The Princess Imposter Read online

  Behind her, she could hear the creaking and groaning of wood and rope as the guards worked to once again lower the bridge. She had to get moving fast, so she sprinted across the grass and onto the road.

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” The people-road was harder and more uneven than the forest floor. And princess feet were more delicate than fairy feet. If she stopped now and let her pursuers catch up, she guessed that the servants would probably carry her back to spare those fragile feet of hers—well, Gabriella’s. And the king and queen would assure her that everything would be all right. But everything wasn’t all right. The other king, Fred’s father, had taken an instant dislike to her. Not only that, he’d guessed that she was an imposter. He’d come right out and shouted it to everyone: “She’s no proper princess!”

  He would convince his wife, and she would convince their sons. Everyone would side with him. There was nothing Phleg could do about that. Probably Princess Gabriella could smooth things over. Well … maybe. Phleg hoped so. Once Phleg returned her to the castle. But as for Phleg, she wasn’t going to give Parf and her other siblings the satisfaction of seeing her fail. And they would know she had failed if she reversed the spell that made her look like Gabriella, for that would make them change places. Gabriella, whatever she was doing back home, wherever she was, would disappear, replaced by Phleg.

  Couldn’t even last one day, her brothers and sisters would taunt her. All of them. Though especially Parf.

  But …

  The road skirted the edge of the forest, a boundary separating the forest from the castle with its surrounding cultivated fields—the humans’ domain. Phleg made it across the road and ran into the woods. Her brothers and sisters wouldn’t know she had failed if she held on to the princess’s form here in the forest. They would assume she had spent the time that she’d looked like the princess—all three days of it—in the castle. Phleg felt she had experienced enough just in this little time impersonating Gabriella that she could make up accounts of how she had spent the remaining two days. After all, she had a good imagination.

  Running in the forest is something all fairies are used to. Phleg knew everything there was to know about the forest, and this made it easy for her to elude those who were pursuing her. For a while she could hear them calling out to her, begging her to please show herself, to come home, to spare her parents. Then, as the search party grew weary, their voices faded, but she could still hear them, more and more distantly, stomping about with their great big feet, breaking through the brush because they were too tall, too broad, and too clumsy to go under or between.

  And then, finally, she couldn’t hear them at all.

  Phleg ran a bit more, wading through streams, climbing trees, and jumping to the near-enough branches of other trees, until she was sure they’d never be able to find her. People, even hunters, weren’t that good in the forest.

  She was sad to have left behind all that good food, but really she’d had more for breakfast than she usually did all day, and she knew perfectly well how to find fruits and nuts and berries when she did get hungry again tomorrow. She was also sad to leave behind that big, soft bed that didn’t need to be shared with any little sisters. But grass and leaves would make comfortable bedding, and fairies frequently sleep outdoors in the summer. The beautiful princess gown she’d chosen this morning—well, that Ellen had chosen for her—was torn and stained beyond repair. It would be sad not to get to choose another one.

  And Phleg never had gotten to wear a crown.

  But—and here was a good thing—there was no one in the forest to tell her she needed to wear a scratchy underskirt. With this happy thought, Phleg wriggled out of that particular item of clothing and tossed it over her shoulder and into the stream she had just crossed.

  “Good-bye, scratchy undergarment,” she called as the current carried it away. “You were good for poofing out my dress, but that was your only redeeming feature.”

  She had run long enough that her hair—algae and all—had dried. So had her dress.

  Phleg yawned. When she caught glimpses of the sky, it was beginning to turn pink and orange from the sunset. So … almost-but-not-quite evening. Not so very late. Still, she decided that it was time to bed down for the night.

  Since fairies are friends to all the creatures who live in the forest, there was nothing to fear from them. It wasn’t worry that unexpectedly kept her awake after she laid her head down on a huge, squishy mushroom cap, or lack of comfort. After a while, she realized she wasn’t used to the quiet. No brothers or sisters meant no chatter.

  Not that she missed them.

