Princess Ben (7 page)

My sobs drowned out the click of the lock. Alone at last, I collapsed, clutching my miserable hands as I had longed to all night. I had not water, even, to bathe them! My battle with the queen had taken every particle of my strength. I could not repeat it—could not even bear the thought. And yet she would sit as regent for years to come, until I reached my majority, the particulars of which she alone had power to
determine. Should she wish, I could remain under her cold and bloodless thumb for a decade or more. I was alone—completely, utterly, bitterly alone, barely able to bend my aching digits. My mother was dead, murdered by our enemies as part of some oblique master plan; my father, wherever he be, showed no sign of returning. Even Lord Frederick, so solicitous on my first dismal day in this place, had departed for points abroad, his return date undetermined. It was I, a plump and heartbroken girl, aligned against a woman who had every indication of being Satan himself.

I sobbed for I do not know how long. No matter how I prayed, no fairy godmother appeared. No elf or leprechaun or world-weary wizard materialized to provide the secret weapon against my foe. I remained alone in a mouse-infested cell, empty but for a pallet and the nightdress into which I now had to struggle.

Getting into the nightdress was not to be the problem; it was struggling out of my gown that overwhelmed me. Normally a handmaid arrived following the queen's departure to unfasten my layers and attend to my corset and stockings. She would then, under the queen's orders, take my evening-wear with her on the absurd assumption that I might escape
my tower, and the further absurd assumption that, once escaped, I would object to being seen in my nightclothes.

Tonight, however, I was alone. The queen must have forbidden her from attending me or the maid had sense enough to avoid Sophia's fury. Either way, I heard no tread to indicate I would soon be released. Exhausted to my core, I craved sleep. But even if my fingers had worked, I could not have removed the constricting and obstinate garb in which I had been clad.

Utterly defeated, I lay my head against the cold stone wall of my prison and sobbed anew. Moonlight cast a daunting sliver of shadow across the floor, but I paid it no heed. I craved only resolution. Even death, harsh as this may sound, seemed apt. Then I might join my mother in the afterlife. I lay my aching hands on the wall, intent to push off, to move to the window and leap out. And then—

The wall beneath my left hand gave way. It did not collapse, should that image come to mind. Instead, it simply, in that instant, abandoned all pretext of solidity.

In the many years since this one unforgettable moment, I have struggled to explain this experience, how best to convey its utterly terrifying
foreignness.
Imagine descending a staircase. Arriving at the bottom, you confidently stride
forward—but you have miscalculated. Another step remains, and instead of touching solid floor you flail through the air for a life-saving handhold. And though you fall only two hand breadths at most, the terror of that one helpless moment remains, poisoning your consciousness, for some time afterward.

Such was my sensation. Moreover, I did not suffer it on a staircase, where one has experience with such momentary crises, but against a solid rock wall.

I leapt back in horror, my heart in my throat. What had I felt? In the moonlight I could perceive clearly the wall's rough stones, with the same mass and substance as the mountain itself. In fact, in the nocturnal illumination their origin was obvious, for Ancienne stone always glitters slightly.

I must be mad. My hands were damaged, obviously. I knew not what I felt.

Sheepishly I stepped forward. I touched the spot where my head had rested. In the most literal sense, it was rock solid. My right hand continued along the wall. Inflamed as my fingers were, the rock registered in unique and painful ways, all of them substantial. With great care, I reached out my left hand, still throbbing from the beating. I touched rock
...rock again ... and then before my disbelieving eyes, my arm plunged to the elbow into the stone.

Again I leapt back. I examined my arm. Except for the beating, it appeared normal. But hands do not penetrate rock!

Determined now, I slapped the masonry. But my fingers touched nothing—perhaps at best the skimming effect of silk; certainly not stone. Again my arm disappeared to the elbow. With enormous control, panting with effort, I held it there in place, suppressing panic at the sight of my absent limb. Deliberately I moved my arm. It moved—it moved as an arm should move. The space, solid as it appeared,
felt
empty. I brought my right hand over and slipped it in until my other arm, too, was elbow-deep in solid stone.

