Princess Of The Silver Woods Part 7

"I'm married too," Lily murmured. She rubbed her ring finger, but in this nightmare, there were no rings there.

"What's that, my beloved?" The King Under Stone looked down at Lily with a smirk.

"I am married," Lily said in a louder voice. She slammed her elbow into the king's ribs and twisted out of his arm in the same motion.

"We do not recognize the mumblings of your quaint little religion down here," the King Under Stone sneered, straightening his jacket as though Lily's strike had been nothing. His smile grew even wider than before. "And," he added, "it's not as if you have any children to tie him to you. I may not have my father's temperament, but I do have all his powers." He threw back his head, his black-and-silver hair rippling down his back, and laughed.

Petunia's heart turned to ice. Lily sank to her knees.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," someone screamed. To Petunia's shock, it was Hyacinth. "I will see your head mounted on the front gate!"

Hyacinth made a run at the king but was caught by Pansy and Daisy, who had gathered near to help Rose with Jonquil. Jonquil now appeared to have fallen unconscious, and Rose sagged beneath Jonquil's weight, her face bleak. Poppy stood by Rose's side, watching the king with calculating eyes, and Petunia wondered if there was some way that Poppy could bring her beloved pistols into this nightmare.

"Let her go, Daise," Poppy said. "I, for one, would like to see him torn apart. And if Hyacinth is willing ..."

"You can't do a thing," the King Under Stone said lightly. He raised Lily to her feet and kissed her on the cheek. She shuddered and tried to pull away, but he held her all the more tightly, both arms winding around her. "After all, it's just a dream."

Petunia woke in her bed, sweating even though the window was open.

She got up, closed the window, and lit the candle on her bedside table. She took a moment to look at the flame as it grew and steadied; fire always soothed her. Then, holding her candle before her like a weapon, she marched across the corridor in nothing but her nightgown.

Petunia entered Prince Grigori's room without knocking. She yanked the bed curtains aside and looked down at the sleeping prince. He was terribly handsome, but Petunia didn't stop to stare, just grabbed his shoulder and shook.

"Wake up," she said. "Wake up, Grigori!"

"Hmm? What is it?" He blinked around sleepily, but then his eyes widened when he took in Petunia in her nightgown, her candle held just over his head. "My petal, what has happened?"

"I need to go home," Petunia said tersely. "Now."

"What time is it?"

"I don't care," Petunia said. "I need to go home."

Dodging out from under her candle, Prince Grigori struggled upright. "Have you had a bad dream?"

Petunia started to laugh. She laughed so hard that the prince had to take the candle out of her hand before she dropped it on the bedclothes. She laughed until she was crying, sobbing, in a heap on the floor by his bed.

The prince set the candle aside and climbed out of bed. He scooped Petunia up in his long arms and carried her back to her own room, where he tucked her into her high bed and summoned Olga to sit with her. Then he sent for his grandmother's physician, who brought extract of poppies to help her sleep.

"No," Petunia gasped as the physician held the cup to her lips. He tipped a little down her throat. "No! Not poppies!" He forced her to drink a little more. "No! Not unless Poppy can take her pistol! And where's mine? I don't want to sleep without my pistol!"

"She's delirious," Petunia heard the physician say as she slipped into the grayness. "You'd better send a letter to her father."

And then she heard the sound of a valse being played, shrill and just slightly out of tune.

Prisoner.

Things had not gone as Oliver had hoped, but they had certainly gone as he had expected.

He was being held in a tiny attic room at the palace while Karl and the others had been taken to the Bruch jail. King Gregor didn't believe Oliver was an earl, but apparently being the leader of the bandits, the abductor of Princess Petunia, and the claimant to a divided earldom made him too interesting for the regular jail.

But not interesting enough for immediate questioning. Oliver sat in the little room until evening, when the door was unlocked and a dinner tray shoved inside. An hour later the door opened and a hand groped around for the tray. Oliver obligingly pushed it closer to the door with his foot.

"Every compliment to the royal chef," Oliver called as the door closed.

The guard only grunted.

He grunted, too, when Oliver thanked him for the breakfast tray. And Oliver thanked him for lunch as well.

And that was all Oliver did. Sit in the room. Sleep. Eat. And try to get the burly guard to do more than grunt.

In the late afternoon, he heard voices outside his room, and the door swung all the way open. The guard stood in the doorway, his rifle held crosswise, and behind him Oliver saw skirts of red-sprigged muslin.

"h.e.l.lo," Oliver said cautiously.

"h.e.l.lo," said a voice, and Poppy peeped around one of the guard's large arms. "Are you well?"

"A little bored," Oliver said. "But otherwise unharmed."

A spark of amus.e.m.e.nt lit her eyes. "I'll send up some books. You can read, can't you?"

