The Princess Curse

by Merrie Haskell

  “Yes,” Dragos said soberly. “Far more.”

  In the distance, a church bell tolled. Dragos stirred. “It’s getting late. We should return.”

  I glanced around at the World Above, at the color and the brightness. I wanted to bolt for Castle Sylvian. Once the sun was up, Dragos wouldn’t be able to follow me, would he? But then night would come again, and his power would swallow the world. It would be only a very temporary running away, and it wouldn’t solve anything.

  I nodded once, fiercely, strode back to the hollowed-out tree, and descended into the Underworld.

  When I climbed out of the passage, I turned to wait for Dragos. What I saw made my scalp prickle.

  As he stooped to come through the doorway into the Underworld, spines burst through Frumos’s cheeks; his red velvet doublet smoothed and grew to cover his whole skin. His limbs grew longer, and his boots turned into hooves. I could make no sense of the transformation before it was over, and I would have said that I merely imagined the horror of it, save that I could not banish from my mind the bloody image of Frumos’s cheeks sprouting spines.

  Dragos was once more a zmeu.

  And I would never, ever confuse Frumos and Dragos again. The image of the transformation was seared into my memory.

  He must have seen my expression of horror, but he wordlessly lifted me in his arms and flew us back to Castle Thonos.

  Chapter 31

  The next two days in Thonos—though it remained hard to call them days with no sun to mark them—passed in a blur. I worried constantly about when Pa’s next food delivery would arrive. Mihas went often to check for the signal from Pa, because not only did time not pass the same in the World Above and the Underworld, but the intervals could speed up or slow down randomly. I wondered how it was that the princesses had never been tripped up by this, but I didn’t quite dare to ask Dragos.

  I worked diligently in the herbary, trying to extrapolate magical properties of Underworld plants from what I knew of their World Above counterparts. I dismissed all the herbs known to induce sleep or calmness. Wakefulness was what the sleepers needed; I would go on the principle that wakefulness was what the Underworld also needed. It wasn’t too hard a stretch, really. If no new life could begin in Thonos, that was a kind of lethargy, a sort of sleepiness. Life needed to be wakened in Thonos, vigor needed to be instilled in its disappearing souls, just as with the sleepers in the World Above.

  With that logic behind me, I set aside narcissus, the flower Hades used to subdue Persephone; violet, which calms; and poppy, for poppies and sleep are synonymous.

  I bottled potential remedy after potential remedy for the sleepers, intending that the next time Mihas met Pa, my possible cures and my notes on them would be delivered to Adina. That was my first plan, anyway; if I actually healed Thonos in the interim, I would concentrate my efforts on turning Thonos’s remedy toward the sleepers.

  How to heal Thonos, though? What was the heart of the land? I thought about the nymph Alethe. What had she said? She wanted me to heal the land, the souls, and also . . . herself. “I am not as strong as I once was,” she’d said. “The river Alethe suffers, just like the souls, just like this forest.”

  My only other idea was to ask Dragos to bring a selection of thinning souls to me, so I could try the potions on them. I didn’t think I could bear to watch another soul disappear in front of me. But I would pursue that course as well, once I had enough potions to make the testing worthwhile, and once I’d visited Alethe at her source.

  When I wasn’t in the herbary, I haunted the land around the castle looking for new plants.

  I saw Dragos only intermittently, as we, of course, did not eat together and he had some sort of duties to attend to. Perhaps I should have been paying attention to what those duties were, but the need for healing this place was paramount, and if I could find a way to do it without learning the duties of the Queen of Thonos, well, I preferred that.

  So I was surprised to smell Dragos’s peculiar scent while I was digging rue outside the dancing pavilion.

  “I know you’re there,” I said offhandedly over my shoulder. Dragos stepped within my circle of lamplight, hooves digging into the soft dirt. I bit my lip and looked away. Sometimes, the reminders of his zmeu nature made me ill.

  When I looked up, he was staring into the darkness of the pavilion, not looking at me at all.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

  “Miss what?”

