Just Ella Read online

  “Well . . . uh . . . actually,” he said, stumbling over his words, “there is something I’m . . . um . . . trying to find a way to do.”

  “What?” I asked, full of curiosity. I had no idea what he might say.

  Jed looked down.

  “You know about the Sualan War?” he asked softly.

  If he hadn’t been acting so strangely, I might have joked, “Do you take me for an imbecile?” Even the village idiot knew to curse Suala, because they were trying to take lands that belonged to our kingdom. At least, that’s what everybody said. I sometimes wondered what Suala’s version was. My father had once said—in the privacy of our own home—that the two kingdoms had been fighting for so long that they’d rendered the land useless to anyone.

  “You want to fight in the war?” I asked incredulously. There were some who did—I remembered boys in my village who spoke of nothing but the glory they would earn in battle. But Jed didn’t seem the type.

  “No,” he said, as if surprised I might suggest such a thing. “I wouldn’t give a minute of my life for that. It’s the refugees, the people who have been thrown off their lands by the war. Every time the battle lines shift, the people on the border lose crops, houses, barns—sometimes everything. And some of them have nowhere to go. So, I want to set up camps to take care of them, to make sure no one starves or freezes or dies because of what our kingdom is doing.”

  His eyes flashed, and I thought, This is the key to Jed. This is the most important thing in the world to him. The whole time I’d known him, which was about three weeks now, he’d seemed mopey and directionless, like an old sheepdog who’d been taken away from his herd. As nice as he’d been to me, I knew he didn’t want to spend his life teaching pompous words to pretend princesses. So this was what he really wanted to do instead.

  “Have you told anyone?” I asked. “Have you asked your father or the king or whoever—”

  “Of course!” Jed said, so forcefully I jerked back against my brocaded chair.

  “And?”

  He shook his head mournfully.

  “They put me off,” he said. “They say they’ll study the possibility; they’ll draw up a committee to see what ought to be done; they’ll think it over. . . . Not that they’d ever let me go, anyhow, because I’m supposed to be studying to take over my father’s job. But meanwhile, people are dying.”

  I tilted my head to the side, considering.

  “Why do you need anyone’s permission? Why don’t you just do it yourself?”

  Jed gave me a condescending look, the first time he’d made me feel like the empty-headed piece of fluff everyone else seemed to expect me to be.

  “I have no great wealth of my own,” he said bitterly. “I don’t want to feed these people just for a day. I want to give them their lives back. But maybe you—”

  Something crept into his voice, a slyness I did not associate with Jed.

  “What?” I asked, my heart beating unusually fast.

  “When you are queen—or maybe sooner than that, once you have the prince’s confidence—maybe you can plead my cause for me. You could convince the prince to bankroll my refugee camps. It wouldn’t take much, not compared with the vastness of the royal treasury. Not compared with what they’re already spending on the war.” Jed leaned forward, beseechingly. “Will you help?”

  I felt a strange disappointment. What had I expected him to say? Given who I was, where I was, what I was—a female, now a female of the nobility—how else could I be expected to help? And I was no stranger to the power of pillow talk. Early on in my father’s marriage to Lucille, while I still thought of the tangled relations in our household as a war that I could win, I had many times thought I’d convinced my father of something—that Corimunde and Griselda should be required to wash dishes with me, say—only to hear the decision reversed the next morning. I would watch my father and Lucille retire to his room together and imagine Lucille purring her arguments—“Oh, yes, I’m all for fairness, but Corimunde and Griselda have such delicate skin, an affliction Ella is fortunate not to suffer”—without me there to counter her. So now I was supposed to possess that—not real power, not the right to make any decisions myself, but the power of persuasion, when coupled with a kiss and a breathy whisper and the rest of what men and women do in bed? Unaccountably, the thought disgusted me.

  It was a long moment before I realized Jed was still waiting for my answer. He was leaning so far forward in his chair that a small breath might knock him off and send him tumbling gracelessly to the floor. His expression was so full of hope, I wanted to cry.

