The Eye of Zoltar

Heading home

We stayed overnight in Cambrianopolis while Boo’s paperwork was processed. We had a good meal, a very welcome bath and slept in clean sheets for the first time in what seemed like an age. Talk between the three of us had been muted, with each of us lost in our own thoughts. We’d all be returning to our usual lives over the next few days. The Princess would go back to being a princess, I would return to Kazam and Addie would be dealing with her usual bread-and-butter tour work – taking eager and very dopey tourists into areas of high jeopardy, then attempting to stop them being eaten.

We were waiting outside the Clearance House twenty minutes before it was due to open. I’d tried to raise Kazam on the conch again, but still nothing. The good news was that my Volkswagen had been found, repaired, filled with fuel and returned the previous evening. We had spent an amusing half-hour trying to squeeze Rubber Colin inside the car, only to give up and instead lash him on to the roof rack. Addie had returned the half-track to the hire company, and we were very glad we’d taken out the Additional Collision Waiver as it was in a considerably worse state than when we hired it.

Boo did not seem particularly happy to see us, and stepped blinking into the daylight as soon as I had signed the paperwork.

‘You shouldn’t have paid the ransom,’ she said as soon as she saw me. ‘If no one paid, the kidnapping business would collapse in an afternoon. You’re all fools.’

‘It’s good to see you again too, Boo,’ I said. ‘This is Addie Powell, our friend and guide, and this is Princess Shazine of Snodd.’

‘A Sister Organza switcheroo?’ asked Boo, staring at the Princess and prodding her with an inquisitive middle finger.

‘My mother did it,’ said the Princess.

‘Once, I knew the Queen very well,’ said Boo, raising an inquisitive eyebrow at the Princess. ‘A good woman until she married that idiot your father. Ask her if she remembers the incident with the squid.’

‘I will,’ said the Princess, who seemed to have become immune to the insults her father’s name attracted.

‘Right,’ I said as soon as we were in the car, Once Magnificent Boo deferentially allowing the Princess to sit up front, ‘let’s get out of Cambrianopolis before someone changes their mind.’

Luckily, no one did, and an hour later we were heading back towards the border. Barring bad traffic or a breakdown, we’d be back at the palace by lunchtime, and the Princess and the handmaiden could be changed back.

‘I used to think Laura Scrubb was the ugliest girl I’d ever seen,’ said the Princess, staring in the courtesy mirror at the face she’d been using for the past few days, ‘but I’ve got to quite like the snub nose, shortness of stature and lack of any agreeable bone structure.’

‘You’ll soon be yourself again,’ I said, with mixed feelings. The Princess in Laura’s body and I had got on really well, but I wasn’t sure how that would translate once she was back to being beautiful and rich and influential once more.

As we drove towards the border I related everything that had happened over the past four days. I told Boo all that I could recall – leaving out the bit about Gabby – and expected her to make comment, ask questions, or say ‘Ah-ha’ or ‘Really?’ or ‘Gosh’ or something but she didn’t say anything until I’d finished.

‘At least it explains why there’s a rubber Dragon strapped to the roof,’ she said at last. ‘I was wondering about that. Where’s the Eye of Zoltar right now?’

I told her it was in the old saucepan in her footwell, and she drew her feet away.

‘Has anyone touched it?’

‘No.’

‘Keep it that way. It’ll be nothing but trouble. If I were you I’d drop it down the first disused mine shaft you come across.’

I explained why we needed it, and that we’d hold a conclave to discuss everything when we got home. Boo merely shrugged at this and muttered darkly about ‘meddling with powers you could not possibly hope to comprehend’.

We passed a road sign alerting us that the border to the Kingdom of Snodd was ahead.

‘Thirty minutes,’ said Addie, who would be picking up her next group from the tourist office, where we first met her.

‘About time,’ said the Princess, ‘I’m really beginning to miss being me.’

I ran over my speech to Queen Mimosa as we drove along. About how I felt the Princess had progressed from being a spoilt brat of the highest order to someone who could, and would, think of others. On second thoughts, I probably wouldn’t need to say anything at all – the Princess would simply open her mouth and speak, and the Queen in her wisdom would know.

We first spotted the smoke when we were still some way from the border. We thought at first that it was the result of a minor border skirmish or something. When I mentioned it to Boo she leaned forward in her seat.

‘That’s not the border,’ she said, ‘it’s farther away.’

‘Hereford?’ I asked.

‘Closer than that,’ said Boo. ‘Perhaps the palace.’

‘The palace?’ echoed the Princess, and urged me to drive faster. The palace was only ten miles from the border, and as we crested the last rise and the Kingdom was spread before us the Princess’s home came into view. And what we saw was neither expected, nor welcome.

‘No!’ cried the Princess, and put her hand to her mouth.

I stopped the car at a lookout spot where several other people were already watching, and we climbed out. The royal palace was on fire, and a long pall of black smoke drifted across the land. There was a small explosion in the castle, then another.

‘My lovely palace,’ said the Princess. ‘I do hope Mummy and Daddy got out okay.’

