Текст книги "Princess of the Silver Woods"
Автор книги: Jessica Day George
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Princess of the Silver Woods
Jessica Day George
Contents
Prologue
Traveler
Kidnapper
Kidnapped
Guide
Guided
Hidden
Guest
Witness
Chilled
Supplicant
Dreamer
Prisoner
Fugitive
Youngest
Worried
Assassin
Spy
Prayer
Conspirator
Gardener
Tested
Captive
Hunter
Dancer
Hero
Arsonist
Woodsman
Prize
Invisible
Petunia
Rescuer
Cloaked
Petunia’s Fingerless Gloves
Rose’s Baby Blanket
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Jessica Day George
For Amy Jameson, friend and agent
Prologue
“You promised us brides!”
“I grow weary of your whining, Kestilan,” said the King Under Stone. The king, who had once been Rionin, third-born son of Wolfram von Aue, gripped the arms of his throne, and the black stone made a thin cracking noise.
“Do you see?” Kestilan pointed to the throne, though no fracture was visible. “Our home crumbles around us! Something must be done!”
“Do you think I merely sit here night after night and gloat over my kingdom?” The King Under Stone’s chill voice would have done their father proud. “I am not blind.” The king gestured at the ballroom with a broad sweep of his long arm.
The marble floor had lost its sheen and there were shallow dips worn into it from a hundred thousand dances. The gilt was peeling from the mirror frames, and the velvet upholstery had faded from black and purple to gray and lavender.
Blathen murmured something, and the king’s head turned sharply. “What was that, dear brother?”
At first Blathen looked as though he would demur, but then he squared his shoulders. “Our father ruled for centuries, yet the palace was ever new,” he said again.
The King Under Stone nodded. “Very true. And you think that it decays now because I am not as strong as our father.”
None of his brothers moved or spoke, afraid to agree or disagree with this statement. Whatever his strength in comparison to their father’s, the new king could still kill any of them as easily as breathe.
The King Under Stone got to his feet, smiling as his brothers moved away. They stepped down off the dais, making him appear taller though they were all the same height. He took the opportunity to loom over them, and his smile became even more terrifying.
“I assure you this is not the case,” he said. “The truth of the matter is that the Kingdom Under Stone is dying because it was meant to contain our father, and our father is gone.”
“So we can leave?” Tirolian’s voice was rich with relief.
The king paused for a while, mulling over how best to tell his remaining brothers the news. “Not yet,” he admitted. “The kingdom is dying,” he went on at last. “Dying with us trapped inside. Like a birdcage smashed beneath a stone. The door to the cage is still locked and there is no way for us to fly out.” His smile became even more terrifying as he saw his words sink in.
“Then what do we do?” Blathen folded his arms across his chest. “I am not going to sit here and let the stone crush me.”
“Of course not,” the king said. “We need only to collect a few things to enable our escape.”
“And what do we need?” Blathen was still frowning, not convinced that his older brother had the answer.
“Just what Kestilan has asked for,” the King Under Stone said, sitting back on his throne. “Just what our father wanted for us: brides.
“Beautiful brides who can walk in the sun.”
Traveler
Petunia was knitting some fingerless gloves to match her new red velvet cloak when the Wolves of the Westfalian Woods attacked. She dropped one of her needles when she heard the first gunshot, and though she could clearly see the silver needle rolling on the floor of the coach, she didn’t stoop to pick it up. The bandits had surrounded them so quickly and so silently that she froze at the sound of the coachman’s rifle and the sudden halt.
“Put the gun down, my good man,” called out one of the wolves. “All we ask is your coin and any jewels, and you can be on your way.”
Sitting across from her, Petunia’s maid, Maria, began to cry.
Petunia pushed back the hood of her cloak, intrigued. No one had ever told her that the Wolves of the Westfalian Woods were young … but the voice clearly belonged to someone near her own age. An educated someone near her own age, unless she was mistaken. She retrieved her knitting needle and then tucked all four needles and the yarn into the basket on the seat beside her, pulling out her pistol as she did so. She checked the bullets, then cocked the weapon.
