The Princess Curse (13 page)

The boy didn’t even struggle. He’d gone limp in Pa’s grip, like a cat grabbed by the scruff. His mouth hung open like he wanted to mew.

“Why were you listening? What were you trying to hear? Do you work for the Hungarians?” Pa was shouting into the cowherd’s face.

“Pa, no! Pa! Shush!” Pa’s roars subsided into shouted whispers. I wondered if anyone would come to investigate the commotion, but then, every man drank too much plum brandy now and again and started a row with his family. Or with the herbalist. Right?

“Cowherd!” I shook my head at Mihas. “Tell him you aren’t a spy, Cowherd.” Of
course
he said nothing. “Pa, you know he’s not a spy!”

“I’ll sit on him until he tells us who he’s spying for. Or wait—is he here to steal? Does he want the golden cup?”

“Oh, Pa,” I cried. “Stop it! Let the boy go!” Pa’d been a bit mad before, but this was utter nonsense.

As suddenly as he had grabbed Mihas, Pa released him. “I don’t feel so good,” he told me, plopping onto my stool so heavily that the wood creaked.

“I can see that.” I sighed. I turned to the cowherd. “Go
away
, Mihas. No one wants you here!”

He stared at me with giant eyes turned violet in the candlelight.

“She said
go
,” Pa said, lurching to his feet. Mihas scrambled backward, I think trying to reach the door, but instead bashing into a low shelf of flasks. A rain of rose-scented oil fell over his head. I groaned. Rose oil was so expensive.

“Pa, sit
down
.” I stomped on his foot, and he sat on his bum like a two-year-old.

Mihas scrubbed at his face and spat, trying to get the oil out of his eyes and mouth. I stepped forward to help him, but he staggered away from me, toward the door again—and this time stepped into the compost bucket. “Augh!” he shrieked, trying to shake the bucket off his foot, but it was firmly wedged. He stumped away, faster than I would have thought possible with one foot disabled and his eyes full of rose oil.

“Mihas!” I called, but there was no getting him to wait. I was about to run after him and offer my aid when I heard Pa retching violently behind me.

“Oh, Easter,” I muttered, and went to help Pa.

When he had evacuated the contents of his stomach all over the herbary floor, I said, “I think we can call this effort a failure.”

“Agreed,” Pa said, and calmly leaned over to erp again.

Ew.

I cleaned the herbary quickly and left Pa snoring on my table. Outside, I looked around but found no signs of Mihas. I went to the ferns growing among the rue and cut three-quarters of the fronds. The night previous, they had been short and tightly curled; tonight they were in full leaf.

I met Marjit beneath the never-blinking eyes of the Little Well’s carved dragons. She hauled a fresh bucket of well water and set it down.

“Brother Cosmin said we mustn’t drink that,” I said.

“Heavens, no! It used to be a holy well, they say, though at some point it gained a reputation for turning people into werewolves.”

Uh-oh.

“But,” Marjit continued, “it’s merely that the well is blessed by a capricious fairy, and it was just safer for everyone to avoid drinking from it.”

She spoke like this was a well-known fact. My lips itched a little.

“Are you sure? Brother Cosmin said that it was cursed by Turkish prisoners.” I pointed at the inscription.

Marjit snorted, sprinkling dirt into the bucket of water. “Brother Cosmin thinks he knows more than the rest of us. It’s a holy well, trust me.”

“Could drinking from it give dreams?”

“Dreams, art, dancing, beauty, luck, kindness—it could grant any of those things. Or it could cause toads to drop from your mouth when you speak lies. It’s risky. Don’t drink from it. Now. Put your ferns in there.” She gestured at the bucket.

When I was slow to move, she grabbed my hands and plunked the ferns into the water, then waved her hands over the bucket and muttered in the church language. I could make out only a few words, mostly numbers. My eyes glazed.

“I’m calling on the Big Lady now,” Marjit told me. “And to Athena, the goddess, who stole the Lord of Hell’s own cap of invisibility and gave it to Perseus. I figure her for your best patron. Not so much Hades, given what you’ve said.”

