Mistaya felt her heart sink. She had ruined everything.
“Off to your rooms!” Pinch ordered, making shooing motions with his hands. “Don’t even think of trying to do anything else. Lock yourselves in and remain there until sunrise. Then report to His Eminence first thing. Now go! Get!”
Obediently, Mistaya and Thom headed out of the Stacks. Mistaya was miserable. She would be sent home for certain. In all likelihood, Thom would be punished in some equally unpleasant way. And it was all because of her.
“Don’t worry,” Thom declared cheerfully as they parted for the night.
“I won’t,” she promised. But of course, she already was.
She reached her bedroom sunk in a miasma of gloom and dark thoughts, opened the door, and nearly jumped with fright when a tall, gangly figure seated on the edge of her bed abruptly stood.
“Hello, Mistaya,” said Questor Thews, and held out his hands in greeting.
REVELATIONS
Mistaya gave a small cry of mingled relief and joy and rushed over to her old friend, wrapping her arms about him with such ferocity that she could hear his shocked gasp. She crushed his body against hers, the feel of his bony frame, all the angles and knobs so wonderfully familiar and welcome. Her reaction surprised her, but it didn’t lessen the intensity of her enthusiasm. She had never been so glad to see anyone in her life.
“Mistaya, goodness!” he managed, his voice a bit strangled, but obviously pleased. “Did you miss me so much?”
“I did miss you,” she whispered into his shoulder. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!”
The long, thin hands patted her hair comfortingly. “Well, I would have come sooner had I known you were in such distress. Of course, it would have helped if you had told me just where you were.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. But I just couldn’t …”
She gave a deep, long sigh, and then she backed away from him far enough that they were eye-to-eye. “How did you find me?”
“It was a guess,” he advised, rather sheepishly. “When we couldn’t find you any other way, Abernathy and I tried to think where the last place was that we would expect you to go. A kind of reverse psychology, I suppose. We put ourselves in your shoes—which isn’t all that easy to do, I might add—and we came up with Libiris. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but we were running out of options. So we decided to come here and see if we might possibly be right.”
“Abernathy is here, too?”
“Outside with the G’home Gnomes.” The blue eyes twinkled. “They gave you up, I am afraid. They couldn’t help themselves. They denied everything, but when G’home Gnomes deny everything, it is usually true. I left them in Abernathy’s care and came inside for a look.”
“But how did you manage that? This place is guarded like a fortress!”
“Oh, I know a few tricks about how to get in and out of places.” He took her hands in his own and squeezed them. “Come. Sit down on the bed while we talk. My bones do not allow for prolonged periods of standing in place anymore.”
They sat on the bed, the scarecrow wizard and the young girl to whom he had always been mentor and friend. She kept one arm around him, as if afraid she might lose him. It was uncharacteristic of her to be so clingy; she saw herself as independent and strong, not as a child in need of an adult’s protective presence. But just now, in this time and place, all that seemed unimportant.
“It wasn’t their fault, you know,” she told him. “Poggwydd went with me to grandfather because I made him. I threatened him. I told him that if he didn’t come with me, he’d be blamed for my disappearing because he was the last one to be seen with me.” She felt embarrassed by her admission, but didn’t back away from it. “The truth is, I was afraid to go alone. Shoopdiesel just happened along and stayed because he’s Poggwydd’s friend.”
Questor Thews nodded. “I thought it might be something like that. Their attempts at an explanation suggested as much. They kept insisting that they only did what was necessary to look after you. I guess that included bringing you here, too.”
“No, they didn’t have anything to do with that. That was all because of the cat.”
“Edgewood Dirk?”
She sighed, somehow unsurprised that the wizard knew. “He showed up at Elderew after Grandfather said I would have to go home. He was the one who suggested that nobody would think to look for me at Libiris. He said he’d come with me and hide me with his magic from any other magic that might uncover my presence.” She shrugged. “I don’t know what I was thinking, coming to the one place I said I wouldn’t go. But I came, anyway. It just seemed to be the only thing to do. He was pretty persuasive.”
“Edgewood Dirk can be like that. But you have to be careful of him.”
“I guess so. Once we got here, he disappeared, and I haven’t seen him since. I don’t know where he went.”
Questor grimaced. “If I know Dirk—and I do—he will not have gone very far away. You have to understand. A Prism Cat is a fairy creature, and his motives are his own. But he always does things for a reason, and bringing you here was not accidental. He brought you here for a purpose. You just don’t know what it is yet.”
He gave her a reassuring smile. “Now tell me everything else that happened.”
Well, she wasn’t about to do that, of course. And she didn’t. But she did tell him some of it: her arrival at Libiris and Rufus Pinch’s refusal to admit her; Thom’s intervention; His Eminence’s decision to let her remain and work with her “brother” in the Stacks; the terrible impossibility of the task to which she and Thom had been set; the ways in which they were spied upon and mistrusted by both His Eminence and Pinch. Finally, she worked her way around to the two questions that weighed most heavily on her mind and to which she was hoping he might provide the answers.
“A couple of very strange things happened during the last few days, Questor,” she began. “Yesterday, I heard a voice calling out to me. Or to someone, at any rate. I heard it clearly. Thom heard it too, both tonight and several weeks earlier, before I got here. We talked about it. We don’t think we were mistaken.”
She chose her words carefully. She had no intention of revealing too many details. If Questor thought she was in any real danger, he would take her away at once, and she wasn’t yet ready to go. For starters, things with Thom were just getting interesting. Besides, she didn’t think that she was in any real danger.
Questor nodded as if he understood. “You probably did hear something.”
“All right,” she continued, wanting to get the rest of it out before she heard what he had to say on the matter. “The other thing is that while I was lying on the floor, just resting for a moment”—she was making it up as she went—”I put my cheek against the wooden boards and felt a pulse and a warmth that reminded me instantly of Sterling Silver. But I don’t understand how that could be.”
She waited for his response, which wasn’t given immediately. Instead, the wizard pursed his lips, cocked first one and then the other eyebrow, narrowed his eyes, and then drew in and let out a long, sustained breath.
“Well,” he said, as if that pretty much covered it.
“Well, what?”
“If you had not gone off on your own, so determined that none of what has already happened would happen, if instead you had taken the time to learn about Libiris first, you might have avoided a good deal of the confusion in which you now find yourself mired.”
He held up one finger in warning as she was about to object. “I just think you need to hear how difficult you have made things for people who love you before I tell you what you want to know. You caused us all a great deal of worry, Mistaya. It isn’t as if you didn’t know we would wonder whether something had happened to you. We have all been thinking of little else since you disappeared. If your grandfather had not sent word that you came to see him, we might not even have known that much.”