The Hostage Prince (2 page)

P
rince Aspen stood in his braies and stared into the broad chest at the foot of his bed. Tapping a finger against his cheek, he considered the neatly folded piles of cloth inside.

Linen hose today,
he thought,
since it is to be a celebration feast.
He reached inside for a pair of periwinkle hose and pulled them on. Tying them at the top, he thought,
And a linen shirt to match.
He rummaged through till he found a fine linen shirt with periwinkle threading. Once he'd hefted it over his head, the shirt hung nearly to his ankles.

“Tunic,” he said aloud.

He looked at the bed, where a tunic had been laid out for him. It was a dark, drab green.

“That will never do, Lisbet,” he said to the empty room. “It doesn't match the shirt at all. I'll need something brighter. Perhaps in a color more . . . unexpected.” He looked in the chest and smiled. “Yes. Red.”

Sometimes in the morning, Aspen liked to pretend he was still back home and Lisbet, his old nanny, was helping him choose clothes for the day. Alone in his room, he could pretend the bustle he heard in the halls was made by brownies, not bogles or goblins, and that when he walked out the door, they would all bow to him with bright courtesy and respect and say, “Good morrow, Prince Aspen.”

Actually,
he thought,
the bogles and goblins all bow and say good morrow, too.
He frowned.
But they do it grudgingly.

Yes, he was a prince here, just like at home. But here he was also a hostage, a prisoner, a bargaining chit to keep the peace.
And though the bogles and goblins bowed and scraped as they were supposed to, Aspen knew that if it came to war, their long knives would be in his belly before he could say back to them, “And good morrow to you.”

He tried to shake off that dark thought by picturing old Lisbet, but realized he couldn't remember what she actually looked like. It had been seven years since he'd last seen her, before he was sent to the Unseelie king as hostage, in exchange for one of their own. He'd been but a child then.

“And I'm still a child if I think games and imaginings will help me here.” Sighing heavily, Aspen closed the chest with a thud and picked up the green tunic.

“Drab dress for another drab day,” he said, and yanked the garment over his head. Then, without fixing his hair—a deeper gold than that of the princes of the Unseelie Court—he opened the door and stalked into the hall. He almost tumbled over a small bogle who was on his knees scrubbing the flagstones.

“Good morrow, Prince Aspen,” the creature said, somehow managing to bow even lower than he already was while still sending out waves of resentment and disdain. Aspen wanted to kick the ugly little thing. It was a sworn enemy of his people, after all.

But kicking a servant was how an
Unseelie
prince would behave.
And I am Seelie
, he reminded himself. It did no good. He had been at this court too long. Almost half his life.

“And good morrow to you, kind bogle,” he said quickly, with a shallow nod of his head, as if giving the creature back its own disdain doubled. Then he trudged down the hall toward the feast hall.

The festivities were already in full force when Aspen arrived.

The Unseelie hardly waited for a civilized hour to start carousing, as Aspen's family would have. There was no decorum to the procedure, no stately procession of courses, no palate cleansers between. The Unseelie sat at their tables—or in some cases,
on
them—and celebrated rude toasts by crashing their tankards together so hard there was as much mead on the floor as in their bellies. They banged spear hafts against the table when they got angry or happy or somewhere in between, and occasionally spitted an unwary hob with the other end. It was a mob scene, unruly and loud. Almost every dinner was like this, and celebrations such as the one they were gathered for—because the queen was due to have a child at any moment—were especially loud. And dangerous. He would have to watch both his back and his stomach.

He admired the serving girls, who managed to scamper from kitchen to table and back again all the while keeping their balance and, at the same time, dodging the various pinches, slaps, and lecherous comments sent their way. It seemed almost as if they had trained with a traveling show of jugglers and jesters, mountebanks, and escape artists.

That thought was so absurd, he laughed at his own imagining.

But the banging and bragging and bashing of spear hafts had reached such a fever pitch already, he had no interest in trying to make his way through the crowd to the king's table where he, as a noble, was expected to sit. Instead he stuck to the wall, and went the slow way around, hoping to avoid notice for as long as possible.

Though, being the Hostage Prince
, he thought,
means I can never avoid notice for long.

A
s soon as she was alone again, Snail went over to the mirror and ran her fingers through her cockscomb hair, which was a dull orange and ugly, not a color often seen in the Unseelie lands. She let out a deep sigh. Only she of all the apprentices in the castle seemed to be affected by too much faerie cake, that golden berry cake soaked with a spell made on Midsummer's Eve. Only she ever suffered any consequence from eating it.

“You!” she said, pointing her finger at the mirror. The mirror did not answer her of course. It was not a magic mirror like the queen had, but rather one of the silvered glass shards stolen from some house in the mundane human world.

“Yes?” she answered herself.
If one doesn't have a lot of
close
friends
, she'd often thought,
make a close friend of oneself
. She wasn't sure if she'd made that up or heard it somewhere. Either way, it suited her. Certainly, she knew a lot of apprentices—pot boys and dog boys, kitchen maids and dairy maids, first-year blacksmiths and second-year needleworkers, and a couple of girls learning to be hedge witches, and the like. She danced and sang with them, and they held parties in the servants' hall. But she wasn't sure she'd call any one of them a
close
friend. Just fey folks she knew.

