Prisoner

Things had not gone as Oliver had hoped, but they had certainly gone as he had expected.

He was being held in a tiny attic room at the palace while Karl and the others had been taken to the Bruch jail. King Gregor didn’t believe Oliver was an earl, but apparently being the leader of the bandits, the abductor of Princess Petunia, and the claimant to a divided earldom made him too interesting for the regular jail.

But not interesting enough for immediate questioning. Oliver sat in the little room until evening, when the door was unlocked and a dinner tray shoved inside. An hour later the door opened and a hand groped around for the tray. Oliver obligingly pushed it closer to the door with his foot.

“Every compliment to the royal chef,” Oliver called as the door closed.

The guard only grunted.

He grunted, too, when Oliver thanked him for the breakfast tray. And Oliver thanked him for lunch as well.

And that was all Oliver did. Sit in the room. Sleep. Eat. And try to get the burly guard to do more than grunt.

In the late afternoon, he heard voices outside his room, and the door swung all the way open. The guard stood in the doorway, his rifle held crosswise, and behind him Oliver saw skirts of red-sprigged muslin.

“Hello,” Oliver said cautiously.

“Hello,” said a voice, and Poppy peeped around one of the guard’s large arms. “Are you well?”

“A little bored,” Oliver said. “But otherwise unharmed.”

A spark of amusement lit her eyes. “I’ll send up some books. You can read, can’t you?”

“All the Wolves of the Westfalian Woods can read,” Oliver said grandly.

“Even the ones with four legs?”

“Poppy,” someone whispered loudly from a hiding place a little way down the passage. “What are you doing?”

Oliver guessed that it was Daisy, who seemed a good deal more timid than her twin. He gave Poppy a wink over the guard’s arm and raised his voice a little. “I have endeavored to teach them myself,” he said. “And they are coming along nicely.”

“So tell me,” Poppy said, “what is an educated young man with courtly manners, who even teaches wolves to read, doing robbing coaches in the middle of the forest?”

“Poppppyyyy,” moaned her sister.

“Hush, Pan,” said Poppy without taking her eyes off Oliver.

Not Daisy then, but Pansy, who was less than a year older than Petunia. Oliver considered his answer for a long time. It was possible that Poppy and Pansy were here out of mere curiosity, without their father’s permission. But it was also possible that King Gregor wanted Oliver to reveal some dastardly intent while flirting with Gregor’s beautiful daughters.

“Well, Your Highness,” Oliver replied at last, “I needed to feed my people. And after the depredations of the war, and with our homes and farms gone, we had no other recourse.”

“Your people?”

Poppy asked it at the same time Pansy asked, “What happened to the farms?”

“When the border was redrawn, some of the farms in my earldom ended up Analousia,” Oliver explained. “They were given to Analousian families who had lost their lands in the war. Some of them were near the manor, however, and that was given to the Grand Duke Volenskaya, who became the Duke of Hrothenborg.”

“That’s where Pet is staying,” Pansy said, and Oliver heard a rustling as she came closer.

“That’s right,” Oliver said.

“So you really are an earl,” Poppy mused.

The guard snorted at this, but Oliver and Poppy ignored him.

“Yes, I am,” Oliver said simply.

“Then why didn’t you come to Bruch and explain to Father what had happened?” Poppy studied him for a moment. “Or, your father would have, I guess.”

“My father died in the war,” Oliver said. “I became the earl when I was seven. My mother’s family did not approve of the marriage; I doubt anyone even knew that I existed. My mother tried to have me confirmed in my title and to petition for the return of our lands, but that was during the uproar over the worn-out slippers and the dying suitors. Since my mother is Bretoner, she was afraid to bring attention to herself.”

“Bretoner?” Pansy had crept even closer. Oliver could see the edge of a pink muslin gown just peeping around the edge of the door. “Did she know Mother?”

“Indeed,” Oliver said. He felt like he was holding out breadcrumbs for birds, and any sudden movement would make them take flight. Or, in Poppy’s case, peck him. “She was one of your mother’s ladies-in-waiting. But her family wanted her to return home to marry a Bretoner lord, and my father’s family had a second cousin handpicked to marry him.”

“No wonder she didn’t dare come to the palace,” Poppy said. “Bishop Angiers would have had her on trial for witchcraft in a heartbeat. But don’t worry, the Church has long since made things right, and he got what he deserved.”

“That’s good,” Oliver said. The way that Poppy kept looking over her shoulder made Oliver think that they would leave soon. It was time to ask his own questions.

“Are my men all right?”

“For now,” Poppy said. “Until Father decides what to do with you.”

“That’s good,” Oliver said again, not sure what else to say. He wanted them released, but he supposed that they were just as guilty. “And Petunia? Have you heard from your sister?”

“Not since the first day,” Pansy said.

She pushed in next to Poppy so that she could see him around the guard’s elbow. She was as tall as Poppy, with shining dark-brown hair and blue eyes. An utterly lovely girl, as all the princesses were, yet Oliver thought Petunia was far more beautiful.

