The Princess Curse (26 page)

“I have a question,” I said when Dragos set me down in the dark courtyard. “You said that your power does not extend where the sun shines. . . . Does that mean you cannot step into sunlight?”

“I cannot,” Dragos said. “In a sense, I am a prisoner of my own kingdom, for I can never truly leave it. I cannot journey beyond the shadows at the edges of my land.” Then, so low I almost didn’t hear, “I miss the sun.”

“You miss it?” I pounced on the phrase, turning my face up toward his voice. It was too dark to see him. “Were you ever able to go into the sun, then?”

“Yes.”

“When? Why can’t you now?”

“Before I became King here, I was freer.”

“Then why become King at all?”

“It’s a long story, Reveka,” he said, leading me into the castle.

“Oh,” I said meekly, as though that settled it. “Of course.” Then I added, “I can see why you think I don’t have time to hear it.”

He gusted a sigh. “It was much like your decision to become my wife, Reveka; quickly made, to save another, and just as painful to me as your choice is to you.”

I bit my lip to keep from saying something I’d regret.

I could make out the sounds of footsteps in the distance, and then a light. Mihas emerged from the castle, bearing a lantern. I was grateful for the light and smiled widely at Mihas.

I glanced at Dragos, saw him watching me, watching Mihas. Puzzled, I tried to read his expression—and of course, that was when the Darkness returned and swallowed me whole. I didn’t even have a chance to fight it. I fell into nightmares.

“Reveka,” a voice said, cutting through the Darkness. There was a huge, warm hand holding mine, and another such hand across my forehead. I was being cradled in warmth. My nose was filled with the scents of ash and stone, almond and cherry bark.

I slit open an eye and saw Dragos’s hand enveloping mine. My fingers were so slender and tiny in comparison to his. I closed my eyes and enjoyed that his skin felt warm and smooth and human.

We were not where I had fallen, in the courtyard. I had been moved. I lay on a thick carpet in front of the fire in Dragos’s hall while he knelt beside me.

The Darkness seemed at bay for a moment, but I tasted the iron tang of blood on my lips. A nosebleed? Confirming my suspicion, Dragos dabbed a rag at my nostrils.

For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to have Frumos here instead.

Frumos is Dragos
, I corrected myself, quashing the dreamy girl within who kept trying to place the human face over the
zmeu
.
There is no Frumos. There never was.

I sat up. Dragos left me the rag and retreated to his chair, where he watched me with shining dark eyes.

“I have patience,” Dragos said, seemingly at random. “Or I thought I did.”

“What?” I asked, standing up and holding the rag to my nose.

“You are reluctant. I am reluctant! You’re barely more than a child, and— Anyway. I can see you are waiting—for escape, or for your father to come for you, or something. It doesn’t matter.” He spread his hands apart, bowed his head. He looked defeated. “Perhaps I should let you go.”

“What?”

“Mere mortals cannot survive in this place for long, Reveka. If you do not become my bride, you will waste away down here and die under the strain of the Darkness. Alethe’s waters alone cannot sustain you much longer. Do you see?”

“N-no. I don’t see,” I lied. I strode away from the fire, trying to buy myself time to think, to discover how to answer him. I checked to see if my nose had stopped bleeding. It had.

Dragos said, “You’re blind, then.”

I whirled to face him, as hurt and as angry as I’d ever been. Why was he doing this? He was the blind one! “Thonos
needs
a queen! So why don’t you just force me to marry you? Or why didn’t you force Lacrimora? Or Maricara, or any of the others?”

“I can’t force it!” Dragos said. “I must have a
willing
bride. Do you think I would have danced around on my hooves for six years if I hadn’t needed a
willing
bride?”

“The night I witnessed the dancing, the princesses didn’t seem that willing!”

“Their father’s stupid interference, with those iron shoes,” he growled. “And if there had been
any other way
, don’t you think I would have taken it?”

“Of course I do, Frumos!”

We both stopped then—stopped talking, stopped arguing. I stopped moving. The air between us filled with silence.

I’d called him Frumos.

“I am
not
Frumos,” Dragos said, his voice so low I felt it more than heard it.

The tone of his voice made gooseflesh run up my arms. “Then you shouldn’t have introduced yourself to me that way,” I snapped. “It’s your own fault, if you hate the name so much.”

