The Princess Curse (22 page)

My hunger-addled brain recalled bits of yesterday’s conversation with the nymph—something about how whatever happened above was mirrored in the world below. And perhaps this was true—perhaps the Underworld was a shadow cast by the World Above. Or a reflection.

But the dying plants? The falling trees? The new life that would not take?

The new life that would not take . . .
Vasile couldn’t get an heir and hadn’t had a child in years. He’d proven himself fertile many times, years ago, but no longer.

A terrible hunger pang gripped my belly, and the Darkness came back, springing shut around me like a bear trap, pressing me to the ground. Memories rolled over me: every half-recalled nightmare of Muma Pădurii, every hungry hour of my life, and every moment of fear I’d ever experienced, from the first time I’d been called a liar and received a beating from the Abbess to the first time I’d heard the distant thunder of the Turks’ cannons to the moment when the princesses had poured poison down Didina’s throat and I had been unable to save her.

When the Darkness finally moved off me, it seemed to be laughing.

I opened my eyes to Thela patting my cheek and calling what seemed to be my name through her thick accent. She pulled me to my feet and plopped me into a chair.

I would normally think I had fainted from hunger, but I’d fainted from hunger before, during the worst of the famine rations, and this was different.

I was terribly hungry, but the hunger wasn’t as bad as the Darkness. The water of Alethe had kept the Darkness at bay for a little while, but that was all.

I would go to Dragos. I would eat. Because I had to admit that Pa wasn’t coming. It had been days, and the steps from the princesses’ tower were caved in. Pa wasn’t coming.

While horrified by this realization, I was also relieved. The Darkness would leave me alone, and I wouldn’t be hungry, true. But if I ate, if I became the Queen of Thonos, then the souls would stop disappearing and the Queen’s Forest would grow again.

I hadn’t realized how much I felt the burden of Thonos’s illness until the decision was out of my hands.

I stood on reluctant, trembling legs and started toward the hall.

Chapter 29

A
knock at the door arrested me. I swayed and sat back down while Thela admitted Mihas.

I smelled food, the warmth of bread and the sourness of cheese. For a brief, dizzying moment, I thought,
He knows what I’ve decided, and he’s brought me the food of the Underworld. How could he, after all his talk of rescue?
My gaze narrowed on the basket over his arm, and steadiness returned. Mihas wouldn’t do that.

“Send your handmaiden away,” Mihas said. I waved at Thela and said, “Shoo!” but that was all I could manage for communication. She kept on making my bed. I shrugged at Mihas.

“If you’re fine with her knowing,” Mihas said, “then your father brought food.”

“What?” Instantly, my resolve to dwell in the Underworld for the rest of my life withered. My stomach gurgled to life. “No! Pa came?”

“Yes. I met him at the edge of the forest, by the lake, when he signaled.” Mihas went to my desk and began unpacking the basket. I tallied the breads, the cheeses, the apples, the plums, the thyme pies, the tartlets. It looked like a lot, but it wasn’t actually very much. No more than two or three days’ worth, at full ration.

I was starving. It wouldn’t hurt anything if I ate a bite of cheese from above while I asked for the tidings from home. I lurched to my feet and crammed a wedge of cheese into my mouth. It was so good, salty on my tongue, and so sharp that my jaw tightened in shock.

“How did Pa get down here if the stairs to the princesses’ tower are caved in?” I asked around the lump of cheese in my cheek.

“He has his own way in. He dug a tunnel.”

“Oh.” I chewed and swallowed. Food! Glorious, wonderful food! I ripped a chunk of bread next and felt my withered resolve shrivel further. “How is Didina?”

A muscle near Mihas’s mouth twitched, and he avoided my eyes by staring at the tapestries on my walls. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Lacrimora woke the sleepers, right? So—how’s Didina?”

Mihas met my eyes. “Lacrimora didn’t wake the sleepers, Reveka.”

“What?” I shrieked. Startled, Thela looked up. Not perceiving danger, but reading my face well enough, she started toward me. I waved her off. “Did Lacrimora
even try
?”

