He paused. “So, then. Do you want me to help you escape? You alone?”
Thom shook his head reluctantly. “No, I won’t leave Mistaya.”
“So here we sit, awaiting our fate, helpless victims of your lack of thumbs and fingers,” Mistaya declared with a flourish that was somewhere between theatrical, disgusted, and clumsy.
“Well, not entirely helpless,” the cat advised. “You do have family and friends who might try to help you. And you do have your own considerable intelligence on which you might rely, just as you did with the problem of returning the books to the Stacks.”
She stared at him. Had he just paid her a compliment? “His Eminence is already seeking to undo what I have done, so it may all have been for nothing. My family and friends have been told to let me be, so I don’t look for them to come to my rescue.” She paused. “And my considerable intelligence is drained of ideas.”
“Perhaps you need to have a little more faith both in yourself and in others. You like being mistress of your own fate, but when you’ve needed help, hasn’t it always been there?”
She thought back to her adventures with Nightshade. She considered her term of imprisonment at the Carrington Women’s Preparatory School. “I suppose so. But that might not be the case this time.”
“Faith, Princess,” the Prism Cat repeated. “It is a highly underrated weapon against the dark things in this world.”
He stood up, stretched and yawned, and turned for the door. “I have to be going now. I have other things to do and other places to be. But we will see each other again. Be patient with yourself. Cats are enormously patient, and as a result we almost always get what we want. I advise you to try it out for yourself.”
“Wait!” she exclaimed, leaping up. “You can’t just leave us!”
The cat was at the door. He stopped and turned. “Cats can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to what anyone says or does. Rather like Princesses.”
The door opened of its own accord. He sauntered out, and the door closed behind him, the locks refastening.
Mistaya looked at Thom. “That cat has a rotten attitude,” she said.
In the somewhat subdued and somber chambers of Sterling Silver, a different attitude was in evidence. Ever since Questor Thews had returned from Libiris with news of Mistaya’s whereabouts, the members of the inner circle of Landover’s high court had been mulling over the King’s decision to honor his daughter’s choice to remain where she was. There were mixed feelings about this, and no one was resting easy. Knowing that Mistaya was with someone as notoriously unpredictable as Craswell Crabbit took a good deal of getting used to. No one was comfortable with the idea that the Princess was alone with such a man, yet no one was willing to press the point with her parents. After all, no one was more aware of the risks than they were, and they did not need reminding.
This did not mean, however, that their friends and retainers were able to stop worrying about it.
Abernathy in particular was distressed. He had been thinking it through from a somewhat different perspective than the others, being both man and dog and, thus, subject to the genetic breeding and emotional makeup of both, and he was beginning to see things that they might have missed.
First, he didn’t much care for the idea of a fifteen-year-old being mistress of her own fate. A child unlike others, but a child still, Mistaya should be held accountable for her actions, and he did not think she should be telling her parents what to do. There was no reason for her to remain at Libiris and in such close proximity to Craswell Crabbit, a man Abernathy had been worried about from the beginning. She should come home and face Ben and Willow and then, after having aired her grievances, she might petition them to go back in the company of either Questor or himself. But she shouldn’t be there alone.
Second, he was beginning to have a strong suspicion about Thom. At first, he had dismissed the boy as someone of no importance. But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered why Crabbit, who never did anything unless there was a strong chance for personal gain, had allowed the boy to stay on. Because he was court scribe, he knew Landover’s history and everyone connected with it intimately, and he had come to suspect that the mysterious Thom might be Andjen Thomlinson, the younger brother of Laphroig, who supposedly had been dead for three years. Abernathy had always been suspicious of that story; there had never been any proof that Kallendbor’s youngest had indeed died. They would be about the same age now, the Princess and the boy, and what Mistaya had related of Thom to Questor suggested he might be less a village boy and more an equal. Which made Abernathy wonder if Crabbit, who was no fool, might have recognized this, too.
Because, third, he was almost certain that Crabbit
