Palace of Lies (6 page)

Had the secret passageways already been burning when I sent my friends into them? Had I actually condemned them to death when I was trying so hard to save their lives?

The secret passageways didn't smell like smoke
, I reminded myself.
And flames climb up. Cecilia and Harper were climbing down. I saw where the fire started. In the ballroom.

Wasn't I right?

“Desmia?” Madame Bisset said. “You've gone pale. This is too much for you to hear, while you're still so fragile yourself.”

I could feel the color draining from my face. I could see how my dainty hand nestled in the sheets was just as white as my bedding and nightgown. But my time in the palace had taught me that “fragile” was a word that could be used like handcuffs. It was meant to make me feel frail and useless and trapped. It was meant to keep me from thinking I had any power or control.

“I would like to be alone with my grief,” I murmured, which was the only way I could think of to fight back.

A gentle half smile played across Madame Bisset's face. It was probably supposed to look sympathetic and kind, but I saw glee behind it.

Madame Bisset thinks I have given up
, I thought.
She thinks I will be malleable now. She thinks she can use me.

The question was, what did Madame Bisset want to use me
for
?

Madame Bisset left the room.

I took that as a sign that I'd acted sufficiently devastated by all the bad news; I'd fooled her into thinking that I was so fragile and frail and mind-numbingly grief-stricken that I would be incapable of coming up with any plots of my own.

What if I
am
so mind-numbingly grief-stricken that I'm incapable of coming up with any plots of my own?
I wondered.

My heart throbbed. I hadn't known it could do that: hold so much pain and regret and fear that the agony seemed to come in waves.

Potential pain,
I told myself, fighting back again.
It's still possible that everything Madame Bisset told you was a lie.
I glanced out the window, toward the smoking devastation that only last night had been the most impressive palace in six kingdoms.
Except the part about the palace burning down. But just because the palace is in ruins, that doesn't mean that anything else Madame Bisset told you is true.

I wanted to slide down deeper under the coverlet. I wanted to cry and cry and cry. I wanted someone—not Madame Bisset, but someone who truly cared, someone sincere—to pat me on the shoulder and say,
There, there. Everything's fine. All you've lost is a palace, and those are easily enough rebuilt. . . .

I imagined Ganelia, the sister-princess who was fascinated by everything architectural, actually being delighted to have a chance at designing a new palace. I imagined Florencia arguing over the cost of all the frills and furbelows Ganelia would want to include on a new palace. I imagined both of them—and the other ten—still gloriously alive.

I have to act to Madame Bisset as though I believe they're dead,
I told myself.
But for myself, to keep from plunging into the depths of grief, I have to hold on to the faith that they survived . . .

And what did I have to do to make sure that I myself stayed safe? So that, if it was still possible, I could rescue the others from wherever they were being held?

Was
I safe enough in this house that I could take time to cry?

No
, I told myself.

I shoved back the coverlet and the sheets. Chilly air rushed at me, and for a moment I hesitated.

This Madame Bisset might not actually be the same evil woman that Ella told me about,
I thought.
It might be that everything Madame Bisset told me is true, and she really does have my best interests at heart. . . .

I had lived with liars and conniving schemers my entire life. I recognized the signs.

I knew when I was in danger.

Just think about escaping
, I commanded myself.
Then you can think about everything else.

I put one pale, bare foot down on the wood-planked floor.

Splinters
, I thought disjointedly.
Shoes.

I looked around, but there was nothing in the room but the bed, the chair, and the bedside table with its porcelain bowl and pitcher.

I am in a box
, I thought, with rising panic.
A cage.

I shook this off and forced myself to place my other foot down on the floor. I reminded myself that, coming to the palace, Cecilia and Harper had made shoes for themselves by cutting up a felt cloak and sewing the pieces back together in the general shape of footwear. They'd been hideously ugly shoes, but surely they'd given some protection against splinters and nails and the kind of burrowing insects that liked to crawl into feet.

I didn't have a knife or a needle. The sheets or the coverlet would make a poor substitute for felt.

Before they made their ugly felt shoes, Cecilia and Harper walked barefoot all the way to the capital city from their tiny village out in the middle of nowhere,
I reminded myself.
They walked barefoot for days.

Cecelia—and all the other girls—had spent pretty much their entire childhoods totally barefoot, and they'd survived.
Truth be told, even in the palace the twelve of them were constantly, secretly slipping their shoes off, complaining about how shoes pinched and bound.

You can do this
, I told myself, putting full weight on my feet, even though nothing lay between them and the surely splinter-filled wood floor.

I could hear a mocking voice in my head—Cecilia or Harper, perhaps, or maybe Rosemary, who was the most sarcastic of the sister-princesses—saying,
Ooo, Desmia, you've managed to stand up all by yourself! Congratulations!

At this rate, even if the others hadn't died in the palace, they would be dead by the time I found them: dead of old age.

This thought propelled me forward, though I stepped cautiously: afraid of splinters, afraid of creaking floorboards . . . My choice of escape routes was either the door Madame Bisset had exited through, or the window that looked out on the palace ruins. I had an image in my mind of Madame Bisset sitting right outside the door, listening at the crack.

So your only possible escape route is the window
, I told myself, trying to be brisk and decisive, when really I felt more like a girl who was terrified of splinters, terrified of making a noise, terrified that I might really have lost practically everyone I'd ever cared about.

I found myself at the windowsill. I appeared to be on the second or third floor, but the roof below the window sloped downward in a way that made it seem possible for someone to shimmy down, clutch the eaves at the bottom of the roof, and
then drop safely to the ground from there. I could imagine Ella or Harper or Cecilia doing that—or even one or two of the other sister-princesses—Lydia? Marindia, maybe?

