The Man Behind the Mask

I had a way with hair. Other people’s, anyway. Mine was wild and curly and I pretty much left it alone. I fluffed the sides of her blond mop with my fingers. The cut was fine, really. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try to improve on it. “Hmm. Maybe just a trim. Reemphasize the feathering around your face…”

“Who knows when we’ll get the chance again?”

I didn’t want to think about that. Hair, I thought. Hair is the question. “Do you have some decent scissors?”

“I’m sure I can dig up a pair.”

I bargained shamelessly. “You’ll have to tell me all your exploits since June. I get the sense it’s been action-packed.”

“One death-defying challenge after another.” She said it dryly, but something in her voice told me it wasn’t a joke. I thought of the scar on her shoulder.

Finally I confessed softly, “As if I’m going to turn you down, whatever we do.”

She caught my hand again. “Come on.”

“Let me grab my robe and slippers.”

It was cold in the passageway—all that stone, with no heat source, I guess. I shivered and pulled my robe closer as we hustled along.

Her rooms were in a different wing than mine, on the next floor up. At one point, we emerged onto a landing in a back stairwell. Brit shut the section of wall that had opened for us, leaving the wall looking as if the doorway we’d come through had never been. We climbed the narrow stairs. She opened a door—a real one, with a porcelain knob. On the other side was a main hallway.

She shot glances both ways, then turned a wide grin on me. “Let’s go for it.”

Giggling, we took off, racing along the thick Turkish runner as fast as our flapping slippers would allow. Around the next corner, with nobody else in sight to witness Her Royal Highness behaving in such an undignified manner, she led me through a door onto another back stairwell. We stood on a landing. She pushed a place on the wall—and yet another door opened up. We went through. She pushed another spot and the section of wall swung silently shut. I stared. The “door” was gone. All I saw was solid wall. It really was amazing.

Brit had already turned and headed off down the gleaming secret passage. I rushed to catch up.

Two more hallways, and she stopped to open another section of wall. She pressed a latch and the wall swung toward us. On the other side, a full-length mirror gleamed. Beyond the hole it left in the wall, I could see a bedroom even bigger and more luxurious than the one assigned to me.

We went through. She pushed a spot on the heavy gold-leafed mirror frame and the mirror swung silently back into place. “Wait here,” she commanded, and went out through a set of high, carved double doors.

I stood by the mirror and gaped at her gorgeous room. The heavy velvet drapes were drawn across the windows. Her bed was bigger than mine—could that be possible?—up on a dais, so much carving on the bedposts and finials, you could sit there staring forever, picking out the moons and suns, the longboats and dragons and mermaids with long, twining hair. Her bedding was crimson velvet, the sheets snowy white against the red. I mounted the dais and sat on the bed, pulling a round red velvet pillow into my lap. I was stroking the thick, soft pile when she returned.

“We’re alone,” she announced. “And look what I found?” She held up a pair of scissors, snicked them open and shut. “Also, my rooms are undisturbed.” I must have looked puzzled. She explained, “It’s my dad.”

I’d met King Osrik just that evening, at dinner. He was tall and lean. Good-looking, for an older guy. Distinguished, I guess you’d say. Dark hair going gray. Dark eyes—Valbrand’s eyes. Upon being introduced, I performed the Gullandrian bow Brit had taught me—fisted hand to heart, a dip of the head—and said how thrilled I was to meet His Majesty.

He gave me a regal nod. “It is my hope that you enjoy your brief stay in my daughter’s homeland.”

End of conversation. My sense was of a man very few people really knew.

The way she spoke of him, with such affection and humor, I guessed that Brit felt she knew him just fine. She went on, “You know I adore him, but he drives me nuts sometimes. He keeps tabs on me. He’s actually bugged my rooms more than once. Which means I’ve learned to seek out and neutralize all electronic surveillance devices on a regular basis. That leaves only my personal maid and cook and the ongoing fiction that the servants don’t spy for my father. Them, I give errands. Lots and lots of errands. Tonight is no exception. I’ve sent them off to do my bidding. No way they’ll be back before dawn. And since we came through the secret passageway, the guards at the main door to the suite don’t even know you’re in here. We have total privacy, a luxury I appreciate a lot more than I used to. It’s so rare these days.”

