A Princess of Landover

“I do say!” she snapped anew. “And stop repeating everything, Grandfather! It makes you sound condescending!”

He shook his head some more. “So your visit to surprise me has more to do with your falling-out with your parents than a desire to see me?”

He said it mildly, but she could feel the edge to his voice. “Yes, I suppose it does. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have missed you very much. I know I should have come sooner to see you, and I might have done so if I hadn’t been sent off to Carrington. I might actually visit more often now, if I am not exiled to Libiris. But you have to help me! You understand what this means better than anyone else! The fairy-born would never submit to such treatment—being locked away in some old building with nothing to do but organize books and papers and talk to walls! Their plan is nothing more than a reaction to my dismissal from school!”

“Your intention, then, is to reside with me until something happens to change your parents’ minds about Libiris and your future, is that right?”

She hesitated, not liking the way he said it. “Yes, that’s right.”

He leaned back slightly and looked over at the fountain as if the solution to the problem might be found there. “I didn’t like your father when he arrived in Landover as its new King. You know that, correct?”

She nodded.

“I thought him a play-King, a tool of others, a fool who didn’t know any better and would only succeed in getting himself killed because he was too weak to find a way to stay alive. He came to me for help, and I put him off with excuses and a bargain I was certain he could not fulfill.”

He looked back at her. “And your mother is one of my least favorite children. She is too much like her own mother, a creature I loved desperately and could never make mine, a creature too wild and fickle ever to settle. Your mother was a constant reminder of her and hence of what I had lost. I wanted her gone, and when she chose to believe in your father, I let her go with my blessing. She would not be back, I told myself. Neither of them would.”

“I know the story.”

Indeed, she did. Her mother, falling in love with her father in the fairy way, at first sight, had given herself to him. She was his forever, she had told him. He, in turn, had come to love her. Neither had any real idea of what that would mean, and neither had anticipated how hard their road together would turn out to be.

“I did not believe in your father or your mother, and I was wrong about both,” her grandfather finished. “That does not happen often to me. I am the River Master, and I am leader of the fairy-born, and I am not allowed to be wrong. But I was wrong here. Your parents were brave and resourceful, and they have become the leaders this land has long needed. Your father is a King in every sense of the word, a ruler who manages to be fair to all and partial to none. I admire him for it greatly.”

He gave her a searching look. “Yet you appear to think otherwise. You appear to think that perhaps you know better than he does.”

She tightened her lips in determination. “In this one case, yes, I do. My father is not infallible.”

“No,” her grandfather agreed. “Nor are you. I suggest you ponder that in the days ahead.”

“Grandfather …”

He held up one hand to silence her, the fringe of black hair a warning flag that shimmered in the half-light. “Enough said about this. I am pleased you have come to me, though I wish it had been under better circumstances. It is a visit that should not have happened. You wish to use me as a lever against your father and mother, and I will not allow it, Mistaya. You must learn to solve your own problems and not to rely on others to solve them for you. I am not about to interfere with your parents’ wishes in the matter of Libiris, or to give you sanctuary, as you call it. Hiding out in the lake country will not bring an end to your problems.”

She felt the strength drain from her. “But I’m only asking—”

“Only asking me to fight your battles for you,” he finished, cutting her short. “I will not do that. I will not be your advocate in this matter. I do not care to challenge the authority of a parent over his child—not even when the child is one I love as much as I love you. I have been a parent with children, and I know how it feels to be interfered with by an outsider. I will not be a party to that here.”

He stood up abruptly. “You may spend the night, enjoy a banquet prepared in your honor, and in the morning you will return home. My decision is made. My word is final. You will go to your room now. I will see you at dinner.”

She was still trying to change his mind as he turned and walked away.

She was taken to a small cottage close to the amphitheater, one that offered sleeping accommodations not only for her but for the G’home Gnomes, as well. Under other circumstances, she would never have been housed close to them, but she thought that perhaps her grandfather was punishing her for disobeying the code that forbade her from bringing outsiders into the city. Or perhaps he thought she wanted them there, it was hard to tell. He didn’t seem to be the man she knew anymore. She was bitterly disappointed in his refusal to let her stay with him. She had never once really believed he wouldn’t. She knew he loved her, and she had been certain that this alone would be enough to persuade him to take her in, at least for a few days. Sending her away so abruptly was difficult for her to understand.

Alone in her sleeping chamber, the door tightly closed and the voices of the G’home Gnomes a faint murmur from the other side of the wall, she sat on her bed and tried hard not to cry. She never cried, she reminded herself. She was too old for that. But the tears came anyway, leaking out at the corners of her eyes, and she could not make them stop. She cried silently for a long time. What was she going to do?

She didn’t have an answer when she walked down the hall to take her bath. She didn’t have one when she was summoned to dinner, either. She ate mechanically of a very lavish feast and was thoroughly miserable the whole time. Her grandfather’s family sat all around her, and her cousins had questions about life in her father’s world, which she answered as briefly as possible, not caring about any of it. Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel were allowed to eat with the family, but placed at the low end of the table away from everyone except a handful of small children who had asked if they could sit with the strange-looking pair and who spent the entire meal staring up at them in a kind of bemused wonderment.

Mistaya spared them only a glance, somehow convinced that their presence had destroyed any chance she had of convincing her grandfather to let her stay with him. She knew it was a ridiculous conclusion, but she couldn’t help thinking it anyway. There had to be some explanation for his refusal to consider her request more carefully. There had to be someone to blame for this.

Dinner went on for a long time, and when it was over there were welcome speeches, music, dancing and a whole lot of other nonsense that left her feeling even more out of sorts. Her grandfather did not even pretend to be interested in the reasons for her foul mood. He spoke with her only once and then just to ask if she needed anything. The rest of the time he spent whispering to the wife he had allowed to sit next to him that evening and to his youngest brother, a dark-visaged youth several years older than she whom Mistaya had never liked and now pointedly ignored.

Back in her rooms, she sat on the bed once more and thought about her situation. It couldn’t be any bleaker. She was being sent home, and once arrived she would be dispatched—under guard, in all likelihood—to Libiris. Confined to the moldering old castle in the tradition of fairy-tale princesses in the books her father favored, she would slowly rot away in solitary confinement. The more she envisioned her future, the darker it became and the more trapped she felt.

Then she turned angry, and the angrier she grew the more determined she became to do something about what was being done to her. She would not permit this sort of treatment, she told herself. She was a princess and she would not suffer it.

Once again, she would have to escape.

Her grandfather, of course, would have already thought of that possibility and taken steps to prevent it. He knew how resourceful his granddaughter could be and he probably expected her to try to slip away during the night and find help elsewhere.

She rose, walked over to the window, and looked outside. There would be guards keeping watch, she knew. She would not be allowed to leave if they caught sight of her trying to do so. Not that she could leave Elderew without help in any case, even with the use of her magic. Magic could only get you so far, and in a land warded by magic and magic-wielding creatures, even she was at a disadvantage. But she had to try something. She had to get out of there before morning.

Then she saw the cat again.

It was walking just outside her window, for all intents and purposes out on a nighttime stroll, wending its way through the grasses and flowers of the little gardens. It was the same cat, she was certain. Silver with black markings, slender and aloof in its bearing, seemingly unconcerned for everything around it.

She watched it a moment, wondering what it was going to do. Then abruptly it stopped, sat down, and looked over at her. She blinked. Sure enough, it was watching her. It hadn’t done this before, but it was doing it now. Well, well, she thought.

Curious, she slipped from her sleeping chamber, went through the common rooms on tiptoe, and eased out the cottage door and around the house to the gardens. The cat was still sitting there, looking at her. She stopped at the gardens’ edge, perhaps ten feet away, wondering what to do next.

“Can I help you with something, Princess?” the cat asked suddenly.

And she could have sworn she saw him smile.

Mistaya stared at the cat, and the cat stared back, its green eyes luminous. Had it really spoken to her or had she just imagined it?

“Cat got your tongue?” the cat asked after a moment’s silence between them.

She nodded slowly. “I don’t guess you’re any ordinary cat, are you? I guess you must be a fairy creature. But you look like an ordinary cat.”

“I don’t guess you’re any ordinary girl, either,” the cat replied. “I guess you must be a Princess. But you look like an ordinary girl.”

She nodded again. “Ha, ha. What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you to come out and talk with me. We have a great deal to discuss, you and I. We have plans to make. We have places to go and people to meet. We have a life to live that extends far beyond these woods and your grandfather’s rule.”

“We do, do we?” She dropped down on her haunches and regarded the beast more closely. She ignored the cool damp of the night air and the silence of the darkness. She didn’t even think about the possibility that her grandfather’s guards might be watching her talk with this cat and wondering why. Her curiosity pushed all these considerations aside as she studied the cat’s inscrutable face. “We have all that to do, you and I?”

The cat lifted one paw and licked it carefully, not looking at her. When it was satisfied with the result, it put the paw back down and blinked at her with an air of contentment. “Allow me to summarize. You have been dismissed from your school and sent home. Your father is unhappy with you and your mother, disappointed. Consequently, they seek to find a way to channel your considerable talents into a project that will further your truncated education. Thus, they choose to send you to Libiris. You view this as punishment, particularly in light of your father’s response to Lord Laphroig’s marriage proposal, and so you flee to your grandfather in hopes that he will better understand your dismay. But he refuses to let you stay and in the morning intends to send you back to your parents.”

It paused. “How does all this sound to you? Have I left anything out, Princess? Would you care to add, subtract, or amend my words in any way?”

She shook her head no. “I think that about covers it, Mr. Cat.” She gave it a sharp look. “How do you know all this?”

“It is my job to know things,” the cat said. “Cats know lots of things about the world and its creatures, especially people. Cats watch and listen. It is what they do best.”

“So you have been watching me?”

“Haven’t you noticed me?”

“Once or twice on the way here. Not before then.”

“Which points up how unobservant people are when it comes to our place in their lives. We wander about freely, and no one pays much attention to us. It allows us to go almost anywhere and discover almost anything without anyone realizing what we are doing. We know so much about you, but no one ever considers what this means. Cats are highly underrated in this regard.”

“Well, I admit to not seeing you before yesterday. But I don’t understand why you would want to know anything about me in the first place. What is the point in knowing all this stuff?”

The cat regarded her silently for a long moment and then yawned deeply. “I should think it would be obvious. I am here to help you.”

She was aware of a growing stiffness in her legs from her prolonged crouch, and she stood up carefully, rubbing her muscles. “Could we continue this conversation on the porch so that I can sit properly in a chair?”

“So long as you don’t expect me to go into the cottage, we can. I prefer open spaces to cramped ones.”

She walked over to the porch and sat down in one of the old rockers that bracketed the front door, wrapping herself in a rough blanket that was draped over one arm. The cat padded its way onto the first step and sat down again. All around them, the night remained deep and silent, and no one appeared to interrupt their conversation.

“How are you going to help me?” she asked after they were both comfortably settled.

“Well, that depends,” the cat answered. “For starters, I am prepared to take you away from here. Tonight.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course. If you really want to leave and not go home to your parents, I can take you somewhere else and your grandfather’s guards will not be able to prevent it. If that is what you really want.”

“It is,” she said. “Assuming you can do as you say.”

The cat said nothing, but instead went back to cleaning another paw—or perhaps it was the same one—licking the fur this way and that, worrying the pads with careful attention to the spaces between, acting as if there were nothing more important in all the world.

“You must possess considerable magic,” she said.

“Your father thought so.”

“You know my father?”

“And your mother. I have helped them, too, in the past, before you were born. Have they told you nothing of me?”

She shook her head. “I think I would remember you, if they had.”

“They should remember me, too. They should remember me well. I did much to help them avoid a rather unpleasant end when the old wizard, the one before Questor Thews, tried to regain control of Landover’s throne from your father and very nearly killed him in the bargain. Your father was in flight, too, at the time, wandering the countryside, searching for answers. Very much like you, Princess.”

“I didn’t know that. They never said anything about it.”

“Parents don’t tell their children everything, do they? Some things they keep to themselves because they are private and don’t need to be shared. Or perhaps people think these things are best forgotten, a part of a past that has gone by and won’t—with luck—come around again for a visit. When all this is over, you might not want to talk about what is going to happen to you, either.”

“What is going to happen to me?” she asked quickly.

The cat blinked. “We shall have to wait and see, won’t we?”

She frowned. “Why should I agree to go away with you?”

“Do you have a choice?”

“Of course I have a choice!” She was suddenly irritated.

“A choice that does not involve going back to your parents?” The cat sounded rather smug. “Besides, you might well ask why I should agree to go away with you, don’t you think?”

“But you just offered!” she snapped.

“Yes, but cats have a habit of changing their minds rather quickly, and I might be in the process of changing mine. You seem to me as if you might be in a lot of trouble, given your rather independent streak and your uncertain temperament. Not to mention all the baggage you carry.”

“Baggage?”

“The daughter of the King and Queen of Landover, their only child, on the run in the company of a pair of G’home Gnomes? Yes, I would say you carry more than a little baggage with you. I might not want to burden myself with all that. I might want to rethink my offer to help.”

She regarded the cat carefully, studying its inscrutable cat face. “But you won’t,” she said finally. “You won’t because you have a reason for coming to me like this in the first place.”

“Perhaps.”

“You won’t because you are a cat and cats are curious and your curiosity has something to do with you being here and you haven’t satisfied it yet.”

“Curiosity comes and goes,” said the cat.

She nodded. “What’s your name?”

The cat looked away for a moment, studying the blackness beyond them as if it had just discovered something of immense interest. “I am like all cats when it comes to names,” he said, speaking to the night. “I have as many names as I do lives. I don’t even know what they all are yet. The one I prefer now is the one your father knew me by. Edgewood Dirk.”

“I like your name,” she told him.

“Thank you. Although it doesn’t matter one way or the other, you realize.”

She took a deep breath. “Does your offer to help me still stand? Will you take me away with you?”

Edgewood Dirk blinked. “All you need to do is gather your belongings, wake your companions, and follow me. No one will see us. No one will stop us. By morning, we will be far away.”

“Far away,” she repeated, liking the sound of it. Then the rest of what he had said caught up with her. “Wait a minute. Did you say I should wake my companions? Those Gnomes? I don’t want them coming with me! I didn’t want them coming with me in the first place!”

“Well, we don’t always get what we want in life,” said Edgewood Dirk.

“Well, they’re not coming with me, Dirk, so you can just forget about me not getting what I want in this case!” She glared at him. “Is that all right with you?”

“Perfectly all right,” he answered, his cat voice as calm as still waters. “Of course, leaving them behind means that when the River Master finds you gone, he will have to find someone to blame, and those two unfortunate G’home Gnomes might turn out to be his first choice.”

She stared at him, speechless.

“Not that this should matter to you, of course,” he added.

She knew he was right, and she hated it. She sighed wearily. “All right then, they can come.”

“If you are quite certain it is all right, Princess?”

She ignored him, finding him increasingly annoying and suspecting that he would become more so as they traveled. She looked around guardedly. “We just walk right out of here, do we? Right through my grandfather’s guards and all the once-fairy who live in the swamps? You know the way out and won’t get us lost?”

The cat stared at her, saying nothing.

“Do you mind telling me where we are going?” she pressed.

The cat did not answer.

She put her hands on her hips and bent closer. “Why won’t you answer me?” she demanded.

A small noise from behind caused her to straighten up and turn around. Poggwydd was standing there with Shoopdiesel peering over his shoulder, both of them looking bewildered. “Why are you talking to that cat?” the former asked hesitantly. “You know cats can’t talk, don’t you, Princess?”

He gave the cat an interested look. “But some of them are rather good to eat. Do you suppose this one belongs to anyone?”

Shoopdiesel licked his lips and looked eager.

Her belongings gathered and her mind made up, Mistaya set off through the fairy-born city of Elderew with Edgewood Dirk leading the way and a reluctant Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel bringing up the rear. Neither understood what was happening, and Poggwydd, on behalf of both, had complained loudly about it on being informed. As a result, she had expressly forbidden either G’home Gnome from speaking one single, solitary word until she gave them permission, threatening that if they did not do as she said she would leave them behind to face her grandfather’s wrath when he discovered she was missing. Frustrated and out of sorts, they trailed along like restless children, shuffling and snuffling and generally acting as if they had an itch they couldn’t scratch. She never looked back at them, and Dirk never looked back at her. In this fashion, single-file and keeping their distance from one another, they passed without notice into the deep woods.

Mistaya couldn’t have told anyone why she was doing this. It made almost no sense to trust the cat, even if you got past the part where you accepted that it wasn’t all that strange that a cat could talk. This was Landover, after all, and all sorts of things talked that didn’t do so in other worlds. The dragon Strabo was a prime example; his vocabulary was both extraordinary and colorful. Not that there were a whole lot of other dragons to compare him with, but that didn’t refute her point about creatures that talked. She had grown up in Landover, so a talking animal didn’t surprise her, even if it would have shocked the girls of Carrington.

But trusting a talking cat—now, that was something else. Cats were not the most reliable of creatures, talking or not. They were independent and self-centered, prissy and devious, and she had no reason to think that this one was any different. Yet here she was, trailing along behind him, ready to believe that he not only knew the way out of Elderew but could actually get clear of the city without being detected. No one else could do this, so why did she think he could?

She guessed it was because she wanted so badly to escape the fate that awaited her if she stayed around until morning. Being sent back to her father would be the ultimate humiliation, and her embarrassment at her grandfather’s rejection was quite enough already. Better that she take her chances out on her own than be stymied even in this small gesture of defiance. Better that she trust a talking cat with dubious motives than sit around and do nothing.

She kept silent until they were out of the city and wending their way back through the swamp and quicksand before she tried speaking to him again. She was aware that the Gnomes were listening in, so she kept her voice at a whisper until she grew frustrated and voiced her questions more loudly. But it didn’t matter. Dirk ignored her, acting as if he hadn’t heard, further convincing Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel that she was suffering from a delusion regarding the abilities of cats.

In the end, she gave it up, and they walked on through the night. By sunrise, they were clear of the woods and had emerged into a broad stretch of grasslands and hill country east, facing into the rising sun.

At this point, Edgewood Dirk came to a stop. Sitting back on his haunches with his tail curled about him, he began to clean himself—an undertaking both meticulous and seemingly endless.

Mistaya couldn’t help herself. She had endured enough. “Look here,” she said to the cat. “You did well in helping us escape the fairy-born. But now you have to tell us where we are going.”

Dirk, predictably, said nothing.

“Stop pretending you can’t speak!” she said. “I know you can!”

She glanced over her shoulder at the G’home Gnomes, who were shifting their gazes from her to each other and back again. “Princess, I don’t think the cat can—” Poggwydd began.

“Be quiet!” she snapped at him. “I know what I’m doing!”