  “The, er. Dancing, I guess?”

  He considered. “It would be strange to miss it.”

  “You were not keen on dancing, then?”

  “I danced more than I wanted to. Why, do you want to dance, Reveka?”

  I blushed. I felt like a child who hints about sweets so overtly that the adult is forced to take pity on her and ask if she’d like one. I didn’t want to dance. I didn’t know how to dance. And it had looked horrible, the dancing, when I first saw it, with the half-fainting princesses and the blood in their shoes. . . . And yet . . .

  You courted twelve princesses with dancing, and I didn’t even get one turn around the floor, I thought, but I didn’t know how to say it. It would come out either coquettish and coy or childish and whiny. And I was none of those things, or at least I didn’t want to be any of them.

  Dragos held his hand out to me. “Come along, then.”

  “Oh, no, I . . .”

  He gestured impatiently, and I folded my arms. “No. It was a ridiculous thought. I don’t want to be danced breathless and bloody.”

  “That’s not how I always danced with them,” he said. “In the beginning, it was all quite decorous and lovely. I’ll show you.” He clapped his hands sharply, and the pavilion glowed, softly at first, then brighter.

  Reluctant, but intrigued, I let him guide me to the dance floor. When he clapped his hands again, the noise of tuning instruments swelled around us. The same insects that had made the place beautiful the first time I’d visited were waking up, not yet in full throat—or in full bum, in the case of the glowing bugs. It was like dawn. It was lovely, even if I hadn’t been light starved.

  Dragos bowed to me, and I curtsied to him, and we danced.

  Which of course sounds much more elegant than it actually was, since I didn’t know the steps. It was the same dance he’d performed with the princesses, and while parts of it looked familiar, I’d never had much chance to practice this skill in the convent or while traveling with Pa.

  But Dragos taught me, very patiently, tracing the patterns tirelessly with me until I memorized them. Even though it was sort of like dancing with a tree given our size difference, it worked well enough.

  Halfway through our first complete dance, I asked, “What’s this called?”

  “The presoniera,” he said. “The ‘prisoner’s dance.’”

  It was altogether too appropriate a name.

  Not much later I asked, “Are you enjoying this?”

  “More than I thought I would. It is novel, not to force someone to dance.”

  I was silent for a moment. “But surely you must have known after even the first year that it wasn’t going to work. None of the princesses were going to marry you.”

  His voice was low, almost a growl. “I didn’t have any other choice,” he said. “I had no other way to find a bride, so I had to hold them to their word and hope that one of them would give in before our agreement ended.”

  “I told you this when we first met! It’s stupid to take the only choices offered, if they aren’t any good.”

  He gave a huge-shouldered shrug. “I inherited a dying world. I thought I could bring it back on my own, but I—” His face held an expression I couldn’t interpret, and I was angry, for a moment, that I wasn’t looking at Frumos’s face, which I had at least a chance of deciphering. “I tried, for the first years—I tried everything. But Thonos has to have a queen or the whole place will die, and everything and everyone in it will disappear.”

  “There’s got to be
a better way to get a bride!”

  “How?” Dragos asked bitterly. “Hades got Persephone through kidnapping! And here am I, stuck as a zmeu—my choices came down to lying or extortion.”

  The vivid memory of the blood lining the princesses’ shoes like red silk returned to me. “So that’s what it was? Extortion?”

  “Yes,” Dragos said, his voice grim. “The first time one of them refused to dance, she would have had to marry me. I had to make it harder and harder to choose dancing.”

  The music crashed to its ending, and I slipped my hands from Dragos’s and stepped back. I stared up at him. “I’m not sure that is better than kidnapping,” I said.

  His cheek spines bristled. I’d made him angry. “When you’ve been the monarch of a dying country for a few years,” he said, “I’ll let you judge me.” He strode to the edge of the pavilion, spread his great crimson wings, and took flight.

  My food ran out that night.

  Chapter 32

  A day later, I woke to the hollowest feeling in my midsection that I’d ever had, and to the taunting, crushing Darkness.