  “I’ll—” I cleared my throat. “I’ll do what I can.”

  7

  That afternoon, while sitting with my ladies-in-waiting working on a particularly vexatious tapestry pattern, I couldn’t get my conversation with Jed out of my mind. I jabbed my needle in and out, the loops of white thread accumulating as slowly as milk in a pail from an old cow. We were working on a scene of knights at a tournament, and my meager needlework skills had been exiled to the clouds in the sky. Simprianna, for all her mental deficiencies, was surprisingly brilliant at knowing where to stitch to make an expression look jubilant or defeated, so she was doing faces. I stopped for a second and watched her needle flying in and out, creating a sense of fervor on every visage.

  Jed had looked just as fervent declaring his hopes for the refugee camps. I remembered thinking years ago, about the time my father married Lucille, that everyone must have something that matters to them more than anything else, that blinds them to everything else. How else to explain my father and Lucille? He was learned and honorable and true; she was base and lazy and greedy and mendacious. She was probably intelligent enough, but she did not care about knowledge, only gossip and fashion and getting her own way.

  For a while I feared that what people whispered was true, that my father was lovesick, blinded to her faults by his desire to touch her skin, caress her body, join his to hers. (She was not bad-looking, if you didn’t know her.) I don’t think most twelve-year-olds want to think about their parents having intimate relations; how much worse that my father’s relations were with Lucille. But then, by listening at doors and watching them together, I hit upon what I was sure was the truth.

  Somehow she’d figured out that his books mattered most to him, and she’d been crafty enough to pretend to love them too. I believe she’d even promised to catalogue them for him—a task he’d been vowing to undertake for as long as I could remember but despaired of ever accomplishing. Of course, after they were married, her true views came out. I never saw anyone look as hurt as he did the day she shoved away a particularly rare book he was showing her and snarled, “Get that vile, dusty thing away from me.”

  I’m ashamed to say I tried to deepen the hurt, reporting to him every inane, vicious, and ignorant comment she had ever made about him or his books. Childishly, I thought he could just undo his mistake, unmarry her. I didn’t understand honor and promises—or didn’t want to. He began traveling a lot more, to search for ever-rarer books, but also to avoid Lucille. And that was what he was doing when he died.

  So that was my father’s passion and where it led him. And now I knew Jed’s. Wanting to help those hurt by the war was a noble cause, to be sure. Why did that bother me? Was it because I didn’t have a cause of my own? Was I supposed to?

  I brought my needle in and out dozens of times, pondering that question. I am engaged, I reminded myself. Prince Charming is supposed to be your passion. No—he is your passion. You love him.

  Somehow, though, it seemed like I needed more. Maybe it was because I’d won him too easily. I’d known girls in my village who’d set their hearts on a particular boy, then plotted their days so they’d be coming out of the baker’s just in time to bump into their beloved as he was leaving the miller’s. They’d save and scrimp for weeks to have enough sugar to bake a pie for their intended, only to say, giggling, “Oh, it was just some extra we had—thought you might wan
t it,” when the pie was delivered, as if any sign of wanting him would scare him off (which it sometimes did).

  I had hardly plotted to ensnare the prince. I’d never even dreamed it was possible. I’d just gone to the ball as a lark, partly out of curiosity, partly to spite Lucille. (Would I have cared about going if she hadn’t forbidden me?)

  I felt a surge of triumph—oh, how I had spited her. Then I was instantly ashamed. Perhaps, truly, what mattered most to me was beating Lucille. It didn’t seem like a very worthy cause. As much as she’d messed up the last five years of my life, Lucille had problems of her own. Now that I was in the castle, and she was still in the village, I shouldn’t think of her as the enemy anymore. I should probably just pity her and find some other goal to focus on. But what?