“Oh, Your Highness!” Maria was scandalized, but she had the good sense to whisper, at least. “Put it away!”
“They aren’t taking my jewelry,” Petunia said.
She owned only a few pieces—as the youngest of twelve princesses, she was hardly dripping diamonds and pearls. But what little she had was in a cedar jewelry case under Maria’s seat.
“They are not getting my mother’s ruby earrings,” she said. “Nor the necklace that Papa gave me for my sixteenth birthday. I’ve only gotten to wear it twice.”
It had a small ruby in the center of a petunia-shaped pendant, and the chain was made to look like petunia leaves. She would shoot anyone who tried to take it. She might regret shooting them later, but she would still shoot.
Hearing a sound just outside one of the coach windows, Petunia trained her pistol on it and braced her wrist with her other hand. She could see figures outside the coach—masked figures in the trees on either side of the road—but none clear enough to shoot in the twilight.
Then a face, the upper half covered by a leather mask made to look like a wolf’s head, poked through the coach window. Petunia carefully adjusted her aim so that the pistol was pointing at the bandit’s left eye.
“Give us your—Here now! Put that thing away!”
It was the one with the young voice, who sounded as if he were in charge. Petunia didn’t move.
“Now, Your Ladyship,” the bandit began. “No one will get hurt if you just give me your jewels and your money.”
“Correction,” Petunia replied. “No one will get hurt if you crawl back to your filthy den and leave us be. If you try to take my jewels, however, you will be very, very dead.”
“She means it,” Maria said, and Petunia was decidedly irritated by the dismay in her maid’s voice. “They can all shoot like men. A tragedy waiting to happen, I’ve always said.”
“Who can all shoot like men?” The bandit peered into the coach to see if there was anyone else inside.
“The princesses,” Maria said, before Petunia could shush her.
Petunia closed her eyes in despair, but only for a moment. She quickly refocused on the bandit, making sure that her aim was still true. She did not want the Wolves of the Westfalian Woods to know she was a princess. They would assume that she was loaded with gold and jewels, and they would not let her go until they had searched every inch of the coach.
“The princesses taught me how to shoot, when I was at court,” Petunia said hastily. “Though I am only the daughter of a lowly earl.”
“Only a lowly earl’s daughter, is it?” the bandit snarled. “What a pity.”
Petunia refused to be fazed by the bandit’s sudden anger. He was no doubt hoping for better quarry, but that was hardly her fault. She inched the pistol forward until it was almost touching his nose.
“I can hardly miss from this distance,” she told him coldly. “Call off your men!”
The bandit had gray eyes, as gray as the dyed leather of his mask, which gave him a cold, wintry look. Petunia almost made a remark that wolves were supposed to have yellow eyes, but she didn’t think he would find it particularly amusing. It was more something Poppy would do, anyway. She concentrated instead on her hands, which were about to start shaking from the strain of holding the pistol still for so long.
Finally the bandit stepped back. “Come now, lads, it seems that this young lady is only the daughter of a lowly earl,” he called.
There were hoots of derision from the rest of the bandits.
“She can hardly have anything worth stealing, now can she?” their leader continued in his bitter, amused voice.
“Is she pretty?” asked one extremely large man, stepping into Petunia’s line of sight.
She promptly transferred her aim to him.
“Not bad,” countered the leader. “For an earl’s daughter.”
“Faugh!” There was the sound of spitting. “The only earl I’ve ever known was uglier than the backside of a donkey!”
The bandits seemed to find this the height of hilarity.
“Drive on, drive on,” Petunia chanted under her breath.“Why won’t you just drive on?”
None of the bandits that she could see were paying attention to their coach anymore. Was the coachman having the vapors? Maria appeared to be doing so, but Petunia couldn’t spare her much attention. Petunia released the hammer of her pistol and rapped on the roof of the coach with the butt, signaling for the driver to pick up the reins and move.
