The Princess Curse

by Merrie Haskell

She chopped a hand across my words. “No matter. All paths don’t have to run the same to be worth walking. Of course, it would be better if you had a mother, but a queen is a queen, and better that Dragos has not left it too late. . . .” She frowned at me. “But you have not eaten!”

  Mihas stirred, muttering, and again the woman waved at him and he puddled into sleep once more. She turned to me, her face etched with sympathy. “It is difficult, I know, for a gardener’s daughter, for an herbalist, to dwell in the Sunless House.”

  “The sunless house?” I repeated.

  “This whole land is the Sunless House. The Underworld, you perhaps call it? It is a vital place, a reservoir of life and death and magic, which exists in tandem with the World Above. Without a properly functioning Underworld, the World Above suffers—and vice versa, of course.”

  “Is the Underworld suffering?” I asked, though I suspected I knew the answer, had seen the answer, written in the blight in this forest.

  “Thonos suffers. The rot you see around you is but a manifestation of the rot across the whole land. Trees fall and none take their place; you have seen this here. But elsewhere, worse occurs. Souls disappear on their journeys and gain neither the Heaven nor the rebirth they have earned. It will be your task, as Queen, to stop this, to heal the land.” She glanced down at herself, at the light visible through her body. “Even I am not as strong as I once was. The river Alethe suffers, just like the souls, just like this forest. Heal us, Reveka.”

  “Er . . . how am I to heal Thonos?”

  She smiled. “By simply being who—and what—you were meant to be: the Queen of Thonos. A queen will rebalance the land, spur life to awaken where now there is only gray death.”

  No wonder Dragos had tried so hard to get a wife; his land was dying, and he needed a queen to heal it. He’d said he didn’t seek heirs. And he didn’t seem to have such a burden of governing duties that splitting them with a wife was necessary.

  The nymph was still talking. “When you are Queen, the healing will be as breathing.” Her smile faded. “But not until then. Never until then. I know; for there was a time I refused to eat, to give myself to the Underworld, too, and everyone suffered for it.”

  Mihas moaned, waggling his head like a turtle. I was prepared for her to put him to sleep again, but in the moment between when I looked at Mihas and when I looked back, she was gone. I strongly suspected an invisibility cap was in play—they seemed as common as dirt around here.

  “Get up, Cowherd,” I said sharply, irritated and not a little frightened by the nymph’s visit. “It’s time to go back.”

  Mihas struggled to his feet. “I’m not a cowherd, you know, so you can stop calling me that. My family raised sheep. We owned but the one cow.”

  I opened my mouth to retort, but no sharp words were forthcoming. Instead I said, “You’re right. I don’t know that I liked being called Cabbage Girl by the princesses all that much, either. I’m sorry. How’s your head?”

  “Fine,” he said, but my apology must have stunned him to silence, and we followed the ribbons back to the boat without speaking another word.

  Chapter 28

  I did not know what to think about my conversation with the nymph, but my mind returned again and again to her words about the blight on the land: It will be your task, as Queen, to stop this.

  If I could heal the land, Dragos wouldn’t need a queen. If I could heal the land, I wouldn’t have to become his wife and dwell in the “Sunless House,” and potentially lose my soul by marrying a demon. If I could heal the land, I could go home to Pa, and the herbary, and Didina—to the dowry I’d earned by breaking the curse. I could take up the dream I’d despaired of.

  The nymph seemed certain that my being an herbalist was a good sign. How so? I wondered. Was curing the ailment of Thonos, at its root, as simple as curing a body of a fever?

  There was no time to waste in getting my tools in order, if that was the case.

  I decided quickly that my bedroom was not going to be an adequate herbary. Fortunately, the bedchamber next to mine was completely empty and seemed disinclined to dampness.

  I had Mihas and Zuste move two long tables I liked into the room, and I added all the bits and bobs I’d collected around the castle. I had my servants hang drying racks for me, filched from the kitchens, while I unpacked my herb pouch and sorted my bounty from the forest. I sent Skiare out with the long list I’d made, after adding cheesecloth to it.

