Palace of Mirrors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Turn left at the corner of the stairs where there’s a red ribbon tied on the post—yes, there it is. Then go down two flights and turn right. . . . But was it left then right or right then left? Was it two flights or three? I can’t remember. I’m too panicked. If I thought my heart was flayed open before, learning that everything I’d always believed was a lie, learning that I’m just one of twelve girls making unfounded claims . . . well, I was wrong. That was nothing. This is what it feels like to have my heart pounded into a pulp, to feel utterly crushed. Harper is in danger, and it’s all because of me.

  I remember how I rushed back to find Harper on the street corner after I saw the boy kidnapped by the press gang and carried off to war. I’d been worried about Harper then, but that was only the possibility of danger. This is worse. This is all but certain.

  Oh, Harper. There are things I should have said to you—not just my secrets about being a princess. . . .

  The stairs below me are completely dark. I’m carrying a lantern, but its dim light seems so easily devoured by the inky blackness around me. I feel like I’ve been descending these stairs forever. Surely I’ve climbed down more than two flights since the post with the red ribbon. Haven’t I? The stairway veers, dropping into a jagged dip to the right. I don’t remember that from before. Wouldn’t I have noticed? I crouch down, holding the lantern close to the steps. Ahead of me the uneven stairs jerk right and left, forming a zigzag path down into the darkness. My heart sinks. This is totally unfamiliar.

  Nothing to do but turn back, I tell myself.

  I race up again, taking steps two at a time. I feel something wet on my cheek and touch it—oh, yeah, I think vaguely. Blood from my wound. It doesn’t matter now. I turn at the landing, but I can’t find the post with the red ribbon anymore. The next time I see stairs going down, I take them. These, too, seem to descend endlessly.

  Fine. These probably go to the dungeon. I’ll go out the door there and just climb up the regular stairs. If anyone sees me I’ll bluff my way out. I’ll think of something. I have to.

  I almost cry with relief when I see the outline of a stone door ahead of me, at the bottom of the stairs. I shove against it, but it doesn’t budge. Oops, no—pull! It takes all my strength to tug the door open a crack. A little more . . . Finally, the doorway is wide enough that I can slip through.

  This is not the same dungeon that I was in before. The stench is worse, the filth is worse, and the curtains of clammy cobwebs are so thick against my face that I’m forced to breathe with my hand over my nose. Also, it’s not just sludge beneath my feet here—it’s torrents of sludge, a river of sludge, maybe all of Cortona’s sewage mixed with the refuse from every slaughterhouse in the kingdom.

  Wonderful, I think. Another pair of shoes ruined.

  With a trembling arm I lift the lantern high, trying to see a way out.

  I gasp.

  In front of me and slightly to the left an executioner’s pike leans against the wall, alongside a rack and a row of thumbscrews and a blade hanging from the ceiling over a stone table strewn with ropes. Sir Stephen never taught me about any of those things, but I heard stories in the village.

  You pull a man’s fingernails out, oh yeah, he’ll start talking. He’ll tell you anything you want to know. . . .

  The way the rack works, see, you turn the crank and then the body stretches—bet you didn’t know a body could stretch that much, huh? Well, it can’t, not really, not without dying. Eventually . . .

  Those were stories I closed my ears to, stories I didn’t want to hear. Even Harper didn’t like those stories. But I heard enough that I know what this place is.

  I’ve found the palace torture chamber.

  I turn to the right because I can’t bear to look anymore, not when I have to decide whether to go back up the secret stairway or force myself to continue through this chamber of horrors, looking for another way out. My arm is shaking so badly now that I can barely hold on to the lantern. I swing the light out in a wide arc.

  And that’s when I see the eleven men hanging on the wall.

  24

  At first I think they are dead. How can they not be, when their bodies are so skeletal? They are old men, shrunken down to bone and beards, their arms pulled to either side by solid chain, their legs tugged toward the ground by cuffs around their ankles. They look like they’ve been crucified.

  Then one of them lifts his head and speaks.

  “Oh, miss,” he creaks. “I pray thee, have a kindness—what can you tell us of the princess? Is she safe?”