Surely a close friend was something else. Something . . . deeper. Or stronger.
Or—well—closer.

She shook her head and the mirror girl shook her head back.

“Get going,” she admonished her reflection, one finger raised. “You know, the queen is about to . . .”

The angular girl in the mirror with the one green and one blue eye, the hair that no brush could tame for long, the nose too broad for beauty, and the ears too short to hear grass sway, had raised an answering finger.

“I know,” she told herself. “I know.”

Then she washed in the basin that Mistress Softhands had filled with hot water, though by now it was only lukewarm.

“Blessed be,” Snail whispered. Sometimes the midwife was a loving creature. Other times . . . well, Snail didn't like to think about the other times.

First she washed her face, for the new mother would need to look at rosy cheeks. Next, she looped the sleeves of her dress above her elbows, then scrubbed her hands all the way up to where the cloth of the sleeves drooped. This was in case she had to hold the newborn babe.

All slippery from spiraling down the birth canal!
It made her giddy just thinking about such a possibility. She had, of course, not been alive two hundred years earlier when the unfortunate Prince Disaster had been born. Nor had anyone she knew.

Except the queen
.
And the king.

The king and queen of Faerie were always very long-lived. It was one of their privileges. Actually no one—maybe the minister of history—knew how old the king and queen really were.

Well,
Snail thought
, I suppose
the king and queen
know.

But everyone had heard about Prince Disaster. And everyone knew that she, Snail, was sometimes accident-prone. Why, Yarrow, that toffee-nosed suck-up, stuck-up apprentice to Mistress Yoke, had once laughed at her in front of all the midwives and said she had Dropitis and the Oopsies. Another time, at an apprentice party, she'd singled Snail out, saying to a pot boy, “Be careful around her, she's got slipshod fingers and careless hands and she
never
thinks ahead.”

Snail shrugged. That was the way of it. Apprentices put other apprentices down. It was how they were able to curry favor and rise in rank. Even so-called friends whispered behind one another's backs, traded secrets, told tales.

At least I don't do that.

She wasn't actually sure she had any talent for midwifery.
Or, for that matter, anything else.
But she knew it wasn't from lack of trying. She knew that she was no stranger to mistakes. Like any apprentice, she'd fumbled a time or three.

She shook her head.
Be honest.
All right, I've fumbled more than that
.
With things like dishes, spoons, bottles, and ham bones
. But she'd never dropped a baby.

Not ever.

Not . . . yet.

Though of course, she'd only actually handled three. The first was a dark-skinned, red-eyed drow infant, screaming and clawing as it came out into the light. The second had been the ostler's child who was part horse and part fey, with an ability to kick as soon as it was free from its sac. The third was a mermaid's newborn, the fish part of him wet and slippery. She hadn't dropped that one, either.

But what if she dropped the prince?

Or the princess
.

She sighed aloud.
It
could
be a princess, though nobody wants one. They already have three of those, and two of them are twinned, haughty, stuck-up . . .
She shook her head.
Well, that's not much different than the other royals, really.

She smoothed down the sleeves of her dress, and took a brush to her hair, beating it into submission.
Perhaps
, she thought,
perhaps Mistress Softhands should have named
me
Disaster, and not Snail.

Making a mistake in the queen's birthing room—with its stark white walls and its large, high bed—carried more consequence than making a mistake in the birth cave of an ogre. After all, ogres were no longer allowed to eat midwives or their apprentices, a rule Snail had more than once been comforted by. But the queen—the queen could do anything she wished. And if someone made a mistake involving her newborn child, her wish could be very brutal and very swift.

Being eaten by an ogre, Snail thought, might actually be a preferable fate.

Snail suddenly remembered that no one ever spoke of the midwife who'd been in attendance when Prince Disaster had been delivered. No one mentioned her apprentice either.
That very silence
, Snail thought uneasily,
means something
. Thinking about it made her tremble.

She looked down at her traitorous, shaking hands and whispered, “That's the last thing I need, wobbly hands!”

This is not
, she was sure of it,
going to be a good day.

But she had to go to the kitchen to get something to eat. Mistress Softhands always cautioned,
Never deliver babies on an empty stomach.
Because, Snail knew, sometimes it takes many hours for a baby to appear and mistakes driven by hunger or thirst could often occur.

Her stomach continued to warn her that she'd eaten too much the night before. It was an argument she didn't dare lose. Instead, she ignored it and left the room without even making her bed, which she knew would almost certainly win her another telling-off.

Going quickly to the stairs, she headed for the kitchen below. She'd make an appearance and grab something small to stick in a pocket of her apron, something to eat later on, when her stomach was quieter.

The sounds of the kitchen on a feast day drifted up to meet her: clanging pots and chopping knives, the spits turning with a loud whirring noise. There were kettles boiling merrily and the shouts of cooks barking instructions to their apprentices, who shouted back at them. Cook boys and cook girls got away with sass that the midwife apprentices never dared.