“But, Princess, cats don’t—”

“Did I give you permission to speak?” she demanded, wheeling back on him. “Did I?”

Poggwydd shook his head dejectedly.

“What did I say I would do with you if you did?”

“Leave us behind. But we’re safely away now. No one can hear us out here. Besides, you’re talking, aren’t you?”

She glared at him. “Just don’t say anything, all right?”

“But what are we doing out here, following that stupid cat?” he whined miserably. “Cats don’t know anything and aren’t good for anything except to eat!”

She pointed a finger at him in warning and turned back to Dirk, who had finished cleaning himself and was now staring at her rather accusingly.

“Well, what do you expect me to say?” she demanded.

He continued to stare at her, and she could tell just by the nature of the look what he was thinking. “Oh, all right,” she said. She sighed and turned back to the Gnomes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. I’m just frustrated by everything.”

And suddenly it occurred to her that perhaps the cat wouldn’t speak to her unless they were alone. Hadn’t that been the way things had worked last night? “Poggwydd, would you and Shoopdiesel wait for me over there by the trees?” She gestured toward where she wanted them to go. “Just for a few minutes.”

The G’home Gnomes trooped off obediently, and she knelt down in front of the cat rather like a humble supplicant. “Now will you speak to me? Please?”

“Since you ask so nicely,” said the cat, “I will do so. But not in front of anyone else. You would do well to remember that in the future. That way we won’t have to go through this charade again.”

“Believe me, I’ll remember.”

“Excellent. Now then, what is it that you want to talk about?”

She took a deep, steadying breath, submerging her lingering thoughts of strangling him. “Where is it that we’re going?”

He cocked his head. “That would be up to you. I promised to take you safely away from Elderew and your grandfather, and I did. I assumed you had a plan. If so, now is the time to implement it.”

“Well, I don’t have a plan!” she snapped. “I just need to go somewhere my father can’t find me while I think this thing through! Mostly, I need to get out of the open!”

She was frustrated and angry by now, suddenly afraid that Edgewood Dirk had taken her from the frying pan into the fire. Dirk, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned.

“Princess,” he said quietly. “While you are with me, no one can find you by use of magic. Because I am a fairy creature, I am able to shield those who travel with me. Your father can look for you until next winter, and he will not be able to find you while you are with me unless he comes looking for you himself.”

She stared at him. “Are you sure?”

“Cats are always sure. Look at me. I seem an ordinary cat at first glance—though of a particularly lovely sort. But I am much more. I am a Prism Cat, Princess. We possess special magic and are of a unique character.”

She frowned, not knowing whether he was serious or not. “I don’t think I understand. Can you explain?”

“I can, but I don’t choose to. Another time, perhaps. Now, back to the plan you don’t have. Where is it that you want to go?”

She sighed. “Somewhere I won’t be found, whether you are with me or not. How’s that?”

“Poorly conceived and expressed. You will be found quickly, if you are not with me. Which means, you must encourage me to come with you by showing some modicum of intelligence in making your choice of where you might go. Otherwise, I am wasting my time on you.”

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded indignantly. “Why do I have to encourage you?”

“Because, Princess, I am not here by chance and I am not bound to stay. I chose to help you in the same way I chose to help your father and your mother. But I need a reason to stay. Cats are curious creatures, you might have heard. But if we lose our curiosity about something, we tend to move on to other, more interesting things. At the moment, I am curious about you. But that could change if you don’t find ways to keep me interested.”

She sat back on her heels, seething. “I have to keep you interested in me?”

“You do. How do you plan to do that?”

“The pleasure of my company isn’t enough for you?”

“Please be serious.”

“I have other friends, you know,” she declared. “I have lots of other friends, and they would all be happy to help me.”

“You have two G’home Gnomes, and neither has the least idea what to do about your situation. You have no one else. You don’t even have your mud puppy anymore, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

She stared at him in disbelief, and then after looking around quickly began calling for Haltwhistle. But the mud puppy did not appear.

“Where is he?” she demanded, a bit frantic.

“I sent him home to the Earth Mother,” said the cat. “It wasn’t difficult. You forgot to speak his name, so he would have left anyway.”

He was right. She hadn’t spoken Haltwhistle’s name at all yesterday, and she knew what that meant. If she failed to speak the mud puppy’s name at least once each day, he would leave and go back to wherever he had come from. She didn’t even know where that was because she had never thought about it. She had always been careful to say his name so that she wouldn’t have to worry. But last night, absorbed in her own troubles, she had forgotten.

“Well, I can find him again,” she declared bravely.

“Not before your father finds you.” Dirk’s remonstrance was maddeningly calm. “Now tell me where it is that you are going.”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably.

“Somewhere you won’t be found …,” he nudged.

“Why won’t you just stay with me? Then it wouldn’t matter where I went. Why won’t you do that?”

Edgewood Dirk licked his chops and closed his eyes. “I know myself too well to make a promise I cannot keep. My nature requires that I be interested in your actions. For that to happen, you have to make interesting choices. Now think. Where could you go that would interest me?”

She shook her head helplessly.

“Put it another way. Where is the last place your father would think to look? Because sooner or later he will give up on talismans and wizards and come looking for you himself.” Dirk paused. “Or perhaps he will send someone in his place, someone more effective at finding what is hidden. Perhaps he will send the Paladin looking for you.”

Mistaya froze. She knew about the Paladin, of course, even though she had never seen him. Everyone knew about the Paladin. They whispered of it when they thought she couldn’t hear, and Questor Thews had talked of it quite openly. They were all proud of its service to the throne, but they were also quite afraid of it: huge and dark of purpose, all armored and armed astride its charger. There had never been anything in memory that had been able to stand against the Paladin.

The last thing she wanted was something as implacable as that searching for her.

“Think, Princess,” the cat pressed. “Where will your father look last for you?”

She thought. The Deep Fell was a good choice because magic couldn’t penetrate its mists.

“The Deep Fell?”

“He will look there first.”

“The Fire Springs!”

“He will look there second. He knows how the dragon feels about you.”

“Not Rhyndweir? I won’t go there!”

The cat waited. Suddenly Mistaya realized what answer he was looking for. “No!” she said at once. The cat cocked his head. “No! Absolutely not!” she repeated.

“When you wish to hide, the best place is always the one those hunting you are certain you will avoid.” Dirk gave her one of those patented looks. “Isn’t it?”

“You want me to go to Libiris,” she declared.

“I don’t necessarily want you to go anywhere. It isn’t up to me. The decision is yours. Please make it. I grow bored with this.”

She saw the logic to Dirk’s reasoning. Her father would never think of looking for her at Libiris. He would look for her almost anywhere else before he looked for her there. But if she went, she was doing exactly what he had asked her to do in the first place. What sort of sense did that make?

“At least you would be going of your own choice and for your own reasons,” Edgewood Dirk offered, as if reading her mind.

She toughened her resolve so that she could accept what she now realized she must do. “All right, I will go to Libiris with Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel.” She paused. “Are you coming with us or not?”

The cat took a moment to study the countryside, emerald eyes filling with a distant look, as if gone somewhere else entirely. Then he looked back at her. “I believe I will,” he answered softly, and then he began to purr.

Ben Holiday was not particularly worried on that first morning when it was discovered that Mistaya was not in her room. She did not appear for breakfast or lunch, nor was she anywhere in the castle. No one had seen her leave. That might have been cause for alarm in another household, but not in his. Mistaya was famous for her unexpected comings and goings, for choosing to set out on a personal mission or exploration without telling anyone. That she might have done so here was a reasonable assumption, particularly when it was well known that she had been spending her last few days meeting with one of those endlessly troublesome G’home Gnomes that kept cropping up at the castle.

This one, Poggwydd, had already been caught sneaking into the castle for purposes of pilfering whatever he could find—he didn’t see it that way, of course—and put out again by Bunion right before Mistaya returned from Carrington. She had taken up his cause, thinking that she might help him change his thieving ways. When he had come to the door asking to see her, she’d brought him into the castle for a visit, given him a tour of its many rooms, and spent hours visiting with him somewhere outside Sterling Silver, presumably in an effort to educate him in the error of his ways. She had even made it a point to speak with Bunion about his overly harsh treatment of the little miscreant. All this she had accomplished in the span of little more than the week that she’d been back home.

Ben knew all this because he pretty much knew everything that happened in the castle. His retainers made it a point of telling him, especially when it came to Mistaya. Willow confided in him, too, when she thought it appropriate, and she had done so here because she was proud of the way that Mistaya was handling her ignominious return. Better that she find something useful to do with her time than sit around bemoaning her fate as a suspended student. Ben agreed, and so both of them had left her alone.

By dinnertime, however, he was experiencing the first faint whisperings of the possibility that things were not all right. Mistaya was still missing, and no one had seen her anywhere since the previous night. He decided to voice his concerns to Willow.

“It is possible she is punishing you,” she offered, none too helpfully.

“Punishing me?” He frowned. They were sitting together after the dinner had been taken away, talking privately. “What do you mean by that?”

“She’s angry with you. You’ve hurt her feelings, and she doesn’t like how that makes her feel. She already told me that much, Ben.”

He shook his head. He hated it that the two of them had a private information-sharing arrangement, but it had always been that way, mother to daughter and back again.

“I didn’t mean to make her feel bad,” he tried to explain. “I was just attempting to—”

“I know.” She reached up and touched his lips to silence him. “But she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks you should have been more supportive of her situation. Not just about Libiris, but about Laphroig, too. She’s unsure of how she stands with you right now. Even when she can think about it rationally, she’s still not quite certain what’s going to happen.”

“So she’s gone off somewhere in protest?”

“Just for a little while, I think. Just long enough to make you worry and maybe rethink what you’ve decided about her future.”

He sighed. “That sounds like her, doesn’t it?”

Willow nodded. “She’s very headstrong, very determined.” She smiled and kissed him. “Very like you.”

But by the following morning, when his daughter still hadn’t reappeared, Ben decided that waiting around was no longer an option. Without saying anything to Willow, he called in Questor Thews and Abernathy for a conference. The three of them gathered clandestinely in Questor’s office and put their heads together.

“I don’t like it that there’s been no word of her from anyone,” Ben admitted to the other two. “It’s been too long for me to be comfortable with the idea that she’s just off sulking somewhere. Is Bunion back yet?”

Bunion wasn’t, Questor advised. He sat up straight and prim in his high-backed chair, his colorful robes gathered about his scarecrow frame. “We could ask one of the other kobolds to have a look around, if you wish.”

Ben didn’t wish. He didn’t want anyone but Bunion doing the looking because he could trust Bunion to do so without giving anything away. It was one thing to go looking for Mistaya because he was worried about her; it was another to give her the mistaken impression that he was spying on her.

“No, we’ll wait for him to come back,” he said. “He should be here by tonight, shouldn’t he?”

The wizard and the scribe both agreed that he should. Three days was enough to find out whatever there was to find out about Laphroig, and Bunion would come right back after that.

“Why don’t you use the Landsview, High Lord?” Abernathy asked. He cocked his dog ears to emphasize his approval of the idea. “You can find her that way, no matter where she is.”

Which was pretty much true, Ben knew, unless she had gone down into the Deep Fell or outside Landover altogether. Neither of those options made a great deal of sense, so there was reason to think that by using the Landsview he might be able to determine where she was and reassure himself that she was all right.

Departing Questor’s office, they passed down the castle hallways until they reached the tower that housed the Landsview. From there, they began to climb, winding their way up a spiral staircase to a landing that fronted a massive ironbound oak door. Ben placed the palms of his hands on the graven image of a knight and a castle that had been carved into the aged wood, and the door swung silently inward. They entered the small, circular room that waited beyond. A huge section of the far wall was missing, providing them with an unobstructed view of the countryside beyond. A waist-high silver railing ran along the edge of the opening. At its center stood a silver lectern, its fittings gleaming in the sunlight. Runes had been carved into the surface of the lectern, thousands upon thousands of them, all in a language that no one had been able to decipher in recorded history.

This was the Landsview, Sterling Silver’s eye on the world.

While Questor and Abernathy watched, Ben stepped up onto the platform and took hold of the railing in preparation for setting out. He reached down into the leather pouch that hung from one side of the lectern and pulled out a rolled-up piece of parchment. Opening it, he fastened it with clips to the lectern, revealing an ancient map of the kingdom, its rumpled surface thick with names. Various colors of ink denoted forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, plains, deserts, territories, towns, and the like. Everything that could be named was meticulously marked.

Ben stared down at the map a moment, remembering the first time he had used the Landsview. How strange it had been, not knowing what to expect, and then how frightening when the world dropped away so suddenly, as if jerked from beneath his feet. He hesitated despite himself, even knowing that there was no reason for alarm.

Then he focused his concentration on the map, choosing the Greensward to begin his search, calling up the now familiar magic to aid him.

At once the tower and castle and all that surrounded it disappeared and he was whisked out into the blue of the sky. All that remained was the lectern and its railing, and his hands held tight to the latter, even knowing that he had not left the room in which the railing was mounted; the magic only made it seem as if he had, as if he really were flying. He watched the land sweep away beneath him as the Greensward appeared in the distance and the countryside took shape.

The last time he had used the Landsview, it was Mistaya who was missing then, too. Five years earlier, she had been stolen away by the Witch of the Deep Fell, who had hidden her from Ben and Willow with magic. It was Nightshade’s intention to subvert her, to turn her away from her parents so she could participate actively in their destruction. Because the Landsview could not penetrate the magic of the Deep Fell, Ben had been unable to find his daughter and had almost lost her forever. But Nightshade was gone and the threat she had once posed was finished, so even though he still could not penetrate the hollows without entering personally, he did not think that this was where his daughter would go.

Still, after almost two hours of scouring his Kingdom—every hidden valley, darkened forest, and mountainous retreat, every town and village, every last possible place in which she might find refuge—he began to wonder. What if he was wrong about Nightshade? Or even about Mistaya’s reluctance ever to return to the Deep Fell? Maybe she thought hiding out there was a good idea because she knew he couldn’t find her unless he went there himself.

Except that the Deep Fell was a dangerous place, and Mistaya was no fool. She might be angry enough with him to go off on her own for a few days just to spite him, as Willow had suggested, but she wouldn’t put herself at risk needlessly.

When he returned to the tower and stepped down off the Landsview, he knew nothing more about Mistaya’s whereabouts than when he had set out to find her. “Nothing,” he reported to Questor and Abernathy, giving a shrug. He hesitated. “Though I suppose she might be hiding in the Deep Fell.”

Both wizard and scribe bristled instantly at the suggestion, insisting that this was not possible, that Mistaya would never go back there after what had happened before. Which, in turn, made Ben feel foolish for making the suggestion, although it also made him feel somewhat better to hear that his friends agreed with his own assessment.

“We have to do something else,” he told them as the three tromped back down out of the tower to the lower regions of the castle.

“Maybe Bunion will have a suggestion,” Questor ventured finally. “No one knows Landover’s secrets better than he does. If there’s a hiding place we haven’t thought of, he’ll remember it.”

“Maybe we ought to leave well enough alone,” Abernathy growled suddenly. The other two turned to look at him. “Well, I mean that if she doesn’t wish to be found, perhaps we ought to respect that. She might have discovered a way to use her magic to hide from us. I don’t know that we ought to be so quick to try to undo that.”

“What are you talking about?” Questor demanded. “Of course we want to undo it! She’s got all of us worried to death!”

“Well, maybe not to death,” Ben tried to amend.

“Whatever the extent of our worry, it shouldn’t be allowed to continue,” Questor declared. His bushy eyebrows knotted fiercely. “She ought to know better than to do something like this! She’s a big girl, not a child. We have a right to do whatever we can to find out where she is!”

Abernathy shook his head, ears flopping loosely. “Spoken like a man who jumps without looking.”

“Well, I don’t see you doing anything to help matters!” Questor snapped in reply. “Should we all just stand around and hope for the best? Is that your answer to the problem?”

“My answer to the problem is to point out how useless you are when it comes to contributing solutions to problems, Questor Thews!”

The argument continued all the rest of the way down the stairs and well into the beginning stages of Ben’s first headache of the day, a headache that only grew worse as the hours lengthened and Bunion did not return.

Berwyn Laphroig, Lord of Rhyndweir—for such was his full name and title—strolled through the weapons room of his castle in an irritated state. He was restless and bored, but the solution to these conditions was not to be found here. There was nothing in this room or even in the whole of his barony that could satisfy his insatiable need to make the young and lovely Mistaya Holiday his wife. There was no other woman who could replace her in his thoughts, none to whom he would give even momentary consideration. Thinking of her only worsened his condition, unfortunately; thinking of her made him even more determined to find a way to have her.

It had seemed easy enough in the beginning, when he had decided he must replace his old wife. Things had not been going well for some time between them, and he could sense that she was looking for a way out of the marriage. Such insolence was intolerable, and he was perfectly within his rights to make certain she could not act on her foolish fantasies. Even her son had become a source of irritation, always clinging to her as if she were a lifeline to a safe place instead of deadweight that would pull him down. He cared nothing for them, really, so it was not difficult for him to decide to dispose of them when he determined they were no longer necessary.

Like his brothers and sisters. Like everyone else who had outlived their usefulness.

His counselors would have been horrified had they realized the extent to which he had gone to fulfill his ambitions. The ambitions alone would have horrified them. Even more certain was the response of his fellow Lords of the Greensward, had he chosen to confide in them. Not that he would ever do such a thing. But if they knew that he had long coveted not only his father’s title and lands, but the King of Landover’s throne, as well …

He smiled despite himself. Not much to guess about there. If they had known, they would have found a way to dispatch him in a heartbeat.

He had confided in no one, however, and given no one reason to suspect the truth. He had disposed of his older brother all on his own. His younger had disappeared shortly after and was never seen again. A poisoner he had enlisted to his cause had taken care of his troublesome wife and son without anyone knowing, and then he had taken care of the poisoner. There was none to bear witness against him, no voices to speak, and no eyes that had seen. It had all been done quickly and quietly, and no trace of his crimes remained to convict him.

Still, Ben Holiday suspected the truth and did not trust him. That might have been worrisome had he thought the High Lord could prove anything.

A door opened at the far end of the room, and his scribe, Cordstick, a wisp of a man with a huge mop of bushy hair, came hurrying across the room. “My Lord,” he greeted, bowing low, hair flopping. “We have a problem.”

Laphroig didn’t like problems and didn’t want to hear about them, but he nodded agreeably. “Yes? What is it?”

“We received word from one of our loyal subjects that there was a man—well, not a man, really—but he was asking questions in the town below the castle about you, and he …”

He stopped, as if uncertain where to go next with this. “He was asking questions about your family, my Lord, all of them, including your wife and child.” He swallowed hard. “About their untimely deaths.”

“Get to the point.”

