by Diane Zahler
The palace was made of pink stone that shone in the dawn and dusk light. It was not large, as it was hard to build outward over the stream, but instead it rose high, with towers and lacy minarets reaching toward the sky. It seemed to float above the water, and its pink stone and marble were reflected below so that you could not be sure which was the real palace, the one above the water or the one that seemed to rest amid the lily pads. It was even more beautiful at night. Cook had told me that while my mother was alive, and a party was planned, the torches on the turrets were lit and tiny lights were placed along the crenellations. Then truly it seemed like a fairy palace, when the lights danced above and below in the night breeze.
What Father had not known was that as the years passed, the stream would gradually cease to flow, and a lake would form, its stagnant waters lapping around the mossy marble pilings. The palace itself grew damp, especially in the lower reaches. The walls dripped with moisture on humid days, and there were four servants whose job was entirely to scrub the greenish mold off the walls as it crept upward from the lake. We had few older workers in the palace, for as our servants aged, their joints stiffened in the damp. Only Nurse remained with us past the age of fifty, and she could endure the pain of arthritic hands and knees only because of her devotion to my sisters.
From where I stood I could see my sisters’ tower window, and I squinted to try to make out their figures through the glass. Their room and the other family rooms were at the top of the palace, and below that were the servants’ quarters, where I slept. Even three floors above the lake, they were a little chilly and damp, and we had to change the stuffing in our mattresses every few months, or it smelled like rotting fruit.
On the next floor down were the staterooms, where Father did business and met with officials and royalty from other kingdoms. They were sumptuous and stately (though damp), hung with tapestries and furnished with chairs and benches cushioned in velvet and tables of inlaid woods in intricate patterns.
The kitchen with its attached pantry was on the lowest level of the palace, but it was less damp than the rest of that floor because the fires burned there continuously, drying out the air. It was the only usable room on that level. The others were originally intended as servants’ bedrooms and storerooms, but the servants who slept there soon developed infections of the lungs and fungus between their toes, and any goods stored there would shortly be rotted and covered with mold. Once I saw a rat in one of these rooms, and I ran screaming and crying to Cook. There was something about rats that terrified me—their nasty, beady eyes, their long, naked tails. I could not bear even to think of them.
Lost in thought, I started when Cook shouted from the land bridge, “Zita! Stop your dreaming and bring those berries in!” Her loud voice echoed across the lake, and I snapped to attention, grabbed my basket, and ran back through the brambles that snatched at my skirt and scratched my bare arms.
The berries were to be part of a magnificent dessert, a strawberry cream layer cake, for tonight was an occasion. The eldest of my sisters, especially Aurelia, were of a marriageable age by now, and Father had invited King Tobin of Blaire and his son, Prince Regan, to dine. The kitchen staff had been commanded to make unusual delicacies, and I had heard my sisters twittering with excitement for days. After the cake was in the oven, Cook sent me upstairs to dust. I came across Aurelia in the upper-floor hallway as I flicked the duster here and there, her usually pale skin pink and her hair and dress elaborate.
“You look beautiful,” I said shyly.
She blushed still more. “Why, thank you, Zita!” she replied.
“Are you going to dine with the prince?”
“I am,” she said. “I, and Alanna, Ariadne, and Althea. I believe that Father intends for him to choose one of us.”
“To marry?” I asked, fascinated.
“Yes indeed,” Aurelia replied, smiling.
“But why has the king waited so long?” I asked bluntly.
Aurelia laughed. “He does not like to entertain,” she reminded me. “And I truly think he had forgotten how very ancient I was, until my name-day celebration last month!” But her voice was light as she said this, for she knew she was still young and lovely.
“I hope you like the prince well, then!” I said daringly, and Aurelia laughed.
“I hope he likes me well, dear Zita!” She reached out and touched me on the shoulder as she passed, and I nearly swooned with happiness.
Already the staterooms were gleaming, so I wandered down the hallway to the one room at the far end whose great oaken door was kept locked. For years I had wondered about it. That day the staff was in such an uproar that Chiara had left her great chain of keys unattended on a table in the hall, a most remarkable occurrence. Without hesitation I picked up the chain and tried key after key in the door, looking nervously around with each attempt to be sure I wasn’t seen. Finally one fit, the door unlatched, and I pushed it open, wincing as it squeaked after years of disuse.
