The Runaway Princess (20 page)

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Authors: Kate Coombs

BOOK: The Runaway Princess
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“You're really going to stay here?” Nort asked, astonished.
“I should,” Lex said. The young wizard paused, looking expectantly at Nort.
Nort took his cue. “We need your help.”
“Really?”
“Really truly.”
Lex grinned. “You've convinced me! Let's go!”
“Um, Lex.”
“What?”
“Maybe you could change your clothes first,” Nort suggested.
Lex remembered his bleeding pajamas. “Oh. Right.” He snapped his fingers. In an instant, he was wearing a dramatic black cloak and a curlicued gold mask.
“A mask?” Nort said.
“My true identity must not be known,” Lex announced grandly.
“If I were a wizard, I'd use magic to disguise myself as someone else.”
“Oh, very good!” Lex snapped his fingers once more. With a squiggle of light, he turned into an ogre, a blue one with long red fangs. Lex spun around, showing off his new look. “Do you want me to change you, too?” he inquired in a voice like iron walls falling onto rocks.
“No, thanks.” Nort backed away. “You need something less noticeable, actually.”
Lex dropped his heavy claws. “You don't like it?”
Nort shook his head.
The ogre snapped his fingers with some difficulty. Lex reappeared, looking like himself again. Now he was dressed in a tan shirt with black breeches and boots. The only oddity was his cap, which, though brown, was topped with what appeared to be a burning phoenix feather. Nort gestured at the feather.
“You're no fun,” Lex complained. The feather vanished. Lex went to the door. “Coming?”
“Can't you zap us there?” Nort asked.
“Nope. Only inside the house.”
Nort followed him. “So you have a magic carriage out back, right?”
“I had a magic carpet,” Lex said, “but I traded it for something better.”
“What's that?” Nort asked.
“Peanut butter.”
“Peanut butter?”
“A lot of it,” Lex said. “Best quality. I'll make you a sandwich when we get back.”
DORN AND DAGLE STOOD LOOKING AT THEIR trap with unabashed awe. The trunks of young trees rose like dragon's wings into the morning, perfectly poised to spring back and slam their glittering prey into the deep pit.
“It's beautiful,” Dagle breathed.
Dorn wiped his eye on his sleeve. “Yes, it is.”
“Aren't we going to put the cow in?” Dagle asked.
“Oh. Right. The bait.”
The princes turned around.
The cow was gone.
“No!” Dorn cried.
“It wasn't wolves, was it?” Dagle said, puzzled.
Dorn examined the ground where the cow had been tethered. “There's no blood.”
“Then what happened?”
Dorn picked up the frayed end of the rope that had
held the cow in their camp. “Looks like she worried at her tether for so long that she pulled free.”
“We'll have to get another cow. Unless we can find her.”
“First let's go back to the castle and find ourselves a well-cooked meal,” Dorn said.
“Bacon and eggs!” Dagle exclaimed, considerably cheered.
 
It may be easy to attack a bandit camp in the dead of night when the bandits are not expecting you. It is more difficult to guard a camp against bandits who know its every twig and pebble, especially when you are not expecting them. Or so Vantor's guards discovered. They fought as best they could, but the Bandit Queen was soon in possession of her camp again. “Pack up!” Alya yelled.
The bandit tribe scrambled to take everything that hadn't been destroyed by Vantor's men. Including the gold.
“Be grateful my quarrel is with your leader,” the Bandit Queen told Vantor's guards. She flipped the nose of the nearest. “We've done this to you twice now. Perhaps you should rethink your loyalties.”
The bandits rode out.
When Vantor arrived some time later, he saw nothing but six battle-bruised men tied to trees.
“We found the bandits once, we'll find them again,” the prince announced. “Now move out!”
“Your Highness …” asked one of the men riding with him.
“What?”
“Aren't we going to untie them?”
“They can rot here. May their last thought be regret for losing my treasure.” Prince Vantor spat on the ground and strode off. The rest of the men followed him uneasily.
Behind the trees, Hanak's spies slipped away to find their captain.
 
