The Rules of Ever After (3 page)

“But you’ll have me to do it with, if I can pass the test and become your queen! We’ll sing and dance and explore your king­dom together. Phillip, we will have so much fun and have each other for company! Oh, and I can give you some tips on archery if you wish.” Gwen mimed pulling back the string on a bow and released an imaginary arrow into the air. “I once played the role of Gingerfair the Huntress in an evening of folly for my parents. I was quite convincing with my bow. Of course, I have to pass the test first. I’m so worried about what the test could be!” Gwen dropped her head and stared at her fingers as she twisted the rings she wore on one hand. “Honestly.”

“Well, worrying won’t help. If you’re a true princess, then you’ll pass the test with ease.” Phillip bit his lips to keep from giggling as he said the words. He couldn’t help but remember the dis­appointment and embarrassment of the last “princesses” as they were roused from sleep to discover they’d failed his stepmother’s test. He felt bad for ruining their reputations as royalty, but he couldn’t let any silly girl’s bloodline force him into a marriage, no matter what his mother’s dying words had been.

“I don’t understand why a test is necessary, anyway! I didn’t think any kingdom used tests anymore. I have my letters of patent and my father’s word. Isn’t that enough?”

“Well,” Phillip said, as his mind raced for an explanation, “it would be, were it not for the warnings of our royal soothsayer.”

“Oooh! A soothsayer.” Gwendolyn squealed and slid closer to Phillip. She placed her small hand on his arm and leaned closer to his face. “Tell me more!”

“Yes,” Phillip said, as he took her hand off his arm. “A soothsayer proclaimed that if I married a false bride, the kingdom would be destroyed. So my stepmother proclaimed that all girls be tested. Her proclamations are practically law.” He kept close enough to the truth to hide his lies. It was his birthday curse and not a prophecy, but a soothsayer
had
once visited the kingdom. All he had proclaimed was that the trees would bear no fruit; then, when the orchards had produced a bountiful harvest the next spring, he was promptly tossed into the moat. Also, Cauche­mar’s proclamations were law. Since her marriage to King Henry, she marched around the halls of the castle daily, terrorizing the peasants and mice alike with rants and threats of horrible vio­lence. No one questioned her words, for it had been rumored for years that she held a great magical power beyond anyone’s knowledge.

“Oh, that’s amazing,” Gwen said, her eyes widening. “My sooth­sayer only said that sleep would be my downfall. What kind of proclamation is that? I mean, honestly.”

“Maybe he meant if you don’t sleep tonight you’ll fail the test?” Phillip looked up at the ceiling to keep himself from laughing.

“Oh, no,” Gwen pouted, flopping onto her back, her chestnut braid whipping behind her. “Now I’m even more worried, and it’ll be even harder to sleep! Couldn’t you give me a little hint as to what it might be? Why hasn’t any girl passed?”

If you only knew
. Phillip grabbed the regal history book from the tall nightstand and dropped it on the bed beside Gwen, where it landed with a heavy thud. “Try reading? It usually makes me sleepy.”

“I’ve read so much my eyes are crossing. That will only make me more nervous,” Gwen whined as she turned over onto her stomach and buried her face in the coverlet.

“Well,” Phillip said, as he reached into his sleeve and pulled out the green glass bottle, “I might have something that could help you.”

Gwen sat up and turned to face Phillip. She scrunched up her brows as she looked at the bottle. “What is that?”

“This is Dr. Hickenkopf’s Miracle Tonic. I bought it from a travelling doctor. He said it will cure whatever ails you.” Phillip showed the bottle to Gwen. The girl’s eyes widened as she read the words on the gold label. Phillip quickly pulled the bottle away and started to tuck it back into his sleeve. “But I don’t know if I should share it with you. It was very expensive.”

“Oh, please let me have some!” Gwen begged, as she reached toward the bottle in Phillip’s hand. “Surely it will help me sleep!”

“I don’t know.”

“Not even for your future bride?”

“Oh, okay,” Phillip said with a dramatic sigh. “But don’t tell anyone, or everyone will want some. Here,” he said and handed the bottle to Gwen.

She giggled as she let her hand brush against his while taking it. She read the label again before removing the cork stopper. She took three quick swallows. As she brought the bottle down, she wiped the sleeve of her nightgown across her lips.

“That should do the trick,” Phillip said as he took back the bottle, corked it and tucked it back into his sleeve. As he inched toward the foot of the bed, Phillip said, “It’s late, and I should leave you. Now, close your eyes and get some rest.” He climbed over the footboard and quickly made his way down the slats. When he reached the bottom, he dropped softly to the ground.

“Prince Phillip?”

“Yes?”

“I hope I pass tomorrow, and we’re wed. You have very kind eyes.”

