by Terry Brooks
She decided not to correct his warped view of old events or to challenge his obvious lie about thieves. She was enjoying herself far too much to spoil the fun. “So the thieves took you prisoner?” she pressed.
“They did indeed,” Poggwydd continued dramatically, gesturing wildly with his hands. “I fought them off for as long as I could, but there were too many for me. They stole everything I had, trussed me up, and hung me from that tree. Not a care for what might happen to me, left like that; not one glance spared for me as they left.”
“Good thing I came along when I did,” she said.
“Well, you could have come sooner,” he pointed out.
“Are you all right now?”
“I’ve been better, but I think I will be all right after I’ve had something to eat and drink. You haven’t any dried meat in your pockets, do you?”
She shook her head. “Why don’t you come back to the castle with me and get something to eat there. You can be my guest at dinner tonight.”
A look of horror crossed his face, and he shook his head vigorously. “Oh, no, I can’t do that!” He swallowed hard, searching for something more to say. “I would like that, you understand. I would be honored to be your guest. But I have … I have a meeting of the tribal council to attend, and I must get back. Right away. This incident with the thieves has thrown me well off my schedule, which, by the way, is very demanding.”
She nodded. “I suppose so. Well, perhaps another time, then?”
“Yes, another time. That would be wonderful.” He nodded and backed away. “Soon, I promise. It was good seeing you again, Mistrya. Or Ministerya. Good to see that you are doing so well. And your strange little dog, too. Does he still go with you everywhere, or does he sometimes wander? He looks like he needs a lot of fresh air and sunshine, so I hope you let him out now and then. Outside the confines of the castle, I mean.”
She gave him a look, and he smiled with all his teeth showing. “It was just a thought. Well, thank you for cutting me down from that branch, even if you did almost break every bone in my body.” He rubbed himself gingerly to demonstrate the pain he was feeling. “I hope to see you again. I shall, in fact. I have made my home in this part of Landover. A fresh beginning after the encounter with the witch. It took me a long time to get over that, you know. But it was worth it to help you.”
Well, she supposed that he did help her, if only indirectly and inadvertently. By engaging her in conversation, he had kept her out of the Deep Fell long enough for her to learn the truth about what everyone thought had happened to her. He had also provided an object lesson in the temperament and disposition of her would-be teacher and mentor. Witnessing Nightshade’s efforts to destroy him had given her cause to think, for the first time, that she might be making a mistake by staying.
“Good-bye now,” he called over his shoulder to her, moving rapidly away. “Farewell.”
She let him go. There was more to this business of being hung up in the tree than he was telling her, but that was usually the case with G’home Gnomes. She watched him disappear over a rise, and then she turned and started walking again toward the castle with Haltwhistle at her side. Time to be getting on.
She was within hailing distance of the front gates, just across the causeway leading over to the island on which Sterling Silver gleamed in brilliant greeting, when she saw Questor Thews appear on the battlements and wave to her with one stick-thin arm.
She thought the wave looked encouraging.
FATHER KNOWS BEST
Ben Holiday sat across the table from his daughter and stared at her in dismay. It was all too much. Here she was, a young girl who had everything she could possibly want. She was beautiful, intelligent, talented, and skilled. She possessed an extremely potent form of magic. She was the daughter of the King and Queen of Land over and had every opportunity to become something special and to accomplish wonderful things.
Yet her wrongheaded stubbornness and poor judgment eclipsed all of her good qualities and extraordinary abilities and reduced her to a source of constant irritation to those who loved her most.
“Suspended,” he repeated for what must have been the fifth or sixth time, staring down at the letter.
She nodded.
“For using magic.”
She nodded again.
“You used magic?” he repeated in disbelief. “Despite what we agreed? Despite your promise never to do so outside of Landover?”
Mistaya was wise enough to sit there and not even nod this time.
“I don’t understand it. Where was your common sense when all this was happening? What about our agreement to give this a try? Did you think that meant you wouldn’t have to put any effort into it? That you could just do whatever you felt like doing without any consideration for the consequences?”
She straightened just a bit. “Why don’t you just accept that this was a bad idea in the first place? I don’t belong over there. I belong here.”
His jaw clenched and he felt his face redden. He wanted to tell her that she belonged where he told her she belonged, but he managed to keep from doing so. Barely.
“So what I want for you—what your mother wants for you—that doesn’t count at all?”
“Not when it’s the wrong thing.” She sighed. “If you were in my shoes, what would you do? You wouldn’t let someone send you to a place where you didn’t fit in, where people made fun of you and called you names, where they didn’t even understand the importance of taking care of their trees. Would you?”
Ben didn’t know what he would do, and he didn’t think that was the issue here. They weren’t talking about him; they were talking about her. That wasn’t the same thing at all.
