1416934715(FY) (5 page)

“Who said anything about giving up?” I said, as I finally managed to snatch my hands away. “I’m not giving up. “I’m just tired of wishing for what I can never have, that’s all.”

“Then wish for something else,” Raoul said without heat.

“You make it sound so simple when you know its not,” I said, the words bitter in my mouth. “But since you request it, then this is what I wish. I wish for a mother to love me, a mother for me to love. And perhaps some sisters into the bargain. Two would be a nice number. That way, perhaps there will be a chance that one of them might actually like me.”

“For heavens sake, Rilla,” Raoul exclaimed. “You know you’re not supposed to speak a birthday wish aloud.”

“What difference does it make?” I flung back. “It’s not going to come true anyhow.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Raoul said. “Now come inside and get cleaned up. You smell disgusting.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “For that, you can help me up.”

Raoul reached down and pulled me to my feet.
But when I expected him to let go, he held on. “I am sorry, Rilla,” he said. “You see why I think hope is such a tricky thing?”

“I do,” I nodded.

“Come,” Old Mathilde said. “I am an old woman, my bones ache, and there will still be chores in the morning. Let us go back inside.”

After the others had gone to bed, I stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing my hands till they were red and raw. But the scent of my father’s hate could not be washed entirely away. It clung to my skin, a faint rotten smell. At last, I gave up. I climbed the stairs to my room, curled up in bed, and pressed my face against the windowpane, gazing out at the stars.

One wish,
I thought.
That is all I want Why is that so very much to ask?

And now I had thrown my birthday wish away. Even worse, I had thrown it away in anger.
You are your father’s daughter, after all, Cendrillon,
I thought.
Tonight, you’ve proved you’re no better than he is.

Like him, I had chosen anger over love.

I began to weep, then, great, hot tears. I hate to weep, even when I know I have good cause. It makes me feel like I have failed, as my wish had failed that night.

At last, I put my head upon my pillow and cried myself to sleep, an act I had never performed before. Not even on the night that I was born.

But in the morning, it was not just chores as usuaL For in the morning, there was a soldier at the kitchen door.

Susanne had just finished the daily ritual of setting the mornings bread to rise. Now, she and Old Mathilde were bustling about together, setting out ingredients for two birthday cakes. I wasn’t sure how much stomach I would have for mine. In spite of the fact that I had wept myself into an exhausted sleep, I had not slept well. It seemed to me that my dreams were filled with the cries of desperate men. I had been up at the suns first light.

“Would you like me to gather eggs?” I offered now. Usually, this was among my least favorite of the daily chores. I could never rid myself of the notion that the hens resent the way we snatch their eggs. Raoul tells me I’m being ridiculous, of course—which irritates me because I know he’s right.

“That would be helpful. Thank you, Rilla,” Old Mathilde replied. We had not spoken of the events of last night, but I saw the way she looked at me with careful, thoughtful eyes. Not surprisingly, I found this irritating too. All in all, not one of my better mornings, birthday or otherwise.

I took the egg basket down from its hook, tucked it into the crook of my arm.

“Make sure you bundle up,” Susanne advised. “Its cold out this morning. You mark my words, we’ll have a hard frost before the week is out.”

I took my shawl down from its peg, wrapped it around my head and across my chest, then tucked the ends into the waistband of my apron as I reached for the kitchen door. I pulled it open, then faltered backward with a startled yelp. I was staring straight down the length of a sword into a pair of startled, desperate eyes.

Old Mathilde was beside me in a flash. In one hand, she held the longest of the fireplace pokers. I heard a bang from across the courtyard, realized it was the sudden slam of the stable door. And then, over the soldier’s shoulder, I saw Raoul running toward me, full tilt. Above his head, he swung a leather lead, making it sing like a whip.

“Raoul, be careful,” I shouted, just as the soldier heard the sound himself and began to spin around. I’dont know whether he lost his footing, or whether the legs that had carried him this far now abruptly refused to hold him any longer. But, in the next minute, before Raoul could even reach him, the soldier went down. Toppling over like a storm-felled tree, his head striking, hard, against the cobblestones. Raoul skidded to a stop even as Old Mathilde thrust the fireplace poker into my arms, then elbowed me aside to hurry down the two steps from the kitchen to
the courtyard. She knelt beside the stranger, placed her fingers against his neck.

“He lives,” she said shortly. “Help me get him into the house.”

“Wait a minute,” Raoul exclaimed. “You’re going to take him in?”

“I took you in,” Old Mathilde replied.

“But—,” Raoul began.

Old Mathilde straightened up, and looked Raoul right in the eye. “If we treat him like an enemy, that’s all he’ll ever be,” she said. She turned around to look at me in the open kitchen door, where I still stood, hesitating. The expression in her eyes made up my mind. I set the poker aside, put aside the egg basket, and walked down the steps to join her.

“For pity’s sake, Rilla.” Raoul protested.

“For pity’s sake,” I said. “That’s absolutely right. We wished for the fighting to stop, Raoul. You wished it just as hard as I did.” I knelt at the soldiers feet, saw, with horror, that his boots were cut to ribbons, his feet bleeding and torn. “This is our chance to do something more than wish. Now come and help us get him into the house.”

Raoul swore then, a thing he almost never does. But even as he did so, he was moving toward Old Mathilde and me, scooting her aside to slip his hands beneath the soldier’s shoulders and so take the heaviest part of the body himself.

“I really hope youre right about this,” he said. “On three.” He counted out, and when he hit the number
three, the three of us lifted the soldier from the cobblestones. By the time we made it up the kitchen stairs, Susanne had dragged the cot out and placed it near the fire. We settled the soldier onto it. Then Raoul and I stepped back as Old Mathilde set about discovering the full extent of his injuries.

