The Runaway Princess (20 page)

A romantic, that's what she was, and she was paying for it with this adventure.

Grimly, she started into the valley. She would do well to remember where her affectations had led her.

As they descended, Evangeline saw what distance had concealed. Piles of charred wood were stacked beside a new barn. Thin cattle were penned in pastures already stripped of grass. And she frowned at the drooping fields of barley. Even the grain looked sad, withered and fighting the curling edges of blight.

“What has happened here?” she asked.

“War and revolution,” he answered, looking almost weary as he gazed on the blackened stump of what was once a huge oak. He pointed ahead to the village. “But it seems there are no revolutionaries now.” Ahead of them, the single road swarmed with activity. People moved toward the largest hut, carrying baskets and clothing, their pleasure-filled voices echoing up the path. Several half-loaded carts stood on the road, and children ran and shrieked with laughter.

Evangeline sensed a party atmosphere. Sensed, too, the moment the villagers spotted the strangers.

For the laughter was silenced, the women gathered their children behind their skirts, and a forest of pitch-forks suddenly aimed for their stomachs.

Evangeline halted in the middle of the path, but
Danior waved and called a greeting as he strode onward. The stupid man would walk right onto the prongs. Running after him, she grabbed his tattered sleeve and set her feet.

He slowed, surprising her. She hadn't thought he would pay attention to so small a thing as her objection to his bloody and unnecessary death.

But no. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her along with him, explaining, “They've been raided times without number. The village was burned to the ground during the Revolution of Ninety-six, and again three years ago when deserters from Napoleon's army found their way here. The people are wary, but don't fear. They've been unswervingly loyal to me.”

She looked again to see if he saw something she didn't, but the sun still sparkled on the sharpened tips of the pitchforks. “They don't look loyal now.”

“Can you blame them?” He indicated himself. “I don't look royal.”

He didn't. His cravat and jacket were gone. His shirt was dirty, torn, and minus the collar and cuffs that had given it style. The fine cloth of his trousers had lost many a battle with brambles, and here and there his white undergarments shone through. And the black shadow of a beard gave him the appearance of the lowest sort of ruffian.

“Don't worry.” His voice contained a soothing tone. “I wouldn't bring you any place where you would be in danger.”

It was the second time—no, the third time—he'd alluded to her safety in that condescending manner, and she wanted to retort that she wasn't afraid. But she was.

They had almost reached the glowering peasants, and those pitchforks began to dance and sway.

Holding his hand open so they could see he concealed no weapon, Danior said, “My people, don't you recognize me? I'm your prince!”

“You don't look like our prince,” one man called out.

Then a child shrieked and dodged around her frantically grasping parents. “Danior, Danior, what did you bring me?”

Danior strode to meet the gap-toothed girl. He lifted her into his arms and spun her around, a big bear of a man giving a child a ride. But when he stopped, the father pushed a pitchfork at Danior while the mother snatched the child away.

The girl screamed in protest.

Evangeline hurried forward.

“Don't cry, Norita,” Danior said. “We'll play after your papa and I have talked.” He held the mother's gaze as she backed away.

The mother slowed her retreat. “You knew her name.”

“I know yours, too, Lupe.” He looked at the father. “And yours, Rainger.”

“It is him.” Lupe set her daughter down. “It's not Dominic, it's the prince!”

Pitchforks lodged into the ground as the villagers surged forward, laughing and talking.

“Forgive us, Your Highness.”

“We heard your brother was on the prowl . . .”

“More revolutionaries we don't need . . .”

Danior laughed, a real laugh of charm and grace. “No need to apologize. I would reprimand you if you welcomed me in any other way.”

It was a charming scene. Rather too charming, given Evangeline's susceptible state of mind, and she looked away—and into the Serephinian-colored eyes of an inquisitive old woman. Evangeline smiled weakly and looked elsewhere, and found almost every woman observing her with eager interest.

I'm not who you think I am
, she wanted to say.

Instead she kept her mouth clamped shut as Norita tugged at Danior's tattered waistcoat. “What did you bring me?” she insisted.