Cordstick nodded quickly. “Well, we thought it best to detain him, my Lord. We knew you would want to question him about his interest in your family, not knowing, of course, what his purpose might be. So we sent guards to take him prisoner and hold him for questioning.”

He stopped again, looking around the room as if help might be found among the suits of armor and racks of sharp weapons. Laphroig rolled his eyes. “Yes, you took him prisoner. And?”

“After we had done so, we discovered he was not a man at all, but a kobold. Why anyone would confide anything in a kobold, I couldn’t say. Perhaps they didn’t, but it was enough, it seemed to me, that he was asking these questions. I thought that holding him was the better choice, if it came to a choice about what to do with him, kobold or not, and …”

Laphroig held up his hand. “You are trying my patience, Cordstick, and I have very little of it to spare this morning. Who is this kobold? Do we know his name?”

Cordstick looked miserable. “We do. Now, after seizing him. It is Bunion. He is the King’s man, a creature of some renown.”

Rhyndweir’s ruler was angry, but not surprised. Of course the High Lord would try to find out what he could now that he knew Laphroig’s intentions regarding his daughter. But that sort of thing couldn’t be allowed. Not even by the King. Not in Laphroig’s own lands.

“There may be unpleasant repercussions from this business, my Lord,” Cordstick ventured. He bit his lip. “Perhaps we should let him go.”

“Perhaps not,” Laphroig answered at once. “Perhaps we should torture him instead and discover the truth behind this intrusion into the affairs of Rhyndweir. Perhaps we should make an example of him so that Ben Holiday will think twice before he sends another of his spies into our territory.”

Then he hesitated, holding up one hand quickly to stay Cordstick’s departure.

Torturing one of the High Lord’s people, he thought suddenly, would in all likelihood complicate his plans for marriage with the High Lord’s daughter. Perhaps discretion was the better part of reprisal in this situation. Yet it galled him that Holiday would feel free to send someone to spy on him in his own barony, no matter what the situation might be. He stewed about it for a moment, thinking that if the kobold simply disappeared—as others who had troubled him had—no blame could attach to him.

“Where is this creature?” he asked his aide.

“Downstairs, in one of the anterooms, safely under guard,” the other replied with a confidence that immediately troubled Laphroig.

“Take me to him,” he ordered. “I’ll decide what to do with him once I’ve seen him for myself.”

Drawing his black robes about him, tilting his head so that his slicked-up black hair cut the air like a shark fin, he swept through the door to the halls beyond, leading the way and forcing Cordstick to hurry to catch up to him. With his scribe barely managing to regain the lead, they ascended from the weapons room to the upper receiving chambers, moving from those reserved for invited guests to those well back and better fortified. Always best to take no chances with those who sought to work mischief in your realm, Laphroig was fond of saying.

But apparently chances had been taken in this case, Rhyndweir’s Lord realized as they approached the holding chamber and saw the door standing ajar. Rushing forward now, the two burst inside and found all four guards hanging by their heels like ornaments from the drapery cords, gagged and bound and weaponless.

Of the kobold, there was no sign.

Laphroig wheeled on a terrified Cordstick. “Call out the guard and find him!” he hissed. “Immediately!”

His scribe vanished as if by magic, and Laphroig stalked from the room in fury, leaving the guards hanging where they were.

It took barely an hour to determine that Bunion was nowhere in the castle, but that before departing he had located and thoroughly searched Laphroig’s office and its records. Another might not have been able to determine that anything was amiss, so neat and tidy was the room in question. But Laphroig was immediately suspicious, and after tamping down his rage sufficiently to act on his suspicions had gone directly to his private chambers. There he had discovered that safeguards he had personally installed and were known only to him had been disturbed. His protections had been breached and his personal files and papers examined.

Laphroig sat down for a time to think things through while waiting on the search for the kobold to be completed. He didn’t think the creature could have found anything of value, since he made it a point not to keep anything that might give him away. There were no records on his acts, nothing to show that he had dispatched those family members who had stood in his way. There were no notes or revealing pictures or anything of the like. There was nothing that could have helped the kobold in his efforts to discover what role Laphroig had played in the deaths of his family.

He paused, a chill running down his spine.

Unless …

He went at once to the bookshelves set in the stone wall to one side of the writing table and looked. Sure enough, the book on poisons was gone—the book that had provided him with the recipes for the nectars necessary to dispatch his wife and son. He took a deep breath and exhaled. He had kept the book only because he thought he might have need of it again sometime. The poisons he favored most were underlined in that book, and the poisoner’s notes on the details of their usages were written in the margins. He had forgotten about that, thinking that no one would ever have reason to look at one book shelved among so many.

But the kobold had. How it had found it in the short time provided was a mystery he could not solve. In any case, the damage was done.

He waited until Cordstick appeared with the unsurprising news that Bunion had escaped completely, and then he ordered the four guards still hanging in the library to be cut down and hung from the castle walls instead. Cordstick, grateful that he wasn’t the one sentenced to hang, carried out the order swiftly, wondering if perhaps it was time to look into another line of work. If he hadn’t served the family for so long that it no longer felt as if he belonged anywhere else, he might have packed his bags then and there.

As it was, he simply made it a point to stay out of his master’s way.

It was nearing sunset when he had cause to go in search of Rhyndweir’s Lord once more. He felt some small confidence in doing so this time, having news of a different sort to offer up. Although his master kept his counsel close and private, Cordstick knew him much better than he suspected. It was inherent in the nature of his service that he should be able to do so, because knowing the mindset of the master you served had saved more than one servant’s neck over the years.

He found Laphroig in his office, slumped in his reading chair with the lights off and the curtains drawn. His black clothes were a rumpled mess, and his black hair was sticking up all over the place. His pale face looked ghostly in the near darkness.

“My Lord,” Cordstick ventured tentatively.

“Go away” was the miserable response.

“I have news I think you should hear,” Cordstick pressed gently, careful to remain just outside the doorway.

A short silence followed. “About the kobold?”

“No, my Lord. About the Princess Mistaya.”

Laphroig was on his feet at once. “The Princess? Close the door! Come over here where we can talk privately. Shhh, shhh, keep it quiet now. Just you and me. Tell me quick—what is the news?”

Cordstick had judged his master rightly. He closed the door to the chamber and hurried over to stand next to him, bending close and speaking in a whisper. “Our spy at the King’s court sends news that isn’t known as yet by more than a handful of people. The Princess Mistaya has disappeared. The King and his Queen are looking for her everywhere.”

“Well, well,” Laphroig murmured, his mind racing with possibilities.

“If you were to find her, my Lord …,” Cordstick began.

“Yes, that would make the High Lord beholden to me in a way he could not ignore, wouldn’t it?” Laphroig finished. He was smiling so broadly that for a moment he assumed a frog-like visage. “Yes, yes.”

He put his hand firmly on his scribe’s thin shoulder. “You must find her, Cordstick.” His grip tightened and his eyes narrowed. “Before anyone else has a chance to.”

Cordstick nodded in agreement, shuddering inwardly at the other’s rather hideous smile. “As you wish, my Lord,” he managed before scurrying from the room.

It is not true that things are never as bad as they seem or that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence or that there is a silver lining inside every cloud. These are things we wish were true, but which are more often than not false hopes. So it was with little surprise that as Mistaya and her companions crested the final hill leading up to Libiris, she found all her fears of what awaited her fully realized.

“Oh, no,” she murmured, just softly enough that the others could not hear her, and swallowed hard against the sudden lump in her throat.

Libiris was like something out of a particularly nasty nightmare. It rose against the darkening horizon as if seeking to imitate Dracula’s castle: stonework all dingy and windswept, mortar cracked and in places crumbling, windows mostly dark and shuttered, and parapets spiked with iron lance heads and lined with razor wire. Towers soared skyward as if seeking to puncture holes in the heavens, and the heavy ironbound wooden doors facing toward her were locked and barred in a way that left no room for doubt about how visitors could expect to be greeted. If this building was intended as a library, she thought, the builders had a peculiar way of showing it. Libiris had the look of something that had been built with the intention of keeping people out, not letting them in.

Things didn’t look much better as Mistaya shifted her horrified gaze away from its rugged walls, which oddly enough cast shadows in all directions, a phenomenon she would not have believed possible. Woods surrounded Libiris, dark and deep and unfriendly, the trees leafless and skeletal, the limbs withered, and the forest floor littered with deadwood and bones. She had to look twice and carefully to be certain of this last, but bones there were, some collected in small piles, as if gathered by the wind like leaves. Spiky plants and thorny brush filled in the gaps between cracked and blackened trunks, and the smells were not of fresh greenery but of decay and mold.

It all looked, she thought suddenly, as Sterling Silver had been described to her when under the sway of the tarnish upon her father’s arrival years earlier. How odd.

“Let’s go home,” Poggwydd said at once and backed away.

She was half inclined to take him up on his suggestion. But instead she turned to Edgewood Dirk, who was sitting calmly next to her, washing his paws. “Is this really it?”

“Yes, it is.” The emerald eyes gleamed as they found hers. “Might you be thinking of taking the G’home Gnome up on his offer?”

She frowned. They could talk like this comfortably now because her irritating companions would no longer come near the cat. Neither Poggwydd nor Shoopdiesel approached within a dozen yards after the events of last night. Apparently overcome by either greed or hunger, they had attempted to lay hands on Dirk, probably with the intention of parting him from his skin. The effort had failed miserably. She still wasn’t sure what had happened, since she had been asleep at the time. A flash of light had awoken her in time to watch both Gnomes run screaming into the night. Today, returned from wherever they had fled to, their fingers burned and their faces blackened, they had made it a point to stay well clear of Edgewood Dirk.

“If I were to leave and go elsewhere, would you come with me?” she asked anxiously.

“No, I would not. I have business here that I must attend to.”

“Business? What sort of business?”

“That is for me to know.” Dirk’s voice tone was insulting. “A cat never discusses his business with humans, not even Princesses. A cat never explains and never apologizes. A cat never alibis. You must accept a cat as it is and for what it is and not expect more than the pleasure of its company. In this case, you must remain at Libiris if you wish to share mine.”

She didn’t care to remain at Libiris or to share the pleasure of his company, but she didn’t really have a choice if she wanted to remain hidden from her parents. If she left Dirk, she left also the concealment that being with him offered. Her father would be quick enough to find her if she acted precipitously.

“What did you do to the Gnomes last night?” she asked, changing the subject. She hesitated. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

The cat yawned. “I don’t mind. I gave them a small sample of what it means to lay hands on a Prism Cat. No one is allowed to do that.”

“No, I imagine not.”

“Rather like your mud puppy. Magical creatures are not to be handled. We have our defenses, each peculiar to the species or, in some cases, to the individual creature. Touch us at your peril.” He glanced at her. “You weren’t thinking of trying, were you?”

She shook her head. “No, I was just curious. I don’t know anything about Prism Cats. I told you before that my father never spoke of you.”

Dirk glanced back at the G’home Gnomes, perhaps to reassure himself that they were still keeping their distance. “I shall speak for myself, then,” he said. “You need to know something of the character of the company you keep. My character is obviously impeccable, but a few words of further elucidation couldn’t hurt. I am a fairy creature, as you know. I live in the mists except when it suits me. I stay pretty much in one place except when I travel. I keep mostly to myself except when curiosity compels me to engage with others. Such as now, with you.”

“Curiosity about me?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

The cat regarded her. “Well, I should think it would be obvious. You are a very curious creature. I want to see what will become of you.”

“Become of me?”

“It would help this relationship tremendously if you would stop repeating my words back to me.” Edgewood Dirk rose and stretched. “As for what I did to your companions, I simply gave them a small demonstration of what happens when you misbehave around me. Watch.”

The Gnomes must have heard this because they began backing away hurriedly. Mistaya held her ground, unwilling to display anything remotely approaching cowardice. The Prism Cat ignored them, closing his eyes and arching his back, his body going so still that it seemed to have turned to stone. All at once, it began to glow, and then it did turn into something like stone, changing from fur and flesh to a crystalline form. Emerald eyes glittered out of planes of crystal that shimmered and reflected the forest and the first of Landover’s eight moons, which had risen in the east. It ceased to be immobile and began to shift about as if turned to clear liquid glass. He faced her for a long moment, and then the light of his body flooded back into his eyes and he became a cat again.

“There is a small sample,” he advised. “If you try to touch me, of course, there is more. Ask your foolish friends for details, when you have a moment. There is more to my magic than this, but I don’t think we have to dwell on it just now. It is sufficient to say that not much that walks on two legs or four can stand against a Prism Cat.”

Big whoop, Mistaya thought. The cat was so full of himself that there wasn’t room for a speck of humility. Irritated, she turned her attention back to the blackened structure in front of them. “So what do you suggest we do now?” she asked him.

The cat followed her gaze and cocked his head. “I suggest that you go up to the door and ask for lodging. Once inside, you can figure things out at your leisure.”

She glared at him. “Why don’t you go up to the door and ask them to let us in. You’re the one with all the magic!”

“Am I?” he asked mildly. He regarded her calmly for a moment, and then stretched anew. “No, I think you had better be the one to ask,” he said. “People get nervous when cats speak to them. They are much more accepting of people than animals in these situations, I’ve found.”

“That seems a rather broad generalization, even coming from you. But I guess they can’t refuse a Princess of Landover, can they?”

“Probably not. However, I wouldn’t tell them who you are, if I were you. Which, thankfully, I am not.”

“Why not? I mean, why not tell them who I am?”

The cat blinked. “At the very least, they would let your father and mother know that you’ve arrived safely.”

She grimaced. He was right, of course.

“So I am just supposed to pretend that I’m some peasant girl out wandering the countryside, lost or whatever, and I’ve found my way here—poor, pitiful me—and I need shelter?”

She glanced into the darkness, where Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel sat huddled together, watching. “What about them?” she demanded, turning back again. “What am I supposed to say about … ?”

But Edgewood Dirk had disappeared.

She stared at the empty space he had occupied, not quite believing that he wasn’t there. Then she looked all around, searching the darkness. Nothing Not a sign of him. Anger flooded through her. He had abandoned her! Just like that! He had left her on her own!

“Fine!” she muttered, furious now. “Who needs you?”

She descended the hill in determined silence, not bothering to look behind her to see if the G’home Gnomes were following, knowing that they would be, resigned to the fact that she would probably never be rid of them. The descent took some time, and as she drew nearer to her destination she was able to determine that it did not improve in looks upon closer inspection. Everything seemed to be in disrepair and suffering from obvious neglect. No lights burned in the windows or from the towers, and the darkness suggested a total absence of life. Perhaps that was how things were these days at Libiris, she thought hopefully. Maybe its tenants had abandoned her. Maybe there was no one here anymore, and she wouldn’t have to beg for admittance. She would just have to find a way in—and the place would be hers for as long as she wished!

Excited by the idea, she hurried ahead to the ironbound doors, gaining confidence as she neared. Of course there was no one here! Why would there be? Who would live in a place like this? Even the overseer had long since departed, discouraged with the work his charge had required, disappointed in the lack of support he was receiving from the Kingdom. After all, no one had come here for years. Not even Abernathy or Questor Thews had come. They just assumed that someone was still here.

She felt positively buoyant.

She reached the doors, grasped the huge iron knocker, and rapped it hard against the plate, announcing her arrival. The sharp clang of iron on iron echoed through the stillness and slowly died away. Nothing happened. She waited impatiently, already searching for a way to open the door from without. Impulsively, she tried the handles, but the door was securely barred. She might have to chance using magic, just a little, to gain admittance. Or maybe there was another way in, through another door on another wall. Surely there was no reason to keep such a decrepit place as Libiris locked up once it was abandoned.

Then, rather too suddenly, a small door set within the larger doors, close down to the ground, popped open. A head crested with a tuft of white hair poked out, and a pair of gimlet eyes looked up into hers. “What is it?” the owner asked in a dialect she could only barely understand.

“I’m seeking shelter for myself and my friends,” she declared, still recovering from her shock at actually finding someone here.

The head tilted upward slightly, and she saw a face that most closely resembled that of a rodent, long and pointed and hairy. The eyes narrowed with suspicion, but she refused to be intimidated and held their gaze with her own. “Can you let us in, please?” she pressed, trying hard to sound both desperate and helpless and not angry.

Teeth flashed behind a wicked smile. “No, I cannot. Go away!”

The head disappeared back inside, and the door slammed shut.

Mistaya stood staring at the tiny portal in a mix of fury and frustration, very tempted to knock down the doors using her magic and march inside, announcing who she was as she did so and demanding that her tormentor be made to answer for his uncivilized behavior. She was cold and tired and hungry, and she did not deserve to be treated like this.

The G’home Gnomes appeared at her elbow, their wizened faces looked up into her own tentatively. “Maybe we ought to just leave,” Poggwydd suggested from one side, while Shoopdiesel nodded in hasty agreement from the other.

Maybe that would have been the best thing for it, but Mistaya was already set on doing the exact opposite. She had put up with enough of people pushing her around. She reached up for the knocker and rapped on the plate once more, much harder this time. She had only a few seconds to wait before the smaller door popped open anew. The little man reappeared; he must have been waiting just on the other side. He was angry now and not bothering to hide it.

“I told you to go away!” he snapped.

“Go away to where?” she snapped back. “We are in the middle of nowhere. Don’t you know anything of the King’s guidelines to hospitality? He wrote them himself when he was made King, years ago. All strangers are to be given food and shelter when they seek it in genuine need; none is to be turned away without good reason. What reason do you have to turn us away? Are you frightened of a girl and two G’home Gnomes? What is your name?”

All this appeared to catch the ferret-faced fellow off guard. He shrank back a bit under the force of her wrath. She watched his mouth tighten and his eyes fix on her belligerently.

“My name is Rufus Pinch!” he snapped. “And I do only what I have been ordered to do and nothing more. I don’t know anything about the King’s guidelines to hospitality.”

“Well, you should!” she shot back, even though she had just made it all up. “I shall be forced to report you to someone who can afford to take the time to come out here and instruct you on their usage! Turning away supplicants in the middle of the night is unacceptable behavior!”

The little man hunched his shoulders and folded his arms across his chest defensively. “Well, I can’t let you in,” he repeated.

Things seemed to have reached an impasse, but suddenly another section of door—this one apparently the upper half of the smaller—swung open and a second figure stepped into view. It was a boy, not much older than she was, rather tall and angular in build, his black hair worn long, his jaw lightly bearded, and his eyes bright with secret laughter.

“What’s happening, Pinch?” he asked the little man, arching an eyebrow at Mistaya. “Is there a problem?”

“This girl wants in, and you know the rules as well as I do. We are not to allow entry to anyone, no matter—”

“Yes, I know the rules. But this is my sister, Ellice. She’s here at my invitation.” He stepped forward quickly and took hold of an astonished Mistaya’s hands. “Hello, Ellice. I gather you got my letter and decided to come help us with the work. I’m very happy to see you.”