  My thread tangled then, and I had to interrupt a discussion about dressing gowns to get Simprianna to help me unsnarl it. (She was also quite skilled at that. I suppose I was too hard on her, considering her an absolute simpleton.) I apologized profusely to Simprianna, as if that could make up for all the cruel things I’d ever thought about Lucille.

  “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how it happened.”

  Silently Simprianna picked at the knots in my thread with a perfectly curved fingernail. Then she began to pull out my last row of stitches.

  “Wait,” I said. “Why—” Then I saw a snarl that I hadn’t even noticed at the beginning of the row. All my stitches since had been useless.

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. I’m sorry about that too. I guess my mind was wandering.”

  Simprianna barely glanced up.

  “Aye, Princess,” she sighed. “Can you not ask your fairy godmother for help?”

  “My what?” I asked.

  She and a few of the others giggled. I heard someone whisper, on the other side of the tapestry, “Well, of course she has to pretend she doesn’t know. . . .”

  “Nothing, Princess,” Simprianna murmured, keeping her eyes on her work.

  I looked around. All twelve of the other ladies had their heads bent low over the tapestry. Nobody was going to enlighten me. But—fairy godmother? It reminded me of Mary asking about magic. I decided the castle folk, servants and nobility alike, were a superstitious lot. I wish I had had a fairy godmother to protect me all those years I lived with the Step-Evils. Of course, I wouldn’t need one now.

  Would I?

  8

  Once he’d shared his dream for the refugee camps, Jed seemed to feel he could tell me anything. My daily religion lessons were taken up less and less with talk of the trinity or the “corporeal evidence of His Holiness”—whatever that meant—and more and more with banter, jokes, and Jed’s tales about his childhood.

  “I feel sorry for any child who didn’t get to grow up in this castle,” he said one sunny morning a few weeks after he’d taken over for his father.

  “Why?” I asked in surprise. By then, Jed surely realized my own childhood had taken place outside of any palace walls. And if he didn’t, I hardly cared if he found out. “I would think a child in this castle was to be pitied. All those people around telling you to sit up straight, don’t speak while the minister of the treasury is speaking, and don’t spill your soup on the foreign ambassador or it’ll start a war—”

  Jed laughed.

  “Yes, there was rather too much of that for my taste. But we children were kept mostly out of sight, so we didn’t have to worry about foreign policy. What I meant was . . . have you never noticed the length of the banisters on the main staircase?”

  I nodded, remembering my awe the night of the ball at the sight of the grand staircase, which rose from the entrance hall to a spot that would be three stories higher in a normal house. The tallest man I’d ever seen, a carpenter in my village called Tom the Giant, could have lain down on a step with neither his head nor his feet touching the sides. And the staircase was lined on each side by pillars and a banister of rare polished wood that I knew from Lord Reston’s lectures had been brought from faraway lands decades ago.

  “You used to slide down the banisters,” I gasped. I did not confess that I had longed to do that very thing from the moment I’d seen them. But I’d never been near the banisters when there weren’t at least a dozen others with me. And while it would be delightful to see the scandalized expression on Madame Bisset’s face, I did still want to marry the prince. Not to mention, to continue living. Considering that I’d been confined to my room for letting my petticoat slip out and show beneath my skirt for an instant, I had a feeling Madame Bisset would view banister sliding by a princess as a crime worthy of execution.

  “Was it as much fun as it looks?” I asked Jed.

  He grinned in a way that made me think he must have been an awfully ornery little boy.

  “Oh, yes. My brothers and I would sneak out at night and have races, one of us on each side.”

  “Brothers?” I asked.

  “I have three. All younger, and all away at school in the East,” he said.

  “So, will they all become priests like you?” I teased.

  He grimaced.

  “No, ’tis only the oldest who must follow his father’s career. They may do as they wish. They would be allowed to work with the war refugees, as I may not. If any of them wanted to. Which they don’t.”

  “What do they want?” I asked.

  He laughed.

  “To be priest to the king. The one thing they won’t be allowed. What’s that your friend, the servant girl, is always saying?”

  I’d told him about Mary.

