The Princess

For a time, Elias believed they were still in the square.

They had taken him down from the post, but only so they could turn him over. Hands closed around his arms and legs. Someone told him to hold still, and he tried to explain that he had been still, that he had done everything they asked, but the cloth between his teeth made it impossible to speak.

His father was there. That was worse somehow. He wanted him to go home before they started again.

Then the wood beneath him softened, and a woman said they would have to soak the linen longer.

The pain came anyway.

He caught his father’s wrist and felt the tendons shift beneath his fingers.

“I’m here, lad. You’ve got hold of me. Keep hold.”

Elias tried to tell him about the men coming through the smoke.

They were behind him. His father had to turn around.

But his father kept looking at him, and by the time Elias found enough breath to shout, the room had disappeared.

---

There was a battlefield beneath a red sky.

He knew where the ground fell away beyond the smoke. He knew there should have been men on the ridge, though he could not remember their names or why they had left him. Something enormous moved behind the burning trees, dragging one wing through the fire.

He tried to get up.

Hands pressed him down, and he fought them with what little strength remained. Someone was calling him Elias. They kept calling him Elias when there were things in the smoke that would hear.

“Behind you,” he managed. “Father, behind—”

His voice broke into a scream.

For a moment he saw the bedchamber. The shutters were open, and his father was leaning across him with both hands braced against the mattress. Another man stood nearby, grey-haired, his sleeves rolled to the elbow. There was blood on a cloth hanging from his hand.

Then the wings came down, blotting out the window.

He heard himself shouting about angels. He knew, with an urgency that left no room for anything else, that they must not let them inside.

---

Sometimes a girl read to him.

Her voice reached him through places that could not have contained it: across the ruined field, beneath the heavy darkness where he waited for the next blow, through the sound of something scraping at the other side of a door.

She read about a man travelling north with three mules and an elderly brother who objected to every road they took. Elias could never remember where they were going. Whenever he heard her again they seemed to have lost another mule.

Once she stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“He cannot possibly have crossed it there. The river’s far too wide.”

Will answered from somewhere close by.

“Perhaps the mule could swim.”

“The mule has more sense than either of the brothers. It would have stayed at the inn.”

A page turned. Her voice resumed, quieter now, and Elias followed it as far as he could.

Other times she spoke to him without the book. She told him they were changing the sheets, or that the physician needed to look at his back. He did not understand why she always warned him. There was never anywhere he could go.

Once he heard her telling someone to fetch more hot water. There was no uncertainty in her then. The room moved around her voice, feet crossing the floor, a door opening, something heavy being set down.

When she spoke to Elias again, she was nearer.

“Your father’s washing his hands. He’ll be back before we turn you.”

He wanted to ask who she was.

Instead he found himself standing knee-deep in black water while bells rang somewhere beneath it.

---

His mother came and wept where she thought he could not hear.

He tried to open his eyes for her. The effort seemed simple until he attempted it, and then there was nothing in him capable of doing what he asked. He could hear her speaking to his father on the other side of the bed.

There was washing at home. Someone had taken care of it. Someone was looking after the house.

These things troubled him. He wanted to tell her where he had left his good shirt.

When he finally managed to speak, he told her the demons had got through.

Her hand stopped moving over his hair.

Afterwards, for a long while, he could hear the priest praying in the passage.

---

When Elias woke, there was a crack in the plaster above the window.

It ran from the corner of the lintel towards the ceiling, where it divided around a dark knot in the beam. He looked at it for some time. Nothing moved through it. The ceiling remained where it was.

He lay partly on his stomach, supported by pillows along one side. His left arm rested in front of him on the sheet. It looked unfamiliar, the wrist too narrow, the tendons standing out beneath skin that had lost its colour.

He moved his fingers.

The movement worked. Encouraged, he tried to draw his arm closer.

Pain spread across his back with such force that he stopped breathing.

He lay still until he could take a shallow breath again. There was soreness everywhere beneath the sharper hurt: his ribs, his shoulders, the places where his hips met the mattress. Even his throat felt scraped raw.

Will sat by the window with a book open across his knees.

He was not reading. His head rested against the wall, and his eyes were shut. He had a strip of linen wound around one finger.

Elias tried his name twice before any sound came out.

Will lifted his head. For a moment he did nothing at all.

Then he set the book on the floor and came to the bedside.

