by Kailin Gow
He did know he needed to be part of that group, and not just because he wanted to make sure that Alana was okay. Leaving Spencer and Roland together without him would just be asking for trouble. In fact Wirt doubted that they would get out of the door without some sort of fight. Alana smiled as Wirt moved over to join them.
With the groups assembled, they set off in search of the missing princess, heading through the transport tubes as the different groups tried to cover as much ground as possible. Wirt and the others did the same, shooting through the tubes with even more speed than usual, checking all the obvious places Priscilla might have gone.
They dropped into Llew’s cave, asking the dragon if he had seen her. He shook his head.
“Not recently, boyo. I’ll keep an eye out, though.”
They dropped by the library, in case Priscilla had taken her new lesson seriously enough to want to read up on it. The Thing in charge contrived to indicate, however, that it hadn’t seen her.
They even combed one of the stranger halls of the school, where gravity seemed to depend entirely on the perceptions of the people walking along its floor (and occasionally, its ceiling) just in case Priscilla had wandered in there and floated off.
At the end of that, Spencer shook his head. “This isn’t doing any good. We shouldn’t be searching randomly like this.”
“So you’re saying we should give up,” Roland shot back.
“Spencer isn’t saying that at all,” Wirt said, trying to keep the peace. “We just need to stop and think for a bit. We’re Priscilla’s friends. We should be able to work out where Priscilla might have gone rather than running around the tree without a clue.”
“And how do we do that?” Roland demanded.
“Maybe we should start with her room or something. There might be a hint in there.”
Alana nodded, seeming happy with the idea.
“She sometimes leaves me notes when she’s going somewhere. Or gets her mirror to tell me.”
The mirror. Wirt hadn’t thought of that before. With a magic mirror in hand, why were they searching, when they could just have it tell them where the princess had gone?
Alana seemed to have the same idea. “We need to get back to our room.”
That didn’t take long, and when they got there, Wirt couldn’t help noticing that the place was still dominated by Priscilla’s things, the way it had been the one time he’d seen the inside of the room before, as a frog. There were formal court gowns draped over furniture, shoes everywhere, and old copies of Royal Gossip Monthly scattered around. There was even a collection of plastic troll dolls cluttering up the dresser and lying on their sides, though since Priscilla was the princess of a magical kingdom, these looked a lot more realistic than the usual kind.
To someone who didn’t know Priscilla, it would probably look as though the room had been ransacked, sending them off on some fruitless search for a culprit. Wirt, however, knew as well as anyone that, while the princess might have heard of neatness, she certainly didn’t see how the concept applied to her.
Priscilla’s magic mirror sat on the wall, and Alana moved over to it.
“We need a rhyme,” she said, and then thought for a moment. “Mirror, mirror, shiny and flat, show me where Priscilla’s at?”
Wirt expected the mirror’s voice to come back with some sort of biting comment on the scansion or rhyme, the way it usually did. Instead, however, it remained no more than just an ordinary mirror, reflecting the contents of the room, from the piles of dresses to those hideous troll dolls.
Roland seemed to get into the spirit of things. “How about ‘mirror mirror, hanging there, show me now the princess fair’.”
“Maybe if we’re going for poetry from the nineteenth century,” Spencer muttered. Thankfully, Roland didn’t hear him.
“I think someone must have turned some kind of password protection on,” Alana said, staring at the mirror. “That worries me. Priscilla wouldn’t do that, and it means someone doesn’t want us to find her easily.”
“So we need to search the room,” Wirt said, looking around once more. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of going through Alana and Priscilla’s things. Spencer, meanwhile, looked even more unhappy with that idea, and just stood there while they started to look around.
“What’s new here?” Wirt asked. “What’s different?”
“It’s hard to tell,” Alana said. “Priscilla has so much stuff, and she brought back a bunch of trinkets from the summer too.” She seemed to think for a moment, before moving to the side of her own bed, where a silver-framed picture of her and Spencer sat.
