Someday My Prince

by Christina Dodd

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Dom expected to know the minute he rode over the border into Sereminia. He thought that some part of him, some hidden bit of flesh and bone would say, Here, king’s son, you have set foot on your father’s land. The land you were cheated out of by an accident of birth.

  Yet the peaks remained lofty and unattainable, the wind whistled down the canyons, the summits passed without note, and eventually, on the descent down yet another mountain, he recognized one of his old haunts.

  He had passed into Sereminia without knowing when.

  A path became a trail, and finally a road. In Sereminia, all roads eventually led to the river, and he heard its rushing waters before he saw it. The river gleamed like molten silver in the sunlight, and while it was beautiful, the rivers were just as beautiful in Bertinierre. He dismounted, knelt on the bank, and as he plunged his hands into the water and washed his face, he shivered. The rivers in Bertinierre didn’t make a man freeze from their bone-chilling cold, either.

  No, he wasn’t feeling the exultation he had anticipated on his return to Sereminia. He felt only urgency. He needed to get back to Bertinierre before the war touched Laurentia.

  “Ho, there.” A man’s voice hailed him.

  Dom turned in the smooth motion of a mercenary who’d left his back exposed.

  No man stood there, but a youth of perhaps sixteen. He leaned on a hoe and examined him inquisitively. “I don’t recognize you.” He indicated Oscuro, tied to a tree. “You’re not from around here.”

  His pronouncement had a ring of truth that Dom couldn’t fail to recognize. He wasn’t from around here. He hadn’t been for a long time. “No.”

  “I definitely don’t recognize this horse.” The lad revealed his true interest. “He’s a beauty.”

  “Yes.” Dom rose to his feet. “I’m from Bertinierre.”

  “Really?” The lad’s eyes lit up and he forgot about Oscuro. “Rumors say there’s a fight going on in Bertinierre.”

  “So there is.”

  The lad sagged against the hoe. “I wish I was there. Not here, where nothing ever happens.”

  Dom looked past him, into the fields of growing barley. The land was prosperous, each stalk a tribute to Danior’s wardship and the advantages of peace. And this stupid youth was complaining.

  “What’s your name, son?” Dom asked.

  “Gregor.”

  “Well, Gregor, things used to happened here. Haven’t you ever heard about the fight King Danior had to gain his throne?”

  “Against the evil Dominic,” the youth said in a singsong voice. “Yes, I’ve heard about it. Papa talks about it all the time, and how he played such a big role in saving the prince and princess. But that was years ago, I was just a kid, nothing’s happened since, and anyway, I think Dominic is just an ogre made up to frighten little children.”

  The imaginary ogre stood there and stared at the lad. A tale to frighten children? He’d been gone thirteen years, and returned to find himself a myth? By Santa Leopolda, that girl Rosabel wasn’t the only one. “He was real,” Dom sputtered.

  “You sound like my father.” Gregor lifted his smock and wiped off his forehead and smeared dirt on. “You and he ought to get on well. Come on, there’s the dinner bell.” He invited a stranger to his home without hesitation; another sign of peace. “You and Papa can tell your stories and scare the little ones.”

  Dom had already gone one full day without eating, and he was too good a mercenary to refuse a meal. “Thank you,” he said. “I would like to scare the little ones, but I don’t have time to sit down for dinner.”

  Gregor examined him. “In an awful hurry, then.”

  “Yes. I have to save my woman.”

  He wasn’t even an ogre, Dom realized. He was a ghost, walking the streets of Plaisance, recognizing landmarks and not being recognized. No one raised a hand in greeting or in blows, no one spoke his name or paid him heed. Plaisance hadn’t really changed. The capital of the Two Kingdoms still gleamed in the sunshine, an ancient city that had taken root on either side of the river valley and grown into this tangle of streets where merchants, monks, and noblemen lived side by side. If anything, Plaisance looked a little cleaner and definitely more prosperous. The merchants were plumper, the children wore shoes, and a few of the streets now wound out of the flatlands and up onto the slopes of the surrounding mountains to accommodate the city’s growth.

