The Thirteenth Princess

1.
In Which I Am Born

2.
In Which the Dumbwaiter Is Discovered

3.
In Which I Get to Know My Sisters

4.
In Which I Meet a Witch

5.
In Which a Change Takes Place

6.
In Which I Take Action

7.
In Which I Go on a Journey

8.
In Which I Dance

9.
In Which Help Is Sought

10.
In Which Help Arrives

11.
In Which the Great Wave Breaks

12.
In Which There Is an Unmasking

13.
In Which My Story Does Not End

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

M
y name is Zita, and I am the thirteenth of thirteen princesses. My twelve sisters have become the subject of legend, even in faraway kingdoms, but I am sure that you have never heard of me.

I first heard the tale of my birth from Cook, who was my friend and my confidante, when I was no more than seven years old. She had just showed me how to roll out a circle of dough for pie crust that didn't stick to the rolling pin, when I brought myself to ask the question that had been on my mind for some time: “Cook, where is my mother?”

Her round, flushed face became very serious, and she put down her rolling pin, dusted off her floury hands, and came to sit beside me at the long wooden table.

“I have been waiting for you to ask,” she said. “You must listen as I tell you, and you must not interrupt.”

Solemnly, I nodded.

“Your mother was the queen, the wife of our king,” Cook began. Immediately I interrupted.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “She was the queen?
Our
queen? Do you mean that King Aricin is my father—that horrid man? Wait—do you mean that the princesses are my
sisters
?”

Cook glared at me and reached for the rolling pin, and I ducked instinctively, though I knew she would never so much as tap me with it.

Before Cook could go on, the underbutler, Burle, appeared at the kitchen door for his midmorning tea. He was a short man with the face of a weasel and whiskers to match, and I despised him. Whenever he entered a room, I left, so I took the opportunity to scurry under his arm and out of the kitchen as Cook hurried to put the kettle on.

In an upper hallway I found Chiara, the housekeeper, who loved to gossip. I hoped she would tell me more. She paused in her dusting when she saw me.

“Do you not have a task to do, Zita?” she scolded me.

“If not, I can find you one quick enough!”

“No, wait,” I begged. “Cook has told me something amazing. Is it true? Are the princesses my sisters?”

Chiara's beady eyes softened. “True enough,” she told me.

“Then the queen—the queen was my mother?”

Chiara gave a bark of laughter. “You'd never know it to look at you, but it is so!”

I could hardly take this in, it was so strange and wondrous. I was a princess! No matter that my hands were reddened from washing dishes and the ends of my hair scorched from working too near the kitchen fire. I was related to the twelve beautiful, golden-haired girls I saw only from a distance, graceful and lovely in their embroidered gowns and delicate jewels. To think about it, I sat behind a potted plant, where no one would bother me, and soon more questions occurred to me. I went back to Cook for answers, knowing that Burle would have finished his tea and departed.

“What did my mother look like?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, Queen Amara was as beautiful as ever a queen could be,” Cook told me, sprinkling herbs into the soup. She described the queen's silvery hair, and her eyes as blue as a spring-fed lake. My mother loved the king, Cook said, and he adored her. Their marriage was a cause for great rejoicing in the kingdom, for the
king was nearly forty by then and had despaired of ever finding a wife. He would not marry for heirs alone, nor for convenience, but waited for true love. He had many dalliances as he waited, of course, for he was a handsome man in those days.

I could not help myself. “What is a dalliance?” I asked.

Cook's red face turned even redder, and she harrumphed in the way she had when she did not want to answer a question.

“He was well liked, is what I meant,” Cook responded. “Various princesses longed for him, and many others—from ladies in waiting to serving maids—caught his eye. But he bided his time, and he found the love he sought with your mother.”

Within a year, Cook told me, the queen was pregnant. The king had hoped for a son, but when a daughter was born, he was pleased nonetheless. On her naming day, Mother clothed the baby in a silken dress embroidered with pearls and gold, and the king named her Aurelia, his golden one. “All our children shall have names beginning with A, like their mother,” the king said fondly. They delighted in the child's calm smiles and sparkling blue eyes. Her hair came in golden blond, and even as a baby she was beautiful, like the queen.

“That is the princess Aurelia?” I asked.