I thought I’d made him angrier, so I was surprised when he started to laugh. I started to laugh, too.

I don’t know what we might have said next, but then Mihas came in at a dead run. “They—the guards—they’re bringing him!” Mihas panted.

“Who?” I asked.

Mihas’s face was white, his eyes panicked. “Your father!”

Chapter 34

W
ith a swirl of his cloak, Dragos left the room.

My knees wobbled, and the Darkness that I had believed was defeated threatened to press me flat. But I hoisted my skirts and ran after Dragos, though I couldn’t match his long stride. Mihas drew up the rear.

“Where are they taking him?” I gasped at Mihas.

“The throne room!”

I lost sight of Dragos in the dark, and had to let Mihas guide me with his torch.

The throne room was by far the most decorated place I’d seen in the castle. A variety of weaponry and armor hung on the walls, and a long trident with a stunted center prong was slotted upright into the arm of an ebonwood throne at the far end. Another, smaller throne sat beside the first. Between and behind the thrones rested a great iron scale.

By the time I entered the room, Dragos was already seated on his throne, one hand resting on the shaft of his trident. The throne was large for a human but small for a
zmeu
. Dragos dominated the room and the throne, his hooves trailing halfway down the dais steps.

“Over here, Reveka,” he said, patting the seat of the smaller throne. “He must see what you might become.” Mihas tried to sidle into the room after me, but Dragos ordered him off with one word: “Go.” The boy disappeared, and I felt bereft. I could have used a friendly face.

I climbed up the steps and settled myself on the edge of the seat, my stomach in knots. I felt the cold prickle of the Darkness catching up to me.

Lord Dragos inhaled deeply and sent a jet of flame out across the room. A thousand thousand candles lit, most so high above us that I hadn’t known that they were there. The room blazed bright as day. No,
brighter
, for inset in the walls behind the candles were a myriad of faceted jewels. The Darkness should have skittered to unseen corners, but instead, it seemed to take up residence around my throat.

“Bring him in,” Dragos called, his voice a low, rolling roar.

Doors opened at the far end of the room, and Pa was there, tiny and indistinct between two red-liveried guards, whose faces seemed made of bone.

The guards marched Pa to us at a slow pace. I nearly twitched, so nerve-racking was this, but both Pa and Dragos appeared unmoved. When Pa was brought to a stop before us, I saw that his hands were bound. I shrieked and ran down the dais steps to him. I embraced him, then turned angrily to Dragos. “Unbind him!” I cried.

Dragos lifted one black claw, and a guard stepped forward and slashed Pa’s bonds.

“Well?” Dragos said. “What will you offer me for her? Money? Jewels? As you can see”—he waved a set of claws at the jewels on the walls—“we are in no need of such here.”

“I offer only myself,” Pa said.

“What?” I cried. “That’s no good, Pa! You can’t be Queen of Thonos.”

Dragos ignored me. So did Pa. Dragos leaned his spiny chin on one hand and regarded my father. “You come here armed only with that?”

“I was a soldier. A talented one, at that,” Pa said. “I’ve fought for every prince in the land. I was in the Black Legion. I was field marshal for Vlad Ţepeş.”

“If I need a general,” Dragos said, “I have my own skills in that area.”

Pa was silent for a moment, assessing. He glanced at me, then back at Dragos. “It’s all I have to offer,” he said quietly. “Please. She’s just a child.”

Well, that wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t think I should jump in to argue with Pa.

“When Demeter came to the Underworld to claim Persephone, she threatened the world with eternal winter if Hades did not comply,” Dragos said. “That was a compelling argument. Yours is not.”

“A threat to the world would move you?” Pa asked, furrowing his brow. “I can threaten the world. I could brush aside the names of Vlad and Attila and rain down hell on this earth if it meant freeing my daughter. I could make the Battle of Poienari look like a Christmas feast. I could tear open the throat of Corvinus’s country and leave his blood for the Turks to drink. I could slash the flank of the Turkish Empire and lure in the Polish, and let them fight until Doomsday. I’ve always been a man who fought to create peace, but I could become a man who fights to create chaos. Tell me, Prince
Frumos
, is that what it would take?”

I stared at Pa. I’d never seen him like this. I’d never
imagined
him like this.

And why had Pa called my
zmeu
Prince Frumos?

