The Last Princess (7 page)

I nodded, not daring to speak.

“Welcome to the New Guard.”

10

GIRLS’ BUNK SECTION WAS ON THE THIRD FLOOR, IN A LONG
room with a row of tall windows overlooking the courtyard. Hampton Court’s antique floors were scratched, its portraits graffitied and torn. I glanced out the window—even the gardens were destroyed, the birdbaths broken.

“This is Polly,” Portia announced to the twenty or so girls in the dorm. I waited for her to make introductions, but
she didn’t offer. “You can have that bed,” she told me, pointing to the corner. “And take this.” She tossed a bulky beige laundry bag at me.

I quickly looked through the bag. It contained a uniform, brown woolen socks, and a pair of boots. No weapon. In fact,
I realized, Portia seemed to be the only one with a weapon.

I settled on my narrow metal cot and looked around the room. Most of the girls
were gathered in a circle on the floor, playing a game of cards. In the pot: one silver hoop earring, a razor with a bright pink plastic handle, a bullet, a red cap with fuzzy earflaps.

On the bunk next to me sat a small Indian girl, tracing an imaginary pattern with her finger on the pea-green woolen blanket.

“I’m Polly,” I said.

She looked up at me, startled. “Vashti.”

“Have you been here
long?”

“Not too long,” she replied shyly.

Her face was delicate with big brown eyes, and her hands and fingers were so thin. “How? I mean, why did you come here?”

Her brown eyes swelled with tears and I immediately regretted asking.

“I’m sorry,” I said, placing my hand on hers.

I looked over at the girls playing cards, worried they might overhear us. “Vashti,” I went on quietly. “Do you know
which part of the palace Cornelius Hollister lives in?”

She shook her head quickly.

“Do you know any way I can find out?”

She stared at me with her wide eyes and leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “If you don’t want trouble, don’t ask questions.”

She turned to look at the girls, engrossed in their game, then back at me. She lifted her hair from where it fell around her neck, revealing a
vicious scar. Running from her neck down her back were four bloodied, blackened lines.

I gasped. “Who did that to you?”

She lifted her chin lightly, gesturing to the girls sitting in a circle on the floor. “They did it with a fork.”

I stared at the girls, imagining them pinning her to the ground, stabbing her neck with a fork and raking it through her skin. “Who
are
they?” I whispered.

“The
ones you really need to watch out for—aside from Portia, of course—are June”—she gestured to a tall, pale girl wearing severe circles of dark eyeliner and swallowed nervously before continuing—“and there’s Tub. She’s second-in-command.”

Next to Portia, at the head of the circle, sat an angry-looking brunette. Her huge, muscular arms were covered in swirls of tattoos that looked like she had carved
them herself with a knife. She glared around the circle with hard, dark eyes. Just then there was a knocking on the bunk door.

“Sergeant?” an older girl asked. She wore the same
gold medallion as Portia but was clearly intimidated by her. “Lights out in ten minutes. And don’t forget to put out all fires,” she added timidly, eyeing the candle that flickered in the center of the card game.

“Thanks,
Sarah.” Portia smirked. Sarah ducked out of the doorway, and Portia clapped her hands. “You heard her, girls. Bedtime!” She swept the pile of goods toward her with a giggle, watching as everyone climbed into bed.

Once everyone was settled she walked to the doorway. “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she said in a singsong, then blew out the candle and stepped into the hallway.
The room went dark. The only dim light came from the moon, glowing weakly behind the gray clouds. The wind rattled against the tall glass windowpanes.

“Vashti,” I said under my breath. “Portia doesn’t sleep with us?”

“Portia? In
here
?” she whispered with a shudder, as though the thought alone terrified her. “No, she bunks with the other commanding officers on the top floor.”

I rolled over to
face the window, hoping to sleep, but there was a sound coming from outside. I listened harder. Underneath the gusts of wind and rattling glass, under the hushed snatches of conversation, I heard the sound of human cries.

I sat up in the dark, startled. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” the girl named Tub asked.

“The screams.”

“Oh, it’s just the prisoners in the Death Camps,” Tub said. “You’ll
get used to it soon enough. Now, no more talking, or I’ll report you.”

I stared up at the ceiling, my heart pounding in my chest as I thought of the scars down Vashti’s back.
Stay calm. Don’t ask questions. Be patient.
I recited the words over and over in my head, like a mantra.

