The cat blinked. “We shall have to wait and see, won’t we?”
She frowned. “Why should I agree to go away with you?”
“Do you have a choice?”
“Of course I have a choice!” She was suddenly irritated.
“A choice that does not involve going back to your parents?” The cat sounded rather smug. “Besides, you might well ask why
“But you just offered!” she snapped.
“Yes, but cats have a habit of changing their minds rather quickly, and I might be in the process of changing mine. You seem to me as if you might be in a lot of trouble, given your rather independent streak and your uncertain temperament. Not to mention all the baggage you carry.”
“Baggage?”
“The daughter of the King and Queen of Landover, their only child, on the run in the company of a pair of G’home Gnomes? Yes, I would say you carry more than a little baggage with you. I might not want to burden myself with all that. I might want to rethink my offer to help.”
She regarded the cat carefully, studying its inscrutable cat face. “But you won’t,” she said finally. “You won’t because you have a reason for coming to me like this in the first place.”
“Perhaps.”
“You won’t because you are a cat and cats are curious and your curiosity has something to do with you being here and you haven’t satisfied it yet.”
“Curiosity comes and goes,” said the cat.
She nodded. “What’s your name?”
The cat looked away for a moment, studying the blackness beyond them as if it had just discovered something of immense interest. “I am like all cats when it comes to names,” he said, speaking to the night. “I have as many names as I do lives. I don’t even know what they all are yet. The one I prefer now is the one your father knew me by. Edgewood Dirk.”
“I like your name,” she told him.
“Thank you. Although it doesn’t matter one way or the other, you realize.”
She took a deep breath. “Does your offer to help me still stand? Will you take me away with you?”
Edgewood Dirk blinked. “All you need to do is gather your belongings, wake your companions, and follow me. No one will see us. No one will stop us. By morning, we will be far away.”
“Far away,” she repeated, liking the sound of it. Then the rest of what he had said caught up with her. “Wait a minute. Did you say I should wake my companions? Those Gnomes? I don’t want them coming with me! I didn’t want them coming with me in the first place!”
“Well, we don’t always get what we want in life,” said Edgewood Dirk.
“Well, they’re not coming with me, Dirk, so you can just forget about me not getting what I want in this case!” She glared at him. “Is that all right with you?”
“Perfectly all right,” he answered, his cat voice as calm as still waters. “Of course, leaving them behind means that when the River Master finds you gone, he will have to find someone to blame, and those two unfortunate G’home Gnomes might turn out to be his first choice.”
She stared at him, speechless.
“Not that this should matter to you, of course,” he added.
She knew he was right, and she hated it. She sighed wearily. “All right then, they can come.”
“If you are quite certain it is all right, Princess?”
She ignored him, finding him increasingly annoying and suspecting that he would become more so as they traveled. She looked around guardedly. “We just walk right out of here, do we? Right through my grandfather’s guards and all the once-fairy who live in the swamps? You know the way out and won’t get us lost?”
The cat stared at her, saying nothing.
“Do you mind telling me where we are going?” she