I couldn't actually imagine myself climbing over shingles and eaves.

Think about what Ella had to do to escape from her Madame Bisset in Fridesia,
I reminded myself.

Ella had had to dig her way out from a dungeon, starting from the . . . well, hadn't she called it a “crap hole”? Was it possible that chamber pots weren't available in dungeons? Shouldn't I be glad that I would just have to climb down a roof, not through bodily waste?

I wedged my fingertips against the bottom of the window and began trying to raise it.

It didn't budge.

Belatedly I noticed the matching padlocks on either side of the window. Both of the empty keyholes stared tauntingly back at me.

Of course there were padlocks. Of course the keys were missing. Of course Madame Bisset and whomever she was working with would want to keep me locked in my cage—and they could easily pretend that they were just trying to keep me safe.

Locks can be picked,
I reminded myself.

This was actually something I was good at—I'd learned in the palace. All I needed was a hairpin, and . . .

I patted my head. I didn't have any hairpins. My dark hair
flowed down my back long and loose and unencumbered, because I'd been put to bed, treated like an invalid.

This, too, could be easily justified. Hadn't Madame Bisset said I needed time to grieve and recover before making myself presentable and going out in public? Hadn't I myself asked for time alone to mourn?

It wouldn't make sense for me to ask to have my hair done in the midst of grieving.

A creaking noise sounded outside my room, beyond the door Madame Bisset had left through. I pictured her sitting in a chair right outside the door, and shifting her weight ever so slightly just to remind me,
I'm out here. I'm listening.

I pulled my hands back from the window. If Madame Bisset came in, I could say,
I'm just looking at my former palace. I'm trying to see if there's anything left, any memento of my sister-princesses I could ask to have retrieved and preserved. . . .

Would Madame Bisset instantly understand what I was really doing?

No second creak sounded. The door didn't swing open.

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

I could fall to my knees and sweep my hands across the floor and hope that some woman who'd stood in this room before me had lost a hairpin that had gotten stuck in the floorboards. Then, assuming there was a hairpin, I could only hope these padlocks were similar enough to palace padlocks that I could open them, and do it quickly enough to flee before Madame Bisset returned.

All of that seemed entirely too painstaking and time-consuming. There wasn't a blazing fire roaring toward me or great clouds of choking smoke spinning in my direction—as far as I knew—but I felt just as much urgency as I had the night before, when my palace was burning before my eyes. I had to know what had happened to the others. If any of them were still alive, I had to find them.

I cast my gaze about the room once more—bed, chair, table, pitcher, bowl. Dashing across the room, heedless of splinters or creaking, I snatched up the porcelain pitcher.

It was heavier than it looked. There was no question that this pitcher could shatter a window.

But—how loudly?
I wondered.

I reached back and pulled the sheet from the bed, then wrapped the sheet around the pitcher. There. That would muffle the sound. But would it muffle it enough?

I wished I could somehow test my plan ahead of time before swinging the pitcher at the window full strength, with all my might. I liked practice and preparation and planning things out. But once the window shattered, there'd be no turning back.

I went back to the window and raised the sheet-wrapped pitcher high over my head. As I swung the pitcher forward, I thought of another way to hide the noise: I began wailing, “Oh, my sisters. Oh, I miss my sisters . . .”

It was entirely too easy to start myself wailing and weeping. Breaking the window wasn't as successful: The
pitcher bounced back. I'd been too afraid of noise to hit hard enough.

So I did get a test case, I thought.

But I wasn't cautious. I didn't quickly put the pitcher back in place and scramble back into bed and wait to see if Madame Bisset opened the door. Instead, I raised the pitcher again and moaned even louder, “My sisters . . .”

This time I swung the pitcher as hard as I could. Spiderwebs of cracks began spreading across the window, and I held the trailing edge of the sheet up against the window casing to catch the shards of glass as they fell.

“My sisters, my sisters . . .” I sobbed, and to my own ears the sobbing sounded as loud as a roaring fire, as overwhelming as a shattering window.

But I hadn't been thinking straight: Of course the broken glass fell forward, rather than crumbling illogically backward so I could catch it silently with the sheet. The shards of glass slid down the roof, making a sound like cracking ice; even if Madame Bisset didn't hear the noise over my sobbing, how long would it take for someone to notice the broken glass starting to pool on the ground below?

You were an imbecile for doing this in bright sunlight,
I told myself.
You were an imbecile for thinking this could work at all. . . .

I stepped out onto the roof and added a third criticism:

You were an imbecile for doing this barefoot . . .

But I was on shingles now, and there was no turning back. I sat down with the sheet folded beneath me and edged
forward, hoping the sheet would work like a sled over ice.

Cecilia wouldn't necessarily have done this any better, but she would have had Harper helping her out, suggesting improvements in the plan
, I thought.
They would have figured out together how to do this without getting covered in blood and broken glass. . . .

I reached the bottom edge of the roof a little too quickly. I had to scramble to find something to hold on to—a gutter? An eaves trough? I barely got my hands around something stone and solid.

Oh, a gargoyle
, I thought, looking at the gruesome beast as I slid past.

But my grip was tight around the gargoyle's neck, and though my arms jerked painfully in their sockets, I kept holding on. I came to a stop, my body dangling down from the gargoyle.

For a moment I was filled with love for that gargoyle. His ugly scrunched-together face seemed like the loveliest sight I'd ever seen.

Then I realized that, in my white nightgown in the bright sun, I might as well be a flag or a beacon. Granted, the few people out and about in the courtyard all seemed to be gazing toward the still-smoking ruins of the palace. But it would take only one quickly turned head, one glance toward me, and there'd be screams and shouts and a growing crowd.