Eight Princesses and a Magic Mirror Read online

  The city is built of white stone, with leafy squares where people sit at café tables playing cards. The air is full of the smell of rich cooking, of talk and music. On the second biggest square is the market where traders meet from far and wide. And in the biggest square of all is the palace, built of the same gleaming white stone as the rest of the city. Peacocks strut about its walls and guards in bright uniforms stand outside its golden gates. This may sound grand, but it is a friendly palace. The city’s elders, when they are not playing cards in cafés, like to sit on the benches in the courtyard to swap stories about the old days, and on holidays, families bring picnics where children, including Princess Abayome, run about and play. Everyone loves Abayome because she never gives herself airs but is easy and generous and cheerful. Last year, a little girl called Odé was swept down from the forest in a flood that drowned her entire village, and now she sleeps in the princess’s bedroom, and Abayome loves her like a sister.

  That is the kind of place Bamfou is. Happy and kind and welcoming.

  Or at least it was, until the king brought home his new queen.

  Abayome was planting daisies in the palace flower beds with Odé when the king returned with his retinue. She had missed her father in the long months that he had been away. As soon as she heard the horses, she ran to greet him with Odé in her muddy gardening clothes.

  “Father!”

  “Daughter!”

  Something was wrong. Instead of swinging Abayome around as he always did and then pressing her to his heart, the king turned, and in a voice trembling with love, said, “Abayome, my daughter, there is someone I want you to meet.”

  And he rushed forward to help a lady from her carriage.

  Abayome’s eyes widened. She had never seen a person so beautiful.

  Skin lustrous as polished ebony, golden eyes fringed with long lashes. Copper braids woven around a high clear brow, with beads of turquoise to match the silk of her embroidered dress.

  “Your new mother,” murmured the king.

  Abayome, who had not expected a mother, let alone one so splendid, stepped forward in a daze and only just remembered to bow.

  “Goodness,” the new queen said. “How dirty you are. Please do not come near me until you are clean.”

  Odé stared at Abayome, as if to say, Really? You’re going to let her talk to you like that? and Abayome herself stared at her father with much the same astonishment.

  But the king only had eyes for the queen.

  And so everything changed.

  On the evening the new queen arrived, a welcome feast was thrown on the palace’s loveliest terrace. The chirrup of crickets and the scent of tobacco flowers filled the warm night air. Guests sat on woven cushions on the ground, eating spiced rice served on banana leaves with roasted lamb and pepper sauce, toasting the king and his new queen with coconut water straight from the shell. And after dinner, once they had split the coconuts to scoop out the flesh inside, the king asked Odé to sing.

  Odé rarely spoke, but she loved to sing, and her voice was sweet as a nightingale’s. She sang songs she remembered from her village. Abayome’s favorite was about a place right on the edge of the forest with the dark green tree world on one side and the open mountains on the other, and in between, a waterfall tumbling into a pool so clear people said the old shaman had cast a spell over it to keep it secret. It was a wonderful song but a terrible one too, because it was about all that Odé had lost. When she finished everyone was very quiet, caught in its magic and thoughts about the beauty and cruelty of the world.

  “Well!” The new queen shattered the silence. “I can see I have work to do. Tomorrow, I shall send for proper musicians, as well as furniture and plates.”

  Everyone stared at the king then, as if to say, Are you really going to let her say that? and still the king beamed at his new wife with love and pride. Abayome glared at the queen. The queen gazed coolly back.

  Abayome looked away first.

  For as long as she could remember, Abayome had done the same thing every morning during the dry season. She jumped out of bed as soon as the first birds started to sing and ran to the river beach outside the palace grounds to swim with the town children before they went to school. Then she ran back to the palace and ate a huge breakfast of sweet mangoes and omelet in the kitchen, before racing upstairs to get dressed in her most comfortable clothes. Next came lessons with her tutor, who let her study exactly what she wanted, which was usually stories about the old days, and the forest, and the wild creatures who lived there.

  On the day after the new queen’s arrival, when Abayome ran out of her room, a pale young woman in a smart blue dress stepped into her path.

  “I am the queen’s personal maid,” said the pale young woman. “My name is Mademoiselle Amélie. Her Grace has sent me to look after you.”

  “Look after me?”

  “To wash and dress you,” said Mademoiselle Amélie. “In the correct fashion.”

  Abayome did not take well to being washed and dressed in the correct fashion. She howled as she was plunged into a tub of scalding water and squealed as her thick eyebrows were plucked to narrow lines. She whimpered as her nails were filed and she gagged as her skin was rubbed all over with lotions. When Amélie started tugging through her tangled hair, Abayome began to cry, then watched in silent horror as it was oiled then parted into dozens of braids secured with pink and white beads to match her new stiff, starched dress.

  When it was over, Mademoiselle Amélie took her to the queen, who smiled and held out a small gold mirror. Abayome stared at her reflection.

  “Is that me?” she breathed.

  The queen smiled again. “You may keep the mirror.”

  The king was sent for.

  “Are you not proud of her, my love?” asked the queen.

