The Thirteenth Princess

by Nina Clare

  “It was the king who caused you to lose your home—and your father. Was it not?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes hardening a little once again. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “So what loyalty do you owe to him? I want to help you and Rose, not use you like he does.”

  His eyes softened and he stepped towards to me and whispered in an urgent tone, “Milady, you must know there are hidden doors and spy windows all over the palace?”

  I nodded, though I had not realised there were hidden peepholes as well as doors.

  “You shouldn’t speak so openly of the king in this way. It’s treason. You don’t know who might be watching or listening in.”

  The back of my neck prickled. I glanced around me.

  “Is someone listening now?” I whispered back.

  “I don’t know, they might be. Tell my sister she’s not to worry. And, thank you, milady, for treating her well. She’s much happier now she’s working upstairs. I can’t say more—it’s not safe.”

  He stepped away again and shook his head as though he were trying to shake something from his mind. I saw his eyes change again, darken in colour and harden in expression. He resumed his air of arrogance. It was most peculiar, as though he were under an influence he could not shake off.

  “May I leave now?” he asked haughtily. “I am expected elsewhere.”

  “You may. But first, I want you to carry this up to my chamber door.” I pointed to the heavy atlas.

  He followed me up the royal family staircase. At the door, I took the book and dismissed him. Male servants were not permitted to enter our chambers. I hurried to my antechamber, dropped the book on my table, and ran back out into the hallway, down the staircase, and up the stairs leading to Uncle’s wing. I saw the back of Jem slipping through the hidden door, and I waited a minute before pushing on Grandfather Zircon’s painted tunic and slipping into the torch-lit hall after him.

  I knew Uncle was dining downstairs at that time, and would be on about the third or fourth course of his usual eight. I knew I had the time it took for him to finish his supper before ascending to his chambers. If Beryl would not tell me what was going on and Jem could not tell me, then I was going to have to find out for myself—invisible cloak or no invisible cloak.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The golden hands holding the torches were eerier than I remembered. It was not just their realism that made them so uncanny—it was because the torch flames did not flicker. Their light was strangely still. My breathing sounded unbearably loud to me as I hurried through the hall. I heard Jem’s words about secret windows and doors in my mind, and I could not get rid of the feeling of being watched. I half expected a pair of the golden hands to suddenly become Uncle’s bejewelled fingers reaching out to grab me.

  In the hexagonal hall, the Dark Prince sneered down at me, his eyes following as I hurried past into the study chamber. Carefully, I climbed the steep steps to the hidden door at the top. With a deep breath to try and still my pounding heart, I pressed upon the centre-most book in the bookcase, the door released with the softest of clicks, and I slipped inside.

  I was in a shadowy walkway that snaked off into dark corners under roof eaves. A single torch lit the way. The floor was of bare boards and the walls were cold stone. Uncle could not spend much time here, I thought; he liked luxury too much.

  Down the hall, I could see the same strange, coloured light I had seen last time. It was seeping from the doorway as a thin mist—green with a tinge of yellow around the edges. As I crept towards the doorway, I could smell the misty light too. It smelled like rotten eggs. I put my hand over my nose.

  I could hear two voices as I drew near. One voice belonged to Jem, but I did not recognise the other. It was a man’s voice, a little quavery, like that of an old man’s, yet still strong and bass.

  “Two parts mercurinium, one quart alembic of aqua dissolutive, and one eighth of a gram of powdered lunite. Are you getting it down, boy?”

  “Yes, milord,” replied Jem’s voice.

  I crept closer, and then a floorboard creaked beneath my foot.

  “What was that?” I heard the old man ask. “I heard a noise. Go and look.”

  I scurried away, meaning to flee back down the stairs. As I neared the doorway, I could hear heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. A familiar muttering sounded—it was Uncle. He had finished supper so much earlier than I had anticipated. He was coming towards me, and Jem was about to step out into the hallway behind me. I pressed myself into a dark corner under an eave.

