Palace of Lies (19 page)

I stirred uncomfortably. This sounded like regular palace life to me. Someone fell out of favor, and instantly everyone piled on, listing all the misdeeds that person might be guilty of. But I had always stayed above the fray. I'd never had to wonder what it would be like to be the target of such false allegations.

At least, not until rumors started flying that I had supposedly killed my sister-princesses.

Nobody could believe that!
I thought.
Surely . . .

I made myself concentrate on Janelia's story.

“Someone just wanted to get rid of you,” I said. “They didn't come up with any solid proof, did they? They were probably hoping the accusations would scare you, and you'd
leave the palace on your own. And then they wouldn't have to bother disposing of you.”

“I wouldn't have ever left, if I'd had a choice,” Janelia said, and her voice still carried the despair of a decade earlier. “Not when it meant leaving you behind.”

“But you did leave me,” I said, and even though I didn't mean them to, the words came out sounding accusatory.

“I stayed as long as I could!” Janelia said. “I tried to fight the accusations—I told anyone who would listen that I was innocent, that I'd never done anything wrong. But then I was summoned before Lord Throckmorton.”

I could picture this: Janelia, ten years younger and wearing a maid's simple dress, cowering in the entryway to Lord Throckmorton's imposing suite; Lord Throckmorton's corpulent frame towering over her, his eyes narrowed in disapproval; the cold eyes of the kings and queens and lords and ladies in the portraits behind him seeming to glare down on Janelia as if they, too, disapproved of everything about her.

I could picture all this because of the times I'd been summoned by Lord Throckmorton. I always felt scorned and guilty, thoroughly guilty, even as I racked my brain to think of a single thing I might have done wrong.

“I still don't understand how it all happened,” Janelia said. “How could I, a mere maid, have done anything worth the attention of Lord Throckmorton? Even if any of the accusations were true, why would Lord Throckmorton get
involved? I've been trying to figure that out for ten years!”

I gasped and put my hand over my mouth.

“What?” Janelia said. “Do you understand? Did he tell you anything about me?”

I slid my hand back from my mouth.

“I didn't know anything about this at the time. I don't even remember you being at the palace,” I said. “But if this happened when I was four . . . I think that was when Lord Throckmorton found out I wasn't the true princess. That I was just an impostor. And—he wouldn't have wanted anyone else to know.”

I remembered everything my sister-princesses and I had pieced together about our own stories. Every other princess had had a royal item with a secret letter from the queen tucked inside. In Cecilia's case, the royal object had been a harp; some of the other girls had had a pendant or a silver chalice or a bowl. By the time I met my sister-princesses, I had no special item—why should I, when I had a palace full of royal things? But I could remember a crystal globe that broke when I was little. Though of course Lord Throckmorton never confessed, I was certain that he'd found my letter from the queen, and discovered the secret about me that I hadn't even known myself.

But if I could remember the crystal globe, why couldn't I remember Janelia?

Janelia gaped at me.

“If that was Lord Throckmorton's reason, why didn't he
just have me killed?” Janelia asked. “Why didn't he silence me once and for all?”

I felt the danger in that question. I knew how Lord Throckmorton's mind worked; he'd probably considered that possibility.

“Did he ask any odd questions when he summoned you before him?” I asked. “Anything that seemed unrelated to the false accusations?”

“Everything seemed odd and terrifying to me then!” Janelia said wryly. “But . . . he did dwell on exactly when I'd been the queen's serving girl, and whether I was with her until her very last day.”

“Because in the queen's letters to her fake-princess daughters, she didn't give the name of the servant who'd gotten the babies from the orphanage,” I said. “The queen probably did that to protect you, in case any of the letters fell into the wrong hands. Which they did.”

I brooded on this a moment longer.

“Lord Throckmorton must not have been certain you were the right girl,” I said. “He had to interrogate you to find out.”

“But he never came right out and asked,
Did you get babies from the orphanage for the queen? Did you substitute your own baby sister for the queen's dead daughter?
” Janelia objected.

“Oh, Lord Throckmorton almost never asked a direct question,” I said. “He preferred playing cat and mouse. So you'd never know, answering him, if you were accidentally
boxing yourself in or backing into one of his traps.”

“That's exactly how I felt!” Janelia said. “He had me so confused I felt like saying anything would be like confessing to a crime.”

I had always assumed that everyone always felt like that at the palace, at least in the years before Lord Throckmorton was vanquished. But maybe Janelia, as a lowly serving girl, had been oblivious for most of her time in the palace. Maybe she'd been too focused on building fires and emptying chamber pots to see the palace intrigue around her.

“You didn't say anything about me, did you?” I asked. “You didn't tell him I was really your sister, or—”

“No, no—of course not!” Janelia said. “I wouldn't endanger you like that!”

“So you didn't even speak my name to Lord Throckmorton,” I asked, and I winced at how much I sounded like Lord Throckmorton, drawing someone into one of his traps.

Janelia's eyes darted to the side.

“Well . . . ,” she began. “I didn't give away your identity, but . . . I begged to be allowed to stay in the palace, to take care of you.”

“So he knew I was important to you,” I said, tapping my chin thoughtfully.

“Was I supposed to lie?” Janelia asked, flashing me an uncertain smile.

Yes, no, maybe
, I thought.

“Any action you chose had risks,” I said. “Lord Throckmorton was very good at telling when people lied.”

“So what could I have done?” Janelia pleaded. Somehow the tables had turned, and it felt like Janelia was the younger girl and I was the older, wiser sister she was begging for advice.

I shrugged.

“Nothing,” I said. “Lord Throckmorton would have found you out, no matter what. If it served his purposes to banish you, he would have banished you from the palace no matter how much you lied or pleaded or pretended to have something to barter with.”

