The Princess Curse (25 page)

I hated that she knew things about Dragos that I didn’t. “Well, bring
lots
of food next time, in case Dragos is feeling capricious. As much as I can carry up the mountain. Maybe as much as Mihas and I can carry up the mountain together.”

“The mountain?” Lacrimora asked.

“Yes, where the castle is,” I said.

“There’s a castle?”

“Of course,” I said, suddenly feeling smug. I knew
something
about Dragos that Lacrimora didn’t. “Where else would a king live?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. “Reveka, do you
want
to marry the
zmeu
? Don’t you care about your soul at all?”

“Of course I care about my soul! But is
my
soul any more important than all the souls in this realm?”

“The . . . souls in this realm?” she repeated.

I waved my hand at the Darkness around us. “This isn’t an empty land, Princess! This is the Underworld.” I found myself explaining, briefly, what I understood of the disappearing souls, which honestly wasn’t much.

“Well,” she said, dismissing them piously, “they aren’t
Christian
souls.”

“What does
that
matter? A soul is a soul. I wouldn’t refuse to treat a
body
because it was a Turk! I’ll do my best for these souls.” I felt fierce and strong.

A light burst and faded on the mountainside—a door of the castle opening and closing. Mihas, playing lookout to see if my father would signal him? “I have to go,” I said. “Tell my father—”

“If you’re lucky, I won’t tell him half the nonsense you’ve spouted tonight,” Lacrimora said. “God bless your soul, Reveka! I hope he keeps you from foolishness.”

Rather than argue with her further, I turned away. At the last moment, I remembered. “Lacrimora!” I called. “What was in your potion?” I rattled off the half dozen ingredients I had suspected, like the narcissus and sticklewort.

“You got all of those correct,” she said. “Also, water from the lake. Scrapings from a gravestone. And a mushroom from this forest.” She bit her lip. “Will that help you?” she asked. “Can you wake them, knowing that?”

It was the first time that she’d shown concern for the sleepers. I wondered: Did she
really
sleep at night?

“I don’t know,” I said. “What did the mushroom look like?”

She described it, nodded dismissively to me, and turned to leave.

I put my invisibility cap on as soon as her back was turned and followed her until she left the path to stride through the autumn forest. She came, in time, to a cliff face and wriggled through a narrow crack there. Pa’s tunnel!

When she was truly gone, I turned back to the forest. I searched for Lacrimora’s mushroom, nibbling bread as I went, until I found a few samples of fungus deep in the summer forest. I had no idea which was the one she had used, or if it was even important that she’d used a mushroom.

I was in a pretty little glade I didn’t recognize; and though I hadn’t marked my path in or out, I wasn’t worried about getting lost. It was a relatively small forest, and it was easily my favorite place in Thonos. I soaked in the weak, false sunlight. I wished the nymph would visit me again.

I took off my cap and lifted my face to the light. “O nymph Alethe!” I called. “It is I, Reveka, herbalist’s apprentice, gardener’s daughter, bride of Thonos, and I have questions for you!”

Nothing.

I chuckled at my brashness but waited just a moment longer in case she
had
heard. Still nothing.

I left the glade, and as I did so, I nearly stumbled. I saw something, something that I hadn’t seen before. On a withered tree branch, tiny emerald leaf buds sprouted.

Perplexed, I stared at this for a long moment.

Surely this wasn’t a sign of new growth. Surely it was not!

I looked for more evidence of this new life. Scattered here and there around the forest, green sprouts pushed from the crevices between stones and tarnish flaked from tree trunks, exposing bright silver underneath. These signs weren’t everywhere—they weren’t even to be seen in very many places—but there were changes in every season’s woods.

How new was all of this? I hurried to the edge of the spring forest where I’d argued with Lacrimora. There, I found the patch of dead dried moss I’d collected from while waiting for her. It was, without a doubt, much greener and springier than before.

I sat back on my heels.

Something had changed. But what?

I gathered my things and returned to the lakeshore.

I put my socks on my hands and clambered into my boat. Lacrimora’s dark words returned to me:
I know how to kill a
zmeu
.

I shivered and willed her never to return to Thonos again.

Chapter 33

I
fell asleep that night with a full stomach and a sick heart. With regard to my stomach, even though I had vowed to portion the food out carefully so that it would last, I couldn’t stop eating until sated. As for my heart, the thought of Didina and her dying mother lying still and silent in the western tower nearly broke it. And the thought of the disappearing souls—each soul was like a chain locked around my heart, holding it together.

And the thought of Pa fighting Dragos?

I rose as soon as I was rested and went to work.

My pace was frantic but not as fast as it could have been. I took careful notes as I went. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than succeeding at waking
one
of the sleepers, or saving
one
of the souls, and being unable to replicate my success because I couldn’t remember if I’d pulverized an herb or merely chopped it.

I lost track of the passage of time, and when Dragos came into the herbary, I blinked at him as though I hadn’t seen him in ten years. His appearance caused my stomach to twist in knots of fear, but for a moment, I couldn’t think why. Then I remembered:
Pa is coming to kill him
, and I was afraid for both of them.

Almost immediately, though, the fear was overcome by anger. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re the one who controls the passage of time?” I asked.

“That’s not quite true,” he said. “I
can
control whether this world follows the day and night cycle of the World Above, but it takes a great deal of concentration and attention. It is better for me and for Thonos to let it go along as it wills.”

Oh. I was about to ask if controlling the time in Thonos meant controlling the time in all the Underworld when I realized then that he might now be curious to know how I’d learned as much as I had. I was an idiot! A double idiot, too, for being upset that Lacrimora knew something I didn’t.

