Palace of Mirrors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  If these girls are not my children, then what do I have to leave behind? What has my life been worth?

  When I stop reading, it is so quiet in Desmia’s chambers that I swear I can practically hear the tears rolling down Nanny’s cheeks.

  “That poor woman,” she murmurs. “That poor, poor woman.”

  She lapses back into a respectful silence. It feels as though we’re all at the queen’s funeral, mourning her life, mourning the sorrows she was never able to get past.

  Then the royal captain moans, “Poor Suala! That’s what you should say!”

  Harper’s mam, who knows everything there is to know about respecting grief, whirls on him.

  “How can you say that? At a time like this? When we’ve just found out that that poor woman . . .” She sniffs, unable to go on.

  The royal captain all but rolls his eyes.

  “When that poor woman—what?” he says sarcastically. “Practically guaranteed that Suala would be plunged into civil war? If she wanted to pass off a fraud, she should have picked just one girl, preferably one who looked a lot like her and the king, so no one would ever suspect. And then—”

  “She wanted to help as many girls as she could,” I say, forcing the words out through a clotted throat. “She wanted to save us all.”

  I’m thinking that, really, she succeeded. Mostly. I can look around at all the other girls and tell that they’ve been well-loved, well cared for. Except for Desmia, who became Lord Throckmorton’s pawn. . . . I wonder if he did find the queen’s letter in Desmia’s royal object. Or if he figured out that there were twelve other “true princesses” just from spying on the other knights, and didn’t care whether any of the princesses were authentic, as long as he could use them for his own purposes. It really doesn’t matter.

  None of us are pawns now.

  “Humph,” the royal captain grunts. “I’ve got daughters. I’ve seen them nearly scratch each other’s eyes out when two of them want the same boy. And now we’ve got thirteen girls who are all going to want the same throne, but none of you actually deserve it.”

  He’s glaring at us all, as if to steel himself for the coming battles.

  “I’ve had reason lately to research royal law,” Desmia speaks up, in a trembling voice. “It says that anyone the dying monarch designates as heir is, by law, the heir.”

  “Oh, so you think you have a greater claim than the rest of us?” one of the other girls argues. “Sure, as if we’ll all just go away now, back to our little villages, while you get to stay in the palace, wearing silks and satins, eating feasts, being courted by handsome princes from other kingdoms. . . .”

  Except for the prince part, this is so close to some of the resentful thoughts I had about Desmia, back when I was at Nanny’s, that I’m jolted. It sounds so . . . nasty, spoken out loud.

  But Desmia seems jolted too.

  “No,” she says quickly. “I don’t mean I have a greater claim. I mean that all of us are princesses. The queen said so. Read that last part again, Cecilia.”

  It takes me a minute to grasp what she means.

  “Uh . . . um . . . here it is. I think this is what you want,” I say, fumbling with the parchment. “The queen wrote, ‘As far as I am concerned, these girls are all my children now.’”

  The royal captain releases another disdainful snort.

  “You can’t have thirteen princesses ruling as equals!” he scoffs.

  “Why not?” I say.

  Everyone is staring at me. I stare right back. Desmia and Ella both have faint smiles on their faces, as if they can guess what I’m getting at. Most of the knights and girls look puzzled, but a few are beginning to arch their eyebrows as understanding overtakes them. Sir Stephen and Nanny look proud. Harper looks gobsmacked. And Harper’s mam just looks sad, like she always does—no, wait, even she is starting to look a little hopeful.

  The royal captain shakes his head.

