The Decoy Princess (3 page)

“Any of them come true?” she asked.

“No,” I said, then hesitated. “No, of course not.”
What an odd thing to ask
.

“Animals,” the old woman said. “Do they do what you want?”

My brow furrowed, and a distant part of me wondered at the absurdity of the question. “I can ride a horse.” I took a deep breath to dispel the fog in my head, but it only made it worse.

The gypsy shook her head in disgust. “Can you walk unnoticed?”

“I’m a princess. Walking unnoticed is pretty much”—I took a breath, willing myself out of the fog—“impossible.” My finger throbbed as I gripped the bone knife. I wondered if the fox had run away, and my attention wandered until I found a pair of black, unblinking eyes watching me from under the dresser. It was panting, afraid. My water had spilled, and I wished I could find enough stamina to coax it out to drink from the puddle.

The gypsy followed my eyes to the fox. She made a rude sound I and leaned forward. I made no protest as she reached out and plucked a loose hair from the shoulder of my dress. Holding it over the candle, she made a show of smelling the smoke when it flashed into light and was gone. “She can do little for the amount of venom you’ve subjected her to,” she said sourly. “She’ll hate you if you haven’t told her the cost, which I’d wager six horses you haven’t. What is she, eighteen?”

“She’s twenty, and I chose that risk.”

The woman harrumphed. “Breach the confidence, and you’ll be ripped to shreds. The Costenopolie playing field will be destroyed to keep any disturbing ideas from taking root.”

“I’m aware of that.” His stance was stiff with no show of repentance. A part of me wondered who this woman was who thought she could treat Kavenlow as a drudge.

“She’s weak-minded. I pulled her here easier than if she were a starveling child.”

Kavenlow gritted his teeth. “She would have come without your summons. She likes gypsies.”

“So do I,” the woman said sharply. “But I don’t go traipsing into their vans with no thought to my safety.”

A spark of anger finally broke through my fog. “Kavenlow sees to my safety,” I said hotly. “I don’t need to think about it. And you will not address him in such a tone.”

The woman’s brow rose as if surprised I had broken my silence. “This is what you taught her?” she said, fanning that mind-numbing smoke at me. My anger died, all my efforts to pull from my haze gone in a breath. “Reliance on others? A smart mouth that runs without thought? You wanted a princess, Kavenlow? You have a princess. What you plan on making from this is beyond me.” She leaned back with a shrewd gleam. “Either you are a moonstruck idiot or more cunning than even my master.” Her eyes narrowed in threat. “He’s dead.”

I could almost hear the words, “I killed him,” hanging unsaid between them. Kavenlow stiffened, his feet planted firmly and un-moving. “How I play my game is my business,” he said through his gritted teeth. “Do you recognize her or not?”

A sigh escaped the woman. Her fingers played with the jewelry about her neck. I watched, unable to look away until the fox poured itself from under the dresser and slunk to the puddle by my feet. For a moment, only the small sound of its lapping could be heard, and then it slunk back into hiding. I smiled, pleased it had trusted me.

“Aye,” the gypsy said grudgingly, eying the fox’s nose peeping from under the dresser. “I’ll recognize her. There’s something there—though the package it comes in is worthless. You should burn your plans and start over. This woman is only fit for dressing in finery and resting on another’s arm.”

A flush of anger cut through my benumbed state, then died.

“Thank you,” Kavenlow said, an irate relief in his voice.

“Thank you?” the gypsy questioned mockingly. “Whatever for? Go on. Get out. I want to leave before the crush.”

Kavenlow hesitated. “Something is coming? Tell me.”

A shaft of light stabbed into the smothering darkness as she shifted the curtain and peered into the street. “If you can’t see it, you’ll have to wait until it happens. I’m not your nursemaid.”

Plucking her smoldering stick from the wall, she wafted it under my nose. “You won’t remember any of this,” she said to me, and I lost sight of everything but her eyes sharp with an old bitterness. They were blue. What gypsy has blue eyes?

“When I cut you,” the woman said, “Kavenlow beat me with the flat of his sword, burned my van, and slaughtered my horse. Oh, it was a sight to remember,” she said dryly.

“Burned your van?” I said, my eyes tearing and my words slurring at the sudden smoke.

The gypsy smirked at my loose speech, the folds of her face falling into each other. “Yes. Burned my van down to its wheels. It’s what he wants to do. Can’t you tell?”