  “D-Desmia?” I stammer.

  “No,” he says weakly, “not her. She is but a fake. Know you of the true princess?”

  I think that it must take great effort for him to form those words, to move his ancient jaw. But he’s not asking for food or water or release. He’s asking about the true princess.

  “What is the true princess’s name?” I ask cautiously.

  In spite of everything that’s happened, everything that I’ve seen and heard, I am still longing for all eleven men to chime in together: “Cecilia!”

  They do not say this.

  “If you knowest not her name, perhaps I’d best not say,” the first man mumbles.

  The man beside him whispers, “Oh, come now, this is a mere girl, not Throckmorton. . . .”

  “How else will we ever know?” another adds.

  And a bold man on the end throws his head back and calls out, “Lucia! Her name is Lucia!”

  At once the other men turn on him.

  “Roget, how can you say that? What good are jokes, now?”

  “Roget, who knows how much time we have before Throckmorton returns . . . ?”

  “It’s Fidelia, miss,” one man says while the others argue.

  “Fidelia? You jest! The true princess is Sophia!”

  “Aramina!”

  “Porfinia!”

  “Ganelia!”

  While the skeletal men spit out names and argue, I notice for the first time that a twelfth set of chains and ankle cuffs hangs at the far end of the wall. A twelfth set waiting for a twelfth man, I think. Waiting for Sir Stephen.

  “You were all knights,” I say. “Knights who became tutors . . .”

  “Well, I became the true princess’s tutor,” the one the others have been calling Roget replies. Sir Roget, I think, remembering Ella asking me, Did your Sir Stephen know Sir Roget, who hid Lucia in Gondervail? Or Sir Alderon who hid Fidelia in Tsurit?

  “How dare you say that! I was her tutor,” another man corrects him.

  “No, I was!”

  “No, me!”

  I don’t count, but I’m sure I hear eleven claims and counterclaims. I close my eyes, weakly.

  “Why?” I whisper.

  The men fall silent. I open my eyes, and they are all staring at me.

  “Why did all of you lie?” I ask. “Telling those girls, each one of them, ‘You are the one and only true princess,’ when it wasn’t true?”

  “I promise you, miss, I did not lie,” Sir Roget says. “On my honor as a knight, I swear—”

  His oath is drowned out by ten other knights also swearing, “I did not lie, I promise.”

  I can’t figure this out. They all seem to be telling the truth—or they all seem to think they are telling the truth, which is perhaps an important difference. I can’t even understand how all of them could have been hanging there for God knows how long without having thought to compare stories.

  “But Sir Stephen always told me . . .,” I begin, and stop. I still want to believe Sir Stephen. I still want to believe—no! I know!—that he and Nanny are trustworthy. I remember Harper’s theory that maybe Sir Stephen thought he was telling the truth, but someone had lied to him. So many lies and possible lies, I think. How can I ever find the truth? A lump is growing in my throat because I miss Sir Stephen so much—Sir Stephen and all his certainty. . . . My eyes turn again toward the twelfth set of chains and cuffs. I force my gaze away.


  “Sir Stephen?” Sir Roget says eagerly. “You know of Sir Stephen? He is our only hope now. Is he well? Is he preparing a plan of attack?”

  My head is spinning. These knights know about Sir Stephen, so he must know about them—does he know they all claim to have tutored the true princess? Does he know they’re all here in the torture chamber? Does he know about the chains and cuffs waiting for him?

  I shake my head impatiently, trying to clear it.

  “A friend of mine is on his way to find Sir Stephen,” I say. “But Lord Throckmorton . . .” I don’t have time to explain. I don’t have time to straighten out their stories, either, not when Harper could be stepping into Lord Throckmorton’s trap at this very moment. “I have to go. Is there another exit from this room?”

  The knights are silent, as if reluctant to let me leave. Then the oldest-looking one, the one who spoke first, croaks, “They brought us down the stairs over there.” He points to the right.

