Palace of Mirrors (10 page)

The sky is nearly dark when we finally come out on the other side of the village of Spurg.

“We need to find a place to stop for the night, but I want to get as far away from this village as we can,” Harper whispers to me as we step onto the blessedly bramble-free path again. “Can you make it another mile or two?”

“Sure,” I say, feeling the eyes of another surly guard on us.

We walk and walk, into darkness, into exhaustion.

This is worth it. I’m doing the right thing,
I tell myself, just to keep going.

Finally we collapse beside the path, rolling into the grasses again. I would be content to fall asleep wherever I land—I’m that tired—but Harper has to carefully arrange us and our possessions. He positions the harp between us and the path, “so anyone coming toward us will run into it, giving us warning.” He tucks our food sack under his clothes, so no squirrels or moles can nose into it in the
night. He insists on sleeping at my feet once again, “for safety.”

“Safety,” I repeat as I cuddle into my cushioning cloak. “Right.” But Harper is too far away to hear me. I wish, peevishly, that he didn’t know anything about how soldiers sleep, how they protect their fellow soldiers. It would be nicer if I could share the cloak’s warmth with him, if we could lie with our faces together, whispering into the night.

Strangely, this thought makes me blush, because I am describing how husbands and wives sleep. And I’m not asking for
that.
It’s just . . . I never really thought before about how being the one and only true princess is really a lonely thing. When I relieve Desmia of her duty, it will be me alone on the throne, alone on the castle balcony waving to the throngs below, alone worrying about when my enemies might attack. . . .

I fall asleep feeling grateful that, at least for now, Harper is with me. I’m not alone.

Yet.

  11  

We reach Cortona four days later, just before noon. We are much the worse for our travels: our bare feet coated with dust, our faces dirty, our clothes snagged beyond repair by the brambles and thorns beside all the village fences we had to walk along—outside Spurg, Tyra, Donnega, and Kahreo. But nobody’s stopped us; nobody’s recognized me. (How could they?)

We begin seeing the spires of Cortona from a distance of miles. First we see the spires, then the turrets, then the domes, and finally the sturdy white city walls that somehow seem gracious and airy, rather than mean and inhospitable like all those village fences. The arched gateways that lead into the city are a marvel, as peddlers, dancing girls, goat tenders, and what look to be court officials stream through them.

My stomach lurches with panic.

“Don’t you think we should at least wash our faces before we go in?” I ask Harper. He has been so quiet and standoffish the past four days that I resist the urge to clutch his arm while I say this. And really, clutching his arm isn’t the kind of thing I would have done back home anyhow. Is it? It’s kind of hard to remember who I am and what I’m like, when I’m standing in the shadows of those massive walls, watching the river of humanity flowing through the gates.

I am the true princess. I am the true princess. I am the true princess even if my face is dirty. . . .

I’m working so hard to remember myself, I almost miss Harper’s answer.

“Looking like ragamuffins is a pretty good disguise,” he says. “Maybe we should go in now, get a feel for the lay of the land, then adjust our appearance accordingly. Is that all right with you?”

Okay, I
know
that’s not like Harper, to ask my opinion so deferentially. He must be just as awestruck as I am. I shrug agreement, and we let ourselves be swept through the gates along with everyone else. No one guards the gateways here, but once I get into the city, I see why: On nearly every corner soldiers stand on alert, staring coldly out into the crowd. The soldiers look taller than any of the men back in our village, just as the buildings here tower higher, soaring three, four, even five stories above the ground. And the buildings aren’t made of sticks and logs
and rotting boards—they’re bronzed brick, imperial stone, gleaming stucco, all lined with shining windows.

I’m so busy looking around that when the crowd surges forward, I very nearly lose track of Harper.

He reaches over a goat that’s come between us and grabs my hand.

“Don’t let go!” he orders.

Harper’s hand is dry and warm and soothing, while mine is sweaty with fear. We’ve never held hands before. I think about what it means in the village when boys and girls only a few years older than Harper and me wander around with their hands clasped together. They’re always peering dreamily into each other’s eyes, sneaking shy kisses . . . and soon after, there’s a wedding.

And then usually the boy gets sent off to war, and that’s the end of that.

Harper is
not
peering dreamily into my eyes or making any attempt to kiss me. He’s practically pulling my arm out of its socket as the crowd pushes him in one direction and me in the other. I have to leap gracelessly over the goat to avoid being torn limb from limb.

“Slow down!” I call to him.

“—can’t—” That’s all I hear of Harper’s reply, because a large man’s belly is shoved against my ear. Then Harper yanks me toward him.
Thanks a lot, Harper—I guess you’re counting on the fact that at least my other arm will still work, and all I’ll really need it for is to sign royal proclamations. . . .
My body slams against his side; he releases my hand and grabs my waist instead.

“Hold on to the harp,” he mutters.

He’s taken it from his back and is holding it in front of him. Together, we use the harp to plow our way through the crowd. I’ve never really thought much about this, but it
is
an impressive instrument: skillfully carved willow wood, shiny strings . . . Harper and I look like we belong in a backwoods village—a very poor backwoods village—but the harp looks like it belongs in Cortona, and so people step out of the way for it.

“Look,” Harper breathes.

The crowd has pushed us into a wide courtyard. There’s an impressive clock tower in the center of the square, with huge clock hands pointed very nearly to noon, and at first I think that’s what Harper’s referring to. Then I see that just about everyone else in the crowd has turned to the right, to gaze up at . . .