“We got one letter explaining that she’d gotten lost and had to find her own way to the manor, but nothing since. Did you really kidnap her?”

“It was an accident, but yes,” Oliver said. “She saw me and my brother with our masks off, so we snatched her before she could raise the alarm. She stayed with us one night, and then I took her to the manor. Quite unharmed, I assure you.”

“And things at the estate, they seemed … all right … to you?” Pansy pressed.

Oliver started to say that they had been fine, but then he stopped. “I don’t know.” He leaned forward a little, conscious more than ever of the guard. “Your Highnesses, I saw … creatures in the garden of the manor. People … made of shadow. I think they were trying to get to Petunia.” Oliver moved back a little, waiting for Poppy to scoff or Pansy to squeak in fright.

But both the princesses surprised him.

Poppy shrank back, and her hands twisted in her skirts. It was Pansy who stood up straighter and looked him in the eye.

“Shadowy creatures?” Pansy’s voice was shrill despite her stern posture. “What nonsense! Come, Poppy, we’re going.” She tugged Poppy’s arm to make her move.

Oliver stared after them. They’d believed him—he knew they had. But why were they pretending they hadn’t?

The guard glared at Oliver. “If you’re lying, there’s a special place in hell for you.” He slammed the door in Oliver’s face, locking it with a scraping of metal that made Oliver’s teeth ache.

He hadn’t been dreaming the shadows in the garden. One look at Poppy’s face told him that much, and Pansy’s and the guard’s reactions had confirmed it.

“But what are they?” Oliver asked his empty room.

After another night and morning spent pacing the tiny room, Oliver was frantic. His mother and Simon would be beside themselves with anxiety, he wanted reassurance that his men were all right, and he couldn’t stop wondering if the shadow creatures had gone after Petunia again.

Poppy had sent books to him with his dinner tray, but he couldn’t concentrate for more than a pair of minutes. Besides his personal distractions, the books were both rather dry histories of Westfalin. Oliver wasn’t sure whether Poppy was joking or she really thought such things riveting reading for the imprisoned. A scrap of paper fell from one as he leafed through it, but if it had been marking a particular page, he couldn’t find it now.

And then, just when he was expecting his lunch tray, King Gregor sent for him.

Oliver was taken to the same room where he had first met the king, with its long, dark table and the high-backed chairs full of scowling men. The king was at the head of the table, a broad-shouldered man with wiry gray hair and wild eyebrows at his left, a gentle-faced priest at his right. The men along each side of the table were all uniformly older, grim, and dressed in black. This made the pair sitting at the end of the table all the more striking.

Opposite King Gregor at the foot of the table was a young man with unfashionably short hair and a pair of silver knitting needles in his hands. By his side in a cushioned chair sat the only woman in the room. She was gravely beautiful, with golden brown hair held up with garnet-studded combs, a gleaming gold watch pinned to the bosom of her green gown. She was untangling a skein of gray yarn with her slender fingers, and Oliver thought that together the two of them looked remarkably like a woodcut he had seen of the Destinies. If the older man seated on the woman’s other side had been holding a knife, with which the Destinies sever the thread of a man’s life, it would have completed the picture. He was toying with a pen, to Oliver’s relief.

Oliver bowed to the king. “Your Majesty,” he murmured. Then he turned and bowed to the pair at the other end of the table. “Crown Prince Galen, Crown Princess Rose.”

“Smart lad,” grunted the man with the eyebrows at the king’s side. “I’ll give him that.”

“If you’re that smart, why did you turn yourself in, hey?” King Gregor barked.

“Because it was time,” Oliver said.

“Time to stop stealing from the innocent … time to stop stealing the innocent themselves?” King Gregor’s face was red. “If you did indeed abduct my youngest daughter—and why you would boast about it if you hadn’t, I don’t know—she hasn’t said a word about it, nor has the Grand Duchess Volenskaya von Hrothenborg, who is hosting Petunia at her estate!”

“My estate, if it please Your Majesty,” Oliver said, cutting across the bluster. He could see how his mother had quailed at the thought of facing the king.

Gregor thumped the table with his fist. “Still pretending to be an earl?”

“I am an earl,” Oliver said. “The Earl of Saxeborg-Rohlstein. My father was Caspar Gerhard Saxony, the twenty-fifth earl of Saxeborg-Rohlstein. My mother is the Dowager Countess Emily Ellsworth Saxony, once lady-in-waiting to Queen Maude, may her soul rest in peace. My father died in service to the crown, leading a regiment in the war with Analousia. When my mother brought me to Bruch to be confirmed in my title, she found that my earldom had been divided up and given to others, and Bretoners like herself were being accused of witchcraft.”

This statement was followed by the sharpest silence Oliver had ever experienced.

“Your Majesty, I believe that Heinrich might be some help in this matter,” said Prince Galen after the longest minute of Oliver’s life.