I was stuck on the part about the guards. “You have guards at your door?”

She nodded. “All the members of the royal family do.”

“You need guards?”

“Let me put it this way. The guards are there because it’s palace protocol. Of course, they’ll protect me, if a sticky situation arises—which it never has so far. In the meantime, they’re in a perfect position to report all my comings and goings to His Royal Majesty—” she grinned “—at least when I leave through the main doors.” I tossed the pillow back into the giant pile at the head of the bed. She added, “The life of a princess does have its little challenges.”

“No kidding.” I got up and took the scissors from her. “Fine-tooth comb?”

She held up her other hand and I saw she had the comb, too. “Let’s go in my dressing room,” she said. “It’s got better light, a good mirror and a swivel vanity chair.”

As soon as she’d got her hair wet and I had her in the chair, I asked about the scar on her shoulder.

“From a renegade’s poisoned arrow,” she said—renegades being seriously delinquent teenage boys who terrorized the Vildelund, the wild country to the north. She said she’d barely survived. She was delirious, near death for days, while her body fought off the poison.

I snipped away and she sucked a few peanut M&M’s—she’d always had a thing for them—and told me all about her quest to find Valbrand.

“They all swore he was dead.” She met my eyes in the wide mirror over the marble counter. “But he wasn’t dead. I knew it.” She put her hand over her heart. “I knew it here.” I’d never seen her so intense and passionate—well, except maybe when she looked at Eric. “So, since no one would believe me, I took a guide and flew to the Vildelund to find the mysterious Eric Greyfell, who had gone looking for Valbrand after he disappeared at sea.”

“And this was when—that you went to the Vildelund?”

“Didn’t I say in my letters?”

I shook my head. They were postcards, actually. There had been three of them. What can you write on a postcard?Hello, how are you? I’m fine. Wish you were here…

Brit said, “I went to the Vildelund in early September.”

“And at that point you still hadn’t met Eric?” “Nope. He was a hard man to meet. When he returned from his quest to find Valbrand, he came to Isenhalla just long enough to report to my dad that he was certain Valbrand was dead—and then he rushed off to the Vildelund, where he’d been hanging out ever since. I wanted to hear the story of what happened to my brother from Eric himself.”

“So you flew there and…”

“The plane crashed.”

I stopped snipping to stare. “With you in it?”

“That’s right. My guide was killed.” Her blue eyes, right then, looked nearly as haunted as Valbrand’s. “I was knocked out when we went down. I came to in the wrecked plane. The guide didn’t. The crash broke his neck.”

I sighed. “Bad, huh?”

“Yeah. Real bad. I crawled from the wreckage to find the renegade waiting. He shot me. Eric found me and took me to the village where his sweet aunt Asta lived. Asta took care of me until I got well. And eventually, I found my brother—right there, in the Vildelund.”

“With Eric?”

“That’s right. For a long time, Valbrand wasn’t…ready yet, I guess you could say, to come back here and deal with everything he’s dealing with now. He’d made Eric promise to stay with him in the north until he could bring himself to come home.…”

Our eyes were locked in the mirror.

It was a good opening. The right place to ask a few questions about her brother—and maybe even to tell her the way I felt. But she looked away and the moment got by me.

I finished trimming. I’d taken some off the sides, in layers, to give it more lift. I worked in a little styling gel, then grabbed the blow dryer she’d set on the counter for me.

“I love it,” she announced when I turned the dryer off. She fluffed with her fingers and turned her head this way and that. “It always looks fuller when you do it—now for the pedicures.” She dragged me into the enormous marble bathroom, where we soaked our feet in the sunken tub and then took turns in a paraffin bath.

She did me, then I did her, long sessions with a pumice stone and deep foot massage. We yakked the whole time. For polish, she had a rack full of Urban Decay, great colors with Goth names: Asphyxia. Freakshow. Gash. I chose Pipe Dream, a nice barely-there shade. Brit went for Toxin, a sort of Easter-egg purple that didn’t fit the name at all.