  “Oh, you mean”—I mustered up my best imitation of her voice—“don’t that beat all?”

  We laughed together, at either my poor imitation of Mary’s words or the perversity of Jed’s brothers.

  “I wish—,” I started, and immediately clamped my mouth shut. For what I had intended to say was, “I wish I could laugh this way with the prince. I wish I felt as close to him as I do to you.” I didn’t need Madame Bisset around to tell me those were inappropriate words, indecent thoughts. But I shouldn’t worry. The prince and I would feel close as soon as we could be together without a chaperon. I was just lucky that Jed, being a priest in training, didn’t need to be chaperoned in my presence as well.

  “What do you wish, milady?” Jed asked with mock formality.

  Because I had to say something, I blurted out, “I wish I knew if you know the truth about me.”

  I saw a gleam of interest in his eyes, as if he’d been longing to discuss this but hadn’t felt he could bring it up himself. In that instant, I decided to tell him everything.

  “Well, I do know,” he started slowly and carefully, peering straight into my eyes, “that you’re not a Domulian princess, as is claimed.”

  “And how do you know that?” I asked.

  He began ticking off the reasons on his fingers.

  “One, Domulia is the farthest land we know of, and you probably could not have had time to hear of the ball and travel here between the time it was announced and the time it was held.”

  “Maybe I have magical powers,” I teased.

  He seemed strangely jolted by that, but went on.

  “Two, Domulian princesses are famously ugly and wart covered and you, well, are not. Either one. Ugly or wart covered.”

  It was the first time he’d mentioned my appearance since the day we met. His glance made me uncomfortable.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “Three, you once told me a story about your father giving food away to a hungry neighbor. Kings do not live near hungry people, and if they do, they don’t feed them. They employ them. Or banish them.”

  “But maybe my father was an extraordinary king,” I argued.

  Jed ignored that.

  “And, four, you do not remember this, because I was far in the background, practically out of sight, but I was there the day the prince put the slipper on your foot and whisked you away to the palace.”

  I blushed. How had I missed him? Of course, t
hat day I’d had eyes only for the prince. I vaguely recalled that he’d had a crowd of retainers with him, but they had seemed more like props than people.

  “You were? Why?”

  “One of my royal duties,” Jed said with a shrug. “I was supposed to be getting experience advising the prince. Of course, all my advice was disregarded. I said that since your entire village knew about you, the king should announce to the world that his son was marrying a commoner, in a show of unity with his people or some such thing. I thought it would be good for the royal image in the kingdom. But it was decided that acknowledging the truth would insult all the kings who’d hoped to marry off their daughters to Charming. As it is, I’m sure all the foreign kings have heard the rumors and are insulted, but they can’t confront the Charmings without calling them liars.”

  For just that instant, I could imagine Jed as a royal adviser. He would give well-reasoned counsel, but he wouldn’t care enough to be persuasive. Because he’d always be thinking about the refugee camps instead.

  “Why—” I gulped, not quite sure I had the nerve to voice my question. But this might be my only opportunity. “Why is the prince willing to marry a mere commoner?”

  I wanted Jed to look me in the eye and say, “Because he’s fallen head over heels in love with you. Don’t you know? Everybody’s talking about it. Men older than my grandfather say they’ve never seen a prince so deeply in love.”

  But Jed wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “I’d guess it’s because you’re not ugly and wart covered like a Domulian princess,” he mumbled, staring fixedly at the fire.

  There was a silence between us, and I felt as tongue-tied and uncomfortable as I often did with the prince. Then Jed looked up and gave me a solid grin.

  “So. Do you have magical powers or was there a fairy godmother helping you at the ball, the way everyone claims?” he asked.

  9

  “What?” I asked, flabbergasted. It had been one thing to hear Mary and Simprianna talk about magic and fairy godmothers as if such things truly existed. They were uneducated, bound to be superstitious. Simprianna also couldn’t count beyond ten. But Jed was learned. He was practical. He was a man.