“All right,” I said. Pagan nonsense, I supposed, calling on dead gods instead of ever-living saints, but I still suppressed a shiver. At least it wasn’t the Devil. I closed my eyes and muttered a prayer for intercession to Saint Hildegard.

Marjit’s droning continued. At length, her waving and words grew to a climax, and she drew out the last word in a moan and pulled her hands slowly apart. In the palm of her left hand was a netting needle—a big one, white like bone, with a large eye.

“A Thrice-Mothered Needle,” she said. “Bathed in a mother’s tears, a mother’s blood, and a mother’s milk. The eye is big enough for a fern stem to pass through.” She handed it to me. “Get to work.”

The sky was graying, and I was only half finished with the simple cap I’d planned. A rooster called in the distance, waking the crows along the rooftops, who cawed morning insults to one another. At least, I always thought caws sounded like insults. Perhaps caws are actually love poems to other crows.

“When are they going to leave?” I said, stabbing almost blindly with my needle, my eyes crossed from the night of netting by the tiny light of a dark lantern.

“I imagine when Corvinus gives up on our country,” Marjit said. “That is the lumpiest hat I’ve ever seen.”

I smoothed the cap. I was still clumsy at netting, and I hadn’t known how to handle the fern fronds at first without snapping them.

“No harm in the extra time to finish?” I asked. “It’s daylight.”

“If you’re done before next moonset, there’s no more harm than there is in old Marjit.” She patted her chest.

I smiled, but my liver wasn’t in it. I rolled up the cap in my apron and tucked it under my arm. “Good night, Marjit.”

“Hmph. The least you could’ve done was cut me some fresh bath herbs. Sleep well, Apprentice.”

I slept hard through the early hours, and I woke bleary-eyed at midmorning when Brother Cosmin stumbled into the herbary and called for me. He was only half awake himself.

I poked my head over the edge of the loft. “Would you like a tisane, Brother Cosmin?” I asked solicitously. He agreed, and I slid down the ladder and set about warming a nice tisane for each of us. I made mine with pearl barley for wakefulness. In his, I mixed a strong dose of valerian for sleep, and covered the bitterness with three kinds of mint.

He drank, and I wondered if it was too much. He was older than he seemed. Perhaps his heart couldn’t take it. I promised myself that if he woke hale and strong, I would never slip secret sedatives to old men again.

As soon as he nodded to sleep over his mortar and pestle, I whipped out the cap and started netting, keeping my apron at the ready to throw over the top of my work if I heard the door squeak.

An hour passed, then two. The ferns dried out and started to break, and I had to soak the whole mess in water again.

When I had knotted the last stitches, I held the cap doubtfully for a moment before placing it on my head. It was a misshapen mess, worse than the socks I’d made, but I blamed the material as much as my lack of skill. Nonetheless, it fitted my head, and stayed on, and didn’t disintegrate, for all that it appeared fragile and strange.

I looked at my hands. They were as my hands always were, though perhaps a bit more blue than normal. In fact, the whole world appeared a little bluer.

“Did it work?”

Brother Cosmin snorted awake at the sound of my voice. “Hello? Reveka? Now, where did that shirking girl go off to this time?” He looked all around him.

And he didn’t see me.

He didn’t see me
.

Chapter 17

T
hat night, I huddled in a corner of the princesses’ tower, well out of everyone’s way, invisibility cap perched atop my head, and watched.

The princesses took their evening meal in their room, in light of their injuries. They passed the time with moaning, while shoving sheepskins and moleskins and battings into their shoes to ease their pain. I thought it was too bad for them that they would try to poison me if they found me, since I knew a really excellent recipe for meadowsweet tea that would help their feet.

“I’d curse
him
if I knew how,” Princess Maricara said, after dismissing the servants.

“You say that every day,” another princess said. “I wish you’d just figure it out and stop carping about it.”

