“When the stars align properly, yes. But you might have noticed over the past few weeks that sometimes you have to work at it.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “Well, I guess I did notice something of the sort.”
They were quiet again for a time, and then her father said, “What do you think you will do now, Mistaya? Now that you’ve come back home.”
She had thought of little else. “I don’t know.”
“You have a lot of options open to you. You’ve probably thought of a few that I haven’t. I’m not asking this to try to persuade you to do anything in particular. The choice is yours, and whatever you decide is fine with your mother and me. I think.”
“Thank you.”
“So do you have any ideas?”
“Some.”
“Care to talk about them with me?”
He sounded so eager, she could hardly make herself give the reply she had already decided on. “Maybe later. Can we just sit here like this for now?”
He said they could, but she thought that he would have preferred the discussion he had suggested. Trouble was, she just wasn’t ready. She didn’t know what she was going to do. She thought it might take some time to figure it out.
As it turned out, she was wrong. She went for a walk outside the castle grounds late in the afternoon, needing to stretch her legs and find space to think. She was in a meditative mood, and movement always seemed to help spur her thinking. In addition, she wanted to see if there was any sign of the G’home Gnomes, Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel. After the horse to which they were tied had galloped in terror away from a hungry Strabo, they had thought themselves doomed. The dragon had caught up to them almost immediately, but then it had refused to eat them after finding out they were G’home Gnomes. Even dragons had limits when it came to food choices, Strabo had observed archly before abandoning them to fly after tastier morsels. Eventually, Questor Thews and Abernathy had come across them on their way to Libiris, still bound and gagged astride their grazing horse. Showing considerably more compassion than others, they had released the pair and, after hearing how they had revealed Mistaya’s hiding place to Laphroig, had sent them packing, and no one had seen them since. Mistaya wouldn’t have blamed either one for refusing to have anything to do with her from that day forward and wouldn’t have lost a great deal of sleep over it, either. But she felt certain she hadn’t seen the end of them.
So she went looking for them that afternoon, out to the woods where she had first encountered a dangling Poggwydd some weeks earlier on her return from Carrington. Maybe they had come back and made a new home, a fresh burrow in the soft earth. Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t want anything to do with her. Maybe they were waiting to see if
But a thorough search of the area revealed nothing, and she was just about to turn around and start home again when she saw Edgewood Dirk.
The Prism Cat was sitting at the base of an ancient broadleaf, his emerald eyes fixed on her, his silver-and-black coat glistening in a wash of hazy sunlight. She stopped and stared, making sure she wasn’t seeing things, and then she walked over to stand in front of him.
“Good afternoon, Princess,” the Prism Cat greeted.
“Good afternoon, Edgewood Dirk,” she replied. “I wondered what had become of you.”
“Nothing has become of me. I’ve been here all along, watching.”
“Watching? Me?”
“Not simply you. Everything Cats like to watch. We are curious creatures.”
She smiled despite herself. “So you know what happened back at Libiris?”
The cat blinked. “I know what I care to know, thank you. All’s well that ends well, it seems.”
“Do you know what became of His Eminence and Pinch?” She arched one eyebrow at him. “You do, don’t you?”
“Perhaps.”
