The Princess Curse (12 page)

“No! No, it’s important to keep this a secret. Because if my father finds out, he’s going to send me away. And if the princesses find out, they’ll probably . . .” I trailed off, wondering how to end that supposition.
Poison me?
“I came to you because I need a witch, and I thought maybe you knew one.”

The laughter left Marjit’s eyes. “This is a lucky day for you,” she said. “For
I
am a witch.”

Chapter 15

I
n the end, it was the very fact that she’d been able to keep her witchcraft a secret that made me trust Marjit. I told her everything about the list.

Right away, she saw a number of things that I’d done wrong in trying the herbs on the list of Plantes Which Confer Vpon the Wearer Invisibilitie. “You’ve no
intentions
. You’ve not called on any Holies. There’s nothing to spark the magic. Invisibility en’t a simple quality of these plants, it’s a sleeping quality that must be drawn out, with a rhyme or holy water or sommat similar.”

I understood this. It was like how burdock works best on burns if you say a prayer for frost first. At the same time, I didn’t like it, because it wasn’t very clear or precise. None of this was written down on the list, and Marjit seemed very blithe about waving her hands, chanting a few words, and expecting it all to work.

“And I bet your ferns will work without the seeds,” she added.

“How?”

“Go out and cut some of them. Not all! You’ll want to nurse them along and try to harvest the seeds if this fails. What you cut, fashion into a wreath—or no, a cap. That’ll stay on your head better. You know how to net? You’ve spent all that time with Adina—she’s got to have taught you.”

“I’m bad at netting, but . . .”

“You’ll be good enough. You’ll make up your cap, I think with a prayer to the Big Lady—”

“The Big Lady?”

“Hush, don’t you worry about that.” She stared off into the middle distance, muttering slightly under her breath, before saying, “You’ll need a special needle.”

“A Nine-Brides Needle?” I asked. It was a stupid joke, but she took me seriously.

“No, though that’s a good thought, because of the stealth. No. I don’t have one on hand, and—well, I don’t know of nine weddings happening anytime soon. Sommat else. I’ll have to think on it.” She counted something on her fingers. “Come back in twelve days. The dark of the moon is the perfect time to do a ritual of invisibility.”

“No. It can’t wait that long! By then . . .” By then, Didina’s mother, and maybe the Duke of Styria, too, would be dead, or past the point of no return. “Look, the moon is waning. Isn’t that good enough?”

Marjit started to shake her head, then sighed. “I can’t guarantee anything, mind you,” she said. “Come tomorrow night at midnight. Have your ferns ready. And be prepared for a long night.”

I nodded. “Can you keep this a secret, Marjit?”

Marjit appeared to think about this. “Well, I suppose. . . .”

“Marjit!” I begged. I thought she was teasing, but I couldn’t risk anything.

“Of course I can keep a secret,” she said, and leaned down to kiss my cheek.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that wasn’t the promise I’d wanted.

Pa came with me to help Adina with the sleepers the next day, I think because he felt bad about being so harsh to me. Adina smiled at him and asked him for news of the castle.

“I’ve no good tidings, I’m afraid,” Pa said. “I was at the morning summoning—do you know of this ritual, Reveka? Every morning after they bathe, the princesses are brought before the Prince, to answer for the holes in their shoes. Princess Maricara always steps forward and says that they do not know, because they are asleep when the holes are made.”

I rolled my eyes. “Can’t Prince Vasile tell they’re lying?”

Pa said, “It takes a liar to spot a lie.” He pinched open Sfetnic’s mouth, dropped in a spoonful of broth, then massaged the boy’s throat. I waited for Pa to give me a significant glance, to make this a lesson about truth for me, but he didn’t. He just added, “Prince Vasile is terribly honest.”

“Honest for a prince,” Adina amended. “He’s not honest for a normal man.”

Pa continued with his news. “Usually, the Prince invites the princesses to sit down for a cup of spiced wine and some bread, but this morning, he let another man speak—an emissary from the King of Hungary, who has been sent to investigate the disappearance of a Transylvanian Saxon named Iosif—but really, he seems to be here to wring concessions out of our Prince about his heir—or lack thereof.” Pa frowned, staring down at Sfetnic’s peaceful face. “The Hungarians want Vasile to agree to become a count, beholden to King Corvinus, like the rulers in Marmatia.”