But he left Janelia alive,
I thought.
Why did he do that?

Either Janelia was lying now, or she'd left out some key portion of the story. Or I was missing something. Lord Throckmorton never left loose ends that might threaten his power.

Unless . . .

“Did Lord Throckmorton pay you?” I asked abruptly. “Did he give you money to keep my true identity secret?”

“What?
No!
” Janelia said. “He didn't know I knew your true identity! Er—not that he let me know about.”

Janelia looked confused. Lord Throckmorton usually did have that effect on people.

I slumped back against the rock wall of the cave.

“But the money you used for raising Tog and Herk and the other boys . . . ,” I prompted.

“I was getting to that,” Janelia said. “After Lord Throckmorton talked to me, he kicked me out of the palace once and for all. He said if I so much as showed my face at the palace door, I'd be executed. He said I was lucky he didn't execute me on the spot for stealing that silver vase. And I pleaded with him—I said you'd gotten used to me. I said it would be devastating to you to lose your most familiar caregiver, when you'd already lost your parents.”

“He wouldn't care about that,” I interrupted. But I had to harden my heart to get the words out.

I thought about the bitter old woman I remembered as my earliest nanny: Grechettine. She'd been the first to tell me that people wanted to kill me and steal my throne. She'd give me nightmares and beat me when I woke up screaming in the night.

But had she really been part of my life from the very beginning? Was it possible she'd replaced Janelia when I was four?

Was I maybe screaming for Janelia when I had those nightmares, and that was why Nanny Grechettine beat me so violently?

I couldn't remember. But my words made Janelia wince.

“It's true—Lord Throckmorton didn't waver, no matter how much I pleaded,” she said. She had her back firmly against the rock wall too. “He didn't even let me tell you good-bye. I was glad then that I'd at least told you about us being sisters as a kind of fairy tale, something to keep secret
between the two of us. I thought you'd figure it out as you got older, and come looking for me.”

“But I didn't even remember you, let alone—” I began.

Janelia patted my arm.

“It's not your fault,” she said. “I failed too, trying to send messages to you, or finding a way to visit you in secret. All I could do was have Tog and Herk and Terrence and the other boys watch over the palace for me, and keep their ears to the ground to hear any news or gossip about you. . . .”

It was strange how comforting I found that, to think that for the past decade people I hadn't even known were watching over me.

I remembered that one of those people was Terrence, who had betrayed and abandoned me only yesterday.

“Were you paying the boys to spy?” I asked hesitantly. “Paying them with—”

Janelia held up her hand, as if to warn me about the rest of the story.

“When Lord Throckmorton threw me out, I was hysterical,” Janelia said. “I was standing there in the courtyard, sobbing like crazy, hitting my fists against the door, and a man I'd never seen before pulled me aside.”

“I knew it! One of Lord Throckmorton's agents,” I muttered.

Janelia's eyes widened in surprise.

“No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “It couldn't have been. He saved my life. He kept me from
going so crazy that Lord Throckmorton just had the guards kill me.”

“Oh, I'm sure this man said he was someone else—” I accused.

“Desmia, listen,” Janelia insisted. “It wasn't someone connected with Lord Throckmorton. It was the queen's former physician.”

I turned my head and stared at Janelia.

“You mean—”

“Right,” Janelia said. “The only person besides me who knew from the beginning that you weren't the true princess.”

I rubbed my hand wearily
across my forehead. Wasn't it enough that I had to wonder if my sister-princesses were alive or dead? Wasn't it enough that I was in the dark about who had set the palace on fire? Wasn't it enough that I had to flee to Fridesia, the land of my former enemies, and that I was wounded and had only paupers to rely on?

How was it that the ancient history from fourteen years ago was haunting me even now?

Because it isn't finished,
I thought.
It won't be finished as long as any of the other princesses or I keep the throne. And as long as the losers from the queen's deceptions yearn to get their power back.

“The queen's physician was banished,” I said. “After he delivered the baby princess who died. The princess who truly would have deserved the throne, had she but lived.”

I was annoyed that I had not thought to wonder about the fate of the queen's physician. How could I have overlooked both major loose ends in the queen's story: the serving girl
and
the physician? When my sister-princesses and I sent Lord Throckmorton and his henchmen to prison, why hadn't the other girls or I asked,
Hey, any of you know what country that physician was banished to? Any of you know any
more
angles to this story we need to keep track of?

I knew the answer to that. None of us would have trusted anything Lord Throckmorton or his henchmen might have said. I didn't even trust anything I'd heard from advisers we didn't send to prison.

I sighed.

“No matter who that man
said
he was,” I told Janelia, “I'm almost certain he was in Lord Throckmorton's employ.”

And then I could see it clearly, how Lord Throckmorton would have planned things.

“Lord Throckmorton wanted to keep you nearby,” I went on. “Just in case he ever needed to get rid of
me
. If I ever rebelled against his authority. He would have called you in and tricked you somehow into admitting that I really wasn't the princess, that it was a lie all along. And somehow he would have worked it to come off that
he
still needed to be left in charge.”

“I never would have betrayed you like that!” Janelia protested.

“Not even if the choice was betray me, or betray Tog and Herk and all the other boys you were taking care of?” I asked.

Janelia opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again. She looked like a helpless fish, caught on a hook.

“I couldn't have made that choice,” she whispered. “I would have . . . escaped. I would have made sure Tog and Herk and the others rescued me.”

In spite of myself, I found myself admiring the fact that Janelia hadn't instantly protested,
Oh, naturally, Desmia, it's you I care about the most! I'd throw all those beggar boys to the wolves before I'd do anything to harm a hair on your head!

But hadn't Janelia put Tog and Herk and the others at risk, rescuing me? Weren't Tog and Herk at risk right now, traveling to Fridesia with me?