  I like the quiet, Phleg thought. I’m just not used to it.

  “Hmph!” she said out loud. And she invited a rabbit that was hopping past to lie down next to her—not because she was lonely, but because the rabbit looked tired.

  Petting the rabbit’s soft fur wasn’t enough to distract herself from the silence. The only sounds she could hear were the regular rustlings and gurglings of a healthy forest at night. So she thought back on the story she’d heard Fred making up for his little brother. It had been a good story. Phleg began from the beginning—well, the beginning that she had heard—and mentally went over the details.

  She hadn’t spied Fred in the crowd of servants and royalty chasing her, and she hadn’t heard him; she would have been able to pick his voice out from the clamor of the others. It wasn’t that she felt disappointed—it would have been silly to feel disappointed—she just … had noticed not noticing him. Fred’s father had probably ordered the boys and their mother to start packing their bags for home before she even made it out of the moat.

  Fred had stood up to his father for her—well, for Princess Gabriella—and that had been nice of him. Phleg guessed that the real princess wouldn’t have properly appreciated what Fred had tried to do, because princesses were used to things like that. Phleg wondered if the real princess would have enjoyed Fred’s stories. Phleg hadn’t meant to ruin things between them. Of course, she hadn’t meant to ruin things for herself, either.

  “Want to hear a story?” she asked the rabbit, just in case he was missing his family.

  It wasn’t that she missed hers; it wasn’t that she was practicing for when she could share Fred’s story with her brothers and sisters. Because she didn’t like them well enough to do anything like that …

  This time, when the fairy children began to stir in the morning, Gabriella heard them and began to wake up.

  She told herself, The servants are being awfully noisy this morning.

  She told herself, My goodness, what a strange dream I had!

  She told herself, I must have tossed and turned all night—that’s why I’m tired and sore even after a good night’s sleep in my big, soft, comfortable bed.

  She told herself, Don’t open your eyes.

  Miss-mot squealed and threw herself onto Gabriella as though Gabriella were a pillow.

  Gabriella opened her eyes, saw where she was, and began to cry.

  Miss-mot decided to join in, sobbing and hiccuping.

  One of the slightly older sisters picked up Miss-mot and asked, “Did she hurt you?”

  Gabriella was too upset to protest that no princess would ever hurt a child.

  But then she saw that the older fairy girl held the squalling toddler tucked under her arm, disregarding the child’s noise, not to mention the flailing arms and legs. Her violet eyes were looking at Gabriella. “Sometimes she falls into me like that, and I swear it feels like her arm must’ve gone right through me, and I expect when she gets up she’s gonna have ahold of my spleen.”

  Switching from crying to laughing, Gabriella snorted—the most unprincessly sound she had ever made. “She just knocked the wind out of me,” she explained, dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown.

  “Then why you crying?”

  It would be downright rude to say, Because I don’t want to be here. So Gabriella said, “I guess I’m a bit homesick.”

&nbs
p; “You miss your mumsy?”

  Before Gabriella could answer, Parf called from the boys’ side of the room, where he was running his fingers through the hair of one of his brothers, trying—intentionally trying, Gabriella saw—to get it to stand up straight. “She misses her servants bowing and going, ‘Yes, my lady. Of course, my lady. Your wish is my command, my lady.’ ”

  “Nobody talks that way to me,” Gabriella said.

  “Bet they do,” Parf scoffed.

  “Bet they don’t,” Gabriella countered.

  “Then what do you miss?” asked the girl who was holding Miss-mot. Miss-mot had stopped crying but was now squirming. The girl set her down.

  “I do miss my mother,” Gabriella admitted. “And my father. And my friends.”

  “And your brothers and sisters?” one of the boys asked.

  “I don’t have any of those,” Gabriella said.

  “None?” several of the fairy children asked in awed disbelief, as though she had said she had no fingers or lungs.

  “Yeah, well,” Parf said, “and she don’t have no chores, neither. All she has to do is sit around and look pretty.”

