Kingdom of Ruses

by Kate Stradling

  Kingdom of Ruses

  By Kate Stradling

  Kingdom of Ruses

  Copyright © 2012 by Kate Stradling

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written consent of the author.

  Published by Kate Stradling

  katestradling.blogspot.com

  For my loving Mother, who says that book dedications are always cheesy

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Deception by Rote

  Chapter 2: Fateful Encounters Ensue

  Chapter 3: Trickery Most Fair

  Chapter 4: Viola Confronts a Charlatan

  Chapter 5: Confession of a Crime is Often Harder than It Seems

  Chapter 6: Of Blood-bonds and Strange Rituals

  Chapter 7: Viola Knows Both More and Less Than Expected

  Chapter 8: A Ruse by Any Other Name

  Chapter 9: Uninvited Visitors From Afar

  Chapter 10: Rejection is a Dish Best Served Cold

  Chapter 11: Historical Truths and Lies

  Chapter 12: Advent of a Malevolent Force

  Chapter 13: Intruders Are Most Unwelcome Here

  Chapter 14: Prelude to a Festival

  Chapter 15: The Sacrificial Lamb

  Chapter 16: Missing Pieces

  Chapter 17: Life Carries on Just as Before

  Chapter 1: Deception by Rote

  Father told me that I should keep a record of things, and has given me this journal to do just that. I’ve thought it over and decided to write nothing but the truth, and because of this, I’ll have to keep the journal here in the Prince’s library, probably hidden on one of the higher shelves, tucked away behind the old history annals so that Charles and Edmund don’t find it. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they did happen upon it, except that they would likely pull a silly prank of writing as though they were me and filling the pages with some awful dross I would never write.

  So, if I happen to get overly sentimental or neurotic, I’m not actually the one who wrote that, are we clear? It was Charles or Edmund, even if the handwriting looks like mine.

  By way of introduction, my name is Viola Lisette Moreland. I am sixteen years old, and a middle child. My hair is blond, though not particularly golden (if that makes any sense at all), and my face is, in my opinion, rather plain, but I do like my eyes. They are blue, but Father always says they are purple, and that they have been that color since my infancy. I suppose I’m average in every other way, so it’s sometimes fun to say that I have purple eyes, even if it is a stretch of the truth.

  Now that that’s out of the way, I should get on with my reason for finally starting this journal. I am so very frustrated! This morning I ventured into the city for the first time in months. Mother needed something from the market, and Edmund was with Father in lessons, and Charles was off on guard duty, so trusty little Viola was sent. Father doesn’t like me going into the city, especially on my own, but I don’t know why. Nothing dangerous ever happens here. Lenore is a picture of peace and tranquility, and her citizens walk about in such oblivious contentment. It is very dull.

  I overheard one lady at the market say to another that this year’s midsummer festival was looking to be quite the to-do, and she wondered whether the Prince would stay very long, or whether he would summon any magical creatures again for entertainment. I very nearly choked, and I wanted to throttle Charles all over again for last year’s fiasco. (Honestly, what was he thinking, conjuring griffins? How are we supposed to keep that trend going?)

  The second lady seemed less interested in beasties and more in the quality of the vegetable selection, but she did take enough time to say that she thought the Prince should oversee the festivities for longer than an hour, and that he was such a capricious fellow.

  If she only knew the half of it!

  I’m going to say this here, and only because this journal is never, never to leave the confines of the library. The people of Lenore are deluded. There are no magical beasts, and there is precious little magic. Most importantly, THERE IS NO PRINCE AT ALL! It’s all fake, the biggest charlatan’s act ever concocted. Part of me wanted to scream it at the top of my lungs, to let everyone know that the Eternal Prince of Lenore, whom they all love and revere as their leader, is nothing more than a story told to make them feel safe. But of course I couldn’t say anything of the sort, because that would defeat the purpose.

  Father says that perpetuating this legacy of deception is necessary for the continued wellbeing of the kingdom. I know in my heart that he’s right, that the Prince’s reputation alone keeps us safe and stable, but I can’t help but feel it’s a rather weighty secret for just one family to bear, and mine has borne it for generations. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to let the people know the truth and make them stand up by their own strength rather than relying upon the protection of a fictitious ruler. Then I usually remember that the Empire of Melanthos is poised on the other side of the mountains and would probably be more than willing to bring us into its fold of principalities.

  And so, I hold my tongue and keep the Moreland family secret forever. Except in this journal, where I’ve told the honest truth and already suffer pangs of guilt for it. I wonder if these pages will end up as fodder for the fire.

  Viola paused in her writing and stared down at the stream of words before her. She felt utterly blasphemous at the sheer candor they conveyed. Her father had told her the journal was to be a way to pour out her true feelings—he had sensed her growing frustration, she thought—but she wasn’t sure that he meant for her to be quite so blunt about certain things.

  Even as her hand moved to tear the pages from the small, leather-bound book, though, she was arrested by the sound of a strange thunk.

  “Horse,” said a voice from below. “Throw another.”

