by Rebecca Hahn
“Be advised, my girl. I won’t tolerate anything that endangers my kingdom or my people. Not for a moment.” He holds my gaze again, a long, hard time. Then he waves the hand my way. “Go on, both of you,” he says.
And then, quite suddenly, the queen is standing, somehow sliding her sewing gracefully and easily into her seat as she does so. She comes over to me and takes my arm, leads me past the unmoving guard at the door and out into the hallway. I follow, unresisting, keeping my needles hidden from her with my free hand.
I am shaking. The king’s last question has frozen my mind, it seems. The queen is pulling me down the hall, up a wide staircase. My feet are sinking into the carpets, and the lamps are casting an orange glow everywhere, over my very thoughts. I feel the brush of a breeze through darkened woods, and I shiver. For an instant, the lights from the lamps are the lady’s glowing eyes, and the carpet is a soft, deep moss.
When I blink myself back, the queen is still tugging me along. She takes me to the left at the top of the stairs and down another hall, around a bend. A square block of light falls from an open doorway ahead. We stop when we reach it and look in at a wide fireplace—not as big as the king’s, but nearly—and a small round table and a small carved chair and the largest bed I’ve ever seen, with a little dark-haired maid tucking in the sheets.
“Good,” says the queen. “It’s ready.” The maid straightens at her voice, dropping a curtsy. “Sylvie, this is the king’s niece, the princess Marni. She’ll be needing a room; this is as good as any for the moment.” The queen peers up at me. I have an inch or two on her. She has a round face and that dazzling smile that lights up sparks in her eyes. “We’ll get you somewhere nicer soon,” she says.
I shake my head at that. “This is nice.”
“Yes, but somewhere nicer.” She looks close at me, sighs. “Oh, my dear. I know this is all terribly new to you, and you’ve just lost the person you loved most in the world. But really, in some ways it’s for the best. He wasn’t going to live forever. And you’re growing into a lady. You can’t do that as a flower girl. It’s time that you came home.” She nods then, once, and takes off down the hall again. Home. Seems there are hordes of folks wanting to tell me where I might find that. This particular home comes complete with a bedroom twice the size of Gramps’s and my hut, and an eager new aunt, and a maid who is curtsying again, calling me lady.
And the queen had called the king Roddy.
It is as much as I can handle for the moment, never mind the lady in the woods wanting me to run off with her, never mind the king with his sharp questions or his pretty wife. I can’t keep my thoughts steady anymore, with all this soft light, with the little maid chirping round my heels. I only just manage to slide the needles and my Gramps’s note beneath the mattress while the maid’s not looking. And then she’s gone, and I’m tucked into that enormous bed, without Gramps, without even the moon to watch over me.
I turn my head to muffle my tears just as he used to do, and I cry until it feels there’s nothing left of me, and then I sleep.
That’s how it begins, everyone pretending I’m a princess.
It starts that night after the queen leaves me, and my new little maid is calling me lady and waiting on me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop her, because I can’t think of what to say. And it continues the next day when that same maid, Sylvie, shows up moments after I’ve woken, carrying a tray heaped with food. There are eggs, steaming in a pile, and sugared toast, and spicy sausages, and a bunch of ripe raspberries, big, round tame ones, not like the little things I snitch out in the woods. I’m marveling at them, at how such a perfect taste could exist and I never knew it, and when she’s taken away the dishes, I’m so full and dizzy with the strangeness that I let her brush my hair, for hours it seems, until it’s a bright russet color it’s never been. She buttons me into a deep green satin dress that sets off my hair. It holds my shoulders just so, and other parts of me as well, so that I’m twisting this way and that, trying to figure out a new way to breathe.
And then the queen comes round in a sparkling silver gown. She peeks in through the door, shooting that smile at me where I’m sitting on the small carved chair. Sylvie slips away through a door near the fireplace that must lead to her quarters or the kitchens. “You look marvelous, dear,” the queen says.
