The Princess Curse (9 page)

The Princess leaned forward in her chair, trying to read the vellum scrap I held. I handed it to her without a qualm, since I’d memorized the words by now.

“Which of these things have you tried?”

I told her how Didina had been working on the list, and how I’d tried pig’s weed my own self.

“It may very well be another fool’s errand, trying to figure out this list,” the Princess said. “What was your plan, if you managed to discover a method for becoming invisible?”

“The same as anyone’s, Princess. Hide and watch. Only with a more refined method of hiding.”

“I see.” She waved the list languidly for a moment, then said, “Let me keep this for a bit, so I can supply you with the items you are missing. Then I want you to begin your experiments anew. And come tell me right away if you discover anything. But whatever you do, keep trying to waken the sleepers. We have, perhaps, two weeks before the Duke of Styria dies and war becomes inevitable.”

That was a sobering deadline, even though I was elated at the prospect of the Princess Consort’s help. I agreed to the Princess’s plan, and she dismissed me.

Outside the solar, I ducked behind the
zmeu
tapestry—and trembled.

I steadied myself with a pinch of sage under my tongue, but I’d need a calming tea to really make a difference. I dropped my head back against the wall, willing myself not to cry.

Didina’s ma and the Duke of Styria were both dying, and Didina herself was asleep in the western tower, and someday she’d start slipping away, too. And if war came to Sylvania—would Pa keep me here, or would he send me away? Without me, what would happen to Didina? Adina couldn’t wake her, and no one else even knew how start trying.

I had to work fast. And secretly. Pa was going to be righteously angry with me if he found out I was involved in
any
of this.

Chapter 12

I
wanted to go to Adina, but I couldn’t face her yet. I went to the herbary instead, and found Brother Cosmin uncharacteristically busy.

“There’s an emissary from the Hungarian King just arrived, late last night,” Brother Cosmin said. “We have no time to waste.” He pointed to a list of about a thousand tasks that he’d written out for me.

“Didina—” I began, and started to sniffle.

“I know,” he said, shaking his head, his mouth a narrow white slit where he pressed his lips tight. He jabbed his finger at the task list. “We have work to do.”

I couldn’t believe him—to think only of work at a time like this! And this was Brother Cosmin, who barely ever thought about work at all. My tears dried up. I slammed over to my table and looked for something to pulverize.

Brother Cosmin didn’t speak, not even when Pa burst through the door and grabbed me up in a tight hug.

Fortunately for me, Pa hugged the breath out of my lungs before I could speak, because it took me a moment to realize he had no idea that I’d been in the princesses’ tower the night before. He was just reacting to Didina’s situation. He didn’t suspect my involvement.

I figured this out because he wasn’t shouting at me.

Pa left again in short order, and Brother Cosmin still didn’t say anything—just pointed at the next item on the list when I finished something. He had me bundle countless stems of santolina and rue into fumigants for the castle fires, and boil rosemary with orange peel for the Prince’s after-dinner wash water. Only when I assembled the posies did he speak.

“One of the gardeners will take those to the tower for us,” he said, placing the box of flowers outside the door. “I don’t want to go up there. I suspect you don’t, either.”

I supposed I didn’t.

The gardener who showed up in due course was none other than Mihas, the boy I’d accidentally saved from drinking from the Little Well. He stood holding the flower box, gawking at me until I was uncomfortable. To my surprise, Brother Cosmin ordered him to attend to his business. “Ridiculous boy can’t keep his mouth closed,” my master muttered. “Is he setting up housekeeping for moths?” This made me snort. At least I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed Mihas’s mouth problem.

Brother Cosmin went off to supper. I wasn’t hungry, so I brought
Physica
over to my table, looking through it to see if the saint had anything useful to say about lizards. In her opinion, they weren’t very poisonous, and they had no use in medicine. There was, of course, nothing about invisibility in the entry on lizards. Or in the entry on mistletoe. Or the one on pig’s weed. I checked.

I wondered, not for the first time, who had placed “Plantes Which Confer Vpon the Wearer Invisibilitie” inside this book, and where they’d gotten their information—useless, pointless list that it had turned out to be.

And yet, here I was, still working at it. Still trying to solve the puzzle.

