The Thirteenth Princess Read Free Page B

hair. My mother, I surmised, and I stood long gazing at her faded beauty on the wall.
    Sneaking back out, I placed the chain of keys exactly where I had found it, returned to the kitchen, and ventured to ask Cook about the room.
    â€œThat’s the ballroom,” she said shortly. “Hasn’t been used in…oh, I don’t know how long. A decade, at least. Used to be…” Her voice trailed off, and I waited expectantly for tales of grand balls that had been held there. But Cook’s attention was on the bread, and she brushed me aside as if I had been a fly buzzing around her food.
    That night I passed the peas, dressed in a starched and spotless white apron. I was able to observe the meeting of my sisters and Prince Regan, who was as dark as they were fair, and as handsome as any prince should be. As thrilled as they were at the prospect, when they met him they seemed struck dumb. He kissed their hands and attempted conversation when they sat at table.
    â€œPrincess Aurelia,” he said, “do you play an instrument?”
    Across the table, Aurelia sat with eyes downcast and did not answer. Father’s brow furrowed at her rudeness.
    â€œI love to ride, myself,” the prince addressed Althea,who sat beside him. “Do you enjoy riding, Princess?”
    Again the downcast eyes, and silence.
    Poor Prince Regan became very flustered, and his father and mine took up the conversation, but the dinner ended soon and awkwardly, without my sisters having spoken a single word or raised their eyes from the table.
    My father raged that night, but my sisters had no explanation for their behavior. Appalled by his daughters’ lack of manners, Father brought in a deportment instructor to teach them how to behave in social situations. I thought Master Beolagh a very silly man, obsessed with propriety and manners. I brought tea to the room during one of the lessons, and after observing his teaching, I felt glad for once that I was not a true princess, forced to endure such tedium as learning to eat soup while balancing a book on my head.
    Another prince came a few weeks later, and I heard from Chiara that the same thing occurred—silence, confusion, anger. “Those girls are spoiled rotten,” she said sourly. “A royal prince is not good enough for them!” After that, my father did not invite any more suitors, and my sisters spent more time in their bedchamber, alone.
    Although they were princesses and each should have had her own bedroom, they preferred to sleep alltogether in a long room with a sloping roof. Less damp and drafty than the rest of the palace, it had a fireplace at each end and six large beds on each long wall. The mattresses were plump and comfortable, the bedclothes were silk, and the quilts were patchworked velvet, each of a different color. There were beautiful Arabian carpets on the floor, cushioning my sisters’ delicate feet from the cold tile and warming the place with color.
    I loved that room. It was there that my sisters gossiped and combed one another’s hair, discussed upcoming birthdays, swayed before mirrors, and practiced their dance steps in the spaces between the beds. I longed to go there, to spend time with my sisters. I walked past whenever I could find time and waved to whichever girls were inside, and they waved back. We all feared our father’s wrath, though, if he should see us together, for as the years passed he grew not less bitter about my mother’s death, but more.
    It was my eighth sister, Alima, the adventurous one, who one day hid in the bedroom’s huge closet during a game of hide-and-seek and discovered a false back to the space. She removed it and found a dumbwaiter there. We had dumbwaiters that ran between the kitchen and the dining hall, to bring up the food while it was still hot and bring down the dirtied dishes without breaking them. Nobody knew about this hidden dumbwaiter, though. It ran from the back