The Princess Curse (18 page)

“Certainly, girls your age do marry, all the time,” he agreed. “But a girl as young as you lives as a daughter of the family, as a sister to her husband, until the couple prove their maturity to their parents. Consummation . . . waits. For many years, sometimes.”

I’d never heard that about the ruling classes, but suddenly, it made sense why Princess Daciana wasn’t a mother yet.

“You’re telling me you went to all this trouble to get a bride, and you want to wait a few more years before getting your heirs?”

“I will have no heir of my body here,” Dragos said, and for an instant, his voice—well, perhaps more his accent—sounded like Frumos’s. If I closed my eyes, could I imagine that he was the slender young man who’d pretended not to know my name? “It is only a bride I require, a queen for my land. And I’m very grateful that you’ve sacrificed yourself by marrying me. For yes, I am a dragon, a
zmeu
, and that’s as bad as anything. But you must have had plans. You must have wanted . . . a family? Children?”

“We won’t have
any
children?” For this, I was mostly grateful. I couldn’t imagine bearing little red-skinned, horned babies. But I also felt the pang of a loss I did not even fully comprehend. I had never intended to marry, but how could I gain a husband and lose all prospect of children in a single day? In a single hour?

“I am a lord of the Underworld. This is a domain of darkness and death. No life begins down here.” He spoke so sadly, my ire fled, and with it my sense of gratitude and loss. Mostly, I just felt pity. And that emotion seemed to be a doorway for the darkness.

“All life begins in the dark, though,” I said, looking at the candles. They did very little to hold the darkness at bay. “All seeds sleep in the dirt.” The words felt hollow. I could feel the darkness pressing on me. I tottered on my feet, losing my balance a little.

Dragos was there in an instant, hoisting me onto a chair by the cold fireplace. A flash, and he ignited the fire. “Stay a moment—I will fetch you some food and water. You will be all right, with the fire and the candles?”

I nodded and buried my head in my hands, wondering how I was going to live here, and that’s when the darkness came striding in like it owned my soul, robbing me of my breath. For a long, horrible moment, I could only remember the lies I’d told, the half-truths I’d kept, and the fear of punishment in this life and the next that lying brought. I moaned—and then, the darkness was gone.

I breathed. It was like lead ingots had been removed from my chest. That . . . thing, it wasn’t just darkness. That was . . .
Darkness.

A few moments later, there was the scuff of a footstep, and I sat bolt upright, terrified, my hands clamped down on the arms of my chair. Lord Dragos didn’t have footsteps, he had . . . hoofbeats. This was someone else, and there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else. “Who’s there?” I cried, and nearly jumped out of my skin when Mihas stepped into the light.

Chapter 23

“R
eveka,” Mihas whispered, lurching to kneel before me. “I have a message from your father!”

“What?” I leaped to my feet, capsizing the cowherd. He lay on the floor, looking confused.

“Before I came back up the mountain, your father and the mean princess, Lacrimora, said I was to look to your welfare—”

“Did they order you to come back here?”

“No. I offered to come.”

“What? Why?”

Mihas looked confused.

“You idiot! I came here to free
you
!”

His mouth gaped open. He gestured around. “You did this for me?”

“For all of you! For my pa, of course, mostly, but for all of you trapped idiots, too. And for the sleepers in the tower—Lacrimora will wake them now.” Tears of fury sprang to my eyes.

He got slowly to his feet. “Your father’s message—he says, ‘Hold fast. Eat nothing. Drink no wine, or beer, or the water of Lethe. Do these things, and you can leave the Underworld again.’ He will come for you. He will rescue you.”

“The others, they all drank the wine and ate the food, and Lord Dragos released
them
from their bonds—”

“I asked this same question,” he said. I felt markedly stupider for thinking like Mihas. “Princess Lacrimora said Dragos would never release you if you ate here, because you agreed to be the consort of the Underworld. But your father shushed her and said— Oh.” Mihas looked sad. “He said not to tell you that.”

I ignored this. “So am I just supposed to starve?” The Darkness was pressing at me again, trying to steal my breath. I tried to ignore it.

“I will bring you food and drink from the World Above as I can,” Mihas said. “I’ll be your footman. If I set a plate of food elegantly before you, you can be sure that it is safe. If I fumble with it, then it is not safe.”

