The Prince Problem Read online

  “Very nice,” Amelia said. “Thank you.” She was not good at selecting, but she could recognize that Constance had brought out her best features.

  She turned and saw that many of the princesses had stopped primping and were looking at her.

  “Oh,” said Princess Angelica, “are we doing flowers?”

  “Well, it is spring,” Princess Gilda said, ripping the tiara off her own head. “Gold and gems will cheapen the evening. Maggie! Maggie! Go fetch some flowers!”

  “I think I’ll check on my parents,” Amelia said, and slipped out of the room before the chaos could truly take hold.

  At least, she thought, no one said anything about betrothals. It would have been humiliating to have everyone know her parents were desperate to find a match for her. And she was fairly certain that if one of the princesses had known, they all would have. Quite a few of them—the triplets Selena, Serena, and Serafina came to mind immediately—would have been totally incapable of not blurting out such news.

  Servants bowed and smiled to Amelia as she walked the halls down to the ballroom. The ball had officially begun. She could hear the murmur of voices and stringed instruments playing soft music. The visiting parents were in there, and if not all the princes, then certainly most of them.

  Oh dear, Amelia thought as she realized she was the first princess to arrive. All the rest, apparently, would be fashionably late.

  Seven princes spotted her right away and headed in her direction, two of them actually jostling each other to get there first. Do they know? Amelia wondered. Or were they just acknowledging her as the host princess? And the only princess currently within sight?

  Three princes arrived a step before the others. They bowed deeply, presenting to the slower four a close view of their buttocks.

  “A dance?”

  “May I have the honor?”

  “Shall we?”

  All three spoke at once, and each extended a hand to her.

  A couple of the ones in back reached around them to offer their hands, too.

  It was going to be a long night.

  The water closed over Telmund’s furry little head. I’m going to drown, he thought, and will never have a proper funeral. It was a shame that he wouldn’t get to hear what people would have said about him. Not that he would have overheard them in any case, but people generally said nice things about someone who’d died. Telmund would have liked to hear something about himself that didn’t include the phrases “nose stuck in a book” or “head in the clouds.” Even Albert the old hayward had been acclaimed once he was dead. People forgot all their former grumblings that he was too lazy to take proper care of the fences and hedges in his charge. Never mind that cattle had wandered off regularly and that no one dared complain while he was alive because of Albert’s foul temper—accompanied by his dead-on aim flinging cow pats.

  Once he was gone, Albert had simply done the best he could, and he became prickly but fair.

  Maybe they’ll call me an idealistic visionary, Telmund thought. That sounded better than impractical daydreamer.

  Of course, his little brother, Wilmar, would eventually convince their parents of what had happened. After all, the bowl seller had seen the whole thing. He could corroborate Wilmar’s account of the witch. But even if they dragged the river, how likely would they be to find the body of one small rat?

  On the other hand, Telmund had heard people use the expression looking like a drowned rat. Surely that implied rats were bad swimmers. The river below him may well have been full of rodent corpses.

  Maybe the body of another rat would be pulled out and honored at his funeral.

  Except …

  Except he hadn’t drowned yet.

  He had bobbed up to the surface of the water, and his little ratty paws and feet seemed to be doing a better job of keeping him afloat than his own human arms and legs would have been capable of.

  As irksome as Wilmar could be (which was very), family loyalty would cause him to fuss enough (Wilmar was a champion fusser) that the castle steward would start to wonder if perhaps the rat he’d thrown into the river had been more than a rat. The steward might take into account that, if he was responsible for drowning one of the king’s sons, then a swift and well-deserved punishment was sure to follow.

  Could the steward swim? Telmund wondered if he would risk his dignity by jumping into the river, just in case Wilmar’s frantic shouts about the rat being his brother were true. Or would he squander valuable time by looking for some lackey to send into the water?

  Where were Wilmar and the steward?

  Telmund had been paddling anxiously, intent on keeping his head above water. Now he managed a quick glance toward the bank. Wrong bank, because there was nobody there. Thinking he must have gotten twisted around, he looked toward the other bank. No one there, either.

  No one.

  At all.

  His eyesight as a rat wasn’t as keen as he was used to, but there was no Saint Abelard Festival. No castle. Just rolling fields, and beyond them forest.

  With much frantic paddling, Telmund managed to turn himself around, facing the direction from which he’d come. He could just barely make out the top of the castle, its spires showing off in the distance. This was the right direction to be looking, but trees blocked the festivities on the green. He was being swept downstream. The flow of the river felt much stronger on his little rat body than it had been those times he’d tried swimming as a boy. Industriously as he paddled, he continued to be swept farther and farther away.

  By the time he realized that swimming upstream was a lost cause, he had bypassed the fields and was surrounded by forest. Trees crowded the river’s edge. Now he concentrated on getting to the bank—either bank. But the river was wider here. Wider still from a rat’s perspective. Every time he got close, some eddy or current flung him back toward the center.

  And then, up ahead, a waterfall. Not much by human standards. A boy his age probably could have stepped over it, but only a boy who hadn’t left his human form behind on the festival grounds. If anything could have given Telmund the strength to paddle to safety, it should have been the sound of the surging, tumbling water. But no. The river dragged him closer and closer to the cascading falls—then sent him catapulting over rocks that could gash him or knock him senseless.

