Princess of the Silver Woods (Twelve Dancing Princesses) Page 12

  “This will be our room, Petunia,” he shouted after her. “When we are wed.”

  Petunia ignored him, running even faster as ahead she saw the front hall of the palace. The front doors were open wide, and she ran out and down the steps to the black lake. There was no way across: the water of the lake burned the skin and the boats were gone. Across the water, she could see the silver trees moving in a breeze that no one could feel.

  The trees had grown from a blessed silver cross their mother had once dropped on her way to the Midnight Ball, and their wood had proved to be deadly to Under Stone and his sons. Now Petunia wished she could get to the little wood, not to escape, but so she could gather some of the branches of those trees. She imagined whittling daggers or arrows from them, weapons that could be used to attack Rionin and Kestilan and the others.

  She felt in her pockets for the little scissors she carried to snip yarn with, and remembered that this was just a dream. And even if she could get across the water and break off some of the branches, she wouldn’t wake up in the morning with the silver in her hands.

  “Come here,” Kestilan ordered, crunching across the coarse black sand of the shore.

  The sand, too, was more than it appeared: Galen had brought a handful out with him during their escape from the first King Under Stone, and it had turned out to be tiny black diamonds. Galen later had them set into a bracelet for Rose. Petunia bent and gathered up a handful, rubbing the sharp little jewels between her palms.

  “What are you doing?” Kestilan’s nose still bled, and he was flushed to an almost normal human ruddiness with his anger.

  “This is just a dream,” Petunia said. “So this won’t hurt.”

  She cast the diamonds into his eyes.

  As he howled and clawed at his face. Petunia reached into the sash of her gown. It was just a dream, so the rules of the real world didn’t apply. She normally didn’t walk around with a pistol stuck into her sash like a pirate in a romance, but in a dream she could do as she liked. She drew the pistol she found there, cocked it, and fired, shooting the ground an inch from Kestilan’s right boot.

  “Don’t worry, it’s just a dream,” she told him, her voice sounding strange and faraway.

  “Have you gone mad?”

  Servants and courtiers came running at the sound of the shot, and Petunia brandished the pistol at them, causing them to draw back. Among the crowd she saw Blathen and Telinros, and she aimed at the latter. He was Pansy’s partner at the Midnight Balls.

  “If you can do what you like to us in our dreams, then we should have the same freedom,” she said as she drew back the hammer and heard the bullet click into place. Telinros put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Coward,” she muttered.

  “Petunia,” said the King Under Stone, arriving at last, the servant who had summoned him cringing at his heels. “Let us not be foolish.”

  “I am not being foolish,” Petunia said, and now she aimed at the king. The pistol shook only slightly. “I am merely taking my cue from you, Your Majesty, and doing what I like with these dreams. A pity this isn’t a real pistol, and that I am not really here. You are not immune to bullets, as I recall from the last time we met in the flesh.”

  “That has changed now that I am king,” Rionin said with cold pride. “Though my brothers have not that advantage.”

  “Good to know,” Petunia said. She readied her finger on the trigger.

  “But Petunia,” Rionin said with a smile. “When next we meet in the flesh, and that moment is rapidly approaching, you will not have a pistol. You will have nothing but what we give you.”

  “How enticing,” Petunia said, her voice just as cold and distant as his. “I can hardly wait.”

  She squeezed the trigger and shot the King Under Stone. And woke up, in a sweat, in the bed she shared with Pansy at the grand duchess’s estate.

  “Are you all right?” Pansy’s voice came in a mumble, her face half buried in her pillow.

  “I just shot Rionin,” Petunia gasped, sitting up.

  “You did what?” Pansy pushed herself up on her elbows. “You shot Rionin?”

  “In my dream,” Petunia said.

  “I wasn’t there,” Pansy said. “I was sleeping, just sleeping.”