  Parf saw his mistake as soon as two of his brothers started chanting, “Parf thinks the princess looks pretty, Parf thinks the princess looks pretty.”

  Which caused the girls to say, “She is pretty.” Though a moment later, they qualified this statement, adding, one by one:

  “Even if her hair is funny.”

  “And she doesn’t have wings.”

  “And her eyes are a spooky color.”

  “And she’s tall as a bear.”

  “I do have chores,” Gabriella said, before they could think up anything else that was wrong with her appearance. “I need to make visitors to the palace feel welcome. In times of trouble, I need to always stay calm and happy so people don’t worry. I need to be pleasant to everybody.”

  Parf snorted; Gabriella suspected he often made that sound. “Oh, that sounds like backbreakingly hard work,” he scoffed.

  Gabriella couldn’t help herself. She said: “Yes, I’ve seen how easy it’s been for you to make me feel welcome.”

  Parf snorted again, but had no other answer.

  From down the hall, Mumsy hollered, “Is anybody coming to breakfast, or are you all going to stay in bed the whole day long? I swear, nobody appreciates all the work I do around here.”

  The fairy children continued to dawdle and poke one another and chatter among themselves.

  Gabriella considered her situation. If leaving here was not going to be as easy as she had first thought, she realized, then she must fit in.

  Well, perhaps not fit in.

  She resolved: I’m going to make the situation better by being the princess I’m meant to be.

  Looking at the fairy girl who had expressed concern for Gabriella’s spleen, Gabriella raised her eyebrows and made a go-ahead-and-say-it gesture.

  The girl’s brows furrowed in concentration as she tried to figure out what Gabriella was indicating.

  Gabriella mouthed the words she wanted the girl to say.

  Unsurely, the girl said almost, though not quite, a question: “I do.” Gabriella nodded, and the girl repeated it more confidently: “I do.” Then, all at once, she understood and shouted it for Mumsy to hear: “I do appreciate all your work, Mumsy!”

  Shouting from other rooms is common and discourteous, but Gabriella felt that, for this family, it was excusable.

  “Well then, come and eat,” Mumsy said, the pleasure evident in her voice, “before I feed it to the squirrels.”

  Their feet as noisy as a herd of panicked sheep, the children hurried to the kitchen, knocking into one another as they all tried to fit through the doorway more or less at once.

  Gabriella followed, still wearing her mud-and-grass-stained and slightly crusty nightgown, then sat in the same chair she had the night before, not sure if everyone was assigned a seat or if that was too much order to expect.

  Meanwhile, the fairy children crowded around the table, jostling one another, leaning over to reach their hands into the bowl that was set down in the middle, loading their plates with the pancakes Mumsy had made.

  “My! This smells good!” Gabriella said. Pecan and cinnamon, by the scent of them. Watching the quickly dwindling stack, Gabriella hoped there would be some left by the time the bowl came round to her.

  “This tastes good,” Parf corrected her, already sitting down with his mouth full. Gabriella suspected—a very ungenerous suspicion—that his main purpose in proclaiming this was to gloat that he’d gotten his serving while she still sat and waited.

  Mumsy had taken her share before even calling the children—which wasn’t model maternal behavior—but she took Parf’s compliment at face value. “Thank you,” she said.

  “It’s very good,” one of the other children chimed in.

  “I like it, too,” another, not to be outdone, said.

  A couple more joined in, one to say, “The pancakes and the syrup are both yummy,” and the other, “Pecans are my favorite.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” Mumsy murmured, sounding almost bashful for all the praise.

  Once the children had grabbed all the pancakes they wanted and had sat down, Gabriella said, “Parf, could you please pass the bowl?”

  “Your arm broke?” he asked. “You want me to set some cakes on your plate for you and cut them up into small pieces and feed you?”

  Gabriella only smiled as warmly as she could.

  The boy next to Parf picked up the bowl and stretched across the table to hand it to Gabriella. Parf reached in for another helping. Which left one pancake for Gabriella.

  “It is as good as it smells,” Gabriella announced.