  The streets thronged with people, but no one looked on his face and ran from him. No one noticed him at all. He had become something they wanted to forget; that mad and mercifully brief moment when they’d wanted to overthrow their ancient royal family and deny an ancient prophesy.

  Yet as he walked toward the Palace of the Two Kingdoms, he knew how to get attention. He walked up to the captain of the Royal Guard and demanded an audience with King Danior. The captain was neither dim-witted nor self-satisfied, for he well remembered the revolution. He took one look at Dom’s face, his features stamped with the heritage of the royal family, and pointed the way inside. As Dom walked through the doors of the palace, the captain fell in behind him, and Dom could almost feel how the man’s hands twitched toward his weapons.

  Dom found himself ushered into the prime minister’s office, and in only a moment the prime minister himself walked in.

  Dom recognized him at once. “Victor! Brother. How good to see you.”

  “Damn.” Victor stood, hands on hips, and glared.

  “I hoped the captain was wrong. What are you doing here?”

  “Maybe I’ve come for a job,” Dom answered. “Our brother the king seems to be handing out high posts to just about any shirttail relative.”

  “Worse, His Majesty would probably give you one.” Victor turned his back and walked out. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder.

  Dom hurried to catch up. “Sloppy,” he reprimanded. “What if I was carrying a weapon?”

  Victor cast him a disgusted glance. “You didn’t come to kill us all now. If you wanted to do that, you would have come before, or come sneaking in like a thief. No, you came to fulfill the old lady’s prophesy.”

  The old lady’s prophesy?

  You’ll return begging on your knees.

  Victor saw Dom start as he remembered, and he said with relish, “I hope they let me stay and watch.”

  But he wasn’t begging on his knees, Dom wanted to retort. He would never beg on his knees. The old lady wasn’t right.

  “Did the girl Rosabel return from Bertinierre unharmed?” Dom asked.

  Victor stopped in his tracks. He swiveled to face Dom. “You have been busy, haven’t you?”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. She didn’t like the man with Princess Laurentia, so she came home by a secret route. You were that man, weren’t you?”

  Dom grinned at his half-brother.

  “So she was right to be cautious.” Victor swiveled to face front again and marched down the ancient corridors.

  He followed as Victor led him up worn stairs. The adornments of the palace he’d once worked to overthrow didn’t interest him. Only Danior interested him, for Dom’s goal was within reach.

  Victor tapped on a solid oak door, then swung it open. “It is him,” he called, then waved Dom inside.

  Dom stepped inside, expecting to see an anteroom, or at the least some kind of office. Instead he stepped into a bedchamber. A vast royal bedchamber, decorated in gold and silver, with candles burning to light the dim corners and a curtained bed on a raised dais.

  Worse, a woman reclined in the bed, and a man sat at her side. Evangeline—and Danior.

  “Don’t tell me you’re sick,” Dom blurted, all his fine plans crumbling with the knowledge that Danior would not leave his beloved wife if she were ill.

  But Evangeline only laughed, a hearty peal of amusement. “Not at all. I’ve never felt better.”

  “You must have just traveled into town, or you would know the news.” Danior’s voice sounded the sa
me, only stronger and more sure, if such a thing were possible. “We have just been blessed with another daughter.”

  Danior looked so proud. Obnoxiously proud, but what else was new?

  Now Dom saw the cradle beside the fire, and the stooped old nurse who rocked it with her foot. “May I look on my niece?”

  Danior gestured his permission and Evangeline smiled at Dom with such delight he wondered if childbirth had driven her mad. Her and Danior both. Dom wouldn’t let a man like him close to a helpless infant, not knowing what they knew of him. But they said nothing as he approached the cradle and drew back the covers. “Ah.” The sigh was drawn from him. “A princess.” The babe slept, her plump mouth moving as she dreamed of milk and comfort. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he would wager they were blue, for she carried the same mop of black hair that Victor carried—that Danior carried—that he carried. There could be no doubt that they were all related, and he would have a child who looked like this soon. He knew he would.

