Free Palace of Mirrors by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page B

Spurg.”
    Spurg,
I think.
I’ll remember that. When I take my throne—when I’m in charge—Spurg is going to be sorry this guard wasn’t nicer.
    I follow Harper away from the path with great dignity, holding my spine perfectly straight. Surely that will make the guard see that we’re not a couple of pickpockets. But it’shard to maintain a dignified, haughty posture while fighting through brambles and weeds, pressed close against the wooden fence. As soon as we’re out of the guard’s sight, I give up all pretense of dignity. I swing my arms viciously, shoving past thistles and thorns; I cry out, “Ow! Drat!” and “Harper, do you have to let those branches swing back right into my face?” and “Why do they need a fence when they have all these hawthorn trees right on top of each other?”
    The sky is nearly dark when we finally come out on the other side of the village of Spurg.
    “We need to find a place to stop for the night, but I want to get as far away from this village as we can,” Harper whispers to me as we step onto the blessedly bramble-free path again. “Can you make it another mile or two?”
    “Sure,” I say, feeling the eyes of another surly guard on us.
    We walk and walk, into darkness, into exhaustion.
    This is worth it. I’m doing the right thing,
I tell myself, just to keep going.
    Finally we collapse beside the path, rolling into the grasses again. I would be content to fall asleep wherever I land—I’m that tired—but Harper has to carefully arrange us and our possessions. He positions the harp between us and the path, “so anyone coming toward us will run into it, giving us warning.” He tucks our food sack under his clothes, so no squirrels or moles can nose into it in thenight. He insists on sleeping at my feet once again, “for safety.”
    “Safety,” I repeat as I cuddle into my cushioning cloak. “Right.” But Harper is too far away to hear me. I wish, peevishly, that he didn’t know anything about how soldiers sleep, how they protect their fellow soldiers. It would be nicer if I could share the cloak’s warmth with him, if we could lie with our faces together, whispering into the night.
    Strangely, this thought makes me blush, because I am describing how husbands and wives sleep. And I’m not asking for
that.
It’s just . . . I never really thought before about how being the one and only true princess is really a lonely thing. When I relieve Desmia of her duty, it will be me alone on the throne, alone on the castle balcony waving to the throngs below, alone worrying about when my enemies might attack. . . .
    I fall asleep feeling grateful that, at least for now, Harper is with me. I’m not alone.
    Yet.

  11  
    We reach Cortona four days later, just before noon. We are much the worse for our travels: our bare feet coated with dust, our faces dirty, our clothes snagged beyond repair by the brambles and thorns beside all the village fences we had to walk along—outside Spurg, Tyra, Donnega, and Kahreo. But nobody’s stopped us; nobody’s recognized me. (How could they?)
    We begin seeing the spires of Cortona from a distance of miles. First we see the spires, then the turrets, then the domes, and finally the sturdy white city walls that somehow seem gracious and airy, rather than mean and inhospitable like all those village fences. The arched gateways that lead into the city are a marvel, as peddlers, dancing girls, goat tenders, and what look to be court officials stream through them.
    My stomach lurches with panic.
    “Don’t you think we should at least wash our faces before we go in?” I ask Harper. He has been so quiet and standoffish the past four days that I resist the urge to clutch his arm while I say this. And really, clutching his arm isn’t the kind of thing I would have done back home anyhow. Is it? It’s kind of hard to remember who I am and what I’m like, when I’m standing in the shadows of those massive walls, watching the river of