“Go ahead and fetch those eggs, Cendrillon,” she instructed. “You go along with her, Raoul.”

“Even if we did the right thing,” Raoul murmured, as we made our way to the henhouse, “I reserve the right to say
I told you so
if anything goes wrong.”

The soldier ran a fever for a solid week, after which time he was so weak he could hardly hold up his head. His hands had been as torn and bloody as his feet. His clothing had been icy and soaked, as if he had been tossed into the sea, thrown ashore, then been so desperate to get away from the water he had not even bothered to look for a path, but simply climbed straight up the cliff to reach our kitchen door.

Old Mathilde, Susanne, and I took turns caring for him, changing the dressings on his wounded hands and feet, keeping an eye on him while he slept, ladling chicken broth down his throat when he awoke. The he announced he feared he was sprouting feathers was the day we knew he would recover. That was the day he graduated from the cot to a chair.

It was also the day he told us who he was.

His name was Niccolo Schiavone, a minor nobleman’s youngest son, born and raised in the land we
did not name. He was only about a year older than Raoul and I, and not a soldier, in spite of the sword. He had taken it from the body of a dead comrade in a moment of desperation, certain he would not meet with a shred of kindness upon our shores. The voyage on which he had embarked was his first at sea, his first outside his homeland. He had been sent as a courier, carrying information to the queen herself.

“What kind of message requires warships to send it?” Raoul demanded one night after several weeks had gone by.

Raoul, Old Mathilde, Niccolo, and I were sitting together in the kitchen. During Niccolos recovery, the days had slid from October into November. It was full winter now. The sea outside our windows was gray, a mirror of the dull and glowering sky; the wind blew hard and cold. But at least it was still blowing in its usual direction. As Niccolo had grown stronger, he had begun to demonstrate his gratitude for the fact that we had rescued him by performing various tasks around the great stone house.

His first feat had impressed us all, but particularly Susanne, and it was this: He revealed his ability to chop onions without crying. Then he graduated to meat, and finally to wood for the kitchen fire, great piles of which were now stacked neady outside the kitchen door. He recaned Susanne’s rocking chair. When Old Mathilde discovered he had a talent for drawing, she set him to work making sketches of new and bigger cold frames to use in the spring. We had all carefully refrained from
mentioning the reason Niccolo was available to perform these tasks in the first place: He had as good as been part of an invasion force.

But the subject of Niccolo’s message could not be put off forever, and it was probably inevitable that it would be Raoul who finally brought it up. He might have gone from believing Niccolo intended to murder us all in our beds to grudging acceptance, but he was still a long way from trust. In this, though I don’t think either of them realized it, he was no different from Niccolo, himself.

“I think that I must give you a true answer,” he finally said in response to Raoul’s question. “Though there are many in my land who would say that I should not.

“The news I was bringing to the queen is this: Her father is dead. Her brother now sits upon their country’s throne. For twenty long years, brother and sister have waited for this moment. Now that their father is dead, his will can no longer hold them back from what it is that they desire: a return to the ways of war.’

“But why?” I cried. “Why did our two countries ever start fighting in the first place? Do you know?”

Niccolo’s dark eyebrows rose, and I could tell that I had taken him completely by surprise.

“Of course I know,” he said. “Or I suppose, in fairness, I should say I know what I’ve been told.” He paused for a moment, gazing at each of the three of us in turn. “You truly do not know?”

“We do not speak of it,” Raoul said softly. “We do not even name the place you live aloud, for to do so is
considered as good as inviting your soldiers to march down our roads.”

“Please, Niccolo,” I said, “Tell us what you know.”

Niccolo rubbed a hand across his face, “To speak the truth,” he said, “there isn’t all that much to tell. In the land of my birth it is simply said that the conflict between our peoples began with a wish for love, ended in hate, and that in between run rivers of blood. Only when true love can find the way to heal hates wounds can there be a genuine peace between us once more.

“It is for this reason that our late king married his only daughter to the son of his greatest foe. He hoped that love might grow between them and so put an end to the seemingly endless cycle of war.”

“Well, that certainly didn’t happen,” Raoul said with a snort. “We may have stopped fighting for the time being, but everybody knows that what our king and queen feel for each other is a far cry from love. Were about as far away from court as we can be in this place, and even here we hear rumors of the queens constant plotting.

“They say it has divided the court. The king has food tasters, to make sure he isn’t poisoned. Soldiers sleep at the foot of his bed, and outside his chamber door. And he sends Prince Pascal away from court for months at a time. It’s the only way to keep him safe, and from becoming his mother’s pawn. They say she will never be satisfied until the first son of her heart and blood sits on the throne.”

“Which makes no sense at all,” I said, “For
Prince Pascal is an only child. Of course he will inherit the throne. All the queen has to do is to wait.”

“And the longer she waits,” Niccolo said. “The older her son will become. Your king is young, still in his prime. He should live for many years yet. Years which will see his son grow to full manhood. The queens chance for influence diminishes with every year that goes by. But if her husband were to be killed in battle, and her son came to the throne before he turned eighteen . . .”

“Then he would need a regent,” I said. “Someone to help guide him, and who better than his loving mother?”

Niccolo nodded. “That is so.”

“So the ships we saw were what they appeared to be,” Raoul said. “An invasion fleet. Now that they are destroyed, what will your new king do?”

Niccolo shook his head. “I do not know.”

“And you,” I said quietly. “What will you do?”

“I have been thinking about that,” Niccolo answered slowly. “Much as I might wish to stay here, I don’t think I have a choice. I was charged with bringing the queen news of her father’s death. I must carry out my charge.”