The Man Behind the Mask. Christine Rimmer
held out her hand. “Come look.”
I peered at her sideways, scowling. “Don’t be cranky. I really am sorry I freaked you out.”
“I’m not cranky,” I insisted. Crankily. “I just don’t see why you couldn’t come in through the door.”
She made an impatient noise in her throat. “Hel-lo, I’m a princess, remember? Around here, I have an image to maintain.” She opened her pink robe to display her own cartoon-character pajamas—Wile E. Coyote, as a matter of fact—then lifted a foot with a fluffy pink slipper on it and wiggled it at me. “I prefer not to go running through the halls once I’m dressed for bed.”
The reminder of her royal status put me right back into pouting mode. “You always used to say that being a princess didn’t mean a thing to you.”
We shared a long look. She said, softly, “I’m learning that it means quite a bit. That it’s an important part of who I am.”
Did those words surprise me? Not really. I could sense big changes in her. A whole lot had happened since she’d boarded the royal jet in L.A., back in June, for her first visit to her father’s land. In June, Valbrand had been missing and considered dead for almost a year; King Osrik, the father she now called “Dad” was a stranger to her—and she’d yet to meet the man she now planned to marry.
“Well?” she demanded, after a too-long pause. “D’you want to see the passageway or not?”
I shoved my AlphaSmart off my lap, jumped from the bed and padded to her side. Brit opened the armoire door and slid my clothes out of the way.
The whole back of the armoire was another door—it opened onto a narrow hallway of the same silver-gray slate as the palace facade. An electric lantern—Brit’s, no doubt—sat on the passageway floor just beyond the armoire, casting a golden glow, making strange, shimmery light patterns on the glossy stone. I could see straight ahead maybe a hundred feet. Then a dead end, a shadowed blackness to the right. A turn in the passageway, I guessed. “Amazing.”
Brit beamed. “Isenhalla is riddled with hidden hallways. They were included in the original construction, back in the mid-sixteenth century, when King Thorlak the Liberator built the current palace on the ruins of an earlier one destroyed by the Danes. It was a dangerous time. Poor King Thorlak. He never knew when he might need to duck inside a curio cabinet and get the hell outta Dodge. And there’s more…”
I loved this kind of stuff and Brit knew it. “Tell.”
“In the mid-nineteenth century, King Solmund Gudmond took the throne. King Solmund was, shall we say, more than a little bit eccentric—enough so that by the end of his reign he was known as Mad King Solmund. In the final years before his death, he would wash his hands a hundred times a day and wander the great halls at night wearing nothing but a look of total confusion.”
“And King Solmund had exactly what to do with the passageways?”
“Before he lost his grip on reality, he had them modernized, adding more hidden entrances and exits, improving the internal mechanisms within the secret doors.”
“Fascinating,” I said, and meant it.
“Yeah. It’s become a minor hobby of mine, to hunt down all the secret hallways and follow them wherever they lead.” Her face was flushed, excited. I’d never seen her look happier.
Or more at home.
“You love it here.” There was a tightness in my chest.
She quirked an eyebrow at me. “Is that an accusation?”
I shook my head. “I guess it just hit me all over again. You’re really never coming home.”
“This is my home.” She spoke gently, with only the faintest note of reproach.
I scrunched up my eyes. Hard. No way I was letting the waterworks get started. “I’ll miss you, that’s all.”
Her mouth kind of twisted. She patted my arm. “Don’t forget the royal jet. Flies both ways. And the phone. And what about e-mail? You know we’ll be in touch.”
“I know,” I said and gave her a big smile. I didn’t want to be a downer, but I was thinking that visits and phone calls and e-mails could never stack up with her living directly across the walkway from me in our charmingly derelict courtyard-style apartment building. In the months she’d been gone, I’d come to realize how much I counted on her friendship.
East Hollywood with no Brit. Could it really be happening?
She grabbed my hand. “I know I’ve been neglecting you.”
Wrong. Yes, I missed her. Yes, I hated that I was going to have to accept that her life was different now and our friendship would change. But I did not feel neglected. “Oh, come on. You’ve knocked yourself out checking on me every chance you get. You’ve been crazy busy.…”
“Still. We’ve hardly had a moment to ourselves since you got here. I’m fixing that. Now. Let’s go to my rooms. We’ll talk till our tongues go numb. Do the mutual pedicure thing. You can mess with my hair.”
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,