The Runaway Princess (23 page)

As he skidded to a halt on the bank, he saw their boat, with Evangeline at the oars, pulling for the center of the river.

“Evangeline!” he roared. “You come back here right now.”

Turning her head, she looked at him, and lifting one oar, she waved.

“Evangeline!”

She called something across the water, and while he couldn't quite hear her, he was sure she said, “I love you. I will love you forever.”

The boat's bow tilted straight down as it dove into
another cataract, and Evangeline desperately leaned into the oars. To no avail. A whirlpool caught her and spun her one hundred and eighty degrees, and she found herself facing upstream, where a veritable waterfall raced down at her. Then she shot around again, just in time to climb up and out and face another mountain of water.

She didn't know how long this had been going on. Forever. Not long. Her sweaty palms clutched the oars, and a boulder loomed before her. She paddled away and the river snatched her, sweeping her around and onward. The bottom of the boat scraped on another stone, it tilted, and water lapped in from the side. If this ordeal didn't end soon, she wouldn't have to worry about Danior. She'd be singing with the angels in paradise—and she couldn't carry a tune.

As rapidly as she'd entered the rapids, she shot out. The roar and splash fell behind her, the river widened, and the churning smoothed into a slow, comforting glide into a valley that extended as far as
her eye could see. Evangeline clutched the oars as a similar rush in her veins slowly diminished. She was safe. She was fine. She had made it.

The boat had not. The impact of rocks had broken the seal of tar. Water seeped in from every seam. She steered toward the Serephinian shore, her arms aching as she tried to navigate the increasingly heavy craft through the current.

The boat sank ten feet from the sandy shore, and she had to swim—a skill she had never learned. She went down three times before her feet struck bottom and she crawled up on the sand.

Gasping, spitting up water, she rolled over and stared at the pure blue sky with its delightful, fluffy clouds, and practiced first her German, then her Baminian, then her good old English curse words.

Danior could have told her about the rapids. Who would have thought the river could drop so fast and contain so many rocks? Thank God she'd read those letters from that American frontiersman. If he hadn't described a similar ordeal, and how he'd survived, she might have crashed on the rocks and perished.

As it was, she was still above Plaisance, when she had planned to float past into Spain. From there she had decided to go on to . . . somewhere. Now she'd have to take her chances on the road. Danior would probably start looking for her in this exact site, knowing full well that if she made it through the cataracts, she'd be forced to stop here. And the revolutionaries, too, were watching.

Yet what did they matter? She wasn't the princess, and Danior had made it clear the princess was who he must have.

His pride and his prattling about their children and their right to the throne had fired her determination to flee.

Should she go to England, with its dark, cloudy days, everlasting loneliness, and bone-chilling damp? No. For the first time, she faced the truth. If she went back there, someone might recognize her as the one who took Leona's fortune, and she'd read too much about English jails to make that an acceptable prospect. Moreover, she had no money. She'd already experienced an English charitable institution, and she'd barely made it out alive.

So she had to go somewhere else. She knew so many miscellaneous bits of information. There had to be a way for her to make a living.

In France, perhaps. She understood the theory of wine-making. Or in Italy. She could guide the English tourists through the Roman antiquities. Or even in Switzerland, descending a cliff on a rope to rescue the local goats.

But if she didn't get moving, she wouldn't make it, because if she knew Danior he was navigating that river as fast as he could. He didn't have a boat or oars, but she didn't believe that would stop him. The man would make do with a log and twigs.

Dragging herself erect, she looked around. Pine trees marched almost down to the river on either side and extended in dark green patches up into the mountains. Here and there across the river she could see clearings with fields and a village. Most villages looked deserted; one bustled with the same excitement and focus as Blanca the day before. The people were going to Revealing. Not just the annual
celebration of when Revealing might take place, but
the
Revealing.

For some inexplicable reason, Evangeline gazed on those tiny figures and felt as guilty as a rebellious princess. She shouldn't, but she did.

Turning away, she walked up the bank, favoring her still aching foot.

What were they going to do if the real princess didn't show up? Danior wouldn't get the chance to open the crystal case, not even with that gadget he'd had made, without his princess at his side.

A deeply rutted road wound its way north and south, following the river. This forest was almost eerie in its solitude, although she fought the uncomfortable sensation of being watched. Yet when she turned and looked, she saw no one. Everyone was already in Plaisance. So she turned south.

Danior would be standing on the steps of the cathedral, alone, trying to explain to people who had waited for this moment a thousand years that his princess preferred obscurity to marriage to him. That she'd rather see the two countries fall into the hands of the revolutionaries, to know that war and mayhem destroyed their way of life just when faith gleamed its brightest.

And they'd kill him. She'd read about mobs, and she knew about blighted hopes. They'd tear Danior from limb to limb, and he wouldn't fight them because all his dreams had been dashed by her defection.

By the
princess's
defection, she corrected herself.

The path curved to avoid the boulders and trees. Sometimes she walked beside the river, sometimes it wandered out of sight, but always she heard its
continuous murmur as she strode in the grass beside the road.

This whole adventure had been a mishap, a series of coincidences that marked her as the princess, threw her into proximity with the first real man she'd ever met, and ended this morning when she escaped him for the third and last time.

Of course, she wasn't completely gone from him. He kept her heart, and she ached with the kind of pain that made her want to double over and howl.

Princess-like behavior, indeed.

She wasn't the princess, and yet . . . and yet . . . what would it hurt if she went to Plaisance? She could find a place tonight, surely one of the villages had an empty hut where she could sleep, and tomorrow she could go into Plaisance and join the crowd as they went to the cathedral. If the real princess didn't come, and the people were angry enough at Danior to kill him, then she could . . . well, she could do something.