The coach moved. Not, however, in quite the way Petunia had in mind.
The noise of her pistol on the roof apparently scared the guard sitting on top of the coach, and he fired his rifle at one of the bandits. The bandit fired back, startling the horses. They bolted, dragging the coach behind them. There were shouts, and more shots fired, and the sudden lurching motion of the coach threw Maria off her seat and into Petunia’s lap. Petunia dropped her pistol, and her knitting basket fell to the floor, the contents spilling out and entangling her and Maria in red wool.
There was a scream from the roof of the coach, and then a thud on the road as the guard fell off. Maria, still on the floor of the coach, was now praying loudly.
Petunia tried to stick her head out of the window to see what had become of the guard, but she was thrown sideways, landing on top of Maria. The horses screamed, the coachman cursed, and they came to a halt with the coach tilted so far to the right that Petunia would have fallen out the window had it not been filled with earth and grass from a roadside bank, upon which they had apparently stuck fast.
She extracted herself from Maria, braced herself against the sloping seats, and tried to get the door open. She was short, but surely not too short to reach up and just—
“Allow me, Your Highness,” said the coachman, flinging open the door from the outside and making Petunia shriek in surprise. “Sorry,” he said, abashed.
“It’s all right,” she told him, when she had taken a deep breath.
She grabbed his forearm and allowed herself to be pulled up and out of the door, to sit on the upward side of the coach. The coachman stretched back through the door to pull out Maria, who stopped having hysterics long enough to clamber out with much groaning and panting.
From her vantage point, Petunia could see exactly what had happened: the road curved sharply to the left on its way through the forest. The panicked horses, going much too fast with a heavy coach behind them, had failed to make the turn and smashed into the high bank.
The other outrider was with the horses, soothing them. Petunia could see that one horse was severely injured, and another looked to be favoring a foreleg. She looked back up the road but couldn’t see any sign of the two-legged wolves or the injured man.
Petunia did not know what to do. She was not good with blood, preferring to spend her days gardening in the calm of her father’s hothouses. And as the youngest, she rarely had to make any decisions, her father having very strong ideas about what his daughters could and could not do, and her eleven sisters nosing in on anything that their father didn’t. The most drastic thing Petunia had done in recent memory was to have one of her oldest sister Rose’s old gowns remade into this cloak.
But now what to do? She was supposed to be at the Grand Duchess Volenskaya’s estate by nightfall, but the coach was broken, a man was hurt, and the horses were in no state to continue. Should she and Maria walk back to Bruch? Or should they wait for someone to find them? A shiver ran down her spine. The bandits had surely seen what had happened.
“Are there any estates close by?” she asked the coachman.
“None until we reach the grand duchess’s, Your Highness,” he said uneasily.
“What about an inn?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Highness.”
He, too, was scanning the forest for the bandits. He climbed down from the coach and went to confer with a guard who was removing the harness of one of the horses. The men talked in low voices for a moment, and then the coachman ran back along the road to the injured man.
“Should I go and help him?” Petunia called to the guard with the horses.
“No, no, Your Highness!” The man took an anxious step toward her. “You stay right where you are!”
Uneasy, Petunia clung to the side of the coach and looked inside for her pistol. It was there at the bottom among the tangle of her knitting basket. She felt an itching between her shoulder blades and knew the bandits were watching her from the trees.
“Allow me, Your Highness.”
One of the guards climbed inside and fetched the entire mess out, and Petunia distracted Maria from her fits by having the maid help her untangle the yarn and put everything neatly away, the pistol on top within easy reach.
“Now, just sit here and let the menfolk take care of matters,” Maria chided her.
Petunia tried. But sitting still, she was confronted with a more urgent question than whether to walk on or wait for help. She tried to ignore it, but by the time the coachman had helped the half-fainting guard back to the coach, she could no longer sit still.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, sliding down off the coach.
“Princess Petunia! Where are you going?” Maria squawked.
