"Very useful for thieves," Belinda remarked, with a trembling smile.
"I have the feeling Morton used us to get potentially troublesome magic items out of Seafoam, along with helping us," Bib added.
Merrigan searched the box faster. Any moment now, the soup's influence would take Belinda from sweating to heaving. The whole purpose of searching through all the minor magical trinkets was to find something to prevent the nausea. Merrigan finally explained what she was doing, after finding a magic waxed paper bag that kept pouring out sweets until they had a pile taller than the box. As far as Bib could tell, the sweets in assorted flavors and colors had no magical properties other than soothing sore throats.
"But what if stopping me from being sick somehow ... I don't know, interferes with the tracking spell?" Belinda said.
"You don't know unless you ask." Merrigan wished with all her might that they would find something they could use, right this moment, as she reached into the box.
Belinda fled for the garderobe just as Merrigan's fingers touched a soft fold of cloth. She pulled the small bundle out and unrolled it to find a simple, conical sleeping cap. A note was pinned to it in Morton's distinctive, neat blocky handwriting: Do not use when you are alone. Merrigan put it inside Bib's pages for him to analyze.
"It is just what it appears to be—a cap for sleeping. Very dangerous," the book announced, as Belinda came back to the table, looking a little white around the mouth, and the hair at her temples dark with sweat.
"Dangerous how? Could we use it as a weapon?" Merrigan said.
"Only if we could convince our enemies to put it on, then for the next man in line to take it off the sleeping man and put it on his head, and so on."
"But the first man would just wake up, so what good would it do?" Belinda said, stroking the long tassel of silky black threads.
"Taking off the cap doesn't wake you." Bib ruffled his pages so the cap slid off.
Merrigan shuddered, grateful Morton had put that note on the cap. What if she had put the cap on just to keep her head warm, say if she was caught in the rain?
"Surely there has to be some way of reversing the sleeping spell. Who would make such a thing?" Belinda wiped her shaking hand on her skirts.
"Reverse." Merrigan could almost laugh with the relief that shot through her. "Bib, if we turned the cap inside out and put it back on someone's head, would that wake them?"
"It should," the book said after a moment. "Turn it inside out and put it back on me." He sighed loudly, riffling his pages from top to bottom down one side. "I do hate these limitations to my powers of analysis. Someday, there's going to be something very sticky and wet and staining that I will have to study, and I dread thinking of the damage to my papers when that happens."
Belinda and Merrigan smiled, but neither could laugh. Merrigan's fingers itched as she turned the cap inside out and laid it on Bib's open pages. After a few moments, he announced that yes, she was right—reversing the cap reversed the sleeping spell.
"You don't sneeze and you don't heave when you're asleep," Merrigan said, handing the cap to Belinda.
"But I've awakened myself ... Oh. Yes. When I'm deeply asleep, during the middle of the night, I'm not sick. The spell only starts working when I'm waking."
"You'll be more comfortable while we wait, and hopefully the bait will still work. Besides," Merrigan added, as Belinda walked over to her bed shelf and lifted the curtain, "we can't have you sneezing like mad when those idiots walk into our trap."
"You are brilliant," Belinda said as she lay down. "What did I ever do to deserve a friend like you?" She settled herself, tugged her skirts straight, and pulled up the blanket. She pulled the cap down over her thick curls and sighed. "Oh, I feel bet ..." A soft snore escaped her before her eyes finished closing.
"You're under a curse," Merrigan murmured as she stepped over to pull the curtain down to hide her from sight. "That's what you did to have a friend like me."
Later, when the peas had been boiled soft and chunks of ham and carrots and onions were added, Nasius suggested they put several bowls of soup around Belinda's bed, to increase the spell's reaction. A few snorts issued from the sleeper when the clouds of steam from the bowls first seeped through the curtain, then she quieted again. A far as Merrigan could tell, the other princess was comfortable, no suffering from the proximity of peas.
"What if the sleeping spell totally cancels the spell to bring the princes to her?" she said to Bib, when lunchtime passed and still no foreign princes had invaded the warehouse.
"They're dilettantes," he responded. "The rain only stopped an hour ago. My guess is that they've stayed indoors this whole time." He chuckled, a delightfully malicious sound. "You'd think that all the privations of hunting for so long would weed out the weak and unworthy, so that in the end, only one prince would be left, who has become worthy through effort, and Belinda would be happy to let him carry her back home to her father's kingdom. With all the warping done to her disguise spells and the quite frankly nasty, childish nature of the detection spell, I'm of the opinion that these young men are holding on out of vanity. They can't believe a princess wouldn't want them. Still, their basic nature is showing, when they won't hunt in the rain and cold."
"Meanwhile, Belinda suffers.