“Don’t try to get up. I’m going to fetch your father, but first—” He stopped, looking closely at Elias’s face. “Do you know where you are?”

Elias could see a washstand, two chairs, a chest beneath the window. None of it belonged to them.

He moved his head a fraction against the pillow.

“All right. That doesn’t matter. You’re in a house in the city. You’ve been here a while.”

Will reached for a cup, then put it down again and went to the door.

“He’s awake,” he called into the passage. “Come up. He knows me.”

The speed of the footsteps frightened Elias before he understood why.

His father appeared with his shirt open at the neck. He had grown a beard. Not much of one, but enough to change his face, which seemed thinner than it ought to have been.

He crossed the room and knelt where Elias could see him.

“Hello, lad.”

Elias tried to answer. His father reached for the cup Will had abandoned.

“Let’s get some water into you before you start.”

Between them they raised his head a little. The effort of swallowing was astonishing. He managed two mouthfuls before he needed to stop, and his father lowered him with a care that made him wonder what, exactly, they were afraid would break.

“How long?”

The words were hardly more than breath.

His father glanced at Will.

“Twenty-four days.”

Elias looked from one to the other.

It could not be right. There had been the square, and the room, and dreams he did not want to remember. Whatever lay between those things could not have held twenty-four days.

“You’ve woken before,” his father said. “A little at a time. Mostly you didn’t know us.”

Will pulled the chair closer.

“You knew me once, but you thought we were supposed to be hiding from someone. You got quite cross when I wouldn’t put the lamp out.”

Elias remembered fire. He kept his eyes on the cup.

His father stayed beside him, one hand resting on the edge of the mattress. He asked no more questions, and seemed content to be looked at. After a while Elias understood that he was trying not to cry.

That frightened him more than the beard.

---

The physician arrived before Elias could ask much else.

He introduced himself as Master Renn, though he said they had met several times already. He had long fingers and a tired, practical voice. He examined Elias’s eyes, felt the pulse at his wrist, then rested the back of his hand against his cheek.

When he asked whether Elias remembered the previous evening, Elias shook his head.

“You had a difficult night. I would rather you didn’t spend this morning trying to recover it.”

He helped Mistress Annet turn him far enough to examine the dressings.

Elias had thought he was prepared for the pain this time. By the time they settled him again his face was wet and he had bitten the inside of his mouth. Nobody commented on either.

Renn covered him and waited for his breathing to ease.

“There are places healing as I would wish, and places I am less pleased with. You’ll need to stay as you are. No attempts to sit up, even if you begin to feel capable of it.”

Elias had never felt less capable of anything.

“How long before I can go home?”

“Your father has been asking me that for three weeks. I’m afraid waking up does not entitle you to a better answer.”

There was enough dryness in the man’s voice to make it bearable.

Renn drew the sheet clear of the dressings.

“You’ve lost a great deal of blood, and the fever has taken what strength you had left. Some of the wounds are still deep and unclean. Until those improve, I shall remain an unwelcome part of your day.”

At the door he spoke quietly to Elias’s father. Elias caught only a few words, but he saw his father’s expression settle back into something that must have become familiar while he slept.

The physician had not come to tell them he was safe.

---

Later, when his father went to find his mother and Mistress Annet had finished coaxing a little broth into him, Will returned to the chair.

Elias had slept again. He could not tell for how long.

There was a book on the floor beside Will’s feet, its brown cover rubbed pale at the corners.

“Were you reading to me?”

“Some of the time. I’m not as good at it. Apparently I make everyone sound like the same old man.”

“The mules.”

Will bent to retrieve the book.

“You remember that? We’ve nearly finished it. They’ve spent six chapters trying to cross a mountain they were warned about at the beginning.”

Elias watched him thumb the pages.

“There was someone else.”

Will rested the book on his knee.

“The princess reads most of it. She’ll be pleased you remember. She’s been insisting you could hear us.”

Elias lay still.

At first the word brought back only the square: a pale face above the crowd, his own desperate efforts to keep looking towards it.

“She’s been here?”

“Every day.”

Will said it simply, then seemed to recognise that Elias had no means of understanding.

“She found the house. It belongs to her family, though they don’t live in it. It’s kept for when someone needs to come into the city without half the court hearing about it. There’s a yard at the back, and another way out through the adjoining street. Annet looks after it, and she’s the only servant who stays.”