I was astonished to find an enormous empty space, hung with large, moldering tapestries. The room boasted a floor of inlaid wood that might once have shone beautifully but now was dull from neglect. I wandered around, peering at the weavings on the wall in the dim light. The windows were curtained with great falls of moth-eaten maroon velvet, and my eyes could barely trace the figures woven into the hangings. I made out a court of dancing maidens, a unicorn, a dragon. In each of the tapestries was the same figure, a lovely woman with a sheaf of silver-gold hair. My mother, I surmised, and I stood long gazing at her faded beauty on the wall.
Sneaking back out, I placed the chain of keys exactly where I had found it, returned to the kitchen, and ventured to ask Cook about the room.
“That’s the ballroom,” she said shortly. “Hasn’t been used in…oh, I don’t know how long. A decade, at least. Used to be…” Her voice trailed off, and I waited expectantly for tales of grand balls that had been held there. But Cook’s attention was on the bread, and she brushed me aside as if I had been a fly buzzing around her food.
That night I passed the peas, dressed in a starched and spotless white apron. I was able to observe the meeting of my sisters and Prince Regan, who was as dark as they were fair, and as handsome as any prince should be. As thrilled as they were at the prospect, when they met him they seemed struck dumb. He kissed their hands and attempted conversation when they sat at table.
“Princess Aurelia,” he said, “do you play an instrument?”
Across the table, Aurelia sat with eyes downcast and did not answer. Father’s brow furrowed at her rudeness.
“I love to ride, myself,” the prince addressed Althea, who sat beside him. “Do you enjoy riding, Princess?”
Again the downcast eyes, and silence.
Poor Prince Regan became very flustered, and his father and mine took up the conversation, but the dinner ended soon and awkwardly, without my sisters having spoken a single word or raised their eyes from the table.
My father raged that night, but my sisters had no explanation for their behavior. Appalled by his daughters’ lack of manners, Father brought in a deportment instructor to teach them how to behave in social situations. I thought Master Beolagh a very silly man, obsessed with propriety and manners. I brought tea to the room during one of the lessons, and after observing his teaching, I felt glad for once that I was not a true princess, forced to endure such tedium as learning to eat soup while balancing a book on my head.
Another prince came a few weeks later, and I heard from Chiara that the same thing occurred—silence, confusion, anger. “Those girls are spoiled rotten,” she said sourly. “A royal prince is not good enough for them!” After that, my father did not invite any more suitors, and my sisters spent more time in their bedchamber, alone.
Although they were princesses and each should have had her own bedroom, they preferred to sleep all together in a long room with a sloping roof. Less damp and drafty than the rest of the palace, it had a fireplace at each end and six lar
ge beds on each long wall. The mattresses were plump and comfortable, the bedclothes were silk, and the quilts were patchworked velvet, each of a different color. There were beautiful Arabian carpets on the floor, cushioning my sisters’ delicate feet from the cold tile and warming the place with color.
I loved that room. It was there that my sisters gossiped and combed one another’s hair, discussed upcoming birthdays, swayed before mirrors, and practiced their dance steps in the spaces between the beds. I longed to go there, to spend time with my sisters. I walked past whenever I could find time and waved to whichever girls were inside, and they waved back. We all feared our father’s wrath, though, if he should see us together, for as the years passed he grew not less bitter about my mother’s death, but more.
It was my eighth sister, Alima, the adventurous one, who one day hid in the bedroom’s huge closet during a game of hide-and-seek and discovered a false back to the space. She removed it and found a dumbwaiter there. We had dumbwaiters that ran between the kitchen and the dining hall, to bring up the food while it was still hot and bring down the dirtied dishes without breaking them. Nobody knew about this hidden dumbwaiter, though. It ran from the back of the closet in the princesses’ bedchamber down to the pantry beside the kitchen, opening in a space behind the sacks of potatoes. My sisters were thrilled by the discovery, for it meant that they could sneak into the kitchen late at night and remove any sweets or pastries that had been left out. This befuddled poor Cook, who began taking the blame for losing large quantities of pie and cake that were intended for the king’s table.