  “I don’t have time to explain palace protocol to you,” he says scornfully. “Or monarchical authority, or divine right, or—”

  “I know all about palace protocol,” I retort. “And monarchical authority. And I don’t believe you can invoke divine right, not when King Bredan was killed by a man, but anyhow I’ve been studying this stuff all my life! And so have the other girls, so we’re ready. Of course we could rule as equals—there are thirteen of us, so there’d always be someone to break the tie. Or . . .” My gaze falls on Ganelia, the one who claimed in the secret stairways not to have any leadership skills. “Maybe we wouldn’t rule as equals; maybe it would be better if we all just specialized in what we’re best at. Ganelia could oversee building in the kingdom, and Rosemary is good at ordering people around, and everyone loves the way Desmia waves on the balcony”—Desmia’s smile turns down a bit, so I rush to add—“and she knows more about royal law than anyone else, and . . . what are the rest of you good at?”

  “Lucia knows every principle of leadership inside out,” Sir Roget volunteers.

  “Sophia can speak four languages,” Sir Anthony says.

  “Fidelia is an expert strategist,” Sir Alderon adds.

  The knights go on endlessly bragging about their princesses—not would-be princesses anymore, not with competing claims, but real princesses, ready to work together. I feel Sir Stephen’s hand patting my shoulder.

  “Well done,” he whispers. “I believe this is exactly what the queen would have wanted.”

  The royal captain throws up his hands, cutting off the litany of praise.

  “All right!” he says. “I surrender! It’s indisputable: Suala has thirteen princesses—thirteen brilliant, talented, educated, beautiful princesses. We shall be the envy of the entire world!”

  Epilogue

  I stand in the tower room where Harper and I were once imprisoned. The door behind me hangs open, so I don’t have to worry about being trapped. But I’m not facing the door; I’m facing the window. I’m watching the scene in the courtyard below, where dancers swirl and the crowd cheers and twelve jeweled crowns twinkle in the blaze of lights.

  I hear footsteps behind me.

  I turn around and see a handsome young man in a fine dark suit with gold trim at his collar and cuffs. Then I blink and notice the freckles. It’s Harper.

  “Hey,” he says, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “Then you should have looked here first instead of last,” I say, and I’m proud of myself that I can say something like that to Harper, in my old, familiar, joking way, when he looks like he does, and when I myself have a crown on my head and a shimmery ball gown draped around my body and delicate, bejeweled slippers encasing my feet.

  “You’re missing your own party,” Harper says.

  I shrug.

  “There are twelve other princesses down there,” I say. “Who’s going to notice one more or less?”

  He opens his mouth, and I’m sure he’s going to say something like, Well, I did. Don’t I count? And then he’s going to get all prickly and offended. So quickly, before he has a chance to say anything, I slug him in the arm and say, “Except you, of course, and you’re probably just looking for a way to escape your mam. Right?”

  A strange expression crosses Harper’s face, and I see that I’ve misread him again. I have no idea what Harper was going to say.

  He steps across the room and joins me at the window.

  “Pretty fancy party,” he mutters.

  “Uh-huh.”

  For a second the two of us just stand there regarding the swirling dancers and the twinkling lights and the way all of it is reflected, again and again, in the mirrors that the palace staff put all around the courtyard. The palace types surely do love their mirrors.

  “So,” Harper says. “Now you have everything you always wanted.”

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Sure you do,” Harper says. “The crown, the dresses, the power . . .” He grins. “I hear you even changed the game of chess.”

  Thi
s is true, sort of. Sir Stephen says there’s a new variation of chess being played in the land, where pawns can become queens if they travel all the way across the board. But it’s not like any of the other princesses or I ordered that change. It just happened.

  Harper’s grin deepens.

  “Not to mention, now you’ve got shoes that aren’t made of cloth and covered in mud. . . .”

  I crack a smile, but it fades quickly.

  “It doesn’t feel the way I thought it would,” I mumble.

  “What—do the shoes pinch, or something?” Harper asks. “You can always ask for a new pair, or get them adjusted, or—”

  “It’s not the shoes,” I say, though they do pinch. So does the crown, actually. I can’t ever forget I’m wearing it.

  “Don’t tell me you’re mad because you have to share being princess,” Harper says. He’s almost glaring at me. “Not when it was your idea.”