He glanced towards the door.

“The princess said we’d be safer here. Nobody comes asking who’s in residence, because nobody’s supposed to ask.”

Elias tried to fit the room around that explanation.

“Does the king know?”

“Not that you’re here.”

His back throbbed with his heartbeat. He waited for it to settle before speaking again.

“What does she do?”

Will looked at the book in his lap, then back at him.

“Whatever’s needed. Reads when you’re quiet. Helps Annet with the dressings. Sits with you when your father needs to eat, though getting him to leave was harder at first. She’s ruined a fair number of sleeves.”

There was something familiar in the way he spoke of her. Elias heard it without understanding it.

“Your father trusts her,” Will added. “So does your mother. That took a little longer.”

Elias could imagine that much.

He looked down at his wrist again. Near the base of his hand, an uneven band of healing skin marked where the restraint had rubbed.

Will followed his gaze but did not offer an explanation Elias had not asked for.

After a while he said, “She usually comes before the evening dressings. You can sleep until then. I’ll stay.”

Elias did not mean to take him at his word. There were things he still wanted to ask.

When he opened his eyes again, the light had changed.

---

The woman who came through the door was carrying a parcel beneath one arm and arguing with Will about the price of a horse.

“You paid him before you’d seen it walk,” she was saying. “I’m afraid your uncle’s opinion of the man has very little bearing on whether the animal has four sound legs. Tell your father to wait until my groom has looked at it.”

Will followed her into the room with an empty cup. “My father’s been buying horses since before either of us was born. I can give him your message, but if I mention the groom, he’ll buy the bloody thing just to prove he doesn’t need one.”

“Then say you’ve heard it’s lame. Surely you can manage—”

She saw Elias.

He had been watching the doorway with his cheek resting against the pillow, too tired to take much interest in their conversation. Now he saw her expression change before she had time to prevent it. Her eyes widened, searching his face, and the breath she drew seemed to catch halfway into her chest. The parcel slipped against her arm. She held it there without noticing.

Elias remembered those eyes above the square.

Here, they were only a few feet away, and so full of relief that he did not know where to look.

Will took the parcel from her.

“He woke again a little while ago. Annet’s been in, and his father’s gone to fetch something from the apothecary.”

She barely seemed to hear him. She came to the bed and stopped beside the chair, still wearing her cloak.

“I had begun to think you were doing it deliberately,” she said. Her voice was almost steady. “Every time they told me you’d opened your eyes, I arrived to find you asleep again.”

Elias tried to shift his head towards her. Pain caught beneath his shoulder, and he stopped.

She moved the chair instead.

“Stay where you are. I can sit here.”

There was nothing hesitant about the way she made room beside him. She lifted a folded blanket from the chair and put it at the foot of the bed, checked the water in his cup and loosened the clasp of her cloak with one hand. Elias watched her perform these small tasks in a room he still did not recognise.

Will had told him she came every day. He had believed him without understanding what that meant.

She knew which floorboard would creak beneath the chair. She knew to place the cup near his left hand. When she finally sat, she glanced towards the window and asked Will to close it a little before the draught reached the bed.

“I’ll bring up another jug while I’m downstairs,” Will said. “Try to keep him awake. He’s been listening to me all afternoon, so you’ve an unfair advantage.”

She looked up at him, and something passed between them that Elias could not read. Then Will left, taking the empty cup.

For a while she said nothing. He was grateful. Speech cost more than he had expected, and everyone who came into the room seemed to need proof that he could still manage it.

Her cloak had fallen open over a plain blue dress. There was a crease along one sleeve where it had been rolled back repeatedly, and a small pale stain near the wrist. He found himself looking at that instead of her face.

“You’ve been helping Annet.”

It came out rougher than he intended.

“She needed someone who could follow instructions. Will was very willing, but he went white the first time Renn removed the dressings, and she had to send him downstairs before she acquired another patient.”

Elias could imagine Will objecting to this account. He looked towards the door, half expecting him to return and correct it.

The princess saw the movement.

“He came back. He’s done rather better since.”

She spoke of him with an ease Elias had never heard from anyone of her station. He wondered what Will called her when he wanted her to pass something, whether his father bowed each morning, whether they had all learned some way of being together which he would now have to discover.

