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FLIGHT

Mistaya marched back through the castle to her sleeping chamber without speaking to anyone—not even to a bewildered Questor Thews, who tried to ask her a question—closed and locked the chamber door, and sat down to contemplate her undeserved misery. The day was bright and clear and sunny outside her window, but in her heart there was only gloom and despair.

How could her father be so unfeeling?

It was bad enough that she had returned home under a dark cloud, suspended from the prestigious boarding school to which he had sent her with such high hopes, her future a big, fat blank slate on which she had no idea what she would write. It was worse still that she was almost immediately confronted with a marriage proposal she didn’t need from a man she didn’t like, a proposal so outrageous that it should have been rejected out of hand and yet somehow wasn’t. But to top it all off, she was now looking at months of exile to a place that no one in their right mind would visit under any circumstances, a gloomy and empty set of buildings that were crumbling and breaking apart, that were filled with dust and debris, and that housed moldering old books no one had opened in decades.

At least, that was the way she envisioned it in her mind as she sat before her mirror and looked at her stricken face and thought to herself that no one should have to endure this.

She grew tired rather quickly of feeling sorry for herself and turned away. She walked over to the window, stared out at the countryside for a moment, then opened the window and breathed in the scents of Bonnie Blues and Rillshing Cedars. She loved her home. She loved everything about it, and what hurt her most about everything that was happening was that she was going to have to leave it. Technically Libiris was also her home, since it was a part of Landover, but not all parts of Landover were created equal. Consider the Fire Springs and the wastelands east, for instance—nothing in that part of the country was particularly charming. But Libiris was worse still.

Or so Questor had led her to believe.

She thought about her friend and mentor for a moment and could not quite make herself believe that it had been his idea to send her there. But her father would not lie about such a thing; it would be too easy to find him out if he did—and besides, he never lied. He did a few other irritating things from time to time, but not that.

She drummed her fingers on the windowsill and thought. There was no point in sitting around feeling sorry for herself. She would have to do something about her situation if she wanted it to improve.

Her first impulse was to talk to her mother. Willow was more sympathetic to her plight, more understanding of her struggles in general. But her mother was unlikely to cross her father in this instance and would probably suggest that Mistaya give Libiris a chance. Questor and Abernathy supported her father already, so there was no point in pleading with them.

She sighed. This was all so unfair.

She had a sudden urge to cry, and she almost gave in to it. But crying was for babies and cowards, and she wouldn’t do it no matter how much she wanted to. She stiffened against it, reminding herself that teen angst was for those movie magazines and romance novels that she had discovered in her father’s world. In Landover, there was no place for it.

All right, her mother was out. Her friends were out. Whatever help she was going to find, she would have to find elsewhere.

Right away, she thought of her grandfather, the River Master. The River Master was the leader of the fairy-born—a collection of creatures that had forsaken the fairy mists that encircled Landover to come live in the world of humans. They made their home in the lake country south of Sterling Silver and more particularly in the city of Elderew. She could go there, and her grandfather would take her in and give her shelter and might not even tell her parents—at least, not right away. Willow was his daughter, but their relationship had never been all that strong. Willow’s mother was a wood nymph whom he had never been able to tame or hold, a wild creature that refused to marry or even to settle. Willow was a reminder of her, and her grandfather neither needed nor wanted reminding. He liked Ben even less, an interloper from another world become King through a series of happy coincidences who didn’t really deserve the job. Her grandfather tolerated him, but nothing more.

She had learned all this while growing up, some of it from Questor and Abernathy and some from her own observations and experiences. She had never appreciated her grandfather’s attitude, but she could see where it might come in handy in this instance. Because even though the River Master was not close to her parents, he loved Mistaya intensely.

Of course, there was always the possibility that he was angry with her for not having come to see him for more than a year. That might require a little repair work on her part—perhaps even a little groveling. She thought about it a moment and then shrugged. Well, she could grovel, if she had to. She would find a way to win him over, whatever it took. Going to Elderew was the best option open to her.

She folded her arms defiantly and nodded. Yes, she would run away to her grandfather. And she would do so immediately. No waiting around for the inevitable; no praying for a miracle. She would leave tonight.

She would pack some clothes and sneak out of the castle while everyone was sleeping. That might not be so easy. The castle was guarded, and her father’s retainers were under orders to keep a close watch over her. It helped that Bunion was off checking on The Frog, but there were other eyes. If she tried to leave carrying a suitcase or a backpack, someone would notice and report it and she would be hauled back before she got halfway to Elderew.

Even more troubling was the fact that her father had ways of finding her, even if she didn’t tell him where she was going. Once he discovered she was gone, he would use the Landsview or one of his other magical devices to track her down. Then he would simply mount up and come looking for her. She would have to find a way to thwart him.

She frowned with irritation. This couldn’t happen in his old world, where you could be found only through technological means and not through magic. But she wasn’t about to go back to where she had come from.

Was she?

No, of course not, she chided herself. What was the point of going back to the very place where she had been so miserable? But it did suggest another possibility. She could pass out of Landover into any world; like the fairies in the mists and the dragon Strabo in the Fire Springs, she had that ability. Once she was outside Landover, her father might never find her. It was an interesting thought, and she mulled it over for a long few moments. In the end, however, she discarded it. Leaving Landover wasn’t acceptable. She had come home to Landover to stay and stay she would—just not at Libiris.

She flounced back over to the window, breathed in the scents of the countryside, rushed back to her bed and threw herself down, staring at the ceiling as she tried to work out the details of a plan. But planning wasn’t her strong point. She reacted to people and events almost solely on instinct—the result of being a child of three worlds, she imagined—so thinking ahead too far was counterproductive.

She was still considering how to make her escape unnoticed when one of the pages knocked at her door and informed her that she had a visitor—a G’home Gnome, he advised with obvious distaste.

At once she had the answer to her dilemma.

She rushed down to greet Poggwydd, who stood uncertainly at the front entry, gnarled hands clasped as gimlet eyes tried to take in everything at once, his posture suggesting that he had every expectation of being thrown out again momentarily.

“Poggwydd!” she shouted at him with such exuberance that he nearly dropped to his knees in fright. She rushed across the room and embraced him like an old friend. “So you were paying attention to me when I told you to come see me!”

He stiffened and gave her a halfhearted bow. “Of course I was paying attention! I took you at your word and then decided to see how good that word was!”

“Well, now you know.” She smiled, took his hand in her own, and dragged him forward. “Come see the castle. But don’t try to steal anything, all right?”

He mumbled something that she took to be an assent, and for the next hour they wandered the halls of Sterling Silver, looking in all the chambers—(save those her mother and father were occupying)—and talking of how life in the castle worked. She only caught him trying to take something once, and since it was an odd little silver vase, she let him keep it. Gradually, he relaxed and began to act as if he belonged, and they were soon talking with each other like lifelong friends.

As the tour finished and the urgency of her intended mission to escape began to press in upon her, she suddenly had a brilliant idea.

“Poggwydd, can I ask a favor of you?” she said.

He was instantly suspicious. “What sort of favor?”

“Nothing complicated or dangerous,” she reassured him. She shrugged disarmingly. “I just want to give you some clothing to keep safe for me until I need it. Can you do that?”

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.

She 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.”

She started off without speaking, already determined to get rid of him at the first opportunity.