“Sisters,” a third princess intervened, “peace! We have important issues to discuss. We need to bring Iosif back. Bring him back and give him to the Hungarian emissary. Then the shoes can come off, and—”

“And just how do you propose we do that?” Maricara snapped.

The rest of the princesses shook their heads. “There’s no way,” Otilia said. “Even I can see that.”

“There’s one way,” Tereza said. “And that’s if one of us accepts the proposal.”

Stone silence greeted this suggestion, until Ruxandra, one of the tavern maid’s daughters, said, “Fine.
You
accept it.”

This led to an outbreak of squabbling that Lacrimora shushed. “No. Absolutely not. No one is accepting anything.”

“I . . . I could—” Otilia began.

“No,” Lacrimora said. “We have come too far in this together to accept losing one of us now. And—Otilia, you love another! Even if there are those among us who don’t care for your immortal soul, surely they can see how wrong it would be.”

“On the contrary, we are princesses,” Tereza said with overweening dignity. “Princesses do not marry for love, like peasants or minor nobility. They marry for wealth and peace, for the good of their countries. Honestly, what could be for the better good of our country?”

“I think we’re back to
you
accepting the proposal,” Princess Viorica said.

“I think we’re back to reminding each other about what losing your immortal soul actually means!” Lacrimora said. “We may only be sisters by half, but we do owe this consideration to one another.”

Tereza bowed her head. “Yes. Of course, Lacrimora is right.”

“Besides, Iosif is a pawn in Hungary’s game. They don’t actually care if they get him back,” Lacrimora said.

There were a few grumbles, but everyone agreed.

Lacrimora, gazing out the window at the sky, said, “It’s time.”

Viorica and a few of the others went around the room, peering under beds and poking behind curtains. I held my breath when Princess Suzana stopped, one hand raised, and put a finger to her lips. She jerked her head at one of the beds. Everyone nodded. But there was no call to action, no swarming on the hidden person, like there had been the night they’d caught Didina, even though it was clear they had found someone else in the room.

Maricara and Suzana limped over to step on opposite corners of the hearth. With a grinding of stone on stone, the floor opened to reveal stairs leading down.

Maricara led the way, a tiny dark lantern in hand.

The others followed her. Just as I was about to tag along at the end of the procession, Mihas slid from beneath a bed and sneaked down after them—far too close on Lacrimora’s heels, I thought, for someone who didn’t have an invisibility cap! I goggled at him, unable to determine why he was here and what he thought he was doing—but I didn’t have a chance to goggle long. The stone floor started to close up again. I dashed down the steps after the procession, and the stones drew together behind me with a tired rumble.

I was standing in darkness only faintly broken by Maricara’s narrow lantern beam ahead.

In front of me, Mihas trod on the back of Lacrimora’s trailing gown. She cried out.

“What’s wrong?” Otilia asked.

“Um, nothing,” Lacrimora said. “I put my hand on something slimy.” Indeed, the wall to my right held a faint sheen reflecting the light from the dark lantern ahead—water, and also slime. She motioned Otilia ahead, and the procession continued.

Idiot cowherd,
I called Mihas under my breath. He was going to get himself killed. Or whatever it was that happened down here.

The descent seemed to take forever, with the princesses hobbling on pained feet. Most of them were only capable of walking down one step at a time, like a small child who is first learning how to use stairs. I took care to hang back, well away from Mihas, and Mihas seemed to have gotten the sense to stay well away from Lacrimora’s hem, at least.

Eventually, the stairs gave way to . . . snow.

I hesitated on the last stone step, my foot poised in midair. The snow glowed slightly, even where it covered winter-sleeping trees ahead. The door in the floor I’d expected, and the stairs leading down, and the dark passageway . . . but I’d never anticipated a whole world beneath the surface of our world, a world with trees and . . . snow. “Saint Hildegard’s garden,” I swore in amazement.

My hand flew to my mouth, covering it too late. None of the princesses glanced back, but Mihas looked over his shoulder. His glance passed right through me, though, and while he hesitated a long moment, he followed Lacrimora.