  While my servants worked to obtain the rest of my materials, I began a careful assessment of the plants of the Underworld. I divided all the seeds I’d collected in half. The first half I planted in tiny pots of earth. The second half I studied closely. I wrote down all the observed characteristics of the seeds: their smell, their shape, and their color. Then I cut them and examined their inner layers, and finally I powdered them, and tasted each seed in tiny doses—noting flavor, of course, but also any effect, such as immediate tingling on my tongue.

  After I finished with the seeds, I moved on to flowers, then roots, then bark, then finally leaves and stems. While there was not a one-to-one correspondence of properties between World Above plants and their Underworld counterparts, there were many similarities. Mistletoe grew the same way down here as above and showed all the signs of being a potent poison; roses still smelled sweet; and so forth.

  All this activity served, for a time, to make me forget that I was starving; for though I drank mug after mug of tisanes made from the herbs I’d brought from the World Above, they did not fool my stomach into believing I’d eaten, even when I chewed the too-tart dregs of my teas.

  I worked steadily throughout the day. Only when I heard a knock down the hall at my bedchamber door did I realize that I was going to have to make the case for my herbary sooner, not later. I yanked open the herbary door and poked my head out. Dragos turned, surprised.

  “My lord.” I beckoned him over, and he came in, ducking his head and folding in his wings to fit through the doorframe. He looked around at the chaos I’d made.

  “An herbary,” he said, though sounding more inquisitive than anything else. I launched into my defense anyway.

  “Even in a land where people don’t fall sick and die, there are baths and bath herbs. Or there could be. And clothes! Clothes need scenting. Aren’t there mice or moths or spiders to keep out down here? Doesn’t matter—I like the smells of southernwood and santolina. And cooking herbs! You must need cooking herbs. And yet you say there’s no need for an herbary!”

  Dragos’s ears twitched. “I’m sorry. I spoke hastily. I should not have tried to deprive you of your few pleasures. It’s just—”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s silly, and a waste of my time.”

  “Not at all. You may find that there are other properties in the plants that grow down here. Healing is not a necessity, but—”

  “Not a necessity? I learned today that your whole world is suffering! Thonos is ailing.”

  His ears flexed and tightened. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Thonos is ailing. I hadn’t thought of it in terms of needing an herbalist, but yes, we are ailing. Streams dry up, trees die. . . . Souls are disappearing, just slipping away into nothingness, sometimes before my very eyes.”

  Exactly as the nymph had said. “Like the cursed sleepers,” I said, thinking of Didina’s ma, slipping away before Adina’s eyes.

  “Pardon?”

  “The men and women Princess Lacrimora and her sisters poisoned. They’ve lain for years in a sleep like death. Sometimes, they just . . . die. Decline. Slip right away.”

  “Poisoned,” he said, the word a dull thud.

  “Yes! They poisoned my friend Didina, just poured noxious wine down her throat. To protect their secret. Their dancing with you.”

  “Poisoned . . . I see.”

  “You did not know?” Somehow, this thought made me feel a little better—until I remembered what he did to the men who followed the princesses down into the Underworld. Instead of poisoning th
em, he’d enslaved them and made them drink the waters of Lethe, and put their immortal souls in danger.

  In a way, I could see that perhaps Lacrimora’s poison was a little bit—just a very tiny bit—more generous than the alternative. Broadly speaking.

  “I didn’t know.” He seemed lost in contemplation for a moment, but then he stirred. “They had their reasons,” he said. “As I had mine. I came to ask if you were going to dine with me tonight.”

  My head was shaking no before I even gave it permission to move. If he was going to ask, apparently I was going to tell him the truth.

  “Sorry,” I said pathetically. If I joined him at dinner, the temptation to eat might prove to be too much, and now that I knew Dragos didn’t need a wife as much as he needed a healer, it seemed foolish to give in.

  He was gracious. He did not press me.

  I crept back to my room not much later, too hungry to concentrate anymore. Mihas was standing outside my door, attentive, like a footman. I asked him to fetch me the Water of Life.

  “The Water of Life?” Mihas’s eyes widened. “Do you have some?”