“I brought you a . . . kiss.” Leaning down, he placed a kiss on the girl's cheek. “And that's enough for a minx like you.”

Heeding her mother's hissed instructions, Norita curtsied and said, “I like it, Your Highness.” Then she added, “Do it again.”

Lupe covered her eyes in chagrin, but Danior rumbled with merriment and kissed the girl. Then
he held out his arms, and children rushed to him. He ruffled the boys' hair and kissed the girls' cheeks, put one of the little ones up on his shoulders and barely winced when he clutched his hair for support. And he coaxed the shy girl, the one who walked with a crutch, out from hiding, and held her in his arms.

He really did like daughters, Evangeline realized. And sons. He probably really did work at the orphanage and wash faces with royal ruthlessness, and that was good because she didn't know what to do around children.

Not that it mattered, because she wasn't going to wed Danior and have half a dozen daughters. No matter how appealing he looked with his hair rumpled and children hanging off him.

“Where are you going, my people?” He indicated the wagons piled high with belongings. “Did you see me and decide to leave?”

The tumult quieted and the old woman answered, “We're going to see you, Your Highness, at Revealing in Plaisance. Why aren't you already there?”

“There's been some difficulties along the road.” Parents began to retrieve their children, and Danior gave them each a pat as they left. The crippled child he held the longest, speaking softly to her before placing her on the bench stretched across the sides of the cart.

A young man, short and sturdy, blessed with an aft of authority, leaned against the door sill of the hut. “That's what we heard. Rumors are flying, Your Highness, that the rebels have captured you, or Princess Ethelinda, or both.”

“Someday there'll be tales written of our adventures,” Danior answered, “but I'll be there to pen them.”

The men laughed and slapped each other on the shoulders. The women nodded, and Evangeline heard one say, “I told you so.”

“We assumed as much,” the old lady said. “That's why we're on our way.”

Striding to her side, Danior placed his hands on her skinny shoulders. “I can always depend on you, Memaw.”

“Is that Princess Ethelinda?” Norita asked, her high-pitched voice clear over the adults' talk.

Danior ignored Evangeline's squeak of dismay, but answered as she might have wished. “It is the princess, and she wants to be called Evangeline.”

Evangeline smiled as graciously as she could. “I'm not really—”

Danior looked at her, scorching her with the threat in his eyes.

“—Really dressed well enough to feel like a princess,” she finished lamely. Right now, discretion seemed the better part of valor.

“Your inner beauty shines through the tattered clothing.” Danior sounded warm and loving.

But she knew the truth. He would shake her like a rag doll if she disillusioned his people.

Her admission brought a heightened interest. The villagers looked her over, some cynically, some avidly, but all so thoroughly that she knew they would never forget her face. And what would these people think if, two days hence, they saw the real princess take her place at Danior's side?

Danior lifted a straight-backed chair into the back of the cart, then helped the old lady into it. “There's been no sign of revolutionaries here?”

“No.” But the man at the door looked warily around at the mountains rimming the valley. “We've kept a watchful eye out, and the dogs you gave us run loose every night. Those bastards aren't going to catch us with our butts bare again.”

“Lauri!” One of the women elbowed him and indicated Evangeline.

He scowled and kicked the dirt. “She might as well know what's gone on around here. The rumors say she ran away, and until she settles down and does her duty, we're all in danger.”

“A woman with me is a woman under my protection, and is above reproach,” Danior rebuked him, and Lauri lowered his head in acceptance.

Then Memaw snapped, “She was a child the first time, and in a far country the second. D'you think she's responsible, fool?”

Lauri's head came up. He glowered at the old woman, ready to fight, but Danior placed his hand on Lauri's shoulder. “Women make fools of us all, eh, Lauri?”

It wasn't an answer, but an awkward attempt to mollify a young man humiliated by tactless castigation, and into the moment of silence that followed, Evangeline's muttered comment was clear. “Easy enough to do.”

The men looked astonished, much as they would if a faithful mule kicked.

The women burst into surprised laughter.

Memaw said, “You'll do, young Evangeline, you'll do.”