He took a deep breath to calm himself and exhaled slowly. King of Landover, ruler of a nation, overseer of a crossroads that linked multiple worlds, and he couldn’t even control his own daughter. He didn’t know when he had been as angry as he was at this moment. Or when he had been so frustrated. He felt powerless in the face of her emotionless response to what had happened and her clear refusal to allow it to affect her in any meaningful way. She wasn’t talking about when she would go back or what she would do to make that happen. She wasn’t talking about going back at all. This was his idea, damn it. His idea for her to go to a boarding school in his world and mingle with girls her own age. Not girls with magic at their command. Not creatures strange and exotic, dragons and mud puppies and the like, for which she had such a fondness. Real, live human girls with human quirks and oddities that required that she exercise at least a modicum of diplomacy. But did she do this? Did she even try? Oh, no, not Mistaya. Instead, if this letter was any indication, she had simply run roughshod over students, administration, and rules with no regard for anyone but herself, and the end result was that she had gotten tossed right out the door.
Now she was sitting here as if nothing important had happened, looking not in the least contrite or ashamed, having decided quite clearly that this put an end to his grand experiment as far as she was concerned.
He read the letter from Headmistress Harriet Appleton once more as he tried to think what to say.
“Reading it again won’t change anything,” his daughter declared quietly. “I broke their stupid rules, and I’m out.”
“You’re out because you didn’t try to fit in!” he snapped. “You keep trying to turn this back on the school and the other students, but it’s really about what you failed to do. Life requires that you make concessions; not everything will go your way. That was what I was hoping you might learn by attending Carrington. You have to work at being part of a larger community. How do you think I function as King? I have to take other people’s feelings and needs into consideration. I have to remember that they don’t always see things the same way I do. I have to treat them with respect and understanding, even when I don’t agree with them. I can’t just tell them what to do and sit back. It doesn’t work like that!”
“Perhaps Mistaya needs a littl
e more time to grow up in Landover before she goes back into your world,” Willow offered quietly. She had been sitting off to one side, listening, saying nothing until now.
Ben glanced over at his wife and saw his daughter’s features mirrored in her face. But the similarity ended there. Willow was measured and calm in her thinking while Mistaya was emotionally driven, quick to act, and less willing to spend time deliberating. Of course, Willow had been like that, too, when she was younger, before Mistaya was born. Probably she understood their daughter better than he did, but she wasn’t saying anything to demonstrate it.
“She’s a very mature, smart young lady,” Ben pointed out. “Much smarter and more mature than those girls who got the best of her.” He shook his head. “She needs to be able to deal with this sort of thing. It’s not going to go away just because she’s come back here. There will be challenges of the same sort in Landover, whether today or tomorrow or somewhere down the road. That’s just the way it is.”
He looked back at his daughter. “But we’re getting away from the point. You’ve been suspended from Carrington, and now I get the clear impression that you don’t think you’re going back.”
“It’s not an impression,” she replied. “It’s a fact. I’m not going back.”
Ben nodded slowly. “Then what is it that you think you are going to do?”
“Stay here in Landover and study with Questor and Abernathy and learn from whatever they can teach me.” She paused. “Is that so unreasonable?”
That’s not the issue, Ben thought. This isn’t about being reasonable; it’s about doing what’s expected of you when there’s something to be gained from doing so. But Mistaya wasn’t about to see it that way, and he couldn’t think of a way to change that at present. He knew he couldn’t let her get away with this, couldn’t let her come back and dictate what she was going to do with her life after failing to give the learning experience he had afforded her a decent chance. He just didn’t know what to do about it.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said carefully. “I’ll give it some thought. I’ll talk it over with Questor and Abernathy and see what they think. They may have some ideas on the matter, too. Fair enough?”
She eyed him suspiciously, but he held her gaze until finally she nodded. “I suppose.”
She rose, walked over to her mother, and bent to kiss her cheek. Then, without looking at her father, she left the room.
Ben glared as she closed the door behind her. He waited until he was sure she was safely out of hearing and then said, “I can’t let her get away with this.”
“This isn’t personal, Ben,” his wife said quietly. “She’s a young girl trying hard to grow up under difficult circumstances.”
He stared. “What are you talking about? She’s got everything! How much easier could it possibly be for her?”
Willow came over and knelt next to him, one hand on his arm. “It could be easier if she were like everyone else and she didn’t have to work so hard at trying to be so. You forget what it was like for you when you first came into Landover. Another world entirely, another life, everything you knew left behind, everything unfamiliar and uncertain.”
She was right, of course. He had purchased his right to be King through a Christmas catalog in a scheme that was designed to take his money and leave him sadder but wiser or, in the alternative, dead. He hadn’t really believed a place like Landover existed or that he could be King of it, but he had lost his wife and child, his faith in himself, and his sense of place in the world; he was desperate for a chance to start over. He had been given that chance, but it was nothing like what he had expected, and it took everything he had to fulfill its promise.