He bent forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I’m Thom,” he whispered in her ear as he pulled away. “Play along.”

“You never mentioned a sister,” Pinch declared accusingly.

“You never asked,” the boy answered quickly. “No one ever asks about my family, so I don’t talk about them. But I have one, you know. Everyone has a family.”

Pinch did not look satisfied. “Well, no one said you could invite her to come here,” he pressed. “The rules are the rules. No one is allowed into the building. No one is to be given shelter or fed or encouraged in any way to try to enter or to remain at Libiris. His Eminence has made it quite clear.”

“His Eminence has also made it quite clear, on more occasions than I care to think about, that we need someone else to help with the work. You and I and the Throg Monkeys are not enough to accomplish what is needed. You’ve heard him say that, haven’t you?”

“Well, yes, I’ve heard him, but—”

“Have you done anything to try to satisfy his complaints?” the boy interrupted quickly.

Pinch frowned. “No, I—”

“Then please don’t criticize those of us who have. There is a reason I am chief sorter and chronicler and you are an overseer. Now let’s go inside and get my sister warm.”

Still holding Mistaya’s hand, the boy pushed his way past a reluctant Pinch into the doorway. “Wait!” Mistaya exclaimed. “What about my friends? My escort,” she corrected quickly. “They must come inside, too.”

Pinch stepped quickly to block their way. “I draw the line here!” he declared, glaring at the G’home Gnomes. “These two were not invited to come and are not fit in any case to do the work. They must remain here!”

Thom nodded reluctantly, giving Mistaya a look. “I’m afraid that’s so. But there are stables on the south side of the building where they can get out of the weather and sleep the night. I will see that they have something to eat.”

“Humpphh,” Pinch growled disagreeably. “Very well. But they must leave here tomorrow at first light.”

Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel looked very put upon but showed no inclination to argue. Recognizing that Thom had pushed the matter of gaining entry as far as he could, Mistaya nodded. “Good night, my faithful friends,” she called over to the Gnomes, not without some small warmth. “Thanks for bringing me. I will see you in the morning to bid you farewell.”

She followed Thom through the small door and heard Pinch close and bar it tightly behind her.

Before the unfriendly little man could offer further thoughts on the matter of Mistaya’s arrival and admittance, Thom led her through a small, tunnel-like entry into a much larger anteroom, its walls lined with benches and hooks for hanging coats and wraps, high ceiling intricately carved with figures that in the near darkness she could not make out. Stray lights burned here and there, but mostly the room was draped in shadows. The thick smell of must and stale air filled her nostrils, and a chill had settled with a proprietary sense of entitlement.

Thom led and Mistaya followed. The wood floors creaked as they walked down the length of the room, which was twice as long as it was wide. A high desk, elevated on a platform to allow whoever manned it to look down on whoever sought admittance, ran across the far end of the room, effectively barring entry to whatever lay beyond a pair of massive wooden doors set in the wall behind. The desk was old and splintering at its joints, and there were spiders spinning their webs where space permitted. She assumed there were spiders elsewhere in the room, as well, in places she couldn’t clearly see. She looked down as they approached the desk and noticed faint clouds of dust rising in small puffs with each footfall.

“Don’t mind that,” Thom advised cheerfully. “This room doesn’t get much use.”

She stepped close to him. “Why did you say that I was your …”

His face darkened as he quickly put a finger to his lips and shook his head. He pointed to his ears and then made a sweeping gesture toward the walls. “Later,” he whispered.

He led her around one end of the desk, but did not try using the larger portals, choosing instead a small door at one corner of the room, a door so unobtrusive that she might have missed it completely if he had not taken her right up to it. He grasped a handle that was all but invisible, pulled the door open, and led her through. A hallway beyond wound off into a darkness that would have been complete if not for the handheld lamp he suddenly produced and fired with his touch, something she recognized immediately as magic. She arched one eyebrow at him, thinking as she did so that there was more to this place and its inhabitants that she had first thought.

They passed a number of doors, all of them closed, but Thom finally stopped before one and opened it. Inside was a very small, unadorned bedroom, dark and windowless, with a bed, an ancient cedar chest, a small set of shelves, and a table and chairs. There were no decorations hanging from the walls, no rugs on the floors, and no hints of color anywhere. Mistaya looked around in dismay.

“We can talk here,” the boy said, giving her a quick, reassuring smile. “They don’t listen here. My room, maybe. But not here. These are the servants’ quarters, the rooms set aside for the keepers of the stacks and the files, and there haven’t been any of those for decades. There’s only Pinch and the Throg Monkeys and me. And His Eminence, of course. Sit with me.”

He seated himself on the edge of the bed and motioned for her to join him. She did so, feeling braver now, more sure of herself than when she had faced Pinch alone. She didn’t know who this boy was, but she didn’t think he meant her any harm.

“Why did you help me back there?” she asked him. “Why did you tell that little man—Pinch, you called him—that I was your sister?”

He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t plan it. I saw you, and I just decided to help you out.” He shook his head. “I get bored here. There’s no one to talk to. I thought anyone traveling with two G’home Gnomes out here in the middle of nowhere would have stories to tell.”

“Well, I might not want those stories told just now. Will you make me go if I don’t choose to tell them?”

“Not if you tell me some others. I just want someone to talk to. I’ve been here for almost three years now. I never go anywhere, and no one ever comes to visit. You saw how you were greeted. It’s the same with everyone else. Not that there’s much reason for anyone to want to come here, anyway.” He paused. “Do you know where you are?”

“Of course,” she declared at once. “This is Libiris.”

“Then why did you come here? Surely, you didn’t come by accident?”

She hesitated. “Didn’t you just tell me no one ever comes here on purpose?”

He cocked his head. “I did.”

“Well, there you are. I got lost. A mistake.” She waved one hand dismissively, hoping he believed her. “But what are you doing here?” she followed up quickly. “What keeps you?”

“I’m an apprentice to His Eminence, in service to Libiris.”

She pursed her lips. “You keep mentioning that name. His Eminence. Is he some sort of ruler or Lord? How did you become apprenticed to him?”

He frowned. “It’s kind of complicated. Can we talk about it in the morning? You look tired.”

Again, she hesitated, this time because she sensed he was hiding something. But she really didn’t have any right to demand answers to her questions if she wasn’t prepared to answer his. Even if it irritated her.

She managed a smile. “I am tired and I do need to sleep. But can I have something to eat first?”

Thom stood up at once, unfolding his angular frame. “We’ll go down to the kitchen. Then I’ll take something out to your friends. I still think it’s funny that you are traveling with G’home Gnomes.”

She couldn’t argue with that. But there was much about her life that she found odd of late, so the Gnomes in particular didn’t stand out. She stood up with him. “Would you like me to tell you something about those Gnomes?” she asked him.

He nodded eagerly. “I would, indeed.”

Together they went off to find the kitchen.

The trouble with being raised a Princess of Landover is that it makes it very hard to settle for anything less. Sterling Silver, for example, was more than her home; it was her caregiver. A sentient being, it knew instinctively what she needed and provided it for her. A bed that was just right for her size and shape, suitably warmed each night, floors that were heated to order, food prepared and delivered, air that was sweet smelling and always fresh, a channeling of sounds that were pleasing and comforting, clothes to wear, and beautiful things with which to decorate her rooms—these were just a few of the comforts she had been provided, always without her asking. The castle was magical and capable of magical acts, and it had looked after the Kings of Landover and their families since its inception.

Nor was her transition from the castle to the Carrington Women’s Preparatory School particularly difficult. She was no longer able to rely on the buildings for special service and care, but if she wanted clean clothes to wear and fresh sheets to sleep on and good food to eat, there were people who could provide them all. And there were a plethora of advantages that even Landover lacked. Her father’s world was technologically advanced, so there were movies and televisions and radios and cell phones and computers and vast numbers of retail stores and malls to enjoy. There were airplanes and automobiles and trains and buses for transportation. There were cities that were vast in size and filled with exciting places, some of them actually educational. All in all, it was a fair trade-off for what she was leaving behind in Landover, and she had found it an exhilarating experience (when she allowed herself to do so).

There was nothing at all exhilarating about Libiris. In addition to being dark and dank and cold, it felt like a tomb for the dead. The air was stale and smelled of decay. Her room was a smaller version of the larger structure—close, cold, and dead feeling. Her bed was miserable and her pillow, a rock. She found no clean clothes to wear, no water to drink or bathe in, no toilet facilities of any sort, and no windows to let in fresh air. The silence of her surroundings was like a great weight pressing down on her. Now and then, she would hear a small noise from somewhere far away, but she could never identify it and be reassured that it meant the presence of other living creatures.

She made it through the night, surviving an uneasy sleep, still dressed in the clothes she had worn coming in. She woke to blackness, but when she arose from the bed a tiny light flickered on over the door. More magic, she noted. She found the door unlocked and walked out into the hall. Tiny lights flickered on up and down its length. She wondered where Thom might be sleeping, suddenly anxious for his company. But there was no way of knowing how to find him. She walked the hall from end to end, stopping at each door and listening to the silence beyond as if it might reveal some secret. She did not venture beyond the hall once it turned down other corridors, afraid she would become lost in what appeared to be something of a labyrinth.

Finally, she returned to her room and sat down on her bed to wait. Idly, she began sorting through the few possessions she had brought, laying them out on the bed for study. At the bottom of her duffel, beneath the few items of clothing, she found the compass, the virtual map ring, and the book on wizard spells that Questor had given her. Below all that was the fairy stone she had brought as a present for her grandfather and had failed to give to him. She had carried it all that way and forgotten she had it. She held it in the palm of her hand, feeling immeasurably sad. She found herself thinking about all the things she had taken for granted in her life before this, the way you do when you are feeling sorry for yourself and wondering what has brought you to your present state. But thinking of it didn’t make her feel any better, so she shoved such thoughts out of her mind and began concentrating instead on what it was she intended to do with herself now that she was here.

The irony of her situation did not escape her. She had fled from Sterling Silver for the express purpose of not being forced to come to Libiris as her father’s envoy, and yet here she was anyway. She could argue all she wanted to that it was a matter of circumstances; that she had come here not because her father wanted her to but because it was her own choice, a choice made out of necessity and one that she could revoke at a moment’s notice. She could rationalize that her presence was mostly due to Edgewood Dirk—wherever he was—who had talked her into coming, persuading her it was the only place in which her father would not think to look for her.

But it was all words, and none of them mattered more than the fact of her being here in a place she did not really want to be.

She stewed about it for a while, and then finally there was a knock on the door, and when she called back it opened and Thom stepped inside.

“Good morning,” he greeted cheerfully. “Are you all right?”

She brushed back her hair and gave him a short nod, unwilling to admit that she hurt everywhere and hated everything. “Is there somewhere I can wash?” she asked instead.

He took her down the hall to one of the doors she had passed earlier and opened it for her. Inside, there were counters with basins and pitchers of water. On the wall hung towels. None of it looked too clean or too new.

“You can use these,” he told her. He looked vaguely embarrassed. “I’ll stay outside until you’re done. So that no one disturbs you.”

When he was gone, she stripped off her clothes and began washing herself as best she could, thinking all the while how much better things would be if she were back in Sterling Silver. Halfway through, it occurred to her that she could make it better simply by using a little of her magic. A shower with hot water, a soft towel instead of a harsh rag, and a little warmth in the floors would make things almost bearable. She nearly gave in to the temptation. But using magic would risk revealing her location to her father and mother. More than that, it would indicate a certain weakness of character. If she used magic to lessen her hardship, she was admitting that she wasn’t tough enough to deal with things the way they were. She hated the idea that she wasn’t strong enough to endure a little discomfort. She thought herself better than that, and she wasn’t about to do anything that would prove her thinking wrong.

So she suffered through the coldwater splash and the freezing air and the rank smells and the rough surface of the towel, and she was pretty much finishing up when a panel in the wall opened and a handful of rangy monkeys appeared. At least, that was what they appeared to be as they crowded into the room, all but tumbling over one another as they pushed clear of the opening. When they caught sight of her, naked save for the towel she was desperately trying to wrap about herself, they straightened up as if electrified and hissed like snakes. She screamed in response—more from embarrassment than fear—yelling at them to get out.

The door to the room flew open and Thom charged in, caught sight of Mistaya, made a vague attempt at shielding his eyes, and then quickly placed himself between the monkeys and her, shouting loudly at the former until they all piled back through the hole in the wall and slammed the panel shut behind them.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered, keeping his back turned and his eyes averted. “Those are some of the Throg Monkeys. They aren’t supposed to be in this part of the building, but they seem to go wherever they want these days. Even His Eminence can’t keep them in line. Guess they’ve been using this washroom for themselves.”

“Can you just keep looking over there until I’m dressed?” Mistaya asked rather pointedly.

“Oh, certainly, of course,” he agreed at once. “I wouldn’t have come in at all if I hadn’t heard you scream, but then I … Well, I didn’t know what … It could have been anything, after all … Really, I didn’t see anything … much.”

He trailed off awkwardly, apparently unable to find any good way to end the conversation. She left things hanging there while she quickly finished drying and dressing in her old clothes, promising herself a change as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

“What sort of creatures are those Throg Monkeys?” she asked finally. “Trolls or kobolds or what?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t even know where they came from. His Eminence found them and brought them here to do the heavy work in the Stacks. Which was a waste of effort, it turns out. They don’t do very much work at all. They wouldn’t do any except that I found a way to make them. They seem to think that work is beneath them. Mostly, they just sit around looking bored.”

“Except when they’re poking their noses in where they don’t belong.”

“Except for that.” He hesitated. “Did they frighten you?”

“They came through the walls rather suddenly. So, yes, they frightened me. But they won’t get a chance to do that again, I can promise you.”

She finished tying the stays to her blouse and cinched her belt. “Throg Monkeys, huh. I thought I knew every species of creature in Landover, but I never heard of them.”

“I thought the same thing,” he agreed. “Can I turn around now?”

“You can.” She waited until he was facing her. “There, you see? No damage done. But I am hungry.”

He took her back outside and down the hall to the kitchen where he had fed her the night before. The kitchen had been empty then, and it was empty now. She couldn’t quite figure out who did the cooking or when they did it, but there was a pot of something bubbling on the stove. Thom ladled them up two bowls of something that might have been thin stew or simply gruel, added hunks of bread, and pumped two cups of water from a sink. They sat at the same table, a small wooden block with benches, and consumed their meal. It did not look appetizing at the outset and did not improve with the tasting. Mistaya ate hers anyway, concentrating on the bread. She needed something in her stomach.

“Now that you’re here,” he asked her after the meal was nearly consumed, “how long do you intend to stay?”

She thought about it a moment. “How long do you think I will be allowed to stay?”

He shrugged. “Depends. If you want to continue to pretend to be my sister, you can stay as long as you like. Otherwise, I think you better make plans to leave after breakfast.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “That’s rather abrupt, isn’t it?”

“You saw how things are around here last night. If you want to stay, you have to work in the Stacks. That was the excuse I gave for your being here.” He gave her a quick smile. “Look, I want you to stay. I told you that last night. I want to have someone to talk to.”

He hesitated. “Okay, it’s more than that. I don’t want to talk to just someone. I want to talk to you. I like you.”

She almost blushed, but not quite. “Well, I don’t mind being your sister if that’s what it takes for me to stay. But don’t you have to get permission from His Eminence?”

“Oh, sure. But he’ll agree. He likes beautiful things, so he’ll like you well enough.” He faltered, apparently realizing what he had just said. He brushed nervously at his mop of dark hair. “We can go see him after you’ve finished eating.”

“I’m finished,” she announced, and she stood up.

He took her back out of the kitchen and down the hallway past all the doorways to the servants’ rooms, including her own, until they were back in the front anteroom where the big desk fronted the two huge closed doors. Only now the doors were open, and Thom led her through.

She stopped short when she saw what was there. They had entered a cavernous chamber with ceilings so high she could only just make out massive wooden support beams standing out in stark relief against the shadows. The floor of the room comprised huge stone blocks on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of shelves, row upon row running left to right and back into farther darkness. The shelves were each perhaps twenty feet high and connected by rails on which rolling ladders rested. Books and papers of all sorts were crammed into the shelves and stacked on the floors and dumped in piles in the aisles. Although there were windows high up on the walls on either side, their glass was crusted with grime and dust and cobwebs, and the natural light was reduced to a feeble glow. Usable light emanated from more of the tiny flameless lamps she had seen in the hallways earlier, these attached in pairs at the ends of the shelves, their yellow glow almost, but not quite, reaching to the center of each shelving unit.

“The Stacks,” he announced. “It’s kind of a mess up here, but better when you go farther in. We’ve been working back to front and from the middle outward. Don’t ask me why; His Eminence ordered it done that way. So those parts are cleaned up and organized.” He paused and looked at her. “It’s a big job. You can see why we need help.”

She could, indeed. As she was thinking that the number of workers necessary to clean up this mess was not a handful, but hundreds, a pair of the Throg Monkeys emerged from the gloom between the stacks, hunched over and conversing in low tones. When they caught sight of Thom and her, they abruptly turned around and disappeared back into the gloom.

“That’s the way they are,” Thom advised. “They do their level best not to be found so that they don’t have to work. They are very good at it, too. Every day, I have to hunt them down and herd them over to the section we’re working on. It takes up a lot of valuable time.”

She kept staring in the direction of the vanished Throg Monkeys, thinking how creepy they were. “How many of them are there?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know. I keep trying to count them, but I can never get them all together in one place. There are a lot, I know.” He frowned. “It seems as if there are more all the time, but I don’t know how that can be—unless they’re breeding, of course, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that. Fortunately.”

He grimaced. “However many there are, there aren’t enough since only a small percentage of them ever do any work. The only thing I can trust them to do is lift and haul; they’re hopeless at organizing and filing. I keep telling His Eminence that we need better help to finish this job, but he never does anything about it.”

He gave her his loopy grin. “But now we have you—my little sister, Ellice. Things are looking up!”

She gave him a grimace of dismay. “How long have you been at this?”

He looked skyward for a moment. “Oh, about three years now.”

“Three years? Three whole years?”

The loopy grin returned. “Well, it’s slow going, I admit. But His Eminence seems satisfied. Come on. Let me introduce you.”

“Wait!” She held up her hand to stay him. “What am I supposed to do when I meet him? What should I say?”

“Oh, that’s easy. You really don’t have to say much of anything. His Eminence will do all the talking. You just have to play along. Remember your lines. You are my little sister, Ellice. We live in a little village at the south edge of the Greensward called Averly Mills. When I introduce you, bow to him. Always address him as ‘Your Eminence’ or just ‘Eminence.’ Can you do that?”

She could if she had to, though she didn’t much like the idea. But she held her tongue. “Does he have a name other than ‘Eminence’?” she asked instead.

