A Princess of Landover (16 page)

S
he 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.

EDGEWOOD DIRK

M
istaya 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?”