All four ovens must have been in use, for the heat nearly drove her right back up the stairs. But she sneaked a quick peek in to see what might be on offer.

“Here at last, Mistress Drop-Everything.” It was Yarrow, sitting like a lady at the cook's own table, acting as if she owned the kitchen. Her hair, unlike Snail's, was pulled back in a sedate black bun. Beside her sat the newest apprentice midwife, hand over mouth, giggling. She was one of those poor creatures whose only way of advancement was to toady up to a more successful girl and do her bidding, laugh at her jokes, fetch and carry without complaint.

And she does it very well
, Snail thought.

Yarrow went on relentlessly, her narrow lips in a sneer that did not destroy her beauty. In fact, it enhanced it.

Some toff
, Snail thought,
will soon notice her, some princeling or duke. And soon enough she will leave midwifery behind. She'll be renamed Star or Moonbeam or Sunshine, and eat in the Hall.

“Well, you didn't drop things fast enough to get down here in time, and breakfast is already served, eaten, and digesting properly. And . . .” Yarrow turned and smiled that namby-pamby, peely-wally smile at the journeymen cooks around her, all of whom seemed to melt under the heat of her simper. If the journeymen cooks had a vote, Yarrow would have forthwith been elevated to a full midwife, despite the fact that—to Snail's certain knowledge—she had little intuition about a laboring woman's danger and less patience with the poor woman's complaints than a midwife needs. “And—” She made a jab toward Snail with a long fork, as if she knew Snail hated being poked in the belly.

Even that far away from the fork and in no danger of being poked with it, Snail flinched. She almost yelled at Yarrow, but bit back the response. She knew that fighting Yarrow spit for spite would win her nothing in this company, except that then everyone would know about her hating to be poked, so she bit her lip and didn't answer back. Instead she edged toward the barrel where the good leftovers were kept, ready to send out with the swine boy for his pigs.

“Away there, Snail!” hissed Nettle, one of the pot boys, and as close to a friend as she had. “No pinching food today.”

As usual, his thatch of hair stuck straight up from his head as if permanently startled. It never needed any of the goop or goo or oil the other boys used to give them that banty-rooster hair.

Nettle looked perky today, not green or wan, though Snail definitely remembered him eating much more cake than she had last night. It seemed unfair. A few of the other apprentices in the kitchen looked as haggard from their long night's party as Snail felt. But there was Nettle grinning and pink-faced, clutching a huge haunch of raw venison to his chest and staggering toward the spits with it. As it was one of the finer pieces of meat in the kitchen, Snail knew that it was destined to be roasted with savory herbs and served to the High Court. The lesser pieces would be thrown into the stew pots for the rest of the guests. But raw—that was how the Border Lords liked theirs. Raw and still bleeding—like their enemies, as they proclaimed at every feast. Usually while banging their tankards loudly on the table.

“Why no pinching?” Snail asked, suddenly thinking,
Maybe it's a good thing I ate so much cake
last night.
Her stomach seemed to congratulate her for the thought.

Nettle nodded his head to where a huge, squat creature perched on a high stool in the center of the room. “Bonetooth hisself is here today.” Then he was off, maneuvering through the crowd of kitchen workers with his bloody burden.

Snail sighed and shifted her aim for the far doors of the kitchen, rather than the pantries. She needed to stay out of sight. Master Chef Bonetooth brooked no nonsense in his domain—and no latecomers or visitors! It was said that he got his cooking skills from his mother, a brownie who'd kept the kitchens in Dunvegan Castle for a hundred years, drinking milk from silver bowls left for her by the island chiefs themselves. While that may or not have been true, everyone
knew
that he got his temperament from his father.

An ogre.

Ducking and scampering to keep bodies between her and Bonetooth's line of sight, she was just passing the door into the Great Hall when disaster struck.

Disaster always comes at the end
, Mistress Softhands liked to say, meaning that once disaster came, nothing else was ever the same.

Turning for a lingering a glance at a sideboard covered in soft cheeses and fresh bread, Snail failed to notice either the newest apprentice midwife sneaking behind her, nor the serving girl with a tray full of hot violet tea by her right elbow.

Suddenly, she felt a sharp shove in the small of her back, and cried out, “What are you . . .”

The girl behind her giggled.

The journeymen cooks wahooed.

Nettle cried out, “Snail!”

But it was too late. Snail crashed against the server, and they both fell through the doors into the Great Hall.

As they tumbled to the floor, the tray went sailing end over end. The teapot dropped, tea splattered, and Snail found herself looking up at a set of fine silken breeches that had, until very recently, been a beautiful shade of periwinkle. She looked up past the spreading stain on the left leg, past a green tunic to a white silken shirt with periwinkle threading and a slight spattering of purplish tea, to a clenched jaw and a pale face with high cheekbones that was framed by long, pointed ears.

Oh, Puck,
Snail thought, horrified. This was almost as bad as making a mistake in the birth chamber.
I've spattered a noble.