  But they did not.

  Not this time, anyway.

  It seemed such a simple goal: Get to the edge and climb out of the water.

  But mile after mile, hour after hour, the river carried him farther from home. Forests and cultivated fields alternated with one another. He spied three more castles—never as close to the water as his family’s own island castle. Maybe one of them might be the home of his second-oldest brother, Baldwin. Telmund’s sense of geography was not his strongest virtue.

  In any case, there wasn’t anyone around to pay heed to his little rat cries for help.

  Until finally—finally—the river narrowed. There was a mill on the left-hand bank, with its big wheel churning up water. Surely he could get to the right-hand side before he was swept up by the wheel. He paddled for all he was worth.

  Then, a miraculous stroke of luck: A boy only a couple years older than Wilmar stood on the bank and seemed to catch sight of him.

  “Help!” Telmund cried. Squeak!

  The youngster took a step forward. Yes! He had seen! The kind child was going to wade in and pluck Telmund from the river!

  Or not.

  Why was the boy leaning down? What was he picking up? A stone, Telmund realized, just as the boy drew his arm back and flung with all his might. The splash of the stone caused water to spill into Telmund’s mouth as he opened it to cry for help once again.

  Not content with his near hit, the boy picked up a second stone. This one landed short as well.

  The third made a wooden thud!

  Before Telmund could work out why a stone should sound wooden, he realized something was lifting him out of the river, higher and hi
gher into the sky …

  The mill wheel had caught him up.

  And then it brought him down again, dunking him into the water.

  Telmund stopped fighting to get to the edge of the river and concentrated all his energy on not swallowing any more water. He was long since out of the range of the stone-throwing boy, and he could not let his weary body give up. He knew that eventually, about a five-day journey from Rosenmark, the river would empty into the sea. How long would it take for a newly formed rat to float all that way? Surely he would find some way to make it to the shore by then. Wouldn’t he?

  Unless he died first.

  It would be so easy to stop struggling and let the river have him. The river or …

  There was something in the water up ahead. Something that eats rats? he wondered, with what was not nearly the level of alarm he should be experiencing. But after being terrified for so long, Telmund was feeling more of a numb dread than an oh-my-goodness-what-am-I-going-to-do? panic.

  He squinted into the distance. As much as he didn’t want to know what was ahead, still—even more—he did. But he couldn’t make out what was in the water. Some beast lying in wait for whatever—whomever—the river carried downstream? Whatever it was, it was motioning him closer with long arms. And many, many beckoning fingers. That would send a chill up the spine of boy or rat. What ghastly nightmare could it be?

  My eyes are failing, Telmund thought. Everything was growing dim. The river had carried him again into a wooded area; naturally, it was darker in the woods than out in the open, but even so, this was too dark.

  Still, this evidence of the coming end didn’t spur him to struggle against his oncoming fate. With an unspeakable horror lying in wait just ahead, maybe drowning would be the easier fate …

  Until Telmund realized—not with a sudden jolt but a dawning awareness—that it wasn’t a living creature waiting in the water. It was the bough of a tree that had fallen into the river. And it was the smaller branches—not fingers—that were stirring so lifelike in the current.

  I must get to that branch, he thought—rather more hazily than resolutely, he knew. It was his only chance of survival.

  Still, even recognizing this, he didn’t have the strength left to swim.

  But one of those beckoning branch-fingers was close. Close enough that Telmund managed to catch hold of it with his flailing little rat paw as he swept past. He lurched to a stop so abruptly that his feeble grip almost released. But it didn’t.

  Now what? he wondered.

  It took him a moment to answer his own question: Climb.

  The branch was slippery with rot, but Telmund managed to lift himself up out of the brackish water.

  Then to the main bough.

  Then, on legs so weary they were shaking, across to the land. Blessedly not moving, not out-to-fill-his-nose-and-mouth land. Now that he was out of the river, Telmund became aware of how cold the water had been. And, he realized, there was nothing wrong with his eyes. The sun had simply set. It was night.

  Lots of things that would love to dine on a rat would be prowling at night, he realized. Hunting.

  Nonetheless, exhausted, he curled into a little rat ball right where he was and fell asleep.

  “So I said to the duke,” Prince Hagen was telling Amelia as they danced, never noticing that her eyes were beginning to glaze over, “ ‘you may be a duke,’ I said, ‘but obviously you don’t know as much about hunting boar as you think you do.’ I mean,”—Hagen paused, but only for the briefest moment to give a dismissive sniff; he never stopped talking for longer than a breath or a sniff—“it’s not the same thing as hunting deer. Not the same thing at all.”

  “Well …” Amelia said. But not fast enough.

  “This had to be last fall,” Hagen continued, “because we were there for the wedding of the Earl of Estwallen—which was a lavish affair, really almost bordering on being overdone, don’t you think? You were there, weren’t you? Everyone was.”

  Amelia was nodding, but Hagen didn’t wait for an answer before continuing.