Amazing. Perhaps he wasn’t a total idiot after all.

“Now, the water you can drink, as long as you are careful never to drink from the river Lethe.”

Lethe—I’d heard of that. In the Greek myths, it was the river of forgetting, which souls had to drink from in order to leave behind their lives on earth. “All right. No food, no wine, no Lethe. I understand. I assume it’s all right to use the toilet facilities, however?”

Mihas looked confused, then vaguely appalled. “I didn’t ask!” he wailed.

“It was a joke, Mihas.”

His brows drew together. “How can you make light of this?”

“How can I not?” I peered into a water pitcher standing alluringly on the table. I hadn’t been hungry or thirsty until Mihas had told me I was on a restricted diet. “Did my father give you any further message for me? ‘Don’t eat. Don’t drink anything but water, and then not if it’s from Lethe.’ But nothing else?” No ‘Thank you’? No apology for stealing my invisibility cap?

“I . . . I don’t think so,” Mihas said, sounding confused.

“Never mind.” I poked my nose into the pitcher and inhaled. It smelled like springwater. “What’s the water of Lethe like?”

Mihas appeared to consider. “Like water,” he said. I groaned and put the pitcher back down.

I didn’t hear Dragos enter, but I felt the room fill with his presence. I turned to find him glaring at Mihas.

“Why didn’t you go with the others?” he asked the boy.

“I vowed to serve you,” Mihas said.

Dragos snorted, looking carefully from Mihas to me. “And I released you from your vows. You should have taken the chance while you could. You will not be released a second time.”

“I came to serve,” Mihas said. “May I show your guest to her room?”

“She is my betrothed and your future queen,” Dragos said. “Not a guest.
She
will tell you what she wants.”

“I could rest,” I said feebly.

“Very well.” Dragos extended his hand to me, and for lack of anything wise to do, I let my fingers touch his. He bent nearly in half to press his dragon lips—which were not really lips at all, but simply the coldness of his tusks where they poked from his mouth—to my hand. I tried not to shudder.

He stepped back. “I must see if I can find servants for you,” he said. “Mihas here will not be enough. Sleep well, Reveka.” And his hand and his tusks and the whole of him were gone in a swirl of red wings and black cloak.

I stared after him for too long a moment, until Mihas coughed, evincing more discretion than I had ever suspected he possessed. He held out his arm in a courtly manner, and I took it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for an herbalist’s apprentice to play queen to a cowherd’s footman.

Mihas took a brace of candles and led me down two hallways to a bedroom. Bedchamber and hallways alike were stone, stone, and more stone. There was no softness anywhere, no carpets or tapestries. The bed even lacked curtains, which it direly needed, for I was beginning to feel the stone-damp in my bones. There was at least a mattress filled with something softer than straw, covered by a bearskin—head still attached.

I dropped to one of the chairs, which was of course stone. Like miniature thrones, all of them, and every single one needed a cushion. I pressed my palms against my eyes, keeping the tears away just barely by remembering that Mihas was in the room with me.

I was, for the first time, glad of his company.

While my head had been buried, he’d made a fire in the hearth. “This will take the chill off the room. I must go to serve my lord now.”

“Our lord,” I said, but not very loudly, more trying out the words than anything.

Mihas heard me anyway. “Our lord,” he repeated.

After Mihas left, the Darkness pushed in close around me. I was having a hard time breathing. I closed my eyes, selecting a darkness of my own choosing . . . though my presence here, that was my choice, too, wasn’t it? I’d saved Pa, ended the curse—tried to save Mihas, not that the stupid cowherd would stay saved. . . .

The wave of palpable Darkness rolled back just enough for me to crawl into bed, so crawl into bed I did, though I made sure to turn the bear’s head as far away from mine as possible. I didn’t want to spend the night feeling like it was going to eat my face. Or kiss me.

I thought about crying but just went to sleep instead. I didn’t sleep terribly long, and I certainly didn’t sleep well. I dreamed of earthquakes, and falling buildings, far too vividly.

