Sleeping Beauty fhk-5 Page 27

  "Do not annoy your Princess, gentlemen," he said with a laugh. "Her aim isvery good. Perhaps you might consider if your ability to dodge is as good."

  They didn't reply, of course. It wouldn't be appropriate. But she could see that she had impressed them. Good. It won't hurt for them to know that I can defend myself. It might keep them on their toes a bit. With a little wave to Siegfried, she set off down the hall. After that workout, she needed a bath.

  And it was in the bath, chin deep in hot water, that she was able to think.

  There was no doubt that Desmond was wonderful. Unbelievable, in fact. But did that mean that he was in fact unbelievable? He saw her for no more than an hour at a time, less than that was spent alone in his company. He had plenty of time to study her, quiz servants about her, even use more esoteric means to find out about her. Then, all he had to do was be utterly charming for the short period of time he was with her, and guardedly genial when he was with anyone else, just to be sure that no bad reports got back to her.

  Whereas Siegfried had every opportunity to lose his temper with her. Over the course of training, she had hit him by accident many times, quite hard, including once in his "jewels". He had never done worse than shout at her the one time she had very nearly done something stupidly dangerous to herself. He had lost his temper, yes, but never taken it out on her, and always apologized.

  She licked the salty sweat off her upper lip and pondered.

  She certainly had had the answer to her question of who she was attracted to. No, do be honest with yourself. It is a great deal more than mere attraction. And this was Eltaria, where Kings and Queens and Princes and Princesses actually fell in love all the time. It was not out of the question that she could be falling in love with Siegfried. He might not be the sharpest sword in the rack at times, but there was no doubt that he also wasn't stupid. And he was kind, brave, loyal... But there was still the last trial to go.

  Damn you, Tradition! she thought fiercely. Do something about this!

  Chapter 18

  It was warm, too warm. Rosa had tossed and turned in her soft, rose-scented sheets until the last sound faded from the Palace and the last servant went to bed for the night. Now she lay in her bed and stared at the patch of wall where a beam of moonlight, piercing through a parting of the curtains, slowly moved its way down the wainscoting. The too-warm air pressed down on her. She longed for a storm.

  The moonlight was an irregular, pale slash on the wall. Crickets chorused outside the window, and once in a while she heard the steady footfalls of a guard patrolling the grounds. She was tired, and yet couldn't sleep. Her brain buzzed with thoughts. She felt as if she had been awake for hours. Judging by the position of that patch of moonlight, she probably had been.

  And still her mind buzzed and chirped like the crickets and would not let her rest. She kept trying to think of a way she could covertly help Siegfried, and nothing would come.

  It had been two days since the last trial had been announced, and so far, there were two dropouts. She hadn't expected more than that, but every man less meant more pressure on the ones still in the competition.

  One was Andret. Andret had always been one of the more...enthusiastic and cheerful of the competitors. He had come to Lily all smiles immediately after the trial was announced.

  "Majesty," he had said, after his bow, "in a sense, I came here under false colors. Frankly I never intended to try for Rosa's hand."

  Lily, so she told Rosa, had been unsurprised, and a little amused.

  She had asked why he was telling her now, though. "Because I have no good ideas for the defense of this realm," he had replied. "If I did, be sure I would tell you, but I do not, so I must bid you farewell. I have greatly enjoyed testing myself against your challenges."

  It became obviouswhy he had never intended to finish the trials when his mother, the Sorceress Aubergine, arrived to fetch him away. With her, driving a second chariot, this one drawn by a pair of Gryphons, was a stunning flame haired young female. Any thoughts that she might have been his sister evaporated in the heat of their greeting. It was quite entertaining for those who happened to be present to watch it.

  The other dropout was the son of the ruler of Reritain, to the east. No one had been sorry to see him leave. He had been sullen to the point of surliness, and had made no allies here.

  That left three remaining candidates from the neighboring kingdoms, which was enough to prevent anyone from deciding to invade, whether their candidate had lost the contest or was still in the running. At least, for now.

  Rosa turned over again, trying to find a cool spot. Nothing. Her thoughts kept circling around the remaining competitors, trying to work out if there was anything she could do to keep them from quitting.

  The longer this trial went on, the better.

  There were eight left now. Eight young men who had taken various approaches to the problem they had been set. Leopold gambled. Every night he sat down at the gaming tables with her courtiers — and by day, she knew, he went into the city to a gambling club where he pitted his luck against that of rich young men of merchant families. He was winning, too, quite handily, and growing increasingly cheerful as he did so. She didn't know him well enough to tell if this meant he couldn't think of anything so he was glad he was making a small fortune at the tables, or if it meant he had thought of something, and he was cheerful and winning because of it.