I was ignorant of the existence of the dumbwaiter until one afternoon when I was alone in the kitchen peeling potatoes for a galette. Cook was upstairs in her room with a headache, and I was shocked to see Aurelia come into the kitchen, for the princesses almost never ventured belowstairs.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, far more rudely than I intended, but Aurelia did not take offense.
“I have just a minute, Zita,” she said with a furtive air. “Can I trust you to keep a secret?”
“Oh, yes!” I cried, and clapped a hand over my mouth as Aurelia shushed me.
“Tonight,” she whispered, “when everyone has gone to sleep, go into the pantry and wait.”
“But why?” I demanded.
“You will see,” she said mysteriously, and swept out of the room.
I was twitchy with excitement all afternoon. That night, when Salina, Bethea, and Dagman slept, I crept out and down to the kitchen pantry. There I hid, wrapped in a flour sack, dozing and starting awake at every small noise, for hours. Then I heard a real sound—like the creak and moan of a tree scraping against a window, or an animal suffering in the night. I shivered nervously.
In a shaft of moonlight, I saw a figure step from behind a pile of potato sacks, and my fear fled. It was Aurelia. She peered through the dimness of the pantry and whispered, “Is that you, Zita?”
“Yes, of course it is. How ever did you get here? Didn’t the guard in the hallway stop you, or was he sleeping at his job?”
Aurelia laughed. “No, he wasn’t sleeping. I didn’t come through the hallway. Look, I’ll show you,” and she pulled me into the pantry, shoved aside the bags of potatoes, and pointed out the hidden dumbwaiter.
I was thrilled. “Can I go up with you? Oh, please, can I? Can I sleep up there with you?”
“Of course you can come visit. We have all decided it. But I don’t think you’d better stay. What if Cook discovered you were missing?”
“I’ll wake early,” I assured her. “I’ll get back to my own bed before anyone knows. Oh, please!” Aurelia gave in quickly. “Come on, then,” she said. “And bring the pie left over from dinner!”
“Cook will be furious if I do,” I said. “There’s some leftover quince tart in the icebox. She’ll never miss that.” I pulled out the tart, ran back to the pantry, and climbed into the dumbwaiter with Aurelia, making sure to replace the potato sacks. It was a snug fit with both of us, but I loved to be so close to my sister. Aurelia gave a quick yank on one of the ropes, and slowly we began to ascend. We passed a door on the second floor, a door on the third floor, and then stopped at an open door, through which I could see the faces of Asenka and Anisa peering out at us.
“Zita! You’re here!” Asenka said. The other girls crowded around me, chattering like sparrows. We saw each other so seldom that any meeting was a special treat for me, and I realized now that they too felt the bond that joins sisters together.
I was in their midst, and it was like heaven. They all wanted to brush my mop of red curls and admire my green eyes, so unlike theirs. When I asked if I could stay, they all said, “Of course you must stay!” in a single voice, then set to arguing about whom I would sleep with.
Aurelia stopped the discussion in her imperious way. “I’m the oldest, so she will sleep with me,” she proclaimed. “Next time, she can sleep with you, Alanna, and the next time after that with Ariadne. We’ll take turns in order of age.”
“Why does Alanna get her before me? We’re the same age!” complained Ariadne.
“You were born four minutes later,” Aurelia reminded her. “Don’t worry, you’ll have your turn. Now,” she said to me, “Nurse comes in to check us at midnight exactly, so you must hide under the bed till then. When she leaves, you can climb up with me. And you, Anisa, you must be the one who wakes Zita early, so she can get back downstairs without getting caught.”