“What is it, Alana?” Roland asked. “Do you know where the princess is?”
Alana shook her head. “Just something I have to do.”
She moved over to the bed, picking up the picture and holding it out to Spencer. “Here, Spencer. I forgot to give you this back.”
“Is this the right time-” Wirt began, but Alana cut him off with a look.
Spencer shook his head. “That was a gift, Alana. Keep it to remind you of me.”
“I don’t want to be reminded of you,” Alana snapped back. “It’s bad enough that I have to see you every day. Now take it back, or I’ll throw it into the lake.”
Spencer took the picture reluctantly, and the atmosphere in the room grew noticeably tense. They kept searching though.
“We need to think about what happened,” Wirt said. “Spencer, you were in class with her, right?”
“I already told you, she got back fine.”
“Obviously she didn’t,” Roland put in.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Shut up, both of you,” Wirt said. “We need to think. Spencer, did anything happen in the class?”
The other boy started to think. “Well, Ms. Genovia did start to talk about her vacation. Something about the frog swamps of Ur. But she was telling us how important it was to get along with people, and how looking a little odd shouldn’t be a barrier to that kind of thing. Priscilla seemed quite enthusiastic about it, now I think about it.”
“She would be,” Alana said. “She went travelling over the summer, meeting different people from the edges of her father’s kingdom. She picked up half the new things here on the way. I’ll say one thing for Priscilla as a princess, she always likes to take an interest in people, make them feel wanted.”
“How does picking up a set of random troll dolls make anyone feel wanted?” Roland asked.
“Those aren’t dolls,” Alana explained. “Those are sculptures of some of the leading trolls in the kingdom. Priscilla commissioned them while she was staying with the trolls, as a way of showing that the royal family cares about them.”
“That’s actually quite clever,” Wirt said.
“Priscilla can be, if people give her a chance.”
Still, Wirt couldn’t help frowning at the thought that someone would treasure the figures. “There are actually creatures out there that look that ugly?”
Alana seemed slightly taken aback by that, but Wirt noticed that at least she was getting involved, rather than just feeling upset that Priscilla was gone. “Wirt, you can’t say things like that. I mean, just think of all the strange people you’ve met since you came to the academy.”
Wirt nodded. He guessed Alana had a point there.
“Anyway, Priscilla said that the trolls were lovely people, and that they hardly ever eat people these days.”
“Hardly ever?” Wirt echoed. “Well, it’s a start, I guess. Spencer, you said Priscilla seemed excited?”
Spencer nodded. “Actually, she said something about not being able to wait to show Ms. Genovia something. You don’t think that’s all this is, do you? She’s gone off to show Ms. Genovia some souvenir, and hasn’t noticed all this trouble? I mean, it’s not like either of them pays much attention to the rest of the school.”
Alana shook her head. “The headmaster got the teachers to look, remember?”
&nbs
p; “Well, maybe Priscilla upset Ms. Genovia, and now she’s hopping round as a frog,” Spencer suggested, before catching Alana’s eye and shutting up.
“That wouldn’t work either,” Wirt said. “Remember, being kissed by a princess undoes the spell, so Priscilla could turn herself back any time she wanted.”
Alana, meanwhile, seemed thoughtful. “There’s something wrong here. Something very wrong.”
“You mean besides Priscilla being missing?” Wirt asked.
Alana nodded. “Besides that. It’s the mirror. Those things are designed to tell the truth. They can’t not do it.”
“Like you said,” Roland pointed out, “there’s probably some kind of password.”
“That was just a guess,” Alana said. “The more I think about it, the more I think that the mirror is telling us the truth.”
“But it’s just showing us the room,” Wirt said.
“Exactly.” Alana moved over in line with the mirror, and it looked to Wirt like she was working out the angles involved. She went to stand next to the dresser, looking down. Wirt followed the line of her gaze. She was looking at the troll dolls. There was a quartet of them. Three of them were warriors, while another wore a bright blue dress and a tiara.