The palace.

I see suddenly why the crowd has fallen silent and stopped pushing and shoving. Several people have even let their jaws drop open. The palace is overwhelming—overwhelmingly large, overwhelmingly beautiful, overwhelmingly grand. It has graceful arches and frilly turrets, and you would think that that would be like putting a lace bonnet on a soldier. But the arches and turrets and other flourishes just make the palace look more majestic,
more imposing, more daunting. I realize that my notion of impressive architecture is a one-room cottage without any holes in the roof, but I think
anyone
would be stunned and amazed by this palace.

“She’s coming!” “Up there!” The people around us begin shouting and pointing.

I tilt my head back farther, so I can see the balcony that soars out over the crowd. It seems so high up that I wonder if it’s hidden by clouds on less sunny days. Six men in regal black stand at alert on the balcony. They’re too far away for me to see their eyes, of course, but just by the way they stand, I can tell that they’re constantly scanning the crowd, looking for any possible danger at every moment. Behind them, at the window—or the door? Is a door still a door if it’s entirely made of glass?—a figure dressed in palest yellow is stepping out into the sunshine. Maybe it’s just because of the gauzy dress and veil she’s wearing, but the figure seems unreal, like a spirit in a dream.

“It’s the princess . . .”

“Princess Desmia . . .”

“Our beloved princess . . .”

The awed whispers flow through the crowd, as if everyone thinks that speaking out loud would break the spell and Desmia would vanish.

“She’s so beautiful,” a boy murmurs behind me.

“How can he tell?” I mutter to Harper. “Her whole face is covered with that veil!”

I expect him to join me in sarcasm—kind of like how we always join together to make fun of Herk the tailor and his cowbell concerts. But Harper just looks from Desmia to me and back again without saying a word.

Great. He’s apparently fallen under Desmia’s spell too.

What? Are you jealous?
A little voice in my head taunts me.

I stare at the figure on the balcony as she raises one hand and gracefully waves it back and forth. It’s like watching a willow tree sway in a gentle breeze, the movement so delicate and dainty that it could be set to music. I could never wave like that. Hoisting buckets of water and stacks of firewood isn’t very good practice for such tiny motions.

Thanks a lot, Nanny,
I think bitterly.
You too, Sir Stephen—what were you thinking? Didn’t you know I’d need to wave like that? Couldn’t you have slipped in a few lessons in gracefulness along with the geometry?

Desmia keeps waving. Her veil ruffles in the breeze, and even that doesn’t break her concentration or the precise motion of her hand. She’s like a perfect china doll.

Really,
I think,
I wouldn’t want to have to wave like that. Too careful. Too tedious. I’d rather carry water buckets. The people of Suala are just going to have to get used to a princess who waves her arm back and forth wildly. People like exuberance, too, don’t they?

Desmia leans out over the balcony, the bottom of her veil pinned against the railing.

“Blessings,” she calls in a faint, bell-like voice. “Blessings upon my subjects.”

The crowd cheers. They love their china-doll princess.

Maybe when I take up my rightful position, I’ll have to hire Desmia to keep waving from the balcony every day. Just to keep the people happy. But will they still love her so much if she’s not the princess? And would that endanger her? If the point of revealing my true identity is to keep Desmia safe, would it be fair to expect her to keep appearing before the public?

And . . . if Desmia’s their idea of a princess, will they ever love me?

I’m so dizzy with questions and doubts that I almost miss Desmia’s exit. She’s backing away from the railing now, gliding back through the glass door. The six guards peer out suspiciously at the crowd for another few moments; then they, too, retreat out of sight. The balcony hovers high above us, completely empty.

Many of the people in the crowd around us let out great sighs—maybe they’ve been holding their breath ever since their first glimpse of Desmia, and they just now remembered that they need to breathe. Or maybe they’re sighing with disappointment because she’s gone. Or maybe they’re still so filled with awe and disbelief at what they saw that they have to express it somehow. Maybe they’ll be sighing for hours—no, years. Decades from now they’ll
be telling their grandchildren, “And once I went to Cortona and stood in the courtyard by the palace and saw Princess Desmia on her balcony. . . .”

“Cecilia?” Harper whispers. “What do you want to do now?”

Slowly I turn and focus my eyes on my friend. The crowd is thinning out around us now, and people are giving us a wide berth because we look so ragged—and probably because of how we smell, now that I think about it. But to me the sight of Harper’s dirty, freckled face is a comfort. Just looking at him shores up my resolve and banishes some of the more unpleasant questions hanging around my mind.

“We need to gather information, remember?” I tell him.

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Come on,” I say.

I’m tempted to grab his hand again—just to pull him along, for no other reason, really—but I chicken out. Instead I beckon him forward, toward the palace. The closer we get to it, the more it seems to soar overhead. I think it really must be as tall as the tallest mountain in the kingdom, Mount Valerian, and that’s more than fourteen thousand feet high.

The huge doorway leading to the palace is surrounded by double rows of guards. I go and stand directly in front of the nearest guard.

“Excuse me, sir,” I say. I clear my throat and try to forget that I’m barefoot, ragged, and filthy. I’ll be wearing royal finery soon enough. “What must one do if one wishes to arrange a private audience with the princess?”