  If he could get back to Laurentia before it was too late.

  Carefully, he slid one hand under the child’s head and one under her tiny body, and he lifted the slumbering child to his chest. She weighed so little, yet was so precious.

  “She should be swaddled.” He knew that from his experience with Ruby.

  “That’s what I say, too,” Danior agreed. “But Evangeline won’t hear of it.”

  “Barbarians,” Evangeline muttered.

  When Dom had a child of his blood, he would swaddle her. He would guide her and protect her. He looked toward Danior. “I need your help.”

  Danior watched him in bemusement, as if the sight of his rebel brother and his infant daughter amazed him. “Do you? What kind of help?”

  From beside the cradle, a creaking voice asked, “And are you willing to go on your knees to save your princess?”

  Dom looked down at the stooped old nurse and recognized the gleam in her eyes. It was the old nun, the old saint who had uttered the prediction before throwing him out of the country.

  He had sworn he would not go on his knees, not to Danior, not even for this, but Laurentia’s life was at stake. Laurentia’s, and their child’s, and ... Laurentia’s. He had to make this right. Even if Laurentia never forgave him, even if their children were never conceived, even if he never loved another woman, he had to rescue Laurentia and make her world right.

  Somehow he would save her kingdom for her ... because he loved her.

  The babe in his arms squirmed and sighed, a promise for the future, and he answered steadily, “Yes. For Laurentia I will go down on my knees.”

  And he did.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The prison chamber was small but scrubbed and, despite its being below street level, dry. Laurentia had a narrow, straight-backed wooden chair and table and an iron bed with a feather mattress and clean linens. She received only two meals a day, but they were substantial, if plain. The Pollardine guards treated her well, although one had taken her courtesy to mean affection, and she’d had to teach him differently with the heel of her boot on his instep.

  Dom had taught her that, but she didn’t think about Dom. Instead, she thought about herself.

  As each day passed of the slow, torturous week, she paced the cell, back and forth, along the track countless other prisoners had made in the sandstone floor. She examined the scratchings other prisoners had made in the sandstone walls. And she thought about the way she’d changed in the last five years.

  Before her marriage, she had been a child, wanting what she wanted without a thought to possible consequences. Her marriage had demolished that girl with her bright, youthful convictions, and Laurentia had had to rebuild herself. From the strengths of the girl and the experiences of the woman, she had created Bertinierre’s beloved princess: strong, self-willed, worthy to rule.

  She’d had only one weakness: she believed in true love.

  Dom had diagnosed her weakness at once, and he’d taken advantage of it. Very well. But she was still the princess of Bertinierre, and neither Dom, his schemes, nor any of his cohorts could destroy her. In the end, she would win all.

  A faded cloth covered the small barred window at the top of her cell. Night after night she heard the drunken shouts of the soldiers as they celebrated their victory. She heard occasional gunshots, and feet running on the cobblestones. Yet she couldn’t hear the everyday sounds of life on the street. The merchants calling out their wares, the chatter of the women hurrying to the well, they were indistinguishable in the living grave she inhabited.

  But on the second day, she discovered that if she balanced the chair on top of the table, carefully climbed up, and stood on her tiptoes, she could push the makeshift curtain aside and her eyes were right at street level. So every morning she watched the shoes of Omnia’s merchants as they scurried by and the boots of the mercenaries as they marched past, and pretended she was still an important part of the city. And sometimes... a friend would come and talk.

  Laurentia was never balancing on the chair when Weltrude arrived.

  Laurentia knew Weltrude’s schedule, for Weltrude had informed her she would visit every afternoon, and Weltrude never varied her agenda. Every afternoon she left the palace where she now occupied Laurentia’s own quarters, and rode in the royal landau to the center of town. The guards bowed her into the prison. The clink of the key in the door leading to the corridor of Laurentia’s cell was the signal that Weltrude had arrived, but Laurentia knew Weltrude had first passed through two more doors and walked along two more corridors—corridors filled with Bertinierrian patriots who had resisted the invasion.

