“It’s not really a banquet in the strictest sense of the word,” Gloria said. “The queen has arranged a welcome home dinner for Juliana. There will be some important political figures and high-ranking Citadel personnel there, but it won’t be a huge party, and it’ll be served in the formal dining room, not the banquet hall. This will be fine.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re the expert. I like the color.”
Gloria held it up against me. “It suits you.” She turned me so that I stood before the mirror. Juliana’s face stared back at me. I shivered.
“Oh dear,” Gloria fretted. “You’re cold.” The door chimed. “That’ll be the ladies. They’ll do your hair and makeup. Go into the closet and get dressed while they set up. I’ll let them in.”
Juliana’s aestheticians were waiting when I emerged from the closet. They all greeted me with a stiff, “Good morning, Your Highness,” to which I took care not to respond with anything more than a head nod, as Gloria had instructed. Apparently, no staff or domestics were allowed to speak to the royal family unless they were first spoken to except in salutation. They did their work fast. The hairdresser, Louisa, blow-dried my hair until it was stick-straight and then styled it into a waterfall of big, soft curls. Then Rochelle, the makeup artist, applied layers of foundation, powder, blush, mascara, and eye shadow to my bare skin.
“The princess is going on the box this morning, so make sure she’s camera ready,” Gloria instructed Rochelle. When they were finished, they left as silently as they came. Gloria gave me a bunch of shoes to choose from; they were stilettos, about three inches high. Apparently, that was all Juliana owned.
“Perfect,” Gloria said. I gripped a nearby bedpost to make sure I didn’t fall flat on my face. Gloria gave me a quick once-over.
“One last thing.” She went to the dresser and grabbed a small, gold pin. She fastened it to the dress right above my heart, careful not to damage the delicate fabric. “This is a rowan branch,” she explained. “It’s the symbol of the House of Rowan, to which Juliana belongs. We all wear one in the Citadel.” Sure enough, there was an identical pin fastened to her shirt. Thomas had been wearing one, too—as had the General. “But this one is special. It’s linked to Thomas’s KES earpiece. If you press it, you’ll be able to communicate with him.”
“I better not lose it, then, huh?” I said, fingering it absently.
“If you do, there are more in that crystal bowl on the dresser,” Gloria told me. Her mouth quirked at the ends. “Juli can be careless sometimes.”
“Is that what you call her? Juli?” I liked the sound of it. My birth certificate read
ALEXANDRA EMILIE LAWSON
, but I’d gone by Sasha for so long that I sometimes forgot it wasn’t my real name.
Gloria nodded. “Those of us who know her well.” I wondered if Thomas called her Juli.
“Gloria,” I said. “This interview …”
She pursed her lips, which, I was learning, meant she was trying very hard to think of the exact right way to put something. “It ought to be fine. We have a deal with the CBN. We approve all the questions in advance. But Eloise Dash … she’s a more ruthless reporter than she appears to be. You’ll have to be on your guard with her. Juliana doesn’t like her, but then again she doesn’t like any reporters.”
I took one last look in the mirror. The girl I saw reflected in it looked much more like the girl in the photographs than she did me. Gloria, Louisa, and Rochelle had done their jobs well; I was starting to understand, for the first time, how anyone might mistake me for a princess.
Gloria went to fetch her tablet, and as she passed through a ray of sunlight, I saw something sparkling on her left ring finger.
“Are you married?” I asked, pointing to her hand.
Gloria glanced at the ring as if it was so much a part of her that she had forgotten it was even there. “Engaged.”
“Like me,” I joked weakly.
Ugh
.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” Gloria rushed to a nearby bureau and started rifling through a carved jewelry box. When she found what she was looking for, she came over and dropped something in my hand—an engagement ring. It had a thin, delicate band of what looked like platinum and a pear-shaped diamond the size of a geode sitting in the center.
“It came from Farnham a week after the engagement contract was signed,” Gloria explained. “Juliana never wore it out of protest, but I think you should. It would look bad if Prince Callum showed up and you didn’t have it on. And God knows what Eloise Dash would say if she noticed your ring finger was bare.”
