“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?”