  “I dreamed that I was there with Kestilan,” Petunia told her, “and I got so angry that I hit him. I threw the diamond sand in his eyes, and then I thought of having a pistol and it appeared. The others came out of the palace and I shot Rionin,” Petunia said, panting. “He made me look at the room he said would be our room—his and mine—when we are wed. Kestilan, not Rionin. Rionin wants to marry Lily. Still. I think. But Kestilan said that Rionin is going to give Jonquil and those of us whose partners are dead to some of the courtiers, to increase his power.”

  “What are we going to do?” Pansy asked, her face white.

  “Did he say when you would wed?” Rose asked when Petunia had awakened her to tell her about the dream. “Do you have any idea when this will happen?”

  “No,” Petunia said, and tried not to feel guilty that she hadn’t thought to find out.

  She and Pansy had gone to Rose’s room, which she was sharing with Jonquil for the night, to tell them what had happened. Jonquil was sitting up, and Lily was trying to coax her to drink some chamomile tea and try to sleep, when the two youngest sisters entered. Soon they were all huddled on the wide bed, with Petunia describing her dream in detail.

  Maybe she should have asked more questions of Kestilan, she thought, and done less hitting. And shooting. But she didn’t particularly enjoy these dreams, and attacking Kestilan and Rionin had been deeply satisfying.

  “Galen thinks … he thinks Rionin will make his move soon,” Rose said with a little catch to her voice. “I just wondered if they’d hinted at how soon.”

  “Now, Rose,” Lily said comfortingly. “It was three years ago when Blathen went after Poppy in Breton. We thought then that Rionin would try to do something, but there was nothing except the dreams.”

  “Yes, I know,” Rose sighed. “But now the dreams are coming nearly every night. And they’re more than just dreams … the line between dreaming of the balls and being there physically is blurring somehow. Their father couldn’t do such things.”

  “And they’re trying to come into the house, through the garden, like they did that time at home,” Petunia said, then rather wished she hadn’t when Jonquil made a small sobbing noise.

  But Rose just nodded. “Keep whatever charms you’ve got on at all times,” she said.

  Petunia self-consciously checked for hers. She had both a knitted bracelet and a charmed garter on, even though she was in her nightgown and not wearing any stockings.

  “I gave you those sachets to put under your pillows, though it doesn’t seem to have worked for Petunia tonight,” Rose went on. “Also, keep your pistols handy, and plenty of bullets. The silver daggers that Bishop Schelker blessed for us too.”

  “I feel strange carrying weapons around,” Pansy admitted.

  “We’re at war,” Petunia told her. “A soldier needs his weapons close during a war.” It was something both Galen and Heinrich had always told them.

  “I don’t want to be a soldier,” Pansy whined.

  “I don’t think we have a choice, Pan,” Lily said gently.

  Petunia’s pistol and dagger were hidden under her mattress. She hadn’t been carrying them at all, here at the estate, even though she knew it was foolish. But it wasn’t as if she could wear a leather belt and holsters over a morning gown. She’d tried cutting slits in her skirts so that she could wear her weapons underneath them, but Olga kept sewing them up again. She supposed she’d just have to settle for hiking up her skirts, flashing her legs at Kestilan, and then shooting him, if it came to that.

  “I keep thinking about the silver wood,” Petunia said. “Galen and Lily shot four of the princes. But if they become king, they have to be killed with blessed silver and their true name. Do we know Rionin’s tru
e name? Is it Rionin?”

  “We can hardly ask to look in the family bible,” Pansy grumbled.

  “But … maybe it’s foolish, but I just keep thinking of how the wood was Mother’s … it sprouted from her brooch,” Petunia said. “I wonder if it has extra power. I wish we could get a few branches, and make arrows or bullets or knives out of it.”

  “To do that,” Jonquil said in a faint voice. “You’d have to go back there.”

  “It would be worth it, to get some of their silver branches,” Petunia said stubbornly.

  Rose just shook her head. “There’s simply no way to sneak into the Kingdom Under Stone,” she said. “For one thing, we don’t know how to get there anymore. And once you got there, you’d have to unlock the gate … and goodness knows that Galen’s chain is barely holding it closed as it is. I think that’s the only thing that’s keeping Rionin and his brothers from coming to take us away.”