Chapter 24

W
hen I woke, the fire had warmed the room to a tolerable temperature. So that was something. But the Darkness dimmed the light of the fire and pressed me into the bed. I lay feeling paralyzed by the weight of endless night. It took me a long moment before I could convince my limbs to move. Wondering if I was awake or dreaming, I tried to say, “Get up! Your eyes are open! You’re awake! Move!”

But even my effort to speak was strangled by the Darkness, and I could only grunt.

Hearing my own voice freed me, though, and I was able to wiggle my fingers, and from there to sit up.

I crawled stiffly out of bed and went to crouch by the fire. I stayed there for what felt like a long time, until I wondered if anyone was ever going to remember me. Probably not. Lord Dragos had indicated that the enchanted footmen were the only servants he’d employed, and if Mihas was now doing the work of thirty men, it was unlikely anyone was going to come in and solicitously ask if I needed a chamber pot. Or a fresh change of clothes. Or a bath.

I shivered. I doubted proper bathing facilities existed in the Underworld. And if they did, a “proper bathing facility” probably meant a cold bath with sandpaper towels.

And yet, the pavilion below had been well-appointed and delightful to the senses. And warm enough. Couldn’t this castle be made as comfortable?

Well, I was used to shifting for myself. I jammed my feet into my shoes, supremely grateful for my thick woolen socks. If I were dressed like a princess, I’d probably freeze to death here. On a hopeful hunch, I dug under my bed and found a chamber pot, and used it.

I wondered if I was allowed to leave my room at will. I tried the door, and it opened.

“Of course,” I said airily. “You’re the future queen. And where would you go, anyway?”

I grabbed up a candle and lit it from the hearth. It was not difficult to find my way to the hall from the night before. A fire crackled there now, and a wolfskin rug had been added to the floor, along with a few rather hairy cushions. “How delightful,” I muttered, lifting one of the cushions to my stone chair and settling down on it.

The Darkness pressed on me, pressed on my eyes. In spite of fires and candles, the shadows crawled ever closer.

I heard hooves on the stones of the hall and braced myself.

“Did you sleep?” Lord Dragos asked, entering the room.

“A little.”

“It’s morning in the World Above.”

I frowned. “Already? Perhaps I slept longer than I thought.”

“Time does not run reliably on the same track below as it does above,” he said.

I should have expected time to be different. There are stories about people who dance with fairies for a night and in the morning find a hundred years have passed and everyone they loved is dead of old age. But . . .

The Darkness crept closer, seeped into my pores, wrapped itself around my waist like a bodice.

I moaned, and the Darkness broke over me like a wave. The walls swayed around me, and I found myself slumped in my chair, limbs stretched out as I attempted to bear the weight of the Darkness. I lay still for a long moment after it released me and moved on.

No wonder people drank Lethe. It would be a sweet relief, after moments like that.

When I could breathe and see again, Dragos was watching me gravely. He extended a silver goblet. “I’m sorry. Drink this.”

“I don’t want it,” I said, feeling ragged. I levered myself up to sit on my hands, so they wouldn’t betray me by taking the cup. “And what are you sorry about?”

“I forgot what it was like when I first came here. I apologize. I should have remembered. . . .”

His eyes were still not Prince Frumos’s eyes. Not that it mattered. I didn’t trust Prince Frumos any more than I trusted Lord Dragos. Or King Dragos. Or whatever he was calling himself. Only, there was something sad and honest in his expression now.

I looked at the goblet. “When you first came here? Haven’t you always been here?”

He lowered the cup and stared into it. “I am as newborn to this world as you are, in the grand scheme of things. Drink,” he said. “It will make things easier. It is the same water that you drank from the Little Well in Castle Sylvian. The fact that you once drank that water is probably all that’s kept you from going completely under by now.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand. You told me not to drink from the Little Well a third time.”

“That was when you were for the World Above, when you were to live and die there. Down here . . . The Underworld is for the dead. Mortals who come here have a particularly hard time adjusting. You will be susceptible to the influences of the—well, let’s call it the air.

“My servants, of whom Mihas is the only remaining representative, were given the waters of Lethe to help them forget the world they came from, so they would not mourn what they had lost and to decrease their confusion. Some call it the Water of Death. But myself, I drink Alethe, which is the opposite of Lethe in every way and is what we call the Water of Life.”