  Thank goodness for Thela; she bustled in with a branch of candles, lit a fire, and gave me the Water of Life. The Darkness receded, even while my hunger clamped down like a vise.

  As soon as Thela departed on some mysterious errand, I changed into my old, comfortable clothes—she had not been brazen enough to throw them out—and left to go somewhere, anywhere, else. If I stayed in the castle, I just might eat something.

  Pa had to be coming today, I decided. He just had to be. I divided all my remedies in two, copied out duplicate notes, and put the notes and potions into a basket, then headed down to the lake.

  I decided to row one of the boats to the Queen’s Forest. I didn’t get very far before I discovered I was raising blisters on my hands, but I pushed on. Halfway across, I got the bright idea to use my stockings as mittens, and that helped, though it did make me a smidge clumsy.

  On the other side of the lake, I climbed a small, barelooking hill and found, to my surprise, a succulent plant with jewellike, jagged leaves growing at the top. Burn plant, here in the Underworld? Brother Cosmin had a pot of it growing on a windowsill in his herbary, because it didn’t like the cold winters very well.

  I broke open a leaf of the plant, hoping there’d be a goopy juice inside like the burn plant I knew—and there was, though it shone like quicksilver. Hesitantly, I applied it to my blisters.

  The effect was instant cooling, as if I’d plunged my hands into a snowbank. In the World Above, burn plant has a gentle soothingness for broken or burned skin—hence its name—but nothing like this. Astonished, I collected half the patch of the succulent and tucked it into my basket. This was too useful an herb not to know! Too bad I couldn’t think of a way to apply its property to the problems of Thonos or Sylvania.

  I settled to wait next to a tree in the very edge of the spring forest’s morning sunlight. If Pa came, it would be to this spot, or very near it; from here, he would signal Mihas—then Mihas would have to come all the way down the mountain and across the lake, giving me plenty of time to discuss things with Pa.

  Hours passed. I collected moss, I took a nap, I wrote more details on my note to Adina. I began cataloging the kinds of blight I saw in the forest and considered the treatments I would try if the plants in my herb garden were ill like these.

  It was a long time later—hours and hours—when a shadowy figure in a heavy cloak stole into the grove.

  “Pa!” I cried.

  The figure pushed back the hood of its cloak. It was not Pa. It was Lacrimora. I recoiled.

  She held out a basket to me. I reached for it eagerly, but then hesitated.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You did poison my friend,” I said. “And dozens of other people, too.”

  “Better asleep than a zmeu’s wife,” she snapped.

  “Oh, is that what you tell the dead-alive in the western tower?”

  “I sleep at night, if that’s what you’re asking. None of them could free us from the curse, and serving in the Underworld seemed a fate worse than death. Perhaps it was—most of the men Dragos sent back don’t remember anything about their lives before his service.”

  “You selfish, selfish princesses! One of you could have made the sacrifice. But not a single one of you would.”

  “And who among the rest of us could live with the shame and guilt of that, for the crime of sending a sister into the darkness forever?”

  “Maricara could, I’m sure.”

  “We wouldn’t give her the chance! Maricara was the one who got us into the mess in the first place. We never listened to Maricara once she sold us to Dragos for her own relative freedom. She was the one who stumbled into this realm and, like a fool, ate the food that was offered her. When Dragos claimed her, he asked for her hand in marriage, and she bartered for her parole instead—‘Oh, Your Lordship, I have eleven sisters. Perhaps one will want to marry you!’ And she sold us out. Brought us down here and tricked us into eating the food here all by herself! But the rest of us—we couldn’t let any of the others go to this darkness. Not when there was a chance we could all go free.”

  “What chance?”

  “If none of us gave in for twelve years, we would be released from the curse,” Lacrimora said. “We were halfway there.” I thought she might sneer at me then, but she held out the basket to me again and said, “We’ll get you free, too, Reveka.”

  “Where’s my father?” I asked, taking the basket. I rooted around inside it immediately and found a chunk of bread to pop into my mouth.