“Heinrich? What would he know about it?” King Gregor looked at his oldest son-in-law in distraction, rubbing at his chin as though trying to scrub the clean-shaven skin right off.

“The captain of Heinrich’s regiment was the Earl Caspar Saxony,” Galen said. He took the neatly wound yarn from Rose’s hands with a smile and began wrapping it around one of his knitting needles.

“My father was the captain of the Eagle regiment,” said Oliver. His mother had told him that often and with great pride.

The king raised one eyebrow, and Oliver saw a sudden similarity to Poppy in the expression and the set of his jaw. “Fetch the boy,” the king snapped at one of the guards.

What boy? Oliver wondered.

“To the victor go the spoils, they say,” King Gregor went on after one of the guards had left. “I drew up the border to take whatever spoils I could when the war ended. Which is why I can’t believe I would give Analousia half an earldom.”

“I’m afraid you did, Your Majesty,” said one of the ministers.

Everyone in the room turned to stare at the man, who shuffled through some papers on the table in front of him. He absently stuck a pen behind his ear, leaving streak of black ink on his gray hair.

“Here it is,” he announced. “The earldom of SaxeborgRohlstein was declared defunct, according to this. There are no heirs listed. All dwellings within its borders were declared empty. ‘Estate abandoned, land to be divided,’ it says in your own handwriting, sire. And here is your signature.” He held up the paper for the king’s inspection.

King Gregor snatched it from his hands and studied it. “That’s my hand, all right,” he said after a moment. “But I don’t remember writing this. Why would I say it was abandoned?” He looked around the room, but no one answered. “I’d been to that estate, with Maude, just before the war. It was a fine place!”

Oliver wanted to snatch the paper from the king’s hands and throw it on the fire, as though that would do any good. He caught the crown prince looking at him and glared. The crown prince raised his eyebrows and the fingers of one hand, as though urging Oliver to be calm.

The old minister had more papers to hand to the king. “And here is a copy of the deed giving the estate and surrounding farms to the grand duke as a reward for his service during the war, along with the title of Duke of Hrothenborg.”

“Blustering fool,” the king said, almost to himself. “Made a terrible duke. Does anyone remember what Hrothenborg did to deserve that?” He looked around. “Anyone?”

It seemed that no one did.

“This is highly irregular,” the king remarked, striding around the room. “I’m starting to suspect that it falls into your area of expertise, Galen,” he said to the crown prince.

Oliver wondered what the crown prince’s area of expertise was, and saw he wasn’t the only one. He saw one of the ministers mouth, “Knitting?” to his fellow, who smirked.

The man with the impressive eyebrows did not look puzzled but was looking over the papers with great concern. “This isn’t good, Gregor,” he said in a gravelly voice.

“No, it isn’t, Hans,” the king retorted. “I would like to—”

“Prince Heinrich,” announced the guard at the door, and Oliver’s question was answered as the “boy” King Gregor had sent for entered the room.

He was actually a man in his late twenties who walked with a pronounced limp. He looked a great deal like Galen but slightly shorter and more weather-beaten. And, Oliver supposed, to someone like King Gregor, just a boy.

Oliver himself must appear to be a squalling infant, then.

Heinrich bowed and nodded all around, and then his gaze fixed on Oliver. “Yes, Your Majesty?” he said to his father-in-law without moving his eyes from Oliver.

He was married to Lily, the second oldest princess, Oliver remembered. Also, Oliver thought that Heinrich was Galen’s cousin or some other relation, and looking at them made that obvious. He wondered that the two oldest princesses had been allowed to marry commoners—Galen would be the future king! What had they done to deserve such rewards?

“Heinrich,” King Gregor said. “What was the name of your captain in the war?”

“The Earl of Saxeborg-Rohlstein, Caspar Saxony, sire,” Heinrich said promptly.

“Ever talk about his family?” The man was all but shouting at Heinrich, who looked as though it were nothing out of the ordinary.

“Oh, yes. His wife was foreign, I believe.” Heinrich tilted his head, studying the ceiling as he thought. “I don’t remember her name,” he went on after a moment. “But he always spoke of her with great affection. He had a young son, and then a daughter? Perhaps the youngest was another son …” Heinrich shook his head. “I’m sorry, I just don’t remember much.”

“Does this young man bear any resemblance?” King Gregor asked gruffly.

Heinrich stared intently at Oliver, then nodded. “I marked it as soon as I entered, yes.”

“Very well,” King Gregor said. “You can stay or go.”

“I believe I will go,” Heinrich said deferentially. “Lily is not feeling well.”

“Still?” A cloud passed over the king’s face. “Hans,” he said to the man with the eyebrows. “You could do more good with Lily than here, I’ll wager.”

“Most likely,” said the other man. He handed the papers to Crown Princess Rose before following Heinrich out of the room.

“So,” King Gregor barked at Oliver when the door had closed behind them. “You’re an earl. Now I have to find out if I can hang an earl for banditry, or just keep you in prison for the rest of your life.”