“I don’t remember coming here,” he said. “Will told me about the house, but I thought he must have misunderstood. There must be someone who’ll notice we’re in it.”

“It belongs to my mother’s family. It was kept for journeys when they preferred not to announce themselves, and for visitors who couldn’t be received openly. Most of those arrangements ended years ago. Annet stays because someone must keep the roof sound and the rooms aired.”

She rested her hands on her knees.

“My father has no reason to come here. The household accounts go elsewhere, and Annet has spent thirty years knowing when to say a house is empty. Your family can stay until you’re well enough to travel.”

He looked at the chest beneath the window, where somebody had placed his father’s spare shirt beside a stack of clean linen.

“My father will want to pay you.”

“He’s already offered to mend the back gate, though I suspect that was partly an excuse to leave this room without feeling he’d abandoned you. I’ve accepted. You needn’t concern yourself with the rest.”

There was a firmness to the last part which might have irritated him if he had possessed more strength. As it was, he was relieved to have one question settled.

She reached for the jug.

“Annet said you should drink whenever you wake. I can help, or I can fetch Will if you’d prefer.”

He wanted to tell her he could do it himself. His hand was lying inches from the cup, yet even closing his fingers around it seemed doubtful. He gave her a slight nod and looked at the mattress while she raised the pillow.

She did not hurry him. When he had swallowed, she waited to see whether he wanted more.

It was the waiting that brought the square back.

He remembered staring towards her between the blows, certain that if he could make her understand, if he could somehow separate himself from everything else she was watching, she would speak. He had been waiting for her then too.

His mouth closed against the cup.

She lowered it at once.

For several breaths he listened to water moving inside the jug as she set it down. He could feel her attention on him.

“I remember looking at you,” he said. “I thought you might tell them there’d been a mistake. You’d seen what happened in the street.”

The words had taken most of his breath. He waited until he had enough for the rest.

“I kept thinking you were about to say something.”

She sat back slowly. This time she did not reach for anything.

“I went to him after they arrested you. I told him the guards had already beaten you, and that you’d had no weapon. He asked whether I had finished, then sent me away.”

Elias watched her face. There was anger in it now, held tightly enough that it scarcely moved her features.

“When your father’s appeal was granted, I believed someone had finally made him listen. I was standing there expecting to hear you would be sent home.”

He remembered the clerk examining the paper again. His father trying to come forward.

“The hundred was for the appeal,” he said.

“I believe so. Your father gave him an opportunity to be generous, and he chose to make a spectacle of what happened when people asked him to reconsider.” Her fingers pressed briefly into the fabric of her skirt. “Had I stood up then, you would still have been tied to the post while he decided how to answer me. I knew what he could use to silence me. So I sent for Renn, and I had a carriage brought to the side of the square.”

She stopped, looking directly at him.

“I thought I could at least make certain you came away alive. By the time they carried you to it, I wasn’t certain of even that.”

Elias could hear a cart in the street below. A wheel struck something loose in the road, followed by a man calling to his horse.

He had imagined her standing beside the king without ever imagining what she had thought while she stood there. Her explanation gave him something he had not possessed before. It did nothing to soften the memory of looking up and finding her still in the same place.

“You knew where you were taking me,” he said. “I didn’t know there was anywhere to go.”

Her eyes lowered to his hand on the sheet.

“No. You couldn’t have known.”

She let him rest after that. He was glad she did not tell him she understood. He did not understand much of it himself yet.

The cloth beneath his cheek had grown warm. He shifted his head to find a cooler place and felt the bandages drag. She noticed, but waited until he had settled before asking whether he wanted Annet.

He shook his head.

“I’ve had enough of people turning me over.”

“I expect you have. Renn will want it done this evening, but there’s no reason to begin before he arrives.”

He looked at her sleeve again.

“Will said you read to me. I remember someone reading, but I thought it was part of the fever.”

“That was usually me. Your father took over once and skipped several pages because he thought the brothers had spent long enough complaining about the weather. Will objected on your behalf.”

There was affection in the account, given without ceremony. Elias pictured his father squinting at the page and deciding that neither he nor his unconscious son needed any more of it.

“What else did he tell you?”

“About you?”

Elias nodded against the pillow.

She considered him for a moment, and he saw the first trace of something beyond concern.

“He told me you were a sensible boy who had never given him cause to worry. Will was sitting behind him at the time, which made the claim rather difficult to accept.”