“Into the bushes,” Petunia said as casually as she could, while the coachman and the guards all opened their mouths to protest. “I’ll be right back, and I’m armed,” she assured them, tilting her basket to display the pistol resting atop her red wool, and then she climbed up the bank and into the underbrush before anyone could accompany her.
She did not need an audience to watch her relieve herself!
Kidnapper
Oliver sent his men back to the old hall by various routes, leaving only himself and his brother Simon to peer at the wreckage of the coach they had almost robbed. They took cover high up in one of the trees, on a platform concealed by branches and a few dead winter leaves.
“Does this happen a lot?” Simon leaned farther over the edge of the platform, and Oliver pulled him back before he fell.
“You mean, do we often cause people to crash their coaches?” Oliver couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice. “No, we don’t!”
“I mean, one person points a gun at you and you back off,” Simon said.
Oliver spluttered for a moment, insulted. “That crazy little girl had a pistol one inch from my right eye, Simon!”
“She was a little girl?” Simon looked like he was going to make a smart remark, but the expression on Oliver’s face stopped him.
“I don’t know how old she was,” Oliver snapped. “But she wasn’t very big, all right?”
“So was she small young or small little?” Simon pressed.
“Shush,” Oliver said.
The truth was, Oliver really didn’t know how old the girl was. Judging by the cut of her gown and her high-piled dark hair, she was in her late teens, but she was barely tall enough to look back at him through the high windows of the coach, and the hands holding the pistol had been just large enough to grip it. She also had the bluest eyes Oliver had ever seen, but that told him nothing.
Nor did he know why he had been so offended at her dismissing her father as being “a lowly earl.” Earls often held a great deal of land and wealth and enjoyed prime places at court. There was no need for her to be insulting about it, and toward her own father.
But there’d been a flicker in her eyes when she’d said it. Perhaps she was downplaying her family’s wealth and position in order to get away from him. The coach had been of good quality and so had the horses, before the crash, and she had a maid and three guards, plus the coachman. Of course, anyone traveling through the woods now had at least two guards with them, not that it stopped Oliver and his men from taking what they liked. Usually.
The combination of the pistol leveled at his eye and the girl’s insistence that she was only an earl’s daughter—though a friend of the royal court—had made Oliver hesitate. They had enough for now; they didn’t really need whatever the girl was hiding in her trunks. There was no harm in letting her go.
But then the horses had startled, and his men had barely had time to get out of the way of the stampede. A stray bullet had narrowly missed Simon, and then the idiot atop the coach had fallen onto the road. It rubbed Oliver’s conscience raw not to help, but Oliver had to remember that he was the villain and it was not his place to assist someone he had almost robbed.
Simon, he was sure, had been hoping to see some grisly injuries, but Oliver had been praying that the girl and her maid wouldn’t come to any harm. He would have stepped forward to help, then; he hadn’t sunk so low as to refuse an injured woman aid.
Not yet, anyway.
“What’s she doing?” Simon’s voice was hushed.
“What now?”
Oliver leaned in close to his brother, peering over the edge of the platform. The girl had gotten off the coach and was saying something. Her people didn’t look pleased, but she turned her back on them and went into the woods anyway.
“What is she doing?” Simon asked again. “Is she mad?”
As the girl stepped behind a large clump of juniper and flipped her heavy cloak up around her shoulders, Oliver felt the heat rise in his cheeks. He knew exactly what the girl was doing. He clapped a hand over Simon’s eyes.
“Hey!”
“Shush, you,” Oliver hissed.
“Get off!” Simon tried to pry off his brother’s hand.
“You don’t need to watch her … taking a …” He suddenly couldn’t think of a polite way to say it.
Simon went still, but he started laughing, and not quietly. “Are you serious? I guess sometimes even the high and mighty have to pee in the bushes!”
“Simon, be quiet!”