  I could hear Uncle’s heavy breathing as he struggled up the stairs, and the rustle of his cape against the walls of the narrow stairway.

  “The king is coming. That’s what you heard,” I heard Jem call back to the person in the chamber.

  I noticed that the torch flame did not even flicker as Uncle trod heavily past it. Something tickled my cheek, and I brushed it. A large spider fell to the floor and scuttled into a crack in a floorboard. I shuddered. I knew I should leave while I had the chance, but my irrepressible curiosity overwhelmed me and I peeked back down the hallway. Uncle had not gone into the chamber, but stood in the doorway. Fingers of green and yellow light were curling round him.

  “Good, good,” he said to whoever was in the room. “Just the one left to deal with, but he won’t be back till next year. It will be too late then.”

  I strained hard to hear more.

  “I thought you said no one would have the last one?” said the booming voice of the elder man.

  “Didn’t think they would,” said Uncle, not sounding like he usually did. The domineering tone he usually spoke in had changed to a strangely submissive voice. “I thought they’d all been paid off. Must have been one of those foreigners who don’t understand real language, but he won’t be around to get in the way, so it’s no real matter.”

  “He’d better not,” the elderly voice said darkly. “It took a lot of work to dispatch the others.”

  “Perhaps you should have done it my way,” I heard Uncle say, but he said it in his muttering voice.

  The elderly voice said something else in an angry tone, but he must have moved farther away, for I could not make out his words. I decided I really must leave while I could. I must make a dart for the door and hope Uncle did not turn round and look down the hallway as I did so. With a fast-beating heart and a light head, I made a dash for it.

  But the door would not open.

  Secret doors do not have knobs or handles; there is always some particular spot you have to find to open them. Frantically, I pressed all over the door—in the middle, to the left, to the right—it would not open! I felt something brush my shoulder. Not more spiders! I had to get out!

  “Well, I’ve work to do as well,” Uncle said.

  He turned round and began walking down the hallway. He was looking straight at me. I froze. Something was pressing on my arm. My stomach flipped over and my legs felt like lead candlesticks. I stared back at Uncle, waiting for the explosion of rage to burst forth.

  He just looked right through me. I could not believe it. I glanced down at myself—I was not there—I was invisible! Uncle pressed on the door, high up on the left, and he walked right past me. Before the door closed, I felt something push me towards it and propel me down the stairs after Uncle. My soft kid slippers made no sound behind him. I was driven through the study and past Uncle, who had sat down with a grunt at his desk. I moved out into the hexagonal hallway, down the hall of golden hands, and back through Grandfather Zircon’s cloth-of-silver tunic.

  As the secret door closed behind me, Beryl whisked the invisible cloak from our shoulders, folded it up, and put it into her pocket. She glared at me.

  “Did I not tell you to leave all to me?”

  I nodded sheepishly.

  “Do you not understand what danger you put yourself in—again?” She really was cross. Her green eyes glittered like dark emeralds.

  “I am sorry.”

 
“Promise me you will never go up there again!”

  “I promise.”

  “Go up to your sisters. The most important thing you can do at this time is to try and keep their spirits up. I will send for you shortly. Perhaps tomorrow.”

  “You know something, then? You were up there, where the green-and-yellow light was coming from? Where Jem is—you have been there invisibly?”

  “Go!” she answered, pointing up the stairs. Frustrated, I knew I would get no answers from her that night.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Inside our chambers, it felt as through a heavy curtain had fallen and shut out all the sunlight. The Royal Physician had been sent for and had prescribed a sedating draught to my distressed sisters. Though Beryl had commanded them not to give way to despair, I could feel it creeping round them like a lurking ghost as each hour passed with no news to give them hope. I told them over and over that Beryl was working to find out the truth, that Beryl always made everything right, but my words sounded hollow with repetition, and I felt drained with the persistent effort. I retired to my own bedchamber and waited. What I was waiting for I did not know, but there was expectancy. I knew something was going to happen, I just longed for it to come quickly.