Kavenlow pried the knife from my fingers. “That won’t work with her,” he said as he tucked it into the coin purse dangling from my wrist. “She will eventually remember. She’s stronger than she seems.

I’ve never been able to cloud her memory.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not you, then, isn’t it?”

His lips pressed into a thin line behind his graying beard. Taking my arm, he moved me to the door.

The rush of light and heat as he opened it was so sudden and shocking, it was almost a pain. I balked, unable to leave the cool rest of the van. With a smooth motion, Kavenlow hoisted me into his arms.

“Come see me again when you find unfailing love, dearest,” she said sarcastically as he carried me down the steps, “and I’ll tell you your children’s fortunes.”

Two

“Not so tight,” I gasped when Heather tugged my bodice laces. “I do have to breathe.”

“Tish, tash,” the young woman said, giving the laces a final yank before tying them off. “We have to make the most of what little you have. Heaven help you, Tess, if you took away the dress and long hair, you could be a boy. And you want to make a good impression if you see him in the hallways—by accident, of course.”

My eyebrows rose at the blatant hint of scheming. “And passing out from lack of air will impress the chu out of him, won’t it,” I said dryly, but a stab of anticipation brought me straight.

Saucily humming the music I had picked out for my wedding, Heather helped me into a clean dress.

She had joined the palace staff as a kitchen girl when I was seven and she was eight, but after borrowing her for a game of tag, I insisted she become a member of my “court.”

Court
had been a rather grand name for my loose gathering of companions at the time. I had been horribly obnoxious, demanding everyone play with me, noble and commoner alike. Heather, though, remained while others drifted away—a
steady companion
and extra set of ears keeping me informed of the palace gossip.

“Have you seen him?” I asked, worried as I sat in a rustle of fabric before my mirror in my outer room. She had been unusually silent while I’d washed the street dirt from me, making me think the news wasn’t good.

“He who?” Her eyebrows were high with an artful disinterest.

“Garrett!” I said, pushing her away in exasperation as she tried to arrange my hair.

“Prince Garrett of Misdev?” She said his name around a languorous sigh that sent her ample chest heaving dramatically. “The entire staff met him after breakfast while you were out. He’s been with your parents since, cloistered away with papers and maps. Dreary stuff. I don’t know how he stands it, the poor man. I’m sure he’d rather be out hawking or riding.”

Heather pulled a curl from my topknot, and I tucked it back. I didn’t like her that close to my darts; she thought they were only a favorite bit of decoration. Lord help me if she ever pricked herself. I didn’t wear my knife or bullwhip behind palace walls, either.

“And where did Kavenlow ride off to in such a hurry?” she continued. “The cook said he took the cold pork she was going to serve tomorrow and ran to the stables. Such a fuss that woman made. You’d think he stole a live pig the way she was bellyaching!”

I frowned. “Kavenlow left? By horse?”

“Right out the front gate.” She teased out another curl. “Bilge scrapings, Tess. Let me put your hair down. Honestly! Why won’t you let me pad you in front a little, too? Just for today? You’re as tall and thin as a dinghy’s mast.”

Exasperated, I let the curl stay. Heather’s preoccupation with my looks was because I didn’t have any, and she did. She was shorter than me by half a head and pleasingly round where a woman should be, with rosy cheeks, blond hair, and wide, child-bearing hips. Fine, good, Costenopolie stock, as Kavenlow would say.

“Kavenlow didn’t tell me good-bye,” I mused aloud. “That’s not like him.” Then I brightened.

“Perhaps it has something to do with a betrothal gift.”

“That must be it,” Heather said. “Though why he raided the larder is beyond me.”

“We didn’t eat while we were out.” I carefully took the darts from my topknot and placed them in the hairpin cushion. My hair tumbled down, and I reached for the brush.

The morning’s excursion had been an obvious ploy to keep me out of the palace and prevent me from meeting Garrett. I thought Kavenlow was being grossly overprotective. Though our grandparents had warred upon each other, King Edmund had far more to gain by his second son marrying into the family, hoping to prosper by the Red Moon Prophesy rather than be destroyed by it. Our marriage had been arranged for almost a year, but Garrett and I weren’t supposed to meet until a month from now at the summer festival, then be wedded this winter at the turning of the year. That he was early didn’t bother me at all.

