The Princess Curse (14 page)

I dropped my foot to the ground. The snow crunched lightly, and the chill spread slowly. Snow in July. It was impossible, wasn’t it?

I trotted after the princesses, catching up with Mihas as he entered a copse of trees whose trunks were tarnished silver. Icicles like faceted glass dripped from laden branches. Wonderingly, I reached out to touch a branch: Were these living trees?

The small branch broke as soon as I touched it, and it plopped into the snow. The brittle snap of the twig rang out in the silent wood like a harquebus shot. Mihas jumped behind a tree trunk, while I froze in place. A few princesses peered back toward me, saw nothing, and went on; only Otilia stopped dead on the path. My stomach seized with apprehension. But she didn’t look around.

Lacrimora nudged her sister in the back. “Move along. They’re waiting.”

Otilia moved on, and Lacrimora followed. Mihas eventually broke from the cover of his tree and went after them.

The silver twig shone dully in the snow. I scooped it up and tucked it into my herb pouch, resolving not to touch anything else. I hurried after the group.

The forest lightened with each step. At first I thought the snow was glowing brighter, or perhaps my eyes were adjusting, but truly the sky was lightening, and we were walking into dawn.

The snow grew patchy here, giving way to piles of autumn leaves of bright pinks and purples and golds such as I had never seen, not among summer flowers or even royal silks.

And the sun—
a
sun, anyway, narrow and dark as though we were viewing the normal sun through the blue veil of the Virgin in a stained glass window—rose, sending slender shafts of light through the trees. The trees changed from tarnished silver to greening copper. My fingers itched to touch and investigate these plants. I dared not touch any more branches but did spy bits of deadfall. I collected a verdigris twig from the ground, rolling it between my fingers. I sniffed it, and it smelled like metal. I put that twig in my pouch, too.

The sun rose quickly—so quickly that it seemed like a dream. With every footstep, the strange sun gained a degree in height, and only when I stopped to collect the twig did I realize that the sunrise was in direct correlation to our progress through the forest. When I stopped walking, the sun stopped rising. I paused many times, trying to make sense of this phenomenon, until I lagged far behind the princesses and had to sprint to catch up. They had no care for any of this. They were well used to it, I guessed. Did Mihas notice? I couldn’t tell. He didn’t seem as intrigued by the forest as I was.

The sun became of secondary concern to me as autumn forest became summer forest. The darkened sun was at noon height now, and the tree trunks were spotty brass. Leaves of dull emeralds hung silently on still trees. It felt most strange, to be in a forest without animals, without wind, without water. The dark light was oppressive, casting strange, deep shadows everywhere.

The forest path wandered through a field of shimmering white ferns, like the ones my cap was made of. The princesses’ long skirts slithered against these plants, spilling diamond seeds to the ground. Here, the path was a glittering scar of brown earth worn into the forest floor. I longed to kneel and bury my fingers in the soil to assess its qualities for growing herbs, maybe even to dab a bit of the dirt on the tip of my tongue like Sister Anica had taught me. But it wasn’t even proper soil. It looked like crushed garnets, and it made me uneasy.

The whole forest, in fact, made me uneasy: something about the unreal shine to everything, while fascinating at first, felt unnatural in the end.

I did stoop to pick up a fallen brass twig, however, which I also tucked into my pouch.

Then summer forest gave way to spring. The sun was setting here—or was it rising? We had walked backward through the seasons, so perhaps we were also walking backward through the course of a day. I couldn’t say. Long rays of dull red light shot through bronze trees. Ruby and emerald buds dotted the branches, and the forest floor was speckled with patches of young grass and amethyst starflowers. The effect was pleasing, until I looked more closely: The buds bore blight at their centers, and the grass was pale and withering. I collected a bronze twig here.

We came out of the trees onto the banks of an enormous lake, where starless night reigned once again. The blazing light of ten thousand candles danced across dark water, shining from a golden pavilion standing on a hill. Sweet music drifted to us, and twelve little boats waited on the shore, each with a lantern hanging from a tall hook at the stern. Beside each boat stood an oarsman wearing red livery—each oarsman more handsome than the last. Each man held out a hand to a princess, who took the hand and turned to wait for her sisters.