  “Princess, were you able to speak with Jem?” Rose asked when she attended me later that evening.

  “I did. I was not able to find out anything specific, but I know Beryl is looking out for him.”

  “Mistress Beryl? How can she help?”

  “No one is more able to look after another soul than Mistress Beryl,” I promised. “I will tell you when I know anything more, Rose.”

  ***

  The next morning, which should have been the morning of Diamond’s coronation, dawned bright with autumnal sunshine, defying the gloom felt by the kingdom’s inhabitants.

  I waited impatiently all day for Beryl to send for me, as she had said she might. I tried hard to distract myself with my atlases. I tried hard to encourage my sisters. I tried hard to hold fast to hope.

  At last Rose came with the message: Beryl wanted to see me in the apple orchard.

  “The apple orchard?” I was surprised at her choice of place.

  “Yes, and she says it concerns Jem, so I am to bring him also. Beryl said he has been sent to the apothecary on errands, so I must catch him on his way back.”

  “Go and find him. I will meet you in the orchard.”

  Beryl sat on a low wall that sheltered the orchard from the goats who liked to eat the low-hanging apples. She was in the shade of the two ancient trees that formed a grove known as the Cat’s Eye. The trees are said to be far older than the palace. They were so named because their roots have grown intertwined and wrap around at the bases of their great trunks, then separate into two individual trees before intertwining in the boughs again. The space between them is an elongated ellipse, like the shape of a cat’s eye. There are no other trees in all the palace grounds, or in the entire kingdom, as great in size as those two majestic trees. They also yield small but exceptionally sweet golden apples.

  Beryl sat calmly, but she looked serious, as though she were thinking hard.

  “It is best to talk away from the palace,” she told us when all four of us were together. “Some walls have eyes and ears.”

  “Do you have news?” I asked eagerly—desperately.

  “You tell them, Jem,” said Beryl, with a nod to him.

  Our eyes turned to him.

  “They never left the palace,” he said.

  I took a moment to register what he meant.

  “The princes?” I said. “They are alive? They are still here?”

  Jem nodded. “But,” he said, “they’re gone.”

  I was bewildered. I looked to Beryl. “Gone where?”

  “It is as Jem says,” said Beryl. “They are in the palace, and yet they are not to be seen. They are bound. Bound by an enchantment—a strong one. I have known for many years something of this nature was underway, but I did not know how it would finally manifest. The princes are in another world.”

  “What . . . what can you mean?” stammered Rose.

  “It is possible to create other worlds, other states of being,” said Beryl. “Though they are very limited, very static. It is a little like bringing a dream back into the waking world. It is difficult to explain in human language.”

  Rose looked aghast now. “But . . . but . . . enchantments and things like that aren’t real!” she said with widened eyes. “Are they, Jem?”

  Jem shrugged. “Strange things go on up there,” he said as he nodded in the direction of the topmost turret of the palace, where Uncle’s wing was housed. Rose was now openmouthed as well as wide-eyed.

  Beryl tapped her fingers together and gazed away with a look of great concentration. I knew that look. I called it her “puzzling-out face.” She was thinking very hard about something important, so I held my tongue and stopped myself from asking the countless questions that were buzzing like bees around my mind.

  “It is not that they are gone,” she said musingly. “It is that they are hidden. They are still here, but we cannot see them. The enchantment has hidden them from ordinary sight. It is a matter of making use of a higher law to usurp the enchantment. But how to make them visible so the law can be put into effect . . . ?”

  She kept tapping and thinking. “If they are trapped in a dreamlike world, then one must enter the dream . . . must find the way in to awaken them.”

  I could not make sense of what Beryl was saying.

  “So, can you find them?” I eventually asked.