  “It’s even better with the syrup.” One of the girls passed the smaller of two pitchers around several of her sisters to Gabriella. “I helped gather the maple sap last autumn.”

  “Then I definitely need to try it,” Gabriella told her.

  “And have some milk,” a small boy said, picking up the second pitcher. He walked around to where Gabriella sat, three places down from him. “I milked Tansy myself.”

  “Why, thank you,” Gabriella said. She sipped the milk, which had a stronger taste than the cow’s milk she was used to. “Tansy is your goat?” she guessed.

  This got yet another snort from Parf. “Not our goat,” he said. “Only people hold other creatures captive. Tansy is a goat. One of several who sometimes visit and let us milk them in return for brushing or for treats. Sometimes we have sheep’s milk, and we don’t imprison them, neither.”

  As though Parf hadn’t spoken, Gabriella nodded to the boy who had done the milking and said, “That’s kind of Tansy, and kind of you.” She drank the last of the milk faster than was strictly speaking proper, because she saw some of the children had finished their meals and were beginning to get up from the table. She asked Mumsy, “Shall each of us bring our own dishes to the sink and wash them, so that they don’t gather in a big pile for you?”

  “Or for you,” Parf snickered.

  Mumsy ignored him and said, “That would be nice.”

  Gabriella stood by the sink and helped the children. She was actually doing the majority of the work, but at least the children were trying. Some looked less eager to participate than others; a couple even grumbled. But only Parf flatly refused to cooperate, leaving his plate and cup on the table when he headed for the door.

  “Oooh,” one of the girls called after him—a girl who, if Gabriella had heard properly during breakfast, seemed to be called Lazy. “Guess he’s shown he’s the princess who expects to be waited on. Yes, Your Highness. Your wish is our command, Your Highness. Please let everybody else do for you, Your Highness.”

  Parf whirled around, but seeing all his siblings laughing at him, couldn’t come up with anything better than, “Oh yeah, Lazy?”

  “Yeah,” Lazy and several others answered.

  And Parf skulked away.

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nbsp; Mumsy came to the sink last and said, “I’ll finish up.” She waved her fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Go on, get out of here,” she ordered the children, “before I find tasks for all of you.”

  The little ones were gone before she finished gesturing.

  Which left only Gabriella and the next oldest girl, the one who had called Parf a princess and whose name may or may not have been Lazy. She looked to be maybe twelve or thirteen years old. She told Gabriella, “I’ll be helping you and Parf today.”

  “Oh,” Gabriella said, following the girl. “Parf again?” And to think that just yesterday she had speculated that he might like her. Clearly the opposite was true. She didn’t know which was worse. “Are we doing more laundry?”

  “No,” the girl laughed. “You got us all caught up yesterday, even the winter clothes, whichen we won’t be needing for another five months. Phleg and Parf normally take care of the animals in the morning. I get to help today because everyone figures you’ll be useless.”

  Charming.

  Remembering that Parf had rather clearly indicated that the fairies did not keep animals, Gabriella asked, “Which animals?”

  Again Lazy laughed, but not unkindly. “Whichever come.”

  “All right,” Gabriella said. “And, excuse me, this is terrible of me, and I really apologize, but I don’t believe we were ever introduced. What’s your name?”

  “Daisy,” the girl said.

  Finally a normal name. Not that Gabriella knew any girls named Daisy, but it seemed like a name a nice tradesman’s daughter or farmer’s wife might have.

  Before Gabriella could say anything, Daisy finished, “’cepting Parf and them, they call me Lazy. Or Crazy. Or Hazy. Not on account of that I am any of those things, but the rhyme is just too good not to use.”

  “I will not,” Gabriella assured her. She stopped walking, inclined her head formally, and said, “I am honored to meet you, Daisy.”

  Daisy giggled and imitated Gabriella’s action and tone. “Likewise, I’m sure, Gabby.”

  And Gabriella didn’t even wince.

  Outside, Parf was waiting for them. “Took your time,” he grumbled.