  “I’m not! Honest!” I say. “I’m still kind of stunned that we got any power—I don’t think we would have, except that all the advisers and ministers were arrested. There’s nobody else left to rule. And really, it’d be a lot harder if I didn’t have anyone else to share things with, even though Sophia does get on my nerves, acting like she’s the only one with good ideas, and Marindia—don’t get me started on Marindia!—she has these really great ideas, but she’ll never bring them up in our meetings, and so we’ll argue for hours, and then at the very end, as we’re walking out, Marindia will just whisper, ‘Well, how about doing things this way?’ and it’s exactly right, and then—”

  “You’re all still adjusting,” Harper says. I can tell that he didn’t follow me away from the celebration just to hear me talk about our hours and hours of meetings.

  I look over at Harper, and in the dimness of the tower I can’t really see him. I can’t tell if he’s the handsome young man who appeared in the doorway or the freckle-faced boy I’ve known all my life. Maybe that’s why it feels safe to confess, “I think my problem is, I always thought that taking up my crown would be my happy ending—my happily ever after—and . . . it’s not.”

  “You’re not happy?” Harper says, and there’s something extra in his voice that I don’t stop to analyze.

  “Oh, I don’t know!” I say impatiently. “I don’t really mean that—I mean that it’s not the ending. It’s just the beginning. Lord Throckmorton and all his conspirators are locked away, and the other princesses and I are safe, and we got that cease-fire on the Fridesian border, of course, but now we’ve got to negotiate the peace treaty, and make it fair and solid, without cheating either side, and without leaving anything so vague that the two kingdoms start fighting again. And we’ve got to figure out what to do about all the soldiers coming home, how they’re going to adjust, and now the agriculture minister is saying there’s going to be a bad crop on the western side of Suala, and so we’ve got to worry about that, and . . .” I grimace. “You can make fun of me if you want to. I guess I really did think that being princess would be nothing more than sitting around eating bon-bons and looking pretty.”

  “You do look pretty,” Harper whispers. And for a second it seems like he’s going to reach out and take my hand, and lean in close and tell me exactly how pretty I look, and then I could tell him how handsome he looks. But I guess I’m wrong; I guess my eyes were tricked in the dim light. Nothing happens.

  “Porfinia’s prettier,” I say. “And you know Desmia’s better at waving from the balcony, even though we’re all taking turns with that now.” I’m mostly just babbling, filling in the little space that came between us when he didn’t reach out and take my hand. But something clicks—I do want to tell him this. “And Florencia is much better at studying the kingdom’s budget than I am, and Adoriana has this talent for arranging flowers, and Elzabethl knows how to talk to the servants to get them to do exactly what she wants, and I swear, if we ever have to fight another war, Fidelia’s the one I’d want planning the strategy, and . . .” I draw in a breath that’s somehow turned ragged and pained. “Really, everyone else is better at being a princess than I am!”

  Harper stares at me. His jaw sags, and his eyes bug out.

  “You really think that?” he asks.

  I nod. And then I’m annoyed with myself all over again, because tears have begun to prickle in my eyes. Harper brushes one of the tears off my cheek—such an amazingly tender gesture. But the effect is ruined, because at the very same moment he snorts.

  “You are such an idiot,” he says. “If all the others are better princesses, how come you’re the only one Lord Throckmorton never caught?”

  “You know,” I say. “Only because I ran away. I came to Cortona before he had a chance to catch me. Remember?”

  Harper nods, and in that moment he looks almost like Sir Stephen trying to lead me through a geometry proof.

  “So you were the only one brave enough to come to Cortona,” he says. “The only one who wasn’t willing to let another girl be sacrificed for you. Don’t you think that counts for anything?”

  “Well,” I say, “I wouldn’t have come to Cortona if you hadn’t talked me into it.”

  Harper grins, and even in the fancy suit the mischievous, freckle-faced boy I’ve always known shines through.