  “Obviously no, since I asked you to fetch it for me,” I said, but I was too curious to be irritated. Was the water not freely available? I told Mihas to wait, and I trotted off to find Dragos, who was of course dining.

  The zmeu seemed amused by my request. “The ordinary water around here will do you no harm,” he said. “It is the same water that wells up through the ground and runs through the rivers of the World Above.”

  “I don’t want to accidentally drink Lethe.”

  “You would have to drink from it daily, not just once.”

  I thought about the legends of the Underworld I knew, the Greek stories of Hades and Persephone. “I thought souls only drank once from Lethe and easily forgot everything.”

  His ears flared. “You are not an eidolon soul but a mortal girl, so it is different. It interests me, though, that you should know this about Lethe—do they tell these legends, or are you well-read, Reveka?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve read every book of herb lore I have ever had the chance to, and all the pamphlets about Draculea, and the Gospels. When we lived in Moldavia, I wasn’t apprenticed, so I read everything King Stefan’s librarian would let me, which was mostly Homer and herbals. I’ve read . . . about thirty books, I suppose?”

  “So the answer is, for your age and station, you are well-read.”

  “I guess,” I said. “If being well-read matters. Hades is supposed to be ruled by, um, Hades, and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, so I can’t vouch for any of the information I learned by reading.”

  Dragos rose to fill a silver pitcher from a stone amphora in the corner. “Hades the country broke apart two hundred fifty years ago, around the time that the Golden Horde swept into Europe. Hades the King, or Pluto, or Dis Pater—whatever you’d like to call him—is long gone.”

  “Thonos used to be part of Hades, then? Like Sylvania and Transylvania and Wallachia used to be part of the Roman Empire in the World Above?”

  “Yes.” He handed me the silver pitcher. “Thonos was a prized region of Hades, largely due to the fact that the sources of the rivers Lethe and Alethe are here.”

  “Ah. Well, thank you for the water.” I stumbled through a curtsy, trying not to slosh, and scurried back to my bedchamber.

  When I gave Mihas the pitcher, he guzzled the entire thing, then fell into one of the fireside chairs, eyes closed.

  “Mihas?” I shook his shoulder.

  He opened his eyes. “It’s coming back. I didn’t think it would.”

  “What’s coming back?”

  “My memory of the World Above.”

  When Mihas left, I lay down to rest just for a moment—and fell asleep.

  When I woke again, Thela was in my room preparing my clothing. It was the only signal for morning that I could recognize in this dark world.

  I wobbled to my feet and let her dress me. I couldn’t focus my thoughts, and I felt that this did not bode well for a day of study in my herbary. While Thela combed out my hair, I sat still and considered the disappearing souls of Thonos, and how their fate mirrored the way the sleepers in the World Above sometimes slipped away from Adina’s care.

  My hunger-addled brain recalled bits of yesterday’s conversation with the nymph—something about how whatever happened above was mirrored in the world below. And perhaps this was true—perhaps the Underworld was a shadow cast by the World Above. Or a reflection.

  But the dying plants? The falling trees? The new life that would not take?

  The new life that would not take . . . Vasile couldn’t get an heir and hadn’t had a child in years. He’d proven himself fertile many times, years ago, but no longer.

  A terrible hunger pang gripped my belly, and the Darkness came back, springing shut around me like a bear trap, pressing me to the ground. Memories rolled over me: every half-recalled nightmare of Muma Pădurii, every hungry hour of my life, and every moment of fear I’d ever experienced, from the first time I’d been called a liar and received a beating from the Abbess to the first time I’d heard the distant thunder of the Turks’ cannons to the moment when the princesses had poured poison down Didina’s throat and I had been unable to save her.

  When the Darkness finally moved off me, it seemed to be laughing.

  I opened my eyes to Thela patting my cheek and calling what seemed to be my name through her thick accent. She pulled me to my feet and plopped me into a chair.

  I would normally think I had fainted from hunger, but I’d fainted from hunger before, during the worst of the famine rations, and this was different.

  I was terribly hungry, but the hunger wasn’t as bad as the Darkness. The water of Alethe had kept the Darkness at bay for a little while, but that was all.