"All the Wolves of the Westfalian Woods can read," Oliver said grandly.

"Even the ones with four legs?"

"Poppy," someone whispered loudly from a hiding place a little way down the pa.s.sage. "What are you doing?"

Oliver guessed that it was Daisy, who seemed a good deal more timid than her twin. He gave Poppy a wink over the guard's arm and raised his voice a little. "I have endeavored to teach them myself," he said. "And they are coming along nicely."

"So tell me," Poppy said, "what is an educated young man with courtly manners, who even teaches wolves to read, doing robbing coaches in the middle of the forest?"

"Poppppyyyy," moaned her sister.

"Hush, Pan," said Poppy without taking her eyes off Oliver.

Not Daisy then, but Pansy, who was less than a year older than Petunia. Oliver considered his answer for a long time. It was possible that Poppy and Pansy were here out of mere curiosity, without their father's permission. But it was also possible that King Gregor wanted Oliver to reveal some dastardly intent while flirting with Gregor's beautiful daughters.

"Well, Your Highness," Oliver replied at last, "I needed to feed my people. And after the depredations of the war, and with our homes and farms gone, we had no other recourse."

"Your people?"

Poppy asked it at the same time Pansy asked, "What happened to the farms?"

"When the border was redrawn, some of the farms in my earldom ended up a.n.a.lousia," Oliver explained. "They were given to a.n.a.lousian families who had lost their lands in the war. Some of them were near the manor, however, and that was given to the Grand Duke Volenskaya, who became the Duke of Hrothenborg."

"That's where Pet is staying," Pansy said, and Oliver heard a rustling as she came closer.

"That's right," Oliver said.

"So you really are an earl," Poppy mused.

The guard snorted at this, but Oliver and Poppy ignored him.

"Yes, I am," Oliver said simply.

"Then why didn't you come to Bruch and explain to Father what had happened?" Poppy studied him for a moment. "Or, your father would have, I guess."

"My father died in the war," Oliver said. "I became the earl when I was seven. My mother's family did not approve of the marriage; I doubt anyone even knew that I existed. My mother tried to have me confirmed in my t.i.tle and to pet.i.tion for the return of our lands, but that was during the uproar over the worn-out slippers and the dying suitors. Since my mother is Bretoner, she was afraid to bring attention to herself."

"Bretoner?" Pansy had crept even closer. Oliver could see the edge of a pink muslin gown just peeping around the edge of the door. "Did she know Mother?"

"Indeed," Oliver said. He felt like he was holding out breadcrumbs for birds, and any sudden movement would make them take flight. Or, in Poppy's case, peck him. "She was one of your mother's ladies-in-waiting. But her family wanted her to return home to marry a Bretoner lord, and my father's family had a second cousin handpicked to marry him."

"No wonder she didn't dare come to the palace," Poppy said. "Bishop Angiers would have had her on trial for witchcraft in a heartbeat. But don't worry, the Church has long since made things right, and he got what he deserved."

"That's good," Oliver said. The way that Poppy kept looking over her shoulder made Oliver think that they would leave soon. It was time to ask his own questions.

"Are my men all right?"

"For now," Poppy said. "Until Father decides what to do with you."

"That's good," Oliver said again, not sure what else to say. He wanted them released, but he supposed that they were just as guilty. "And Petunia? Have you heard from your sister?"

"Not since the first day," Pansy said.

She pushed in next to Poppy so that she could see him around the guard's elbow. She was as tall as Poppy, with s.h.i.+ning dark-brown hair and blue eyes. An utterly lovely girl, as all the princesses were, yet Oliver thought Petunia was far more beautiful.

"We got one letter explaining that she'd gotten lost and had to find her own way to the manor, but nothing since. Did you really kidnap her?"

"It was an accident, but yes," Oliver said. "She saw me and my brother with our masks off, so we s.n.a.t.c.hed her before she could raise the alarm. She stayed with us one night, and then I took her to the manor. Quite unharmed, I a.s.sure you."

"And things at the estate, they seemed ... all right ... to you?" Pansy pressed.

Oliver started to say that they had been fine, but then he stopped. "I don't know." He leaned forward a little, conscious more than ever of the guard. "Your Highnesses, I saw ... creatures in the garden of the manor. People ... made of shadow. I think they were trying to get to Petunia." Oliver moved back a little, waiting for Poppy to scoff or Pansy to squeak in fright.

But both the princesses surprised him.

Poppy shrank back, and her hands twisted in her skirts. It was Pansy who stood up straighter and looked him in the eye.

"Shadowy creatures?" Pansy's voice was shrill despite her stern posture. "What nonsense! Come, Poppy, we're going." She tugged Poppy's arm to make her move.