I know I ought to thank her, but I’m still dizzy with it all, and I barely manage an answering smile. She bustles on into the room, patting down a crease on my bed, rearranging the little statues of animals lined up along my fire’s mantel.
I push through my haze to frown. “There’s no need to watch over me,” I say. “I’m sure you’ve a thousand things to do, and the king will be wanting you for breakfast or some such.”
“Oh, no,” the queen says. She doesn’t pause in her straightening, meddling, shifting, and her voice gets even brighter. “He left early this morning.”
“For what?” I say.
“Ah,” says the queen. “I’m not entirely sure. Something to do with the woods. Well!” She straightens up tall, as tall as she can, and quirks an eyebrow at me. “No doubt your uncle will be back before long, and meanwhile, I’ll take you down to court!”
She sweeps out into the hallway as if certain that I am just behind, and after a brief, unsettling moment when I’m sure the world is about to roll up underneath me and spill me over, I take a deep breath and follow.
By court, it turns out she means the main hall of the castle. It’s lined floor to ceiling with great glass windows, and there’s a gigantic fireplace taking up one whole corner. There’s not much to furnish it—no tables or couches or such. But it’s not for lounging, is it? It’s for grand events, and for the lords and ladies to meet and talk, to scheme and gossip.
When we walk in, there are a dozen of them there already, and they turn their heads at once to look our way. These are the same ladies who came down to buy our flowers, time after time. They are the same lords, some of them, who stared at me with hungry eyes as I grew. Then, they were a procession of colors and silks and bright false laughs—I knew their faces, but I never bothered with their names. Now the queen introduces them to me, and they bow and curtsy, calling me lady. There’s the beautiful dark-haired Lady Elinor and the grumpy-looking Lady Flan, who grasp each other’s arms as we turn away, already tittering over something. Lord Beau, who’s not much younger than Gramps, is dripping in many-colored jewels, and he looks down his nose at me as he bows in a way Gramps never would have to anyone. Lord Lesting holds a handkerchief to his face as he greets me—the queen murmurs that he is perpetually sneezing, and means no offense by it. Lady Hettie is a round, bright-faced woman whose smile is like to split her face as she gives us her curtsy.
“Don’t worry, dear,” the queen says when we’ve greeted them all. “They’ll be eager to introduce themselves again—and again and again—all day long. Their own princess—come home to them at last!” She squeezes my arm, her eyes shining at me. “Now, Marni, don’t be shy! Make friends!” She reaches up to pat my cheek. “Yes?”
“Yes,” I say at once, reflexively.
“Good,” she says. “I’ll check on you this afternoon.” And then she’s gone, and then they’re all surrounding me, making more bows and curtsies, even kissing my hands, some of them, until I put an end to that by hiding my hands behind my back. I don’t know what to say to them, but it turns out there’s no need. They’re happy enough to talk for me, the ladies fussing over my new dress, the lords going on about things I don’t quite understand—rents and politics and such—all of them telling me over and again how sorry they are for my loss. Over and again, I can’t think how to reply. It’s not real, any of this. It’s a dream, and tomorrow I’ll wake in my old bed with my own tattered nightgown and my Gramps just across the room, breathing.
Four of the ladies soon enough pull me aside to one end of the hall. “You poor little thing,” says one, a Lady Susanna. She’s piled her hair in a mass atop her head—it looks ready to
topple at any moment, and a few times I see her stabbing a pin through it. The others wear their hair down, in ringlets along their backs. The dresses of all these ladies are gleaming heaps of fabric, and their fingers glint with colorful jewels.
“Oh, yes?” I say. “And why would you say that?”
“Well,” says another, the lovely Lady Elinor, “you’ve been holed up in that dreadful place for so many years, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” says round Lady Hettie. “We all saw you there.” The ladies nod at me; Lady Susanna’s hair tilts dangerously to the left. “We wanted to do something, really we did.”
“About what?” I say.