I could feel the metal springs in the mattress and smelled mildew on the blanket. I turned onto my side, covering
my ear with my hand. The agonizing cries echoed in my head, becoming the horrible soundtrack to the images replaying in my mind: Jamie and Mary captured by Hollister’s soldiers. My father’s chest soaked in blood as he lay dying on the ballroom floor. My mother hunched over, gasping, as the poisoned peach fell from her hand. The haunted, hollow faces of the Collectors by the river and the horrible
yellow teeth of the soldier who had attacked me behind the gatehouse.

I gritted my teeth, burying my face in the pillow so no one would hear me cry.

When my sobs finally subsided and my breathing calmed
down, I felt oddly separated from myself, like a wall of steel was coming down, protecting the real me from the one that would now face the world.

As I felt myself drifting off to sleep, only
one word echoed in my head.
Revenge
.

11

THEY WOKE US IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. OUTSIDE THE TALL
rectangles of windows the sky was inky black. I bolted upright in bed, panicked and sweating. Alarms sounded through the palace walls and the heavy rhythm of soldiers’ footsteps resounded through the hallways and down the stairs, echoing against the thick stone walls. Still dazed with sleep, my eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness.
I could make out the figures of the girls in the barrack dressing quickly in their uniforms.

“Hurry, get dressed,” Vashti told me.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s the Death Night.” Vashti pulled the laces on her boots tight. As she tied them in bows her hands trembled.

“Death Night?” My voice choked on the words.

She sat down beside me. “They take the prisoners they captured in the night raids and
pair them up with the soldiers of the New Guard. Then we fight to the death. It’s practice for battle.”

In the dark, I tried to look into Vashti’s brown eyes, absorbing her words. Then I heard Portia’s voice calling from the doorway. “Meet outside the courtyard in ten minutes for Rank Testing.”

“Hurry,” Vashti said again, touching my shoulder. “You have to put your uniform on.”

The night was
cold and dark. I stayed close to Vashti, following the long lines of soldiers from the palace to the outside grounds. In the distance the flames of torches lit up the walled courtyard, casting flickering shadows and smoke. The flames leapt wildly in the wind, pieces of fire breaking free and dying in the air.

“To Base Court,” a soldier called out, marching the lines of troops through the remains
of what had once been the fountains and manicured boxwood lawns. In the light of the fiery torches, I looked up at the keep, at the guards patrolling the turret walks and the watchtower overlooking the courtyards. Under the haze of the coal lamps, guards paced up and down the grounds, patrolling.

The crowds of soldiers gathered in the courtyard, watching with excited anticipation. A diesel truck
hummed at the far end, the glare of the truck’s headlights casting a spotlight on the paved stone ground. The words painted in black on the truck read
A NEW GUARD FOR A NEW TIME
, splayed across its side like a giant banner.

A hushed silence fell over the crowd as a soldier made his way to the back of the truck. The guards parted as he pulled a masked prisoner from the back, shoving him roughly
into the glare of the truck’s lights.

The prisoner’s hands were chained behind his back, his feet shackled, his head covered in a black cloth bag with small ovals cut out for eyes. A burly, short, red-faced guard pushed the prisoner to the center of the courtyard with the barrel of his gun.

Vashti turned to me, whispering in my ear. “That’s Sergeant Fax. He’s one of the cruelest guards.”

“New
recruits will be called at random to fight the prisoners,” Portia called as she walked past the girls’ division. She stood tall, stony faced, her green eyes catching the light, her sculptured, beautiful face a stark contrast to that of the terrified prisoner shivering in the courtyard. Portia’s long hair was pulled back tightly in a low ponytail. A sword hung in a scabbard at her side.

“Soldier
Thomas Cutter,” she called out into the crowd, reading off a piece of paper.

A boy stepped forward. He looked about fifteen. His dark hair was cropped short against his scalp, the crossed sword and sevil, the symbol of the New Guard, shaved into his hairline. His brown eyes caught the light of the truck as a wide smile erupted on his face. He looked eager to fight. Portia smiled back at him and
selected a weapon from a pile.

“Make it double edged,” the young soldier said.

Portia pulled out a gleaming razor-thin, double-edged sword. “He’s one of the Resistance forces,” she informed the soldier. “Make him suffer.”

