Palace of Lies (10 page)

“So you were there the night the assassins killed the king?” I asked in horror. “They killed the king, they killed his guards, they left the queen with fatal wounds . . . How is it that you survived?”

Janelia had stopped gingerly dabbing at my feet, and was just staring now at all the blood.

“I fear that another servant girl died in my place,” Janelia said in a hollow voice. “I've learned that one servant girl looks much the same as another to men like Lord Throckmorton—unless she is unduly beautiful, which I was not.” She swallowed hard. “And neither was Lena.”

Janelia stopped talking, and I had to prompt her: “Lena?”

Janelia winced and took a deep breath.

“Lena . . . my friend . . . I had asked her to bring more wood for the queen's fire right before midnight,” Janelia said. She seemed to be looking off into the distance, at something I couldn't see. “Lena tarried coming up the stairs. If she had just gotten there faster, put the wood on
the fire, and been out of the room again before the last chime of midnight, before the assassins arrived . . .”

Janelia dragged her gaze back to me now. Her eyes burned.

“Lena tried to defend the queen,” Janelia said. “The way her body fell near the bed, not over by the fireplace—I'm sure that's what she was doing.” Janelia swallowed hard, a shamed expression on her face. “And I—I lay frozen, half under the bed. I couldn't move. It was like I was under some evil spell or something . . . the spell of cowardice. And the assassins never knew I was there because they never came around to that side of the bed. That's the only reason I lived. Because I was a coward.”

“Who wouldn't have been afraid?” I murmured. I remembered how terrified I'd always been of Lord Throckmorton. And, until the very end, it had been in his best interest to keep me alive.

Suddenly I realized that Janelia had spent the past fourteen years thinking about that night the wrong way.

“I'm sure the assassins knew you were there,” I said. “They were experts—they would have been watching. They would have kept track of who entered and left that room. They probably killed that other girl—Lena?—because she saw them. Even if they were wearing masks or disguises, she could have described their stature, their physiques. But you . . . you didn't see them. You only heard what happened. And . . . it was in their interest to leave a witness, as long as she didn't know
too much. So you could spread the terror to everyone else in the palace.”

Janelia gaped at me.

“I—I never thought of that,” she said.

I shrugged, as if knowing the minds of evil men was something to be modest about.

“I know how Lord Throckmorton and his minions thought,” I whispered.

Janelia still didn't go back to cleaning my wounds.

“So I was supposed to
not
be terrified, as well as not a coward?” she asked bitterly. “I have more to feel guilty about?”

“Or less,” I said. “You shouldn't think Lena died in your place. It was her own fault for tarrying on the stairs.”

I felt clever saying that. But Janelia snapped, “Don't you dare ever tell Lena's son that! He thinks his mother died a hero!”

I didn't think there was much chance I'd ever meet the son of a dead servant girl from the palace from fourteen years ago—especially now that the palace had burned down.

And what of your sister-princesses?
a cruel part of my brain asked me.
If they are dead, are you going to remember them as dying heroic deaths? Or as being at fault?

“I don't want to hear anything else about the murders right now,” I said. My imperious tone was back, simply because I was trying so hard not to cry. This tone had always
sounded perfectly fine in the palace—it was something I'd aspired to and practiced when I was younger, and it didn't come naturally. But the tone felt out of place in Janelia's hovel, when my blood was soaking into her dirt floor. And when my palace was gone and my sister-princesses might be dead and some enemy I couldn't even identify had apparently tried to kill me, too, and I had had to rely on Janelia's ragamuffin sons to rescue me from Madame Bisset . . .

“You were brave later on,” I told Janelia, trying for a tone of kindness. It came out sounding condescending. “Even after the assassins, you stayed on as the queen's servant. Even as she lay dying.”

Janelia picked up her rag again and started scrubbing away at the blood caked on my left foot.

“
Is
it bravery when your only other choice is starvation?” she asked. “When you're the only one bringing in money in your family, and you don't want to watch your little brothers and sisters starve too? Or watch your new baby sister die?”

I remembered that Janelia had claimed that the two of us were sisters. Maybe I had lost too much blood; maybe it just seemed too incredible. What Janelia had said just kept floating out of my mind.

Does she mean . . . Is she saying
I
was the new baby sister she didn't want to see die?
I wondered.

“But surely at the orphanage . . .” I began. I had little
notion of what orphanages were like. I tried again. “Surely the food was adequate, even if it wasn't as elegant as palace fare . . .”

Janelia gave me a look that I wouldn't have been able to identify even a month and a half ago, before the other girls arrived at the palace. It was a look of pure incredulity, the same look that my sister-princesses almost always gave me when I made any supposition about life outside the palace.

It made me feel like a fool. It made me wonder,
Has everyone at the palace thought me foolish all along? How is it that everyone except my sister-princesses—and Janelia—have always been able to hide those looks from me for the past fourteen years? And . . . is this proof that Janelia really is another sister?

“Children starve to death in orphanages and outside them,” Janelia said. And maybe her rag hit another hidden piece of glass in my foot, because an extra jolt of pain shot through my body. “Especially babies. That's one of the things the queen was so upset about. That's one of the reasons she wanted to stop the war.”

Belatedly I remembered that the queen herself had written about her concern for orphans in the letters she'd left for all the sister-princesses.

Janelia dug at the glass in my foot.

“But you and me and the rest of our family . . . we were never in an orphanage,” Janelia continued.

I jerked back not just my foot, but my whole body.

“What?” I protested. “But I saw the queen's account
myself, in her own handwriting . . . She said
all
of us princesses came from the orphanage!”

Janelia kept her head bowed, her focus on my foot.

