She had just entered the land of the oldest and most powerful of all the Faery Kings. The many castles on the mountains belonged to all of his Dukes and Earls, and she suspected she would have to visit them all before she had gotten what she'd come for. It was not a quick adventure for an early Saturday morning. But just as she was clasping the book together, new words and an illustration appeared on the page she'd been reading, and something about the illustration made her open the book back up. It showed a crow perched on a tree branch above Princess Nell, holding a necklace in its beak. It was eleven jeweled keys strung on a golden chain.
Princess Nell had been wearing it around her neck; apparently the next event in the story was that this bird stole it while she was sleeping. Beneath the picture was a poem, spoken by the crow from his perch:
Nell closed up the book This was too upsetting to think about just now. She had been collecting those keys for most of her life. The first she'd taken from King Magpie just after she and Harv had arrived at Dovetail. She had picked up the other ten one at a time during the years since then. She had done this by traveling to the lands of the Faery Kings and Queens who owned those keys and using the tricks she had learned from her Night Friends. Each key had come to her in a different way.
One of the hardest keys to get had belonged to an old Faery Queen who had seen through every trick that Nell could think up and fought off every assault. Finally, in desperation, Princess Nell had thrown herself on the mercy of that Queen and told her the sad story of Harv locked up in the Dark Castle. The Queen had fed Nell a nice bowl of chicken soup and handed over the key with a smile.
Not much later, Duck had encountered a nice young mallard on the road and flown away with him to start a family. Purple and Princess Nell then traveled together for several years, and on many a dark night, sitting around the campfire under a full moon, Purple had taught Nell secret things from her magic books and from the ancient lore she kept in her head.
Recently they had traveled for a thousand miles on camelback across a great desert full of djinns, demons, sultans, and caliphs and finally reached the great onion-domed palace of the local Faery King— himself a djinn of great power-who ruled over all the desert lands. Princess Nell had devised a complicated plan to trick their way into the djinn's treasury. To carry it out, she and Purple had to live in the city around the palace for a couple of years and make many treks into the desert in search of magic lanterns, rings, secret caverns, and the like.
Finally, Princess Nell and Purple had penetrated to the djinn king's treasury and found the eleventh key. But they had been surprised by the djinn himself, who attacked them in the guise of a fire-breathing serpent. Purple had transformed herself into a giant eagle with metallic wings and talons that could not be burned— much to the surprise of Princess Nell, who had never imagined that her companion possessed such power.
The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at each other, until finally the mighty castle lay in ruins, the desert was scorched and blasted for many miles around, and Purple and the djinn king both lay dead on the floor of what had been the treasury.
Nell had picked up the eleventh key from the floor, put it on her chain, cremated Purple's body, and scattered her ashes across the desert as she walked, for many days, toward the mountains and the green land, where the eleven keys had now been stolen away from her.
Nell's experiences at school;
a confrontation with Miss Stricken;
the rigors of Supplementary Curriculum;
Miss Matheson's philosophy of education;
three friends go separate ways.
The names of the three graces, and diverse artists' conceptions of the ladies themselves, were chiseled, painted, and sculpted freely about the interior and exterior of Miss Matheson's Academy. Nell could hardly look anywhere without seeing one of them prancing across a field of wildflowers, distributing laurel wreaths to the worthy, jointly thrusting a torch toward heaven, or shedding lambent effulgence upon the receptive pupils.
Nell's favorite part of the curriculum was Thalia, which was scheduled for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
When Miss Matheson hauled once on the old bellrope dangling down from the belfry, belting a single dolorous clang across the campus, Nell and the other girls in her section would arise, curtsy to their teacher, walk in single file down the corridor to the courtyard-then break into a chaotic run until they reached the Hall of Physical Culture, where they would strip out of their heavy, scratchy complicated uniforms and climb into lighter, looser, scratchy complicated uniforms with more freedom of movement.
The Bloom curriculum was taught by Miss Ramanujan or one of her assistants. Usually they did something vigorous in the morning, like field hockey, and something graceful in the afternoon, like ballroom dance, or peculiar, giggle-inducing exercises in how to walk, stand, and sit like a Lady.
Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly left it to her assistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various classrooms in an old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the Aglaia period, the girls would get together in groups of half a dozen or so to answer questions or solve problems put to them by the teachers: For example, they counted how many species of plants and animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a ractive simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band before and after the introduction of horses. They designed simple machines with a nanopresence rig and tried to compile them in the M.C. and make them work They wove brocades and made porcelain as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an ocean of history to be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the history of many other peoples around the world that essentially served as backdrop for History