  As for Siegfried — well, Siegfried vanished from the Palace for most of every day. His bird told her that he was going out to the forest. She could sympathize with that; if you were used to being alone in the wild a great deal, then the Palace was not the best place to be able to think. But what if he was going to the forest to escape having to see her, knowing he had no ideas and was not likely to have any?

  She intercepted him early one morning — getting up much, much earlier than she usually did, only to have him look at her with the eyes of a man cut off from what he most desires. "Princess," he had said, holding up his hand. "This is the hardest thing I have ever done. I am not good at thinking — but I will not give up and go away." He had paused then, looked at his feet and stammered, "And I wish you were a shepherdess so that there would be no contest over you, and I could put you in a ring of fire and awaken you and we would live happily ever after."

  That had left her dumb for a moment.

  "If you did not mind being poor, I would rather be wandering roofless with you, than living in a palace with anyone else."

  Her heart thudded in her throat when he said that. But before she could muster the wits to reply to him, he had turned, striding rapidly away.

  Desmond tried to corner her. When he caught her, briefly, he asked, framed in cautious words, if she would give him a boost over the pack. She was both angry and hurt by this — angry because he had asked her to cheat for him, hurt because of the way he had asked. Not that he wanted to win for her, but because he wanted to win, no matter what it took.

  "This trial isn't a form of joke or the sort of test that the riddles were, Desmond," she had said gravely. "And there is no 'right answer' sealed away somewhere. This is a situation that needs resolving. Thus far, none of the best heads in the Kingdom have an answer for it, and whoever comes up with that solution will properly be the right one for the throne."

  She had to give him this much: he took her rebuke well, as far as she could tell. He bowed over her hand, and had been pretty solitary ever since.

  The remaining five closeted themselves in the library or in their rooms. Presumably they were looking for answers, too.

  "She distracted you, didn't she?" The bird was keeping pace with him, flitting from branch to branch.

  "Yes, and I cannot afford to be distracted. Do you think the Godmother could build a great wall around Eltaria?"

  "I think if she could have, she would have. Besides, you'd need troops to man it, wouldn't you? Otherwise all it would take to get in would be a battering ram." The bird was quite good at picking holes in
Siegfried's ideas — which he appreciated no end. An idea that was only a little good was not going to win him the girl.

  The forest was a good place to think, and even Luna — who was, of course, pacing on the path behind him — knew enough to keep quiet while he was trying to come up with a good idea.

  It didn't help, not at all, that there were rumors of mysterious sleeping women in rings of fire appearing in random meadows. Doom was trying to close in on him. And he knew how The Tradition worked. He was a stag, and The Tradition was the pack of hounds. Sooner or later it was going to run him into exhaustion, or into a dead end that he couldn't escape from.

  Then again...

  If I can't win Rosa...I don't think I want to escape. Doom would be preferable to going through the rest of his life knowing that he'd lost her.

  "What about some sort of magical wall?" he hazarded. "One that won't let enemies in?"

  Rosa had gone to bed unhappy, and her unhappiness had brought on insomnia."I would rather be poor with you ..." She might have thought it was flattery, but not with that haggard expression on Siegfried's face. Siegfried was known to stay out in the forest from dawn to dusk. She wished he wouldn't. She wished he was here. She was very much afraid that this was the last chance she would ever have to spend any time at all with him. One of the others, more clever, with better connections and resources, would have a plan that would save her Kingdom. And in a choice between her own needs and those of her Kingdom, Eltaria would win.

  No matter how unhappy it made her.

  She was sure of it now; she was, if not already in love with him, certainly falling in love with him. There was no doubt that he felt the same; when she intercepted his gaze — at breakfast, at supper — it was full of longing and frustration.

  But he was not the sort who would give up. Not until the last of the remaining candidates offered his solution and he either had none, or had one that was rejected. And not because he wanted a throne; she had the feeling that if a crown was all he'd wanted, he'd have gotten one a long time ago. Not because he wanted her only to escape his fate, either. No...his feelings were quite clear. As clear as hers were.

  Finally she got tired of lying in bed, unable to sleep a wink, running the same problems over and over in her head and coming up with the same lack of answers. She got up and pulled the curtains aside enough to flood the room with moonlight. This wouldn't be the first time she'd slipped out for a walk in the middle of the night; when she was younger, she'd often had restless nights. Thanks to her mother, she could do entirely without maids when she wanted to.

  She delved into the back of one of the great wardrobe cabinets in her bedroom, dressed herself in the simplest of her clothing and carried her shoes, and easily slipped out of her rooms, past her sleeping maids. If she was seen, she'd be taken for a servant; she wore the gown and petticoat she had worn when her mother had given her lessons on how shepherds lived. She would have liked to have used the disguise cloak, but Lily had used it last, and it was inher room. Once out in the corridors that the servants used, she pulled on the shoes; a servant tiptoeing around the halls would arouse suspicion, not quell it. The gown still had the faint scent she associated with that happy time, of hay and clover blossoms, a little of the oily sheep smell, and smoke. When that scent was released from her gown, warmed by her body, she found herself suddenly overwhelmed with memories. She had to put her back to the wall of the servants' corridor and cry soundlessly a little.