“The queen thought she was telling the truth . . . ,” she murmured. She let out a deep sigh. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was just helping you stay alive . . . if I could keep you alive . . .”

I felt chills that had nothing to do with the blood I'd lost or the fact that I was sitting on a dirt floor.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

Janelia winced but went on.

“The queen was dying,” she said. “I thought it might be her last day, and maybe you can't believe this, but I was genuinely fond of her. In spite of the danger she put me in. I wanted to do anything I could to keep her happy. So she could . . . die in peace. She sent me to the orphanage with instructions to bring back thirteen orphan baby girls of no more than a month or so old.”

“Did she tell you what she was going to do with all those babies?” I asked. I could listen to this story only as long as I didn't think about who the babies really were: me and Cecilia and Fidelia and all the other sister-princesses: Ganelia with her love of architecture and Florencia with her love of numbers and Lydia with her freckles and Elzbethl with her desire to walk without stumbling . . .

Stop,
I told myself.
Stop thinking about who the babies grew up to become. Or about what happened to them last night.
Think of them as nameless, faceless, anonymous orphans. . . .

“Queens don't explain themselves to lowly servant girls,” Janelia said stiffly. She wrung out a bloody rag and went on with the story. “As much as I thought about it, I guess I thought that her own baby had been sent far away, for safety, and she wanted other babies around her in her last moments as a reminder of new life, even as she slipped away into death.”

From what I had heard about the queen, that sounded like a reasonable guess.

“It took me most of a sleepless night to get all the babies,” Janelia said. “Sneaking in and out of the castle, to and from the orphanage, bringing back a basketful of babies each time. But the queen had been specific—she wanted
thirteen
babies. And there were only twelve baby girls at the orphanage that night.”

“So why did you not grab a boy for the thirteenth baby?” I asked. “Surely there were boy babies in the orphanage too.”

“Plenty,” Janelia said drily. “But I knew even a dying queen could tell the difference between a baby boy and a baby girl.”

I knew so little of babies that this had not occurred to me.

“And—I had made arrangements to bring in wet nurses for all the babies,” Janelia said.

“Wet nurses?” I repeated numbly.

“Babies have to eat,” Janelia said. “Especially little babies—they cry for food every few hours. And when babies are orphans, of course they don't have mothers of their own to give them milk. . . .”

My jaw dropped. This was another part of the story I had never thought about. Maybe I had heard somewhere that babies couldn't eat regular food. But if Janelia brought wet nurses into the palace to feed the babies, that meant even more people knew at least part of the true story from the very beginning.

And there were undoubtedly guards who saw Janelia walking back and forth from the nursery, carrying her mysterious basket,
I thought.
And probably people at the orphanage who saw what Janelia was doing, who heard her explain the queen's request . . .

How was it that anything about my sister-princesses and I had stayed secret for longer than five minutes?

How many people had Lord Throckmorton had killed to protect his own claim to power?

How had Janelia survived?

“My own mother was very ill,” Janelia went on. “
Our
mother. She'd been sick since giving birth to you, and her milk dried up. Whenever I went home, you cried and cried and cried, and I knew that you were starving. . . . I knew that there were wet nurses in the palace with lots of milk, and I knew the queen wanted one more little baby girl to gaze upon before she expired. . . . Can you see why I thought it was an easy decision to bring you to the palace as
a stand-in for the thirteenth baby orphan? Can you see why I thought,
It will make the queen happy and it will get my baby sister a full belly for the first time in her life and of course this is the right thing to do?
Can you ever forgive me my mistake?”

Janelia's voice was anguished and her face twisted as she spoke the word “mistake.” Her hands dripped with blood.

I found that I could not look at Janelia.

I could not look at my sister—was she truly my sister?

Whether I believed her or not, I needed to act as if I did.

“But then the queen began giving the babies away,” I said, and my voice came out sounding convincingly tortured. “The next morning. Didn't you see? Knights of the royal order kept coming in secretly, one by one, and the queen handed each one a baby and told him, ‘This is my child. Please take care of my child.' She convinced each and every knight that he alone had the one true princess. When really he had only an orphan girl. How could you not understand what was going on? How could you not stand with your ear to the door and listen as one baby after another was taken away? How could you have let me go to the worst man of all, Lord Throckmorton?”

I glanced up only long enough to see that Janelia was peering down into the bucketful of bloody water.

“I kept you in the royal nursery until the very last,” Janelia whispered. “I did . . . I did listen at the queen's door. I heard everything. But I didn't know how many knights were in the royal order. I don't know—I guess I didn't
think each and every one of them would come for a baby. I didn't think the queen would live long enough to give away every baby. I was just thinking about making sure you got as much milk as possible. I was going to leave you suckling until the very last minute, and then, if I had to, I was going to confess to the queen that you were the one baby in her royal nursery who wasn't an orphan.”

“You never confessed,” I said accusingly.

Janelia peered straight back at me.

“Because, when every other baby was gone from the nursery, a messenger came for me,” she said. “To tell me that my own mother had just died.”

I could imagine Janelia fourteen years ago, standing alone in the hallway of the palace, weeping over her dead mother. I could imagine this so easily because the palace walls had absorbed so many of my own tears, before I had learned that crying did no good.

“But then . . .” I murmured. “Didn't you have a father who wanted his youngest child back after his wife died? Didn't I—Don't I—?”

It was too much of a stretch to work out the connections, to lay claim to a stranger who might once have been father to both Janelia and me.

Janelia was shaking her head anyway.

“Our father died while our mother was yet pregnant with you,” she said. “He died in the war.”

I didn't know what to say to that. Janelia seemed to be
trying to work her face into something resembling a weak smile.