Chapter 25

Before I could respond, she poked me through a doorway. A canopied bed lay buried under mounds of scarlet cushions, a fire burned brightly on the grate, and a table of luncheon was just being cleared away by a young serving girl clad in black. Other servants pressed and brushed gowns bulging from an armoire near the bed. They looked like they’d rather be elsewhere. A door led out onto a balcony, from which I could see the castle grounds unroll themselves down to the sea. Autumn trees burned in glorious red and orange, while the ocean was the purest china blue.

The fragrance of the leftover lunch hung in the air, and I gazed longingly at the little table. My leviathan sniffed hungrily.

“Dorothy,” Princess Annalise said, “this is my friend, Evelyn, visiting me from Merlia for the wedding. She’s weary after her long journey. Run and bring a tray for her.”

The girl with the heavy tray nodded mutely and disappeared.

“Rhoda, Erma,” she said to the servants tending to her dresses. “Fill a bath right here for my guest, and pick out a frock and slippers, everything.” The girls rose and left the room.

“Stupid girls,” Annalise fumed when they were gone. “So cold to me, a foreigner.” She pressed her lips together tightly. “Soon I’ll be queen and make them mind me differently. But listen to me fretting!” She smiled apologetically and pushed a chair my way. “Sit! Sit!”

She sat and crossed her legs, one slippered foot dangling in midair. My head felt foggy.

“Why would you … ,” I began, then stopped. “I’m just … How did you know?”

She tilted her head. “Know what?”

I patted my shoulder. “About … him?”

She laughed. Even her laugh was pretty. The little bits of jewelry around her neck, in her hair, at her ears, all danced with her movement, catching sparkles of light like snowflakes. Silly Priscilla, to think a village girl’s charms could hold up to those of a lady like this.

“Evelyn, dear,” she said, “do you think I can’t spot another serpentina when I see one?”

I looked down at my lap. I tried to keep my face very still. Embarrassment and confusion overwhelmed me.

Serpentina.

So that was what I was?

There was a name for people—for women, and girls—like me?

Princess Annalise opened the velvet purse that laid in her lap and made a soft clucking sound with her tongue. “Come on, Bijou,” she said in a coaxing voice, wiggling her fingers. “Come out and meet your new friend.”

Her little leviathan poked his head out from under the top of the purse. Whereas mine was pearly white with a tinge of silver blue in his soft scales, Annalise’s—Bijou—was amber colored with a caramel belly. He, too, was beautiful, his tiny horns curving regally from his brow, his delicate whiskers trailing, and his green eyes dark, like an evergreen.

My leviathan had grown anxious to the point of agitation. I pulled back my collar and allowed him to crawl out onto my hand, then placed him on my knees.

Annalise made a soft sound of delight. “What a handsome fellow you are,” she crooned. “Would you two like to play?” In no time they slithered off our laps, landing with soft thuds on the floor, where they sniffed each other curiously. Soon they tangled and wrestled on the carpet.

Annalise watched them with an indulgent smile. “Bijou told me you were here. I was passing near Appleton’s offices, and he grew so excited, I had to poke my nose in to see who I’d find. Marvelous thing, their sense of smell. What do you call your leviathan?”

“Call him?” More jitters. I felt like a drugged patient waking up from a heavy sleep as I tried to comprehend all she was telling me.

She turned an amused face my way. “Yes, call him. His name.”

What would happen, I wondered, if I just ran out of this room?

“I don’t really call him anything.” I felt very small. “I only discovered him yesterday.” Was it really only yesterday?

Her eyes grew wide. She reached forward and clutched both my hands in hers.

“You what? How is this possible?” She fingered a strand of my hair that had come loose. “Where did you say you were from?”

“I didn’t say,” I said. “Why did you tell the servants I was from Merlia?”

She spluttered. “But aren’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I grew up in a small village called Maundley, far inland from here. Two days ago was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on the ocean.”

Princess Annalise rose from her chair and began walking around me, looking me over as if searching for clues. “Fascinating,” she breathed. What was fascinating? “Raised in Pylander? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

There was a knock at the door. Princess Annalise’s eyes darted to where our leviathans lay warming themselves by the fire. She made a clicking sound full of warning with her tongue, and her leviathan scurried behind the wood box. In moments, mine followed.

“Come in.” Dorothy returned with a tray loaded with luncheon. She set it down, then held out a chair and flicked open a napkin. I sat and let her cover my lap. There was enough food for a family of six. Pheasant must be the fowl du jour, accompanied by potatoes, beans, squash, and roasted onions, a dish of cold fruit, a salad of greens with oil, and a loaf of piping-hot bread.

“Thank you, Dorothy.” Annalise waved her hand, and Dorothy left.