  Jonquil gave a small moan, but the others ignored her.

  “And Galen’s working on a way to seal them in permanently?” Lily asked.

  Rose nodded.

  This made Petunia want some of the silver branches more, before they lost that piece of their mother forever. Their father had created the gardens around the palace for Maude, but the silver wood had been truly Maude’s, and only hers, in a way.

  “He is working on a spell to close the gate for good,” Rose told them. “If he can’t find a way to destroy the Kingdom Under Stone completely.”

  Spy

  In the end, Oliver arrived at the estate at the same time as the princesses’ husbands, though they arrived in coaches, and Oliver was on foot. And, while the princes were welcomed at the front gates, Oliver went to the back wall and climbed over.

  Of course, Oliver could have walked through the front gate with the princes. He had been wearing the dull purple invisibility cloak since he’d left the old hall.

  Being invisible made Oliver feel very strange. Animals sensed him coming, heard him, smelled him, but panicked when they could not see him. He walked openly along the road, and other travelers passed him without pausing, as though he didn’t exist. He wasn’t sure he liked the feeling, and invisibility was dangerous besides. He thought constantly of all things that could happen to someone who could not be seen: coaches could run him down, stray bullets from hunters might hit him, and who would find his body? Even if he fell, broke his leg, bumped his head … if he were unconscious, there would be no way to receive help.

  It was with a profound relief that he made his way to the unused hothouse and went inside. He left the cloak in place, but at least he knew he wouldn’t be shot, trampled, or otherwise injured inside the little building. He would be able to investigate the floor at his leisure, in good light, without worrying about one of the gardeners seeing him moving about and coming to look. Which, he supposed, made the invisibility cloak worth the other problems it might cause.

  Oliver tried to remember where the shadows had come from. It had been toward the front of the hothouse, he thought. There was a large worktable there, covered with pots and rusty spades with chipped blades. He wondered why they didn’t throw such things away: the pots were cracked, the tools broken, and it wasn’t as if they were using the hothouse to start new plants. It had clearly become a dumping ground for junk, even more so than in his family’s time.

  “And now here’s a thing,” said Oliver aloud.

  Bending down, he could see that there was no dust on the tiled floor under the table. Not like it had been disturbed by the shadow creatures, but like it had been carefully cleaned. The red clay tiles looked almost polished. Oliver squatted to look at the floor more closely.

  Nothing about the tiles under the table and leading to the door looked any different than the tiles on the rest of the floor. They were just … cleaner. But how often were they cleaned? He could see the scuffed footprints he had made both times he had come into the hothouse, but no others. So if anyone had come in to sweep in the nearly two weeks since he had last been here, they hadn’t stepped beyond this front area. And how often did someone sweep? It was as clean as if it had been done this morning, and yet the latch on the door had been grimy and hard to lift.

  And who swept the way for the shadow creatures, anyway? One of the gardeners? Or Prince Grigori himself?

  More baffled than ever, Oliver put one hand down to help lever himself up and felt something on the tiles. Knees creaking, he crouched down farther and rubbed his fingers across the floor. There was definitely something on the tiles, but he still couldn’t see anything. He scraped it with a fingernail and came up with a little skiff of clear wax.

  Leaning over until his nose nearly touched the tiles; he saw that someone had drawn on the floor with wax. He could feel the marks and lines with his fingers. They had sketched or written something on the tiles under the table and leading to the door.

  But once again he thought: who had done this? If this was how the shadows gained access to the gardens and to Petunia, then surely someone else must have done the wax writing, in order to summon them here.

  No matter who it was, the princes would need to know. Oliver had told Heinrich which hothouse he had seen the shadow creatures come from, but would he find the wax writing? With their status as honored guests, and without the invisibility cloak, it would be hard for the princes to slip away long enough to thoroughly investigate the place. Oliver wondered if he dared to leave them a message, but he didn’t have anything to write with.

