Palace of Mirrors (5 page)

“Ah,” she says, sounding artificially cheerful. “It’s just that the latch broke. I should have known it was getting too old and worn.”

She crumples the leather in her hand, but not before
I’ve gotten a good look at it. The latch isn’t stretched and worn at all. It’s shiny and fairly new, and the tear is as straight and clean as a knife’s slash.

As a knife’s slash . . .

Whatever Nanny wants to pretend, I know the truth. That latch didn’t break. Somebody cut it.

  6  

Nanny bustles about, cleaning up our supper things, then fashioning a hasty replacement for the latch. She insists that I follow my usual evening routine, So I pull out the books hidden behind my sleep mat, spread them across the table, prepare to stare at them until the candle sputters out. But I can’t concentrate on verb conjugations or the geographic features of countries halfway across the globe.

“Don’t you think it’s odd that the latch could just snap like that?” I begin. “With no warning? Maybe—”

“The world is full of odd occurrences,” Nanny says, in a tone that discourages further speculation.

“But—”

“Cecilia. This is your study time. Sir Stephen will be quite upset if you don’t have that royal genealogy memorized by
the time of his next visit. Or those geometric theorems. Or those Latin verbs.”

I’m a little startled that Nanny knows so precisely what I’m supposed to be studying, but she is always sitting right there in the cottage during my lessons.

“But don’t you think—”

“Study!” Nanny points sternly at my pile of books. I give up and bend my head over the books.

I can’t shut out the questions from my own mind, though.
Why would someone cut the latch? How did they do it? Did they slip the knife in through the crack between the door and the wall while Nanny and I were eating supper, and then run away as soon as the door swung open?
That didn’t make sense. If that was the plan, why didn’t they just rush on in and attack us?

I take time to read one Latin word—
occultus,
“secretly”—and then I think of a different scenario. What if someone had sneaked in and cut the latch only partway through—not enough that Nanny and I would notice, but enough that my enemies could come back later tonight, easily open the door, and steal me away? What if no one had intended the door to come open during supper, but the breeze just gave us an unexpected warning?

I shiver. And then I can’t stop shivering. Nanny sees this, and in no time at all she’s crouched beside me, wrapping her own shawl around my shoulders.

“There, there,” she says, patting my back. “No need to
worry. I had some extra leather and fixed us a new latch. We’re shut up tight for the night now. You’re safe.” She gently shuts the book on the table before me. “Maybe just this once, it’d be all right to go on to bed without studying.”

“Will you send for Sir Stephen?” I ask. “Will you let him know . . . ?”

“That the wind blew our door in?” She scoffs. “He’d laugh himself silly if I acted like that much of a ninnyhead.”

Once again I want to scream,
Stop treating me like a little girl! Tell me the truth!
I know Nanny is pretending. Maybe she even knows I know. But I let her lead me over to my sleeping mat, pull my quilt up to my chin.

She’s so rattled she doesn’t even realize I still have my dress and apron on. Her shawl is still on my shoulders. I don’t remind her.

“Good night,” she calls, blowing out the candle. “May the Lord bless you and keep you, this night and every other.”

“You too,” I say, because that’s our bedtime routine. We’ve said those words to each other every night since I was old enough to talk.

But I don’t plunge into sleep immediately. I lie there, wide awake, and it’s like I can feel Nanny’s wakefulness—her watchfulness—on the other side of the room.

She wanted the light out,
I think.
So nobody could see in our windows, see that I was studying. . . .

Or was she just trying to calm me down, so I’d stop thinking of all the worst possibilities? Surely she really is planning to get word to Sir Stephen somehow. Isn’t she? Isn’t that what she’d do?

A new thought strikes me, one that makes my entire body stiffen under my quilt. If Sir Stephen finds out that I’m in danger here in our village, he’ll whisk me away. He’ll take Nanny and me off to some other village, maybe on the other side of the kingdom, some place that shows up on even fewer maps.

Harper . . .
I think, and it’s like a sob in my head, a sob or a wail or a prayer. I couldn’t leave Harper without saying good-bye. I couldn’t let this be our last day together, not when I mocked him this morning and snubbed him this afternoon. I’d have to apologize first, apologize and explain.

Am I willing to tell him the truth?

That question has been hanging around at the back of my mind since before the door blew open, jolting me to think of other things. Somehow all the questions in my mind are jumbled together.
Am I really in danger—more danger than usual, I mean? What’s Nanny planning to do? How much should I tell Harper? What would be the problem with telling him everything, anyway? He’d never betray me, and he could help me watch out for my enemies. . . .