Thom gave her that familiar shrug. “He says his name is Craswell Crabbit, but I think he made it up. It doesn’t matter because he won’t allow us to use that name anyway. Only ‘Your Eminence’ will do.”

“Is he a noble of the Kingdom? Is that why he insists on being addressed as ‘Your Eminence’?”

Thom beckoned with a sweeping gesture of his arm, directing her to follow. “Come with me. You can decide for yourself.”

He walked her down the right side of the Stacks and along the far wall until he came to an ornately carved oak door, scrolled with all sorts of symbols and runes and edged in gilt. At the very center and right at eye level was a sign that read:

HIS EMINENCE

Knock Before Entering

The letters, also outlined in gilt, fairly jumped off the polished wood of the door. Directly below was a huge metal knocker resting on a metal plate. It looked to Mistaya as if it would take a fair-sized battering ram to knock the door down if it was secured.

Without hesitating Thom lifted the knocker and let it fall once. A silence followed, and then a rumbling bass voice replied from within, “You may enter, Thom.”

How the inhabitant knew who it was who’d come calling was a mystery to Mistaya, but Thom seemed undisturbed and pressed down on the door handle to release the latch.

The room they entered was large but not cavernous, and it in no way resembled the Stacks. Here the wood was polished to a high gloss, the walls decorated with paintings and tapestries, and the floor laid with rich carpet. The ceiling was much lower, but not so low as to make it feel as if it were pressing down, and there were slender stained-glass windows at the rear through which sunshine brightly shone in long, colorful streamers. A massive desk dominated the rear center of the room, its surface piled high with documents and artifacts of some sort. His Eminence sat comfortably behind it in a high-backed stuffed armchair, beaming out at them with a huge smile.

“Thom!” he exclaimed, as if surprised that it was the boy who had entered. Then he stood up and held out his arms in greeting. “Good morning to you!”

Mistaya didn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t exactly this unbridled display of camaraderie. Nor was Craswell Crabbit quite what she had envisioned. Sitting behind his desk, he looked fairly normal. But when he stood up he was well over seven feet tall, skeletal beyond simply lean or gaunt, a collection of bones held together by skin and ligaments. As if to emphasize how oddly thin he was, his head was at least two sizes too big for his shoulders, an oblong face suggesting that the obvious compression it had undergone hadn’t been quite enough to make up for the job done on the body. Because his legs and arms were rather crooked, even given the oddity of the rest of his body, the whole of his appearance was something rather like that of a praying mantis.

“Good morning, Your Eminence,” Thom replied promptly. Rather quickly, Mistaya thought, he led her forward to stand before the desk. “This is my sister, Ellice.”

“Ah, what a lovely child you are, Ellice!” the spider enthused, reaching out with one bony hand to take her own.

“Your Eminence,” she responded quickly, letting the hand he held hang limp as she gave him something between a bow and a curtsy.

“Come for a visit?” he pressed. “All the way from … ?”

“Averly Mills, Your Eminence,” she answered smoothly.

“Yes, that is the name. I’d forgotten.” He smiled. “Missing your brother, are you?”

She noticed now that his head was shaved of hair, but fine black stubble grew over his bald pate and along the smooth line of his angular jaw in a dark shadow that refused to be banished. His sharp eyes locked on her own, and she could feel them probing for information that she might not wish to give.

“Yes, Your Eminence,” she answered. “I thought perhaps I might be allowed to remain with him for a time. I am willing to work for my keep.”

“Oh, tut, tut, and nonsense!” the other exclaimed in mock horror. “We don’t treat our guests that way!” He paused, cocking his head at her. “Then again, we are short of helping hands just now, and our library reorganization clearly lacks the concerted effort it requires. Why, if not for your brother, we might not have made any progress at all!”

“Ellice is a good worker,” Thom cut in. “She can read and write and help me with the organizing. She would be an immense help.”

“I would be pleased to do whatever I can,” Mistaya affirmed quickly, trying out a smile on him.

His Eminence looked charmed in his praying-mantis sort of way. “How very gracious of you, Ellice! I would not ask it of you, but neither will I refuse the offer. You may begin work at once! Please consider yourself a part of our family while you are here. Thom, has she met everyone?”

“Mostly, Your Eminence,” the boy answered. “Pinch last night, some of the Throg Monkeys today, although I don’t know which ones or whether they even care. Not all of them, I’m sure. They seem to multiply daily. Anyway, thank you for allowing her to stay with me. I miss her every bit as much as she misses me.”

“Well, I am certain you do.” The oblong face tilted strangely, as if about to fall off its narrow perch. “Though you’ve never once mentioned her before, have you?”

Mistaya felt a chill go up her spine. But Thom simply gave that familiar shrug. “I never thought it important enough to speak about, Your Eminence. You have so much else with which to grapple that it never seemed appropriate to talk about myself.”

The tall man clapped his hands. “How very thoughtful of you, Thom. Indeed, you never disappoint me. Well, then. You’ve had your breakfast and taken a look around, Ellice?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Then I shall not keep you a moment longer. Your brother goes off to work and you must join him. We shall visit again, later. Goodbye for now.”

He gave her another smile and a perfunctory wave that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything other than a dismissal. Giving deep bows and muttering their profuse thanks, the boy and the girl backed from the room and closed the door.

At once Thom put a finger to his lips. In silence, they retraced their steps back down the aisleway and to the front end of the Stacks. When they were safely clear of the walls and out in the open, Thom turned to her.

“What do you think now? Is he a noble of the realm?”

She made a rude sound and didn’t answer.

It was only a few minutes later, the boy and the girl gone by then, that a knock sounded in the wall of Craswell Crabbit’s office. His Eminence grunted and a hidden panel slid smoothly aside to admit Rufus Pinch. The hirsute little man trundled over to the side of the desk he couldn’t see over from the front and peered up accusingly at its occupant.

“Mr. Crabbit,” he greeted.

“Mr. Pinch, don’t call me that.”

Pinch ignored him. “Surely you don’t believe their story, do you?”

His Eminence smiled beatifically. “I tend not to believe anything anyone tells me, Mr. Pinch. That way I am never disappointed. Are we speaking of our Thom and his lovely sister, Ellice?”

“I don’t know who she is, but she’s not who she claims. You can be certain of that.”

“That, and much more, I think. But you are absolutely right. She isn’t who she claims. But then neither is he, in case it had escaped you.”

Pinch looked puzzled. “He isn’t?”

Craswell Crabbit steepled his fingers in front of him. “Do yourself a favor, Mr. Pinch. Don’t try to do the thinking in this partnership. Leave that to me. Stick with what works best for you. Spying. Keep an eye on those two and find out what they are up to.”

He looked deeply thoughtful as he paused. “Because they are almost certainly up to something.”

For the remainder of the day, Mistaya worked side by side with Thom in the dark and musty confines of the Stacks, cataloging and shelving the books that were stored there. Each book had to be removed, checked against a master list that His Eminence had supplied to Thom, cleaned and repaired as best as possible, and then returned to its space. The shelves themselves had to be scrubbed, since dust and grime had accumulated in clumps and layers thick enough to provide homes for nests of insects, which had long since gone condo. The work was slow and laborious, and by the end of the day they had barely completed one small section of the acres that required attention.

Of course, the task would have taken a dedicated crew of twenty able-bodied men and women as long as two years to complete, so they were somewhat at a disadvantage having only themselves and the completely unreliable Throg Monkeys as laborers. The annoying little creatures skulked around like evil weasels, appearing out of the gloom and then disappearing back into it once more, coming and going as they pleased. When they bothered to pass by, they regarded Thom with undisguised dislike and Mistaya with malevolent intent. Thom managed to get them to do some work, mostly the heavy lifting of the books from the shelves to the floor for easy reach, using the whistle they hated so to bring them to heel. But mostly they just drifted about, demonstrating no interest in the charge His Eminence, supposedly, had given them.

Still, some work was accomplished, and by the end of the day Mistaya could look with pride on the small area of shelving to which she had successfully lent her efforts. The ancient wood gleamed with waxing and polishing and the books rested upon it proudly, each in its place, giving the space a look of bright promise. She took special pleasure in hearing Thom compliment her on her efforts, pointing out how much easier things were now that she was there to help.

Neither of them made any mention of the fact that Rufus Pinch had been spying on them the entire time, making a poor job of concealing himself as he peeked around corners and through gaps, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. What he was trying to accomplish was anybody’s guess, but after their first sighting of him resulted in a quick exchange of wordless looks, they pretty much ignored his pathetic efforts in favor of concentrating on the task at hand. Mistaya did find herself wondering more than once if the little man was intent on making this his life’s work, but imagined that eventually he would grow tired of the game.

She also found herself wondering how in the world the job of repairing and restoring Libiris and her books would ever be accomplished if things didn’t change dramatically from the status quo. As things stood now, it would not be likely that the work would wrap up in her lifetime. But she wasn’t there for that, she kept reminding herself. She was only there to hide until she could figure out a way to bargain with her parents about her future. She was working at Libiris not because she wanted to but because it was the only way she would be allowed to stay. As soon as she was able to do so, she was going to leave this dreadful, dingy place and go somewhere else entirely, somewhere at least marginally reasonable.

All of which reminded her that she was in this mess in the first place because she had listened to Edgewood Dirk, and the cat had not reappeared since.

“Tell me something about yourself,” Thom asked her later, as they were eating dinner in the kitchen. As usual, there were only the two of them. Rufus Pinch seemed to have given up spying on them for the day and the Throg Monkeys had gone back into the gloom. “Nothing too revealing; I’m not asking you to give up your secrets. Just something you think I might like to know.”

She thought about it a moment, giving him a measured look. “And then you will do the same?”

He grinned. “Of course.”

“All right.” She thought some more. What could she say that would really amaze him? She wanted to do that, to shock him. But at the same time she had to be careful not to give anything away.

“I know,” she said finally. She squared her shoulders. “I have met the dragon Strabo, and talked with him.”

He stared at her as if she had lost her mind. It was exactly the reaction she had hoped for. “You have not,” he insisted. “You couldn’t have.”

“But I have. It happened when I was ten years old. I was outside my village, carrying milk to my grandmother’s cottage.” She was improvising now, making it up as she went. “The dragon landed in a field and ate a cow right in front of me! When he was done, he looked at me and asked me what I was staring at. I couldn’t speak, I was so afraid. But the dragon said not to worry, that as a rule he didn’t eat little girls. Only now and then, and this wasn’t either. Then he flew away.”

He exhaled sharply. “Right in front of you? I would have been afraid, too! I’ve seen the dragon flying, but I can’t imagine talking to it.” He leaned forward, his face serious. “I think you were very brave.”

She blushed despite herself, not so much at the compliment as at the knowledge that she was perpetrating a deliberate deception in order to impress him. She liked Thom, and she wanted him to see her as something more than a runaway with strange traveling companions. Her meeting with Strabo hadn’t been anything like what she had described, but she couldn’t tell him the truth without giving away her identity.

“I wasn’t so brave,” she said, making a dismissive gesture. “The dragon wasn’t interested in me.”

“You would have made a nice snack,” he suggested. “Did you believe it when he said he wouldn’t eat you?”

She shrugged. “He was scary looking, but not aggressive. He didn’t threaten me. He just made that one comment, that’s all he did.” She was anxious to move on. “All right, now it’s your turn. Tell me something about you that I should know.”

He gave her his boyish grin and shook his head. “I don’t think I have anything to tell you half as interesting as what you just told me.” He rested his chin in the cup of his hands. “Let’s see. Well, I like books. I read all the time.”

“That’s not surprising,” she challenged. “You work in a library.”

“Lots of people work at places they don’t have any interest in.” He paused. “How about this? I don’t like fighting with weapons. I’m not very good at it.”

She gave him a look. He didn’t seem all that awkward. In fact, she thought he looked pretty capable. “What else?” she pressed. “That’s not enough yet. You have to tell me something important, something you wouldn’t tell just anyone.”

He leaned back, looking much put upon. “You can’t expect me to match the dragon story. Well, okay. I saw the dragon once, flying by, high up; I already told you that. Does that count?”

She shook her head. “Something else.”

“There isn’t anything else!” he exclaimed in mock exasperation. “Wait! Okay, one other thing I can tell you.” He leaned forward again, bending close and lowering his voice. “I’m not here because I am an apprentice. I’m here because I’m indentured to His Eminence.”

“Indentured? Like a servant or slave? You mean he owns you?”

“Something like that, I guess. My father sold me to him for five years to satisfy a family debt. I have to stay here working for him until my five years are up.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I’m only in my third year.”

She was appalled. “Why would your father do that?”

“Ah,” he said, drawing the word out. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

She frowned. “Well, you have to tell me!”

He shook his head in rebuke. “Not until you tell me something more about yourself. Then I’ll tell you the rest.”

She leaped to her feet. “That isn’t fair!”

“Who said anything about playing fair?” He stretched lazily. “Anyway, I’m off to bed. We start early around here, and tomorrow is your first full day in the Stacks. You’ll need all the sleep you can get.”

She stared at him in disbelief, started to say something, then stopped. He was already getting to his feet, picking up his plate, and carrying it to the basin to wash. She was furious, but would not give him the satisfaction of finding that out. Two could play this game. She was already thinking about what she would tell him tomorrow that would shock him even more.

He gave her a cheerful wave as he walked out the door, and she smiled back sweetly.

When she rose the following morning, she was pleased to discover that the washroom was no longer plagued by the threat of uninvited Throg Monkeys. Thom had nailed heavy wooden boards over the panel through which the troublesome little monsters had appeared yesterday, and it looked as if they were shut out for good. Nevertheless, she kept close watch as she washed and dressed herself, a good-sized wooden staff close at hand for head-bashing should the need arise.

Afterward, she did not go directly into the kitchen for her breakfast, but down the hall and through several connected passageways to a small, well-sealed door that opened into a mucky courtyard and stables beyond. She saw Shoopdiesel right away, sitting on a bench next to a woodpile, hunched over and picking pieces of straw and clumps of dirt out of his clothing. He looked as if he might have volunteered for duty as a scarecrow in a windstorm, but she was certain that the explanation was far more complicated.

“Princess!” Poggwydd exclaimed loudly, as he came around the corner of the shed leading a small donkey.

“Not so loud, please!” she hissed, motioning him to quiet down. “And don’t call me that! It’s Ellice!”

His grubby hands flew to his mouth in horror at the obviousness of his mistake, and he hurriedly nodded his understanding. “Sorry, so sorry,” he offered in a hushed voice.

She walked over to him, stopping to take a look at Shoopdiesel, who appeared not just to be coated with straw and dirt but impaled. Moreover, he was the recipient of multiple bruises and cuts. “What happened to him?” she asked Poggwydd.

“Oh.” Poggwydd looked embarrassed. “It’s a rather long story, Princess … I mean, Ellice. Rather long and boring. Perhaps it would be better to tell it another time … ?”

“I have time now. What have you two been up to?” She glanced at the animal he was leading. “And what are you doing with that donkey?”

Poggwydd looked all around, as if afraid someone would hear. Shoopdiesel had given up plucking out hunks of straw and earth and was limping as unobtrusively as possible toward the interior of the shed.

“Shoopdiesel, you come back here!” she snapped at him. “Whatever’s going on, you’re obviously involved!”

“It’s really nothing you need to bother yourself with,” Poggwydd insisted in something like a whine.

Mistaya shook her head. “Stop wasting my time, Poggwydd. Just tell me what you and your piggy little friend are doing.”

Poggwydd seemed to consider the advisability of doing so for a moment and apparently the scales tipped in her favor. “Foraging,” he admitted.

She shook her head, despairing that there was any hope for these two. “I thought as much. What did I tell you about that?”

“But, Princess!”

“Don’t call me that! Just tell me why you are back to stealing other people’s animals!”

“But we’re not stealing.” Poggwydd managed to look put upon. “Consider our situation. We have been living out here in the stables since we arrived. It’s very nice out here, too. Lots of soft earth for burrowing, lots of soft straw for sleeping, and a great many rats for eating. Do you know, Princess, that the stable hands actually want us to eat the rats? They encourage it! So we did just exactly as we were told.”

He gave a prodigious sigh. “But we have been eating rats constantly since our arrival, and we thought that perhaps we should eat something else. A varied diet is important, you know. A varied diet keeps you healthy of body and mind, Princess.”

He saw the look that crossed her face and hurried on. “Well, being of a curious nature, naturally we decided to look around. And what did we find but all sorts of strays that no one has any claim to! We could take our pick! But, admittedly, we got a little carried away. Well, Shoopdiesel did, anyway. He’s always been a little too ambitious for his own good. He shouldn’t have tried to capture something that big, even if it was just standing out there, waiting for someone to come along and take it away. He should have known better.”

“A horse?” she guessed.

“A bull. A rather large, unpleasant bull with big horns and a keen dislike for G’home Gnomes. He threw Shoopdiesel twenty feet in the air and then tried to trample him. Poor Shoop only barely escaped with his life!”

As if on cue, Shoopdiesel began to whimper softly. Mistaya rolled her eyes. “And you, in your wisdom, Poggwydd, have settled on this donkey? Is that right?” she pressed.

He nodded wordlessly, dropping his gaze. “It was just wandering around. No owner was in sight.”

“You know, just because you don’t see an owner doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” she pointed out. “For instance, if an ear is tagged with a metal clip, like this one?” She reached out and fingered the tag attached to the donkey’s ear. “That might suggest that you have overstepped your bounds once again.”

“Oh,” he said, trying to look abashed. “I didn’t see that.”

Maybe he hadn’t, but maybe he had, too. Who knew? She couldn’t be sure with these two. What she did know was that they were becoming increasingly annoying and were going to get into some sort of trouble sooner or later that would call attention to them and therefore to her. She couldn’t allow that to happen. Maybe it was time to send them back home.

“You’ve both been of great help to me,” she declared, bestowing on each in turn her most persuasive smile. “I wouldn’t have gotten to Libiris without you. But now that I’m here and staying for a while, there’s really no need for you to worry further about me. You’re probably anxious to get back to your own homes and lives.”

The G’home Gnomes exchanged a hurried glance. “Oh, no, Princess,” Poggwydd said at once. “We want to stay with you. You still might have need of us. Might’nt she, Shoop?”

Shoopdiesel nodded vigorously.

“If we leave, what will you do for friends if you find yourself in trouble again? That cat can’t be trusted. I bet you haven’t even seen him since we arrived.”

There was no arguing with that. She sighed, resigned to the inevitable. “All right. You can stay a few days longer. But pay attention to me. If you do one more thing that causes trouble, you’ll have to leave immediately. I mean it. I’m trying to stay in hiding here, and you don’t help matters by doing things that are likely to anger our hosts. So there will be no more foraging. Stick with eating rats, if you must.”