“We shall see,” Phillip said, feeling a stab of guilt. He swallowed down the feeling as he leaned over to pick up his abandoned lamp. He slipped his hand quietly beneath the bottom mattress to check on the placement of the pea. He knew the pea would now be of no consequence, and leaving it would save him the trouble of slipping it back into place in the morning. Of the four girls previously tested, most had been almost asleep when he had sneaked in or they had been knocked out by the tonic, so he’d never had to remove the pesky legume.

“Prince Phillip?”

“Yes?” he sighed as he leaned against the mattresses.
This girl has some staying power.

“Could I sing for you? It always calms my nerves when I sing. Maybe a lullaby will help me sleep?”

“I think that would be lovely.”

“
T’was a stormy night on the swampy moor, when a handsome knight came to the castle door
,” Gwen began to sing softly. Her voice was quite beautiful as she trilled her way through the familiar old tune. His own mother had often sung it to him as a child, when he had been frightened awake by a nightmare or a storm off the sea. This was the first time he had heard music in the castle since before his mother’s death. Gwen’s voice began fading as Phillip heard her nestle deeper into the mattresses. As he tiptoed across the chamber to the door, he heard the girl whisper the last line of the song.

“
And true love someday shall be
. I mean, honestly.”

Phillip grabbed the door handle and stopped to look back toward her sleeping figure. She snored softly, and her right foot twitched beneath the heavy coverlet. He grinned and whispered, “Sleep tight.”

Her voice had touched a part of Phillip he had long forgotten, and he half regretted the scene he knew would come in the morn­ing. She really did have a lovely voice and was nowhere near as snobbish as the last few girls. She had even made him long to join in her innocent excitement. In a different situation, he was sure they could’ve been close friends. Marriage to a woman, however, would not happen in his lifetime, even if she were this entertaining.

“But what must be, must be,” Phillip said with a shrug, as he pulled the heavy door closed behind him. Groping his way down the hall toward his own bed, he hummed the lullaby Gwen had sung. “
And true love someday shall be.
”

“A
nd true love someday shall be,”
Katerina sang, as
she leaned as far as she could out of the tower win­dow without tipping out completely and falling to the ground many feet below. If she leaned just far enough and tilted her head to just the right angle, she could watch the final beams of sunlight flicker away over the Pearl Mountains in the distant northwest. Those few little sparkles of orange and purple were worth the risk of a tumble to her death. She had not felt the warmth of the sun’s kiss for several years now, so she resigned herself to watching it slip away over the hills like a long-lost love. Awake at sunset and asleep at dawn had been the rhythm of her life for as many years as she could remember. Yet, she imagined, any day now her handsome prince would be outlined in the glow of that sunset on his way to rescue her from this high prison.

“Really, Katerina?” she said to herself as she tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder and began crawling back into the window. “You’re not a princess. You’re the simple-minded niece of an old witch. No prince will come for you, no matter what the stories may imply.” She heaved a deep sigh, her hand slipped from the window frame, and she fell against the sill with a sharp cry of pain.

“Careful!” a voice shouted from below and shook her from her thoughts. “You’re in danger of falling! A girl as pretty as you must always be careful of falling. Any man who sees your beauty should be careful too!”

“Peter!” she cried and leaned out the window again to look down on the young man below. He stared up at her with a large grin. The wind blew his mousy brown hair about, and the light from the lantern in his hand danced across his features. He had his usual leather satchel slung across his shoulder, and she knew from watching him scribble away on previous nights that he kept a small charcoal pencil behind his ear. Katerina smiled back to him as she waved his admonition away. “You need not worry about that! I’m a bird. Living in this perch has made me at home in the air!”

“Though your singing is beautiful, my lady, you’re not a bird,” he said with a slight laugh. “You’re a graceful cat, dancing along the window’s edge after being curled on the sill for a long nap. Why else do you think I call you Kitty?”

“Well, I am certainly more kitten than lady, no matter how many times you may call me one.” Katerina laughed as she sat down on the ledge and pulled her bare feet up under her red skirts. She leaned back against the window frame and stared up at the darkening sky. “Oh, Peter, I’m so glad you came again tonight. It gets so lonely in this tower with just my thoughts and my aunt’s shelves full of jars.”

She leaned over and looked down at the boy, remembering the first night he had appeared below her tower six months before. She had been watching the sunset as usual when he startled her out of her daydreams by calling up to her and asking for directions to the nearest inn. She nearly fell out of the window from fright, since no other person had ever approached her tower. As much as she could tell from so high up and in the fading light, he was a handsome, if somewhat short, boy. His shoulders were broad, and his smile was filled with kindness. Despite his appealing looks, she had hidden from him, remembering her aunt’s warnings not to speak to strangers.