Oliver stared after them. They'd believed him-he knew they had. But why were they pretending they hadn't?

The guard glared at Oliver. "If you're lying, there's a special place in h.e.l.l for you." He slammed the door in Oliver's face, locking it with a sc.r.a.ping of metal that made Oliver's teeth ache.

He hadn't been dreaming the shadows in the garden. One look at Poppy's face told him that much, and Pansy's and the guard's reactions had confirmed it.

"But what are they?" Oliver asked his empty room.

After another night and morning spent pacing the tiny room, Oliver was frantic. His mother and Simon would be beside themselves with anxiety, he wanted rea.s.surance that his men were all right, and he couldn't stop wondering if the shadow creatures had gone after Petunia again.

Poppy had sent books to him with his dinner tray, but he couldn't concentrate for more than a pair of minutes. Besides his personal distractions, the books were both rather dry histories of Westfalin. Oliver wasn't sure whether Poppy was joking or she really thought such things riveting reading for the imprisoned. A sc.r.a.p of paper fell from one as he leafed through it, but if it had been marking a particular page, he couldn't find it now.

And then, just when he was expecting his lunch tray, King Gregor sent for him.

Oliver was taken to the same room where he had first met the king, with its long, dark table and the high-backed chairs full of scowling men. The king was at the head of the table, a broad-shouldered man with wiry gray hair and wild eyebrows at his left, a gentle-faced priest at his right. The men along each side of the table were all uniformly older, grim, and dressed in black. This made the pair sitting at the end of the table all the more striking.

Opposite King Gregor at the foot of the table was a young man with unfas.h.i.+onably short hair and a pair of silver knitting needles in his hands. By his side in a cus.h.i.+oned chair sat the only woman in the room. She was gravely beautiful, with golden brown hair held up with garnet-studded combs, a gleaming gold watch pinned to the bosom of her green gown. She was untangling a skein of gray yarn with her slender fingers, and Oliver thought that together the two of them looked remarkably like a woodcut he had seen of the Destinies. If the older man seated on the woman's other side had been holding a knife, with which the Destinies sever the thread of a man's life, it would have completed the picture. He was toying with a pen, to Oliver's relief.

Oliver bowed to the king. "Your Majesty," he murmured. Then he turned and bowed to the pair at the other end of the table. "Crown Prince Galen, Crown Princess Rose."

"Smart lad," grunted the man with the eyebrows at the king's side. "I'll give him that."

"If you're that smart, why did you turn yourself in, hey?" King Gregor barked.

"Because it was time," Oliver said.

"Time to stop stealing from the innocent ... time to stop stealing the innocent themselves?" King Gregor's face was red. "If you did indeed abduct my youngest daughter-and why you would boast about it if you hadn't, I don't know-she hasn't said a word about it, nor has the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Volenskaya von Hrothenborg, who is hosting Petunia at her estate!"

"My estate, if it please Your Majesty," Oliver said, cutting across the bl.u.s.ter. He could see how his mother had quailed at the thought of facing the king.

Gregor thumped the table with his fist. "Still pretending to be an earl?"

"I am an earl," Oliver said. "The Earl of Saxeborg-Rohlstein. My father was Caspar Gerhard Saxony, the twenty-fifth earl of Saxeborg-Rohlstein. My mother is the Dowager Countess Emily Ellsworth Saxony, once lady-in-waiting to Queen Maude, may her soul rest in peace. My father died in service to the crown, leading a regiment in the war with a.n.a.lousia. When my mother brought me to Bruch to be confirmed in my t.i.tle, she found that my earldom had been divided up and given to others, and Bretoners like herself were being accused of witchcraft."

This statement was followed by the sharpest silence Oliver had ever experienced.

"Your Majesty, I believe that Heinrich might be some help in this matter," said Prince Galen after the longest minute of Oliver's life.

"Heinrich? What would he know about it?" King Gregor looked at his oldest son-in-law in distraction, rubbing at his chin as though trying to scrub the clean-shaven skin right off.

"The captain of Heinrich's regiment was the Earl Caspar Saxony," Galen said. He took the neatly wound yarn from Rose's hands with a smile and began wrapping it around one of his knitting needles.

"My father was the captain of the Eagle regiment," said Oliver. His mother had told him that often and with great pride.

The king raised one eyebrow, and Oliver saw a sudden similarity to Poppy in the expression and the set of his jaw. "Fetch the boy," the king snapped at one of the guards.

What boy? Oliver wondered.

"To the victor go the spoils, they say," King Gregor went on after one of the guards had left. "I drew up the border to take whatever spoils I could when the war ended. Which is why I can't believe I would give a.n.a.lousia half an earldom."

"I'm afraid you did, Your Majesty," said one of the ministers.