“I know Priscilla can be messy sometimes, but she would never leave these like this,” Alana said, straightening up the dolls. “She knows how much things like this matter to other people. Which means…”
Wirt got it then, grinned at Alana for working it out, and reached out to pick up the princess troll. It seemed to squirm in his grip, and Wirt dropped it to the carpet. A second later, there wasn’t a doll there at all. Just Priscilla, rubbing her elbows as she picked herself up.
“Did you have to drop me?”
“Priscilla?” Alana asked, looking at her friend. “What’s going on? I was worried sick!”
Priscilla grinned. “Gotcha.”
Chapter 13
“Gotcha?” Alana repeated, staring at the princess, and Wirt could hear the subtle warnings that meant it was probably time to run for cover. He’d never seen Alana really lose her temper with her royal charge, but he suspected that might be about to change.
“Careful, Alana,” he said, putting a hand on her arm. After all, he didn’t want Alana to blow her chances of working with Priscilla in the future just because she lost her temper now and called her something she shouldn’t.
Alana shook her head, removing Wirt’s hand from her arm as she did it. “I’m fine. Priscilla, do you have any idea how worried everyone in the school has been about you?”
“You were worried?” Priscilla asked, seeming surprised. “Why would you be worried?”
“Of course I was worried,” Alana snapped back. “I thought you might have been eaten by something, or even some Thing, given what the school can be like.”
“But you found me in the end,” Priscilla said, apparently unrepentant. “That’s the important thing.”
“The important thing,” Alana said, taking Priscilla by the shoulders as though she would like nothing more than to shake some sense into her, “is that Ender Paine has had half the school looking for you. Half the school, Priscilla.”
Priscilla nodded. “I know. Isn’t it fun?”
“Fun?” Alana seemed slightly shocked by that one. “Priscilla, there’s nothing fun about going missing. Your father will have been told by now, you know.”
“Well, I should hope so. I would be very upset if we went through all this without Daddy being told.”
“Is that what this is?” Wirt asked, trying to make sense of it. “Some kind of attempt to get attention?”
Priscilla looked at him like he had just suggested that the sky should be bright pink. “I always get lots of attention, thank you. In the summer, there was this lovely travelling minstrel who wrote a whole string of poems about me, you know. Plenty of attention.”
Alana shook her head. “Priscilla, it seems to me that you aren’t taking this very seriously. People will be upset with you.”
“They will?”
Alana nodded. “Of course they will, after a stunt like this. You’ll have to issue an apology or something. At this rate, we’ll be lucky if the headmaster doesn’t insist on you leaving the school completely. He almost certainly won’t let you keep going with your magic lessons.”
“But why?” Priscilla asked, looking suddenly hurt and confused. “He was the one who told me to.”
Wirt felt he had to step in there. “Ender Paine told you to hide like that?”
Priscilla nodded, but before she could explain anything, the door opened to let in another group of students, accompanied by the headmaster, Ms. Burns, and Priscilla’s brother Robert. It made for quite a crowded room, but if it meant that Wirt and the others were going to get a meaningful explanation of what was going on, Wirt could put up with it.
The headmaster turned to one of the boys in the group, a ginger-haired young man in old fashioned robes, who seemed very proud of himself for some reason.
“It seems that you were correct, Thomas. The princess is here. Well done. And thinking to use her brother to lead you to her with a spell based on the link between them was an intriguing approach.”
A student getting praise from Ender Paine? Could this day get any stranger, Wirt wondered.
“As such, Thomas will get the highest marks on this test, followed by the rest of those in his group… yes, what is it, Priscilla? And weren’t you to spend your time hiding in an alternate form, not talking with your friends?”
“I did hide,” Priscilla said. “That’s what I wanted to say. Alana and the others found me first, not this lot. They should get the marks.”