The image was nauseating, but then she wasn’t a G’home Gnome, either. “Can’t you eat grass or something?”

Poggwydd frowned. “G’home Gnomes don’t eat grass, Princess.”

“That’s an example, Poggwydd! I’m just telling you not to eat anything you haven’t been given permission to eat. Are we clear?”

Both Gnomes nodded forlornly, their wizened faces crestfallen and their shoulders slumped. They couldn’t help being what they were, she knew. They couldn’t be something else; they didn’t know how. Given all the time in the world, she probably couldn’t teach them.

“I have to go eat my own breakfast,” she muttered in disgust, turning away.

Beset by images of rats being gnawed on by Gnomes, she discovered that she really wasn’t very hungry anymore. Nevertheless, she managed to eat a little bread and cheese and drink some milk before going off to work in the Stacks. By the time she arrived, Thom was already there, sitting cross legged on the floor as he sorted through the latest batch of books the recalcitrant Throg Monkeys had stacked next to him. He gave her a cheerful greeting, and she was relieved when he didn’t say anything about the fact that she was late. Putting thoughts of the G’home Gnomes behind her, she settled down to the job at hand and in no time at all was deeply enmeshed in cataloging and cleaning.

The morning passed quickly, helped along by her concentration on her work. Very little conversation passed between Thom and herself, and when he did speak it was only to ask her if she had slept well, if she had eaten and if she needed anything. She wanted him to say more, was eager to talk with him, but his seeming reluctance left her unwilling to push the matter. She had to content herself with watching the furtive movements of the Throg Monkeys as they slithered through the stacks like wraiths, crouched over and slit-eyed, their purpose and destination unknowable. She might have been frightened of them before, but by now she had grown used to them and found herself mostly irritated that they insisted on lurking rather than helping.

She was aware, too, of Rufus Pinch peering out at her from various hiding places, a spy without spy skills. It didn’t seem to bother Thom, who appeared unaware of the wizened face and furtive movements of the little man. Thom just worked along as if nothing unusual was happening, humming to himself, sparing Mistaya an occasional look, but saying nothing. She found herself increasingly irritated with him, too. She wanted him to acknowledge what was going on instead of acting as if he were oblivious. But Thom never once said a word or even gave her one of those conspiratorial looks that he had shared with her yesterday.

Then, just when her patience was nearly exhausted, he leaned forward suddenly and whispered, “Had enough, little sister? Let’s go somewhere they can’t spy on us.”

He took her to the kitchen to gather up bread, meat, cheese, and cups of cold well water for their lunch, then walked her out again and down a hallway to a huge old stone stairway that climbed into gloom and a flutter of bat wings.

“Up there?” she asked doubtfully.

He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s safe enough once we’re at the top. And we can lock the door when we get there.”

She followed him up, ascending the tower steps in steady progression, counting until she lost interest. Slits cut into the walls allowed for just enough light to find the way but not enough to chase the gloom. The bats clung to the walls here and there in shadowy communities, but she couldn’t quite decide how they got in since the slits seemed too narrow. It wasn’t until she neared the top and the light brightened that she saw barred window openings in the upper reaches of the tower flanking a heavy ironbound door that sat at the apex of the stairs.

Thom reached the door, lifted the latch, and pushed. The door opened with a creaking of metal fastenings, and sunlight poured through in a bright gray wash.

Once through the opening, they were outside the castle, elevated on a battlement that gave a 360-degree view of the countryside beyond. Mistaya could see for miles, even though the day was hazy and the lake country mists snaked through the forests to coil in pools in the vales and deeps. She could see the dark flanks of the mountains south and west, and father north the deep emerald of the Greensward.

She even thought she caught a momentary glimpse of Sterling Silver’s bright gleam through the drifting haze.

“What do you think?” Thom asked her, and she gave him a broad grin.

They sat facing each other on a bench at the edge of the battlement, their food and drink settled between them, the sweep of the countryside visible through notches in the ancient stone. It seemed to Mistaya that the battlement had been constructed not so much for defensive as for architectural purposes, and she didn’t think it was ever intended for Libiris to be defended against an attacker.

“There really is a throw latch on the door,” Thom advised with a wink, “and I threw it. Rufus will have to find something else to do with himself until lunch is over.”

“Why is he spying on us, anyway?” she wanted to know.

Thom shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m sure he has his reasons. It’s not just you. He watches me, too. Not all the time, but now and then. I think he does it to feel like he’s in control of things. Nominally, he’s in charge of my work. Practically, he doesn’t have any idea at all how I go about it. The Throg Monkeys don’t listen to him, either.”

“The Throg Monkeys are just plain creepy. I wish we had some other help we could call on.”

“I wish that, too. I wish we could do more to put the library back to where it once was. Have you bothered to look at those books you’re cataloging? Some of them are wonderful, filled with useful information and strange stories. I love looking at them.”

“I would love it better if Pinch wasn’t watching all the time.” She gave him a look. “I guess I haven’t paid much attention to what’s in the books. If they’re so useful, why isn’t anyone reading them?”

He shrugged anew. “People haven’t come here in decades. Not since before you and I were born. Most don’t even know about the library. As a matter of fact, most don’t even read. They’ve forgotten how or don’t take the time. They have all they can do to keep food on the table. Life isn’t easy for most living here in Landover. They have to work very hard.”

She frowned, aware that she hadn’t given the matter much thought. “I suppose that’s true.”

He didn’t say anything more for a moment, munching solemnly on his food as he looked out across the countryside. “When I come up here, I like to pretend that all the lands, for as far as I can see, belong to me, and I can do whatever I want with them.”

She laughed. “What would you do, if you had the chance?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I’d give them away.”

“Give them away? To whom?”

To all those people we’ve been talking about. Most Landoverians living in the Greensward have to work for the Lords because the Lords hold title to all the land. Half of what they farm or earn or forage belongs to their masters. They owe allegiance in case of war. They owe fealty oaths of all sorts. They really don’t have anything that they can call their own. I’d give them the land.”

She nodded, thinking. “Hasn’t the King thought of this? I heard he made a lot of changes in the old feudal system.”

“He did. More than any King before him. He’s done a lot of good. But he can only do so much. If he tried to take the land away from the Lords of the Greensward, there would be a war. Only the Lords can give away their own land.”

“But doesn’t the King own this land?” she pressed, gesturing at their immediate surroundings. “Isn’t Libiris his?”

“Libiris is his, but the land isn’t. As a matter of fact, title to this particular piece of land is held jointly by the Lords and the River Master. It took years for them to agree on using even this small piece to build Libiris. I don’t think they’ve ever agreed on anything since.”

“Maybe they could be persuaded to do more,” she said.

He laughed. “Why don’t you be the one to persuade them, then? A girl who talked with the dragon Strabo and lived to tell about it should be able to deal with mere mortals!”

“Maybe the King could do something,” she suggested impulsively.

He gave her a look. “You know, I was once inside the castle and saw the King.”

She felt her throat tighten. “How did that happen?”

“I was with a group of boys carrying baggage for one of the Lords. So I was allowed inside for a bit, and I saw the King and his Queen. I even saw their little girl.”

She nodded slowly, measuring his look. “How long ago was this?”

“Quite a while. I don’t remember a lot about it. I was just a boy. The little girl was just a child. She would be older now. Your age, maybe.” He grinned. “But she wouldn’t be nearly so interesting or pretty as you are, I bet.”

She was suddenly anxious to change the topic of conversation. “Tell me the rest of how you ended up being sent here as an indentured servant.”

He finished the last of his bread and meat and washed it down with several swallows of water. “As I recall, the bargain was that you were supposed to tell me something interesting about yourself first. Something other than that story about you and the dragon.”

“That wasn’t a bargain I made. That was your condition for finishing the story—a very unfair condition, I might add.”

He thought about it. “All right, maybe it was. If I finish the story, will you tell me something else about yourself afterward?”

She stuck out her hands. “Let’s shake on it.”

They shook, his hands strong and firm as they grasped hers. She liked the feel of them—not too rough, but they had seen hard work.

“Well, then?” she asked, withdrawing her hands from his.

“There’s not much more to tell,” he said. “My father sold me into indenture to His Eminence because he felt I might find a better future here than if I stayed with him. There wasn’t much work in the village and no one to teach me a useful trade. Or at least not a trade that interested me. He thought that coming here, working with books I could read and studying on my own when I wasn’t working, might better serve me.”

“Well, couldn’t he have sent you to study with His Eminence instead of indenturing you for five years? It would have been the same thing!”

Thom shook his head. “His Eminence wouldn’t allow it. No one gets to come to Libiris and stay without a reason. His bargain with my father was that if I came, it was as an indentured servant. That was the condition to my apprenticeship. When I am done working, I owe His Eminence half of my first five years’ earnings in my chosen trade, as well.”

“That’s unfair!” Mistaya was indignant. “He can’t do that!”

Thom laughed. “Tell you what. When you talk to the King about persuading the Lords to give up their lands to the poor people, put in a good word for me, too.”

“Maybe I will,” she declared boldly.

He leaned over and brushed her hair back from her face in a curiously tender gesture. “You have a good heart, little sister. Whoever you are and wherever you came from, you have a good heart.”

She didn’t know what to say. “I think you have a good heart, too,” she managed.

There was a moment when their eyes locked and time seemed to freeze. She waited, her anticipation of what might happen next so sharp it made her ache.

Then abruptly he stood up. “Come along. Back to work. Rufus will grow bored if we’re not there to be spied upon.”

She certainly wouldn’t want that, she thought. She felt a pang of disappointment that their time alone together was over. She wanted more. She determined that she would have it.

Picking up their plates and cups, she followed him back through the tower door and down the stairs to work.

It was late in the afternoon, the time nearly run out on their day’s efforts, when Mistaya heard someone calling. The voice was so faint and so distant that at first she thought she was mistaken. She stopped what she was doing and listened for a long few moments without hearing anything more. Her imagination, she supposed. A place this cavernous could play tricks on you, deceive you into hearing and seeing things that weren’t there.

She had risen to begin sorting through a new stack of books when she heard it again. She stood listening anew, staring off into space and trying to pinpoint the location. She thought it had come from somewhere back in the Stacks, where the darkness was so thick and deep that it was virtually impenetrable. But there was only silence.

“Did you hear something?” she asked Thom finally.

He glanced up and shook his head. “No. Did you?”

“I thought so.”

He shrugged and went back to his sorting. She watched him for a few moments, absorbed in his work, and then she quietly rose and started walking toward the interior of the Stacks, searching the gloom. The shelves ran on endlessly into the darkness, finally disappearing altogether. How far back did they go? How big was this room, anyway? She kept walking, glancing over her shoulder once to where Thom knelt on the floor, absorbed in his work. The silence was deep and pervasive, broken only by the soft sounds of her footfalls and Thom’s rustling of pages.

Then she heard the voice again, and this time she was certain that it came from somewhere in the direction she was going.

“Ellice!” Thom called out suddenly. “Wait!”

She stopped and turned. She was surprised to find that she had gone far enough down the aisle that he was almost out of sight. “What?”

He was approaching her at a run. “Don’t go any farther!”

She stared at him. “What are you talking about? I was just …”

“I know what you were doing,” he interrupted. His face was flushed as he came to a stop in front of her, and she was shocked to catch a glimpse of fear on his angular features. “I don’t want you going into the Stacks by yourself. Not ever. Not without me. Understood?”

She nodded, not understanding at all. “What’s back there?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. Then he shook his head in denial. “Maybe nothing. But maybe something, too. I don’t know. I just know it might be dangerous.” He saw the look on her face and grimaced. “I know how that sounds. But I know what can happen because it happened to me.”

She gave him a look. “Are you going to tell me what it was?”

He nodded. “But not here. Not now. Tonight. Just promise me you’ll do as I say.”

She was touched by his concern. He was genuinely worried for her. “All right, I promise. But I still think I heard something.”

She followed him back to where they had been working, quietly dissatisfied. She had told him she would not to go back into the Stacks alone, but she had already decided she was doing exactly that the first chance she got. It wasn’t lying exactly; it was more like …

Well, she didn’t know what it was more like. But it was not his decision to make; it was hers.

She had heard the voice clearly the last time it called, and she didn’t think there was any way she could ignore its plea.

Help me, it had begged.

High Lord Ben Holiday, beleaguered King of Landover and increasingly troubled father of Mistaya, was up early the next morning. He had been unable to sleep for yet another night and had slipped out of the bedroom and come down to his desk in the library to do some work. Even though he was consumed by thoughts of his absent daughter, there were pressing issues in the governing of his Kingdom that required resolution. And even though much of what he did in those still-dark morning hours consisted of rumination and paper rearranging he still felt as if he was doing something.

He looked up in surprise as Bunion appeared in the doorway and announced the arrival of a messenger from the River Master. Ben was still in his robe and pajamas, not accustomed to receiving visitors either at this hour or in this state of dress. Still, he would make an exception here. He told Bunion he would see the messenger, and the kobold disappeared without a word. Within minutes the kobold was back, their visitor in tow. The messenger entered with a slight bow, an oddly misshapen creature with twigs and leaves growing out of his body and patches of moss attached to the top of his head.

“High Lord,” he growled softly, a strange guttural sound that caught Ben by surprise. “The River Master awaits you on the far side of the causeway. He wishes to speak to you of his granddaughter.”

Ben was on his feet at once, asking Bunion and the messenger to wait where they were. He headed down the hallway and up the stairs to wake Willow. They were washed and dressed in minutes and on their way downstairs to meet Mistaya’s grandfather. The River Master refused to go inside man-made structures, which were anathema to him. All meetings had to be conducted out in the open. Ben was used to this and didn’t let it bother him. The River Master almost never left his home in Elderew. The fact that he had come to Sterling Silver said much about the importance of his visit. In any case, Ben would have gone anywhere to meet him if he had news of Mistaya.

He glanced at Willow as they descended the stairways of the castle in the company of Bunion and the woodsy-clad messenger. She looked calm and alert despite the circumstances, her beautiful face serene. The fact that she had been awoken from a sound sleep seemed not to have affected her at all. Nor did she seem bothered by the unexpected visit from her father, who was indifferent to her in the best of times. Ben knew she had grown used to his coldness, the result of his inability to accept her mother’s refusal to become his wife, a betrayal of which Willow’s birth reminded him every day of his life. His grudging acceptance of her marriage to an outsider and her status as Queen of Landover was the best she could hope for. If not for Mistaya, he would undoubtedly have less to do with either of them than he did, so she was probably grateful just for that, though she never spoke of it.

Ben studied her a moment—the slender curve of her body, the smooth and graceful walk, and the strange mix of emerald-green hair and moss-green skin. He had loved her from the moment he had encountered her so unexpectedly, twenty years ago, standing in the waters of the Irrylyn, naked in the moonlight. She had told him he was for her, and that in the fairy way they were bound by fate. He could not imagine now, though he had been doubtful then, that it could have turned out any other way.

She glanced over at him suddenly and smiled, as if she knew what he was thinking. She was almost prescient, at times. He smiled back, reaching over and taking her hand in his. Whatever else happened in their lives, he knew they would never be apart again.

They left the castle through the main gates and crossed the drawbridge and causeway to the far shore of the mainland from their island home. The River Master was waiting just inside a screen of trees not two hundred yards from the moat. He stood with a single retainer, his tall, spare form as still and hard as if it were carved from stone. He wore a look of obvious distaste, which might have had something to do with the people he was meeting or the purpose of his coming or even the weather—there was no way of telling. His nearly featureless face, smooth and hard, turned toward them as they approached, but gave no sign of interest one way or the other.

Ben nodded as he reached Willow’s father. The leader of the once-fairy nodded back, but spared not even a momentary glance for Willow.

“I’ve come about my granddaughter,” he announced tonelessly.

How typical of him to refer to Mistaya as his granddaughter, Ben thought. As if she belonged to him. As if that were what mattered.

“She came to Elderew to ask for ‘sanctuary,’ as she referred to it,” he continued, hurrying his sentences as if to get through quickly. “She complained that she was being misused and generally misunderstood by her parents. I don’t pretend to understand all of it or even to care. I told her that her visit was welcome, but that sanctuary was not a reasonable solution to her problems. I told her she must go home and face you directly rather than trying to use me as a go-between.”

He paused. “In short, I did what I would have expected you to do should one of my children come crying about their treatment.”

Something about the way he said it suggested that he was referring in oblique fashion to Willow. Ben didn’t get the connection, but thought it best not to comment. “But she didn’t take your advice, I gather?”

The River Master folded his arms. “She disappeared sometime during the night and was not seen again. The once-fairy, on my orders, attempted to track her and failed. That should not have happened, and I worried over the reason. Only a true fairy creature could hide its tracks from us. Was she in the company of one? I waited for her to return, as I thought she might. When she didn’t, I decided to come here to tell you what had happened.”

Ben nodded. “I appreciate that you did.”

“I should have done more. She is my granddaughter, and I would not forgive myself if something happened to her.”

“Do you have reason to think that something has?” Willow asked suddenly, speaking for the first time.

The River Master glanced at her, as if just realizing she was there, and then looked off into the distance. “She came to Elderew with a pair of G’home Gnomes. She claimed they were friends who had helped her. I thought them untrustworthy traveling companions for a Princess, but she is never predictable. Her mud puppy was with her as well, however, even though we did not see him, so I thought her safe enough from harm.”

“How can you know he was with her if you didn’t see him?” Ben demanded, no longer feeling quite so calm about things.

“Fairy creatures, such as Mistaya’s mud puppy, leave a small but unmistakable trace of magic with their passing. Even if they are not visible to the eye, they can be detected by the once-fairy So we knew he was there with her when she arrived. But when she left, there was no longer even a tiny trace of him.”

“Perhaps it was the mud puppy’s doing.” Ben was trying to put a good face on things, even though he wasn’t feeling good about this piece of information. Haltwhistle, a gift from the Earth Mother, was his daughter’s constant companion and protector in Landover. He was as close to her as her shadow. “Couldn’t he have covered their tracks?”

The River Master shook his head. “A mud puppy can transport a charge to another place. It cannot hide its own or another’s passing. Mistaya’s trail was hidden from us. Another magic was required for that. Only the most powerful of fairy creatures would possess such magic.”

Ben thought immediately of Nightshade, but quickly dismissed the idea. The Witch of the Deep Fell was gone. There was no indication that she had returned. He was letting his imagination run away with him.

“I shall continue to search for Mistaya, Ben Holiday,” the River Master added. “I shall do everything in my power to find out where she has gone.”

Ben nodded. “I know you will.”

“There is one thing more I need to say. I know what you and my daughter think of me. I know I have brought some of this on myself. But I would do nothing to undermine you with Mistaya. When she asked to stay with me and I told her she could not, I told her as well that when I had doubted your ability you had proven me wrong, that you were the King that Landover needed. I told her, as well, that you and my daughter were good parents to her and that she should listen to you and trust you.”