I flipped through
Physica
, looking for something about nepenthe, when quite unexpectedly I ran across a bit about yew. “The smoke of burning yew wood,” Hildegard wrote, “when inhaled, dissolves bad humors so gently that there is no crisis in the body of the patient.”

I thought about the yew I hadn’t known what to do with in Mistress Adina’s tower. It hadn’t occurred to me to burn it.

When I came in the door with an armful of yew, Adina said, “I’m glad the princesses didn’t get you, too.”

“I, er . . .”

“The Princess Consort told me.”

“The Princess
Consort
told you?”

Adina shrugged. “I’ve mentioned, I think, that I was the herb-wife to this castle before this nonsense began. I’ve been looking for a cure since you started losing your milk teeth.” She sighed, settling back into her chair. “A cure for the sleep, that is. I don’t give a fig for the other parts of the curse. Even if it does mean all the handsome young men disappear.”

“Huh?”

Mistress Adina spread a hand out, gesturing over the bodies of the men, women, and children in the tower. “You see them, yes? The girls, the women of every age. Older men. A few boys. But of the youths—well. No judgment on Sfetnic and his friends here”—she nudged Sfetnic’s body with her toe—“but they have faces that would scare away Christmas. Their handsomer friends disappeared and have never returned, awake or sleeping.”

Adina picked up her netting, fretting with the edge of an unfinished stocking. “They don’t show it, but they must feel bad about this. They must. They’re human girls, so they have to.”

I didn’t agree that the princesses felt bad, except Otilia. But I didn’t say anything. I asked, “What do the princesses
say
when this happens? When someone disappears or . . .”

“Oh, they say they were fast asleep and have no notion of what happened. Princess Maricara always speaks for them, her face smooth as settled cream. I don’t believe a word of it, though!” Adina’s netting was crumpled now in one fist, and she beat the arm of her chair.

I changed the direction of the conversation quickly over to the yew I’d brought, and I told her what Saint Hildegard said about it in her book.

“Try it,” Adina said, but she didn’t seem excited.

Yew smoke, in spite of Saint Hildegard’s recommendation, did nothing for the sleepers. I was sorely disappointed, but Adina was unsurprised. I hung my head out the window until the green smoke cleared and wondered what herbalism was
for
if it couldn’t wake the sleepers.

“If there was a natural cause, I’d have found the natural cure by now,” Adina said.

“That might be true,” I admitted. “But it doesn’t make this less disappointing.”

“Disappointment, ha,” Adina said. “Why don’t you come here and learn how to net? You’ll never want for socks with a handy skill like netting.”

I was a failure as an herbalist, I thought. Why not learn something practical for a change?

I settled down next to Adina and let her show me her needle-binding method for making socks. It was slow going, and my sock was so lumpy and ugly that I couldn’t imagine anyone actually wearing it, not even with the most beautiful leg wraps to cover it up.

“You were there with my Dina,” Mistress Adina said at last. “Tell me, then, what happened.”

I did. I told her everything I could remember. We both cried a little bit, but I went on, all the way to my investigation of the potion and its dregs. “There was something else in there, something I couldn’t identify, something a bit like peaches, a bit like almonds.”

Adina put a finger to her wrinkled lips, thinking. “Peach pits, the inner seed of them, are almost exactly like bitter almonds, in shape, in size, and even taste.”

“But bitter almond is poison. Wouldn’t everyone here be dead if that were in the potion?”

“Peach seeds are different. You have to eat so many of them that it’s barely worth knowing as a poison. There are grannies in the hills who use them to make seed cookies. But don’t send a pig to forage through a peach orchard, or it’ll keel right over in a day.”

I took note of that, in case anyone ever gave me a pig.

I said, “Well, it could have been either bitter almond or peach seed, but that doesn’t exactly help us.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Adina looked over the sleeping bodies spread before her and went back to her netting.

We netted together in silence, waiting.

Darkness fell. The light faded in the princesses’ tower. “Don’t go!” the sleepers implored, and returned to silence.

I got up, curtsied politely to the
stăpână
, and slumped off to the kitchens to grab a few thyme pies before sleep.