  I turn in that direction, then stop and turn back. I peer again at the eleven knights reduced to near skeletons, chained in a torture chamber. Eleven knights who asked nothing for themselves, but only wanted to know the fate of eleven girls. Eleven knights who seem truly admirable, loyal, and honest—but surely must be lying. I whirl around and grab the executioner’s pike. I step toward Sir Roget and lift the pike high above my head. It’s heavy, but I don’t waver.

  “Miss!” he exclaims. Still, he does not beg or plead. He lowers his head, nobly.

  I bring the pike down squarely on the chains that confine his right wrist. The chains fall away with a satisfying clunk. I do the same with the chains on his left and, more delicately, with the cuffs about his ankles. When he tumbles to the ground, I hand him the pike.

  “Free the others,” I tell him. “The girls you ask about are in the dungeon. There is a way to find it if you go up those stairs.” I point to the door I came through. “I can’t begin to tell you how to get there. But when you find the girls, go to the highest point in the castle—there’s a tower there where you’ll be safe. I think Desmia will help you, and Ella . . . I’ll meet you there if I can.”

  I take off running without looking back.

  25

  The stairs are nearby, but then I have to climb and climb and climb. . . . I am dizzy by the time I reach the top, and so stupid with exhaustion that the door utterly confounds me. It’s solid wood and seems sealed tight, undoubtedly locked from the other side. I find myself wishing I’d kept the executioner’s pike—I have such a lovely picture in my mind of myself slashing the door down to splinters. I think about backtracking and retrieving the pike from the knights, but that’s so far away.

  Think, I command myself. Maybe something Sir Stephen taught you would be useful? Not palace manners, not Latin, not geography, not rhetoric—maybe geometry? The door is a rectangle, I think, ever so brilliantly. Bounded on the left by hinges, and . . .

  Hinges. I reach down and pry out the pin of the bottom hinge. By the time I’m done, my fingers are as bloody as my head, but when I shove against it, the door creaks out a little. I pull the pin from the next hinge up, and then the one above that, and by battering my shoulder against the door I make enough of an opening to squeeze out.

  I don’t even check to see where the door leads—I’m just lucky I don’t arrive in a room full of soldiers. Instead, I’m outside the palace, in a dark alley strewn with garbage and rats.

  “Harper, you had better appreciate this,” I mutter, because there is nowhere to put my feet without stepping on a rat’s body.

  Some of the rats are evidently dead, because they don’t move when I step on them.

  It’s a good thing I’m not really a princess, after all, I think, what with having to walk on rat carcasses. But, annoyingly, one of Sir Stephen’s maxims immediately springs to mind: “A royal caught in unpleasant circumstances does not panic, but remembers the value of distracting oneself. Humming a patriotic song is always helpful.”

  The only music I can think of are the tunes Harper plays. Tears blur my eyes—and really that’s a good thing, because then I can’t see the rats I’m walking through.

  The alley curves and shifts, and then, as if there’s an invisible fence somewhere, the rats disappear from underfoot. Respectable shops appear around me now, along with respectable townspeople, who stare and gape and yet somehow manage to pretend that they are not staring and gaping.

  Oh, yeah, I think. My head is bleeding, my hands are bleeding, my shoes are covered in sludge. . . .

  I consider smiling and uttering a polite, And how are you this fine day? but no one will meet my eye. Regardless, I need all my concentration for forcing my feet forward.

  Where am I going, anyhow? Why didn’t I ask Harper exactly where he planned to go to look for Sir Stephen and Nanny and his mam?

  The alley—now just an ordinary street—curves again and spits me out into a vast sunlit square. No, not a square: It’s the courtyard in front of the palace. And it must be noon, because the courtyard is packed wall-to-wall with people all staring toward at Desmia’s balcony.

  I sway, nearly overcome with dizziness and despair. How could I possibly have thought that I could find Harper in all the crowds of Cortona? Why hadn’t I thought to beg the knights from the torture chamber to come with me? They were rickety skeletons, near death, but there would be someone to help me, so it wouldn’t be just me alone, desperately searching an entire city for a single boy.

  And then, across the crowd, I spy Ella.