“About your situation.” The fourth, Lady Charlotte, says this in a hushed-up voice. She’s holding my arm and looking this way and that, as if watching for eavesdroppers, though it’s clear enough where the other lords and ladies are. “We were just horrified with how the king—with how you were stuck out there in that hut, digging in the dirt all day. When I think of your poor fingernails . . .” She’s shaking her head mournfully, her mouth turned down and her eyes all worrisome.
“Yes,” I say weakly, “my fingernails sure did suffer.”
“Well,” Lady Elinor chimes in, “and your hair, of course, and your hands from stitching all those rough clothes.”
There is a murmur of agreement from Lady Hettie and Lady Susanna.
Lady Charlotte nods. “Yes, exactly,” she says. “Now, the others will tell you that I myself wasn’t yet at court when all that happened. You know what.” She’s making meaningful eyebrows at me. I nod, just as serious. “But I know what’s right and what isn’t. And a princess, in a hut like that, with only an old man for company . . .”
“He was the king,” I say, maybe louder than I ought.
“Yes, yes, of course, dear,” she says quickly, flicking glances around the hall. “Still, we know what’s proper.” The others all nod again, bobbing bright visions. “And you may believe us when we say that we did not approve. I mean that we did not approve at all.”
They’re looking at me, staring, more like. They seem to expect something, and I’ve no porch wall to hide against and no Gramps to send them on their way. “I see,” I say, and I try to make it all dripping with extra meaning, the way they do. “I appreciate that.”
Thankfully, that settles them down. They fall back away from me again, smiling pleasantly.
“Well,” says Lady Hettie, “who’s up for a game of pins?” There’s a general murmur of agreement, and the next thing I know, I’m sitting with a number of ladies on the wide castle lawns overlooking the river, watching the lords play.
“Do you ever play?” I ask Lady Susanna after a bit. She’s managed to seat herself next to me simply by refusing to ever let go of my arm.
She laughs. It’s sparkling, a bit like the queen’s, but thinner. “Oh, no,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to get all hot and sweaty.”
I peer over at the men. Seems to me they’re scarce moving at all. Still, with these dresses and Susanna’s hair, could be it’s more taxing than it looks.
We have a luncheon there on the castle grounds. I feel all uneasy being waited on by the castle servants. I keep trying to help myself, though that draws sideways looks from the lords and ladies, and I stop after a bit.
And then when we’re done, the queen comes by to take me into town to shop for dresses. We spend all afternoon poking through the city markets, looking for the finest cloth for new day dresses and evening gowns, summer skirts and ball gowns. Or the queen pokes, and asks questions of the storekeepers, and hands them piles of coins—and I trip along behind, watching, getting dizzier by the minute.
“But, Aunt . . .” I say when the sun is nearly set. She’s asked me to call her “Aunt,” and I don’t see a way to object.
“Yes, Marni?” She’s rubbing a piece of flowered cream muslin between her fingers, frowning at it.
“I’m not going to need all these dresses. Truly, Aunt—four ball gowns?”
“Better too much than not enough!” she declares. “Sir,” she says to the storekeeper behind the counter, “are you sure this is the highest quality you carry?”
So I give up on that. It’s her money, isn’t it? Anyway, soon afterward we’re marching back to the castle. The castle servants will bring up our purchases to us; we’ve only one bundle, a red satin dinner dress the queen says I’m to change into the moment we get back.
And then, at last, when Sylvie has buttoned me tight in that new shiny thing and gone away again, I get the chance to slip my needles out from beneath the mattress and look at them in the last of the light from the window.
They seem like any other knitting needles in the faint sunshine, though when I peer close, I can’t quite say what they’re made of. As I touch them again, it’s as if another sense gets turned on, and my skin fizzles and my hair flies out at the ends. I think hard on what I want these for. I think hard on who I’m aiming to strike with every turn and every twist these beauties take.
There’s the scent of him on the air. I tuck my needles into my skirts, into a clever pocket on the left side. I brush one finger along the bedspread, across the posts that hold the velvet canopy, and I look out the window, across the meadows to where the western woods shine dark beneath a red sun.
Then I slip through the door and go down to dinner.