I held the ring in between the pads of my fingers, shifting it back and forth out of the light. It was the most expensive thing I’d ever held; most of my jewelry came from the sale rack at Target.
“Go ahead,” Gloria prompted. “It’s not going to bite you.”
I slid the ring on; it was heavy but beautiful. Even I couldn’t deny that.
“Is it time to go see the king?” This was the part I was least nervous about. Thomas and Gloria had told me that the king lapsed in and out of consciousness, but that even in his more lucid moments it was unclear how much he was capable of understanding. He would probably be asleep the whole time, which meant that this was the perfect first encounter with someone who didn’t know I wasn’t Juliana.
Gloria consulted her tablet. “It is. Thomas will take you there.”
“Hurray,” I muttered under my breath, though secretly, I was relieved at not having to go alone.
FOURTEEN
“So,” I said, taking a deep breath and turning to face Thomas, who was standing in the doorway. “Am I convincing?”
“Very.” He nodded in approval, carefully avoiding my eyes. “We should go.” He lifted his gaze to Gloria, and I followed it. She was busy scribbling away with her stylus on the glass tablet. “We must keep to the schedule.”
“Yes, you must,” she said, without looking up. “Get out of here.”
Thomas led the way through the Castle’s labyrinthine halls, but as we passed through them it occurred to me that I could’ve done just as good of a job. For whatever reason, Juliana’s surroundings were the parts of the visions that stuck with me the most. I knew what was behind nearly every door we passed, and made a mental note to check out the library, if I ever found myself alone again.
Everything was brighter and sharper outside of my dreams. The walls were covered with paintings depicting a variety of scenes, both wartime and pastoral, portraits of long-dead kings and queens peppered throughout. French windows looked out over the lush garden, magnificent mirrors in gilded frames held our reflections as we walked, and massive crystal chandeliers hung overhead, throwing light over every surface like confetti. Our footsteps echoed as we made our way across the beautiful stone floor. None of the doors had knobs, just LCD panels to the right of each doorframe. Most of the panels were blue, but one or two were green. Thomas had mentioned what the colors meant; green for open, blue for locked. We passed several armed guards in military dress, but they didn’t speak to either of us, nor did Thomas acknowledge their presence. They appeared to be part of normal life in the Castle, but they put me on edge.
“Relax,” Thomas said.
“I’m relaxed,” I insisted.
“You look like you’re being led to your execution,” he told me. “And like your spine is a steel rod—who taught you to walk?”
“These heels are three inches high.
You
try wearing them.” He chuckled. “What? Now you’re making fun of me?”
He held up hands in a gesture of surrender. “Never, princess. Never.”
I glared at him, but didn’t say aloud what I was thinking, which was:
Don’t call me that.
Thomas paused at one of the doors, so abruptly that I almost walked right on past it.
Thomas pointed at the panel. I pressed my hand to it and it flashed, bringing up the now-familiar keypad. “Two, five, four, two, four, four,” Thomas whispered. I input the code, committing it to memory. The door looked like it was made of wood, but as it slid open so that we could pass through I saw that the ornate carvings were merely a façade, and that the real door underneath was made of metal, just like the one to Juliana’s bedroom. It was a strange place, the Castle. The old and the new mingled so closely it was as if they were part of a single organism, and I couldn’t deny that the result was beautiful.
I peered into the room. It was large and brightly illuminated by several fluorescent lamps, which gave it the stark feeling of belonging in a hospital, even though it had all the trappings of luxury—intricate moldings painted white against the mint green of the rest of the room, expensive-looking paintings and tapestries hanging from the walls, antique furniture and heavy velvet drapery. The king’s bed, an elegant mahogany four-poster with a rich red canopy, was in the center of the room, surrounded by machines and IV poles.
The queen was sitting next to the bed in a tall chair. I recognized her from a picture Thomas and Gloria had shown me back at the Tower, during my interminable yet somehow insubstantial briefing. The queen was tall and thin, beautiful despite the worry lines that scored her porcelain skin. I wondered if they were new, the result of her husband’s illness and her country’s political problems, or if she’d earned them over the course of many years. Her thick blond hair was gathered in a chignon at the nape of her neck, and she wore a simple, elegant dove-gray shift dress with almost no makeup; her only jewelry was a pair of drop pearl earrings that swung as she turned to see who was entering the room. When she caught sight of Thomas and me, she let go of the king’s hand and rose from her seat.