Willow had been there to help him almost from the start. She had come to him at night in a lake where he had impulsively gone swimming, a vision out of a fairy world, slender and perfect, a sylph daughter of the River Master, her skin a pale green that was almost silvery, her hair a darker, richer green, fine fringes of it growing like thin manes down the backs of her arms and legs. He had never seen anything like her, and he knew he never would again. She was still the most exotic, marvelous woman he had ever known, and every day he spent with her was a treasure he could scarcely believe it was his good fortune to possess.
Willow patted his arm. “It might not seem like it, but she’s doing the best she can. Mistaya is a grown woman intellectually, but she is still emotionally very young. She is trying to find a balance between the two, and I don’t think she’s done that yet.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” he demanded in frustration. “I can’t just stand around and do nothing.”
“Be patient with her. Give her some time. Keep talking to her, but don’t try to force her to do something she so clearly doesn’t want to do. I know you think it is important for her to spend time in your world. I know you believe there are things there that would help her to be a better person. But maybe all that can wait a few years.”
She stood up, her dark eyes warm and encouraging. “Think about it. I’m going to go talk to her alone and see if I can help.”
She left the room and, as always, his heart went with her.
He walked over to the window after she was gone and stared out at the countryside. His reflection was mirrored in the glass, and he looked at himself with critical disdain. His hair was graying at the temples, and the lines on his forehead and around his eyes were deepening. He was aging, although not so quickly as he had before coming over from his old world. Aging in Landover was slower, although he had never been able to take an accurate measure of its general rate of progress because it differed considerably from one species to the next. Some aged much more slowly than others. Some, like Mistaya, followed no recognizable pattern. Fairies, he had been told, did not age at all.
He should be fifty-eight or so by now, by normal Earth standards. But he looked and felt as though he were about fifteen years younger. It was most noticeable when he crossed back through the mists and saw his old friend and partner from the law firm, Miles Bennett. Miles looked years older than Ben did. Miles knew it, but never spoke of it. Miles was like that; he understood that life treated people differently.
Especially if you lived in Landover and you were Ben Holiday.
He remembered anew his own first impressions when he had come into Landover to take possession of the throne some twenty years ago. Culture shock did not begin to describe what he had experienced. All of his expectations of what being King would mean were dashed immediately. His castle was a tarnished ruin. His court consisted of a wizard whose magic wouldn’t work right, a scribe that had been turned into a dog and couldn’t be turned back into a man again, and a cook and runner who looked like evil monkeys but were actually creatures called kobolds.
And those were just the occupants of the castle.
Outside, there were knights, a dragon, a witch, trolls, G’home Gnomes, elves, and various other creatures of all types, shapes, and persuasions. There were demons housed underneath Landover in a hellish place called Abaddon that Ben had been forced to enter several times over the years. There were trees and plants and flowers that were incredibly beautiful and could kill you as quick as you could blink. There were cave wights and bog wumps and crustickers and cringe-inducing vermin you didn’t want to get within spitting distance of. Literally.
There was the castle herself, Sterling Silver, a living breathing entity. Formed of hard substances and infused with magic, she was created to be the caregiver for Landover’s Kings, seeing to their comfort and their needs, watching over them, linked to them as mother to a child. The life of the King was the life of the castle, and the two were inextricably joined.
Finally, there was the Paladin.
He stopped himself. Don’t go there, he told himself angrily. This isn’t the time for it.
But when was it ever the time? When did he ever want to think about the truth of who and what he was?
He shifted his gaze to the land beyond and
his thoughts to his daughter’s return. He knew he could not just ignore what she had done, but he also knew that Willow was right when she said it would be a mistake for him to force Mistaya into something she had so clearly set herself against. Carrington was still a good idea, but maybe not right now. Given that admission, painful though it was, the problem remained of what to do with her. She would happily return to being tutored by Questor and Abernathy. And why not? Both were besotted with her and would let her do pretty much what she chose.
Which, in part, was why he had sent her off to boarding school in the first place, thinking it might help her to have some rules and some social interactions that didn’t involve a hapless wizard and a talking dog.
He returned to his chair. He was still sitting there thinking, mostly to no avail, when there was a knock on the door, and Questor Thews and Abernathy stepped through.
He gave them a critical once-over as they approached. Now, there’s the original odd couple, he thought.
He loved them to death, would have done anything for either one, and couldn’t possibly have succeeded as King of Landover without their help.
Still, you couldn’t ignore how odd they were.
Questor Thews was the court wizard, a trained conjurer whose principal duties included acting as adviser to the King and making his life simpler by the use of magical skills. Trouble was, Questor wasn’t very good at either, but especially the latter. Ben would give him credit for moments of helpful advice, with a few notable lapses, but the court wizard’s use of magic was another matter entirely. It wasn’t that he didn’t try or didn’t have good intentions; it was all in his execution. With the magic of Questor Thews, you never knew what you were going to get. Much of their time together had been spent figuring out ways to correct the many things that Questor’s magic had gotten wrong.