Cook nodded, allowing the interruption.

I hugged myself in pleasure. The most beautiful, the kindest of princesses—and she was my oldest sister!

“Your father loved your sister Aurelia so much that at her birth, he banned magic from the kingdom, fearing that an evil witch might curse her at her christening, as has happened so often,” Cook informed me. I had heard tales of princesses cursed at their birth by wicked or jealous witches, and I thought this a very wise and loving thing for a father to do.

The soup that Cook had forgotten to stir boiled over at that point, and she blamed me and banished me to the upper floors again. This time, I hid behind a piece of statuary and waited. I knew the princesses—my sisters!—would soon be going out for their daily exercise—a walk, or a ride on horseback, or a turn about the lake in their little rowboats. Sure enough, a few moments later I heard their cheerful voices and the sound of their heels clattering down the stairs. Nurse led them, and to my joy Aurelia was last in line. As she passed by me, I stepped out and plucked at her skirt, whispering, “Princess!”

Aurelia stopped and turned, and her fair face broke into a smile of genuine pleasure.

“Little Zita!” she said. “How pretty your curls look today!”

I pulled at my red ringlets, which I hated.

“I have always wished for curls,” Aurelia told me. “Do you know what I have to do to curl my hair?”

I shook my head.

She laughed. “It is an endless process—and sometimes painful. You are lucky!”

I was tempted to go on talking of hair and curls, but I needed to know something.

“Princess,” I said hesitantly, “I have heard—is it true?—do you know—that you and I are sisters?”

I waited for her to gasp in shock, or laugh at me, or look at me with disdain. She did none of those things. Instead she took my hands quickly in hers.

“Yes, Zita. I do know this,” she said in a low voice. “We all do. And I am so glad that you know it now! We've hated that we've had to keep it secret from you.”

“Princess Aurelia!” Nurse called from below us.

Aurelia looked hurriedly around, and I could see worry in her face. “But I cannot talk now—I must join the others.” And before I could say another word, she squeezed my hands, whirled about, and hurried off to catch up with the rest. I watched her go, puzzled by the mystery that seemed to surround our relationship. But still, I was so happy. Just an hour before, I had been nothing more than a kitchen maid, with no relations, no real friend but Cook. Now I had sisters—twelve of them!

For a while I was content simply to know this and to watch my sisters and imagine myself with them. As I grew older, though, I began to have more and more questions. No one seemed to want to tell me everything, but by the time I was eleven I had pieced together the story of my sisters' births from tales told by Chiara, Cook, and Salina, Bethea, and Dagman, the maids with whom I shared a room. They told me that soon after Aurelia was born—very soon, according to the midwives—Mother was again with child. This time she delivered twins, both girls, both blue-eyed and yellow-haired. The king was a little distressed, but he masked it well. He proclaimed the twins Alanna, because he thought her handsome, and Ariadne, because her steady gaze was a chain that clasped his heart, and he smiled as if he meant it. After dinner each day, he visited the nursery and played with Aurelia and rocked the twins. Chiara said to me in a rare sentimental moment, “I remember thinking that I had never seen such a happy family.”

A year later, Mother was brought to bed again. Again, a girl, Althea, issued forth. The king scowled this time when he heard the news. Adena came next, then Asenka, and then another set of twins, Amina and Alima. By the time these twins were born, the king no longer appeared at the ceremonies, and Mother was thin, approaching gaunt, and tired, though she was only twenty-five.

When Akila, the ninth child, was born, the king was out hunting, and he did not return until two days later. Whispers began in the palace about his distress over the unending line of girls. After the springtime birth of Allegra, and again when Mother bore Asmita, the king raged through the gardens, scattering servants before him like chaff before a wind.

The twelfth baby was born after a hard, long labor, and she went nameless for a week. The castle buzzed with the idea of a princess without a name. Then a kitchen maid suggested the name Anisa to the cook, who repeated it to a downstairs maid. The downstairs maid whispered the name to an upstairs maid, who left it written on a scrap of paper in the nursery. When Nurse found the paper, she brought it to Mother, and wearily Mother accepted the name, never guessing that it had been the name of the kitchen maid's cat.