  I would go to Dragos. I would eat. Because I had to admit that Pa wasn’t coming. It had been days, and the steps from the princesses’ tower were caved in. Pa wasn’t coming.

  While horrified by this realization, I was also relieved. The Darkness would leave me alone, and I wouldn’t be hungry, true. But if I ate, if I became the Queen of Thonos, then the souls would stop disappearing and the Queen’s Forest would grow again.

  I hadn’t realized how much I felt the burden of Thonos’s illness until the decision was out of my hands.

  I stood on reluctant, trembling legs and started toward the hall.

  Chapter 29

  A knock at the door arrested me. I swayed and sat back down while Thela admitted Mihas.

  I smelled food, the warmth of bread and the sourness of cheese. For a brief, dizzying moment, I thought, He knows what I’ve decided, and he’s brought me the food of the Underworld. How could he, after all his talk of rescue? My gaze narrowed on the basket over his arm, and steadiness returned. Mihas wouldn’t do that.

  “Send your handmaiden away,” Mihas said. I waved at Thela and said, “Shoo!” but that was all I could manage for communication. She kept on making my bed. I shrugged at Mihas.

  “If you’re fine with her knowing,” Mihas said, “then your father brought food.”

  “What?” Instantly, my resolve to dwell in the Underworld for the rest of my life withered. My stomach gurgled to life. “No! Pa came?”

  “Yes. I met him at the edge of the forest, by the lake, when he signaled.” Mihas went to my desk and began unpacking the basket. I tallied the breads, the cheeses, the apples, the plums, the thyme pies, the tartlets. It looked like a lot, but it wasn’t actually very much. No more than two or three days’ worth, at full ration.

  I was starving. It wouldn’t hurt anything if I ate a bite of cheese from above while I asked for the tidings from home. I lurched to my feet and crammed a wedge of cheese into my mouth. It was so good, salty on my tongue, and so sharp that my jaw tightened in shock.

  “How did Pa get down here if the stairs to the princesses’ tower are caved in?” I asked around the lump of cheese in my cheek.

 
“He has his own way in. He dug a tunnel.”

  “Oh.” I chewed and swallowed. Food! Glorious, wonderful food! I ripped a chunk of bread next and felt my withered resolve shrivel further. “How is Didina?”

  A muscle near Mihas’s mouth twitched, and he avoided my eyes by staring at the tapestries on my walls. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Lacrimora woke the sleepers, right? So—how’s Didina?”

  Mihas met my eyes. “Lacrimora didn’t wake the sleepers, Reveka.”

  “What?” I shrieked. Startled, Thela looked up. Not perceiving danger, but reading my face well enough, she started toward me. I waved her off. “Did Lacrimora even try?”

  Mihas took a deep breath, fingers fidgeting with his sleeves. “Your papa says she tried, but it was no good—she doesn’t have the cure.” As I opened my mouth again, he said, “I don’t know any more than that!”

  “Did they try the water of the Little Well? The water in the Little Well mixes with the Water of Life, with Alethe!”

  “I don’t know, Reveka!” Mihas said. “I would think they tried. It’s what the princesses drank when they came down here; they would know its properties.”

  I crumpled back into my chair, feeling smaller than a child. I’d come to the Underworld blindly assuming that Lacrimora would be able to reverse her poison, and had not considered that the end of one curse wasn’t the promise of the end of the other.

  There was no way I could eat the food of the Underworld now—not yet, anyway. Consign myself to the darkness when the sleepers needed me? I had so much to do, so little time, and . . .

  “So little food,” I whispered. “Why did he send so little?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Mihas said, “it’s been only a day in the World Above since they returned.”

  “A day? But it’s been . . . three or four days down here!”

  “I know. Time is not the same, above and below.”

  “Yes, I know, but . . . “ I stared at the food, my mind calculating half rations, quarter rations. The time disparity was to my benefit, when it came to finding a cure for the sleeping death. I had far more than a scant two weeks to keep Didina’s mother from death, to pull the Duke of Styria back from the edge, and to prevent a war.