“You’re back,” she said in a flat tone. She folded her hands at the base of her stomach in a ladylike manner; they were the only things about the queen that were not lovely. In fact, they were knobby and red, like she’d just gotten done washing a sink full of dishes, which I doubted.
“I am,” I said. Just knowing that the queen and Juliana hated each other made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to her.
“It’s about time.” The queen glanced back at the king. “He’s been asking for you day and night. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him you weren’t here.”
“Is he lucid?” Thomas asked.
The queen shook her head. “But he is talking. He’s been saying the same thing over and over since you left.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Your name,” she said, with a hint of nastiness. “I’ll leave you alone—he doesn’t seem to notice whether or not I’m here.”
“I’m sure that’s not …” But the queen held her hand up.
“Don’t patronize me, Juliana, I’m not in the mood.” She looked tired and drawn; I couldn’t help feeling a measure of compassion for the queen, despite her incivility. “I have business to attend to in my study. Call me if something changes.” She said this to Thomas, looking me over once more before sweeping out of the room and disappearing down the hallway.
“Don’t let her get to you,” Thomas said. “She’s not as scary as she seems.”
“Really? Because she seems pretty scary to me,” I said. The queen had rattled me. I wasn’t used to being spoken to in such a petulant way by adults. Snotty girls at school, sure, but adults tended to love me.
I gazed once more around the room. The king was lying still; the only sign he wasn’t asleep was the manic fluttering motion of his right hand in the air.
“What’s the matter?” Thomas asked, picking up on my anxiety.
“I don’t like hospitals,” I told him.
“But this isn’t a hospital. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid
,
” I said. Thomas waited for me to continue. “It’s just—I went to the hospital the night my parents died. Ever since then, I can’t … I don’t like it. That’s all.”
“Come on,” Thomas said. His hand grazed my elbow and I started as if he had shocked me. He gave me a curious look, but was polite enough not to mention it. “This won’t be that bad. He’s just lying there.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I can do this.” The king looked so pathetic, alone even when other people were in the room.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Thomas assured me. “The trick to pretending to be somebody else is to do everything exactly the way that other person would do them, even when it feels unnatural, until you get used to it.”
“You would know,” I muttered.
“Yeah, I would know,” Thomas said. “When I was Grant, I ate peas, even though I hate them, because
he
loves them. I drank beer under the train tracks with that dumb friend of his, Ivan, because
he
would do that. I conformed to every aspect of his routine. Did you know he flosses his teeth three times a day? I read his books, I watched his movies, I listened to his music. I slept nine hours a night even though I haven’t done that since I was so young I barely remember it. And you know what?
Nobody ever questioned me
. Not even when I asked you to prom. I’m an expert at fooling people into believing I’m somebody else, so you might as well listen to me.”
I stared at him, my mouth agape. He had some nerve to bring up his performance as Grant to me. But he wasn’t wrong. He’d fooled me with his act. He’d fooled everyone.
“Fine.” I swallowed hard and approached the bed with caution. The king’s eyes were open, but he was just staring at the ceiling. His right hand grazed the air, but it only took me a few seconds to realize that it was repeating the same rhythm over and over again, his fingers moving in the exact same way every time, his wrist rising and falling in a precise pattern.
“He does that a lot,” Thomas said. “That hand thing. Ever since they moved him here he’s been doing it.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. The doctor said it’s nothing to worry about, just a compulsion. Like his brain’s stuck in a loop.” But the tone of Thomas’s voice said that it unsettled him as much as it did me.
I sat down in the chair the queen had recently vacated. “What do I do now?”
“Talk to him,” Thomas said.
“What do I call him?”
“Try ‘Dad.’ ”
“Hi, Dad,” I said hesitantly. The word sounded strange coming out of my mouth. I hadn’t called someone “Dad” in a very long time. The king showed no reaction. He didn’t even blink. I tried again. “Hi, Dad, it’s me—”