Anisa was pleased with her assignment and assured us all that she wouldn’t sleep late. I crept under Aurelia’s bed, as it was near midnight, and lay there without moving as Nurse walked through the room between the beds, checking to be sure each girl was sleeping soundly. I had to bite my cheeks to keep from giggling as I heard the various breathy sighs and snores my sisters put forth to convince Nurse they were deeply asleep. As soon as the door clicked behind her, I sprang out, brushing dust from my hair, and clambered into Aurelia’s bed. It was heavenly; the feather mattress lofty and soft, the bedding silky smooth and scented with lavender. As Aurelia sang quietly to me, I dropped off to sleep and dreamed of the ballroom, alive again with dancers, swaying and stepping to the song my beautiful sister sang.
Just before dawn, as the first rooster crowed, Anisa shook me awake gently. She led me, stumbling with sleep, into the dumbwaiter and lowered me down to the pantry. By the time I reached the bottom I was awake, and I carefully replaced the potato sacks to be sure our secret would stay safe. I crept into my bed in the servants’ quarters, tiptoeing to be sure not to wake the maids who shared my space, and crawled onto my rough mattress to snatch another few moments of sleep before the chores of the day began.
Chapter 3
IN WHICH I GET TO KNOW MY SISTERS
I couldn’t spend every night with the princesses, of course. We would have been found out, or expired from lack of sleep. I limited myself to one night a week, Sunday night, when the castle darkened early and people slept off the revels of their weekend trips into the nearby town.
All week I waited for Sunday night. I submitted meekly to my morning bath, knowing that in the evening my sisters would admire my clean hair and rosy skin, scrubbed with Cook’s rough soap. I sat quietly through prayers, sneaking a look upward through my clasped hands to where my sisters sat in the chapel mezzanine. They looked like angels up there to me; sometimes a shaft of sunlight would pierce the stained-glass window high on the wall above them and scatter vivid blues and reds and golds over them. I helped without complaining as Cook prepared Sunday dinner, always a heavy, many-coursed repast that would have Cook sweaty and grumbling by the time the pudding was made. Sometimes the Sunday hours moved so slowly that I would swear every clock in the castle was broken, but at last nine o’clock would chime, and we would all head to our beds.
After the first few visits, I moved my nightly sleeping quarters to a tiny room at the end of the hallway—no more than a closet, really. But it was private, and I didn’t have to worry about disturbin
g the three maids when I crept out to the dumbwaiter or back in at dawn. Cook narrowed her eyes at me when I told her I was moving, but I explained that Salina, the upstairs maid, had complained of my snoring, and I didn’t like to think that I was keeping the others awake.
“Snoring!” Cook said. “A dose of castor oil might help that.”
“Oh no,” I protested. “It’s the damp. Everyone snores—even you snore!”
This offended Cook and took her mind off castor oil and off me. “Well, I never,” she said, rolling out the dough for dumplings so fiercely that I was sure she imagined me under her rolling pin, flattened into compliance. “Me, snore? I sleep as quiet as a baby, I’ll have you know.”
“No, you’re right,” I backtracked quickly. “It’s not you I was thinking of. It’s Chiara. She snores terribly!” Chiara and Cook were often at war over the dispensation of keys to the pantries or the problem of dust from the flour bins. So Cook liked this.
“Like a lion roaring!” Cook agreed, chuckling, and no more was said of my new sleeping quarters.
Each Sunday night I crept down to the kitchen and into the dumbwaiter, usually clutching pieces of pie and tart that I had managed to hide away during the week, and tugged on the ropes as a signal. My sisters would haul on the ropes as I rose upward, past the staterooms, dark and silent, and then past the servants’ quarters, where I could hear giggling or snores as the dumbwaiter creaked on its journey. At last I would arrive in the closet of my sisters’ room, and they would pull me out of my cramped elevator, laughing and hugging me, and the fun would begin.
Some nights, my sisters would read to me or tell me stories they made up or had heard themselves. Alanna loved to read, especially stories about other princesses, and I learned the stories about Snow White and Rose Red, and Sleeping Beauty, and the terrible twisted dwarf Rumpelstiltskin, who tortured the queen to get her firstborn child. I especially loved Rapunzel, with her golden hair that I imagined was like Aurelia’s, long and shining and straight. The tale of Beauty and her Beast, though, bewildered me. “Why did she go to the Beast?” I asked Alanna.