Palace of Lies (7 page)

So should I use that?
I wondered.
Should I cry, “Help! Help!” and get the people's attention and tell them everything?

There was a follow-up to that thought:
What if they don't
believe me? What if they think I'm just some crazy girl in a nightgown?

My subjects had seen me only high above their heads, standing on a lofty balcony with a veil over my face. The only people who would recognize me were either possibly dead—like my sister-princesses—or possible enemies.

Like everyone else from the palace,
I told myself.
And Madame Bisset.

If Madame Bisset had heard anything of the breaking window or the falling glass, surely she'd already burst into my room; surely she'd already discovered me missing; surely she was right this minute rushing down the stairs of the house to see where I'd fallen.

I looked down.

I was only six or eight feet off the ground, close enough that, if I'd had shoes on—solid ones, anyway—I would have dared to just let go and drop to the cobblestones below. But my feet were still bare, and I could already see blood on them. And if I dropped straight down from the gargoyle, I'd land directly on shards of glass.

If I jump down into that, I'll drive glass into my feet and legs so forcefully that, that . . .

That I could die.

I gulped. My hands began to sweat, holding on to the gargoyle's neck. I swayed slightly, and then began swinging back and forth, as I frantically tried to keep a grip on the gargoyle. My big toe scraped against a pillar at the front of the house.

Had I already lost so much blood that my mind wasn't working properly anymore? I kept thinking,
Pillar, pillar, pillar . . .

Oh. I could wrap my legs around that pillar and slide down it slowly and safely. Or, at least, more slowly and safely than jumping into a pile of glass.

From above my head, I heard a faint voice call out, “Desmia?”

Is Madame Bisset just calling to me from outside the room?
I wondered.
Or has she gone back into the room and found me missing? If she looks out the broken window, can she see my hands on the gargoyle?

How long did I have before Madame Bisset came racing out the front door of the house and discovered me dangling from the gargoyle in my nightgown?

Quickly, I swung my body forward, toward the pillar. On the first pass, I did nothing but scrape my heel on the pillar, leaving behind a smear of blood.

This time you have to swing harder—and let go!
I told myself.

I took one hand off the gargoyle and hitched up my nightgown to free my legs. It was shameful and horrifying, but this time when I swung forward I got both legs around the pillar, and locked my ankles together on the other side.

The gargoyle felt less stable in my hand. I threw my arms forward instead, wrapping them around the top of the pillar just as the gargoyle separated from the roof and went crashing down into the pile of glass below.

Even if Madame Bisset hadn't heard anything amiss before, she had to have heard that.

Probably even some of the people gazing into the palace ruins had heard that, and were right now whirling around to see what the latest catastrophe was. But I didn't have time to worry about them. I just focused on scrambling down the pillar, hand over hand, bare legs scraping against the stone. I left streaks of blood everywhere, but I didn't care about that, either.

Finally I was on the ground, in a space that had been protected from the glass by the overhang of the roof. I crouched down and slipped into a space between the house I'd just left and the one next to it.

I did it!
screamed through my mind.
I escaped!

And then arms wrapped around me, pulling me down to the ground.

“I got her!” a voice cried, right in my ear.

I struggled blindly to get
away. I jerked against the arms clasped around my shoulders.

“No, no, we're here to save you!”

This time it was a voice in my other ear.

I didn't stop struggling, but I twisted around, trying to see who was holding me.

Two pairs of grubby hands, bony wrists sticking out of ragged sleeves . . .

I turned my head. On my left was the scrawniest little beggar boy I'd ever seen.

On my right was . . . I blinked. It
looked
like the same boy, with the same tousled brownish hair and green eyes that gleamed in a dirty face. But right-side boy was bigger. And maybe his shirt had more patches on it, in more variety of colors.

“Look, you try to run away with those bloody feet,
anybody
could follow your trail,” right-side boy argued. “We'll get you
to safety.” He grinned, his white teeth a surprising break in the filth covering his face. “Princess.”

He knows who I am?
I thought anxiously. Princesses could be captured and held for ransom. Whereas girls who were crazy and running around outdoors in their nightgowns but were otherwise unremarkable . . .

I didn't know much about it, but I guessed that they wouldn't exactly be safe either.

And then the younger boy leaned in closer, and I had trouble remembering what I'd been thinking.

“Here, give me some of that blood, and we'll make it look like you just ran to the house next door,” the younger boy said.

He didn't wait for me to agree. He just ran his grubby hand along the bottom of my foot. This made me realize that there were perhaps several small pieces of glass still in the foot, that his touch drove even deeper, bringing out more streams of blood.

“Ow—” I only started to scream; I was already choking it back when right-side boy clapped his hand over her mouth.

“See?” the younger boy said, lightly pressing his hand down onto the packed dirt beside my feet.

He left a smear of blood on the ground, then a second and a third slash of blood leading back out of the alleyway. He disappeared around the corner of the neighboring house. In no time at all, he appeared at the opposite end of the alley, clearly having circled the neighbor's house.

I was still sitting there stunned. I realized I'd just missed my opportunity to run away when there was only one boy holding on to me.

But . . . he was right about the blood,
I thought dazedly. Maybe I was a little dizzy because I'd lost so much of it.
How could I avoid leaving a trail?

How was I going to avoid it now? Even with the fake trail of blood leading the wrong way, it wasn't like I was safe and hidden right now.

“No one saw me,” the younger beggar boy bragged to the older one. “And no one's come out of the prison house yet.”

Prison house?
I thought.

“Then we'll try the rug, not hide her in the rain barrel,” the older boy said.

He turned and pulled down a curling sheet of . . . well, it was some sort of cloth, wasn't it? Or, it once might have been cloth, before it got so threadbare and filthy that now it could really only be categorized as garbage.