Mihas took a deep breath, fingers fidgeting with his sleeves. “Your papa says she tried, but it was no good—she doesn’t have the cure.” As I opened my mouth again, he said, “I don’t know any more than that!”

“Did they try the water of the Little Well? The water in the Little Well mixes with the Water of Life, with Alethe!”

“I don’t
know
, Reveka!” Mihas said. “I would think they tried. It’s what the princesses drank when they came down here; they would know its properties.”

I crumpled back into my chair, feeling smaller than a child. I’d come to the Underworld blindly assuming that Lacrimora would be able to reverse her poison, and had not considered that the end of one curse wasn’t the promise of the end of the other.

There was no way I could eat the food of the Underworld now—not yet, anyway. Consign myself to the darkness when the sleepers needed me? I had so much to do, so little time, and . . .

“So little food,” I whispered. “Why did he send so little?”

“Well, for one thing,” Mihas said, “it’s been only a day in the World Above since they returned.”

“A day? But it’s been . . . three or four days down here!”

“I know. Time is not the same, above and below.”

“Yes, I know, but . . . “ I stared at the food, my mind calculating half rations, quarter rations. The time disparity was to my benefit, when it came to finding a cure for the sleeping death. I had far more than a scant two weeks to keep Didina’s mother from death, to pull the Duke of Styria back from the edge, and to prevent a war.

But the time disparity worked against me with Pa sending so little food. If I didn’t get enough to eat regularly, I’d be useless in the herbary. Pa’s food was my only hope—well,
Sylvania’s
only hope, and Didina’s. I had to keep up my strength and keep my wits about me, if I had any chance of waking the sleepers. But I also had to make the food last. . . .

Unless I took the plunge and ate the food of the Underworld.

Not yet
, I thought. I felt the burden of Thonos’s illness on my shoulders, but I couldn’t think about that now. I forced myself out of my chair. The mouthful of cheese and bread hadn’t been enough, though, and my legs shivered. Mihas caught me before I could fall, and he and Thela moved me back to my chair.

“It’ll be all right,” Mihas said. “Your father will come for you.” He put another chunk of bread into my hand.

There was a tap at my door. Thela opened it to reveal the hulking
zmeu
form of Lord Dragos, while Mihas and I froze. “Is everything all right in here?” Dragos asked.

I glanced at the bread I held. “Yes. Everything is fine.”

We were silent while Dragos looked at the food from the World Above half scattered across my floor and desk. For someone who didn’t speak the language, Thela proved perceptive: She scooped up my dirty clothes from the day before and escaped down the hall.

Dragos drew in a great breath and let it out in a slow stream redolent of ash and almonds. “I brought you something, Reveka,” he said, and pulled a large crate in from the hall. He carried it over and pried the lid from the crate easily with his claws. Mihas scurried around him to stow the food back in the basket, though I noticed that he tucked a plum and a thyme pie into a pigeonhole of my desk. He left with the basket, and Dragos let him.

“Books,” I said in surprise. I stumbled to my feet and went to look. There were easily three dozen, all with wooden covers.

“Codices, really,” Dragos said. “Handwritten texts, mostly in Greek or Latin. They are for you.”

“For—all for me?” I stammered, surprised and not a little bit touched. I picked up one of the books and flipped it open:
Consolatio philosophiae
, “the consolation of philosophy.” Another, in a language that didn’t seem to be exactly Latin:
Le livre de la cité des dames
. I looked, but didn’t see anything that might be an herbal or a book of medicine.

“Thank you,” I said sincerely, for all that I regretted no book of herbs. I was too amazed to know how to show him my appreciation. I had never owned a real book before. “I look forward to reading these.”
Someday
.

“Good,” Dragos said. “I thought I would take you to collect herbs in some other areas of Thonos today. Places you might not be able to get to easily on your own.” He flexed his wings a little.

“Yes, please,” I said, feeling grim reality resettle on my shoulders. On one shoulder were the sleepers. On the other, all of Thonos. I couldn’t know which problem to address first, but I also didn’t know the plants of this world. If I could discover their properties, perhaps the priority would assert itself.

And perhaps there was something to the observation I’d made about the problems seeming mirrored. Maybe I’d solve both problems with one cure. I could dream, couldn’t I?

