Twenty-Two

 

Vasco woke with a start. It took him a moment to realise that the soft weight on top of him was merely the bed coverings, and not Dokia's dead body. He wasn't sure which nightmares were worse – the ones in the heat of battle, or the ones from the night his village burned. He hoped he hadn't woken the princesses by crying out.

He rose and padded to the door to their bedchamber, pressing his ear to the closed door. Silence greeted him – they were surely asleep. Sighing in relief, he crossed to the narrow window and took a deep breath of the cool night air, hoping it would clear his head. But the view from the window made his breath catch in his throat.

A flotilla of small boats, like a flock of swans, drifted across the lake toward the misty island in the middle. Moonlight glistened on silk and he realised what he was seeing – in each boat sat a princess, wearing a shimmering silk gown and, he didn't doubt, a pair of matching slippers that would be danced to pieces by morning. He shouted, but no one seemed to hear him.

He had to follow them. Vasco dashed for the door to the passage, only to find it barred from the outside. He was locked in.

But if he was locked in...surely they had been, too. There must be another way out – through their bedchamber, perhaps.

He tried that door, but it was locked, too. He hammered on it, then threw his weight against the timber, over and over again. He had to follow them. His very life depended on it.

He heard the scrape of a bolt and the door cracked open. "What is it?" a sleepy female voice asked.

Had he imagined the boats? If the princesses were still in their bedchamber, he couldn't have seen them on the lake. Vasco pushed the door wide and strode into the room. A candle burned beside one of the empty beds, but there was not a girl to be seen.

He swore.

"What does that mean?" a female voice asked.

Vasco blinked. Beside the door stood Bianca, wearing nothing but a thin shift, as if she'd been roused from her bed. Shame welled up as he realised he'd been the one to wake her in his panic.

"Forgive me, princess," he said awkwardly. "I had a bad dream, and then I thought I saw something on the lake."

"On the lake?" Princess Bianca crossed to the window beside his bed and peered out. "I don't see anything."

Vasco looked over her shoulder. The boats had reached the mist, which hid them from view. Yet he knew what he'd seen.

"Maybe I dreamed that, too," he admitted.

"When I had troubling dreams as a child, my mother would have one of the maids bring me milk to drink. Ice-cold from the cellars." Bianca smiled at the memory. "I can send for some, if you like?"

Vasco shook his head. "The door is bolted. We are locked in. Though how your sisters managed to get out...I don't know." He wanted to ask her what she knew, but he already felt embarrassed enough. Interrogating a princess was hardly the way to behave after he had woken her so rudely.

"Wine, then?" she asked, offering the jug.

Kun had warned him not to drink the wine. "NO!" he said, then added, "It might dull my wits. I will need all the wits I have to solve this mystery. Is there anything you can tell me about it, princess?"

Sadly, Bianca shook her head. "I don't know where they go. Until tonight, I didn't believe they went anywhere at all, yet they have gone. And tomorrow there will be a pile of shoes on the threshold of our room for me to trip over."

Vasco managed a smile. "A graceful princess like yourself would never do something so clumsy."

Bianca laughed so hard she had to sit down. "I am many things, but graceful isn't one of them. As you will soon find out, if you spend much time with me."

"I have only three days," he replied. Three days left to live, unless he found a way to follow the princesses across the lake. But he didn't tell Bianca that, for he would sound like a whining coward, when he was neither. If he would die for his failure, so be it.

She sighed. "So you do." She glanced up. "Perhaps tomorrow night you should hide in our bedchamber, so you can see where they go. Wearing your new cloak, you will be invisible in the shadows." She reached out to touch the wool cloak Kun had given him. In fact, her words echoed Kun's almost exactly.

Yet she looked the polar opposite of the old witch. Where Kun wore so many layers of clothing she appeared shapeless, Bianca wore a thin shift that clung to her curves even as it concealed them, but barely. She truly was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and in the moonlight shining through the window, she seemed infused with a kind of magic that turned her from a woman into a goddess. The kind armies would die for.

Yet she was still a woman, as much as he was a man. Increasingly aware of how little clothing they wore and how much his body desired her, he forced himself to shut down all such thoughts. She was a princess, which made her untouchable by one such as him. That she spoke to him at all was an honour he did not deserve.

"Perhaps I will. It's too late for that tonight, though. It appears our birds have flown," he said. He bowed. "I am sorry I woke you, princess. It will not happen again."

She rose, unwittingly giving him a glimpse down the front of her shift before she straightened. Vasco had to close his eyes, but it was too late. Those creamy breasts would haunt his dreams until the day he died.

In three days.

"Pleasant dreams, Vasco," she said.

He didn't reply.