  She reached up her sleeve and showed me the second invisibility cap, the one I hadn’t had enough fronds for. I had wondered where that had ended up. It was starting to unravel. “There’s only one of these,” she said. “And I took it from your father. Dragos wouldn’t hurt me if he found me here. But if he caught your father, Dragos wouldn’t let him go. Not a second time.”

  I scowled. I was torn between admiring her for taking the risk out of my father’s hands and being annoyed that she thought she knew Dragos so well. Did she really think that Dragos would kill my father and yet forgive her anything? Did my betrothal count less than all her stupid years of dancing?

  “Tell yourself whatever you want,” I said. “I appreciate the food. Next time, bring more.”

  “Hopefully, there won’t be a next time,” she said. “Your father is going to get you out of here, Reveka.”

  I snorted. “Except that I promised Dragos I’d marry him, in exchange for all your lives. And Pa is very insistent that I keep my promises.” Of course, if I figured out how to heal Thonos, Dragos and I wouldn’t have to marry. But Lacrimora didn’t need to know that.

  “It was a forced oath,” Lacrimora said. “He was going to kill your father.”

  “Why does a forced oath mean less?” I asked, irritated at her casual dismissal of my sacrifice. If it was so easy to rescue me, what meaning did my action hold? “I had a choice! I made the bargain and gave my word.”

  Lacrimora rolled her eyes. “Look, you’re what, fourteen years old?” she said. “You’re a child. Your word is largely meaningless.”

  “I’m thirteen, and I’m old enough to be apprenticed, so my word is as good as yours. And I’m old enough to know that Pa needs to trust me. He can’t fight Dragos!”

  “Why not? He’s a skilled soldier.”

  “There’s a fair bit of distance between ‘skilled soldier’ and ‘dragon-demon King of the Underworld!’ Pa could die.” So could Dragos. “Just. Tell Pa to please, please, please let me handle it. As long as I don’t eat here, I can figure out how to leave.” All I have to do is stop the souls from disappearing. All I have to do is heal the land.

  “Don’t worry,” Lacrimora said. “I know how to kill a zmeu. I winkled it out of His Lordship during all those years of dancing.”

  “What?” All the air left my lungs. “Why would you kill Dragos?”

 
; “It’s the surest way to free you,” Lacrimora said. There was a hard glint in her eyes. “He’s a zmeu. You know what a zmeu is, Reveka! A dragon, a deceiver, a seducer, and a thief—”

  “Dragos isn’t like that—”

  “Isn’t he? He lured Maricara into the Underworld, he tricked her into a duplicitous bargain, and he tortured us for six years. He happily took a child as his bride by threatening to kill her father, and—”

  “Shut up!” I cried, nearly screaming with frustration. My voice rolled back to me, echoed by the trees, and I was embarrassed—by my voice, and by the angry tears that sprang to my eyes. I blinked them away. I didn’t want Lacrimora to see me cry.

  “I’m leaving,” I choked out. “Take this basket—give all the flasks and the notes to Adina and tell her to try to wake the sleepers. Is this all the food you brought me?”

  “That’s all of it. We’ll bring more soon.”

  “Soon! What does that even mean? You know that time doesn’t run the same down here as it does up there, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  “How was that never a problem, when you came down here every night?”

  Lacrimora snorted. “Hasn’t Dragos told you? He’s the one who controls the pace of this world. He can make time stop or speed, whatever he likes.”

  I hated that she knew things about Dragos that I didn’t. “Well, bring lots of food next time, in case Dragos is feeling capricious. As much as I can carry up the mountain. Maybe as much as Mihas and I can carry up the mountain together.”

  “The mountain?” Lacrimora asked.

  “Yes, where the castle is,” I said.

  “There’s a castle?”

  “Of course,” I said, suddenly feeling smug. I knew something about Dragos that Lacrimora didn’t. “Where else would a king live?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. “Reveka, do you want to marry the zmeu? Don’t you care about your soul at all?”