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And it wasn’t like the two of us were on the brink of something grand. I knew very well that the next time I saw him, it was going to be Hello, how are you? and walk on by. He’d as good as told me so—and I know what you’re thinking. How could he have told me if he didn’t even speak?
Well, he didn’t need to say it. I saw it in those beautiful haunted eyes of his: There was not, and never would be, an us.
And no, it didn’t help that I knew those haunted eyes were right. I mean, what were a recently-back-from-the-dead Gullandrian prince and Dulcie Samples, wannabe writer from Bakersfield, gonna have in common anyway? Couldn’t be all that much, even if we ever did get around to actually speaking to each other.
It was hopeless. I knew it.
And I didn’t care. That’s the way it is with love at first sight.
Sitting there, propped against the carved headboard of that antique bed, amid all the lush featherbedding, I let out a long, sad sigh. I was debating with myself. Would I get back on task with my “what I learned” list? Or was I on another Valbrand roll? If so, it was time to keep my promise to myself and switch to a pen and a notebook and—
What was that?
A flicker of movement. In my side vision, to my right. I glanced that way.
The doors to a heavy, dark armoire, shut the last time I looked, gaped open. My clothes were moving, a head emerging from between my winter coat and a little black dress.
I shrieked. The AlphaSmart went flying. I hovered on the verge of my first coronary.
About then, I realized that the head was Brit’s. “Sheesh,” she said. “Calm down. It’s only me.” She emerged in a crouch and turned to shut the armoire doors.
“Holy freaking kamolie.”Freaking was not the word I was thinking. It just proves what a model of self-restraint I am that I didn’t say that other word. “I coulda died of fright.”
“Sorry.” She didn’t look particularly contrite.
And that bugged me. I adore horror movies, but when it comes to real life—don’t scare me, you know? I have three prank-loving brothers and a devilish dad. They know I’m excitable. When I was growing up, they were always popping out of doorways, shouting, “Hah!” They found my squeals of terror hilarious.
Making ungracious grumbling noises, I kicked off the covers, flung my torso over the side of the bed and retrieved my Alphie, after which I dragged myself back up to the mattress and settled against the pillows again. I tapped a few keys. “At least it’s not broken.” I shot her a thoroughly sour look. “No thanks to you.”
She tried flattery. “Hey. Love your pajamas.”
I grunted. We both favored cartoon-character PJs. That night, mine were liberally dotted with widely smiling SpongeBobs. “How long have you been hiding in there?”
Brit dropped to a wing chair and raked her hair back out of her eyes. “I wasn’t hiding. There’s a door at the back of it.”
I blinked. “Oh, come on…”
She crossed her heart. “Hope to die.”
“A door. As in…to a secret passageway?” I was thoroughly intrigued. It’s hard to keep pouting when you’re intrigued.
She jumped up again and held out her hand. “Come look.”
I peered at her sideways, scowling. “Don’t be cranky. I really am sorry I freaked you out.”
“I’m not cranky,” I insisted. Crankily. “I just don’t see why you couldn’t come in through the door.”
She made an impatient noise in her throat. “Hel-lo, I’m a princess, remember? Around here, I have an image to maintain.” She opened her pink robe to display her own cartoon-character pajamas—Wile E. Coyote, as a matter of fact—then lifted a foot with a fluffy pink slipper on it and wiggled it at me. “I prefer not to go running through the halls once I’m dressed for bed.”
The reminder of her royal status put me right back into pouting mode. “You always used to say that being a princess didn’t mean a thing to you.”
We shared a long look. She said, softly, “I’m learning that it means quite a bit. That it’s an important part of who I am.”
Did those words surprise me? Not really. I could sense big changes in her. A whole lot had happened since she’d boarded the royal jet in L.A., back in June, for her first visit to her father’s land. In June, Valbrand had been missing and considered dead for almost a year; King Osrik, the father she now called “Dad” was a stranger to her—and she’d yet to meet the man she now planned to marry.
“Well?” she demanded, after a too-long pause. “D’you want to see the passageway or not?”
I shoved my AlphaSmart off my lap, jumped from the bed and padded to her side. Brit opened the armoire door and slid my clothes out of the way.
The whole back of the armoire was another door—it opened onto a narrow hallway of the same silver-gray slate as the palace facade. An electric lantern—Brit’s, no doubt—sat on the passageway floor just beyond the armoire, casting a golden glow, making strange, shimmery light patterns on the glossy stone. I could see straight ahead maybe a hundred feet. Then a dead end, a shadowed blackness to the right. A turn in the passageway, I guessed. “Amazing.”
Brit beamed. “Isenhalla is riddled with hidden hallways. They were included in the original construction, back in the mid-sixteenth century, when King Thorlak the Liberator built the current palace on the ruins of an earlier one destroyed by the Danes. It was a dangerous time. Poor King Thorlak. He never knew when he might need to duck inside a curio cabinet and get the hell outta Dodge. And there’s more…”
I loved this kind of stuff and Brit knew it. “Tell.”
