“No.” I see Ragne frown and cut her off. “She might be living near the orphanage. It’s an excuse to look for her without people knowing I’m . . . not the real princess.”
“What did you take from a real Gisele?”
I press my lips together. “Everything.”
“And will you give it back now?”
“It’s complicated,” I grumble again, pinching my nose. “I don’t know if it will break the curse, and if it doesn’t, or if it goes bad, being locked in a dungeon will make it a lot harder to make up for what I took.”
“They will put you in jail for giving it back?” Ragne’s brow furrows.
“Gisele is probably angry with me. And if I give her”—I wave my hand at the carriage—“all this back, she’ll have the power to hurt me. Understand?”
Ragne grins sunnily at me with all of her teeth. They are much, much too sharp to be human. “No! I don’t.”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t hurt yourself thinking about it. Anyway, when I get out, you can stay in the carriage or you can come with me, but you have to be small enough to not be seen.Pleasetell me you understand that at least.”
She flops over sideways on the seat, still grinning. “Yes. I will be a squirrel again.”
I don’t dignify that with a response, instead counting through the white pennies. I was right, Barthl shorted me by five. On the other hand, splitting thegildeninto pennies means I can stretch them if I need to. The more “charity” I dish out, the more it might help with the curse. And I’ll pay as many visits as it takes to find Gisele.
There’s a terrible familiarity to the silver coins as they slip through my fingers.
My jaw aches. After a moment, I look up at Ragne, who’s busy pushing her bare feet against the roof of the carriage. “So . . . are you Eiswald’s servant?”
She looks over at me, as baffled by that as by everything else. “No. I am her daughter. Mother saw a human man she wanted in her forests, and he wanted her, and they made me, and I have lived with her since. I can tell you all about her forests, they’re full of lots of nice beasts and bones—”
“She didn’t tell you to serve her?” I interrupt. “When you turned thirteen? Or make you choose between her or your father?”
Ragne swings her legs to the floor and sits bolt upright. “Why would she be so cruel?”
I have no answer for that. I’d been hoping she would.
The carriage slows. Ragne shrinks to a squirrel and darts back inside my hood as I push the window screen aside. We’re past the High Wall, well into the Hoenring, where the houses are mostly smaller, the roads mostly narrower, and the faces unilaterally harder. It’s not as bad as the southern Sumpfling district, which spends most of spring at least an inch underwater, but it’s still a lean life between the High Wall and the Low.
We pull up in front of a lowly clapboard building with a wooden sign that readsGänslinghaus, bordered in what I think were intended to be daisies, if the painter responsible were drunk and blindfolded. A neglected donation box sits by the stoop, the lid still covered in telltale undisturbed road grime and frost from this morning. Something about the house strikes a faint echo in my memory, but I can’t quite place it as I get out of the carriage.
A round face appears in the window, pressing their nose to the windowpane.
“Aunt Umayya!” Even if I couldn’t see the child’s mouth moving, I’d hear them clear through the glass. “There’s a princess outside!”
Immediately five more faces pop into the windows, jostling for a better look. There’s a murmur of a lower voice, chiding, before the door swings open. A woman stands there in a faded woolen dress that looks like it’s retained more stains than dye, unlike the beautiful indigo Magrabi shawl around her shoulders. She looks to be in her early forties, her gray-streaked dark hair pulled back in a serviceable braid, and the laughter in her lined sand-gold face explains the ease in the children.
“Oh, they weren’t joking!” The woman inclines her head quickly, all business. “I am Umayya. Can I help you,Prinzessin?”
This is about where I realize that I haven’t really thought this through beyond “find Gisele.”
“Uh,” I say,verycleverly.
Just then, a little boy of about nine shoves his way past Umayya. He takes off down the road, yelling, “I’m gonna buy raisin buns!”
“JOSEF!” Umayya’s face drops. She starts after him, then turns to me. “I am so sorry, their other caretaker isn’t here right now, just— don’t let them burn anything down!”
She’s gone before I can protest. The doorway rapidly fills with at least a dozen other children, all peering at me like they haven’t decided if I’m a wicked witch or a fairy godmother. The oldest is a boy who looks no more than twelve, and he’s bouncing the youngest on a hip, a baby perhaps a year old. Many of the children look like they’re from Almandy, Bourgienne, and the other middle lands, but some have the snowy-blond hair of the Deep North, the soft dark Sahalian features like Joniza, even the jet-black hair and amber cheeks of the Gharese.
“Are you a real princess?” a little girl asks.
“Uh. It’s complicated.” I look in the direction Umayya ran, but she’s nowhere in sight, and the door is still wide open and letting out all the heat.
