It was a bright winter day. The road snaked from the palace gates and past the town. Beyond it, landscapes became unfamiliar. There were frozen streams to be crossed on rickety bridges, falcons swooping over snowy meadows, copses of silent trees with icy branches glittering clear and sharp in the sun. Now and then, a dazzling unicorn pranced by, or a thin needle of some solitary wizard’s tower rose tall on the horizon. She sat leaning far out the window; she had forgotten to wear a hood, and her ears soon burned with the cold, yet she did not heed Brie’s admonitions to draw the curtains closed but looked and looked, drinking everything in with something much like greed—for it suddenly came to her that she had never traveled anywhere, anywhere at all. By the time the old groom guided the horses through another town, up another hill, to the gates of another palace, she was in a state of childlike excitement.
When she was announced, there appeared to be some confusion as to the prince’s whereabouts, and she, in turn, was surprised to discover that this was the domain of the Duke von Lieber, the jocular nobleman who had paid them a visit some seasons before. The duke himself was away on a weeklong hunt, she was informed by the pomaded butler with a measured gait who showed her in, but the duchess would be overjoyed to see her imminently, or almost imminently, once Her Grace arose from her midday rest. Alone she sat in the reception chamber (Brie and Nibbles had gone off to explore the kitchens) and smiled, imagining with what delight the prince would greet her. The butler brought her a cup of weak tea with too much sugar in it; once the man’s departing steps faded away, there were no sounds save for the ticking of a clock in the corner. The thrill of the ride through the brilliant countryside was still making her blood run faster. And as the minute hand crawled to mark another quarter of a drowsy afternoon hour, she did something out of character: she set down her empty cup, and rose, and walked out of the room, mischievous laughter bubbling up inside her.
No clear goal in mind, she followed a corridor, went through a double door, crossed a hall, passed under an arch, climbed some stairs, turned some corners. She soon discovered this palace to be quite unlike her own—its spaces darker, its air warmer, its furnishings soft and opulent, its lines lithe and sinuous, its colors lush, jewel bright, emerald and crimson and midnight blue—so different from the light-filled, pastel-tinted geometry of the clean, cool, clear expanses to which she herself was accustomed. In a heavily curtained chamber on the second floor, she came upon a low table with curvaceous candelabra twinkling at either end and the remains of an interrupted meal. Her silent laughter died away as she picked up a peach with an imprint of small, perfect teeth in one downy side, trailed her finger along the rim of a goblet, one of two, filled with ruby-red wine. In the next room, dimmer still, velvet pillows lay scattered on the floor, a lyre leaned against the wall, and in a shadowed niche, a cage gleamed dully.
At her approach, the cage exploded with screams.
She clutched at her heart to keep it from leaping away and blinked at the large green bird with eyes of molten amber. The bird was screaming still when a door flew open in the upholstered wall, and Prince Roland strode in. She had just the time to notice that his hair was disheveled and the top two or three buttons of his shirt were undone, when he spoke, and everything else was driven from her mind.
“You! What are you doing here?”
She had heard plenty of shouting in her youth, but no one had ever addressed her with such venom. Stunned, she stared at him. His eyes had gone dark, his face was rigid. He looked like someone else, someone she did not know. She pressed her hands to her mouth, and turned, and fled, pursued by the bird’s strident screaming; and it seemed as if the screams had words in them, some words meant just for her.
She ran—ran through chambers of startled maids, chambers of nasty statues, chambers of stalking cats, until she found herself in a room more frightful than the rest, a badly lit, cavernous place deceptive with the quivering of candles. The air here hung stuffy with some musky perfume, and a monstrous bed stood drowning under storm-tossed waves of scarlet silk. The bed—the bed was horrible, the bed was obscene—and oh, was it possible that someone was hiding under the sheets, breathing, stirring, giggling?
For one lost minute, she felt that she herself might be asleep, she herself might be dreaming, for nothing was what it was, nothing was what it seemed to be. She flew away again, a soundless cry frozen in her throat, her mind in turmoil, down long carpeted corridors, past numbered doors, and still the nightmare went on, and sudden rips ran through the fabric of things all around her, revealing snatches of dangerous half-truths beneath, and she almost lost all hope of ever finding her way out, when an unexpected light grew before her, and there was the yawning O of the concierge’s mouth, and bellboys hurtling out of her way, and the revolving lobby doors—and at last she was outside.
She scrambled into the carriage, repeating, “Go, go, go!” to the old groom, who rushed to put out his cigarette and groped for the keys, raised eyebrows all but vanishing in the nest of white hair. She expected the prince to burst out of doors after her then, to chase her limousine down the street—yet he did not. She lowered the curtain on her window and sat staring straight ahead with dry, unseeing eyes. It was not until the last gas station on the outskirts had remained behind that she realized she had forgotten Brie and Nibbles in that terrible place. At that moment, they seemed to her the only true friends, the only loyal souls, the only ties she had to anything familiar. She thought of a dozen sleek cats she had glimpsed prowling through scented shadows, and had no choice but to order the groom to turn around. As the carriage bounced back over the cobblestones, she remembered her actual reason for coming here and, with a sickened start, unclenched her tense, sweaty hands, only to find her daughter’s darling soap slipper half melted, deformed out of all recognition. She pressed it to her heart and cried, heavy with humiliation, all the way back to the palace.
Prince Roland, fully buttoned now, was standing outside. He watched her as she went in, waited stony-faced while she explained about the mice to the confused butler. It took a long, a very long, time to find Brie and Nibbles. (The reason for the delay was simple, if rather unfortunate: in the kitchen of the von Liebers’ palace, Nibbles had been eaten by a cat. Brie had not wanted to go to the kitchen at all, for she had a queasy feeling in her tummy, but he mocked her for her cowardice with such booming laughter that she ended by gathering her tremulous tail in her paws and creeping after him. Once there, Nibbles made an obnoxious racket, clanging lids on the pots, shouting out the contents of the pantry, boasting that his nose would lead him to the tastiest cheese in the icebox, clowning for all he was worth, when out leapt an enormous beast with burning orange eyes and gobbled him up, just like that, before anyone could finish saying “Parmesan.” In fact, everything happened so fast that there was no possible way to ascertain whether or not Nibbles had died a hero, although it might have seemed to Brie that, in the split second before the murderous jaws gaped open, Nibbles had turned sickly gray and attempted to hide behind her. She had no time to think about it, however, busy as she was bashing the monster on the mouth with a ladling spoon. The cat, momentarily taken aback by Brie’s ferocity, recovered quickly and was readying itself for another jump when the entire kitchen exploded in an ear-splitting commotion. A hundred roaring mice poured out of every crack and crevice and attacked the beast, prodding its sides with forks, lobbing rinds of moldy cheese at its head, poking its paws with toothpicks, until it howled and bolted in a malodorous blur of rotten vegetables.