“In the mid-nineteenth century, King Solmund Gudmond took the throne. King Solmund was, shall we say, more than a little bit eccentric—enough so that by the end of his reign he was known as Mad King Solmund. In the final years before his death, he would wash his hands a hundred times a day and wander the great halls at night wearing nothing but a look of total confusion.”
“And King Solmund had exactly what to do with the passageways?”
“Before he lost his grip on reality, he had them modernized, adding more hidden entrances and exits, improving the internal mechanisms within the secret doors.”
“Fascinating,” I said, and meant it.
“Yeah. It’s become a minor hobby of mine, to hunt down all the secret hallways and follow them wherever they lead.” Her face was flushed, excited. I’d never seen her look happier.
Or more at home.
“You love it here.” There was a tightness in my chest.
She quirked an eyebrow at me. “Is that an accusation?”
I shook my head. “I guess it just hit me all over again. You’re really never coming home.”
“This is my home.” She spoke gently, with only the faintest note of reproach.
I scrunched up my eyes. Hard. No way I was letting the waterworks get started. “I’ll miss you, that’s all.”
Her mouth kind of twisted. She patted my arm. “Don’t forget the royal jet. Flies both ways. And the phone. And what about e-mail? You know we’ll be in touch.”
“I know,” I said and gave her a big smile. I didn’t want to be a downer, but I was thinking that visits and phone calls and e-mails could never stack up with her living directly across the walkway from me in our charmingly derelict courtyard-style apartment building. In the months she’d been gone, I’d come to realize how much I counted on her friendship.
East Hollywood with no Brit. Could it really be happening?
She grabbed my hand. “I know I’ve been neglecting you.”
Wrong. Yes, I missed her. Yes, I hated that I was going to have to accept that her life was different now and our friendship would change. But I did not feel neglected. “Oh, come on. You’ve knocked yourself out checking on me every chance you get. You’ve been crazy busy.…”
“Still. We’ve hardly had a moment to ourselves since you got here. I’m fixing that. Now. Let’s go to my rooms. We’ll talk till our tongues go numb. Do the mutual pedicure thing. You can mess with my hair.”
I had a way with hair. Other people’s, anyway. Mine was wild and curly and I pretty much left it alone. I fluffed the sides of her blond mop with my fingers. The cut was fine, really. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try to improve on it. “Hmm. Maybe just a trim. Reemphasize the feathering around your face…”
“Who knows when we’ll get the chance again?”
I didn’t want to think about that. Hair, I thought. Hair is the question. “Do you have some decent scissors?”
“I’m sure I can dig up a pair.”
I bargained shamelessly. “You’ll have to tell me all your exploits since June. I get the sense it’s been action-packed.”
“One death-defying challenge after another.” She said it dryly, but something in her voice told me it wasn’t a joke. I thought of the scar on her shoulder.
Finally I confessed softly, “As if I’m going to turn you down, whatever we do.”
She caught my hand again. “Come on.”
“Let me grab my robe and slippers.”
It was cold in the passageway—all that stone, with no heat source, I guess. I shivered and pulled my robe closer as we hustled along.
Her rooms were in a different wing than mine, on the next floor up. At one point, we emerged onto a landing in a back stairwell. Brit shut the section of wall that had opened for us, leaving the wall looking as if the doorway we’d come through had never been. We climbed the narrow stairs. She opened a door—a real one, with a porcelain knob. On the other side was a main hallway.
She shot glances both ways, then turned a wide grin on me. “Let’s go for it.”
Giggling, we took off, racing along the thick Turkish runner as fast as our flapping slippers would allow. Around the next corner, with nobody else in sight to witness Her Royal Highness behaving in such an undignified manner, she led me through a door onto another back stairwell. We stood on a landing. She pushed a place on the wall—and yet another door opened up. We went through. She pushed another spot and the section of wall swung silently shut. I stared. The “door” was gone. All I saw was solid wall. It really was amazing.
Brit had already turned and headed off down the gleaming secret passage. I rushed to catch up.
Two more hallways, and she stopped to open another section of wall. She pressed a latch and the wall swung toward us. On the other side, a full-length mirror gleamed. Beyond the hole it left in the wall, I could see a bedroom even bigger and more luxurious than the one assigned to me.
We went through. She pushed a spot on the heavy gold-leafed mirror frame and the mirror swung silently back into place. “Wait here,” she commanded, and went out through a set of high, carved double doors.
I stood by the mirror and gaped at her gorgeous room. The heavy velvet drapes were drawn across the windows. Her bed was bigger than mine—could that be possible?—up on a dais, so much carving on the bedposts and finials, you could sit there staring forever, picking out the moons and suns, the longboats and dragons and mermaids with long, twining hair. Her bedding was crimson velvet, the sheets snowy white against the red. I mounted the dais and sat on the bed, pulling a round red velvet pillow into my lap. I was stroking the thick, soft pile when she returned.
“We’re alone,” she announced. “And look what I found?” She held up a pair of scissors, snicked them open and shut. “Also, my rooms are undisturbed.” I must have looked puzzled. She explained, “It’s my dad.”
