“Good-bye now,” he called over his shoulder to her, moving rapidly away. “Farewell.”
She let him go. There was more to this business of being hung up in the tree than he was telling her, but that was usually the case with G’home Gnomes. She watched him disappear over a rise, and then she turned and started walking again toward the castle with Haltwhistle at her side. Time to be getting on.
She was within hailing distance of the front gates, just across the causeway leading over to the island on which Sterling Silver gleamed in brilliant greeting, when she saw Questor Thews appear on the battlements and wave to her with one stick-thin arm.
She thought the wave looked encouraging.
FATHER KNOWS BEST
Ben Holiday sat across the table from his daughter and stared at her in dismay. It was all too much. Here she was, a young girl who had everything she could possibly want. She was beautiful, intelligent, talented, and skilled. She possessed an extremely potent form of magic. She was the daughter of the King and Queen of Land over and had every opportunity to become something special and to accomplish wonderful things.
Yet her wrongheaded stubbornness and poor judgment eclipsed all of her good qualities and extraordinary abilities and reduced her to a source of constant irritation to those who loved her most.
“Suspended,” he repeated for what must have been the fifth or sixth time, staring down at the letter.
She nodded.
“For using magic.”
She nodded again.
“You used magic?” he repeated in disbelief. “Despite what we agreed? Despite your promise never to do so outside of Landover?”
Mistaya was wise enough to sit there and not even nod this time.
“I don’t understand it. Where was your common sense when all this was happening? What about our agreement to give this a try? Did you think that meant you wouldn’t have to put any effort into it? That you could just do whatever you felt like doing without any consideration for the consequences?”
She straightened just a bit. “Why don’t you just accept that this was a bad idea in the first place? I don’t belong over there. I belong here.”
His jaw clenched and he felt his face redden. He wanted to tell her that she belonged where he told her she belonged, but he managed to keep from doing so. Barely.
“So what I want for you—what your mother wants for you—that doesn’t count at all?”
“Not when it’s the wrong thing.” She sighed. “If you were in my shoes, what would you do? You wouldn’t let someone send you to a place where you didn’t fit in, where people made fun of you and called you names, where they didn’t even understand the importance of taking care of their trees. Would you?”
Ben didn’t know what he would do, and he didn’t think that was the issue here. They weren’t talking about him; they were talking about her. That wasn’t the same thing at all.
He took a deep breath to calm himself and exhaled slowly. King of Landover, ruler of a nation, overseer of a crossroads that linked multiple worlds, and he couldn’t even control his own daughter. He didn’t know when he had been as angry as he was at this moment. Or when he had been so frustrated. He felt powerless in the face of her emotionless response to what had happened and her clear refusal to allow it to affect her in any meaningful way. She wasn’t talking about when she would go back or what she would do to make that happen. She wasn’t talking about going back at all. This was his idea, damn it. His idea for her to go to a boarding school in his world and mingle with girls her own age. Not girls with magic at their command. Not creatures strange and exotic, dragons and mud puppies and the like, for which she had such a fondness. Real, live human girls with human quirks and oddities that required that she exercise at least a modicum of diplomacy. But did she do this? Did she even try? Oh, no, not Mistaya. Instead, if this letter was any indication, she had simply run roughshod over students, administration, and rules with no regard for anyone but herself, and the end result was that she had gotten tossed right out the door.
Now she was sitting here as if nothing important had happened, looking not in the least contrite or ashamed, having decided quite clearly that this put an end to his grand experiment as far as she was concerned.
He read the letter from Headmistress Harriet Appleton once more as he tried to think what to say.
“Reading it again won’t change anything,” his daughter declared quietly. “I broke their stupid rules, and I’m out.”
“You’re out because you didn’t try to fit in!” he snapped. “You keep trying to turn this back on the school and the other students, but it’s really about what you failed to do. Life requires that you make concessions; not everything will go your way. That was what I was hoping you might learn by attending Carrington. You have to work at being part of a larger community. How do you think I function as King? I have to take other people’s feelings and needs into consideration. I have to remember that they don’t always see things the same way I do. I have to treat them with respect and understanding, even when I don’t agree with them. I can’t just tell them what to do and sit back. It doesn’t work like that!”
“Perhaps Mistaya needs a little more time to grow up in Landover before she goes back into your world,” Willow offered quietly. She had been sitting off to one side, listening, saying nothing until now.
Ben glanced over at his wife and saw his daughter’s features mirrored in her face. But the similarity ended there. Willow was measured and calm in her thinking while Mistaya was emotionally driven, quick to act, and less willing to spend time deliberating. Of course, Willow had been like that, too, when she was younger, before Mistaya was born. Probably she understood their daughter better than he did, but she wasn’t saying anything to demonstrate it.
“She’s a very mature, smart young lady,” Ben pointed out. “Much smarter and more mature than those girls who got the best of her.” He shook his head. “She needs to be able to deal with this sort of thing. It’s not going to go away just because she’s come back here. There will be challenges of the same sort in Landover, whether today or tomorrow or somewhere down the road. That’s just the way it is.”
He looked back at his daughter. “But we’re getting away from the point. You’ve been suspended from Carrington, and now I get the clear impression that you don’t think you’re going back.”
“It’s not an impression,” she replied. “It’s a fact. I’m not going back.”
Ben nodded slowly. “Then what is it that you think you are going to do?”
“Stay here in Landover and study with Questor and Abernathy and learn from whatever they can teach me.” She paused. “Is that so unreasonable?”
That’s not the issue, Ben thought. This isn’t about being reasonable; it’s about doing what’s expected of you when there’s something to be gained from doing so. But Mistaya wasn’t about to see it that way, and he couldn’t think of a way to change that at present. He knew he couldn’t let her get away with this, couldn’t let her come back and dictate what she was going to do with her life after failing to give the learning experience he had afforded her a decent chance. He just didn’t know what to do about it.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said carefully. “I’ll give it some thought. I’ll talk it over with Questor and Abernathy and see what they think. They may have some ideas on the matter, too. Fair enough?”
She eyed him suspiciously, but he held her gaze until finally she nodded. “I suppose.”
She rose, walked over to her mother, and bent to kiss her cheek. Then, without looking at her father, she left the room.