The crowd of soldiers cheered him on. The noise was deafening. The masked prisoner was pushed to his knees, helplessly awaiting his opponent. Portia walked out onto the field,
delivering the soldier his sword.

“Unmask him,” she ordered Sergeant Fax. He pulled off the prisoner’s black hood to reveal his face. He was a man in his mid-thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a straggly beard. His horrified eyes darted around the courtyard, a chant of “Kill him!” echoing through the square. Ragged clothes hung from his emaciated, skeleton-thin body, and open sores
covered his skin.

They unchained his hands and feet as Sergeant Fax handed the man a sword, dull and unimpressive in comparison to the young soldier’s. The weight of it pulled the prisoner’s arms to the ground. A wild fury seemed to rage in the young soldier’s eyes. He lifted his sword again, gaining momentum and strength, and brought it down on the prisoner’s neck. With one desperate move, the
man mustered up all of his strength and swung his sword up to block Cutter’s blow.

But this only infuriated Cutter more. He stepped forward and, without giving the prisoner a moment to defend himself, plunged his long sword into the helpless man’s abdomen. He let go of the pommel, leaving the sword piercing the prisoner’s body. The crowd roared as the dying man stumbled backward around the courtyard,
his hands wrapped around the blade, futilely trying to stanch the blood pouring from the wound.

I put my hands to my ears, trying to drown out the deafening noise of the crowd, but Portia’s shrill voice cut through the din.

“New Recruit Polly. Girls’ Division, Section Nine.”

I stared up in shock. Vashti looked at me. I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“You have to,” she said, squeezing my wrist.
“Or they’ll
send you to the work camps. Trust me. You don’t want to end up there, shackled to a chain gang, beaten by the guards—they’ll force you to build the death chambers.”

I stepped forward, terrified. Even as the first prisoner continued to stagger to his death, Sergeant Fax pulled another masked prisoner from the back of the truck. Portia issued me my weapon, a single-edged, middle-length
sword. I grabbed the leather-bound handle tightly as Sergeant Fax dragged the second prisoner toward me. All around me I heard the New Guard soldiers chanting, “Kill! Kill!”

Beneath the black mask covering his face I could see the prisoner was a man—tall, muscular, not emaciated or covered in sores like the one before. Unlike the first prisoner, now lying in a heap in front of the crowd, this
man was not weak from hunger or starvation, or broken from being tortured in the Death Camps. He must have been recently captured.

On the man’s wrist was a tattoo of the British flag, the words
FREEDOM OR DEATH
printed beneath it. I turned, looking at the darkened and blurred faces of the crowd as they shouted, “Fight! Fight!” The torches let out thick plumes of dark smoke into the night air.
In the corner of the courtyard the first prisoner had finally collapsed, his fingers and eyes still twitching.

“Meet your opponent.” Sergeant Fax chuckled as he pulled off the prisoner’s mask.

I stared into his eyes. He stared back into mine. He had the build of a soldier, muscular and strong, his short-cropped brown hair and stubble showing signs of gray. I noticed his kind eyes.

They unchained
his hands and feet. He was given a short, dull-bladed sword. We faced each other. I wondered if there was a way to let him know I was on his side, that I was here to fight the New Guard, not him. I tried to make eye contact. I stepped closer.

And then I saw his sword come down. I raised my own, stopping him with a high block, ducking with a low block. I remembered quickly what the Master of Arms
had taught me: Block small, keep the sword slanted, use the whole force of your body, weight and speed behind each move.

Fierceness shone from his eyes as he slashed wildly with the sword. He wanted to destroy me. He had seen the New Guard invade his district, murder and capture his friends and family. His eyes focused on me as he raised his sword and charged. I backed up, blocking his swings,
our swords clashing deafeningly, the weight of his blows pushing me backward.

I blocked as swiftly as I could, but the sword kept flashing
toward me in a blur of steel. Without warning, his blade slashed through my shoulder, cutting the fine mesh of my uniform but not piercing my skin. Before I turned my eyes from the gash his sword grazed my knuckles like a thousand needling paper cuts. Blood
trickled down my wrist. It was all I could do to grasp the pommel handle and not let it fall to the ground. I felt the warm blood dripping down my arm. From the corner of my eye I saw Sergeant Fax watching grimly.