To her surprise, the next sunset found him standing beneath her tower again. Every day for the next week he had called out to her, until she finally swallowed her fear and said, “Hello.”

After they exchanged names, she had no idea what to say to a boy, so she asked him to tell her a story. He laughed, bowed and began weaving her a tale. As he was reaching the end of the story, he stopped and promised to return the next night to finish. He had continued to return almost every night, talking with her and telling her a continuing string of stories, until his voice, body and movements were as familiar and beautiful to her as the stars and the moon. She could tell by his simple gray tunic that he was not a high-born man, but his ease with words both formal and fantastic showed he had some exposure to courtly life. Though she knew little of his life, Katerina had come to live for the escape from loneliness his words provided.

“I was just looking to see how much sun was left in the sky so I could measure the time until you came!” she called down to him.

“I came at sunset, just as you asked, though I don’t see why I can’t come earlier in the day. Perhaps in the sunlight I could find a way to climb this tower and see your beautiful face even closer. Maybe even ask you to pay for your stories with a kiss?”

“No!” Katerina yelled. “You must never try to come into this tower. You should stay down there and just tell me your stories. I shudder to think what my aunt would do if she caught you here or even knew I had a visitor! I am risking far too much even speaking to you! My aunt is not a very nice woman.”

“I am not afraid of some silly old woman,” Peter said, with a wave of his hand and a smirk. “I have been planning to hide in the bushes so I can see how she gets inside. Then I will take care of her and take you away!”

“My aunt is not some silly old woman! Do you think some silly old woman could construct a tower with no door and yet still come and go? My aunt is a…”

“Your aunt is a crazy old Gloriannan loon! What kind of woman would lock her niece away from the world? What kind of woman forbids a girl to see sunlight? What kind of aunt—”

“I know!” Katerina interrupted his rant. “We’ve been through all of this before. I’ve questioned it all too, but she has her reasons.”

“Nonsense! I’ll just punch her in the nose!” Peter set his lantern on the ground, lifted his arms in a fighting stance and threw a few punches into the fading light. “I’m not just a man of words, I’m a man of action!” He danced around in small circles, swinging into the night. With a sharp jab, he hit a low-hanging branch of a nearby sapling, knocking it away from his face. The branch sprang back and whipped across his face, knocking the boy backwards onto his rump.

“Oh, Peter.” Katerina giggled, as she watched him pick himself up. “I prefer a man of words to a man of action! The quill is a mighty weapon that holds magic untold, or so my aunt says.”

“If only that were true, I’d simply write a door into these walls, and we could run away.”

“But you
can
do magic! You take my mind out of this tower with every word! Just tell me a story!”

“What’ll it be tonight? Trolls? Knights? A princess in disguise?”

“I’d like to hear the story of how a boy who lives in these woods in such plain clothes knows such fancy words.”

“No,” Peter said, as he dropped his chin to his chest. “That’s a story I won’t tell.”

“Very well,” she said and sighed. “Why not continue the one from the other night? I think you left off with the pretty girl in a glass coffin.”

“Ah, yes! One of my masterpieces!” Peter smiled, as he puffed out his chest. He sat down on a large rock at the base of the tower and scratched his head. After pulling a small sheaf of parchment from his satchel, he thumbed through the pages. “Where was I? Ah, yes. So Francine had already eaten the poison rumberry, right?”

Katerina strained to see the young man’s face in the glow of his lantern as the last of the sun’s rays dipped behind the distant mountains. Realizing she had glimpsed her last of him for the night, she slipped from the window’s ledge to the floor, crossed her arms on the windowsill and rested her chin on her hands. She beamed at the sound of Peter’s excited voice rising from the darkness below and let her mind wander into the world his words created. Suddenly, a loud rumbling in the center of the room and a small plume of burgundy smoke rising from the floor pulled her attention toward the interior of the tower.

“Oh no!” she gasped. She stood up and leaned out the window. “Peter, hide!” she hissed. “My aunt is back! She must not see you!”

“Let her find me! I’ll force her to let me take you away!”

“Peter! This is no time for joking! Put out your lantern and hide, please. Then sneak away as quietly as you can. Come back tomorrow at sunset. She rarely comes home two days in a row.”

“But I will make her—”

“Please!” she begged. “You don’t understand—”

“Katerina?” a woman’s voice called from the smoke filling the center of the room. “Sweetheart, who are you talking to?”

Katerina watched Peter step behind a hedgerow before she turned to face the plume of smoke. “No one,” she answered, as she fanned the wisps away from her face. “Just repeating my lessons like you taught me to do.” Katerina began chanting in a sing-song voice, “‘Legs crossed at the ankles and eyes turned down. A queen guards her words and what’s under her gown. An iron fist in a velvet glove will bring a queen her kingdom’s love. Music and art are nothing but waste. Hard working peasants bring good food to taste.’ I think I have almost all your rules memorized.”

