A Princess of Landover (2 page)

V
ince stood at the edge of the enclosure and studied the odd bird just as he had been studying her for the better part of the five years following her abrupt and mysterious appearance. Every day, right after he got off work—unless there was a pressing reason to get home to his family—he stopped for a look. He couldn’t have explained why, even if pressed to do so. Woodland Park Zoo was filled with strange and exotic creatures, some of them species so rare that they had never been seen in the wild. The crow with the red eyes was one of these. Whether she was truly a species apart or simply an aberration was something ornithologists and experts in related areas had been trying to determine from the beginning, all without success. It didn’t matter much to Vince. He just found the crow intriguing and liked watching it.

What he didn’t much care for was the way the crow seemed to like watching him, those red eyes so intent and filled with some unreadable emotion. He wished he knew its story, but he never would, of course. Crows couldn’t talk or even think much. They just reacted to the instincts they were born with. They just knew how to survive.

“How did you get here?” Vince asked softly, speaking only to himself, watching the bird watching him.

It had popped up at the local animal shelter, not there one day and there the next, come out of nowhere. He still wondered how that could be possible. The shelter was a closed compound, and birds didn’t just fly in or out. But this one had. Somehow.

The experts had tried to trap it repeatedly after it had been transported to the zoo, hoping to get close enough to study it more carefully. But they should have thought of that before they released it into the aviary. All their efforts had failed. The bird seemed to know their intentions ahead of time and avoided all their clumsy
attempts to get their hands on it. They had to content themselves with studying it from afar, which they did until more pressing and fruitful pursuits had turned their heads another way. If the bird had not been a bird, but one of the big cats or lumbering giants of the African veldt, it would have gotten more attention, Vince thought. There would have been more money for research, more public interest, something to drive the effort to learn its origins. Vince knew how things worked at the zoo. The squeaky wheel got the grease.

Vince watched the bird some more, perched way up there in the branches, a Queen over her subjects. So regal. So contemptuous, almost. As if it knew how much better it was than the others.

He shook his head. Birds didn’t think like that. It was stupid to think they did.

He glanced at his watch. Time to be getting home. The wife and kids would be waiting dinner. There was a game on TV tonight that he wanted to see. He stretched, yawned. Tomorrow was another workday.

He was walking away, headed for the parking lot and his car, when something made him glance back. The crow with the red eyes was watching him still, following his movements. Vince shook his head, uneasy. He didn’t like that sort of intense scrutiny, especially not from a bird. There was something creepy about it. Like it was stalking him or something. Like it would hunt him down and kill him if it were set free.

He quit looking at it and walked on, chiding himself for such foolish thinking. It was just a bird, after all. It was only a bird.

UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

H
eadmistress Harriet Appleton sat straight-backed at her desk, a huge wooden monstrosity that Mistaya could only assume had been chosen for the purpose of making students entering this odious sanctum sanctorum feel uncomfortably small. The desk gleamed gem-like beneath repeated polishings, perhaps administered by girls who had misbehaved or otherwise fallen afoul of the powers that be. Surely there were many such in an institution of this sort, where
fair play
and
justice
were primitive, possibly even passé, words.

“Come in, Misty,” Miss Appleton invited her. “Take a seat.”

Said the spider to the fly
, Mistaya thought.

Wanting nothing so much as to tell this woman exactly what she could do with her suggestion, she nevertheless closed the door behind her and crossed to the two chairs placed in front of the desk. She took a moment to decide which one she wanted, and then she sat.

Through the window of the headmistress’s office, she could see the campus, the trees bare-leafed with the arrival of December, the ground coated with an early-morning frost and the stone and brick buildings hard-edged and fortress-like as they hunkered down under temperatures well below freezing. New England was not a pleasant place for warm-blooded creatures at this time of year, and
the buildings didn’t look any too happy about it, either. Hard to tell with buildings, though.

“Misty,” the headmistress said, drawing her attention anew. She had her hands folded comfortably on the desktop and her gaze leveled firmly on the young girl. “I think we need to have a talk, you and I. A different talk than the ones we’ve had previously.”

She reached for a folder, virtually the only item on the desk aside from the telephone, a stone image of an owl, and a school cup filled with an assortment of pens and pencils. There was a framed picture, as well, facing away from Mistaya. Although she was interested in who might be in the picture, she could not see without standing up and walking around to the other side of the desk, something she would under no circumstances do.

The headmistress opened the file and made a point of shuffling through the pages it contained, even though Mistaya was quite certain she had already read it enough times to have memorized the contents. Miss Appleton was irritating, but no fool.

“This is your third visit to my office in less than three months,” Harriet Appleton pointed out quietly, voice deliberately lowered in what Mistaya could only assume was an effort to convey the seriousness of the situation. “None of these visits was a pleasant one, the sort I like having with my students. Even more distressing, none of them was necessary.”

She waited, but Mistaya kept quiet, eyes locked on the other’s sharp-featured face—a face that reminded her a little of Cruella De Vil in that dog movie. Were there no beautiful headmistresses in the schools of America?

“The first time you were sent to me,” the headmistress of the moment continued, “it was for fomenting trouble with the grounds crew. You told them they had no right to remove a tree, even though the board of directors had specifically authorized it. In fact, you organized a school protest that brought out hundreds of students and shut down classes for three days.”