I try to untangle my thoughts the way Sir Stephen has taught me to plan my strategy playing chess. Sir Stephen
began teaching me the game years ago, about the same time he began teaching me to read. I can still remember my awe the first time he pulled the carved ivory pieces out of his sack, unwrapping them and naming each one in turn.

“Rook, knight, bishop, king, queen, pawn . . .”

“Where’s the princess?” I asked when the pieces were all lined up on their squares.

Sir Stephen pointed to the queen.

“This is the princess, all grown-up,” he said. “This is what princesses become. She’s the most powerful piece on the board.”

I liked that, and so I liked chess right away. But it took me a while to understand Sir Stephen’s explanations.

“The trick to chess—the trick to strategy—is to keep track of each piece individually, and also in relationship to every other piece. You have to see the board as a whole, and each individual piece alone, all at the same time.” He talked about trees and forests, drops of waters and rivers, soldiers and entire armies. I said I thought forests were made up of trees and rivers were made up of water and armies were made up of soldiers, so what was the difference? And anyhow, weren’t these chess pieces made of ivory, not wood or water or real people? I drove him to tug on his beard in exasperation and threaten to put the game away until I was older. But I was hooked, and eventually I understood well enough that he stopped both the tugging
and the threats. And now I see how everything is connected, how a chess queen’s fate can depend on a pawn, how the questions in my head are all related. The danger I’m in, Nanny’s pretense, Sir Stephen’s response, Harper’s outrage—I can’t do anything about any of those situations without affecting all the others.

So I lie there, wide awake, without saying or doing a thing. I feel like Sir Stephen playing chess: When he’s thinking about his own strategy, he can sit there for ages without taking any action at all. “Move something!” I urge him. “Anything!”

“Nothing before its time,” he always says, and then seems to deliberate even longer, just to prove his point. When he finally takes his turn, I’m so frustrated that sometimes I grab the first piece I lay my hand on, sending my bishop dashing across the entire board, or shoving my knight forward without counting spaces or gauging risks. And then he swoops in to defeat me, chiding, “This is why one must not act too hastily. . . .”

I cannot act hastily tonight, because Nanny is wide awake over on her side of the room. Just as nobody could sneak into our cottage without her knowing, I could not sneak out undetected.

But that is the plan that’s growing in my mind now, cobbled together out of worry and fear and regret and some of the same rashness that always endangers my chess pieces. If there’s even a chance that Sir Stephen will
carry me away from our village tomorrow, or the next day or the day after that . . . if there’s a possibility that Nanny will confine me to our cottage until she thinks it’s safe to let me out of her sight (which might be never) . . . if it’s likely that my enemies know where I am and they’re planning to murder me in my sleep . . . then of course I need to go to Harper now, tonight, and tell him everything, so that I can go in peace to my new home or my confined exile or my death. I get a little sniffly thinking about my death—
Poor thing,
people will say.
She never even got to wear her own crown. . . .
Then I realize that I am sniffling so loudly that surely Nanny will hear me and rush across the room to comfort me once more.

I stop sniffling and listen. Nothing. Nothing except the thin edge of a snore coming from across the room.

Nanny’s asleep after all.

Finally,
I think.
We can’t be in such great danger if Nanny went to sleep so fast. Can we?
I wonder. But I’m not sure how long I’ve been lying there, plotting and planning.

I silently shove the quilt aside and stand up and listen again—still nothing. I tiptoe over to the door. I’m in awe of my own daring. It’s one thing to fling chess pieces across a board without regard for their safety, quite something else to take chances with my own life.
For Harper’s sake,
I tell myself firmly. I ease the new door latch off its peg, take a deep breath, and step outside.

  7  

It’s a moonless night, the darkness as thick around me as cotton batting. I find this comforting. Even if someone is watching Nanny’s cottage, waiting for the right moment to attack, they wouldn’t be able to see me slip out the door. And really, I argue with myself, if my enemies know where I live, I’m safer outside the cottage than in.

The darkness is not so comforting when I stumble forward, vines slithering against my ankles, brambles snagging my dress. My bare feet discover the hollowed-out path between the trees, so I inch forward, feeling my way with my toes. If I touch packed dirt, that’s good and I take another step; if I touch grass or leaves or brambles, I’m off the path and I have to try again. That’s all I let myself think about:
Dirt or grass? Dirt or leaves?
So I’m stunned when my toes plunge into water, squish down into mud. It doesn’t make sense—there’s no water anywhere near the
path to the village. My mind reels; for a moment it seems possible that the world becomes an entirely different place at night, water flowing in the daytime’s dry paths, lakes and forests trading places. I’m picturing a sort of musical-chairs game of mischievous geographical features. Then logic returns, and I remember where I’ve seen mud puddles before.