Cauchemar stepped from the dissipating smoke, flipped her burgundy skirts behind her and crossed the tower toward the girl. Her silver hair was piled on top of her head in a complicated arrangement of braids and curls that had always reminded Katerina of a rumberry tree after it had lost all its leaves. Her mouth was drawn in its usual tight bow of disapproval and her gray eyes squinted as if in constant pain. Cauchemar wore happiness as uncomfortably as a dress two sizes too small. Katerina thought her aunt had probably been a strikingly beautiful woman in her youth, but years of annoyance and condescension had weathered her face into its current array of wrinkles and lines, like an apple left on the windowsill too long. Though she was never cruel to Katerina, she never seemed to be completely pleased with anything Katerina said or did.

“Katerina, I’ve told you a hundred times, you must call me Aun­tie! When I rescued you from your dying mother’s arms, she begged me to raise you as my own child.”

“I’m sorry, Auntie,” Katerina mumbled, as she turned her head away and rolled her eyes. “That’s the one rule I forget.”

“That isn’t the only rule you forgot,” Cauchemar snapped. She grabbed the girl’s arm and dragged her away from the window to the far side of the room. Pushing her down onto a small wooden chair, she said, “I told you to stay away from that window until the last of the sun has disappeared. You know you must keep your skin as pale as the moon.”

“But Cauch—Auntie, I only moved to the window so I wouldn’t choke on the smoke your entrance brings.”

“Yes, that’s a side effect I never could seem to eradicate,” Cauche­mar said, as she walked over to the large cabinet full of jars in the corner of the room. Her tall, thin frame barely cast a shadow, and the pile of gray braids on her head bounced slightly with each step. Scanning the labels, she reached for a nearly empty jar and pulled it from the shelf. “But never you mind. We must drill your lessons especially hard tonight! The time has come for you to take your rightful place on a throne! The last of those silly girls has failed my test! Just in time, too, as I was almost out of these little treats, and there won’t be another harvest for a year at least.” Cauchemar twirled the jar in her hand, making the one remaining pea in the bottom of the jar bounce around inside. Reading the label, she cackled and said “Oh, Sleeping Heavenly Peas! Best investment I ever made. Certainly a better deal than those beans the troll king offered me. Beanstalks that grow into the sky? What on earth would you do with one of them?”

“Grow beans too high to be stolen?” Katerina said, as she crossed from the chair and flopped onto her bed. She spread her red woolen skirts around her and picked at a loose thread.

“Pish. He claimed they would lead to riches. From beans? Who needs riches when you have a throne?” Cauchemar put the jar back on the shelf and began running her long slender finger along the labels of the other jars. “Who needs beans when you can send silly little girls to sleep with a few measly peas? Who needs to worry about food when a whole kingdom waits on you hand and foot? Now, hurry and gather your things. I just need a few items from my supplies, and we’ll be ready to go.”

“Gather my things? Ready to go where? Am I leaving the tower?” Katerina gasped as she leaped up from the bed.

“Keep up, child. I said it’s time to take your place on the throne. You can’t very well do that from in here, now can you? We’re headed to my other home.”

“But Auntie, I’m not a princess. I’ve no claim to a throne. How can I just take one?”

“Well, of course you can’t just take it. That would require an entire army. I have power, but not like that. I said ‘take your
place
on a throne.’ You, my dear, have a power greater than an army of ten thousand men.”

“Magic?”

“No. You have an aunt with ambition who has planned well for you. Though, I admit, magic has helped.”

“I still don’t understand,” Katerina said, as she crossed the tower to the window. Leaning out, she saw Peter’s lantern flickering behind the row of bushes. Glancing over her shoulder to check that Cauchemar was still caught up in her jars, she motioned to Peter to dim the lantern. Then she pointed at her ear, signaling him to listen carefully.

“Do I have to spell everything out for you?” Cauchemar groused, as she turned from the shelves toward the girl. “All beauty and no brains, I think, just like your…” she mumbled as she crossed to the window.

“I’m sorry, Auntie. It’s just, I spend so much time memorizing your rules that it crowds other things out of my brain. Please, come sit with me here on the window sill and explain it all to me. I’m frightened to be out in the world. I feel so safe here in my tower; I might feel better if I knew where I was going and why.”

“Oh, very well. A little night air will do me some good. Scoot over,” Cauchemar said, as she bumped the girl to the side with her hip and sat on the sill. “Where do I start?”

“Follow your rule. ‘Skip the prattle and endless natter. Make them get right to the heart of the matter.’”

“Very good, child!” Cauchemar beamed and patted the girl on the knee. “Fine. There is a young prince that is seeking… well, no… not seeking… let’s say
in need
of a bride. You’ll be that bride.”