A Princess of Landover (47 page)

He arched one eyebrow at her. “You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t really expect me to answer that one, do you?”

“Not really.”

“Then don’t ask me things like that. I’m trying to walk a fine line here between parenting and friendship.”

“They’re supposed to be the same thing, aren’t they?”

“When the stars align properly, yes. But you might have noticed over the past few weeks that sometimes you have to work at it.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “Well, I guess I did notice something of the sort.”

They were quiet again for a time, and then her father said, “What do you think you will do now, Mistaya? Now that you’ve come back home.”

She had thought of little else. “I don’t know.”

“You have a lot of options open to you. You’ve probably thought of a few that I haven’t. I’m not asking this to try to persuade you to do anything in particular. The choice is yours, and whatever you decide is fine with your mother and me. I think.”

“Thank you.”

“So do you have any ideas?”

“Some.”

“Care to talk about them with me?”

He sounded so eager, she could hardly make herself give the reply she had already decided on. “Maybe later. Can we just sit here like this for now?”

He said they could, but she thought that he would have preferred the discussion he had suggested. Trouble was, she just wasn’t ready. She didn’t know what she was going to do. She thought it might take some time to figure it out.

A
s it turned out, she was wrong. She went for a walk outside the castle grounds late in the afternoon, needing to stretch her legs and find space to think. She was in a meditative mood, and movement always seemed to help spur her thinking. In addition, she wanted to see if there was any sign of the G’home Gnomes, Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel. After the horse to which they were tied had galloped in terror away from a hungry Strabo, they had thought themselves doomed. The dragon had caught up to them almost immediately, but then it had refused to eat them after finding out they were G’home Gnomes. Even dragons had limits when it came to food choices, Strabo had observed archly before abandoning them to fly after tastier morsels. Eventually, Questor Thews and Abernathy had come across them on their way to Libiris, still bound and gagged astride their grazing horse. Showing considerably more compassion than others, they had released the pair and, after hearing how they had revealed Mistaya’s hiding place to Laphroig, had sent them
packing, and no one had seen them since. Mistaya wouldn’t have blamed either one for refusing to have anything to do with her from that day forward and wouldn’t have lost a great deal of sleep over it, either. But she felt certain she hadn’t seen the end of them.

So she went looking for them that afternoon, out to the woods where she had first encountered a dangling Poggwydd some weeks earlier on her return from Carrington. Maybe they had come back and made a new home, a fresh burrow in the soft earth. Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t want anything to do with her. Maybe they were waiting to see if
she
wanted anything to do with
them
, given that they had betrayed her whereabouts to The Frog.

But a thorough search of the area revealed nothing, and she was just about to turn around and start home again when she saw Edgewood Dirk.

The Prism Cat was sitting at the base of an ancient broadleaf, his emerald eyes fixed on her, his silver-and-black coat glistening in a wash of hazy sunlight. She stopped and stared, making sure she wasn’t seeing things, and then she walked over to stand in front of him.

“Good afternoon, Princess,” the Prism Cat greeted.

“Good afternoon, Edgewood Dirk,” she replied. “I wondered what had become of you.”

“Nothing has become of me. I’ve been here all along, watching.”

“Watching? Me?”

“Not simply you. Everything Cats like to watch. We are curious creatures.”

She smiled despite herself. “So you know what happened back at Libiris?”

The cat blinked. “I know what I care to know, thank you. All’s well that ends well, it seems.”

“Do you know what became of His Eminence and Pinch?” She arched one eyebrow at him. “You do, don’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Someday, if the mood strikes me. But the mood doesn’t strike me just now. Now is the wrong time. Why don’t you tell me something instead?”

She sighed. She could have guessed that it wouldn’t be that easy. Dirk revealed what he knew of things only now and then. “What would you like to know that you don’t already know?”

“What do you intend to do now that you are back home again?”

“You sound like my father. He wants to know that, too. But I guess I haven’t decided, so I don’t have an answer to your question.”

“Perhaps you do. Perhaps you just need to consider the possibilities.”

She glared. “Why don’t you save us both a lot of time and list them for me. In fact, why don’t you just tell me what you think I should do and save me the trouble of having to decide anything at all?”

The cat blinked and then began washing himself. He took a long time in doing so, a rather deliberately slow process that she was certain was intended to aggravate her. But she held her tongue and waited.

Finally Dirk looked at her. “It isn’t my place to tell you what to do with your life. But I do think putting things off is not a good idea. Or leaving things undone. Cats never do that. They always finish what they start before going on to anything else. Cats understand the importance of completing what they start. They are easily distracted, as you know, so it is necessary for them to establish good life habits early so that they learn to focus.”

He paused. “It might be true of young girls, as well. Although I do not pretend to understand young girls in the same way I understand cats.”

She studied him a moment, and then she nodded. “I think you probably understand young girls pretty well. For a cat.”

Edgewood Dirk closed his eyes and then slowly opened them. “Just the ones who merit understanding. And only once in a very great while.”

