The Birthday Ball (6 page)

Liz's desk was next to Pat's. The little girl held her tongue between her lips in concentration, and she was practicing making letters on her paper. Her bare feet dangled, her legs too short to reach the floor, and she frequently pulled her skirt up to scratch a mosquito bite on her leg.

"You should put some lotion on that bite," Pat whispered to her.

The child wrinkled her nose and thought about it. "Dunno what lotion is," she said. "Never heared of such a thing."

In the castle an entire room was devoted to remedies, everything from headache potions to snakebite salves. A gray-haired apothecary was always there to dispense what one might need, and he could also apply leeches and pull teeth if necessary.

But of course, the princess realized, a poor peasant had no room of remedies, no apothecary, no lotions.

"Oh, dear," she replied to the little girl. "I happen to have some, though I am a very humble and needy peasant myself. Tell your ma I'll bring something for you tomorrow, and you won't have to scratch so frequently."

Liz looked up from her misshapen As and Bs. "Got no ma," she said matter-of-factly.

"Oh, my! Pity! Well, your pa, then. Tell him."

"Got no pa neither."

"But—"

"I be a norphan," Liz explained.

An orphan! The princess knew of such people—she had heard stories about them. They frequently appeared in fairy tales. But here was one in person!

"But where do you live? Who takes care of you?" The princess couldn't imagine being so small and having no one.

"Oh," the little girl explained matter-of-factly, "I stay wif whoever wants me, 'cause they fink mebbe I can help out. Then, when they don't want me no more, I go live wif sumbody else."

"You must be very forsaken and pathetic," the princess said sympathetically. "I'm actually quite interested in orphans, and—"

She felt a sharp tap upon her shoulder and realized that a shadow had fallen across her desk. The schoolmaster was standing beside her and had used his pointing stick to tap her into attention.

"Sorry, sir," she said quickly, and looked down at the geography book she was supposed to be studying. An outline map showed all the domains, and beyond them the seas, which were dotted with small, intricately rendered drawings of serpents and whales rising from the foam.

***

The other children laughed at her lunch. On her first day, the day before, she had brought none, and they had nicely shared torn-off bits of their own thick bread. One, the pudgy boy named Fred, had given her his apple. She had never eaten a whole one before, because at the castle apples were always served peeled and sliced and arranged on a porcelain plate.

"How primitive this is!" the princess said in delight as she bit through the skin, following the example of the others. "How peasant-y!"

"What?" Fred asked.

"I just meant blimey, what a good-tasting apple!" the princess explained, and dabbed some juice from her chin.

"Aye. I'll bring you another tomorrow. I got a whole apple tree by my house."

And he had. She thanked him for it and added it to the lunch she had brought today, her own castle breakfast wrapped in a napkin.

"What you got there?" one girl, Nell, asked, staring at her lunch.

"It's toast. Just bread, same as you, but toasted over a fire."

"And cut in fancy pieces!" Nell pointed out, laughing. She called the other girls to see—"Looky what Pat's got here in her lunch!"—and they all giggled. The princess, looking at her own cold toast, realized that peasant bread would not be cut into neat triangles as this was. She had so much to learn about being humble and poor.

"I just did it to be silly and foolish," she explained, and laughed with them, at the same time hiding the crisp bacon under her napkin.

"Where be your lard?" Nell asked.

"Lard?"

"Your pig fat, to rub on the bread. Blimey, I got lots! Want some of mine?"

The princess looked with horror at the glistening thick glob of white fat that Nell graciously offered.

"Thank you," she said, "but, ah, my belly's full. Just room for apple." She folded her napkin around the toast and bacon, bit into the bright red apple skin, and was relieved to see the lard disappear back into Nell's lunch.

"Pat!" The tiny waif, Liz, came scampering to her from the bushes that ringed the schoolyard. "I had me a bird," she wailed, "what I was taming with scraps of me lunch bread, to be a pet, so I would have sumfing to cuddle! Now I fink a cat has gone and et him!"

"Oh, no!" the princess cried. "Did you see it happen?" She looked to where the child was pointing and saw her own pet lying spread out, bulging belly exposed, in the sun.

"No. But the cat's got fevvers stuck to his whiskers. Blue ones, like me bird."

The princess sighed. "It's Delicious."

Liz burst into tears. "Mebbe it is to a cat, but it was me pet bird he et!"

The princess patted her back, attempting to comfort her, planning at the same time how to provide the orphan with ... what was it she had said she wanted? Something to cuddle.

One of the advantages of being royalty was that, though life was boring, it did provide an opportunity to acquire anything one wanted. She could easily get a pet for this lonely child. She could order a singing bird, even a pair of them, perhaps in a gilded cage. But how to get them to little Liz anonymously?