My hands shook as I held up a bowl of rose petals to the flickering candle, pretending to inspect them closely for mold and hoping that this action covered up the expression on my face.

“Why are you so upset?” Dragos asked.

I huffed. “I can’t
see
very well in this candlelight. In the World Above, we worked by sunlight for a reason. Mold is insidious.”

The most astonishing thing happened then: Dragos hummed low in his throat, and a jeweled third eye opened high on his forehead. A beam of light shot forth, which he then directed at my bowl of petals.

There are a thousand stories of
zmei
in the world, and so many of them mention the third, blazing eye of the dragon that I had been a little surprised that Dragos did not seem to possess one. Now I was surprised that he
did
have one.

“Is this not bright enough?” he asked.

I nodded, too dry throated with wonder to attempt speech. When I had thoroughly determined that the roses contained no mold, he closed the eye, and his forehead became seamless once more. I wanted to touch his head and discover if I could feel the eyeball beneath his skin, but good manners kept me from asking.

Good manners—and a little fear.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Dragos asked.

I nodded. “I—” I fell silent, but his look was encouraging, so I tried again. “I have a few potions I want to test. On the river.”

“Why?”

“When I met the nymph of Alethe, she told me that she was not as strong as she once was. She said she suffers—the river suffers—just like the souls.”

Dragos was silent.

“Dragos?” I asked.

“I had thought—” He stopped, then said, “I had wondered if Alethe’s waters were not as effective as they once were.”

“Would you take me to the source of the Alethe?”

He wasted no time.

I knelt on the mossy bank where the river Alethe bubbled forth from the darkness beneath a half-ruined shrine. A cracked stone altar, dimpled with dead moss, was overlooked by a small statue of the nymph Alethe. The statue’s paint had flaked away, and the face was worn to nothing.

I uncorked a potion I’d made of Underworld iris, rose, and mallow. I paused before pouring it into the water.

“This reminds me of when I first met you in the forest, except now I am the one casting things into the stream, not you,” I said.

Dragos said nothing. He stared at the shrine and the statue of the nymph. I lowered the potion bottle to my lap, watching him.

“I guess you must have brought the plum blossoms from here,” I said. “What were you doing, exactly?”

To my surprise, he answered. “I was honoring a memory.”

“Whose memory?”

“Many years ago,” he began, staring into the current as though looking into another world, “on exactly the day I met you, a woman. . . . No, not just ‘a woman.’ She was a sister to me. She threw herself into a river from a high place and drowned.”

His stark words conjured a vivid picture. Too vivid. I also thought I had heard this story before. But the tale slipped away from my memory, like dawn’s dreaming in the late afternoon.

“It was my fault,” he added.

My mouth was dry. I licked my lips and looked away. I wanted to ask about his life before he became King of Thonos but didn’t know how to begin.

I noticed the bottle in my hand and remembered what we had come here to do. I poured the remedy into the stream, where it was swallowed immediately.

I’m so very wrong about this,
I thought.
If this is even the right tactic, a river and a whole land must need so much more than this tiny bottle to heal it.

“Reveka?” Dragos asked. “Is there something I should be looking for?”

I wanted to cry out that I didn’t know, that I had no idea what to look for, and why didn’t he understand better what was going on with his own land? I almost threw the bottle into the stream but checked my motion at the last moment.

Chagrined, I stoppered the bottle and slid it back into the basket. I was throwing a tantrum, or nearly. Dragos
did
know what would save Thonos. It was I who stood in his way.

I got to my feet. “I need to rethink this. Let’s try giving a remedy to a disappearing soul—if we can find one after it starts to thin but before it evaporates altogether?”

“We can but try,” Dragos said.

On the flight back to the castle, I tapped his arm, which was wrapped securely around my waist. “I want to stop in the Queen’s Forest,” I said. “I want to gather more materials.”

Wordlessly, he changed direction just a little, and moments later, he landed me in the spring forest.

And that’s when I saw Didina.

She was standing on the path through the forest, running flat hands over the tops of the ferns, staring in minute concentration at the plants. She was dressed as always: short black and red striped skirt under a rectangular black apron; black leg wrappings over her stockings; leather shoes; and a white chemise embroidered by Adina.

I ran toward her, calling her name: “Didina! Didina, you’re awake!”

But she didn’t turn to me, didn’t even look at me.

I stopped just short of touching her and stared. The light passed through her. She was a soul.

I screamed and clutched my head. “She’s dead! Lacrimora has killed her! And now she’s disappearing!”

“No.” Dragos’s voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as though I were not bawling like a newborn calf. “She’s not dead. She’s not one of mine at all—not even an eidolon.”

“I— What?” I was jolted out of my tears and my rage and my wailing. “She’s not . . . dead?”

“No.” He waved his clawed hand in front of her, and she did not blink. She continued feeling the feathers of the ferns with her palms. “She’s lost. But still very much attached to her body.”

Now I was laughing with relief. “Oh, thank goodness. Thank God. She’s fine, then. She’s all right.”

Dragos shook his head gravely. “Her body is alive, but she’s trapped, wandering the Underworld. If she goes too far, the body will die.”

I was silent for a long moment, absorbing this. Was this true of all the sleepers—were their souls in the Underworld? And the ones who slipped away from Adina’s care, had they wandered too far?

I wiped my nose while Dragos politely watched Didina’s face and not mine; he only turned to me when I said in a small voice, “Could you take me back to the castle, please?”