The king cursed when he found out the baby was a girl. “No more children,” he proclaimed, and he stopped visiting Mother's room. Mother did not recover fully from Anisa's birth; the doctors were at a loss to find the problem. “I think,” Cook said to me wistfully, “that sadness made her weaken and fail.”

After I learned about Anisa, I stopped asking for a time, fearful of what I would find out. Finally, though, I had to know. I went to Cook, and she told me the last
part of the terrible tale, which began when our nearest neighbor, King Damon, visited our castle. Our guests had grown few over the years. Once, Cook said, our court was a place of great fun, and nobles vied for the invitations that the king and Mother issued for their Twelfth Night and May Day festivals. There were no more of these, but still the occasional wandering king, bored with peace in his own kingdom, might happen by. King Damon brought with him his family—his wife, frumpy Queen Eleanora, and his four sons. Four sons! Aurelia, Alanna, Ariadne, and Althea, now eleven, ten, and nine years old, were thrilled, but the king could hardly bear it. To have to entertain a man who had not one heir but four was too much for him. The four boys played with his older daughters, laughing and dancing about the parquet floor of the drawing room, and the king watched them in silence as he drank glass after glass of wine. After the jesters and tumblers had finished and the guests had stumbled off to bed, he made his way down the long-unused hall to Mother's room. In a fury, he hammered on her door, and when she rushed to open it, he cried out, “I must have a son!”

Now Cook took my hands in hers, and I felt from the dampness of her palms that I would not like this part of the story.

“Nine months later,” she told me, “on a day so hot and oppressive that even to move was to sweat, your mother's labor began. This time, the king paced the floor outside the room in agony. Doctors came and went, looking ever more worried. If I had not known that magic was banned from the kingdom, I would have said that a bad enchantment was at work that day. The heat grew, and at last the sky darkened and cracked open with lightning.”

Cook paused in her story, and I held my breath, caught between dread and anticipation. “A moment later there came a scream so high and horrifying that the glass in the labor room's windows cracked. The king rushed inside to find a wild scene of frantic doctors and midwives, trying to staunch the blood that flowed from your mother. In the midst of mayhem, a baby's cry sounded, and the king scrambled to find the source of the cry.”

She paused again, and I trembled, for I knew what she would say.

“It was a girl,” she told me gently. “It was you.”

I wept then, knowing that I was the thirteenth daughter born to a king who wanted only a son. In every tale I know, the number thirteen is bad luck. If thirteen come to dinner, another invitation is sent out quickly, another place laid. When houses are numbered, thirteen
is always skipped. I felt that I was the unluckiest person in the world. My tears fell still harder when Cook said, “Your mother died that night, my child. It was through no fault of yours, but simply from exhaustion and loss of blood.”

“If it was not my fault,” I sobbed, “then why does the king—my father—hate me?”

Cook sighed and wiped my face with the towel she kept always threaded through her apron strings.

“He was wild with grief and despair,” she told me. “He loved your mother so, though he seemed to have forgotten that over time. But I am sure he does not blame you or hate you.”

Cook was overcome and did not want to go on, but I sensed that there was more to the tale. I went in search of Chiara and found her moving from room to room upstairs. Her keys rattled on their long chain as she surveyed each chamber, making sure fires were lighted, windows sparkled, and drapes were drawn or open as the king preferred. I scuttled along behind her as quickly as I could.

“Oh yes, it's all true,” she said, her dour face glowing with the pleasure of telling tales. “When he looked at you, his lip twisted up the way it is now; and so it has stayed. And before he left the labor room, he said to Nurse, ‘I never want to see this child. Place her with
the servants. Keep her from my eyes. She has killed her mother, and my hope.'”

I gasped.

Chiara went on. “Nurse protested,” she told me, “saying, ‘She is just a baby. Her mother's death is no fault of hers! Please, Your Majesty, at least give the babe a name!'

“But your father laughed and said, ‘A name? She shall not be Arabella, or Alcantha, or Ava. She is no true daughter of mine. Call her Zita, after the patron saint of servants, and keep her with the servants, out of my sight.' And then he fled the room.

“And so,” Chiara finished, “here you are, and there he is, and what can be done? Oh, child, stop your sniveling and do get out of my way!” And she swept away from me, leaving me to try to make some sense of my world, which I no longer recognized at all.