Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [73]
“Nothing.” The king spread his weirdly elongated hands in an innocent gesture. “The gardener’s boy is in perfect health. For the present.”
“And then he’ll fall off a horse, or slip on wet pavement? So that you don’t need to get your hands dirty?” Rose sneered at him.
He smiled his cold smile. “Keeping one’s hands clean—maintaining one’s innocence. Is that not the human way?”
“What would you know about it?”
“A great deal. After all, I was once human.” The king gestured to his sons, standing in silence around them. “And their mothers were all human, just as your mother was human and you are human. And your children and your sisters’ children will be three-parts human.” The king laughed. “What joy it will bring me, to know that my grandchildren will be free to walk in the daylight world!”
Rose had thought she was beyond fear, but she had been wrong. At these words a cold thrill of terror went through her and she staggered, near to fainting, imagining her children walking the streets of Westfalin to do the bidding of the King Under Stone. Illiken caught her, steadying her with his hard, cold hands. She shook him off, turning to a sofa for support instead.
“I will not stay here,” she said, hating the tremor in her voice. “I will not marry Illiken. I will not have his child…. You cannot make me!”
“Oh, but I can,” the King Under Stone said in reasonable tones. “In one week’s time you will marry Illiken, and never see the sunlight again, dear Rose. Don’t you understand that?”
Hope flickered in Rose. “But you have to let us go, that’s the contract. We dance, and then we go home, and when the years are up we’re free. You’re bound by the contract, even as we are.”
“Contracts can be broken, if one is willing to pay the price,” the king purred. “And what is one life, after all?” He reached out and stroked the cheek of one of his sons, whose eyes widened in terror.
“So.” Rose felt nauseated now, as well as faint. “One of your sons will die so that you can keep us here?”
“The penalty for breaking the contract is a life.” The king shrugged. “And I do not intend it to be my own.” He pushed the prince away. “Now go to your room and stay there,” he ordered Rose, all silk gone from his voice and only the stone beneath remaining.
Rose went.
“Are you all right?” Lily took one look at Rose’s face and helped her older sister onto a sofa. “What happened?”
She told them everything, not even sparing the younger set. They had to know. It was their right and their burden, to share among themselves. When she was done, they were all weeping.
“What will we do now?” Violet collapsed rather than sat next to Rose. “We’re trapped here forever!”
“Galen’s going to die,” Rose said softly. “And we’re going to marry the princes.”
“Except for the one who has to die as punishment,” Poppy pointed out. “I hope it’s Blathen.” Blathen was her partner at the Midnight Ball.
“He’ll just have another son,” Rose said softly, having truly seen into the king’s mind. “With another unfortunate woman. And then you’ll be married to a baby.”
“Why are there always twelve?” Orchid wanted to know.
“Twelve what?” Lily retied Orchid’s sash.
“Twelve of us. And twelve princes. That’s so many….”
Rose was piecing it all together in her mind. “There were twelve magicians who imprisoned the king here,” she said. “And if we each have one child, there will be twelve part-human, part-witch children for the king to use. He’s going to get them to break open his prison, I know it.”
They all shivered.
They would never see their father again.
Poor Anne would be hung as a witch and Galen would be killed. And they would be trapped here, year after year, with him and his silent, sullen sons.
Tears leaked out of Rose’s eyes despite her resolve to stop crying. For the first time she understood what Lily had gone through when her Heinrich died, and felt a stab of sympathy.
“We have to