Oliver had been trying not to watch, but now he checked to make sure that the girl couldn’t hear them. He regretted taking Simon with them. The boy was barely fourteen and completely incapable of staying quiet for more than a pair of minutes. Oliver had started robbing coaches under the guidance of Karl and his father’s other men when he was twelve, but their mother had coddled Simon.
The girl was looking around, but it wasn’t stopping her from doing … what it was she needed to do. Oliver quickly looked away.
When he peeked again, she was gone. He let go of Simon’s face.
“I’m not five; you don’t have to cover my eyes like that,” Simon griped.
Oliver couldn’t see the girl anywhere. She hadn’t gone back to the coach. The other guards were busy splinting the injured man’s arm, but Oliver could see that the maid was watching the underbrush nervously, beginning to worry about her charge.
“Where did she go?” Simon strained the upper half of his body over the edge of the platform. “Uh-oh,” he began, and then he fell.
“Simon!”
Oliver grabbed the edge of the platform and leaned over to see where his brother had fallen. Simon had landed badly and was clutching one ankle and moaning. Standing over him, holding a pistol, was the girl. The gleaming blackness of her hair and pistol made a dramatic picture with her red cloak, Oliver noted. Then he drew his own weapon and leaped lightly down to her side.
“Give me the pistol, Your Ladyship,” he said coolly, holding out his free hand.
“Why should I?”
She had courage, Oliver would give her that. Her voice didn’t waver at all, and she barely flinched when he cocked his pistol in her ear.
“Because one of us is a dangerous criminal, and one of us is not,” Oliver said, praying silently that she would give in. “And which do you think is more likely to shoot?”
With a sigh, the girl released the hammer of her pistol and handed it to Oliver, who stuck it in his belt. He tried not to show his relief, and heartily wished that he and Simon were still wearing their masks.
“I’ve faced worse than you,” she announced.
“I’m sure you have,” Oliver said, startled. She certainly didn’t seem afraid of him, which he found flattering and insulting at the same time.
“Oliver, my ankle is broken,” Simon whimpered.
“Your name is Oliver?” The princess raised her eyebrows. “Not a very wolfish name.”
Oliver felt ice sliding through his gut. She had seen their faces and now she knew his name. He was holding a gun to her head, Simon was starting to cry from pain, and he could hear the voice of her coachman, who was starting to wonder where she had gone. This was not how his day was supposed to go.
“Move,” he said. He pointed with the gun toward the deer path that led back to the old hall. “Now.”
“I beg your pardon?”
It had clearly never occurred to her that he would abduct her. That made two of them. Three, actually: Simon had stopped crying and looked equally flabbergasted.
Oliver already regretted it, but he didn’t know what else to do. Let her go? And then what? They couldn’t move very fast, not if Simon’s ankle really was broken. She would have ample time to summon her coachman and the uninjured guards. Oliver could not afford to be captured. Too many people were relying on him.
“Go,” he snarled.
The girl went, stumbling a little over a tree root before she reached the path. When she was a few paces ahead, Oliver stooped down and grabbed Simon’s elbow with his free hand, pulling his brother upright. He got Simon’s arm around his shoulders, and they hobbled after the girl.
They were safely concealed by trees before the maid and the coachman started to look for their charge in earnest, much to Oliver’s relief. Oliver could hear them crashing around in the bushes behind them, but he had Simon and the girl well on their way. Once they got across the stream their tracks would be lost as well.
It was slowgoing with Simon injured and having to keep the pistol in one hand, threatening the girl. And with every step Oliver knew that he had done something terribly wrong. Robbing coaches that looked like they could spare the gold was vastly different from kidnapping. And how old was she? She seemed very confident, and he had to admit she was quick with her pistol, but the top of her head probably wouldn’t reach to his collarbone.
“I’m going to hang,” Oliver muttered under his breath.
“What?” Simon gasped. His face was gray and sweaty.
When they came to the stream, Oliver stepped down into the water so that Simon could use the bank to climb onto his brother’s back. Now Oliver had both hands free, but Simon had his arms wrapped around Oliver’s neck strangle-tight. Standing on the bank next to them, the girl gave Simon a concerned look.