All the courtiers are there—for the first time that day I see the Lord of Ontrei, a few tables away, though he doesn’t look in my direction. The queen waves me over to her table, to the seat on her left side, and just as I sit down, the king comes in to join us.
Then the last of the rather pleasant dizzy fog, which has been following me about all day long, disappears in a sudden flash of cold. I watch the king come up close; I see the moment he sees me sitting at the head table, at his family’s table. I see the jolt of something deep inside him, and how it takes that much more effort to walk to his chair and kiss the queen’s cheek.
He’s holding himself steady, smiling all about at his court, eating his mutton chops, but it’s there, clear as day: the pain it gives him to keep on going when all the while I’m only two seats down and he has but to lift his head to see my face, the face of his sister, the straight back and stillness of his crippled father.
There’ll be no joyful welcoming from this man. He avoids meeting my eyes again all through that dinner, and as soon as he’s finished eating, he pushes back his chair and returns to wherever he came from.
That night, alone in my room, when I bring out my needles and try to knit myself a vengeance, I find I scarce know how to hold them. The smooth cotton of my nightgown slips across my skin, alien. My window is shut against the breeze, and I can’t even feel my legs, tucked under the soft quilts. The needles fit awkwardly in my hands, and they fit awkwardly in this room, and I can’t remember the first stitch I’m to make, or think on what manner of thread I should be pulling from the fire or the air or—or maybe from the curtains draped around my bed.
I fall back at last and let them go for the night. I’m sunk into my mattress, near to swallowed up by my blankets and pillows, and there is such silence here, even more than there must be now in our old, lonely hut. There at least you could hear insects through the night and the wind rushing by on all sides and animals burrowing under the floorboards. Here there is nothing, only stone and fabric and more stone.
I hold my Gramps’s note, tracing each letter until my finger knows their every curve and line, until when I close my eyes, I think I hear them, leaping from the paper to whisper in my ear in that voice I’ll never know again: My Marni, I’ll love you always. Be safe.
I’ll learn the knitting. I’ve been sewing Gramps’s and my clothes all my life, and I reckon I can figure the right stitches for a vengeance if I put my mind to it. No doubt the queen and her ladies do needlework. I’ll practice with them until I’ve relearned all I’ve forgotten, until these needles know my will, until they’re nothing but tools for getting my heart
’s first wish.
Three
OVER THE NEXT few weeks I discover what life is like at my uncle’s court.
There are buildings enough here to house all the ladies and the lords, and their children and their servants and their servants’ children, and still to have room for dancing floors and dining halls and kitchens and stables.
The lords and the ladies spend half the day getting dressed and the other half tittering to one another, going for walks along the river, sinking deep in bows and curtsies if my uncle ever saunters by. The gossip here flows as free as air. They talk of my uncle and his barren wife. They talk of the woods moving in, and whether or not that is the villagers’ and farmers’ fault—though where they got a notion like that, I haven’t the slightest idea.
My uncle’s attitude does nothing to keep them from seeking me out. We socialize in the main hall. I take tea with them sometimes or join a whole group for games and a luncheon out by the river again. They seem to expect me to laugh at their jokes; they seem to expect me to smile.
It seems they’ve forgotten the flower girl, the one who stands against the side of the flower man’s hut and never speaks, and hardly looks at them. They think now that I’ve come to the castle, I’ll be different. I’ll play their court games, abide by their rules. I’ll forget those years, the guilt in their eyes, their awkward questions: How’s our Tulip? I’ll forget digging for bulbs and shivering in the cold, tucked beneath too few blankets, sipping broth with too much water, hoping, only hoping that when Gramps got sick, he would recover on his own, because no one would come to help us, not when a death like that would make the king happy.
They don’t talk of it, who I was before, and none of them even hints at a mention of my mother. It’s as though she never was. As though she never walked these halls. As though she never wore dresses just like mine, and had a maid, and slept in a feather bed, and watched the geese on the river arrowing in from the north. As though they never fell all over her as they’re now falling all over me.