between the front gate’s dragon carvings and up to the western tower, which was shorter and wider than the eastern tower that served as the princesses’ bedroom. Pa pushed me through a squeaky little oak door into a room.

The room was full. Row upon row of men and women, lying head-to-foot on straw pallets, spread before me. On the other side of the room, by a tiny hearth, an old woman sat in a rockered chair, netting socks. She looked up when we entered. She did not smile.

The room smelled of silence and stone—like a cathedral after the incense smoke has drifted away. It didn’t smell as if dozens of people crowded into one space together.

I stared at the bodies lying on the pallets, each one abnormally still, with none of the snoring and scratching and farting normal people do when they sleep.

They fall asleep and never waken.

Pa tried to pull me back out of the room, but I shrugged away to kneel beside one of the bodies—a girl with alabaster skin and straight brown brows. I reached to touch her but paused, hesitant, noticing that I couldn’t really see her chest move. “Is she alive?” I asked the old woman.

The woman set aside her netting and leaned forward. “You are the herb-husband’s new apprentice, yes? As well as the gardener’s daughter,” she said, her voice as cracked as her face. “So you’ve finally come to see the dead-alive?”

I didn’t know how to answer that tactfully, so I asked, “They never waken? No matter what?”

“Stick them with pins and they don’t jump. Thunder and handclaps alike never disturb their dreams. Neither does fire or water awaken them.”

I put aside my horror to think like an herbalist. “Have you tried rubbing their limbs with oil of rosemary? What effect has pepper blown into their nostrils?”

“I try the rosemary every week, and ground black pepper rouses them not at all.” The woman looked expectant and eager, like she was curious to know what I would ask next.

Normally, I’d have been gratified to be taken seriously, but it worried me. Things were in a dreadful state indeed if people hoped for miracles from an apprentice herbalist.

I avoided her eager eyes by examining the girl more closely. She might have possessed all of thirteen years, just like me. “Do they ever . . . die on you?”

“I feed them nourishing soups,” the old woman said. “Drip, drip, drip it down their throats, then massage their necks until they swallow. I swaddle them like babies and change their wrappings regularly. That is what I can manage, and it is enough for most of them. But in spite of all that, some do go around the corner alone. I never can predict which ones will go—young or old, newly fallen or asleep for years. . . .”

I shivered. The girl’s sleeping face was untroubled, and her breathing so slow I could barely hear it with my ear practically pressed to her nose. She looked like a saint’s corpse, dead but incorrupt. As though she would never rot. As though she would exist, always, just like this.

“How did this happen?” I whispered.

“They dared to look upon the princesses,” the old woman said, “when the princesses were not wanting to be looked upon.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did anyone else for a long time. Then Pa stirred behind me. “Reveka. Brother Cosmin will be wanting you.”

“Yes, Pa,” I said, rising to my feet. But before I followed him out the door into the living castle, I paused. “
Stăpână
,” I said respectfully, “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“I am Adina. And this is my daughter, Alina.” She gestured to the woman at the end of the row closest to her. “And that’s Iulia.” She pointed to the girl I’d been examining.

I asked, very politely, “
Stăpână
Adina, would it be all right if I brought some herbs to try to wake . . . them?”

“Try your best,” Adina said indifferently, taking up her netting again. She didn’t seem interested in me anymore, now that I had one foot out the door. I wondered how many people promised to come—and didn’t.

Pa let me catch up with him outside. “Those people back there, Reveka? Those are the ones who don’t disappear,” he said.

“Disappear?”

“Some go into the princesses’ tower and never return.”

“What, are they
eating
people?”

Pa raised an eyebrow. “They leave no bones if they do. But—
now
do you see, Reva? Do you see the curse for what it is? Why you should leave it alone? Why you should not treat it as a lark, and why you should not play games with your herbs?”

“Yes, Pa, I see,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I
did
see. I saw exactly why it was that I had to try even harder to break the curse of Castle Sylvian and win my dowry.

Chapter 3

W
hen we had arrived at Castle Sylvian three weeks before—having walked all the way from Moldavia—I’d been disappointed to discover that the resident herb master already had an apprentice. But Brother Cosmin took me on anyway. At first I’d been pleased, but then I realized he did so because I was already well trained in herbalism by the convent, and he could lie abed longer if he had me do half his work.

The other half of his work had already settled on the shoulders of his first apprentice, Didina. When my pa had said that Brother Cosmin would be wanting me that morning, he was mistaken. It was Didina who would want me. Brother Cosmin went back to bed after the audience with the Princess Consort.

I am being truthful here, and not bad-mouthing Brother Cosmin out of dislike or something—but of his vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, it was hard to tell which he took least seriously. He was a goodish man, a bad monk, and a middling herbalist—he thought betony was the best cure for
everything
.

“Where have you been?” Didina asked, frazzled. She was fourteen, a year older than me, though she’d been learning her art less long. “I’ve not seen Brother Cosmin all morning.”

I hurried in, past Brother Cosmin’s shelf of wondrous books (
seven
herbals, four of them press printed!), and settled down at my worktable. “Princess Daciana had a question about an ingredient in the princesses’ bath herbs this morning.”