‘The powder magazine must have blown up or something,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a clot,’ said Boo. ‘The palace is under attack. See there, landships on the move.’

She was right. Far in the distance we could see the unmistakable rhomboid shape of King Snodd’s defensive landships moving across the land, one of which exploded into fragments as we watched. Beyond the palace, another distant smudge of smoke was drifting into the sky. They – whoever they were – had attacked Hereford as well. I think I felt anger rather than fear, and concern over my friends and colleagues.

‘Who would dare attack us?’ said the Princess. ‘A sneak attack by, what, Midlandia? But why? My cousin is the Crown Prince and the one I was most likely to marry. Our kingdoms would have been joined peacefully in the fullness of time.’

‘It’s not Midlandia,’ said Boo in a dark tone. ‘Look down there,’ she went on, pointing towards the Cambrian–Snodd border. The Cambrian artillery, which had been pointing towards the sky as we entered the country, was now pointing across the River Wye towards the Kingdom of Snodd. Tharv had mobilised his troops to defend his nation, although quite how well they could do this wasn’t clear. As we watched, we could see a single Snoddian landship heading towards the border.

‘Boo,’ I said, ‘can you do a fingerscope?’

‘Of a sort.’

She made two circles with her middle fingers and thumbs and then uttered a spell. In an instant there was a lens in each of her encircled fingers, and we crowded around her shoulder to see the Snoddian landship close up. It was badly battle-damaged, and from the forward hatch there fluttered a white flag of truce – whoever was in the landship was attempting to escape. This was a defeated army on the run. There was another explosion at the castle.

‘Oh!’ said the Princess, clutching her chest in pain. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’

She dropped to her knees and tried desperately to regain her breath.

‘She’s frightened,’ said the Princess, ‘I can feel her.’

‘Feel who?’ asked Addie.

‘Me – her – Laura, the Princess. She’s running. Running for her life!’

I held her hand and squeezed it, and she looked up at me with the same expression of confused realisation I had seen on her face when her body was swapped.

‘This is bad,’ said Boo, ‘and I think this war is all but lost.’

As if to punctuate her words a huge explosion tore through the palace, flinging masonry and rubble in all directions, and as we watched the remains collapsed in on themselves in a massive ball of dust and debris.

I looked at the Princess, who was silently sobbing on the ground, and then at Boo, who shook her head sadly.

‘It’s over,’ she said, ‘I can feel it in the air. A collective sadness, a negative emotion that is disrupting the background wizidrical energy. I’m sorry, ma’am, but your parents, the King and Queen, are both dead.’

‘Oh no,’ she said in a quiet voice, as tears welled up in her eyes, ‘and my little brother Stevie?’

‘Of this, I know nothing.’

‘What about Laura Scrubb?’ she asked. ‘And my beautiful and elegant body?’

Boo shook her head sadly, and the Princess nodded, accepting what she knew to be the truth, that she could never truly be herself again. But with the King and Queen dead, her real body destroyed and the Princess’s little brother’s whereabouts unknown, this could mean only one thing.

‘Your Gracious Majesty,’ I said to the Princess, bowing my head, ‘rightful ruler of the Kingdom of Snodd, you have my loyalty above everything. I wish only to serve, and serve well.’

‘And I,’ said Addie, giving a low bow, ‘humbly request leave to be your personal bodyguard.’

‘I, too, am at your disposal, Your Majesty,’ said Once Magnificent Boo, ‘in matters magical or wherever I can serve. Loyal, like us all, until death.’

‘Loyal,’ we affirmed in unison, ‘until death.’

The new Queen stared up at us from where she was sitting, still on the ground. We’d not had confirmation that Laura Scrubb had gone, but something inside the Princess knew it was true. A small part of her that had stayed with the real Laura until her death, perhaps to guide her back in when the mind switcheroo was over.

‘Okay, then,’ she said, taking a deep breath, and wiping away her tears, ‘I accept all the responsibilities of my birthright, and will not rest until the perpetrator of this foul deed is brought to justice. But I will not be calling myself Queen until I am once more in full command of my lands and people. Help me up, will you? I think I’ve got cramp.’

We helped her up and sat on a bench, all four of us, and watched the black smoke drifting across the distant countryside. The Princess broke the silence.

‘Jennifer,’ she said, ‘I should like you to be Royal Counsel.’

‘With respect, ma’am,’ I said, ‘I’m only sixteen. That’s a job usually reserved for grey hair – someone with experience.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the Princess, ‘you have plenty of experience, and what’s more – I trust you completely and know you will always do the right thing. You accept?’

‘I accept, ma’am.’

She thanked me, smiled, and looked at her hands. The left was still raw and calloused from the previous owner’s years of toil, and the other was the hand of the ex-stoker, with ‘No more pies’ tattooed on the back, and held on with duct tape. It wasn’t an ideal situation, and as far as we knew it, a first for royalty.

‘This is my body now, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I think it is.’

‘Then I’d better start looking after it. Tell me, Jenny, am I horribly plain?’

I looked at her pale, sun-starved face, her brown hair, which was still lank with undernourishment, and her dark-rimmed eyes.

‘It’s not the outside that counts, ma’am.’