  I can see her only because she is being lifted onto a sort of viewing platform in the center of the courtyard. She is wearing a dainty rose-colored dress that gleams in the sunlight, its glow almost matching the marvel of her golden hair. Though she wears no crown, she looks every bit a princess; several in the crowd are staring at her rather than Desmia’s balcony. Dimly, I remember her part in our plans: Under the guise of simply wanting to know more about our delightful kingdom she was going to ask for a tour of Cortona, so she could gauge the mood of the countryside and find out whether Suala’s subjects were more loyal to Desmia or Lord Throckmorton.

  What a stupid plan, I think. But then some of Sir Stephen’s chess training kicks in, and it’s like I can step back and see an overview, all of us like pieces on a chessboard. Ella’s plan—our plan, the one all four of us put together last night—was not stupid. It was simply cautious, a plan perfectly suited to a foreigner who doesn’t want to ruin her fiancé’s peace mission and a princess who already feels like her life is in danger and a girl who no longer knows who she is and a boy who . . . Well, I can’t think of Harper’s reason for caution; that’s probably why he’d agreed to do the most dangerous task. Still, last night we were like chess players deciding to push a few pawns forward so we could figure out our opponents’ mindset and strategy. We thought the game was just beginning. We thought we had time.

  We didn’t know about the half-dead knights in the torture chamber and the trap laid around Sir Stephen and . . . I feel the color drain from my face. There are probably other dangers out there that I still don’t know about, because I ran away from my listening post.

  I had to, I tell myself fiercely. The time for caution is past.

  I begin struggling through the throngs of people toward Ella. The crowd does not exactly part for me the way I saw it part for her. I have to shove, elbow, pinch, poke, and—once, when everything else fails—threaten to smear my bloody hands on a nasty woman’s dress. By the time I reach Ella’s viewing platform, Desmia must be done waving up on her balcony, because the crowd is reluctantly beginning to turn away.

  Guards circle Ella’s platform. I hear the woman sitting next to her—a stiff, matronly type in an ugly, eggplant-colored dress—say, “I’ve arranged a carriage to pick us up now, because you surely don’t want to associate with any of the riffraff in the streets.”

  I plant myself directly in front of Ella’s platform, in plain sight. I want Ella’s help looking for Harper; I want to tell h
er about what I overheard and how I found the knights in the torture chamber. I’d love it if she could figure out how each one of the knights could be so certain that he was the one who’d tutored the true princess. But I can’t tell her anything when so many other people are within earshot.

  The matron sitting beside Ella catches a glimpse of me and sniffs in horror.

  “My—my smelling salts,” she gasps.

  Do I really look that bad? Sure, my shoes and legs are a bit muddy, and my hair’s probably a mess, with the blood and all. But Ella and Desmia did make sure that I got a new dress last night—a plain one pulled from the maids’ supply, because any of their clothes would have been too conspicuous on me, but still, it’s clean and unripped and . . . I peer down, indignant, and see that the formerly clean dress is now smeared with mud and blood and adorned with filthy strings of cobwebs. And I guess I must have ripped a couple of the seams when I was wielding the pike on Sir Roget’s chains, or pulling out the door hinges, or running across the rats.

  Okay, so I look terrible. So what? Wait a minute—can I use that?

  “Please, miss,” I say, addressing Ella. “I am but a poor ragamuffin child, but I wanted to talk to you. I can tell you that even Sualans like myself understand how lucky we are to live here. Suala is a glorious land, and Desmia is a wonderful princess.”

  Ella’s eyes bug out when she sees me.

  “Listen to that,” the matron beside Ella says, having evidently decided she doesn’t have to faint. She simpers. “Even our beggars here in Suala have perfect grammar and diction. And appropriate gratitude.”

  “Please, miss,” I say, trying again, staring at Ella. “If I could just tell you my story privately . . .”

  Ella casts her eyes hesitantly toward the matron, and down toward the guards.

  “Er—,” she says.

  The matron clutches Ella’s arm.

  “Oh, no!” she exclaims. “We would never allow such a thing with a visiting dignitary. That one would lure you into a dark alley and beat you senseless, she would!”