  “I will try,” she said. She gave a deep sigh, as though she was contemplating something exceedingly difficult ahead. “It is going to take all my strength, though.”

  “This is frightening me,” said Rose. “I don’t understand any of it!”

  “Do not worry, dear,” said Beryl, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “What is it you do up there, Jem?” asked Rose. “I’m so afraid for you. What if you disappear too?”

  “I don’t have a choice, Rose. I have to go up there. I just copy things out for him, and sometimes I measure things out and clean his instruments, or get things for him.”

  “For the king?” asked Rose.

  “No, the old man—the sorcerer.”

  Rose looked appalled. “Sorcerer?” she said in a near whisper. “How can there be such a thing? They don’t exist in real life, only in stories!”

  “There just is, Rose,” said Jem. “I don’t understand it either, but I have to do what I’m told to.” His voice altered as he said this, and he lifted his chin. I was dismayed to see the stony look creeping back into his eyes.

  “They think I’m just a boy and I don’t know anything. But I’m learning, Rose. I’m learning his secrets. I watch him.”

  “Oh, Jem, don’t talk like that!” cried Rose. “You’re different when you talk like that.”

  “I’m going to make a better life for us, Rose, that’s what I’m going to do with what I learn from him. They think I’m just another boy they can treat how they like, but I’m not. I’ll show them. I’ve got to go now. I can’t be late.” Jem jumped down from the wall, made a shallow bow to Beryl and me, and ran off through the apple trees.

  Rose had also jumped down and was looking after his disappearing figure with a pained expression. “It’s as if there are two Jems,” she said, turning back to us. “There’s the real one, and now there’s this other one—so hard and proud—I don’t understand what’s happening to him.”

  “It is the sorcery,” said Beryl. “But he cannot see it for himself while he is in its grip. The effect of being immersed in an atmosphere of sorcery is causing him to develop an ambition for it, for the power it gives. That ambition that will take over his soul in the end. It is urgent we get him away from its influence as soon as possible.”

  Poor Rose looked desolate. “You will find a way for him to get away?” she pleaded.

  Beryl gave her shoulde
r another squeeze. “Have courage, dear.”

  “Is a sorcerer very different from a faery?” I asked Beryl out of curiosity.

  Beryl looked aghast at me, but quickly collected herself. “Faery power is a gift bestowed at birth by another faery. Sorcery is a power you must seek out. It takes many years of study and application. You have to be very ambitious to be a sorcerer, and therein is the problem: when a very ambitious person gains power, they usually want more. Power can turn the heads of the best of men. It takes over.”

  “Faeries?” said Rose weakly. “They’re real too?” We did not answer her.

  “Leave me now, girls,” said Beryl, “I need to think some more. Time is very pressing. I need to find a way in to the princes. Perhaps tonight.”

  “You will find them tonight?” I asked eagerly.

  “I intend to try. I need more knowledge to give me more clues to this puzzle. Do not speak of this to anyone,” she told us. “Not even your sisters,” she said to me. “Not yet.”

  We nodded our agreement and left Beryl sitting and staring into the Cat’s Eye with her puzzling-out face on.

  Evening came, and we settled in for the night. The maids had left. I kept the curtain to my chamber open, but there was none of the usual lighthearted chatter or soft laughter to be heard from my sisters.

  Through a gap in the window drapes, I glimpsed the rising moon. It was beginning to wax gibbous, glorious and very bright in its autumnal fullness. Almandine had not looked at it once through her spyglass that evening. I had brought a bowl of autumn crocuses into the chamber that day and placed them near Heliodor’s bed, but she had not even noticed them, and neither had Peridot, who would usually have hastened to draw them with pleasure. How strange those days were without the sweet singing of Sapphire and the melodies of Amethyst’s lute. All the colour and song had been robbed from our lives. These were my unhappy thoughts as I drifted off to sleep.

  Something woke me. The moon was high and shining bright through the gap in the drapes. It was still night, so why had I awakened?