“Climb in,” the younger boy said. “Quick!”

I didn't move. Did they mean
me
? Did they mean I should have anything to do with that filthy, rotten, stinking shred of garbage? Was I supposed to touch it? Be
wrapped
in it?

It was bad enough just sitting three feet away from it. Even at that distance I could catch its reek of rotted fish or pus-filled sores or maybe just the world's stinkiest feet.

“Desmia?” I heard Madame Bisset call from around the other side of the house.

Hands shoved me toward the rotting rug, and I didn't resist, not even when the two boys curved the two sides of it around me.

“You've got to lie down flat!” the older boy hissed, and I heard the urgency in his voice, the fear.

They're probably risking their lives, hiding me
, I thought, and that made it easier for me to straighten out my legs and let the boys press the filthy, stinking rug tighter against my face.

And then they hoisted me in the air. I could guess from the tilt of the rug that each of them had one end balanced on his shoulder—the bigger boy at the front, the smaller one behind.

“Maybe we'll make it safely away,” the older boy murmured.

Just then a voice cried behind them: “Stop!”

It was Madame Bisset.

I froze. I held my
breath, which had the bonus effect of keeping the reek of the filthy rug out of my nostrils. But it made it so that my hearing seemed to go in and out. It was already muffled enough by the layers of rug wrapped around me.

“Yes, mistress?”

Wasn't that the older boy's voice? But it carried such a tone of innocence that it made him sound much younger.

By the motion of the rug, I could tell that both boys were swinging around to face Madame Bisset.

“Where have you come from? Did you see a girl in a nightgown running past?” Madame Bisset asked.

“In a
nightgown
, mistress?” the younger boy asked. And somehow he sounded even more innocent. He made even me wonder if it was possible for girls in nightgowns to go wandering about at mid day—and I'd just done that myself.

I also noticed that he didn't answer Madame Bisset's first question.

The older boy did instead.

“We'uns are taking this rug from a house over by Downtree to another house in Cordelstaff. The owners couldn't make payments on it, mistress,” the older boy said. “Begging your pardon, mistress, for mentioning such places as Downtree and Cordelstaff to the likes of you.”

The front part of the rug shifted, and I could imagine the older boy making an apologetic bow, the kind of motion that would accompany the doff of a cap, if the boy actually had a cap.

Madame Bisset sniffed loudly enough that I could hear her through three layers of filthy rug.

“The likes of you should not be in this area of the city,” she said haughtily.

“Yes, mistress. We know, mistress,” the older boy said, backing away slightly. I recognized this motion too: It was what servants did in the palace, bowing and scraping to proclaim with their every movement,
I am less than you. I am not worthy to be in your presence. I am not qualified to breathe the same air as you.

Cecilia had practically laughed her head off the first time she'd seen one of these little pantomimes at the palace.

“Seriously?” she'd cried. She'd put her hand on the servant's shoulder and burst out, “Aren't you kind of laughing inside every time you do that? The lower you bow—isn't that secretly a sign that you're mocking us that much harder?”

I had never thought of such a possibility.
Did
servants ever secretly laugh at royalty and courtiers? How could they get away with it? How was it that Cecilia had noticed it immediately, while I'd been totally ignorant my entire fourteen years in the palace? Was Cecilia just smarter than me? Did that mean that she and Harper
had
managed to escape from the fire?

Stop thinking about Cecilia
, I told myself, because now there was a lump in my throat that threatened to make me gulp noisily. Maybe it was threatening to make me cry.

And I was missing the older boy's long, convoluted explanation about how his little brother had wanted to see the palace, and so they'd swung through the royal courtyard, “and how sad is it for my little brother that the day he finally gets to see the palace, it's nothing but a pile of smoking stones down on the ground?”

“You better not have been searching through the rubble for items to steal!” Madame Bisset snapped.

“No, mistress. Of course not, mistress,” the older boy said. “Once we saw the palace was gone, we didn't even go near.”

“We didn't want our rug to catch on fire!” the younger boy added.

“I should have my guards search through your pockets just to be sure,” Madame Bisset snarled. Her voice was harder to hear at the end, as if she was turning around, searching for her guards.

“Say, that girl you be looking for . . . might she have had
blood on her feet or shoes?” the little boy asked. “Because, look, there are bloody footprints coming into this alley, and then you can tell, they go back out . . .” The back end of the rug dipped perilously low, and I had to dig my fingers into the filthy, unraveling cloth closest to my hands, just to keep from sliding down. “Look—feel it. The blood isn't even dry yet.”

He touched it? He actually thinks Madame Bisset would touch it too?
I thought in disgust. Though I didn't know why this should bother me: He'd already touched my blood in order to plant the appearance of fake footprints.

I accidentally let myself breathe out and in again. This brought in such a reek of rot and unthinkable bodily functions that it was all I could do to hold back a gagging noise. I forced myself to concentrate on Madame Bisset's response.

“Ah yes, I see. . . . Guards! Come quick! Follow this trail!” Madame Bisset called out. I could guess that the woman was backing away from the offered chance to touch blood. Then her voice went even louder, as if she'd turned back to face the two boys directly. “And begone with you, beggars! Don't let me see you in this part of the city ever again!”

“No, mistress. Of course not, mistress. We'll be out of your sight directly, mistress,” the two boys said, their words running over top of one another.

I felt the rug around me spinning in the other direction. The boys seemed to be settling it back on their shoulders; they seemed to be walking out the rear of the alley at a brisk pace.

I went back to holding my breath. When it came time that I either had to take another breath or faint, I judged that we'd moved far enough away from Madame Bisset and her “prison house.”