“My lords,” Lacrimora said, the last to arrive, “we have a follower.” She turned and swept her arm out wide, to point straight at Mihas, half hidden behind a bronze tree and frozen in fear.

Like dogs on a hunt, the oarsmen raised their heads toward Mihas and attacked as one.

Chapter 18

M
ihas stood no chance. The oarsmen brought him down, bound him swiftly, and threw him into one of the boats.

“The gardener’s boy?” Princess Nadia asked, standing idly by.

Lacrimora shrugged. “Might be,” she said, and bent to fiddle with the bandages in her iron shoe.

I was so horrified by this whole scene, stiff and staring, that I missed jumping into Otilia’s boat with her. Her red-liveried rower had already pushed away from the bank by the time I regained my senses.

Lacrimora, on the other hand, still wasn’t ready. I scuttled up behind her and stepped into the boat nearly simultaneously with her. The boat rocked and swayed wildly with my inept boarding. Lacrimora cried out and sat down heavily on the middle seat. I cringed in the bow.

“Careful,” her oarsman said in a strong Saxon accent. “We almost capsized.”

“It’s these wretched shoes,” she said.

“No one else had any problem with them.”

She scowled. “Thanks for pointing that out, Iosif.”

Iosif. Iosif, the missing Saxon!

Iosif pulled away from shore with a grunt. “Oof. The boat is very heavy today!”

“It’s the shoes,” Lacrimora said, sharply this time.

“I don’t think they were this heavy last night.”

“It’s the shoes,” she growled.

Iosif shook his head. “It’ll be a wonder if you can lift your feet to dance, then.”

“I’ll dance as beautifully as ever, fear not.” She said it so icily, I thought for sure Iosif would shut up then, but he didn’t.

“Oof!” He rowed with his full strength, only barely outpacing the boat that contained a princess, an oarsman, and Mihas. “Your shoes don’t explain why we’re falling behind!”

“No, only you can explain that, lazybones,” Lacrimora said.

Iosif sighed. I felt sorry for him.

The two overloaded boats struggled to the far shore. Ours pulled in just ahead of Mihas’s. The other princesses and their oarsmen had long since arrived and now were wending their way up to the pavilion. An immense dark figure waited on the shore. The silhouette of the waiting figure resolved into a bestial, hoofed creature with tall, spiked wings. I froze with one hand clapped over my mouth so I would not cry out in wonder and terror.

The boat slid into a slip, and the dark figure leaned down. Its narrow, tusked face came much too close to me as it plucked Lacrimora from the boat as easily as if she were a child, holding her gently in its talons; its hot breath skated across my face, leaving behind the scent of bitter almonds and smoke. I could not control the shudder that ran through me.

A
zmeu
. A dragon, a demon, a hoarder of treasures, a kidnapper of young maidens.

“Lord Dragos,” Lacrimora gasped. I’d never seen her discomposed before. I understood her terror perfectly. I was petrified. My stomach was clenched hard in a knot of fear at the very center of me.

“You’re still wearing the iron shoes,” the
zmeu
observed in a low, rumbling voice. “Your father’s wisdom surpasses itself.” It—he, really—was dressed in a split black cloak that did nothing to hide goatish legs clad in short trousers. He wore a king’s ransom in golden bracelets on his wrists. His cloak was fastened with a clasp altogether too reminiscent of his own curved, vicious teeth. I bit my fingers to keep myself silent. If he discovered me—if he found me! All my childish nightmares of Muma Pădurii paled into insignificance next to the scents and sounds of a live
zmeu
.

“My father’s wisdom is to plug the hole in his bleeding pocketbook,” Lacrimora was saying. Though perched in Lord Dragos’s red arms, she had regained her composure and was cooler than rain. I envied her courage. “Iron shoes are proving infinitely more durable than our previous calfskin and satin.”

Lord Dragos snorted a fine, ashy smoke from his nostrils. “Are your iron shoes as durable as my hooves?” he asked. He stamped a hoofed foot on the stones beneath his feet, drawing sparks, and the sound raced, sharp and hollow, out over the lake. An echo shot back from behind the pavilion, as though there were a stone wall beyond it. I squinted and became aware of two kinds of darkness, one being empty, the other being rather solid. A mountain?