He shifted his gaze to Willow. “I have been hard on you, I know. I wish it could be otherwise, but I am not sure it ever can. Although I have tried, I find I cannot put aside entirely the pain even your presence causes me. You are your mother reborn, and your mother is a ghost that haunts me daily. I cannot escape her memory or forgive her betrayal. When I see you, I see her. I am sorry for this, but there it is.”

Willow nodded. “It is enough that you do what you can for Mistaya, Father,” she said quietly. “She looks up to you. She respects you.”

The River Master nodded but said nothing There was a momentary silence as they stood facing one another.

“Will you take something to eat?” Willow tried.

The River Master shook his head. The bladed features showed nothing as they faced her squarely for the first time. He looked as if he might say something more, but then abruptly he turned away, and with his retainers in tow he disappeared back into the trees and was gone.

Ben stood close to Willow, staring after them. He said softly, “He does the best he can, I think.”

There were tears in her eyes as she nodded.

“We have to do something more about finding Mistaya,” he added, anxious to leave the subject of her father. “I’m starting to worry about her. Perhaps the Landsview will help this time, if I…”

“No,” she said at once, her voice firm and steady. “We’ll go to the Earth Mother, instead. She will know where our daughter is.”

Ben nodded and put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her close. She always made the right choice.

They went back inside the castle, ate their breakfast, packed for an overnight journey, had Bunion saddle their horses, and by mid-morning had set out with the kobold as their escort to find the Earth Mother. It wasn’t a given that they would. You didn’t find the Earth Mother just by looking for her. What was needed was a visit to the northern borders of the River Master’s country, close by the swampy areas where the Earth Mother dwelled. If she wished to see you, she would send a mud puppy to guide you to her. If she had better things to do, you would wait a long time and had better have other plans for the interim.

Ben was happy to have Bunion back in one piece. The kobold hadn’t spoken to him directly of his misadventures at Rhyndweir, but Questor had uncovered the truth of things and passed it along. He had also given Ben the book on poisons that Bunion had stolen from Laphroig’s library. The notes and markings pretty much revealed the fate of Laphroig’s unfortunate wife and child and reaffirmed Ben’s suspicions. By itself, it wasn’t enough to convict Rhyndweir’s Lord of murder, but it was enough to underline the importance of keeping him well away from Mistaya until such time as he overstepped himself in a way that would allow him to be stripped of his title and punished in a court of law.

The day was hazy and cool, unusual for this time of year, and the grayness lent a faint despondency to their travel. Without wishing it so, Ben found himself growing steadily more pessimistic about his missing daughter. Where he had come from, there was a reasonable amount of danger for teenagers. But Landover was dangerous on a whole other level, and even Mistaya, for all her talent and experience, need only make one misstep to invite fatal consequences. He should have gone out and found her and brought her back the moment he knew she was missing. He should never have waited for her to come back on her own.

But after a while his pessimism gave way to reason, and he accepted that what he had done was the right thing and he should just have a little faith in his recalcitrant daughter. Didn’t Willow have faith, after all? Had she once expressed serious concern for Mistaya?

On the other hand, Willow was a sylph whose father was a wood sprite and whose mother was a creature so wild that no one could hold her fast. Willow was a woman who periodically turned into a tree and sent roots down into the earth for nourishment so that she could survive. How could he equate his own sensibilities with hers? She could function emotionally on a whole separate plane of existence than he could.

So the morning passed away and then the early part of the afternoon. They stopped once to rest and feed the horses and to eat lunch themselves. Ben was feeling much better about things by then, although he couldn’t have said why. Perhaps it was the fact that he was doing something besides sitting around waiting. He had used the Landsview every day since Mistaya’s disappearance without success. Now, at least, he had reason to think they might find her.

They camped that night by the shores of the Irrylyn. Before eating their dinner, while the twilight shadows settled in about them in purple hues, they went down to the lake to bathe together. Bunion remained behind to set camp for them, and they were alone as they stripped off their clothes in a secluded cove and walked down to the shore. As they sank into the waters—he was always surprised that lake waters could feel so warm and comforting—he was reminded anew of their first meeting. He had been new to the role of King and not yet accepted by anyone beyond Questor and Abernathy. He had come in search of allies, thinking to start with the River Master, and Willow had appeared to him as if by magic. Or perhaps it was magic, he thought. He had never questioned the how and the why of it. But it had changed his life, and every day he was reminded of it anew.

They washed and they held each other and stayed in their quiet, solitary place for a long time before coming back to the camp. Ben thought it was over too soon, thought they could have stayed there forever, and wished with lingering wistfulness that they had.

He slept well that night for the first time, free of dreams and wakefulness, his sleep deep and untroubled.

When he woke again, it was nearing dawn, and a mud puppy was sitting right in front of him, watching. The Earth Mother was summoning them to a meeting as they had hoped.

“Willow,” he said softly, shaking her gently awake.

She opened her eyes, saw the mud puppy, and was on her feet at once. “That’s Haltwhistle, Ben,” she whispered to him, an unmistakable urgency echoing off the words.

They dressed hurriedly, and leaving Bunion to watch over things they let the mud puppy show them the way. Haltwhistle gave no indication that he knew who they were, and to tell the truth Ben wasn’t sure he could have identified the creature without Willow to help him. Mud puppies all looked the same to him. But if it really was his daughter’s, then Mistaya was out there somewhere on her own without her assigned protector, and that was not good.

He took a moment to recall all the times that the Earth Mother had helped them in the past, both together and individually. An ancient fairy creature come out of the mists eons ago when Landover was first formed, she was the kingdom’s caretaker and gardener. Wedded to the earth and its growing things, an integral part of the organic world, she nevertheless maintained a physical presence, as well. She was wise and farsighted and ageless, and she loved Mistaya.

They walked for a long time, leaving behind the Irrylyn and the surrounding forests and descending into mist-shrouded lowlands in which the ground quickly grew soggy and uncertain. Patches of standing water turned to acres of swamp, and stands of reeds and grasses clogged the passage in all directions. But the mud puppy maneuvered through it all without pausing, leading them along a narrow strip of solid ground until at last they had reached a vast stretch of muddied water amid a thick forest of cedars.

Haltwhistle stopped at the edge of this water and sat. Ben and Willow stopped next to him and stood waiting.

The wait was short. Almost immediately the waters began to churn and then to heave and the Earth Mother appeared from within, rising to the surface like a spirit creature, her woman’s form slowly taking shape as she grew in size until she was much larger than they were. Coated in mud—perhaps formed of it—and her body slick with swamp waters, she stood upon the surface of the mire and opened her eyes to look down on them.

“Welcome, King and Queen of Landover,” she greeted. “Ben Holiday of Earth and Willow of the lake country, I have been expecting you.”

“Is that Haltwhistle who brought us here?” Ben asked at once, wasting no time getting to the point.

“It is,” the Earth Mother confirmed.

“But shouldn’t he be with Mistaya?”

“He should. But he has been sent home to me. He will remain here until Mistaya summons him anew.”

“Why would Mistaya send him home?” Willow asked.

The Earth Mother shifted positions atop the water, causing her sleek body to shimmer and glisten in the misty, graying light. “It was not your daughter who sent Haltwhistle home to me. It was another who travels with her.”

“The G’home Gnomes?” Ben demanded in disbelief.

The Earth Mother laughed softly. “A mud puppy will not leave its master or mistress and cannot be kept by humans. A mud puppy is a fairy creature and not subject to human laws. But powerful magic wielded by another fairy creature is a different matter. Such magic was used here.”

Ben and Willow exchanged a quick glance, both thinking the same thing. “By Nightshade?” Ben asked quickly. “By the Witch of the Deep Fell?”

“By a Prism Cat,” the Earth Mother answered.

Ben closed his eyes. He knew of only one Prism Cat, and he had crossed paths with it more than once since coming to Landover, almost always to his lasting regret. “Edgewood Dirk,” he said in dismay.

“The Prism Cat found your daughter in the lake country and took her away with him. But first the cat sent Haltwhistle back to me. The message was clear.”

Clear enough, Ben thought in dismay. But what did Dirk want with Mistaya? The cat always wanted something; he knew that much from experience. It would be no different here. The trouble was in determining what he was after, which was never apparent and always difficult to uncover. The Prism Cat would talk in riddles and lead you in circles and never get to the point or answer a question directly. Like cats everywhere, he was enigmatic and obtuse.

But Edgewood Dirk was dangerous, too. The Prism Cat possessed a very powerful magic, just as the Earth Mother had said. Yet the extent of that magic went far beyond his ability to manipulate a mud puppy. Ben felt a new urgency at the thought of Dirk’s proximity to Mistaya.

“Where is Mistaya now?” he asked the Earth Mother.

“Gone with the Prism Cat,” she answered once more. “But the Prism Cat covers their tracks and the way of their passing, and even I cannot determine where they are.”

Ben felt a slow sinking in the pit of his stomach. If the Earth Mother didn’t know where Mistaya was and couldn’t find her, how could he expect to?

“Can you reverse the magic used to send Haltwhistle home to you?” Willow asked suddenly. “Can you send him back out again to find our daughter?”

The elemental shifted again, scattering droplets of water that sparkled like diamonds shed. “Haltwhistle can only go to her if she calls him now. She has not done so, child. So he must remain with me.”

All the air went out of Ben on hearing this. His one chance at finding his daughter had evaporated right before his eyes. If the Earth Mother couldn’t help him find her, he didn’t know if there was anyone who could.

“Can you tell us anything to do?” Willow asked suddenly, her voice calm and collected, free of any hint of desperation or worry. “Is there a way to communicate with her?”

“Go home and wait,” the Earth Mother said to her. “Be patient. She will communicate with you.”

Ben tried to say something more, but the elemental was already sinking back into the swamp, slowly losing shape, returning to the earth in which she was nurtured. In seconds she was gone. The surface of the water rippled softly and went still. Silence settled in like a heavy blanket, and the mist drew across the water.

Haltwhistle looked up at them, waiting.

“Take us back, mud puppy,” Willow said softly.

They walked back the way they had come, weaving through the swamp grasses and reeds, winding about the deep pools of water and thick mud, carefully keeping to the designated path. Neither Ben nor Willow spoke. There was nothing either of them wanted to say.

On reaching their camp and Bunion, Haltwhistle turned back at once and vanished into the mist. Ben shook his head. He had the vague feeling he should have done something more, but he couldn’t say what. He walked over to where their camping gear was already packed and ready to be loaded and sat down heavily.

He looked at Willow expectantly as she sat next to him. “What do we do now?”

She smiled, surprising him. “We do what the Earth Mother suggested, Ben. We go home and wait for Mistaya to communicate with us.”

This was not what he was hoping to hear, and he failed to hide his disappointment. “I don’t know if I can leave it at that.”

“I know. You want to do something, even if you don’t quite know what that something is.” She thought about it a moment. “We can ask Questor if he has a magic that can track a Prism Cat. He might know something that would help.”

Sure, and cows might fly. But Ben just nodded, knowing that he didn’t have a better suggestion. Not at the moment, anyway. Not until he thought about it some more.

So they loaded their gear on their horses and set out for home, and all the way back Ben kept thinking that he was missing something obvious, that there was something he was overlooking.

The sun was just cresting the horizon when Questor Thews slipped from his bed, drew on his favorite bathrobe (the royal blue one with the golden moons and stars), and his dragon slippers (the ones that looked as if his toes were breathing fire), and padded down to the kitchen for his morning coffee. He had discovered coffee some years back during one of his unfortunate visits to Ben’s world and had secured several sacks in the process, which he now hoarded like gold. Mistaya had been good enough to add to his supply now and again during her time at Carrington, but since she had been dismissed, he wasn’t sure how long it would be before he could replenish his stock.

He finished brewing a pot and was in the process of enjoying his first cup of the day when Abernathy wandered in and sat down across from him. “May I?” he asked, motioning toward the coffee.

Questor nodded, wondering for what must have been the hundredth time how a soft-coated wheaten terrier could possibly enjoy drinking coffee. It must be a part of him that was still human and not dog, of course. But it just looked odd, a dog drinking coffee.

“Any new thoughts as to where our missing girl might be?” Abernathy inquired of him, licking his chops as he took the first swallow of his coffee.

Questor shook his head. “Not a one. The High Lord is right, though. I think we are missing something important about all this.”

Ben Holiday had voiced his opinion on this late last night on his return from the lake country, more than a hint of discouragement coloring his voice and draping his tired visage. He had thought that he and Willow would find her there, but instead they had found only clues that seemed to lead nowhere. If neither the River Master nor the Earth Mother could help, it didn’t look good for the rest of them.

“What could Edgewood Dirk want with her?” Abernathy asked suddenly, as if reading his thoughts.

Questor grunted and shook his head. “Nothing good, I’m sure.”

“He wouldn’t be going to the trouble of hiding her tracks if his intentions were of the right sort,” his friend agreed. “Remember how much trouble he caused the last time he showed up?”

Questor remembered, all right. But on thinking back, it didn’t seem that Dirk had been the cause of the trouble so much as the indicator. Something like a compass. The Prism Cat had appeared at the behest of the fairies in the mists, a sort of emissary sent to nudge the High Lord and his friends in the direction required for setting aright things that had gone askew—all without really telling them what it was exactly that needed righting. If that were true here, then Mistaya might be headed for a good deal more trouble than she realized.

Questor sighed. He was at his wit’s end. He could continue to do what Ben Holiday and he had done every day, which was to go up to the Landsview and scour the countryside. But that had yielded exactly nothing to date, and it felt pointless to try yet again. He had thought about approaching the dragon, always a daunting experience, in an effort to see if it might be willing to help. But what sort of help might it offer? Strabo could cross borders that the rest of them couldn’t—he could go in and out of Landover at will, for example—but that would prove useful only if Mistaya were somewhere other than Landover, and there were no indications at this point that she was.

“I remember when the High Lord was tricked into believing he had lost the medallion and Dirk trailed around after him until he figured it out,” Questor mused, turning his coffee cup this way and that. “He was there when the High Lord was trapped with Nightshade and Strabo in that infernal device that Horris Kew uncovered, too. Dispensing his wisdom and talking in riddles, prodding the High Lord into recognizing the truth, if I remember right from what we were told afterward. Perhaps that is what’s happening here.”

“You make the cat sound almost benevolent,” Abernathy huffed, his terrier face taking on an angry look, his words coming out a growl. “I think you are deluding yourself, wizard.”

“Perhaps,” Questor agreed mildly. He didn’t feel like fighting.

Abernathy didn’t say anything for a moment, tapping his fingers against his cup annoyingly. “Do you think that perhaps Mistaya might be trapped somewhere, like the High Lord was?”

Possible, Questor thought. But she had been wandering around freely not more than a few days ago in the company of those bothersome G’home Gnomes and the cat. Something had to have changed, but he wasn’t sure it had anything to do with being trapped.

“We need to think like she would,” he said suddenly, sitting up straight and facing Abernathy squarely. “We need to put ourselves inside her head.”

The scribe barked out a sharp laugh. “No, thank you. Put myself inside the head of a fifteen-year-old girl? What sort of nonsense is that, wizard? We can’t begin to think like she does. We haven’t the experience or the temperament. Or the genetics, I might add. We might as well try thinking like the cat!”

“Nevertheless,” Questor insisted.

They went silent once more. Abernathy began tapping his fingers on his cup again. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, what are your thoughts, now that you’ve taken on the character of a fifteen-year-old girl?”

“Fuzzy, I admit.”

“The whole idea of trying to think like a fifteen-year-old girl is fuzzy.”

“But suppose, just suppose for a moment, that you are Mistaya. You’ve been sentenced to serve out a term at Libiris, but you rebel and flee into the night with two unlikely allies. You go to the one place you think you might find a modicum of understanding. But it is not to be. Your grandfather takes the side of your parents and declares you must return to them and work things out. You won’t do this. Where do you go?”

Abernathy showed his teeth. “Your scenario sounds unnecessarily melodramatic to me.”

“Remember. I’m a fifteen-year-old-girl.”

“You might be fifteen, but you are also Mistaya Holiday. That makes you somewhat different from other girls.”

“Perhaps. But answer my question. Where do I go?”

“I haven’t a clue. Where do I go? Where Edgewood Dirk tells me to go perhaps?”

“If he tells you anything. But he might not. He might speak in his usual unrevealing way. He might leave it up to you. That sounds more like the Prism Cat to me.”

Abernathy thought about it. “Well, let me see. I suppose I go somewhere no one will think to look for me.” He paused, a look of horror in his eyes. “Surely not to the Deep Fell?”

Questor shook his head and pulled on his long white beard. “I don’t think so. Mistaya hates that place. She hates everything connected with Nightshade.”

“So she goes somewhere else.” Abernathy thought some more. He looked up suddenly. “Perhaps she goes to see Strabo. The dragon is enamored of her, after all.”

“The dragon is enamored of all beautiful women. Even more so of Willow.” Questor pulled on one ear and plucked at one eyebrow. “But I’ve already considered that possibility and dismissed it. Strabo won’t be of much use to her in this situation and she knows it. Unless she wants someone eaten.”

“A visit to the dragon doesn’t seem likely, does it?” Abernathy sounded cross. “Nothing seems likely, when you come right down to it.”

Questor nodded, frowning. “That’s the trouble with young people. They never do what you would expect them to do. Frequently, they do the exact opposite. They are quite perverse that way.”

“Perverse, indeed!” Abernathy declared, banging his coffee cup down on the table, his ears flopping for emphasis. “That is just the word! It describes them perfectly!”

“You never know what to expect!”

“You can’t begin to guess what they might do!”

“They don’t listen to reason!”

“The word doesn’t exist for them!”

“You expect them to do something, they do something else entirely!”

“They very last thing you’d imagine!”

They were both revved up now, practically shouting at each other.

“Tell them what you want them to do, they ignore you!”

“Tell them what you don’t want them to do, they do it anyway!”

“Go here, you say, and they go there!”

“No, no!” Questor was practically beside himself. “Go here, and they tell you they won’t, but then they do anyway!”

The air seemed to go out of them all at once, that final revelatory sentence left hanging in the wind like the last leaf of autumn. They stared at each other, a similar realization dawning on both at the same moment.

“No,” Abernathy said softly. “She wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” Questor Thews replied just as softly.

“Just to spite us?”

“No, not to spite us. To deceive us. To go to the last place we would think to look for her.”

“But her tracks …”

“Covered up by Edgewood Dirk for reasons best known to him.”

“And maybe to her. An alliance between them, you think?”

“I don’t know. But isn’t Libiris the very last place we would think to look for her?”

Abernathy had to admit that it was.