She picked up her pace.

That was a better plan than just walking away and never finding out what happened, torn between imagining the worst—Danior's death—and hoping for the best: Danior's marriage to the real princess.

“Well, it is the best,” she said out loud. “It would be the best for everyone.”

The road made one of its bends, and off to the left she saw a hut tucked into a clearing. A man sat on a chair in the yard; its legs were tilted back, his hat was tilted forward. He smiled, displaying a full, white set of teeth, two incongruous dimples, and eyes where kindness never reached.

She recognized him, and her heart began to pound in fast, steady, earth-shaking thumps. Picking up her skirts, she ran.

He laughed, that familiar, cruel laughter.

Dominic.

She heard the chair smack the ground and pounding feet behind her. Blind with fear, she dodged off the track and ran into the forest, but before she'd taken two steps, he slammed into her and sent her flying. Before she could even recover her breath, he had her slung over his shoulder.

He held one of her arms twisted backward. He gripped her wrist so tightly that the bones ground together, and if she did anything to free herself, it would be at the expense of her joints.

So she stayed as still as she could, endured the pain, waited for the moment when he put her down and she could fight him.

“Princess Ethelinda, you save me so much trouble. You came to me—again.”

By his tone she knew he was amused, and more so when she flinched. “You have a . . . remarkable tendency . . . to be where I am,” she gasped as she jostled on top of his shoulder.

“I have my ways.”

“Spies,” she sneered.

“Of course. Men will do remarkable things for their chance to share in the treasury.”

Men like Victor and Rafaello? she wanted to ask, but the less Dominic knew she knew, the better.

Dominic kicked open the door of the hut, and she blinked at the shadow beneath the thatched roof. Without warning he dropped her—onto a bed and
facedown. He landed on top of her, crushing her into the straw tick. Dust flew, and she grappled behind her, trying to reach a piece of him that would give him pain and her leverage, but he caught her wrist and bent it back again.

Speaking into her ear as sweetly as a lover, he said, “The revolutionaries are divided because of you. Did you know that? Some of them don't follow me any more. They say I should have killed you as soon as I got my hands on you rather than let you live to escape. They said I didn't have the stomach to kill a woman in cold blood.”

The straw crackled, the mattress smelled of age and dirty bodies, and in the dim light, she saw something skitter across the blanket. “Now you attempt to prove them wrong,” she sneered.

Sheer bravado. It was all very well to think she was resigned to her dying without Danior. Right now, facing the knowledge Dominic could, and would, slit her throat in an instant frightened her so much that she shivered like a drenched rat. Worse, she couldn't hide her fear from Dominic.

“Actually, no. Apparently they were right. I can't kill a helpless woman, not even for the cause.” He let go of her wrist just long enough for her to have hope. Then he caught her hair in his fist, stretched her neck backward and climbed up to put his knee on her spine. “But do you know what I can do?”

Gritting her teeth, she bore the pain.

His free hand traveled up her bare leg. “I can rape you.”

His savagery made her ill. “No.”

“You can't stop me,” he taunted. “You're smart, and you're good with a kick, but I have you now, princess. Princess Ethelinda. The beloved savior of our countries.”

“I'm not!”

He chuckled, a gust of real amusement. “You said that before, but Danior wouldn't be chasing after anyone else the way he's chased after you. Our princeling badly wants to marry you, and do you really think he will when he finds out who's been tasting your delights?”

She struggled, ignoring the pain in her scalp and the grinding of his knee in her back. “Bastard.”

“That I am.”

He was going to do this. With the door open, in this filthy bed, in this falling-down hut. Feverishly, she wondered if someone walked along the path now. If someone could hear her. Taking a breath, she screamed as loud and as shrill as she could.

He rammed his knee hard into her back, and she choked and quieted.

“If I do this right, I'll put a bastard in your oven. That way”—air flowed across her buttocks as he lifted her skirt away—“even if the revolution fails and Danior-boy forces himself to the wedding for the good of his country, it'll be
my
son on the throne. The bastard of the biggest bastard of”—his voice faded—“all.”

His palm slid across her nether cheeks, not rudely, not lovingly, but as if he were searching for something. Her stomach roiled, and she thought she was going to retch, but he only muttered, “Impossible.”

He scooted around so the light fell on her, and he searched again. “No. I don't believe it.”

She clenched every muscle in her body, rejecting him every way she could. “Believe what?”

He ran his hand over her one last time. Then he let her go. Let go of her hair, moved off her back and the bed in one smooth movement.

Wrenching her skirt down, she whipped over, expecting a trick, expecting a knife or a blow or something.

He stared at her with a wide, disconcerted gaze, and burst into laughter. Pure, loud, blatant laughter.

He doubled up with it, holding his sides and staggering around the tiny chamber like some demented cur stricken with rabies.

She jumped off the bed. She should have run. Instead she stalked him and when he staggered near, she swung her fist and connected with his eye.

Covering his face, he shouted, “Damn, woman, why did you do that?”

She hit him in the stomach.

He fell over, and she kicked him in the ribs with her boots. The boots Danior had laced on her feet.

Dominic rolled away from her. He stopped laughing. He went limp.

The sudden end to laughter, to movement, to his obnoxious mockery stunned her. She stood over him, her fists clenched, one aching from the impact with his skull. Had she killed him?

She took a step back, and another, and another. He didn't move, a dark, still shadow on the floor.