A Princess of Landover

“I don’t necessarily want you to go anywhere. It isn’t up to me. The decision is yours. Please make it. I grow bored with this.”

She saw the logic to Dirk’s reasoning. Her father would never think of looking for her at Libiris. He would look for her almost anywhere else before he looked for her there. But if she went, she was doing exactly what he had asked her to do in the first place. What sort of sense did that make?

“At least you would be going of your own choice and for your own reasons,” Edgewood Dirk offered, as if reading her mind.

She toughened her resolve so that she could accept what she now realized she must do. “All right, I will go to Libiris with Poggwydd and Shoopdiesel.” She paused. “Are you coming with us or not?”

The cat took a moment to study the countryside, emerald eyes filling with a distant look, as if gone somewhere else entirely. Then he looked back at her. “I believe I will,” he answered softly, and then he began to purr.

THE PRINCESS IS MISSING

Ben Holiday was not particularly worried on that first morning when it was discovered that Mistaya was not in her room. She did not appear for breakfast or lunch, nor was she anywhere in the castle. No one had seen her leave. That might have been cause for alarm in another household, but not in his. Mistaya was famous for her unexpected comings and goings, for choosing to set out on a personal mission or exploration without telling anyone. That she might have done so here was a reasonable assumption, particularly when it was well known that she had been spending her last few days meeting with one of those endlessly troublesome G’home Gnomes that kept cropping up at the castle.

This one, Poggwydd, had already been caught sneaking into the castle for purposes of pilfering whatever he could find—he didn’t see it that way, of course—and put out again by Bunion right before Mistaya returned from Carrington. She had taken up his cause, thinking that she might help him change his thieving ways. When he had come to the door asking to see her, she’d brought him into the castle for a visit, given him a tour of its many rooms, and spent hours visiting with him somewhere outside Sterling Silver, presumably in an effort to educate him in the error of his ways. She had even made it a point to speak with Bunion about his overly harsh treatment of the little miscreant. All this she had accomplished in the span of little more than the week that she’d been back home.

Ben knew all this because he pretty much knew everything that happened in the castle. His retainers made it a point of telling him, especially when it came to Mistaya. Willow confided in him, too, when she thought it appropriate, and she had done so here because she was proud of the way that Mistaya was handling her ignominious return. Better that she find something useful to do with her time than sit around bemoaning her fate as a suspended student. Ben agreed, and so both of them had left her alone.

By dinnertime, however, he was experiencing the first faint whisperings of the possibility that things were not all right. Mistaya was still missing, and no one had seen her anywhere since the previous night. He decided to voice his concerns to Willow.

“It is possible she is punishing you,” she offered, none too helpfully.

“Punishing me?” He frowned. They were sitting together after the dinner had been taken away, talking privately. “What do you mean by that?”

“She’s angry with you. You’ve hurt her feelings, and she doesn’t like how that makes her feel. She already told me that much, Ben.”

He shook his head. He hated it that the two of them had a private information-sharing arrangement, but it had always been that way, mother to daughter and back again.

“I didn’t mean to make her feel bad,” he tried to explain. “I was just attempting to—”

“I know.” She reached up and touched his lips to silence him. “But she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks you should have been more supportive of her situation. Not just about Libiris, but about Laphroig, too. She’s unsure of how she stands with you right now. Even when she can think about it rationally, she’s still not quite certain what’s going to happen.”

“So she’s gone off somewhere in protest?”

“Just for a little while, I think. Just long enough to make you worry and maybe rethink what you’ve decided about her future.”

He sighed. “That sounds like her, doesn’t it?”

Willow nodded. “She’s very headstrong, very determined.” She smiled and kissed him. “Very like you.”

But by the following morning, when his daughter still hadn’t reappeared, Ben decided that waiting around was no longer an option. Without saying anything to Willow, he called in Questor Thews and Abernathy for a conference. The three of them gathered clandestinely in Questor’s office and put their heads together.