  Viola straightened in her chair and craned her neck to peer over the balcony, down to the first floor of the library. She had heard both of her brothers come in a little earlier—this was a common enough play room for all of them—but she had paid no heed to them. She wondered what sort of mischief they were engaging in now.

  The thunk sounded again.

  “Stag,” said the voice. “C’mon, Ed, that’s boring. Aim for something good this time!”

  “I’m trying my best, Charlie,” a second, younger voice protested.

  Viola sighed in disgust. They were playing that idiotic game again. It had been amusing enough when they were children, and, to be sure, Edmund still was a child, but Charles was older than she was. He should have known better. Viola never played anymore, because the game just seemed to rub salt into wounds she didn’t want to acknowledge. The Moreland family lies extended beyond just tales of the Eternal Prince.

  The thunk sounded one final time, and Viola wondered what exactly they were throwing at the chart. She thought she ought to investigate.

  “Oh, very good!” cried Charles from below. “Human! Everybody loves a creature they can relate to. See if you can make this one look innocently vicious!”

  Viola shut her journal and quickly shoved it into the desk where she sat. She locked the drawer and put the key in her pocket for good measure. She would need to find a decent hiding place later, for a locked desk was simply a challenge to Edmund and Charles, but it would do for the moment. She trotted down the nearby stairwell to discover her brothers in the small alcove beneath. Twelve-year-old Edmund was drawing something hideous on the blackboard there while eighteen-year-old Charles looked on critically.

  “No, no. I think you should incorporate the stag with his horns, not his hooves. No one ever
notices the hooves. Put some nice, lovely horns on the man’s head so he can gore unsuspecting passersby.”

  “I like stags’ hooves better than horses’ hooves,” Edmund protested. For a twelve-year-old, he was an excellent artist, Viola had to admit from her position on the stairs. The creature in his picture was only a rough sketch, but she could make out the man’s torso and the horse’s flank.

  “Why don’t you make it a horse’s head on a man’s body, with a stag’s tail?” she inquired.

  Both her brothers jumped guiltily. “You there, Vi?” asked Charles, and he pulled at the collar of his soldier’s uniform in a nervous gesture. “We didn’t know. Did we disturb you?”

  “You can’t have a horse’s head,” Edmund replied with a frown. “It’s only common sense to have the man’s head. If there’s a human part of the chimera, it has to be the head.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” said Viola. “It just usually is. What were you throwing at the chart, anyway? Rocks?”

  Charles moved fretfully to one side to block her view, but not before she caught a glimpse of the chart pinned to the wall. Viola’s heart sank into her stomach even as her sudden fury ignited. “Darts? You were throwing darts?”

  She pushed her older brother out of the way and stared in dismay at the three steel-tipped darts embedded into the grid of the beast-chart. “The pinholes are bad enough, but darts, Charlie? What were you thinking? They’ve put puncture-holes in the wall! And the chart—!”

  “Calm down, calm down,” said Charles as he tugged her away. “The chart is a copy—see, it’s my handwriting there, not that spiny stuff on the original—and it’s not as though we tore a gaping hole in the wall. Remember how we always fought over which animal we actually hit? With the darts we don’t have to, because they stick.”

  “Charlie! What are we going to tell the servants when they come to clean?”

  His face took on an odd expression. “Vi, if they even notice, we’ll just tell them the Prince did it, that he got bored and wanted to throw darts.”

  “The Prince is your excuse for everything!”

  “And why not? We’ve got the task of covering for him all the time, so he should cover for us once in a while, don’t you think?” Charles flashed his sister a rakish grin, and she very nearly slugged him for it.

  “Just because we’ve been put in this position doesn’t mean we have the right to abuse it,” she said with dangerous calm.

  Her brother grew somber. “Good old Viola,” he said, and he rubbed her head like she was a faithful dog. “Always so noble. Look, just try to relax once in a while, would you?”

  “What do you think about this—a stag’s body, with a man’s torso and head, and a horse’s mane?” said Edmund from the chalkboard.

  His timely interruption saved Charles from the pinch that Viola had been mere seconds from administering. The two older siblings turned to discover that during their argument, their younger brother had taken to sketching again. “That’s not so bad,” said Charles upon viewing the work-in-progress. “What shall we call it? Maybe I’ll try conjuring one for the midsummer festival.”

  “Charlie!” Viola hissed in warning.

  “What?” he said, all innocence. “We have to conjure something. The people will be expecting it, and we don’t want to let them down.”

  “We don’t have magic to waste on frivolities like that,” said Viola. “It’s too precious!”

  “Speaking of which,” said Edmund as he continued to sketch his creature, “do you have enough for the doppelganger this afternoon, Vi? Father said the flask was low yesterday, and there’s the joint meeting later. The Prince skipped last month’s, so I don’t think he can skip today’s.”

  Viola looked to her older brother. “Did you refill the flask?”

  “Not me,” he said. “That’s not my responsibility.”

  An irritated noise wrenched itself from Viola’s throat. “Fetching things from market’s not my responsibility, but I’ve already done that today,” she grumbled as she stalked to the door.

  “You went into the city?” Charles called. “Don’t tell Father!”

