Read A Princess of Landover Online

Authors: Terry Brooks

A Princess of Landover (6 page)

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 little 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.

H
e 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.

Abernathy was the chief case in point, and Questor still hadn’t managed to fix that one. To keep him safe from the unpleasant and dangerous son of Landover’s last King, Questor had turned the court scribe into a dog Not fully, of course. He only managed to get him halfway there. Abernathy retained his human hands and his human mind and his human voice. The rest of him became a dog, although he still walked upright. This was not a good thing, because Abernathy still had his memories of his old life and wanted it back. But Questor couldn’t give it to him because he couldn’t work the spell that would reverse the change. He had tried repeatedly to help his friend—because they
were
friends, despite the fact that they argued
and fought like cats and dogs. He had even gotten it right once, and for a brief period Abernathy had reverted to his human form. But mostly Questor had gotten it wrong, and those weren’t incidents anyone cared to talk about.

So here they were: a tall, scarecrow of a man with long white hair and beard, robes of such atrocious patterns and colors that even Mistaya winced, and a distracted air that warned of mishaps waiting just past the next sentence he spoke; and a dog that dressed and walked upright like a man and sometimes barked.

He could tell right away that they had something to tell him. It almost certainly had to do with Mistaya.

“High Lord,” Questor Thews greeted him, offering a deep bow.

“High Lord,” Abernathy echoed, but without much enthusiasm.

Questor cleared his throat. “We need a moment of your time—that is, if you have a moment to spare just now—to put forth an idea that we have stumbled upon while attempting to help you through this crisis with Mistaya, knowing how painful it must be for you—”

“Fewer words, Questor!” Abernathy growled, almost dog-like. “Get to the point!”

Ben smiled indulgently and held up both hands to silence them. “I trust this visit has a constructive purpose and isn’t just a misguided effort to advise me where I went wrong with my daughter’s upbringing?”

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