“He doesn’t look very good,” she said.
“I know,” Oliver snapped.
“Well, why don’t you let me go so that you can find help for him faster?”
“No,” Oliver said. He waved the gun at her. “Wade across. Go on.”
“No, thank you,” she said primly. “I don’t want to get my shoes wet.”
Oliver was about to argue with her, but she crossed the stream in one fantastic leap. On the far side, she adjusted her cloak and waited for him with arched brows as he trudged across through the water and up the other bank, panting already from Simon’s weight on his back.
“That was amazing,” Simon mumbled. “Not you, Oliver. Her.”
“It wasn’t that far,” she said, dismissive. “Listen, I could still find my own way back to the road. I won’t tell anyone your names.”
“Don’t know my name,” Simon said. “It’s Simon, though.” He sounded like he was becoming feverish.
“It’s nice to meet you, Simon,” the girl said. “I’m Petunia.”
“Petunia?” Oliver snorted. “Like the flower?”
The look she gave him made him wish he’d kept better control of his face, but really: Petunia? He’d thought she was going to say something simple, but pretty, like Anna or Emilia. Of course, Queen Maude and King Gregor had long ago set the fashion for flower names by giving all twelve of the princesses awful names like Campanula and Tulip.
He was starting to feel uneasy about how close her connections at court might be. If her father had the ear of the king, no matter how lowly an earl he was, Oliver was in very grave trouble. And that meant that his family and everyone under his care was in trouble as well.
“It’s not much farther,” Oliver grunted.
There was a birdcall, and then another, and Oliver knew that sentries had spotted them. He’d taken only a few more paces when Karl came striding along the path. The big man gave Petunia only a cursory look before lifting Simon off Oliver’s back. He pushed past Oliver and Petunia to hurry off with the injured boy.
The path twisted, and they were at the walls of the old hall. The gate was to the right, but it seemed like too much effort to Oliver, though he usually set an example by using it. Instead, he took the girl’s elbow and steered her through one of the many large breaks in the wall, over the broken stones that had been purposefully left scattered about, half-covered by grass.
“Where are we?” Petunia asked. “Is this your … oh.”
To their left was the hall, artfully propped up from the inside to preserve its derelict appearance. All around them were cooking fires and women carrying baskets of laundry or bread. The bellows were going in the smithy, and near the hall doors was a group of children reciting their lessons with a smiling teacher.
“What is this place?” Petunia’s voice was hushed.
Oliver didn’t answer. The less she knew, the safer his people would be … or was it naive to assume that they could go on living here, now that she had seen them? Part of him, however, wanted to boast, or make a sarcastic remark, welcoming her to his fine country estate.
He opened his mouth to do so, when his mother came out of the hall and headed toward them with an expression on her face that made Oliver feel all of six years old. He stepped a little behind Petunia and almost dropped his pistol trying to holster it.
His mother was brought up short when she got a good look at the girl. Her face went deadly white, and she swayed a little where she stood.
“Mother?” Oliver let go of Petunia’s arm and hurried toward her.
“Maude?” His mother’s voice was barely a whisper.
“No,” the girl said. Her voice was quiet and her face looked strained. “I’m Petunia. But I understand that I look a great deal like my mother.”
“Your mother’s name is Maude?” Oliver felt like the ground had just dropped out from under his feet.
“Yes,” Petunia said, throwing back her hood. “Queen Maude of Westfalin.”
“Your Highness,” Oliver’s mother said respectfully, giving a small curtsy. “Welcome to our humble home. I am the Dowager Countess Emily Ellsworth-Saxony. I came from Breton with your mother when we were just girls.” She gave Petunia a faint smile, but then her eyes hardened and she turned to Oliver.
“Now please explain what the princess is doing here, Oliver.”
“She’s here to visit our lowly earldom, Mother,” Oliver said, and he knew with great certainty that if his mother didn’t kill him, King Gregor would. His fate was sealed.
He started to laugh.
