Palace of Lies by Margaret Peterson Haddix

down. The nightgown I’d been thinking of as snowy-white perfection was smeared with blood. Some of the blood had dried to a brownish color, but other spots were fresh and bright red.
    It looked like the gown of a murder victim.
    â€œOh, you poor, dear child!” Janelia cried. “Did they stabyou when you were escaping?” She looked frantically up at Herk and Tog. “Were either of you injured? Are you sure nobody followed—”
    â€œ Nobody could have followed us, the way we went,” Herk bragged.
    Janelia turned her frantic gaze back to me.
    â€œI had to break a window to escape,” I said. Just saying those words made me dizzy. “I didn’t have shoes. I stepped on some glass. Oh, and slid down a pillar.”
    It already seemed impossible that I had done those things.
    Janelia nodded, a troubled bobbing up and down of her head.
    â€œIt could be worse, it could be worse,” she muttered. She scooted back and peered more directly at my bloody feet. “Tog, put on the kettle so we’ll have hot water to clean the blood away.”
    I remembered how much it had hurt when Herk touched my foot.
    â€œI think there might still be some glass left inside,” I said hesitantly.
    Janelia kept nodding.
    â€œWe’ll get it out,” she said. She lifted the bottom of my nightgown slightly, looking at my scraped legs. “Boys, while I’m helping Desmia, I’ll need you to go to the market to purchase—”
    â€œMam, there’s no money left to buy anything,” Tog said,backing away from a fireplace where he’d just hung a kettle. “If you want us to leave so we don’t see a girl’s leg—the leg of a girl we just rescued , remember?—just tell us to leave.”
    Herk scrambled up.
    â€œBye, bye,” he said.
    And then both boys walked back out the door.
    I missed them.
    Maybe I was dizzy from losing so much blood. Maybe it was just too strange to have lost my palace, lost the girls I thought of as sisters, endured so much to get away from danger—and now have this strange woman claiming a relationship I was supposed to remember. Or, was the strange part that I almost did remember?
    While Janelia busied herself pulling out cloths and watching the kettle, I made myself focus on looking around the small room.
    Dirt floor , I thought. Bedding over in the corner—do all three of them actually sleep on the floor? Table that looks like it would fall apart if someone put his elbows down on it, three rickety stools . . .
    I had never seen such a poor-looking space. Of course, I’d never seen inside any home except the palace and the “prison house” where Madame Bisset had kept me, so for all I knew, maybe most of my royal subjects lived like this. Or maybe, by the standards of ordinary Sualans, this was actually a fine home, an upper-class living space.
    I doubted that. I couldn’t imagine anyone living in aworse place than this. Not if they intended to survive.
    Janelia brought a steaming bucket of water and a pile of rags over beside me. I was relieved to see that she piled the rags on one of the rickety stools, not the dirt floor.
    â€œIt’s not your fault you don’t remember me from when you were little,” Janelia said, though I could tell from the way she bit her lip that it still bothered her. “And—from the other things I tried, trying to get a message to you. I shouldn’t have expected so much. I just wanted so much to believe . . .”
    â€œ Why did I know you when I was four?” I asked. “How—”
    I stopped myself before I could ask, How is it that Lord Throckmorton didn’t have you killed? even though that was one of the things I wanted to know. Maybe what I wanted to know most. I was working out an odd sort of equation in my head: If poor servant-girl Janelia managed to survive in spite of Lord Throckmorton’s murderous ways,