A Princess of Landover (12 page)

He frowned. “Why would you give your clothing to me? Why would you need to keep it safe?”

She thought quickly, and then leaned in close to him. “All right, I’ll tell you why. But you must agree to keep it a secret.” She waited for his nod. “I have some clothes my parents gave me that I want to give to someone else who needs them more than I do. But I don’t want my parents to see me taking them away because it will make them feel bad.”

He struggled with this a moment, his monkey face screwed in thought, and finally he said, “Oh, very well. I can keep them if you want.” Then he stopped abruptly. “Wait. How long do I have to keep them? I don’t have anywhere to put them where they will be safe, you know.”

She nodded. “You just need to keep them safe until tonight. I will come meet you after it’s dark and take them back from you. All right?”

She could tell it wasn’t, not entirely. Taking things in the course of scrounging or stealing was perfectly all right, but taking them any other way seemed odd. Poggwydd was clearly thinking that this could somehow come back to bite him, taking the personal clothing of Landover’s Princess, whether it was her idea or not.

“Poggwydd,” she said, taking his hands in her own. “You won’t be getting into any trouble, I promise. In fact, this would mean I owe you a favor in return.”

He seemed to like the sound of that, and he gave her a crooked smile. “All right, Princess. Where are these clothes?”

She took him to an anteroom off her bedchamber and had him wait while she pulled out travel clothes and packed them in a duffel bag she could sling over her shoulder. Not much, but enough to see her through the few days it would take to reach the lake country and her grandfather. She added a compass, a virtual map ring (really a handy tool for nighttime travel), a small fairy stone (a present for her grandfather), and a book on wizard spells that Questor had given her before she left for Carrington, which she had only just started reading again. This last might offer something useful in the days ahead, and since it was pocket-sized it was easily carried. Then she wrapped the duffel in an old sheet, tied the corners of the sheet in knots to secure everything, and took it out to him.

“I’ll meet you at the Bonnie Blues tonight,” she promised as she walked him to the front entry. A few curious glances were cast their way, but she ignored them and no one said anything. “Just remember to be there to meet me,” she added.

She ushered him back through the gates and went up to her room to wait for nightfall.

It was all very exciting.

S
he managed to put up a good front through dinner, even pretending that she would think more about going off to Libiris—
(as if!)
—and would take her father at his word that there would be no more encounters with the marriage-minded Laphroig. She had more faith in him on this one. But she was fifteen years old, and no fifteen-year-old ever took the word of a parent at face value and without reservations. It wasn’t that parents were deliberately duplicitous—although sometimes they clearly were—but rather that they tended to forget their promises or to find a way to misconstrue their parameters. Whenever that happened, it somehow always ended up the child’s fault. Given where things stood in her life, Mistaya was having no part of that.

But she talked and smiled and laughed and pretty much acted the way she knew they wanted her to act and didn’t let her anxiety over managing a clean break interfere with their meal. She loved her parents, after all, and she knew they wanted only the best for her. Mostly, they delivered. But in this case they were going to have to start over and find a better route.

When dinner was finished, she excused herself on the pretext of wanting to do some reading and retired to her bedchamber. There she sat down to wait, biding her time until the castle stilled and her parents retired. They always followed the same procedure, looking in on her before going off to bed, so she couldn’t try to leave before then. Because she had slipped them a sleep-inducing potion in their ale at dinner, they were likely to check in on her much sooner than usual. So she sat patiently, and before long there was a knock at her door.

“Mistaya?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Your father and I are going to bed now. But you and I will have a talk in the morning about what’s happening. Your father means well, but he is impetuous and sometimes oversteps his parental boundaries. Sleep well.”

Mistaya listened to her footsteps recede, and as she did so she felt a pang of regret over what she intended to do. She had committed herself, though, and there was no guarantee that her mother could help her in this business, no matter how well intended she was. Better that she go to her grandfather’s and bargain from a position of relative strength.

She gave it another ten minutes, then pulled on her cloak and went out the door.

It was dark and silent in the hallway, and she slipped down its length on cat’s paws, little more than a passing shadow faintly outlined by clouded moonlight against the wall. She didn’t have far to go, so she took her time, careful not to make a sound or do anything that would alert the watch. Once she was safely down the hallway and had reached the hidden passage, they were unlikely to find her no matter how hard they looked.

She arrived at her destination without incident, triggered the lock in the panel that concealed the door, waited for it to slowly open, and stepped inside. From there, she went through the walls and down the stairs to the cellars, opened another hidden door in the stone-block walls, and followed a second passage to the outer walls and the door hidden there that opened to the outside world. She knew all this because she had made a point of finding out. You never knew when you might need a way to slip out without being seen, and an obliging Questor Thews, not once suspecting her reasons for asking, had revealed it all to her some time back. She supposed this constituted some sort of betrayal of trust, but she didn’t have time to worry over it now.

Once outside the walls, she slipped around to where the old rowboat was anchored at the back docks, stepped in, and paddled
her way across the moat to the far shore. It took hardly any time at all, and because the moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, there was no light to betray her to the watch should they happen to look down from their towers.

Smiling with no small measure of self-satisfaction at how easily she had accomplished her goal, she prepared to set out for the stand of Bonnie Blues and Poggwydd. But first she decided to see if Haltwhistle was anywhere around. She called for him in a whisper, and almost immediately he appeared, standing right in front of her, short legs barely enough to keep his mottled brown body off the ground, long floppy ears faring little better, reptilian tail wagging gently.