  The king could have told the truth, which was that he was always proud of Abayome. But instead he said, “Oh, yes, my love—why, she is just like you.”

  Abayome had won the queen’s approval. But she lost many things.

  She lost Madu, the head gardener, who had taught her about plants, and Fayola, her nursemaid, who still sang her to sleep, and Baba and Beji, the cooks, who slapped her hands when they caught her trying to steal cakes, then gave her the cakes anyway. They were her family, and she loved them.

  But the queen said, “A princess does not mix with servants.”

  And so Abayome did not mix with servants.

  The queen said, “A princess does not need to learn silly stories about the past, and the forest and its wild creatures. A princess’s education is a serious affair.”

  And so Abayome did not protest when her tutor was dismissed and replaced by a young man called Monsieur Étienne who smacked her fingers with a ruler if she mixed up dates of wars and treaties.

  The queen said, “A princess does not run wild with other children, and a princess does not swim in rivers.”

  And so Abayome lost her playmates and her greatest pleasure.

  When the queen said, as they always knew that she would, “A princess does not share her room with an orphan child from the forest,” even the king protested. But the queen was firm and Odé moved out of the palace and in with Madu and his family. Abayome accepted this, like everything else, for love of her father. But the next time she saw Odé, she turned her head away in shame. And when she heard that Odé had stopped singing, her shame grew.

  On lonely evenings, when there were guests in the castle and the queen would not allow her in the new dining room, Abayome would look in the mirror for comfort.

  “Show me how beautiful I am,” she would order, and the mirror did.

  She told herself that as long as she was beautiful, she must also be loved.

  Months passed. Inside the palace, Abayome grew more elegant, more polished and glossy and groomed, while outside the season turned. Every afternoon more and more clouds drifted up from the sea. They clung thickly to the forest and turned to rain that dripped off leaves and
spilled down rocks, formed ponds and puddles and channels through the dark earth. The channels gathered speed until they hurtled into the river, churning it to a torrent that smashed through banks and trees and pastures, growing bigger and faster and unstoppable.

  Everyone agreed, the shaman in the forest must be sleeping deeply. These were the worst floods anyone could remember.

  A tree whirled down the mountain and smashed into a bridge, cutting the town in two.

  A cow was swept away, never to be seen again.

  A garden collapsed, a family’s livelihood destroyed.

  And then Odé disappeared.

  The head gardener Madu came to the palace to ask for guards to help with the search party.

  “But why?” asked the queen. “I mean, what concern is Odé of ours?”

  “My love!” protested the king.

  “If you please, Your Grace,” stammered Madu, “she is like a daughter to us—to the whole town. Like a sister.”

  He stared at Abayome, who felt her cheeks grow hot.

  Alone in her room, she took out the mirror.

  “Am I beautiful?” she whispered.

  The mirror showed her a girl with thin eyebrows and polished skin and braided hair secured with colored beads.

  Abayome began to cry. She cried until she was puffier and more pink and piggy-eyed than any princess ever was, and then she looked in the mirror again, to see what she had become, and saw to her surprise that the mirror had begun to shimmer.

  At first, she thought it must be a trick of the light. She moved away from the window. Still it shimmered. She crossed the room and sat on Odé’s old bed. The shimmer became a steady glow, until there was no mirror anymore, just light pouring from it. Abayome blinked as it grew brighter. When she looked again the glow had gone, and something else had replaced it.

  An image of a waterfall tumbling into a pool on the edge of the forest, with the open mountain on one side, and the dark green world of trees on the other.

  Abayome blinked again. When she looked in the mirror, she saw only her own reflection, but it didn’t matter.

  She knew exactly where Odé was.

  Abayome left immediately. She told no one where she was going. She knew they would try to stop her, and that they would think her mad if she told them about the mirror. The search party was working downstream, assuming Odé had been swept away. Abayome slipped out of the palace gardens straight to the riverbank and began to walk upstream. It was harder than she had imagined. The ground was slick with mud, and she had to pick her way carefully through debris flung up by the floodwater. She lost one shoe, then another. Slipped. Stood up, her pale pink dress soaked to the skin. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, streaking her cheeks with mud, and carried on.

  Up she went, up and up. The terraced farmland dropped away, and she walked the vast open mountain, past grazing zebra and startled pheasants. Mosquitoes bit her. Thorns ripped her clothes. Her stomach rumbled, and her parched tongue swelled in her mouth, but at last, late in the afternoon, she reached the forest.

  Somewhere in its dark green world, she heard the roar of a waterfall.

  More walking, past trees now with trunks as wide as a house and vines as thick as a grown man’s arm, following the sound of water until at last she came on it, and it was every bit as lovely as Odé had sung it, a foaming, thundering cascade. Abayome watched, mesmerized. She walked up to the water. Reached out to touch it and wondered how it would feel to be in the water . . .

  Under the water . . .

  To be the water . . .

  She leaned over until she felt the spray of the waterfall on her cheek . . . oh!

  Abayome clutched a vine to stop herself tipping into the pool.

  Was this part of the shaman’s enchantment? Was this how she kept the pool secret?