  The door opened right in front of Viola, and a benign face poked through the opening just in time to hear this last comment. “Tell me what?” asked their father as his shrewd eyes surveyed the trio.

  Viola stopped short and hemmed for a moment. Then, “Mother sent me to market to fetch a couple items,” she said quietly. She never had been able to keep secrets from her father.

  For a moment, he wordlessly studied her, not visibly upset, but with a smile on his face that seemed very sad. “And nothing upsetting happened?” he asked. Viola shook her head, and her father patted it affectionately. “Good,” he said, “but next time, send one of the palace servants and tell them the request is from the Prince. I don’t like you going into the city by yourself.”

  “The servants can go, but I can’t?”

  “That’s right. However, I do need you to go to a certain other place and retrieve a bit more of a certain substance sometime soon,” he added with an unnecessary air of secrecy.

  “Yes, I was just coming to fetch the bucket and a flask,” said Viola, not sure why her father didn’t just outright say he needed more magic. Probably habit, she reasoned. They didn’t mention the stuff outside of the Prince’s quarters anyhow. “Edmund told me you were running low, and I’ll need a fair dose to conjure the Prince for your meeting.”

  “I’ve brought you both items you need,” said her father, and, sure enough, he produced the small metal bucket and an empty glass flask. “Careful that you’re not seen heading off into the woods, though. There have been more bodies underfoot around the palace lately than are needed. I’d send Charles with you, but it’s suspicious enough if one of my children goes, let alone two.”

  “I’ll be careful,” said Viola. As she passed him to exit, she paused. “Father, don’t you ever get bitter about having to keep up this ruse day after day, year after year?”

  “Me? No. It’s just a part of life, I suppose.”

  “Well, I wish the Eternal Prince actually existed,” Viola said firmly. “Then we could all live normally while he took care of himself.”

  “Hardly,” her father replied, his voice dry. “I imagine if there were such a being as the fabled Eternal Prince of Lenore, he would be quite demanding. Be careful what you wish for, my dear. Everything has its price.”

  Chapter 2: Fateful Encounters Ensue

  Anyone who stumbles across this journal a hundred years from now might be wondering why my family would be entrusted with keeping such an intricate secret. The answer is very simple: my father, Nicholas Moreland, is the Prime Minister of Lenore, just as was his father, and his grandfather, and so on back for hundreds of years. I don’t think the office of Prime Minister is hereditary in any of the Melanthine principalities—at least, I don’t recall learning any of that during my geography and social studies lessons—but there is another reason that the Moreland family has been entrusted with such a duty: magic. We’ve been magicians for generations.

  I strongly suspect that magic could be taught to any random selection of citizens, but its arcane lore has instead been kept secret. Lenore is fabled for its deep reservoir of magic, and the entire history of such is kept in the Prince’s library. If you ask me, the majority of it is made up, just like the Prince himself. There are some very informative texts on the use of magic, however, and it is from these that Father teaches us—Charles, Edmund, and myself. Charles will one day have to take over the position of Prime Minister, barring any unforeseen circumstances, so his studies should be the most important, but I often feel as though Father singles me out and makes me work harder than the boys.

  It’s rather puzzling. Mother doesn’t understand why I’ve been sequestered off with the others. Most girls my age are done with schooling and focused on getting married. Mother wants me to polish my cooking and housekeeping skills. Of course, Mother doesn’t know about the P
rince (which is silly in and of itself) so she can’t know that I’ve been recruited to help keep up the illusion of his presence.

  I’ve gone terribly off topic. Essentially, the Moreland family has been running this kingdom for the past five hundred years, since the first stories of the Prince, and we haven’t had a stitch of recognition for it. Not that I’m looking for recognition, mind you, but it is an awful lot of work to skulk around and make it appear that someone who doesn’t really exist has been wandering his own living quarters like a regular person. I’m surprised more people haven’t guessed the truth, to be honest, but the only ones in on the secret are me, Charlie, Ed, and Father, and old Dr. Grayson, though how he came to discover the truth of the matter is beyond my knowledge.

  I think some other people might be starting to suspect, though. A new magistrate was promoted in from the military to take his recently deceased elder brother’s place. (Lenore’s military is mostly symbolic, I should here interject, because it is very small and couldn’t fend off an invasion of migrating fowl, much less an actual army. Our soldiers do engage in quite a lot of training, though, so it’s not as though they’re unskilled.) This new lord seems to ask a lot of questions about the Prince. Father has told us to beware of Lord Conrad, but I wouldn’t have needed the warning. He has scheming eyes. He also has a son, Victor, who is good-looking and good-natured enough but always seems to be lurking where you least expect him. Charlie says he’s sweet on me, but I don’t have time for that sort of nonsense.

  I wonder if I ever will.

  Flask and bucket in hand, Viola stopped short in the Prince’s rose garden. She had stolen down here carefully, all too wary of encountering anyone who might delay her errand, but she had not expected someone this far along the path.

  “That leads to the forest,” she called to the dark-haired young man who was cautiously inspecting the small door in the outer hedge. He jumped at the sound of her voice and spun around guiltily.