Mistaya nodded. “Trees are sentient beings. This one had been
alive for over two hundred years and was particularly well attuned to our world, an old and proud representative of her species. There was no one to speak for her, so I decided I would.”

The headmistress smiled. “Yes, so you said at the time. But you will remember I suggested that taking it up with either the dean of students or myself before fomenting unrest among your classmates might have avoided the disciplinary action that followed.”

“It was worth it,” Mistaya declared, and sat up even straighter, chin lifting in defiance.

Harriet Appleton sighed. “I’m glad you think so. But you don’t seem to have learned anything from it. The next time you were in this office, it was the same story. You didn’t come to me first, as I had asked. Once again you took matters into your own hands. This time it was something about ritualistic scarring, as I remember. You formed a club—again, without authorization or even consultation with the school teaching staff—to engage in a bonding-with-nature program. Instead of awarding patches or other forms of insignia, you decided on scarring. An African-influenced art form, you explained at the time, though I never understood what that had to do with us. Some two dozen scars were inflicted before word got back to the dean of students and then to me.”

Mistaya said nothing. What was there to say? Miss Applebutt had it exactly right, even if she didn’t fully understand what was at stake. If you didn’t take time to form links to the living things around you—things besides other students—you risked causing irreparable harm to the environment. She had learned that lesson back in Landover, something the people of this country—well, this
world
, more correctly—had not. It was exceedingly annoying to discover that the students of Carrington Women’s Preparatory were virtually ignorant on this point. Mistaya had provided their much-needed education in the form of a game. Join a club; make a difference in the world. The scarring was intended to convey the depth of commitment of the participating members and to serve as a reminder of the pain and suffering human ignorance fostered. Moreover,
it was accomplished using the sharp ends of branches shed by the trees that were part of the living world they were committed to protecting. It made perfect sense to her.

Besides, the scarring was done in places that weren’t normally exposed to the light of day.

“I didn’t see the need to bother anyone about it,” she offered, a futile attempt at an explanation. “Everyone who participated did so voluntarily.”

“Well, their parents thought quite differently, once they found out about it. I don’t know what your parents allow you to do in your own home, but when you are at Carrington, you have to follow the rules. And the rules say you need permission to form clubs or groups actively engaged on campus. The students are underaged girls, Misty.
You
are an underaged girl. You are only fifteen!”

Well, technically, perhaps. If you measured it by how she looked. Her real age was a matter of debate even in her own home. There was the age you were physically and there was the age you were mentally. There was the number of years you had lived and the extent to which your mind had developed. When you were born from a seedling nourished in the soil of a land where magic was real and a part of you, the commonly accepted rules about growth did not necessarily apply. No point in getting into that, however. Miss Harriet Half-Wit would never understand it, not even if Mistaya spent from now until the end of next year trying to explain.

“Which brings us to the present and the point of this third visit,” the headmistress continued, shaking her head to emphasize the point. “Even I didn’t think you would ignore my second warning about not acting on your own when it had been made clear to you that it would not be tolerated under any circumstances. What were you thinking?”

“Is this about Rhonda Masterson?” she asked incredulously.

“Yes, it is about Rhonda. It is exactly about Rhonda. She’s hysterical! She had to be sedated by the nurse. Her parents will have to be informed. I can’t imagine what I am going to tell them. That you traumatized their daughter by threatening her? That you scared her
so badly that the entire school is talking about it? I am appalled, Misty. And I am angry.”

Mistaya could tell that much. But she still didn’t see the problem. “She called me a name. She did it in front of everybody. She did it to make me angry, and it worked. She got what she deserved.”

“For calling you a name? What name?”

Mistaya tightened her lips. “I can’t repeat it. I won’t.”

“But what did you do to her to frighten her like that?”

Well, that was hard to explain, and Mistaya knew she better not even try if she wanted to keep the truth about herself a private matter. Princess of Landover, born of a human come from this world and a sylph who occasionally turned into a tree—how could she explain that? Telling them the truth about her father was out of the question. Telling them about her mother might give some credence to her commitment to saving trees, but it wouldn’t do much for her overall credibility. Telling them about her real life, which was not in Landover, Maryland, as they all thought, but in the Kingdom of Landover, which was another world entirely, would only lead to them locking her up for evaluation. There just wasn’t much she could say.

Still, she had to say something.

She sighed. “I just told Rhonda that if she kept this up, I was going to get her, that’s all.”

But Harriet Appleton was already shaking her head in a sign of dissatisfaction with the answer. “It had to be something more than that to frighten her the way you did. You whispered something to her, and then—this is what some of the other students told me—you … you did something else to her.”

Other students. Rhonda’s sycophantic followers, all of them blue-blooded East Coast snots from lots of money and little brains. They had been on her case since she arrived at Carrington, making fun of her, teasing her, pulling mean tricks on her, doing anything they could to make her life unpleasant. This time they had pushed her too far. Though forbidden to do so under any circumstances, she had used her magic. Just a little of it, but enough to make them sit up and take notice. A quick conjure of an image of someone she knew
from Landover, someone they should hope they never encountered in real life.

She had shown them Strabo. Up close and personal. Especially Rhonda, who had been made to smell the dragon’s breath.