The Decoy Princess by Dawn Cook
May. 10th, 2008 04:23 pmPrincess Tess of Costenopolie doesn't really have it easy. Sure, she can shop wherever and whenever she wants(shopping is very, very important, you know) and at least her fiance (who she didn't get to choose) is good looking, but then there's this pesky prophecy she was born under that's resulted in people trying to kill her since...well, birth. On the one hand, it's made her great with secret passages and scaling walls, not to mention pretty good with a whip and poisoned darts. Really, it'd all be great if it weren't for those peskt assassination attempts.
But then her fiance Garrett, comes a little early and demands that the wedding ceremony be moved up, and the king and queen are forced to come clean: Tess isn't their real daughter, or the baby born under the prophecy. Instead, she's one of three babies bought off the street to serves as decoys for the assassins while the real princess was carted off to be raised in secrecy in a convent. The only one of the decoy babies to survive the early assassination attempts, Tess is formally(but ever so quietly) adopted by the king and queen, and brought up with no idea of her true origins. Tess, understandably, has a few issues with this. Garrett has even more, and almost as fast as you can blink, he's assassinated the king and queen and sent assassins off to kill the real princess so no one can contest his claim tothe throne once he marries Tess. But then she has the utter gall to go and save herself from him all on her own, thankyouverymuch, and he realizes he just needs a princess, doesn't matter which, as long as there's someone to claim the one he's marrying is the real deal.
Ok, it sounds kind of confusing, but really, it isn't, and before you know it, Tess is out on the streets, little more than a beggar(culture shock!) determined to save the real princess, not to mention her kingdom, and get revenge, teaming up along the way with Duncan, a scammer she blackmails into giving her his winnings when she catches him cheating at cards, and who's determined to find out just how she did it. With a plotline like this, there's a fine line between a heroine who's TSTL and keeps lucking out, and a heroine who's so good that it's just ridiculous. Here, even though it was disguised as games, Tess has been taught to survive and track, and has skills and is smart, but is still naive as to the world beyond being a princess. She has the arrogance and does foolish things, but gets called on them, and avoids blundering into things when she should know better. (And yes, there is a huge difference between blundering into trouble when there's just no way you could be prepared for the situation you're in, or when dealing with parts of life you never realized existed, and blundering in when you should know better, but I won't get into that.)