  His heart thudding, Oliver realized that there was nothing for it: he would have to sneak into the manor and tell someone in person. And the only person he knew he could find easily was Petunia.

  At first he wondered how to occupy himself until nightfall, but he remembered that there was no need to wait. No one would see him climbing up to her window, and everyone would be downstairs with the newly arrived princes. Oliver would be able to find himself a comfortable spot to hide until Petunia returned to her chamber.

  He almost whistled as he strode across the lawns.

  The ivy that grew up the back wall of the manor was just as thick as at the palace in Bruch and easily bore Oliver’s weight. He made it to the window ledge without incident, which was a relief. Even though he was invisible, he had still felt exposed scaling the wall of the manor in broad daylight. He couldn’t imagine what would have happened if the clasp of the cloak had broken or if a gardener had investigated the strange way the ivy was shaking on a windless day.

  He latched the window and searched the room for a hiding spot. He was worried that if he sat in one of the chairs to wait, someone would come in and sit on him before he could move.

  The wardrobe? It was so full of gowns that he didn’t think he could cram himself inside. Besides, it would be awkward if the maid came in to lay out a gown for dinner and grabbed Oliver instead of the blue silk with the lace sleeves.

  He finally settled on the space under the bed. It was high enough that he could lie on his back comfortably, and the maids were very diligent; there was not a speck of dust to irritate his nose. He crawled under on his elbows and settled himself to wait.

  Once again Oliver found himself falling asleep. He pinched his thigh, embarrassed, but it was no good. He had trouble sleeping at night, worrying about everything from Simon’s ankle to Petunia’s safety. But apparently he could drop off to sleep in places far less comfortable and far more dangerous than his own bed. Still, he was a light sleeper, and he knew he would awaken when someone came into the room, so at last he let himself drift.

  “—not going to work,” came Petunia’s voice. “It’s already been remade to fit me.”

  “Why must you be so short,” grumbled another voice. Groggily, Oliver placed it as Princess Pansy as she continued to talk. “I mean, honestly, are you trying to grow?”

  “Do you think I enjoy being short?” Petunia shot back. Then she laughed, taking the sting out of her words. “Cousin Edgar keeps calling me Pocket-size! It’s disgusting!
”

  Through a bubble of laughter, Pansy replied, “I thought you were just doing it so you wouldn’t have to share your clothes.”

  Continuing their good-natured bickering, they went over to the wardrobe. Oliver was about to slide out from under the bed when he noticed a third pair of feet had followed them into the room. From the plain gray hem of her gown Oliver knew that it was a maid, and one of the grand duchess’s household. If she had been wearing the black gown of the royal household he might have risked it, but one of the grand duchess’s maids was sure to sound the alarm. He stifled a sigh and prepared to wait some more.

  There was no fear he would doze off again, as he saw the day gowns of first one sister, then the other, hit the floor. Stocking feet walked all around the bed, and then the stockings were rolled off as well. Oliver tried not to look, but he couldn’t help himself. Petunia’s feet were just as delicate as the rest of her, he noticed, and she had a habit of spinning on her toes when she turned, as though she were dancing.

  New silk stockings were pulled on. Ruffled petticoats. Corsets were tightened—judging from the grunting—and satin slippers tied onto narrow little feet. And then came the gowns. Petunia was indeed wearing the blue silk with lace sleeves that Oliver had noticed before, and Pansy wore something pink. Oliver hoped to catch them on their way out of the room, and hoped that the maid would not stay behind to straighten up.

  But the princesses’ evening toilette was not yet finished. They each had their hair taken down and redone by the maid, and then there were jewels to put on, and gloves and fans to be gathered. Oliver really began to wonder if he shouldn’t just roll out of his hiding spot and try to overpower the maid. This was interminable!

  “Olga,” Petunia said, just as Oliver had decided to risk it. “Would you please go see if Maria needs any help? She’s supposed to be dressing Rose, Lily, and Jonquil, and Jonquil is very particular.”