Much farther east, on the far end of the Greensward, another was contemplating Mistaya’s disappearance, though with much less insight. Berwyn Laphroig, Lord of Rhyndweir, was growing increasingly vexed at the inability of his retainers to track down the missing Princess, a chore he felt they should have been able to accomplish within the first thirty-six hours of learning that she was missing. She was a young girl in a country where young girls did not go unescorted in safety. Thus she had chosen to accept the company of a pair of G’home Gnomes—this much he had managed to learn through his spies. This, and not much more. Since the discovery that she had turned up at her grandfather’s in the company of the Gnomes, not another word had been heard of her.

In something approaching a rage, he had dispatched Cordstick to personally undertake the search, no longer content to rely on those underlings who barely knew left from right. Not that Cordstick knew much more, but he was ambitious, and ambition always served those who knew how to harness it. Cordstick would like very much to advance his position in the court, abandoning the title of “Scribe” in favor of something showier, something like “Minister of State.” There was no such position at this juncture; Laphroig had never seen the need for it. But the title could be bestowed quickly enough should the right candidate appear. Cordstick fancied himself that candidate, and Laphroig, eager to advance his own stock in Landover by way of marrying Mistaya Holiday, was willing to give the man his chance.

If Cordstick failed him, of course, the position would remain open. Along with that of “Scribe.”

A page appeared at the open door of the study where Laphroig sat contemplating his fate and crawled across the floor on hands and knees, nose scraping the ground. “My Lord,” the man begged.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Scrivener Cordstick has returned, my Lord. He begs permission to give you his report.”

Laphroig leaped to his feet. “Bring him to me at once.”

He walked to one of the tower windows and looked out over the countryside, enjoying the sound of the page scraping his way back across the stones. He admired the sweep of his lands in the wash of midday sunlight, though he had to admit that his castle was rather stark by comparison. He must find a way to brighten it up a bit. A few more banners or some heads on pikes, perhaps.

He heard movement behind him.

“Well?” he demanded, wheeling about. “What have you—” He broke off midsentence, his eyes widening in shock. “Dragon’s breath and troll’s teeth, what’s happened to you?”

Cordstick stood to one side, leaning rather uncertainly against a stone pillar. He was standing because it was apparently too painful for him to sit, although it might have been a toss-up had there been a way to measure such things. He was splinted and bandaged from head to foot. The parts of his skin that were not under wrap were various shades of purple and blue with slashes of vivid red. His right eye was swollen shut and enlarged to the size of an egg. His hair was sticking straight up and here and there were quills sticking out of his body.

“What happened?” Cordstick repeated his master’s words as if he was not quite able to fathom them. “Besides the porcupine, the bog wump, the fire ants, the fall from the cliff, the beating at the hands of angry farmers, the dragging through the fields by the horse that threw me, and the encounter with the feral pigs? Besides being driven out of a dozen taverns and thrown out of a dozen more? Not a lot, really.”

“Well,” Laphroig said, an abrupt utterance that he apparently intended to say everything. “Well, we’ll see that you get double pay for your efforts. Now what did you find out?”

Cordstick shook his head. “I found out that I should never have left the castle and may never do so again. Certainly not without an armed escort. The world is a vicious place, my Lord.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that. But what about the Princess? What have you found out about her?”

“Found out about her? Besides the fact that she’s still missing? Besides the fact that looking for her was perhaps the single most painful undertaking of my life?”

His voice was rising steadily, taking on a dangerously manic tone, and Laphroig took a step back despite himself. There was a wild glint in his scribe’s eyes, one he had never seen before.

“Stop this whining, Cordstick!” he ordered, trying to bring things under control. “Others have suffered in my cause, and you don’t hear them complaining.”

“That’s because they are all dead, my Lord! Which, by all rights, I should be, too!”

“Nonsense! You’ve just suffered a few superficial injuries. Now get on with it! You try my patience with your complaints. Leave all that for later. Tell me about the Princess!”

“Might I have a glass of wine, my Lord? From the flask that is not poisoned?”

Laphroig could hardly miss the irony in the wording of the request, but he chose to ignore it. At least until he got his report out of the man. It was beginning to look as if Cordstick might have outlived his usefulness and should be dispensed with before he did something ill advised. Like trying to strangle his master, for example, which his eyes suggested he was already thinking of doing.

He poured Cordstick a glass of the good wine and handed it to him. “Drink that down, and we’ll talk.”

His scribe took the glass with a shaking hand, guided it to his lips, and drained it in a single gulp. Then he held it out for a refill. Laphroig obliged, silently cursing his generosity. Cordstick drank that one down, too.

“My Lord,” he said, wiping his lips with his shirtsleeve, “I understand better now why those who do your bidding do so as spies and not openly. That is another mistake I will not make again.”

If you get the chance to make another mistake, an enraged Laphroig thought. Where does this dolt get the idea that he can criticize his Lord and master in this fashion? Where did this newfound audacity come from?

“Just tell me what you found out, please,” he urged in his gentlest, most reassuring voice, hiding every other emotion.

Cordstick straightened. Or at least, he made a failed attempt at it. “My Lord, there is nothing new on where the Princess has gone or what she is doing.” He held up one bandaged hand as Laphroig started to vent. “However, that is not to say that our efforts have been totally unsuccessful.”

Laphroig stared. “Exactly what does that mean?”

“It means that we know one more thing that we didn’t know before I set out to find the Princess, although I’m not sure it’s worth the price I had to pay to discover it. The Princess Mistaya has not disappeared for the reasons we thought. Nothing bad has happened to her. No abduction, no spiriting away, nothing like that. Apparently, she had a falling-out with her parents and left of her own volition. Because of the nature of the falling-out, it is thought she has no immediate intention of returning.”

Laphroig shrugged. “Forgive me, Cordstick, but I don’t see how that helps us.”

“It helps, my Lord, because she is seeking sanctuary with an understanding third party. Her grandfather, the River Master, turned her down. She must be looking elsewhere.” He paused. “Do you happen to know anyone who might be willing to grant her sanctuary, should I eventually find her and have a chance to speak with her?”

“Ah,” said Laphroig, the light beginning to dawn. “So you think she might come here to live?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.” Cordstick rubbed his bandaged hands and then winced. “If she agrees to let you act as her guardian, she becomes your ward and you gain legal status in determining her future. As her guardian, you will have ample opportunities to …” He trailed off, cleared his throat, and smiled. “To persuade her to your cause.”

“Indeed, indeed!” Laphroig sounded positively enthusiastic at the prospect. He began to pace, as if by doing so he were actually getting somewhere. “Well, then, we must find her right away before she has a change of heart!” He wheeled on Cordstick. “You must find her!”

“I must?” His scribe did not sound in the least convinced.

“Yes, of course! Who else can I depend upon?” He dropped his voice to a near whisper. “Who else, but my future Minister of State?”

Cordstick gave him a calculating look. “I was just about to hand in my resignation and retire to the countryside, my Lord.”

“No, no, we can’t have that sort of talk.” Laphroig was at his side instantly, patting him on his good shoulder. Gently, he walked him over to the window, where they could look out over the countryside together. “That sort of talk is for weaklings and quitters, not for future Ministers of State!”

His scribe frowned. “Would you care to put that in writing?”

Laphroig gritted his teeth. “I would be happy to do so.” He could always deny he’d written it.

“Witnessed by two nobles of the realm?”

The teeth gritting turned to teeth grinding. “Of course.” He could always have the nobles put to death.

“With copies to be sent to a personal designate for delivery to the King should anything unfortunate happen to me?”

“You are starting to irritate me, Cordstick!” Laphroig hissed. But he saw the look on the other’s face and quickly held up his hands. “All right, all right, whatever you say. Is there anything else you require?”

Cordstick was edging toward the doorway. “I will find the Princess, my Lord. You have my word. But this time I will require a personal guard so as to avoid all the unpleasantness of this past outing. I think perhaps fifty or sixty armed men would …”

He ducked through the doorway just as the brass candlestick Laphroig had flung flew past his head and crashed into the wall beyond. The padding of his limping feet could be heard receding into the distance.

Laphroig closed his eyes in an effort to calm himself, and he unclenched his teeth long enough to whisper, “Just find her, you idiot!”

Mistaya returned to work in the Stacks the following morning and did not speak to Thom even once of the voice. She listened for it carefully, but the hours passed, and no one called out to her. The longer she waited, the more uncertain she became about what she had heard. Perhaps she had only imagined it after all. Perhaps the shadows and the overall creepiness of the Stacks had combined to make her think she was hearing a voice that wasn’t there.

By midday, she was feeling so disillusioned about it that when Thom declared almost an hour early that it was lunchtime, she didn’t even bother to argue.

Seated across from each other at the wooden table in the otherwise empty kitchen, they ate their soup and bread and drank their milk in silence.

Finally, Thom said, “You’re not still mad at me for yesterday, are you?”

She stared at him, uncomprehending. Yesterday? Had he done something?

“When I told you I didn’t want you going back into the Stacks by yourself?” he added helpfully.

“Oh, that!” she declared, remembering now. “No, I’m not mad about that. I wasn’t mad then, either. I just wanted to have a look at what was back there because I thought I heard something.” She shook her head in disgust. “But I think I must have imagined it.”

He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “What do you think you heard, Ellice?”

His face was so serious, his eyes fixed on her as if she might reveal mysteries about which he could only wonder, that she grinned despite herself. “Actually, I thought I heard someone calling.”

He didn’t laugh at her, didn’t crack a smile, didn’t change expression at all. “Did the voice say, ‘Help me’?”

Her eyes widened, and she reached impulsively for his hand. “You heard it, too?”

He nodded slowly, his shock of dark hair falling down over his eyes. He brushed it away in that familiar gesture. A lot about him was getting familiar to her by now. “I heard it. But not yesterday when you did. I heard it a few weeks ago, before you came.”

She leaned forward eagerly, lowering her voice. “Did you go back into the Stacks to see if someone was there?”

“I did. That was when I found myself in the trouble I warned you about yesterday. We were supposed to talk about it last night, but you forgot. I think you were still wondering about the voice when you left me. Am I right?”

She nodded quickly. “I thought about it all night. And I did forget to ask you what happened. Will you tell me now?”

He leaned close as well, taking a careful look about the kitchen. “Two weeks ago, around midday, I heard the voice. Not for the first time, you understand. I’d heard it before, very faint, very far away. I was always alone, working on cataloging the books. I’d made myself believe I was hearing things. But this time, I couldn’t ignore it. I went back into the darkest corners of the Stacks when everyone else was eating lunch or off doing something.” He had dropped his own voice to a whisper to match hers. “I have good eyesight, so I didn’t take any kind of light that might give me away to Pinch. You know how he’s always lurking around. Anyway, I had heard the voice very clearly this time. It was saying the same thing, over and over. ‘Help me! Help me!’ You can imagine how I felt, hearing it pleading like that. I decided to try to track it down.”

He paused, glancing left and right once more. “There were Throg Monkeys back there, dozens of them. But they weren’t paying any attention to me. They were carrying books, but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Some of them glanced my way before disappearing back into the shelving. One or two hissed at me. But they do that all the time, and I keep them under control with the whistle. So they let me pass without trying to stop me. It got darker and more shadowy as I went, and everything seemed to lose shape. Like it was all underwater, except it wasn’t, of course. But the Stacks seemed to ripple and shimmer as if they were.”

“Did you hear the voice while you were back there?” she interrupted.

He shook his head. “Not once. I listened for it, but didn’t hear anything. The farther back I went, the deeper the Stacks seemed to go. I couldn’t find the end. I don’t mind telling you that it gave me the shivers. But I kept going anyway. I thought I was being silly feeling scared like that. After all, I hadn’t been attacked or anything. Nothing had threatened me.”

He took a deep breath. “But then something happened. Something grabbed at me. Not like a hand or anything. More like a suction of some kind, pulling at me with tremendous force. It happened all at once, and I lost my footing and fell down. I was being dragged along the floor toward this darkness that looked like a huge tunnel. I started screaming, but it didn’t help. I managed to catch hold of one of the legs of the shelving and pull myself up against it. I clung to it with everything I had. Finally, I was able to pull myself back along the shelves until I was out of its grip. It took a long time, and no one came to help me. Which was probably a good thing, because if I’d been caught snooping I don’t think I would still be here and I wouldn’t have met you.”

Mistaya rested her chin in her hands. “So you never did find out about the voice? Or any of the rest of it?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t. And I didn’t hear it again, either. I kept thinking I would, but I didn’t. So I ended up doing what you did. I convinced myself I was mistaken. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go back into the Stacks in the first place—His Eminence and Pinch had made that pretty clear. I just chalked the whole thing up to not doing what I had been told and almost paying the penalty for my disobedience. Not that I didn’t wonder; I just didn’t know what I should do.”

“So what do you think we should do now?” she asked him. “Now that I’ve heard the voice, too. Now that we know something is back there.” She watched his face as she said it, curious to measure his response. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

He gave her a momentary look of disbelief, and then he grinned. “Of course we should do something. But we have to do it together, and we have to be very careful.”

“We should have a better chance if there are two of us,” she declared excitedly. “We can protect each other.”

“We’d better go in at night, when everyone is asleep. Maybe whatever is back there will be sleeping, too.”

She nodded eagerly. “When do we go?”

“Soon as possible, I guess. Tonight?”

She grabbed his hand impulsively and squeezed it. “I like you, Thom of Libiris! I like you a lot!”

To his credit, he blushed bright red and looked immensely pleased.

They spent the afternoon planning their nighttime excursion, talking about it in low voices as they worked on the cataloging of the books, aware that Rufus Pinch was never far away and always listening. They decided they would go in around midnight, when everyone should be sleeping and no one would be working in the Stacks. They would take glow sticks to give them light, since the shelf torches were always extinguished at night, and they would make their way back into the shadowy recesses of the cavernous room until they found its end. If they were lucky, they would hear the voice while they were doing so. If not, they might at least find the back wall and see what was there.

Several times, as their conversation drifted on to other subjects, Thom remarked again that some of the books from the library seemed to be missing. It was impossible to tell which ones because all he had been given to work with by His Eminence was a list of catalog numbers. The only way he could even tell that books were missing was because he couldn’t find a match for some of the numbers on the list, and occasionally he noticed gaps in the books on the shelves.

“Why don’t they give you the titles instead of just the numbers?” Mistaya asked him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. His Eminence said I didn’t need the titles, only the numbers. Maybe he was trying to save on ink.”

“Did you tell him that there were books missing?”

“I told him. He said that maybe they weren’t really missing, that they were just misplaced. But finding any of them would have meant searching the whole of the Stacks, and I don’t have that sort of time. I try to keep an eye out for them, but I haven’t found any yet.”

She thought about it a moment. “Do the catalog numbers have any relationship to one another? If they did, maybe we could figure out what section the missing books came from.”

“The numbers are all different. They don’t share any common points that I can determine. Hey, would you hand me that book right there? The one with the red lettering on the cover?”

The subject was dropped again, and they continued with their work in silence. Mistaya soon found herself thinking about how long ago and far away her time at Carrington seemed. It wasn’t really either one, but it seemed that way thinking on it. From studying the literature, sciences, and history of a world that wasn’t even her own to cataloging ancient books in a library no one ever used in a world no one outside her own even knew existed struck her as bizarre. Neither endeavor seemed particularly important to her, nor compelling in a way that made her feel she was using her time well. She had felt trapped at Carrington and she felt trapped all over again here at Libiris. Why couldn’t she find a way to make herself feel useful? Why did she feel so adrift no matter what she was doing?

For a moment, a single moment, she thought about leaving and going home. How bad could it be, if she did? She would have to face up to her father’s disappointment and possibly his anger. She would have to prepare herself for a heated discussion about what would happen next. But what was the worst that could come out of that discussion? Maybe she would be sent back to Libiris, but maybe not. If she could manage to keep her temper in check and argue logically and forcefully, perhaps she could manage to talk him into having her do something else. Wouldn’t that be better than what she was doing now?

Still, that would mean leaving Thom, perhaps for good, and she wasn’t quite ready to do that. She liked being with him; even though most of what they did was work, she was having fun.

“Have you ever asked His Eminence for a copy of his master list of the books shelved at Libiris?” she asked after a while, frustrated by finding yet another set of gaps in the shelves.

Thom shook his head. “I don’t think he would give it to me.”

She stood up abruptly. “Maybe not. But I think it’s worth asking. Let me try.”

“Ellice, wait,” he objected.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she called back to him, already on her way. “Don’t worry, I won’t cause trouble.”

Without waiting for his response, she crossed the room to the far wall and followed the aisles through the shelving back to the door leading to Craswell Crabbit’s office. The Stacks felt huge and empty, and even her soft footfalls echoed in the cavernous expanse. She could not quite shed her distaste for the feelings the library engendered in her.

As she drew closer to her destination, she heard voices from inside. To her surprise, the door was cracked open.

She crept closer, curious now, taking slow, measured steps so as not to give herself away. She could hear Crabbit and Rufus Pinch, their conversation low and guarded. As if they didn’t want anyone to hear, she thought. She slowed further. If she was caught sneaking around like this, she would no doubt be tossed through the front door of Libiris instantly.

“… easier if we had them on this side of the wall,” Pinch was saying. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about hauling them all back again.”

“Easier, yes,” His Eminence agreed, “but ineffective for our needs. To work their magic, they need to be right where they are.”

“I don’t trust our so-called allies,” Pinch pressed, his voice a low growl that bordered on a whine. “What if they go back on their bargain?”

“Stop fretting, Mr. Pinch. What possible reason could they have for doing that? They want out, don’t they? And not just into Landover. They need me to accomplish that. They don’t have the skills and the experience to read the necessary passages.”

“They might know more than you think.”

“They might …” His Eminence paused. “Mr. Pinch, did you leave that door open when you entered? That wasn’t very wise of you. Close it now, please.”

Mistaya tiptoed backward as swiftly as she could to where the shelving unit ended and flattened herself against the wall. She held her breath until she heard the door close, then stayed where she was for another few minutes before moving silently away.

When she got back to Thom, he asked, “Any luck?”

“I didn’t ask,” she told him. She gave him a shrug and what she hoped was a disarming grin. “He was busy with something else.”

She thought about the conversation between His Eminence and Pinch for the rest of the afternoon. She was still thinking about it at dinner that night, sitting with Thom, and later when she went to bed.

But when Thom woke her at midnight, leaning close and gently shaking her shoulder until she came awake, it was all forgotten.

“Shhh!” he whispered, putting a finger to his lips. “No talking, no noise at all!”

She was already dressed as she rolled out of her bed and slipped on her boots. The room was dark except for a sliver of moonlight that slanted down through the single high, narrow window on the east wall. She straightened her clothing, retightened her belt, and gave him a nod. He handed her one of the two glow sticks he was carrying, but she didn’t light it. By previous agreement, they would work their way into the Stacks in the dark and light the glow sticks when they could no longer see at all.