Not daring to breathe, I dragged both arms to one side. Almost at once they hit a vertical barrier, undetectable to my eyes. My fingers slipped down this smooth impediment, which felt for all the world like a doorjamb. Up I continued, until standing on my toes I felt a "lintel" (so I dubbed it) above my head. No visible sign, however—rock and masonry had no relation to this smooth, tactile solidity. Dizzy with confusion and exhilaration, I ran my rock-bound arms along this lintel, swirling them about. Almost at once I located the other side of the doorjamb. There. I had found
three sides of a doorway, as cleverly disguised as a moth on a tree. I stood, a swollen hand out of sight on each side of this mysterious and baffling portal.

My pulse rang in my ears. Cautiously, as a swimmer tests the waters, I extended my foot, still in its beribboned dinner slipper. The stone engulfed my shoe and ankle, the hem of my gown disappearing into the stone.

The ground on the other side felt solid.

What had I to lose? Who would miss me, should this end in tragedy?

With a deep breath, I stepped through.

I
N WHICH I MAKE SEVERAL UNUSUAL DISCOVERIES

Coward that I am, I squeezed my eyes shut, and so experienced intensely the sensation of cool silk. Finding myself on the far side of the portal, puffing in relief at the stone beneath my feet, I forced one eyelid open. Before my nose was another wall of stone. Reaching out, I touched rough-hewn masonry and crudely applied mortar, all blanketed with the dust of age. In fact, excepting the dust it matched exactly the walls of the staircase from the queen's reception room to my cell. With a jolt, I realized that just as that horrid stair occupied the tight space between two walls, so did this most peculiar roomlet.

Dim moonlight filtered through the secret portal. On the far side of the doorjamb my cell and bed appeared clear as day. As I peered about the roomlet's gloaming, I espied an ascending flight of steps built between the walls, so matched in appearance and construction to the staircase from the
queen's reception room to my cell that without question they had been constructed by the same hand. Yet
whereto
did this flight lead? My tiny cell occupied the highest floor of the highest tower of Chateau de Montagne. Above was naught but slate roofing and sky.

For some time I chewed my lip. It made some sort of sense—should something as irrational as this experience ever be labeled
sensible
—that a doorway such as this would lead to a secret corridor, and what else is a staircase but a corridor improved by elevation? The dusty little roomlet in which I now stood otherwise served as no more than well-disguised closet. Dearly might an emperor or Midas pay for a closet so perfectly hidden from spies and thieves, but it had no purpose in a barren cell. No, doorway and staircase were but a conduit to the unknown.

I had come this far. I began to climb.

Within a half-dozen steps, the sparse moonlight dissipated so completely that I was ascending in total darkness. Timidly I probed and tested each step and riser before settling my weight. Swollen and aching though my fingers were, still they swept the jagged stones, verifying the solidity of my surroundings. Ever higher I mounted. Then my vision, overwhelmed with strain, began to mislead me, for steps and
walls, ghostly in a pale white light, appeared. I turned my head upward, and my heart froze, for light—ever stronger and whiter—drifted down from above.

Though I stood as a statue for some time, my ears ringing with the effort of my concentrated listening, I could discern no footstep or rustle, no indication that the space above was occupied by a human ... or other presence. Again gathering my scanty resolve, I resumed my creeping journey.

Mounting the last steps, I could now make out a tiny chamber, as neatly designed as a cut gem, tucked beneath the conical roof of the tower. Strong moonlight poured through four diminutive dormer windows, as though the round panes of glass had magnified the faint beams tenfold. Just as a lighthouse via mirrors and lenses transforms the flame of a single candle into a powerful beam, so, too, apparently, did these windows work with moonlight: a lighthouse turned in upon itself.

In this enchanted light I perceived a space such as I had never known. Odd cabinets with peculiar locks lined the walls. A cobwebbed mirror hung above a workbench blanketed in a jumble of unidentifiable objects. A lectern displaying an open book, an unlit candelabra to one side, stood in the room's center. Every item—I cannot emphasize this
strongly enough—was shrouded in dust more than a finger width deep, accented by bird droppings powdery with age; bird nests crumbled in the turret's peak. Mice had left an otherworldly maze of trails on the floor, which was so thick with dust that it felt as soft as carpet.