I frowned. “I thought that the Hungarians wanted to invade us.”

“The invasion would be solely to make Sylvania into this sort of vassal state. But they wouldn’t mind just bullying Prince Vasile into handing over his principality instead.”

“Would Prince Vasile do that, instead of letting the country get invaded?”

Pa grunted. “Doesn’t matter if Vasile would or wouldn’t. King Stefan in Moldavia won’t let that happen. Sylvania has been a good buffer for his country against Hungary, just as Moldavia has been a good buffer for us against Poland and the Turks. There’d be a war either way.”

I shivered, thinking of holes blown into the side of the castle, of cannonballs shooting through Brother Cosmin’s herbary or into this room among the helpless sleepers.

“Anyway,” Pa continued, “all week, this emissary has been pressing Vasile for the release of the Saxon, Iosif, who Princess Tereza was set to marry. Iosif disappeared a week or so ago; the rest of his delegation hurried away from here, and I’m sure they didn’t go home to Transylvania but ran straight into King Corvinus’s arms.”

“But Prince Vasile can’t release Iosif. He disappeared!”

“The emissary doesn’t believe in the curse—because Corvinus doesn’t believe in the curse. They think everyone missing or sleeping in here is a political enemy of Vasile.”

“Even Didina?” I asked, my voice rising with anger.

Pa shrugged. “How do we know what they really believe? Perhaps it is more convenient to deny the curse and think that Vasile is the villain. To believe that all of this is a political ploy to avoid allying with Hungary.”

Pa crossed Sfetnic’s hands over his chest and moved on to the next sleeper. “The emissary has been pressing for an old idea, I think because he’s been told to call Vasile’s bluff and get the Prince to confess that the curse isn’t real. He’s been wanting the princesses to be fitted with iron shoes. And today Prince Vasile agreed,” Pa said.

“What?” Adina and I chorused.

“He had to. The emissary has Prince Vasile trapped. If Prince Vasile doesn’t agree to it, he’s all but admitting the curse isn’t real. If the root of the problem is that the slippers have holes in them every morning, make slippers that won’t wear through—I think that’s his logic.”

I stared at Pa, appalled. “Surely it’s just a threat.”

“It’s not. Armas and a dozen of his men came into the room at that moment, and after them came the blacksmiths. Armas’s men seized the princesses, and the blacksmiths riveted the shoes on right there in the hall, like so many prisoners being shackled.”

I thought of the conversation Cook and Marjit had had in the kitchen and couldn’t believe it. Armas loved Otilia, I thought!

“And then Prince Vasile said to the emissary, ‘Go back to your King and tell him iron shoes can’t break a curse.’ And then”—Pa’s fingers tightened so hard around the cup of broth he was holding that I wondered if he would crack the wood—“the emissary said, ‘Maybe iron shoes could break the curse if you’d heated them as hot as the rivets before you put them on.’ And one of the princesses fainted.”

“Which one?” I asked, fascinated and horrified all at once.

“I don’t know her. Not Lacrimora, not the two legitimate ones. Not Otilia, either.”

Adina burst out, “How could he do that to his own girls?”

Pa shook his head. “It was that or war,” he said, though he didn’t sound convinced. “Armas and his men, once they were out of sight of the emissary, picked up the princesses and carried them to their tower.”

“Not good enough,” I muttered. “Not nearly good enough.”

I didn’t quite know if I meant that in terms of Armas’s behavior or in terms of the princesses being punished.

Perhaps both.

On the way out of the western tower, Pa stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“I know,” he said.

“You know what?”

“That the Princess Consort has you investigating ways to turn people invisible, for spying on the princesses.”

I blinked, examining him closely. He didn’t seem angry.

Then I really heard what he had said.
Ways to turn
people
invisible.

Not
me
.
People
.

“She told you about the list, and how I’ve been testing the things on it?” I asked, cautious not to reveal that my plan all along had been to be the invisible spy.

He nodded. “She told me to assist you if I could.”

“Well,” I said, thinking. “I have a strange nepenthe-seed concoction that comes ready tonight, which I’m not sure how to test.”

“Test it on me,” he said. I frowned at him. Didina had been right to be dubious about the effectiveness of the potion. I didn’t want to test it on him any more than I wanted to test it on me. But Pa’s size did mean it was less likely that I’d overdose him.

