Just Ella (16 page)

The soldier finally ended, “And at the wedding, they pledged to love each other forever and live happily ever after.”

“Ooh,” the peasant woman sighed breathlessly. “I just love a good romance.”

The soldier snorted. “You women,” he said, but he had a softness to his voice, as if he liked the story too, even if he wouldn't admit it.

I gripped the grass with my hands, angry beyond words. These people had been tricked so badly. I didn't know who they'd found to stand in my place at the wedding—I didn't really care—but people should know there wasn't a fairy godmother involved in the true story. They should know the prince wasn't exactly charming after all, and nobody had an ant's chance in an elephant stampede of living happily ever after with him. Maybe it was possible for people to fall in love and marry and be happy together, but my story hardly proved the point.

So why were these lies being spread?

“For-ma-a-tion!” an official-sounding voice snapped from across the road.

The soldiers scurried into position, and in a few moments I heard them marching on again. I still lay tense and worried while the peasants cleaned up behind them, but soon they left too. I strained my ears, but could hear nothing but the buzz of insects and the whoosh of wind blowing through the grass.

I was safe again. I had not been discovered.

But I couldn't get back to sleep. After days of sleeping without problem on rocks, hay, roots, and assorted other discomforts, I was suddenly unable to settle down on the soft grass beneath me. The heat made my head ache, and I had the strange urge to cry.

I opened the medical book to study since I couldn't sleep, but the words only swam before my eyes.

Why did everyone like that story so much when it wasn't true? Why was everyone so eager to believe it? Was it because, in real life, ever after's generally stink?

Would mine?

In two nights' time, I was close enough to the Sualan border to hear the sounds of battle. I had read about plenty of wars in my father's books, but no book could have prepared me for the screams of anguish and terror I heard every day when I hid and tried to sleep. A thousand times over, I pictured the prince slaying Quog—the only killing I'd ever witnessed. I remembered my father dying while crossing the Sualan border, all because one side thought he might be a spy for the other. “It's not worth it,” I whispered in my abandoned sheds and dusty haystacks. “This land is not worth dying for.” I decided that Jed, for the first time in his life, had focused on too small an issue. He shouldn't be helping the refugees; he should be trying to end the war so there would be no refugees.

I reminded myself I had a more immediate problem than the Sualan War.

I still puzzled over the story the soldier had told to the peasants. Had the wedding really taken place without me? And if so, did that mean I was safe? Or, at least, safer?

I decided it did. The morning of the third day after I'd heard the soldiers—something like the fourteenth day after my escape from the palace—I allowed myself to be seen. I kept walking after daybreak, until I came to a man working in a field.

“Sir, please, could you tell me . . .” After two weeks of talking to no one but myself, my voice was rusty. “Could you tell me how to get to a place where they help people who have lost their homes in the war?”

He looked up slowly, his rheumy eyes heavy with a look I couldn't understand at first.

“Ye lost your home, now,” he started.

He thought I was one of the refugees. He pitied me.

I rushed to explain.

“No, no, I'm not, that is—” I looked down at Corimunde's dress, hanging loosely on my frame. Somehow I'd never bothered altering it. That hardly mattered now. After all my nights of traveling, the dress was filthy and ragged beyond repair. I touched my hair—filled with brambles and dirt. I touched my face—streaked with mud and sweat. No wonder he took me for a war refugee. I looked like one.

I felt ashamed of appearing so needy. But I decided not to correct his error. I had lost my home, after all, just not because of the war.

“That place you're talking about,” the man said. “It's up the road a ways. Turn left at the crooked tree. You'll see it. People have worn a path there.” He hesitated. “I don't usually
do this, because I can't be feeding every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes along. But do ye need any food before ye go?”

I didn't realize I looked that bad.

“No, thank you,” I said, trying to sound dignified.

His “a ways” turned out to be an entire morning's walk. Again and again, I fretted that I'd missed the crooked tree—not exactly the easiest landmark to find. I puzzled over several slightly gnarled elms and one twisted pine. When I finally came to the apple tree growing at an almost forty-five-degree angle to the ground, I noticed the path beside it before I noticed the tree. The path was wide and beaten down, its dirt packed as firmly as that of the road I was on.

Jed evidently had had lots of visitors.

I turned down the path and walked perhaps half a mile before a long, low building appeared over the next rise. Knots began to tie in my stomach. If Jed didn't let me stay, where else could I go?

I looked down at my dress again, and wished I could find a creek to wash in. But I was too close now to put up with any delays, and there wasn't a creek in sight.

And I had to make sure no one would recognize me as the missing princess—if anybody here knew I was missing.

I reached the gate by the building in no time. It held no sign announcing the camp's purpose, but I could see dozens of people inside the gate. A row of men were cutting silage, while others stood around tanning animal skins, chopping firewood, or, at the very least, whittling.
At the other end of the yard, women were kneading bread, sewing clothes, or stirring boiling vats of what smelled like lye soap. It seemed a very busy, happy place, except that when people raised their heads to look at me, I saw vacant eyes and faces etched with sorrow. These people hadn't just heard the war. They had seen it.

“Excuse me,” I said to one of the women. “I'm looking for Jed Reston.”

Silently, she pointed toward the main building.

I stepped in to see rows of beds, like a dormitory. This evidently was the children's domain during the day. Some played hide-and-seek among the bedding, but others were just sitting still, staring into space.

“I'm trying to find Jed Reston,” I said to a girl about my age, who looked to be baby-sitting.

“Office is over there,” she said with the kind of insolent shrug I'd used so often on Lucille.

I knocked at the office door. A woman's voice called a cheery, “Come in!”

“I need to see Jed Reston,” I repeated once again when I'd entered and found only a plump, middle-aged woman seated at the desk before me.