Danior exchanged a look of disgust with Lauri, then glared at the women. They turned away or covered their mouths to stifle their merriment, and stiffly Danior said, “I, too, inherited a position as leader at a young age, and it's difficult earning respect, but Lauri is proving himself.”

He looked around, and the women nodded, but their eyes still danced. Danior frowned at Evangeline, and she smiled back feebly. Stupid thing to be caught saying, yet sometimes Danior's conceit begged to be deflated, and there was no one to do it—except her.

His frown grew into a scowl, and without removing his gaze from her, he said, “The village looks good.”

Evangeline looked around with trepidation. Twenty tiny, whitewashed and thatched wooden houses each had one window and one door. Smoke trickled out of a hole in the center of each roof. Mud dabbed the cracks. On the ground around the outside of each, sheaves of hay and leaves were stacked and held in place by large stones. These villagers fought cold, revolutionaries, and poverty. Today they were going to Plaisance for the event they'd anticipated for one thousand years.

It didn't matter that she wasn't the princess. The responsibility for these people, and all the people like them, weighed on her, dragging her onward to a fate she both craved and feared. Even if, somehow, the princess could communicate with Evangeline and joyously relinquish her position, Evangeline couldn't
change her bloodlines or her past; she couldn't learn to be royal, nor could she produce the child Danior demanded. A child with noble bloodlines.

She looked pleadingly at Danior, almost as if he could rescue her from this dilemma, when he was really the cause of it.

But he and Lauri had half turned away. “Are you leaving a guard?” Evangeline heard him ask.

“A few guards. The dogs.” Lauri gripped the handle of his pitchfork and shook it. “If Revealing doesn't occur, it won't matter anyway. There won't be anything left to come home to. We're going to starve here if we don't bring in a good crop, and the blight's on the barley again.”

“Follow the old rituals,” Memaw said.

Lauri flung his arms out, making windmills in the air. “The old rituals are useless.”

“They weren't.” Memaw leaned forward, clutching the arms of her chair. “They helped.”

The women whispered among themselves.

“Rubbish!” Lauri shouted.

“We never had the blight when I was young!” Memaw shouted back.

“Stupid rituals, they were nothing but superstition and ignorance.”

The men muttered to each other.

An old quarrel, oft repeated, it obviously divided the village. It was a quarrel Evangeline had no business interrupting, yet she found herself saying, “Are you talking about the Broadcast?”

“Aye, aye, that's what we're talking about.” Lauri's face was ruddy and his voice blustering. “The Broadcast, done time out of mind to bless the
fields. Well, we have a priest in to bless the fields every year, and it's done no good, we're all still starving by the time winter's finished.”

“Because we don't do the Broadcast,” Memaw insisted, her voice clear and strong. “It's magic.”

“I'm sorry to say it, Memaw, but I agree with Lauri,” Danior interposed. “It's a modern world and sad as it is, no one has time to waste going into the forest to collect herbs and play at rituals.”

Lauri smirked, but Evangeline could keep quiet no more. “Actually,
I
think Memaw's right.”

The murmuring stopped; Danior, Lauri, and Memaw, as well as every other adult and child from the village turned and looked at her. So much attention, and for what reason? Because they hoped she was a princess with the magic to save them?

No magic, she wanted to tell them, but science. Surreptitiously, she wiped her damp palms on her skirt. “The herb . . . it's royal maywort, isn't it?”

“So the old wives call it,” Lauri said, making his opinion of old wives clear by his tone of voice.

Danior only stared at her, his head cocked, an odd wrinkle between his eyebrows.

“The botanical name is
Mentha nobilis
, an herb used by the ancients known to be a curative for flesh and plants.” Delving deep into her brain, she recited the text from the
Genera Plantarum.
“Dried and spread over the growing crop of barley, in the past it was held responsible for the plenteous crops grown in this region known for its short summers and difficult winters.”

“Doesn't matter what the ancients said,” Lauri pointed out in ill-concealed triumph. “Doesn't even
matter if it works. It's rare and delicate, and by royal command we're not supposed to cut it.”