Dragos leaned against the back of his throne. “I’d rather not see that,” he said mildly. I almost thought he might be laughing at Pa, but his voice sounded serious. “I cannot take an unwilling bride,
Doamnule
Konstantin. I would not want one, and neither would my kingdom. She’ll not take my food, so I’ll not have her.

“Go now with my guards to my kitchens, and gather up that wretch Mihas, too. He has conspired to help her avoid eating my food, which is of course why I have no claim to her now. I want him gone with you when you two leave.”

Pa didn’t look triumphant. I didn’t feel triumphant either, so at least we matched. Pa just gave a little bow, looked hard at me, and walked off with the guards. I watched them go, astonished.

When they were quit of the chamber, I turned to Dragos, who now stalked in circles around the throne room. He stopped beside a bowl of fruit and picked up a pomegranate, tossing it from hand to hand as he flopped back onto his throne.

“I don’t understand!” I cried. “I promised to marry you to save him. To save all of them. How can you just let me go now?”

“It’s as I said,” Dragos replied. “I don’t want an unwilling bride.” He dug his claws into the pomegranate’s tender flesh, splitting it open.

“So it has nothing to do with Pa’s threat?”

“I egged him into that threat,” Dragos said. “Even though I think he did mean it. Enough to try, and trying would be enough to make countries fall—Sylvania, at least.” He ripped off a chunk of the pomegranate and tossed it down his gullet. The Darkness pressed against me, making it hard to think.

“No. No, it doesn’t make sense. He knows something, and you know he knows it! I never told him about meeting you in the forest or beside the Little Well. I never once mentioned that I knew you as Prince Frumos. How did he know to call you that?”

“He has an invisibility cap; perhaps he overheard something.”

“No, that’s not
it
,” I said, frustrated. He wasn’t telling the truth! “It takes a liar to spot a liar, and you, Dragos, are lying.” Annoyed with watching him nibble more pomegranate seeds, I picked up the fruit and threw it against the wall. It split into two parts. The Darkness hissed.

Dragos sighed. “I once lived in the world, Reveka. I was a prince once, and worshipped God, and walked in sunlight. Perhaps your father recognizes me.”

I scowled, racking my brains for the name of a prince who’d passed from the world fourteen years before. “Ew. You’re not Vlad Ţepeş, are you?”

He laughed bleakly. “No. It’s part of that long story I’ve not told you, Reveka. And now there is no time to tell it.”

“No. There’s plenty of time. I’m not leaving.” I climbed off my throne, intending to pace the chamber, but the Darkness pushed me down. I sank to the steps before my throne.

“You will leave,” Dragos was saying. “I release you. Don’t you understand?”

“No!” I said, struggling under the weight of the Darkness. “I don’t understand anything! How can you release me? Think of Thonos, and the souls.”
Think of yourself,
I wanted to add.
I can barely stand it here, with both you and Mihas. How can you stand it alone?

He stared down at me. “I could force you to dance with me every night, too,” he said at last. “But I found that sort of thing really wasn’t to my taste, in the end.”

I pounded my fist against my leg. “You’re an idiot, then! A betrothal is a promise. Hold me to it! If I hadn’t interfered, maybe you would have had a bride, in time, from among the twelve princesses.”

He ignored that. “You’re too young to marry. I was . . . overcome by the thought of the youth and life that you bring with you. And your love. Oh, not for me. But that you loved your father enough to give up your life for him. None of the princesses loved any of their sisters enough to do that.”

“They were only half sisters to each other,” I said, as if
that
were the important thing to consider. “And they would say that they loved each other too much to let any one of them sacrifice herself.”

“Perhaps that’s true. But
you
are not for this world.”

I’m a little bit for this world,
I thought, though I didn’t know where the thought came from. I loved my herbary, rough and unsettled. I loved my forest, blighted but growing.

And really, in a way, I loved Dragos, too. Enough to wish him a better life than the lonely stewardship of a dying and vulnerable kingdom.

I bit my lip. I glanced at the torn pomegranate lying against the wall, its juices trickling like blood. I thought of the sleepers in the World Above slipping away beneath Adina’s watchful eye, of Didina’s mother and the Duke of Styria dying in their towers, of the disappearing souls, of Didina, poisoned for trying to save her mother. I thought of the nymph Alethe, and how she had seemed so certain that an herbalist in Thonos would end the blight on the kingdom. How I’d come to hope for this myself.