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 gra.s.ses 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.
THEY SEEK THAT PRINCESS EVERYWHERE!.
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 h.o.a.rded 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 compa.s.s. 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 idea of trying to think like a fifteen-year-old girl is fuzzy." 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 modic.u.m 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 doesn"t seem likely, does it?" Abernathy sounded cross. "Nothing seems likely, when you come right down to it." 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 ch.o.r.e 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s of the good wine and handed it to him. "Drink that down, and we"ll talk."
His scribe took the gla.s.s 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? 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?