Heather pressed her lips and took the brush from me, struggling to get through the tangles the wind from the bay had made of my curls. “I don’t like you going down into the streets. You’re going to end up
dead
,” she said, giving my hair a sharp tug. “And what’s going to happen to me then? You couldn’t pay me to go into the streets with you again.”

“That was years ago,” I protested. “Heather, bury it and find a new horse to ride.”

A tinge of red came over her sun-starved cheeks, and her tugs grew sharper. In all honesty, it had been a near miss. The surrounding merchants and townsfolk had spontaneously retaliated, stoning the man to death under my and Heather’s horrified eyes. To Kavenlow’s fury, he hadn’t been able to stop them. My people left nothing to question in their anger. Kavenlow had stomped about the palace for days. Two days later, he began secretly desensitizing me to the poison on my needles to supplement my growing whip and knife skills.

“You should have sent me,” she said, tugging on my hair. “I know what you like.”

I took the brush from her before she yanked my hair out entirely. “I was buying something for Garrett.”

“Oh, that’s right.” A randy glitter came into her blue eyes. “What did you get him? A matched set of jewels?” Her eyes went wide with a mocking innocence as she fluffed my clean underskirt. “No-o-o-o?

He probably has a pair already. Maybe a great, awful, long sword? No? He has one of those already, too.” She giggled merrily.

“A knife,” I said, meeting her grin with my own. Heather should have been married years ago, but had she accepted any of the numerous offers, she would’ve had to leave me until I was wed as well. And life beside me was too comfortable for her to give it up. Not to mention the court stipend.

“A knife?” Heather repeated. She played with the ends of her hair, her full lips falling into a pout that generally got her whatever she wanted from the cook’s boy.

I nodded. “It used to belong to a desert king. Want to see it?” I reached for my coin bag atop the vanity, pulling out the knife and placing it in her palm. “Be careful,” I warned. “It’s wickedly sharp. The gypsy I bought it from accidentally pricked my finger on it. See?”

Heather dutifully glanced at the tiny spot as I held my hand out. “Kavenlow beat her with the flat of his sword,” I said, a distant feeling coming over me. “He burned her wagon and slaughtered her horse.

She had… blue eyes. Have you ever seen a gypsy with blue eyes?”

Heather’s mouth fell open. “Kavenlow?” she whispered. “He beat her?”

“Oh, it was quite a sight,” I said slowly, seeming to smell smoke. I felt odd, starting when Heather took my hand and pulled my finger closer for a better look.

“Chu, Tess!” she exclaimed softly. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

I pulled away, confused. “I don’t know.” Frowning, I turned to my mirror. “Do you think Garrett will like it?” I asked, tucking the knife in a drawer. “You saw him. What’s he like?”

My pricked finger apparently forgotten, Heather sat on the edge of my dressing couch, her round cheeks pinched as she beamed. “You are so fortunate, it makes me ill. Of all the fat ugly men, you somehow find the single handsome one.”

At least he isn’t ugly
, I thought. “Is he clever?” I asked her reflection.

“Clever? It matters? He’s gorgeous!”

“Oh, how nice…” I said, trying to feign an air of indifference as I smoothed my hair. I’d seen portraits, of course. But portraits often lied.

“Yes, and he looks like he really knows how to use his sword,” she confided. “Even the one buckled to his belt,” she added, her blue eyes innocently serious.

I gave her a raised-eyebrow look. Angels give me strength. I’d been waiting for a husband too long.

A girl can crochet only so many doilies.

“And he made the head cook blush with his praise of breakfast,” Heather added.

That was impressive. Getting that old woman to color took some doing. “He can’t be better looking than the falconer’s boy,” I protested, praying she’d say he was.

She nodded enthusiastically. “By a wagonload. Lord help me, his shoulders would make angels cry.

And he has such a tight little—”

“Heather!” I cried as she dramatically fanned herself, falling back on the couch by the window.

“Oh…” she moaned. “You will have so many children, you will put the peasants to shame. To shame!”

I turned away, pleased. I was obligated to marry the most lucrative offer, no matter what the man who came with it looked like or how stupid he was, especially with the “Marry her for glory or murder her for safety” mentality the surrounding noble families were afflicted with. And the marriage offers had tapered off dramatically since poor Prince Rupert.