“He shouldn’t have left Will in the room.”

The effort of speaking stirred a faint ache through his chest, but she smiled before he could regret it.

“I thought that too. I didn’t challenge him. He wanted me to know you as you were at home.”

Elias looked away from her, towards the window. Across the street, the last sunlight rested on the upper panes of glass. He wondered what his father had chosen to tell her. There were years of things he could have said, and Elias had been absent while he said them.

After a while he asked her to pass him the cloth beside the basin.

She dampened it first, then placed it where his fingers could reach. He managed to wipe his mouth himself. She watched without offering to take over, and he found that he preferred her for it.

When he was finished, she drew a book from beneath the other one on the chest.

“I brought something else. We can abandon the travellers if you like. I’ve become quite tired of their company.”

The cover was dark green, with a hunting bird pressed into the leather. He could not read the title from where he lay.

“What is it?”

“An account of the northern campaigns. The man who wrote it served with my grandfather, although he appears to have spent an extraordinary amount of his service close enough to hear private conversations.”

She opened the cover, revealing a page crowded with small, precise writing along the margin.

Elias looked more closely.

“You’ve written in it.”

“It was making claims I objected to.”

He let his eyes travel over the page. Some of the notes were underlined. One passage had been struck through so firmly that the ink had almost torn the paper.

“Must have been a fair few.”

She followed his gaze and seemed, for the first time since entering, faintly self-conscious.

“He gives the prince credit for holding a bridge which the prince had already left. Three hundred men stayed behind to hold it. Their captain receives half a sentence.”

The mention of men left fighting brought a memory so sudden that Elias’s hand tightened around the damp cloth.

Smoke crossed a ridge. He knew there should have been soldiers there.

The room held. He looked at the bird on the cover until he could no longer see the smoke behind it.

She had noticed.

“We can choose another.”

“It’s all right.” He paused to draw breath. “Will said I talked about battles while I was asleep. I don’t remember much, but there are pieces that keep coming back.”

She closed the book over one finger.

“You sometimes tried to warn us about something in the room. Your father could usually settle you.”

“Did he tell you I’d always done that too?”

“No. He said he’d never heard anything like it.”

He studied her, expecting a question. She seemed to have one, but after looking at his face she laid the book aside.

“You’ve been awake longer than you were this morning. We can leave the northern campaigns until tomorrow.”

Before he could answer, a shiver ran through him hard enough to pull at the wounds. He clenched his teeth and waited for it to stop. She put a hand lightly against his forearm, then rose and went to the door.

She called Annet by name.

The next few minutes passed in a confusion of familiar dread. Annet felt his forehead, examined the stain spreading at the edge of the dressing and asked when Renn was expected. The princess answered while pouring water into the basin. Neither spoke as though Elias’s waking had settled anything.

When they needed to lift the linen, the princess came round where he could see her.

“Annet needs to look beneath your shoulder. I’m going to help support you. We’ll move together, when she tells us.”

He wanted to refuse. His hand caught the sheet instead.

She waited until he was looking at her, then explained where she would put her hands. Her voice held steady through the movement, though the pain soon made the words difficult to follow.

Afterwards, he lay with his eyes shut and heard her ask Annet to send someone for Renn rather than wait.

He had thought being awake meant he was getting better. Now he could not summon enough strength to unclench his hand.

The princess eased the crumpled sheet out of his grasp and laid his arm where it would not strain his shoulder.

When he finally opened his eyes, she was still beside him.

He looked towards the green book.

“If you’re going to read that one,” he said, stopping until he had enough breath, “read the things you wrote as well.”

She glanced at the book, then back at him.

“Some of them are rather uncharitable.”

“You’ve scratched holes in it. I’d like to know what he did.”

For a moment the relief he had seen when she entered returned to her face, quieter this time. She drew the chair close and opened the book carefully, flattening the damaged page beneath her hand.

“I’ll have to begin a little earlier, then. Otherwise you might think I’ve treated him unfairly.”

His father came back while she was finding the passage. She told him about the fever and that someone had gone for Renn, then moved her chair enough for him to sit beside the pillow. Elias felt his father’s hand settle around his wrist.

The princess began with the crossing of the river. She read slowly, pausing now and then to explain an objection she had crowded into the margin, and when Elias’s eyes closed she went on at the same pace.