Page 17 of The Abandoned Princess

I moved to the small section of my room that acted as a kitchen, preparing a simple meal that I ate at my sturdy wooden table and chair. The two pieces of furniture formed the center of my ever-more-elaborate exercise routines—routines I should practice once I finished eating.

But even without the black cloud fogging my thoughts, it was hard to muster the energy for it. My eyes strayed to my shelf of books, but I knew they would be equally unable to hold my attention. I had read every volume more than once—both the titles Eulalie begrudgingly supplied and those smuggled up by Charli and carefully concealed among the others.

But my thoughts were too busy focusing on a princess who didn’t feature among my dresses—one whose stories I had only heard about from Celine. I had claimed to be interested in Celeste’s godmother-gifted beauty, but I only had the mildest curiosity about her looks. My true interest lay in her other giftings. The village children didn’t know about Princess Celeste’s alter ego as the spymaster Aurora, but I couldn’t help pinning some hope in it.

Everyone said Celeste was not only the most beautiful but also the most intelligent of all the royals. In the first year of my imprisonment, I had been sure her network would hear the rumors of me, and she would find a way to see through the enchantment.

That hope had proved to be unfounded, but it might be different if Celeste herself ended up in the village. The possibility of such an eventuality had always been too small to even consider, but the tour changed everything.

From the conversations the night before, the royal guard were keeping the king’s itinerary a closely guarded secret. The honored towns and villages were only being notified of the royal arrival just before it happened. There must have been rumors it might come this way, but I suspected Charli had kept those from me on purpose. She wouldn’t have wanted to get my hopes up until it was confirmed the royals would be coming to our remote corner of the kingdom.

I finished my food and started striding up and down the room. I could sit around doing nothing, just waiting to see if Charli would be able to lure a royal to the clearing, and holding onto the foolish hope that royal might be Celeste. Or I could climb down and do what I’d never done before—go as far as the village and see the tour’s arrival for myself.

I stopped my thoughts there. I couldn’t let my jittery impatience get the better of me. Now, of all times, I couldn’t afford any self-indulgent escapes, even of the shortest duration. With my birthday fast approaching, Eulalie might reappear at any time, and I couldn’t let her catch me out of the tower. I had long ago imagined every possible nightmare scenario that might happen if she did, and it wasn’t worth the risk.

It was the same risk that meant I hadn’t seen even a glimpse of Lori in days. I couldn’t allow a moment’s impatience to ruin the sacrifices we had both made.

I groaned and paced faster. After all this time, I had grown used to my situation, but sometimes the desperate desire to be free of the tower hit me as strongly as it had in the first few weeks. But I couldn’t lose focus now.

I had accepted my captivity for five long years for a number of reasons. Many of them were purely self-interested, of course. It might give me immediate relief to go striding off into the village and beyond, but there wasn’t a lot of point to escaping when no one would be able to see or hear me. Food I ate would have to be stolen, as would clothes and any other necessities. And I wouldn’t even be able to interact with the objects around me unless I was somewhere out of sight. Written notes left in an obvious place or delivered by a child would appear blank. In short, I would have to live in the world as a ghost.

And worse than that, I would have to always be on the look out over my shoulder because there was one adult who could see me. One adult who had killed her previous, unruly test subjects.

As long as I appeared to stay meekly in my tower, Eulalie would supply food, material, books, even information on occasion. But if I showed any rebellion…I shivered.

I had felt guilty enough just convincing the eight-year-old Charli to bring me a rope. Could I really be sure there would be no ramifications for her or her family if she assisted me? But I had only been thirteen myself back then and desperate to be free.

Even after she had found a rope with enough length, it had taken a painfully long time for any of the children to succeed at getting it to me. They had tied one end to a rock, but getting it through my window had been a challenge. In the end Simon had managed it, spinning the rope quickly enough to get the necessary height and releasing it at the right moment to send it shooting upward at the correct angle.

I closed my eyes and relived the magical feeling of grass beneath my feet and warm arms hugging me tightly. Spurred on by Lori’s concerns—called up to me at night, after the children had left—I had planned to keep my time out of the tower short. I had intended it as merely the prelude to more elaborate trips and an eventual escape. But it had proved much more difficult to climb up than to climb down.

After two hours, much sweating, and a great deal of grunting, I had finally scraped myself back up over the lip of the window. I don’t know how long I had stayed sprawled on my back on that occasion, but thankfully I had roused myself enough to pull up the rope, detach it from the beam I had used as an anchor, and conceal it in the chest.

In retrospect, I should have hidden it somewhere craftier. But at the time I was just relieved Eulalie hadn’t appeared an hour earlier. When she discovered the rope, she was furious, recognizing instantly that I was plotting an escape. But it didn’t seem to occur to her that I might have already managed a brief stretch of freedom only to return to my cage.

She had confiscated the rope, of course, and threatened many dire consequences on the nearby village if she ever found me with such a thing again. After that, my brief excursions from the tower had been achieved by tying together my sheets, blankets, and most of my dresses. I had ripped more than one in the process, and gotten a nasty bump on my rear end when one of my knots failed mid-climb.

Such excursions happened only on occasions when I was certain Eulalie was far from the tower, and now was hardly an opportune time for one. Clearly she knew about the children and allowed our interactions—monitoring when they lost the ability to see me was part of her testing. But that acceptance had limits.

The children had helped me with open hearts, and I had to protect them and their families. Even if I could have made a proper escape, I wouldn’t have saved myself and Lori and left them to Eulalie’s vengeance. It certainly wasn’t worth taking the risk just so I could live as a ghost.

My goal had to be freeing myself of the enchantment and then taking Eulalie down. And playing along with her was my best hope of convincing her to set me free at the end of the test. If she thought I had been a help rather than a hindrance during these years, it was possible she’d balk at killing me and release me instead. Especially since I had been preparing a convincing argument of why it would benefit her.

I gave up striding back and forth in favor of lying on the floor and staring at the tower’s rafters. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, but eventually I roused myself to eat again. After that, the normal routines took over. I tidied, cleaned, and prepared myself for the evening as usual.

The skies had cleared after the storm, and the moon was large in the sky, so even when night fell, the darkness was far from complete. I packed away the extra blankets I had dragged out during the rain, rejoicing in the warmer weather. I had always loved nights that remained mild even after the sun’s departure.

“Daisy!”

The shout made me drop the blankets and rush for the window. It sounded like Charli, but she never came to visit me after dark.

I had left the wooden shutters open to enjoy the night air, so I leaned out to peer down at the ground. Charli stood there, squinting up at the light that must have been pouring from my window.

It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the softer moonlight as I took in the slim girl and the stranger standing beside her. Not only was he clearly well over thirteen, but I had never seen him before. If he was from the village, he had already been over thirteen when I first arrived, and he had never been among those who visited the clearing at night for a secret rendezvous.

A current of excitement ran through me. Had Charli already succeeded? Had she brought me a royal?

CHAPTER 7

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