  “Okay, so you should get points for having the good sense to be friends with me,” he says.

  I almost give him a little shove, our old way of relating to each other. But he is wearing that fancy suit. And something else is buzzing in my brain. A bit of alarm.

  Harper’s still talking.

  “And you’re the one who rescued all the knights, who then rescued all the other princesses,” he says. “I can’t take any credit for that one. And you tried to make sure that Ella rescued me. And you’re the only one who dared to defend Desmia against Lord Throckmorton.”

  The way he’s talking, I’m starting to think differently about the fact that on the day we discovered the queen’s letter the other princesses looked like princesses, while I was covered in muck and cobwebs and blood. Those weren’t signs of shame. They were battle wounds, badges of honor. I should have worn my rips and stains proudly.

  But I’m wearing a ball gown now. A ball gown and a crown and silver, jewel-covered slippers. And I was so busy with the coronation this afternoon and the peace negotiations and the agricultural reports before that that this is the first time I’ve seen Harper all day.

  I turn and face him squarely.

  “What about you?” I say quietly. “You were brave too. You tried to rescue Sir Stephen and Nanny and your mam. You were willing to walk all the way here, to keep me safe, even though you knew you might be carried away to the war. Don’t you think you deserve credit for all that? Or some . . . reward?”

  Harper looks away from me, out toward the party.

  “I got to see you crowned princess, just like you were supposed to be,” he says. He’s speaking so softly I can barely hear him. He runs his hand through his hair, making it stand up all over the place in a familiar way. Then he turns back to me, a slight frown on his face. “And Mam says I can be her assistant.”

  That reminds me of the other big news in the palace. Even though Sir Stephen and Nanny and Harper’s mam never got to play in the music competition, Harper’s mam evidently talked to a lot of the other musicians while they were waiting behind the stage. She apparently made so many good suggestions for their performances that she was offered the job of palace music instructor.

  Harper’s frown deepens.

  “So if I wait a million years until she retires, I could maybe even become the head harp teacher myself, and then finally get to play the way I want to,” he says.

  As expected, his mother is not thrilled with his new method of plucking the harp strings as quickly as possible.

  “I seem to remember promising you the job of Lord High Chancellor of Fishing Ponds,” I say. I hesitate. “But . . .”

  At the same time Harper says, “Except . . .”

&
nbsp; “You first,” I say.

  “No, no, royalty before commoners,” Harper says.

  “No, I insist! You—”

  “What are you going to do, order me to talk, because you’re the princess?” Harper asks brusquely.

  I take one look at his face and decide not to, even in jest.

  “Okay! Okay!” I say. “What I was going to say is . . .” It is amazingly hard to make myself speak. I whisper. “‘But I would miss you.’”

  Harper looks down.

  “And I was going to say, ‘Except it wouldn’t be any fun alone,’” he says. “‘Without you.’”

  Neither of us seems to know where to look after that. I peer down at the party again, at the blur of lights and mirrors. Then I stare at the stones of the tower, each one held apart from the others by a thick layer of mortar. Or joined by mortar, depending on how you look at it.

  Then, somehow, I’m gazing right into Harper’s eyes.

  And what I see there—it’s like seeing everything at once. Why Harper didn’t want to play a love song in front of me. Why he stopped wanting to be a soldier, even though he still said that he did. How many times he’s wanted to hug me but held back. Why Ella thought that my feelings for Harper were like hers for Jed. And . . . how easily I could lose him.

  “Maybe I could go with you,” I offer faintly.

  The corners of Harper’s mouth curve down again.

  “You’re a princess,” he says. “Princesses don’t have time to concern themselves with fishing ponds.”

  “We wouldn’t just have to look at fishing ponds,” I say. “We could go around inspecting the countryside, gathering information about everything. And maybe we could travel to Fridesia, too, for the peace negotiations. And . . .” I feel a little shy, mentioning this. “And to go to Ella and Jed’s wedding.”