  Abayome edged away until her back was wedged against a cliff and took a shaky breath.

  A wild creature began to howl. . . .

  The mirror was hanging on a ribbon around her neck. She pulled it over her head and opened it.

  “Show me Odé,” she begged, as another creature screeched.

  But there was no shimmering or vision. The mirror reflected only her face, covered in bites and scratches, and the cliff behind her, and . . . oh!

  Halfway up the cliff was a ledge. And on the ledge . . .

  On the ledge, a human foot. A human foot that, as Abayome began to climb, revealed itself to be attached to a human leg, curled under a little human girl’s dress, attached to a little human girl’s body, lying hunched and motionless on a bed of leaves.

  Abayome’s heart was pounding as she heaved herself onto the ledge. She was too late! She was too late, and Odé had died alone and frightened in the forest where her entire world had once been swept away, and it was Abayome’s fault, because she had been more concerned with pleasing the queen and being a beautiful princess than with caring for Odé.

  “Abi?”

  And now there were ghosts here as well as wild creatures, and the ghosts knew who she was, and they were calling to her.

  “Abi! Abi! You came!”

  And it wasn’t ghosts at all, but Odé, who was in her arms, and she wasn’t dead, and the clouds above were bursting and the rain was pouring through the high canopy, but the girls didn’t care, because it was dry on their ledge between the forest and the open mountain, and they had each other, and they were safe.

  They stayed the whole night in the forest, cuddled close for warmth and, though the screeches and howls grew louder and closer, they weren’t afraid because they had each other. In the morning when the sun broke and the rain stopped, they walked back down the mountain, and they sang all the way.

  When the first houses of the city appeared, Abayome stopped.

  “We should probably tidy ourselves up a bit,” she said, and reached for the mirror around her neck.

  But the mirror had gone.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Odé. “Everyone will be so happy to see you. They won’t care what you look like. They never did.”

  And Abayome knew that she was right.

  The news that Odé had returned and that the princess had rescued her spread around the flooded town like a tidal wave, and by the time the girls reached the palace gates a happy procession of townspeople walked with them, singing and dancing and telling each other, “That is a true princess of Bamfou.” Abayome agreed. And when she was dry, and dressed in her comfortable old clothes, she informed her father the king and her stepmother the queen that from now on her sister Odé would be sleeping in her room once more, and that, come the dry season, she would be swimming again in the river. And for once the king looked not at his queen but at his daughter and agreed that it should be so.

  THE

  PRINCESS

  OF THE

  HIGH SEAS

  All the children on the island kingdom of Rhain were given their first boat on their twelfth birthday. It was one of those facts of life there, like midwinter bonfires and snowdrops in spring. The sight of the dories and cockles out in Taransay Bay on a clear, still day, their bright hulls reflected in the water, the excited young voices calling out across the waves, were a comforting reminder that island ways continued as they always had, and always would.

  The only children not to receive a boat were the Rhainian princes and princesses. Boats for islanders are a matter of survival, for fishing and trade, but the sea is not always kind. Boats bring death too. The same tradition that insisted that every island child must have a boat, also stated that the royal children must not. No one had ever questioned it, and at the time our story starts, three of the four princesses of Rhain were perfectly happy with this rule. Catriona, Ailsa, and Iseabail had no interest in going about on the water. It was not something princesses did. Princesses boarded boats only if they had to, for example, when they left to marry a prince, and when they did, someone else sailed them there, just as someone else always led their horses when they went out riding, and boiled wate
r for their tea. A princess’s job was to stay safe, doing things like embroidering covers for chairs or finding new ways of using feathers in hats. Catriona, Ailsa, and Iseabail thought all this was delightful.

  And then there was Ellen.

  Ellen, unlike her older sisters, did not accept things just because they had always been so. Ellen questioned everything. Why must she sleep at night and wake by day? Why could she not wear clothes to run in instead of long skirts and petticoats? Or paddle on sunny days like the island children, or watch the Spring Regatta with the servants from the roof where everyone knew the view was best? It was no surprise to anyone when, on her twelfth birthday, Ellen demanded, “Why may I not have a boat, like all the other children?”

  The older princesses giggled. The king sighed. Only the queen said nothing.

  “Because it has always been so,” the king said, when he had finished sighing. “Try to be more like your sisters.”

  Ellen, who was not a polite kind of princess, said she didn’t see why her father got to decide what she should do rather than letting her decide for herself, and she swept out of the breakfast room through the door to the servants’ corridor. She stomped along a dark passage to the wine cellar, through another door, then ran and tumbled and stumbled down steep stone steps cut into the cliff until she reached the castle’s quay, where she flung herself to the ground and burst into tears.

  Of all the questions she had ever asked, this had been the most important, because Ellen loved the sea more than anything in the world. She had thought her parents understood.

  She had hoped so much they would make an exception. . . .

  Her tears spent, she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, facing the waves. She wondered if anyone would recognize her if she chopped off all her hair and ran away to sea, or if it would be possible to steal a boat, or even secretly build one. She didn’t hear her mother until the queen sat down beside her.