I stole toward the lectern, small eddies of dust rising about my ankles. Once arrived, I had another fright, for the mighty tome resting there, though obviously ancient with its yellowed pages and aged leather binding, was as clean as the queen's own throne. Thick dust draped every adjoining surface, and bird droppings as well (I was revolted to note), but the book itself lay pristine.

With effort, I calmed myself. There were no footprints in the room, no evidence of occupancy for a century or more. The book itself must have some mysterious power. Inadvertently I proved this when, in reaching to touch the binding, a thick clump of dust dropped from my sleeve. The dust drifted downward as dust is wont to do, but as it neared the book, it purely and simply vanished. How clever! I scooped up a large handful of dust to test this again but at the last moment refrained, sensing (and I shall forever look upon this moment as a great leap in my maturity) that perhaps a volume of such antiquity and obvious capability should not be put to use for parlor tricks.

Those childhood tales of the founding of Montagne, the legendary couple who cured the mountain giants' chilblains and through magic protected their new country from harm ... those fictions, I suddenly realized, must have some foundation in fact. Magic alone could explain my passage through a solid masonry wall, and magic alone explained the presence, and certainly the contents, of this secret room. Why I of all people would stumble upon this lost and forgotten chamber at this particular moment in time; that I could not explain. Except—and this realization sent me gasping so deeply that I spent several minutes coughing dust from my lungs—except for the fact that I, as granddaughter of the king, had descended directly from Montagne's founders. However many generations later, their blood flowed in my veins. This marvelous adventure was, in some manner, my birthright.

Again I peered at the spotless open book. After wiping one aching hand on my gown (which, sadly, was already far more soiled than brocade should ever be), I reached out a trembling finger and touched it.

I did not disappear. That was a blessing. The book felt clean to my touch, of course, but otherwise booklike. When I tried to turn the page, however, my eyes grew wide, for however papery the pages felt and appeared, with their tiny words and inked drawings, the book remained as solid and immovable as a block of granite.

If I had not yet come to the conclusion that this tome was a force of magic, the title words—difficult to discern, for the room though illuminated by the moon had not light for scholarship—left no doubt. "The Elemental Spells," they proclaimed, in a flowing, archaic script I would discover soon enough was not the easiest to decipher. A dense paragraph followed, too challenging to read in the weak light, and then a series of precise illustrations and captions, with arrows highlighting specific elements, much as a cookery book might demonstrate the proper way to trim a roast, or an engineering manual the ideal configuration of a gristmill.

The pictures greatly intrigued me. Each showed a pair of hands gesturing in a most specific manner. A sketch of a hand with snapping fingers, for example, emphasized that the snap should be off the third, or ring, finger. I attempted this. My own fingers were so swollen that I could scarce manipulate them, yet, consumed with curiosity, I forced them to bend.

With great effort I produced a small sound, nothing akin to the well-known snap with which we are all of us familiar, but noise nonetheless in that silent room. Beneath this drawing was a series of words in a tongue I did not recognize; it looked wild, foreign, and unpronounceable. Helpfully, a second line of text sounded the words out syllable by syllable. With great focus I whispered the words, though I had not a clue in the world what such gibberish would produce.

Again I spoke, uttering the words with more confidence now, and at the same time forcing my fingers into their snap. At once a minuscule puff of flame appeared in my palms. I shrieked—well would anyone, I should say, under such tension—and leapt backwards. Breathless with alarm, I rubbed my hands, searching out a burn. There was none, naught beyond the welts and grime already present.

However unscathed I was for now, caution dictated I attend more closely. I returned to the book. The next illustration was of two hands cupped; another sequence showed the hands working in unison through an elaborate snap and fluttering move. Once burned, as it were, I now doubled my vigilance, and practiced the nonsensical words with my arms held straight out from my sides, fingers stiff and wide to avoid any possible misunderstanding.