She needed to give it some more thought. But now the bell was ringing. She could see the schoolmaster (and he
was
handsome, she thought, very handsome indeed, even if Tess the chambermaid
had
said he had a fierce face!) standing on the

steps, shaking the bell to summon them back to their desks.

***

He detained her at the end of the school day. "Pat?" he said. "I'd like you to stay for a minute, if you will."

The other pupils filed nervously past her on the way to the door. "Punishment," one whispered sympathetically. "Hope it don't be too harsh."

Punishment?
The princess had never been punished for anything, never in her life.

Apprehensively she waited at her desk until the schoolroom was empty. The schoolmaster, who stood at the door at the end of each day to say goodbye to his students, strode past her to his tall desk at the front. She noticed, again, his soft leather shoes, and remembered what Tess the chambermaid had confided, that the schoolmaster was part of a noble family in another kingdom, though he pretended otherwise.

His mouth was set in a firm line and his brow was furrowed so that he looked very stern when he summoned her to his desk.

"Come forward," he said curtly.

Odd, the princess thought, how often
she
had been the one to summon and command. How easy it was to do that. How hard, how demeaning, to be the one summoned! One didn't know exactly what to do, or where to look. She stood before him, her hands at her sides, and she looked at the floor and her own bare feet. Then, as an afterthought, she curtsied.

"Yes, sir," she said.

"I wanted to speak to you privately," he said, "about your schoolwork."

"Sir," she replied, "I'll try harder. I'm new, and didn't know the way to go about things, and so I skipped ahead in the book. I knew I shouldn't, but the pictures of sea serpents? I never been near no sea but I was interested in them things, and I skipped ahead without permission. I won't do it again, sir, no, I won't."

Then she curtsied once more.

He was staring at her.

She continued her lengthy apology. "And I know I kept leaning across to the orphan when she was working on her circles. I just thought I could help, sir! She's a pathetic orphan and has no ma nor pa what could help her at home. Also she has mosquito bites, sir, what itch her fiercely.

"I'm a poor peasant girl, remember, sir, and I hope you won't whip me, 'cuz my pa was killed by a something—a lion? No, a wild boar, it was.

"I'll try harder," she said again, and then fell silent.

The schoolmaster pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his mouth. His shoulders shook for a moment. Then he folded his handkerchief and looked sternly at her, his mouth set again in a line.

"I simply wanted to commend you, Pat," he said. "Your schoolwork is quite extraordinary. I don't know where you came from, or where you attended school before—"

"Some other domain. I forget what."

"Be that as it may, you were well taught. How old are you, Pat?"

"Soon sixteen, sir."
Four days,
she thought.

He frowned, thinking. "I was sixteen when I left the village school and went far distant to study at a teachers' academy. You might think about preparing to do the same. I could help you with the preparation, if you like."

"But I'm a girl, sir," the princess pointed out. "A poor peasant one," she added. "Very humble and pathetic."

"Yes, well, I understand that. But there were
some
girls at the teachers' academy. So although unusual, it is not unheard of.

"You might like to think about it. That's all. You may go now, Pat."

"Yes, sir, I will do that, I'll think about it, when I have time, though right now I must hurry back to my hut, I mean my hovel, to help with the..." Desperately the princess tried to remember what hard-working peasants actually did. "Pigs. That's it. I must tend the pigs, a very dirty and thankless job, and I believe I might milk a cow as well, sir, quite hard on the hands, and what's the other? Yes! Collect firewood. I must bend over and get a very achy back, collecting firewood; oh, it's a difficult life, indeed, sir."

She looked up at last and saw that he was laughing.

"Blimey," she said, without thinking, "you're wicked handsome when you laugh, sir!"

Then she curtsied and fled.

9. The Prince

Prince Percival of Pustula dressed entirely in black, always. Even his underclothing was black. His hair had once been a nondescript brown, but he kept it dyed jet black and thickly oiled. His mustache, as well.

Black matched the darkness of his moods—he was always depressed—and, in fact, the color matched his heart. Percival was a black-hearted man who hated his subjects, the Pustulans, the populace of his domain; who hated his own family (he had sentenced his own mother to a minimum-security prison seven years before and he did not venture there on visiting days, never had, not once, and on the most recent Father's Day he had given his aged father a tarantula); and who, in truth, hated everyone but himself.

He spent a great deal of time in front of the mirror. He had had his own bedchamber lined with mirrors so that he could view himself from every angle. He preened. He strutted.

"Right hip? Ah,
yes,
" he cooed to his own image on a sunny morning as he stood sideways in his underwear and observed his own stance and the jut of his hipbone.

"Pecs?" he murmured, and changed his position so that he could see the muscles of his chest bulge around the shoulder straps of his black silk undershirt. "Oh,
niiicce,
" he said admiringly, turning slightly to the left and then to the right.