“Oh, no, you don't,” she replied, still cheerful. “You just check in with me, that's all you have to do. We'll get you set right up.”

So I was mistaken for a refugee once again. For a split second I considered going along with the charade. I could probably manage to keep Jed from ever seeing me. I pictured my future, sent out to some patch of farmland safely away
from the war, safely away from the castle and Lucille. I could have my own hut, raise my own food. It might not be bad.

But I did want to see Jed. I wanted to tell him everything that had happened, ask him his opinions, find out how his dream was turning out. I couldn't come this far and hide from him.

“You don't understand,” I told the too-cheerful woman. “I'm not a refugee. I'm an old friend of Jed's. Could someone tell him that, um . . . Ella is here?”

I just hoped Jed would recognize my nonroyal name.

The woman narrowed her eyes, not missing my hesitation. I think she took me for some unsavory companion from his past, one he was better off rid of. And perhaps that was true, though not for the reasons the woman imagined. If the prince found out I was here, it wouldn't be good for Jed.

“And will he want to see you?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “Yes.”

The door behind me pushed open.

I turned around to see the intruder, and it was Jed. He stopped short at the sight of me.

“Ella,” he breathed in a voice that made my heart beat fast and my head feel light. I didn't realize Jed could have that effect on me. But I was so exhausted and hungry, my body's reactions weren't very reliable.

I tried to recall what I'd planned to say, to convince him to let me stay.

“I ran away,” I started. “I—” I remembered the woman at the desk.
I turned around and saw she was leaning forward, listening intently.

“Mrs. Smeal, could you go check on the bedding supply?” Jed asked.

“I just counted all the blankets yesterday,” she replied.

“Count them again,” Jed ordered. He had a tone in his voice I'd never heard back at the castle. He seemed more confident, older.

“But—” Mrs. Smeal still protested.

Jed gave her a look that silenced her immediately. She slunk out the door with an injured air.

Jed took my hands in his.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look—”

“A little worse for wear?” I finished his sentence ruefully. “Digging out from a dungeon will do that to a girl. So will walking for two weeks.”

Jed looked confused.

“But a rider came out and told us about the wedding only yesterday. He said it took place last Friday.”

“There may have been a wedding,” I retorted, “but I wasn't there.”

I told him my story. I think I must have gotten some of it a little garbled, because he stopped me after a few moments, put his arm around me, and led me to a couch. Then he put his head out the door and called, “Ermaline, can you bring me a bowl of that stew left over from lunch?”

I ate like a starving person, which I basically was. Then I continued my tale. Jed interrupted only once more.

“They had Quog guarding you?” he protested when I reached that part. “But he was sentenced to death weeks ago.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Rape.” Jed looked away. “Many of them.”

I took a shaky breath.

“I guess he got a stay of execution, until the prince could deliver the sentence personally. Oh, Jed, Quog was just a prop to them, something to scare me into submission. And then they actually thought I'd leap into the prince's arms with joy, seeing him slaughter Quog—”

“They didn't know you very well,” Jed murmured.

Even with the stew making me feel steadier, I couldn't quite read Jed's expression. I hurried through the rest of the story and finished up, “. . . so you can see there aren't very many places in the kingdom that I'd be welcome. And I know I might be endangering you and your cause by coming here. But I did study those books, and I know I would be useful.”

“Oh, Ella,” Jed hugged me tight. “You should have known I would never turn you away. But I have a better plan.”

He slid down and crouched on the floor before me. Awkwardly, he put first his right knee on the ground, then his left. Then he raised his right knee again and leaned toward me. I couldn't figure out what he was doing. He took my hands in his once more.

“Ella,” he said solemnly, “will you marry me?”

I jerked my hands back in shock.

“What?” I asked.

Jed looked sheepish, but persevered.

“I want you to marry me,” he repeated.

“I don't need that kind of charity,” I said sulkily. Who would ever have thought: For all that I'd always said I didn't care about marriage, I kept getting the most unexpected offers.

Jed raised his earnest face toward mine. To my surprise, he had tears sparkling in his eyes.

“It's not charity,” he said. “Don't you know? I've been in love with you since that first day I met you. From the moment you opened that door, when I came to tutor you.”

I remembered the thunderstruck look on his face.

“No offense,” I said. “But I'm not too impressed with the concept of love at first sight right now. You heard where it got me. Anyhow, I don't exactly look the way I did then. So you can forget that sight.”

Jed reached up and touched my face. I didn't move away. I was trying to decide if I liked it.

“You still look beautiful to me,” he said softly. “But it's not your looks I'm in love with. Or,” he corrected himself, “not just them. It's your personality, and your sense of humor, your courage, your perseverance, your intelligence. . . . Basically, everything about you.”

“You sure had a funny way of showing your love,” I grumbled. “Why didn't you tell me before?”

“You were betrothed to the prince,” he said. “I thought you loved him.”

“I thought so too,” I admitted. “But you knew he was a jerk and a fool. Why didn't you tell me?”

Jed only looked at me. I thought about how it would sound if he'd told me any time at the palace, “I love you. And, oh, by the way, that guy you're engaged to is a lout.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that wouldn't have worked.” I thought about the awkward silences that had developed between me and Jed, the questions he'd avoided answering, the moments I'd wondered how he could suddenly seem as distant as the prince himself. “It must have been torture for you.”

Jed nodded silently. A moment passed before he admitted softly, “I couldn't stand to call you ‘Princess' or hear anyone else refer to you as ‘Princess,' because that reminded me you would never be mine. So in my mind you were always just ‘Ella' when I thought about you, which was about twenty-seven hours a day. Sometimes, when we were together, and I wanted so badly to give up the pretense and pull you into my arms and—well, you know—I'd
make myself call you ‘Princess' to hold myself back.”