I forgot conversation and plied my fork and knife for several minutes. It was all I could do not to groan, the food was so delicious. Annalise took a piece of fruit, just to be sociable. Then she cut up little morsels of meat on a saucer and set it down for the serpents. Her eyes never left me. As I ate, Rhoda and Erma returned, whichever one was which, tugging a beautiful tall-sided copper bathtub, followed by a procession of young boys with yokes on their shoulders and buckets of hot water dangling from either end. The boys poured my bath and left, staring at me as they went. Erma and Rhoda unfolded a standing partition before the tub.

When they were gone, Annalise spoke again. “Into the tub with you,” she said, “and tell me, what did your mother teach you about your leviathan? What did you learn about hers?”

“First, do you have a place where I may keep these papers from Lord Appleton?” I asked. Annalise pointed toward a drawer in a small writing table. I slipped my letters inside. They were now the most precious things I owned.

Then I went behind the partition and removed Dolores Rumsen’s dress—for the last time, I hoped—and my underthings, realizing as I did so just how much I smelled of the road and the sea, then stepped one foot into the tub. A warm, drowsy bliss came over me as I lowered myself down into the water. I’d never had such a deep, hot bath in all my life.

“Well?”

“It’s very nice, thank you.”

“No, I mean, what did you learn from your mother?”

Oh. “I never knew my mother,” I said. “She died of influenza not long after I was born.”

“But that can’t be true.”

I pinched my nose and dunked my whole head under the water. I’d always wanted to do that back home, but our little tub was nothing like big enough. When I came up and opened my eyes, I gasped to see two little serpentine heads peeking over the edge of the tub, Bijou and my leviathan. They slid into the tub, and I screeched to feel them sliding around my wet skin.

“Oh, don’t mind them, they love a warm bath,” Annalise’s voice said from beyond the partition. “Your mother can’t have died of influenza. You must be mistaken.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. “My grandfather told me. Both my parents died treating sick people at the university infirmary.”

“Both your parents?” she said. “At this university, here, in Chalcedon?”

“Um-hmm.” I kicked at the wrestling little serpents frolicking around my ankles.

“I wonder,” she said. “I heard of a serpentina cousin, years ago, who left Merlia to study. Quite a scandal she was at the time. They said she married a commoner.”

I stopped washing. “Married a what?”

Annalise took a guilty little breath. “Oh. Tactless me. I’m sorry. It’s just that, usually, if serpentinas marry at all, they … ”

“They marry kings, like you.”

“Oh no, not everyone marries a king, certainly, but … ” She opened the drawer in her desk. “I must write to Grandmother and ask her about it.” She peered around my partition, and I ducked lower underneath the suds. “Serpentina women live to a frightful old age, you know. Don’t you know? Unless something happens to them, which is well-nigh impossible.” She rubbed her hands together. “My land, but what a treasure you are. What a find! A maiden child from … what was it? Maundley? A born serpentina, and she doesn’t know it. Why, that means you’ve never had your initiation … My heavens, can you even swim?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you’ll learn in no time. I didn’t think there were any of us here on the continent. I was sure I was going to be so lonely here.”

She turned and looked out the window toward the sea. For a moment all her vitality left her. She took a deep breath.

“You’re getting married, aren’t you?” I said. “You shouldn’t be lonely then.”

She closed her eyes and laughed once, then again, a little too hard, too high, pressing her hand into her belly. “You sweet girl,” she said. “You are just the kind of company I’ve needed.” She wiped her eyes with a finger. “What’s that you’re wearing?”

Again I sunk lower in the bath, and this time I covered my upper half with a washcloth.

“I’m not wearing anything,” I said.

“No, around your neck.”

“Oh, that. It’s a good luck charm.”

She smiled. “And does it bring you luck?”

I shrugged. “Who knows where luck comes from?”

“Well said. Now, where are those wretched girls with your clothes?” She disappeared again. “I’ll have the tailors up, to take measurements and make you some gowns. We will need one in time for the wedding—you shall be my maid of honor! And we’ll go riding, and sailing, and perhaps you can even teach me needlework for the long dull winter evenings.”

The leviathans’ slapping tails flung soapy water into my eyes. They needed no long introductions in order to become immediate fast friends. Was that how it was supposed to work with serpentinas too? Using that title for myself made me cringe. But how else could I account for it, this reckless way in which Annalise had scooped me up and adopted me? Half an hour ago I’d never laid eyes upon her, and now I was to be her maid of honor? Priscilla and I had taken years to learn to get along.

There was a knock on the door. “Ah, that will be your clothes now. Come in!”

The door opened. Too late I realized the serpents were still in the tub with me, their eyes poking out of the water like frogs’ eyes in a pond. I should have thought soap would bother them, but perhaps it was nothing compared to ocean brine. The water wasn’t quite so warm as at first, and my skin had begun to wrinkle. I looked forward to climbing out and getting dressed.

“Oh, it’s you,” Annalise said, in a voice clearly not intended for Rhoda or Erma. There were soft rustling sounds for a moment.

“Only three more days, darling,” said King Leopold.