Lacrimora smiled and said nothing. It was not a friendly smile, but Lacrimora’s smiles never were.

“Who is our new guest?” the dragon asked.

For one panicked moment, I thought he meant
me
, and I nearly screamed. But for the fist that I now had practically stuffed into my mouth, I probably would have. But the
zmeu
was looking at Nadia’s boat, the one containing Mihas. A small cadre of red-liveried men trotted down from the pavilion and dragged him away as soon as his boat reached the shore.

“Just another young idiot,” Lacrimora said, raising a shoulder in a shrug, and that was the tally of Mihas, right there.

Even though it didn’t differ all that much from my assessment of him, her casual dismissal made me angry, and for half a second, I forgot to be afraid.

The
zmeu
carried Princess Lacrimora up the path after Mihas, while Iosif crawled out of the boat and dragged it farther ashore, grunting as he pulled the boat with my weight in it. Then he followed Lacrimora and the
zmeu
toward the pavilion.

Stay in the boat,
I told myself, watching them walk up to the pavilion.
I’ll just stay in the boat. I won’t go anywhere near that creature.

But in spite of that wise warning, I climbed out of the boat.

Fine, stretch your legs,
I told myself.
Just don’t follow them.

But of course, I followed them.

You are without question your own worst enemy,
I scolded myself, even as I tiptoed after them.

From a distance, the structure was merely lovely; up close, it was fantastical. The supports of the pavilion were trees of gold, and the roof was the interwoven golden canopy of their leaves. A pearly cicada flew past to land on a tree trunk, where it rubbed its legs together to produce the sweet tones of a lute. All the music was made by tiny jeweled creatures, by lizards and locusts and small birds.

And the light came not from candles but from a myriad of wasps with small, glowing bums. Pretty enough, if you like that sort of thing, but it gave me an itchy feeling to see all those waggling antennae. I decided not to look too closely at them anymore.

A series of raised platforms surrounded a large central floor of gleaming golden wood. One of the daises held a banquet table; another, a small, tented bower; a third, a number of silk-swathed chairs. At the edge of the banquet dais, Lord Dragos set Lacrimora on her feet and offered her his enormous hand. She grasped his smallest finger and allowed him to lead her up to the table, where her sisters were sitting. Poor Mihas was tied to a small chair at one end.

Dragos helped Lacrimora hobble to her seat. “I’ll remind myself not to worry about the shoes. Because if your father interferes too much, if even one of you is incapable of dancing . . .”

“Fear not, my lord. We are all as capable of dancing as ever we were. No forfeits will be made tonight.”

“How lovely,” Lord Dragos murmured, his voice shaded with more layers of meaning than I could even guess at, and pushed in her chair.

I approached the banquet table. Each princess sat between two men in red, and behind each diner, a footman stood at attention.

The food spread before the princesses and their companions was glorious—and incongruous. Ripe red apples were mounded next to luscious grapes and stacks of bright oranges, lemons, and limes. Plums, currants, and strawberries nestled together with wintergreen berries, bilberries, and pears. I’d never seen an orange in summer before, let alone summer strawberries side by side with autumn apples, and my hands twitched to reach out and verify that this fruit was indeed fruit, and not more oddities like silver or copper trees. How did all this get here? Where did it come from?

The fruit wasn’t even the main part of the meal; there were fine, crusty breads and ripe cheeses, cakes and sweets, eggs and pickles, pies and roasts. The scent of it was overwhelming, and though I hadn’t been unbearably hungry in years, the sheer bounty of the feast was staggering, and terribly, terribly alluring.

And I grew angry, looking at this pile of food spread before the princesses.

How was this . . . a curse?

I was torn. I wanted to climb up and stomp through the food, smashing it to bits before any of it passed the princesses’ lips, as it doubtless had been passing their lips nightly. I also had a strong desire to rush in and steal a pocketful of cheeses and fruits for myself. But for once, rationality reigned and I stayed far back from the table, refusing either temptation. And refusing, also, the temptation to leave the pavilion, row myself back to the far shore, and climb to the surface world to tell Prince Vasile that the curse had everything to do with a
zmeu
.

Girding myself with a deep, calming breath, I forced myself to wait and see what they would do to Mihas.