I’d met King Osrik just that evening, at dinner. He was tall and lean. Good-looking, for an older guy. Distinguished, I guess you’d say. Dark hair going gray. Dark eyes—Valbrand’s eyes. Upon being introduced, I performed the Gullandrian bow Brit had taught me—fisted hand to heart, a dip of the head—and said how thrilled I was to meet His Majesty.
He gave me a regal nod. “It is my hope that you enjoy your brief stay in my daughter’s homeland.”
End of conversation. My sense was of a man very few people really knew.
The way she spoke of him, with such affection and humor, I guessed that Brit felt she knew him just fine. She went on, “You know I adore him, but he drives me nuts sometimes. He keeps tabs on me. He’s actually bugged my rooms more than once. Which means I’ve learned to seek out and neutralize all electronic surveillance devices on a regular basis. That leaves only my personal maid and cook and the ongoing fiction that the servants don’t spy for my father. Them, I give errands. Lots and lots of errands. Tonight is no exception. I’ve sent them off to do my bidding. No way they’ll be back before dawn. And since we came through the secret passageway, the guards at the main door to the suite don’t even know you’re in here. We have total privacy, a luxury I appreciate a lot more than I used to. It’s so rare these days.”
I was stuck on the part about the guards. “You have guards at your door?”
She nodded. “All the members of the royal family do.”
“You need guards?”
“Let me put it this way. The guards are there because it’s palace protocol. Of course, they’ll protect me, if a sticky situation arises—which it never has so far. In the meantime, they’re in a perfect position to report all my comings and goings to His Royal Majesty—” she grinned “—at least when I leave through the main doors.” I tossed the pillow back into the giant pile at the head of the bed. She added, “The life of a princess does have its little challenges.”
“No kidding.” I got up and took the scissors from her. “Fine-tooth comb?”
She held up her other hand and I saw she had the comb, too. “Let’s go in my dressing room,” she said. “It’s got better light, a good mirror and a swivel vanity chair.”
As soon as she’d got her hair wet and I had her in the chair, I asked about the scar on her shoulder.
“From a renegade’s poisoned arrow,” she said—renegades being seriously delinquent teenage boys who terrorized the Vildelund, the wild country to the north. She said she’d barely survived. She was delirious, near death for days, while her body fought off the poison.
I snipped away and she sucked a few peanut M&M’s—she’d always had a thing for them—and told me all about her quest to find Valbrand.
“They all swore he was dead.” She met my eyes in the wide mirror over the marble counter. “But he wasn’t dead. I knew it.” She put her hand over her heart. “I knew it here.” I’d never seen her so intense and passionate—well, except maybe when she looked at Eric. “So, since no one would believe me, I took a guide and flew to the Vildelund to find the mysterious Eric Greyfell, who had gone looking for Valbrand after he disappeared at sea.”
“And this was when—that you went to the Vildelund?”
“Didn’t I say in my letters?”
I shook my head. They were postcards, actually. There had been three of them. What can you write on a postcard?Hello, how are you? I’m fine. Wish you were here…
Brit said, “I went to the Vildelund in early September.”
“And at that point you still hadn’t met Eric?” “Nope. He was a hard man to meet. When he returned from his quest to find Valbrand, he came to Isenhalla just long enough to report to my dad that he was certain Valbrand was dead—and then he rushed off to the Vildelund, where he’d been hanging out ever since. I wanted to hear the story of what happened to my brother from Eric himself.”
“So you flew there and…”
“The plane crashed.”
I stopped snipping to stare. “With you in it?”
“That’s right. My guide was killed.” Her blue eyes, right then, looked nearly as haunted as Valbrand’s. “I was knocked out when we went down. I came to in the wrecked plane. The guide didn’t. The crash broke his neck.”
I sighed. “Bad, huh?”
“Yeah. Real bad. I crawled from the wreckage to find the renegade waiting. He shot me. Eric found me and took me to the village where his sweet aunt Asta lived. Asta took care of me until I got well. And eventually, I found my brother—right there, in the Vildelund.”
“With Eric?”
“That’s right. For a long time, Valbrand wasn’t…ready yet, I guess you could say, to come back here and deal with everything he’s dealing with now. He’d made Eric promise to stay with him in the north until he could bring himself to come home.…”
Our eyes were locked in the mirror.
It was a good opening. The right place to ask a few questions about her brother—and maybe even to tell her the way I felt. But she looked away and the moment got by me.
I finished trimming. I’d taken some off the sides, in layers, to give it more lift. I worked in a little styling gel, then grabbed the blow dryer she’d set on the counter for me.
“I love it,” she announced when I turned the dryer off. She fluffed with her fingers and turned her head this way and that. “It always looks fuller when you do it—now for the pedicures.” She dragged me into the enormous marble bathroom, where we soaked our feet in the sunken tub and then took turns in a paraffin bath.
She did me, then I did her, long sessions with a pumice stone and deep foot massage. We yakked the whole time. For polish, she had a rack full of Urban Decay, great colors with Goth names: Asphyxia. Freakshow. Gash. I chose Pipe Dream, a nice barely-there shade. Brit went for Toxin, a sort of Easter-egg purple that didn’t fit the name at all.