  Laurentia had a corridor all her own. There were no neighbors in the cells around Laurentia. Apparently Weltrude believed Laurentia could forment a counter-invasion even from prison.

  After the sound of the key in the outer door, Laurentia heard the approaching murmur of the guards as they produced fulsome compliments for the traitor who had taken her place. Then the key rattled in the lock of her own cell, and Weltrude had arrived.

  Seven days. Seven visits.

  Seven letters.

  Today, the solid oak door swung wide, and there stood Weltrude smiling with brightly rouged lips.

  Laurentia smiled back. She couldn’t bear to have Weltrude know the depths of her misery. “Weltrude, come in. Have a seat.” She pointed to the chair, now safely resting in the middle of the floor. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you better hospitality.”

  As the door shut behind her, Weltrude said, “Thank you, my dear. You must admit, when you think of the misery of the Bastille, you are quite lucky to be in such comfortable circumstances.”

  Laurentia still smiled, knowing full well what would result if she shouted the truth—that she didn’t belong here, that Weltrude had raised perfidy to an art form, and very soon her crimes would be punished.

  Weltrude seated herself in a rustle of silk, leaving Laurentia standing, as always. “Even my own dear father kept quite a nasty dungeon. Did I tell you he was a king, too?”

  “Yes, I believe you did.” Every day, several times.

  “I want to make sure you remember it. I was a king’s daughter, too, a true princess in every sense of the word, but the world’s diplomats thought my father’s kingdom would be better ruled by Russia, so they gave it to the czar and I was left homeless.” She unbuttoned her white gloves, took them off, and smoothed them in her lap. “After Father died, I had to make my own way in the world, but I survived because I’m strong. I’m running this country now.”

  “I thought de Emmerich was running the country.”

  “He thinks so, too, but he’s really not good at anything but bullying. He is very good at that.” Weltrude contorted her face into an exaggerated expression of conspiratorial amusement.

  Horribly enough, Laurentia feared it was true. She knew the strength of Weltrude’s will; she had just never comprehended the direction of Weltrude’s ambitions. For so many years Weltrude had been Laur
entia’s anchor; now Laurentia discovered those years had been filled with petty enmity, scheming, and bitterness.

  But if Laurentia had her flaw, so did Weltrude, and Laurentia recognized it—her vast, overweening confidence. “What about Pollardine’s king?” Laurentia asked.

  “Humphrey doesn’t care about power! He just spends the money.” Weltrude frowned. “And searches for his diamond.” Snapping open her painted ivory fan—Laurentia’s fan—Weltrude waved it before her face. “This chamber is a little stuffy with so little ventilation—”

  It’s the flames of hell licking at your boots, Weltrude.

  “—but it’s really altogether quite acceptable for you. We could have kept you in the dungeons under the palace, of course, but we feared your father might find a way to communicate with you there.”

  Laurentia folded her hands before her, put her toes on an imaginary line, and concentrated on not fidgeting.

  “Those dungeons are rather dark and dank. That fool of a kidnapper de Emmerich hired died in most unpleasant circumstances.”

  Laurentia flicked a glance at Weltrude’s satisfied expression. “Poison usually is unpleasant.”

  “But how good of Dominic to bring him back where I had access to the food.” Weltrude smiled again, showing a streak of lip rouge on her teeth.

  Laurentia took great satisfaction in not telling her.

  Weltrude continued, “No wonder he had to take the job from de Emmerich. Your Dominic was not very smart!”

  Laurentia found herself wanting to shout in Dom’s defense, and the horror of that momentarily shattered her self-possession. For one moment she dropped her mask and the clawing agony was plain to see.

  Like a rich, sleek snake, Weltrude had been watching, and she struck. “Yes, your Dominic. I knew as soon as I saw him de Emmerich had chosen well. Dominic knew what he was doing all along.” She waggled her finger at Laurentia in grotesque roguishness. “He seduced you just for the secret.”