  “Oh no, wait a moment. It was in the spring, because it wasn’t the wedding itself—they had just announced the wedding banns … a much more tasteful affair. No, no, wait—I’m wrong. It was the fall. I remember now, because the horse I usually favor for boar hunting had come down with colic. My father’s foolish equerry would have missed the diagnosis—thought the horse needed its teeth filed. ‘It’s not his teeth, it’s his innards,’ I said to the incompetent man—so it’s a good thing I know horses as well as I do. There was one time—”

  “Excuse me,” Amelia interrupted—very bad manners indeed, but Hagen could move from one topic to the next effortlessly and endlessly. If only he could dance half so smoothly. “I need to …”

  It was as though Hagen’s endless prattling had sucked all the words out of her. She couldn’t think how to finish that thought. She could have said, I need to let my toes recover from your stepping on them, but that would have gone beyond bad manners to being inexcusable.

  No matter. Hagen had spotted one of the triplets—Serafina—for the moment without a dance partner. “That’s quite all right,” he said to Amelia. “Which one is that? Serena?” But he didn’t wait for her answer, heading off to intercept whichever one it was before she could get away. Most of the princesses were very good at evading Hagen, making Amelia his best option.

  Amelia limped off the dance floor. Yes, admittedly she was an indifferent dancer, but even given that, some of the princes seemed more prone to step on her toes than they should have been.

  Her parents, who were excellent dancers, moved across the floor like two people in love, which was exactly what they were. They had eyes only for each other and wouldn’t have even noticed Amelia, except that she was in too big a hurry to get some distance between herself and Hagen—the worst of the toe crushers—in case Serafina saw him coming and managed to escape.

  Fleeing may have been too strong a word for Amelia’s current flurry of movement—or it may not—but in any case she crashed right into one of the servants. The poor man had been carrying a tray full of tarts and pies to set out on one of the long tables that lined the room.

  Dishes clattered to the floor in an aromatic explosion of broken crockery, crumbled pastry shells, and jellied fruit. The mess splattered not only Amelia and the servant but the gowns and legs of the nearest guests.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Amelia said, mortified.

  It was her voice, rather than the sounds of culinary mischance, that caught her parents’ attention. Oblivious to the chaos around her, they each held one arm out, inviting her to dance in a threesome with them. Which would have been fine had she been three years old.

  Amelia shook her head.

  “Any likely prospects?” her mother called over to her.

  Amelia hoped no one could guess what she was talking about, and once again shook her head.

  Luckily, her parents believed in love at first sight and other such storybook conventions, so they didn’t press her to try harder.

  Meanwhile, Amelia could see that Serafina had hurriedly invited the aged father of one of the princes to dance, and now Hagen was heading back in Amelia’s direction. Undeterred by the servants who had swarmed around her to clean up the spilled foodstuffs, he was closing in.

  Her father, noticing where she was looking, winked at her, then swirled his wife around, all in perfect time to the music, blocking Hagen so that Amelia was able to make her escape.

  There were six sets of doors leading outside, and she chose the closest. A little later into the summer, there would have been couples dancing out here, but this spring evening was a bit chilly for that. Even though there was light from the many doors to the ballroom and from lanterns affixed to poles, Amelia found herself blissfully alone.

  Concerned that the probably perfectly nice (for someone else) but clumsy and boring Hagen might have noted her exit, she lifted the skirt of her gown up above her ankles and hurried
down one of the paths of the ornamental garden.

  So much had happened since she’d been in the garden with the botanist that morning. Just hours ago, Amelia had no worries beyond learning the Latin names and medicinal properties of the local plants; now she didn’t even linger to enjoy the scents. She kept moving, zigzagging through the gardens until she found herself by the river that formed the northern border of the park.

  She flung herself onto one of the benches there and waited for her heart to stop thudding, listening intently for any sounds that might indicate a tiresome prince had followed her. All she could hear was the chirping of frogs and crickets. Not even the distant sound of music from the ball lingered in the air.

  She rested her head on the back of the bench and looked up into the star-sprinkled sky. Slowly, Amelia gave way to feeling sorry for herself.

  Maybe it was because the occasion had been a ball—and balls are meant to be bright and merry and lighthearted—but each of the princes to whom she’d spoken that night had seemed young and empty-headed.

  Of course her parents had invited people her own age, so they not only seemed young, they were young.

  But so was she.

  Which left empty-headed.

  Maybe it was expecting too much to hope that princes who were close to her age would want to discuss politics and world affairs and advances in science, but that was what interested her. She did not want to discuss hunting or horses or which prince could belch the loudest.

  Amelia sighed.

  Someone behind her—someone she hadn’t realized was there—said, “Star light, star bright …”

  Amelia jumped.

  But it wasn’t Hagen stepping out from the shadows, or any of the other princes or princesses from the ball. Nor was it any of the parents or servants. It was a little girl.

  The girl couldn’t have stood any taller than Amelia’s shoulder, which would have made her about ten. Her features, however, seemed to be of an older girl.

  The girl stood backed against one of the juniper bushes, looking as if she had just stepped out from its leafy depths. Or maybe she was ready to shrink directly into it, should Amelia speak crossly to her.