her feet, trudging down a couple of steps, which dissolved into a view from considerably farther down the mountain, followed by a closeup of Princess Nell unscrewing her water bottle and drinking melted snow; another view from farther down; Nell sitting down for a rest; a soaring eagle; the approaching cloud layer; big trees; descending through the mist; and finally, Nell tramping wearily down the last ten steps, which left her in a clearing in a dark coniferous forest, carpeted with rust-colored pine needles. It was twilight, and the wolves were beginning to howl. Nell made the usual arrangements for the night, lit a fire, and curled up to sleep.
Having reached a good stopping-place, Nell started to close the book. She'd have to continue this later.
She had just entered the land of the oldest and most powerful of all the Faery Kings. The many castles on the mountains belonged to all of his Dukes and Earls, and she suspected she would have to visit them all before she had gotten what she'd come for. It was not a quick adventure for an early Saturday morning. But just as she was clasping the book together, new words and an illustration appeared on the page she'd been reading, and something about the illustration made her open the book back up. It showed a crow perched on a tree branch above Princess Nell, holding a necklace in its beak. It was eleven jeweled keys strung on a golden chain.
Princess Nell had been wearing it around her neck; apparently the next event in the story was that this bird stole it while she was sleeping. Beneath the picture was a poem, spoken by the crow from his perch:
Nell closed up the book This was too upsetting to think about just now. She had been collecting those keys for most of her life. The first she'd taken from King Magpie just after she and Harv had arrived at Dovetail. She had picked up the other ten one at a time during the years since then. She had done this by traveling to the lands of the Faery Kings and Queens who owned those keys and using the tricks she had learned from her Night Friends. Each key had come to her in a different way.
One of the hardest keys to get had belonged to an old Faery Queen who had seen through every trick that Nell could think up and fought off every assault. Finally, in desperation, Princess Nell had thrown herself on the mercy of that Queen and told her the sad story of Harv locked up in the Dark Castle. The Queen had fed Nell a nice bowl of chicken soup and handed over the key with a smile.
Not much later, Duck had encountered a nice young mallard on the road and flown away with him to start a family. Purple and Princess Nell then traveled together for several years, and on many a dark night, sitting around the campfire under a full moon, Purple had taught Nell secret things from her magic books and from the ancient lore she kept in her head.
Recently they had traveled for a thousand miles on camelback across a great desert full of djinns, demons, sultans, and caliphs and finally reached the great onion-domed palace of the local Faery King– himself a djinn of great power-who ruled over all the desert lands. Princess Nell had devised a complicated plan to trick their way into the djinn's treasury. To carry it out, she and Purple had to live in the city around the palace for a couple of years and make many treks into the desert in search of magic lanterns, rings, secret caverns, and the like.
Finally, Princess Nell and Purple had penetrated to the djinn king's treasury and found the eleventh key. But they had been surprised by the djinn himself, who attacked them in the guise of a fire-breathing serpent. Purple had transformed herself into a giant eagle with metallic wings and talons that could not be burned– much to the surprise of Princess Nell, who had never imagined that her companion possessed such power.
The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at each other, until finally the mighty castle lay in ruins, the desert was scorched and blasted for many miles around, and Purple and the djinn king both lay dead on the floor of what had been the treasury.
Nell had picked up the eleventh key from the floor, put it on her chain, cremated Purple's body, and scattered her ashes across the desert as she walked, for many days, toward the mountains and the green land, where the eleven keys had now been stolen away from her.
Nell's experiences at school;
a confrontation with Miss Stricken;
the rigors of Supplementary Curriculum;
Miss Matheson's philosophy of education;
three friends go separate ways.
The names of the three graces, and diverse artists' conceptions of the ladies themselves, were chiseled, painted, and sculpted freely about the interior and exterior of Miss Matheson's Academy. Nell could hardly look anywhere without seeing one of them prancing across a field of wildflowers, distributing laurel wreaths to the worthy, jointly thrusting a torch toward heaven, or shedding lambent effulgence upon the receptive pupils.
Nell's favorite part of the curriculum was Thalia, which was scheduled for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
When Miss Matheson hauled once on the old bellrope dangling down from the belfry, belting a single dolorous clang across the campus, Nell and the other girls in her section would arise, curtsy to their teacher, walk in single file down the corridor to the courtyard-then break into a chaotic run until they reached the Hall of Physical Culture, where they would strip out of their heavy, scratchy complicated uniforms and climb into lighter, looser, scratchy complicated uniforms with more freedom of movement.
The Bloom curriculum was taught by Miss Ramanujan or one of her assistants. Usually they did something vigorous in the morning, like field hockey, and something graceful in the afternoon, like ballroom dance, or peculiar, giggle-inducing exercises in how to walk, stand, and sit like a Lady.
Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly left it to her assistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various classrooms in an old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the Aglaia period, the girls would get together in groups of half a dozen or so to answer questions or solve problems put to them by the teachers: For example, they counted how many species of plants and animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a ractive simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band before and after the introduction of horses. They designed simple machines with a nanopresence rig and tried to compile them in the M.C. and make them work They wove brocades and made porcelain as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an ocean of history to be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the history of many other peoples around the world that essentially served as backdrop for History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
The latter subject was, curiously, not part of the Brilliance curriculum; it was left firmly in the hands of Miss Stricken, who was mistress of Joy.
In addition to two one-hour periods each day, Miss Stricken had the attention of the entire assembled student body once in the morning, once at noon, and once in the evening. During these times her basic function was to call the students to order; publicly upbraid those sheep who had prominently strayed since the last such assembly; disgorge any random meditations that had been occupying her mind of late; and finally, in reverential tones, introduce Father Cox, the local vicar, who would lead the students in prayer. Miss Stricken also had the students all to herself for two hours on Sunday morning and could optionally command their attention for up to eight hours on Saturdays if she came round to the opinion that they wanted supplementary guidance.
The first time Nell sat down in one of Miss Stricken's classrooms, she found that her desk had perversely been left directly behind another girl's, so that she was unable to see anything except for the bow in that girl's hair. She got up, tried to skooch the desk, and found that it was fixed to the floor. All the desks, in fact, were arranged in a perfectly regular grid, facing in the same direction– which is to say, toward Miss Stricken or one of her two assistants, Miss Bowlware and Mrs. Disher.
Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she