“I’ll leave you to dress,” Dragos said, and departed.

When the door closed, I crammed the hunk of bread into my mouth and cast about me for something to wear. I knew I couldn’t get into a fancy princess dress without Thela’s help, so I laid out my old chemise, skirt, and apron—and devoured the thyme pie. I got dressed between bites of plum and sucked the pit free of the last threads of flesh as I bound my hair up in a scarf.

I spat out the pit and opened the door. Dragos was waiting. Mihas was nowhere in sight.

“You’re going to wear
that
?” Dragos asked.

“Thela has disappeared, and I can’t get dressed in
those
alone.” I pointed at the shimmering gowns hanging across the room. “Does it matter?”

“You’re to be a queen,” Dragos said. “Do
you
think it matters?”

I weighed this in my mind for a bit. A queen was a queen regardless of clothing. But it was easier to command the respect one deserved if one looked—and acted—the part.

“I suppose it does,” I said. “But there is no way that I can get into gowns such as those by myself. There are all these lacings and knots.”

“We can wait for Thela. Though perhaps I will tell her to make herself a little more available in the mornings.”

“Well, don’t do
that
,” I said. “She’s probably got things to do—”

Thela came around the corner then and motioned me inside, where she divested me of my peasant clothes and shimmied me into a bodice, which she laced so tightly, I could only gasp at the end.

I mulled over the conversation with Dragos while Thela helped me into an underrobe, gown, and stockings.

Something didn’t make sense. If I had to prove to the servants that I was a lady—well, no, a queen—I needed to dress like a queen. But I couldn’t dress like a queen without help.

At some point, it began to seem as if the whole of royalty was simply a charade for the servants.

I supposed, technically, it was exactly that.
I can barely walk by myself,
the impractical gowns said.
But I can command people and send them on my errands.

I might enjoy sending people on my errands. But I enjoyed not falling down when I walked, too.

When I was dressed, Thela stepped back and assessed her work. She smiled. Her eyes were as old as the mountains, but her face was as smooth as my own. I wished I could speak to her, discover her story.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,
I reminded myself, and went to find Dragos.

Chapter 30

T
hanks to Dragos’s wings, we went from border to border of Thonos that day, landing here and there to look for likely herbs, while Dragos simultaneously educated me about his land.

Most of Thonos was as dark as the castle, but a few places—particularly near entrances to the World Above—were lighted areas like the Queen’s Forest. In the Blessed Fields, where I plucked asphodel, a pale golden ball hung in the sky like a sun, shining on the souls of heroic men and women, the youngest of whom had fought the Romans. When we visited other places, there were more kinds of false suns and, occasionally, glorious moons and fields of stars.

Wherever there was light, I saw eidolon souls. Nearly everyone looked as normal as my servants Zuste and Thela—opaque, solid, real; aware of their surroundings and us, but not overly curious about anything. Some waved, but we were not, I could see, a normal, World Above king and queen to these people, to be touched and adored. I said as much to Dragos while we flew in darkness toward a starlit marsh. “It makes sense,” I said, eyes closed and concentrating on something other than the fact that I couldn’t see
anything
. “It’s not as though they pay taxes and, in return, we distribute bread. Or do we? Do eidolons eat?”

“They
can
eat, but they don’t need food to sustain them. But it is untrue that they do not receive anything from us. We protect them. And though there is no taxation, they would fight in my army if I asked them to.”

“Who would you fight?” I asked, shivering. I had not truly thought that there was no war in the Underworld, but I had hoped.

“When the Golden Horde came through in the World Above, their gods tried to sweep through the Underworld as well. Or so I’m told. Right now, I do not worry overmuch about the Underworld lords linked with the Turks expanding into Thonos.” He sounded unhappy. “That may change, of course, but the lords of the Turks’ Underworld are djinn, and they are remote from the religious concerns of the Turks at present. Or
any
of their concerns.”

I tried to imagine an army of souls, tried to imagine a group of djinn ruling beneath the lands of the Sultan, but decided not to work too hard at it. I was more curious about the other direction.