Cook’s superlative crusts aside, I was partial to thyme pies because I felt I had an especial right to them: I tended and harvested and dried all of the castle’s thyme. Cook gave me two pies when I showed up, letting me sit in a quiet corner of the kitchen while he finished kneading his bread dough and gossiped with his undercooks.

I wasn’t really paying attention—I had more important things to think about than who went strolling down to the orchard with whom—until Armas came in. He didn’t see me sitting in the corner. Marjit entered just a few seconds later and tried to hand him a small square of parchment. “From our mutual friend,” she murmured.

He stared at the square like it was a packet of poison. “I don’t want it.”

Marjit glanced around, saw Cook staring at her, saw me in the corner, and quickly tucked the square into her sleeve. “That’s going to cause some disappointment in certain quarters,” she said.

“She knows my terms.” He strode from the kitchen without acknowledging anyone else.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” Cook asked, winking at Marjit.

“Hardly,” Marjit answered.

“Didn’t mean
you
and Armas. I know sommat you don’t think I know.”

Marjit looked haughty. “I doubt that very much, Becer.”

Cook grinned. “I discovered just the other day, Armas’s pa was the blacksmith in a village wherein a certain princess was born in a mill,” he gloated. “So much for secrets, Bathwoman!”

Marjit’s expression changed in a flash from consternation to easy teasing. She laughed. “You’re wrong about that, my friend! There’s no way a princess would let a blacksmith’s son court her.” For a moment, I believed her carefree attitude, but then I remembered what Otilia had told me about her home village when I’d helped with her hair, a few days before. She’d mentioned she could see the sparks from the blacksmith’s forge from her attic, and spoken with a certain longing. . . . Marjit was
such
a liar.

“There’s no way Prince Vasile would like it, sure,” Cook said. “But a man like our Chief of Prisons, he’s resourceful.”

Marjit told Cook to leave the gossipmongering in expert hands and turned to me. I shrank back into the corner. “I hear you have a suitor, Reveka.” She spoke loudly. I could see Cook and all his assistants listening intently.

I started and blushed—for a moment I thought she meant Frumos, though how he could count as a suitor I did not know, nor could I figure how she knew about him.

“A suitor?” I asked with false coolness. I wasn’t afraid to stretch the truth to Marjit, now I knew she was a liar, bigger and bolder than I’d ever been.

“You’re of an age to think about courting soon,” she said. “And a girl likes to understand her prospects, maybe practice a thing or two.” This brought laughter and some nudging from the undercooks.

“What are you talking about, Marjit?” I asked.

“Your pa’s new assistant! The cowherd from the hills. He always makes sure to watch for you when you take your flowers to the princesses.”

I blinked. “Who?”

“The really handsome boy, Mihas!” Marjit exclaimed.

Mihas! The boy at the Little Well? Him? The undercooks were laughing harder now and casting me sly looks. Cook was making mouths at me. I was getting angry.

Marjit went on. “He’s too young for me, of course. But he’s not too young for you!”

“No, but he could be too stupid,” I said.

Silence descended in the kitchen. I heard the shuffle of sandals from beyond the threshold, and then Mihas entered the room. I’d not been able to see out the door from the corner, so I had no notion if he’d been standing there, listening—but the way everyone acted, I thought he must have been. And they’d all known it.

I stood abruptly and left the kitchens. A chorus of catcalls and guffaws followed me out.

Mihas also followed me.

“What?” I shouted, and then felt immediately chagrined when he flinched and nearly dropped the pie he held in his other hand.

“I just come to see if you felt sick from drinking from the well.”

“I feel fine,” I said, praying he hadn’t overheard me call him stupid.

“Oh,” Mihas said. His jaw dropped open, and I thought I was going to be treated to another long view of the interior of his mouth—when he lifted his pie and took a big bite. He stared at me, chewing. Just like a cow chewing its cud.

“Is there something else you wanted?” I asked.

“I don’t have to replace the bucket that monk threw down the well,” Mihas said after a moment.

“That’s good,” I said. Maybe I did wish that he’d overheard me call him stupid. Marjit was right that he was handsome, but his cowlike qualities made me feel ashamed for admiring his looks. He didn’t need to know that, though, and feel bad. It’s not like he could help having spent all that time around cows, picking up their habits.