  Finally she fought her tears down and made her way out into the kitchen yard, between the Palace and the stables. She lost herself quickly in the passageways among the stables, the mews, the chicken-houses, the dovecotes, the rabbit-hutches — the Palace supported a lot of animals, more than most people might guess. Many of the buildings were brick and stone, even the chicken-houses, since stone and brick were easier to clean than wood, and easier to secure against predators and vermin. The stables, the kennels and the mews even supported living quarters for those servants who tended the beasts.

  Once safely in the shadows, she put her back against one of the cool stone walls, and deeply breathed in the night air, only faintly scented with straw and horse and dog.

  Dog? She realized with a start that she must be near the kennels. Not necessarily a good thing...the kennels were where the Huntsman had his quarters, and he was the very last person she wanted to encounter in the dark even if he didn't recognize her.

  Just as that thought passed through her mind, she heard the voices.

  One was Desmond's.

  What was Desmond doing out here so late at night?

  She didn't recognize the other.

  Impelled by concern as well as curiosity, she inched forward until she could hear the two speakers clearly.

  "...the progress on hunting that unicorn?" Desmond asked, impatiently. Her hand went unconsciously to the necklace at her throat.

  "Slowly, Prince." That was the Huntsman! "The beast is proving elusive. I find its spoor, but always days old. I took the bait — verified bait, I swear to you — out into the forest, and the unicorn never came near."

  "I want that horn. Ineed that horn. Besides that, I need the blood, the mane and the hooves, but the horn is imperative." This was an entirely different Desmond from the one she was used to hearing. Arrogant. Demanding. And ordering the Huntsman to kill a unicorn. Anger suffused her, and outrage. How dared he! This was her Kingdom's treasure, inher forest!

  "As you say, Highness. Have you any other tasks for me?"

  And then, after the anger, disgust. Kill a unicorn? Of all things, a unicorn?

  When she told Lily —

  "The Princess is proving resistant," Desmond was saying, snapping her attention back to the topic at hand. "I am going to need you to stand ready to take her at any moment."

  Had he been the one giving the Huntsman his orders all along? Had he been the one who had sent the Huntsman in the first place?

  "That won't be easy, sire," the Huntsman replied, and she could almost hear the frown in his voice. Sire? "She is well guarded these days."

  And I am going to be even better guarded now that I know about you! she thought with a feeling of shock. The Huntsman she had been wary of, but Desmond? He was in no way related to any of the five enemy Kingdoms on the border! At least...they had thought he was not...

  She calculated how quickly she could get help here if she just started running and screaming now. Not quickly enough. The guards won't know it's me. They might not even realize it's a human sound. It could be taken for one of the peacocks, disturbed, or some other animal. We are near enough the forest that anything could come into the yard and be killed by a dog or kill something else. If she began running and screaming, Desmond and his lackey would have plenty ot time to grab her and make off with her before help came. She knew then she was going to have to get away, get to the Palace, raise an alarm — No, that would not do — it would be her word against his. Between this moment and when she finally organized guards to come after him, the Huntsman could be back in his bed, and even if Desmond was found outside of his rooms, he could say, well, anything. He could deny he was ever at the stables, and hewould deny that he was talking to the Huntsman. He could claim that she was dreaming, sleepwalking.

  She would have no way of disproving him.

  No, she needed to get back into the Palace, wake Lily and tell her what she had overheard. Her best bet to catch him was through magic. All this time, they had been watching the Huntsman, not him. Now that they knew what he was up to, they should be able to catchhim at meetings with the Huntsman. At something, anyway

  She froze, as she heard a growl behind her, and smelled hot, doggy breath.

  "What's that?" Desmond said sharply.

  She knew not to move. That growl had been deep and menacing.

  "My hound seems to have found a spy, sire," the Huntsman replied, in a growl not far removed from the dog's.

  "Well that you set him to watch then," replied the Prince, and uttered
a few guttural words in a language she didn't recognize. "Now you can call him off."

  She heard a whistle, and the dog padded away.Now! she thought, ready to run for it, and —

  Couldn't move. Not a muscle. She couldn't even make a sound.

  She was barely able to blink and breathe.

  "Let's see what little mouse we've caught," said Desmond, his voice full of cruel amusement. Two dark figures approached her where she was stuck, leaning against the stable wall. The light from a shuttered lantern flashed into her face, and she heard the Huntsman's swift intake of breath, and then Desmond's slow chuckle.

  "Well, well, well. It looks as if you have managed to snare me my quarry after all," Desmond said. He tore off the magical bracelet Lily would have used to find her, and threw it on the ground before uttering another handful of words. And that was all she knew....