“Good old Haltwhistle,” she greeted, and she kissed at him on the air.

Together they went looking for Poggwydd. They found him waiting in something of a grumpy mood, sitting with Mistaya’s sheet-wrapped travel bag clutched between his bony knees, a scowl on his wizened face. “Took your sweet time about getting out here, Princess,” he muttered.

“I had to be careful,” she pointed out. She reached for her bag, smiling. “Thank you for taking care of my clothes, Poggwydd.”

To her surprise, he put both arms around the bag and hugged it possessively. “Not so fast. I have a few questions first.”

She fought down a sudden surge of irritation. “What do you mean? What sort of questions?”

“The kind that require explanations. For instance, why do you need a compass, a map ring, a fairy stone, and a book of wizard spells to deliver a bunch of old clothes?”

Her jaw dropped. “Did you look through my things?”

“Answer my question.”

She was fuming now. “Precautions against trouble. I have to travel some distance to make the delivery. Will you give them to me please?”

He ignored her. “Traveling is required because whoever you are taking these clothes to cannot come to the castle to get them?”

“That’s partly it. Give me the bag, Poggwydd.”

If anything, his grip grew tighter. “Hmmm. You know, Princess, it’s dangerous traveling alone at night. I think I had better go with you.”

“I can do this by myself, thank you. Besides, I have Haltwhistle.”

“That’s right. You have the assistance of your weird little dog. Clearly, he is a better friend to you than I am.”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped.

“Well, you trust him enough to take him along, but not me. He probably knows the truth about what you’re doing, doesn’t he?”

Her mind was racing. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Then allow me to enlighten you. Maybe it slipped your mind, but you are running away.”

“I am not!” She tried to sound indignant. “If you don’t give me my bag right now, I really will stop being your friend!”

“Sneaking out of the castle at night, having me meet you with clothes and travel stuff you could have carried out by yourself, and then telling me you intend to go somewhere mysterious alone? Sounds like someone running away to me.”

She regretted ever thinking it a good idea to give her bag to this ferret-faced idiot. But it was too late for regrets. She had thought herself so clever, letting Poggwydd do the hauling. That way, she had reasoned, she wouldn’t be burdened with the extra weight and if caught could argue that she was just going for a walk.

“You better tell me the truth about this right now!” he insisted. “If you don’t, I’m going to start yelling.”

“All right, don’t do that!” She sighed, resigned to the inevitable. “My parents and I have had a disagreement. I am going to visit my grandfather for a while, and I don’t want them to know where I am. Okay?”

Poggwydd looked horrified. He leaped to his feet, arms waving. “You really are running away?”

“Not exactly. Just … taking a vacation.”

“Vacation? You’re running away! And I’m helping you! And after you’re gone, they’re going to find out about me, and they’re going to say that it is all my fault!”

She held up her hands in an attempt to calm him. “No, they’re not. Why would they blame you?”

“Because G’home Gnomes get blamed for everything, that’s why! And I’ll get blamed for this! Someone will remember that I was the last one to visit you. Someone will remember that I left carrying a bag of clothing. Someone will tell that kobold, and he will come after me and hang me from the tree again!”

“No, he won’t. Bunion promised—”

“It doesn’t matter what he promised!” Poggwydd snapped, cutting her short. He was beside himself, hopping up and down in agitation and dismay. “This is all your fault! You’re leaving me behind to pay for your bad behavior! You used me to help you, and now you are leaving me! Well, I won’t stand for it! I shall alert the watch immediately and then they can’t blame me!”

He started to turn away, heading for the castle, and she was forced to reach out and grab his arm. “Wait! You can come with me!”

He tried to jerk his arm free and failed. “Why would I do that?” he demanded, stopping where he was. “Why would I come with you?”

“Because we’re friends!”

That silenced him for a moment, and he stood there looking at her as if she had just turned into a bog wump.

“Friends don’t leave friends behind,” she continued. “You were right about my decision to leave without you. I was being selfish. You should come with me.”

He seemed suddenly confused. “I
was
right, wasn’t I? I knew I was. But …” He stopped again, trying to think it through. “You’re going to see your grandfather? The River Master? You want me to go with you to the lake country? But they don’t like G’home Gnomes there. They like them there even less than they do everywhere else.” He paused. “Except maybe in the Deep Fell, where the witch lives.”

“We’re not going to the Deep Fell,” she assured him, although suddenly she was thinking that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. With Nightshade still not returned from wherever her misguided
magic had dispatched her almost five years earlier, the Deep Fell was safe enough. Well, maybe not all that safe, she conceded.

“I think this is a bad idea,” he continued. “You shouldn’t leave home like this. You should tell someone or they will worry and come hunting for you. If they find you, they’ll find me and I’ll get all the blame!”

She was massively irritated with his whining, but she recognized that there was a reason for it and that she had brought the whole thing on herself by involving him in the first place.

“What if I write you a note?” she asked him.

“A note? What sort of note?”

“One that says you are not to blame for this. They would know my handwriting. They would know it was genuine.”

He thought about it a moment. “I think I will just come with you and take my chances,” he said finally.

She almost started arguing against it, then remembered it had been her suggestion in the first place. “Well, that’s settled then. Can I have my bag now, please?”

Grudgingly, he released his grip and shoved it toward her. “Here. Take the old thing. Do what you want with it.” Surly and grumpy-faced, he lurched to his feet. “Let’s get going while we still can.”