Wirt felt he spoke for all of them in the next moment. “What exactly is going on?” he demanded. “You’re talking as though this was all some kind of test.”
Ender Paine looked at him as though Wirt had missed the most obvious point in the world. “This is the second year, boy. Everything is a test. The princess here agreed to help us test your skills at locating people by hiding.”
“I was a troll doll,” Priscilla said proudly. The headmaster rolled his eyes, but it seemed Priscilla didn’t see that.
Ms. Burns stepped forward then. “You say that your friends found you, Priscilla?” The teacher asked.
Priscilla nodded. “It was Alana really. She worked out that I would never leave my troll figures like that, and she worked out why my magic mirror only showed this room when they asked it where I was. And she and the others thought to check here rather than running off doing stupid ‘trace me through my brother’ spells.”
The red-haired boy who had seemed so proud a moment ago looked furious then. He jabbed a finger towards Wirt and the others. “But they cheated!”
“That’s a very serious accusation, Thomas,” Ms. Burns said. “Can you prove it?”
Thomas shook his head. “But it’s obvious. They came straight here. And it’s obvious that the stupid princess wants her friend to win.”
“Stupid?” Priscilla’s voice took on a dangerous note. “You want to watch what you’re saying. Some of us have been practicing turning things into other things, you know. Or do you want to spend your days hopping about catching flies?”
Wirt wondered if she might actually do it. He also started to see why royalty wasn’t generally allowed to learn magic directly. Thankfully though, Alana chose that moment to step in, putting an arm around the princess and moving her gently away.
“Priscilla, if you turn him into a frog, they’ll only make you kiss him to turn him back. You don’t want that, do you?”
“Kiss him? Eww! Not if he were the last frog on Earth!”
“So it’s better if you don’t turn Thomas here into one then, isn’t it?”
Priscilla nodded. “Absolutely. But I still won’t have him calling you a cheat. You didn’t cheat.”
The red-haired boy was either braver than he looked, or very desperate to get a good grade for this task. “You said
yourself that they used a magic mirror to find you.”
“How is that different from using a locating spell?” Wirt asked, deciding that he didn’t like the other boy very much. “Besides, anyone could have come here and done that if they took the time to find out that Priscilla keeps one here.”
Thomas wasn’t willing to give up that easily. “Then there’s this stuff about how the princess would never leave her troll dolls lying around. How were we meant to know that?”
Wirt pointed at Robert. “You could have asked her brother what Priscilla was like. He would have told you. Alana knew it because she has made an effort to learn about Priscilla.”
“Because she works with her every day.”
To Wirt’s surprise, Ender Paine stepped in then, raising a hand for silence. “It is entirely acceptable for the girl here to have used her knowledge of the princess. Advisors are meant to know the royalty they work with.”
“Well, why was the princess human when we got here then?” Thomas demanded, before looking slightly nervous as he realized the tone he had just taken with the headmaster. “I mean… isn’t it possible that she never really hid? You said that yourself, sir.”
“I did hide!” Priscilla said indignantly, and Wirt got the feeling that she was considering the frog spell again. “I hid brilliantly.” She said a few words, and there was the little troll doll again. A second later, and she was back. “You see. Hiding.”
“Adequately, at least,” the headmaster said. “Assuming that you did it.”
“I did! Alana only spotted where I was because-”
“Because of some business with a mirror. Yes, you said, your highness. Now, please be quiet.”
It said a lot about Ender Paine that he could even make Priscilla shut up. He stood silently for a moment, seeming to think. “Ordinarily, of course, this would not be an issue. I always find that those who complain about cheating are merely the weak, and deserve to be trampled.”
Yes, that certainly sounded like Ender Paine’s approach to educational theory from where Wirt was standing.
“However,” the headmaster continued, “cheating on any test I have put together is another matter. So we need to find a way to establish the truth of this quickly and efficiently.”