“What’s the risk, exactly?” he asked when I seemed reluctant.

“Hallucinations, catalepsy, death . . .”

“Brother Cosmin lets you use herbs that can kill people? You haven’t been his apprentice for even two months!”

I stared at Pa. “You can kill someone with most anything if you try hard enough. Or, more likely, when you
don’t
try hard enough.”

“You are not reassuring me, Reveka.”

“Pa, I studied herbs at the convent. I’ve been learning for
ages
. And herbs that don’t have a drastic effect on the body aren’t much use. Controlling the dosage is the true art of herbalism.”

“Can you manage not to kill me?”

“Certainly,” I lied. It was a tiny lie. I was pretty certain, and Pa had never admired hesitancy. “When?”

“Why not tonight? You said the potion was ready.”

True! But so were my plans with Marjit.

“You'll need to fast for the potion to be effective,” I hedged.

“I haven't eaten since before noon.”

“Well . . .” I tried to think how long that would leave me with Marjit.

Pa was starting to get that frowny face that meant he thought I was lying. So I smiled, and said, “Sure. Tonight.”

Chapter 16

P
a looked reluctant when I peeled back the layered cheesecloth from the bowl to expose the sodden mess of nepenthe seeds, but he drank a cup of the wine down to the dregs anyway.

The nepenthe wine had no immediate effect, and we sat together in silence while I leafed through
Physica
and Pa pared his fingernails. The noise of the paring stopped after a bit. I didn’t look up, thinking that he’d simply gotten his nails to their preferred length, but when I finally glanced at Pa, I was surprised to find him staring into the distance with his knife paused halfway across one nail.

“Pa?” I asked, and he looked toward me as though startled. His pupils were tiny.

“Reveka,” he said very loudly. He clapped his hand over his mouth, dropped it, and said my name at a more normal volume. “Reveka.” He smiled broadly at me then, a smile so relaxed and friendly and un-Pa-like that I would not have recognized him as my father if I’d met him on the street.

“Are you all right?”

He giggled. My Pa, dour soldier,
giggled
.

“Fiiiiiiiiiiine,” he told me. “Can you see me? Am I invisible yet?”

“No, not yet,” I said.

Pa stood up and strode across the room and back, then settled down beside me on Brother Cosmin’s stool. He stared at me for a long moment. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think I’d know you for your mother’s daughter, if we were strangers. Fortunately, I know you for
my
daughter: that chin”—and he jabbed my chin—“that cowlick of hair just there . . .” He poked at my forehead. “Just like my mother’s and my brothers’. But not a touch of your mother in you. I can barely remember what she looked like, except she didn’t look like you.”

She was prettier than me; that I knew. Enough nuns had told me so. And taller. I thought you were supposed to get to be prettier and taller than your mother, but this must be a fable they tell to girls so that we keep trying to grow up.

Pa giggled again, so hard that he lowered his head to the herbary table. His shoulders shook. “I said ‘fortunately,’” he said.

“What?”

“I said, when I talked about you looking like me . . . I said, ‘fortunately.’ It can’t be fortunate for you, though.”

“Pa,” I said firmly, “let’s leave the discussion of my looks alone.”

“Yes.” He stood and paced the room a few times again, then climbed onto the table and lay across the open copy of
Physica
. There was no rescuing the book, but as long as he didn’t squirm, it probably wasn’t in danger.

“Pa, maybe you should—”

“Am I invisible yet?”

“No.”

He turned his head to look at me, his cheek resting against the page I’d been reading. “You’re a good child, Reveka,” he said. “I don’t tell you this, because the Abbess said that praise inflates your pride, but you
are
good. You don’t even lie as much as she said you did.”

I bit my lip, scowling. He didn’t notice this. He was rolling his head back and forth across Hildegard’s words and looking dreamy. “And she’s just so beautiful.”

“Who? The Abbess?”

“Not the Abbess,” he said. “The Princess—”

A scraping noise came from outside. Pa bolted upright, swiveling his head like an owl’s to stare at the casement. “I heard that!” he cried, and ran over to open the shutters. Before I quite knew how it had happened—or even noticed who was standing on the other side of the casement—Pa hauled Mihas the Cowherd in through the window by his collar.