“I know. You want to do something, even if you don’t quite know what that something is.” She thought about it a moment. “We can ask Questor if he has a magic that can track a Prism Cat. He might know something that would help.”
So they loaded their gear on their horses and set out for home, and all the way back Ben kept thinking that he was missing something obvious, that there was something he was overlooking.
THEY SEEK THAT PRINCESS EVERYWHERE!
The sun was just cresting the horizon when Questor Thews slipped from his bed, drew on his favorite bathrobe (the royal blue one with the golden moons and stars), and his dragon slippers (the ones that looked as if his toes were breathing fire), and padded down to the kitchen for his morning coffee. He had discovered coffee some years back during one of his unfortunate visits to Ben’s world and had secured several sacks in the process, which he now hoarded like gold. Mistaya had been good enough to add to his supply now and again during her time at Carrington, but since she had been dismissed, he wasn’t sure how long it would be before he could replenish his stock.
He finished brewing a pot and was in the process of enjoying his first cup of the day when Abernathy wandered in and sat down across from him. “May I?” he asked, motioning toward the coffee.
Questor nodded, wondering for what must have been the hundredth time how a soft-coated wheaten terrier could possibly enjoy drinking coffee. It must be a part of him that was still human and not dog, of course. But it just looked odd, a dog drinking coffee.
“Any new thoughts as to where our missing girl might be?” Abernathy inquired of him, licking his chops as he took the first swallow of his coffee.
Questor shook his head. “Not a one. The High Lord is right, though. I think we are missing something important about all this.”
Ben Holiday had voiced his opinion on this late last night on his return from the lake country, more than a hint of discouragement coloring his voice and draping his tired visage. He had thought that he and Willow would find her there, but instead they had found only clues that seemed to lead nowhere. If neither the River Master nor the Earth Mother could help, it didn’t look good for the rest of them.
“What could Edgewood Dirk want with her?” Abernathy asked suddenly, as if reading his thoughts.
Questor grunted and shook his head. “Nothing good, I’m sure.”
“He wouldn’t be going to the trouble of hiding her tracks if his intentions were of the right sort,” his friend agreed. “Remember how much trouble he caused the last time he showed up?”
Questor remembered, all right. But on thinking back, it didn’t seem that Dirk had been the cause of the trouble so much as the indicator. Something like a compass. The Prism Cat had appeared at the behest of the fairies in the mists, a sort of emissary sent to nudge the High Lord and his friends in the direction required for setting aright things that had gone askew—all without really telling them what it was exactly that needed righting. If that were true here, then Mistaya might be headed for a good deal more trouble than she realized.
Questor sighed. He was at his wit’s end. He could continue to do what Ben Holiday and he had done every day, which was to go up to the Landsview and scour the countryside. But that had yielded exactly nothing to date, and it felt pointless to try yet again. He had thought about approaching the dragon, always a daunting experience, in an effort to see if it might be willing to help. But what sort of help might it offer? Strabo could cross borders that the rest of them couldn’t—he could go in and out of Landover at will, for example—but that would prove useful only if Mistaya were somewhere other than Landover, and there were no indications at this point that she was.
“I remember when the High Lord was tricked into believing he had lost the medallion and Dirk trailed around after him until he figured it out,” Questor mused, turning his coffee cup this way and that. “He was there when the High Lord was trapped with Nightshade and Strabo in that infernal device that Horris Kew uncovered, too. Dispensing his wisdom and talking in riddles, prodding the High Lord into recognizing the truth, if I remember right from what we were told afterward. Perhaps that is what’s happening here.”
“You make the cat sound almost benevolent,” Abernathy huffed, his terrier face taking on an angry look, his words coming out a growl. “I think you are deluding yourself, wizard.”
“Perhaps,” Questor agreed mildly. He didn’t feel like fighting.
Abernathy didn’t say anything for a moment, tapping his fingers against his cup annoyingly. “Do you think that perhaps Mistaya might be trapped somewhere, like the High Lord was?”
Possible, Questor thought. But she had been wandering around freely not more than a few days ago in the company of those bothersome G’home Gnomes and the cat. Something had to have changed, but he
