Palace of Mirrors by Margaret Peterson Haddix Read Free Book Online Page A

cram my hand over hismouth, cutting off his scream before it starts.
    “Stop it!” I command him. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your mother or any music competition. This is the truth. I’m the real princess.”
    Harper’s eyes grow to huge shadowed disks. He looks stunned enough that I think I’m safe pulling my hand back.
    He shakes his head.
    “Eelsy, this is crazy. How could I ever believe that?”
    I blink back sudden tears. I didn’t expect this question.
    “I’m your friend,” I say. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”
    “But you do play tricks on me sometimes,” he says suspiciously.
    “Hey! You play more tricks on me than I play on you! Remember that time you gave me that candy made out of onions?”
    “Yeah, but you’re the one who put starch in your hair, to make it stick out straight, and told me you’d been struck by lightning.”
    I’d been particularly proud of that prank, but I’d almost ruined it because I couldn’t stop giggling.
    “Well,” I admit, “if you’d been smart enough to ask, ‘Cecilia, is that the honest truth, swear to God, cross your heart, hope to die?’ I would have confessed.”
    Harper runs his hand through his hair, making it look even messier than usual.
    “Eelsy, you’re sitting in manure! Princesses don’t sit in manure!”
    “They do if they’re in hiding, pretending to be peasants,” I say. My voice cracks on the word “pretending.” “Being a princess isn’t just about sitting in a castle looking pretty.”
    Harper squints at me.
    “Cecilia, is this the honest truth, swear to God, cross your heart, hope to die?”
    “Yes,” I whisper. “Except I’m hoping
not
to die, and that’s why I was so scared this morning that I was mean to you, and I really am in danger, and I really do need someone to protect me, and if we were in the same cottage, I would be glad if you were sleeping beside the door, making sure we were safe . . .”
    Harper looks down and gulps so hard that I can see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. (When did Harper get grown-up enough that his Adam’s apple sticks out?)
    “I don’t understand,” he says. “If you’re the princess, why would they hide you here?”
    “It’s out of the way,” I say. “They thought it’d be safe. No one would recognize me.”
    Our village is so remote that no one would come here who’s ever been face to face with royalty. No one would ever see me and say, “My goodness, that child is the spitting image of our poor deceased queen.” (Am I? This is something Sir Stephen won’t discuss with me.) I’ve seen my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s profiles on coins, and I’ve studied the coins and compared them to my ownimage in the pond. But the coins show my grandfather and great-grandfather as old men, with beards and grizzled eyebrows and sagging jowls. And I’m just as happy not to look like that.
    Harper seems to be considering my story with great seriousness. His eyes narrow again.
    “But if you were just a baby . . .” He tilts his head suspiciously. “Did they change your name? And Desmia’s? So they didn’t have to say, ‘Oops, sorry everyone, the princess’s name is actually Desmia, not Cecilia. Don’t pay any attention to this little switch, it doesn’t mean a thing—’ ”
    “I hadn’t been christened yet, when my parents were murdered,” I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. “Remember, it’s the custom with the royal family that they don’t announce a baby’s name until the christening day.”
    This is a part of the story that’s always bothered me. I ache a little every time I think about the fact that my parents never got to hold me up in front of the entire kingdom and God himself and announce, “This is our dear, dear child, our baby Cecilia, whom we love beyond endurance. . . .” Sir Stephen says I was barely seen publicly at all before the murderers came. So that saved me from having to live my life under a complete alias, the