Suddenly she heard her father calling her, although later she
could never be certain that she had heard anything at all, and she turned toward the castle to look for him.

When she turned back again, Edgewood Dirk was gone.

She stood staring at the spot he had occupied for a very long time, as if by doing so she could make him reappear. She could hear him speaking in her mind; she could hear his words quite clearly. They jumbled together at first and then they sorted themselves out, and suddenly she discovered she knew exactly what she was going to do. Maybe she had known all along, but just hadn’t realized it. In any case, it hadn’t taken any time at all to figure it out. It had just taken a few words of wisdom from a very unusual cat.

She started back to the castle. She would tell her parents at dinner. She would tell them that it was important to finish what you start and to make a habit of doing so. She would tell them that she had learned this from a rather unexpected source, and now she must act on it.

DÉJÀ VU

V
ince stopped when he reached the aviary and stood looking for what he already knew wasn’t there. He couldn’t seem to help himself. Every day he came and every day he looked and every day it was the same thing. The bird was gone. The crow or whatever it was with the red eyes. After all these years, it had disappeared. Vanished. Just like that.

No one knew for sure what had happened. Most hadn’t paid much attention to the bird for months—years, really, if you didn’t count the ornithologists. Some still didn’t realize it was gone. There were more important matters to occupy their working lives and dominate their conversations. But Vince was of a different mind. He didn’t think there was anything more important than the disappearance of the bird. Even if he wasn’t sure why, he sensed it.

That bird shouldn’t have gotten free. Security should have taken greater care than they did when they opened the door and took those two madmen into custody. But they weren’t paying attention to anything but the two men, and the crow would have been watching.

Just like it was always watching.

Vince knew, even if the others didn’t. It gave him a creepy, uncomfortable feeling, thinking about it. But he knew.

Five weeks gone now, and things were pretty much back to normal.
No one had forgotten that day, a day that had started out pretty much like every other. He wasn’t the first one to notice the two men in the aviary, but he heard Roy shouting and rushed over to see what was happening, and there they were—these two guys, trapped in the aviary, kicking and hammering on the bars and shaking the cage in their efforts to get free. Odd pair of ducks—that was Vince’s first thought when he saw them. They were wearing clothes of the sort you sometimes saw on those people who spent their weekends playing at being knights and fighting with swords. They didn’t have any armor on, but they wore robes and tunics and scarves and boots and big belts with silver buckles. One was tall and skinny with a head that looked too big for the rest of his body, and the other was short like a dwarf and all wrinkled and whiskery. They did not look happy, their faces contorted and flushed with anger and frustration. They wanted out, but neither Vince nor Roy was about to help them. How they had gotten into the cage in the first place was hard to guess, considering that the cage door was still locked. But they had no business being there, whatever their excuse. At best, they were trespassing on city property, and it was likely that by interacting with the animals without authority they had broken a few more laws, as well.

Roy had already called security, so Vince and he stood side by side watching the two men rant and rave. Neither could understand anything the pair was saying. Roy thought they were speaking an Eastern European dialect, although how he would know that, being of Scottish descent, was a mystery to Vince. Vince thought it more likely that they were speaking Arabic. He thought the emphasis on the hard vowels suggested one of the Middle Eastern languages, and even if the big one was as pale as a ghost, it wasn’t impossible that he might be an Arabic albino or something. He might have been raised in Egypt or Morocco, Vince thought—even though he had never been anywhere outside the state and didn’t know the first thing about either of those countries.

Nevertheless, the two speculated on the matter until security got there and hauled the interlopers out of the cage in handcuffs and
tossed them into one of those holding pens on wheels they used when the animals needed to be moved to a new enclosure. Shut the doors and took them away, and that was the last anyone had heard of either one. Vince guessed the authorities would try to find out where they came from and send them back. But he heard later that they didn’t have any identification on them, and no one could figure out what language they were speaking. That last was especially puzzling. In this day and age, with people all over the world moving here and there at the drop of a hat, you would think they could find
someone
close by who could speak any language in existence.

But not in this case, apparently. So the pair had ended up in the hands of the Homeland Security people to determine if they might be terrorists. But if no one could understand them or figure out where they came from, what could Homeland Security do?

It was odd that the two men had appeared just like the crow with the red eyes. Exactly the same way: not there one day, there the next, and no explanation for how they got there. It was as if animal shelters and aviaries were some sort of transport devices, like in that TV show
Star Trek
. Beam me up, Scotty. Maybe the madmen and the bird had been beamed up from another planet.

Staring at the aviary now, in the aftermath of all the excitement, Vince shrugged his disinterest. What did it matter? If there were answers to be had, they weren’t going to be given to him. They were gone, all three of them, and they likely weren’t coming back. The crow with the red eyes especially. It wasn’t coming back for sure. Any fool who had watched it as he had could tell you that. Now that it was free, it was long gone. It wouldn’t be caught again, either. Not that bird.