An army marched down the Dragon Crags into Greeve. Two armies, actually—a large force from Tarylon and another from Lors. When they came within sight of the castle, the marchers paused.
King Tark brought his horse up alongside King Jal's. “We capture Greeve's royal seat—”
“And Greeve is ours. Stromgard will have no choice.”
“It's a nice little kingdom,” Tark said with a sideways look. “Reparation for our pain and trouble?”
“We split the place right down the middle,” said Jal. “West for you, east for me.”
“Only proper,” Tark agreed, pleased. “You don't mind about the castle and the city?”
Jal shook his head. “Lot of upkeep, that. We both want what's just south of us, I'd say.”
“Once we get our sons back,” Tark reminded the other monarch.
Jal grimaced. “After that.”
At a sign from the two kings, the army rode down the royal road to surround the castle. Stromgard would have been outraged if he had been at home to see.
 
On the other side of the kingdom, Bain and his sister surveyed their new camp. Old camp, really, a site at the foot of the mountains they sometimes used when the king's guards sniffed about the other camp too closely. The tents were up. The sentries were posted. The wounded had been tended. Children were laughing again. In the middle of it all sat eleven chests filled with dragon gold.
“So it's over,” the Bandit Queen said, polishing her dagger absently on the hem of her tunic. She sat with her brother on the hill overlooking the camp.
“Alya, what do you intend to do now?”
She looked at him, surprised. “We'll move on. We've got enough to make a good life to the south.”
“And the dragon won't complain,” Bain said thoughtfully. “She's a pile of bones.”
“But?” Alya stopped polishing the dagger.
“But nothing.”
The Bandit Queen narrowed her eyes. “You can't fool me. You're put out over losing to that Vantor.”
“He didn't win!”
“Then who did?”
Bain smiled slowly. “Why, the princess.”
“I liked her,” Alya admitted.
Bain began whistling under his breath.
“Are you worried?” his sister asked him.
“The prince of Rogast is capable of anything.”
“Besides,” Alya said sweetly, “you want to see how the story ends.”
“Yes. I do.” Bain was already in motion and raising his voice. “Feg!”
 
It wasn't long before the scarf tired of Meg and Cam's adventure and dropped them in the middle of the Witch's Wood.
“I'm beginning to recognize every root in this place,” Meg said, resigned. She tromped off in the direction of Janna's farm.
“Tell me the rest,” Cam said, following her. “I kept missing bits while we were flying.”
“First tell me what it was like inside that spell.”
Cam hesitated. Finally he said, “Like walking around in the fog, lost. When you know who you are, but not where you are.”
“I'm sorry, Cam,” Meg said miserably.
“It's not your fault. Really, Meg. Now finish your story. You couldn't find the wizard, and some street boys surrounded you?”
Meg took a deep breath and let it out again. “All right. So Dock, the leader, agreed to take us right to the wizard's door. We gave him the invisibility bottle to pay him.”
“What did he do with it?”
Meg laughed. “I've been trying not to think about it.”
The rest of her story took them almost to the edge of the wood. As the trees grew sparse, Cam caught Meg's arm. “What are you going to do now?”
She faced him. “What I've always wanted. I'm leaving this stupid kingdom to make my fortune, like a prince in one of the tales.”
“They're not true, you know,” Cam said quietly.
Meg stared at him for a long, grim moment. “Yes they are,” she hissed. The scarf came down and perched on top of her head. All of its eyes glared at Cam, as if to punctuate Meg's remarks.
Cam spoke into the sudden silence. “Look, Meg. I'm not saying princes don't have adventures. But I'll bet a lot of them get eaten by the first dragon they come to.”
Meg grinned suddenly. “I have my own dragon.” Then she grew serious. “Aren't you coming with me?”
Cam dropped his head, scuffing the dead leaves and dirt with his toe. “I'm not saying I won't. It's just that—the whole time I was locked up in that spell, I missed you, I missed my sister, I missed my breakfast. But mostly I missed my garden.”
Meg didn't know what to say.
“You want all this magic,” Cam said, trying to explain. “But I've got magic, too.”
“What?”
Cam waved his hands. “I plant seeds in the earth and they
grow.
I make them strong and good by my arts!”
Meg's face softened. “That is a kind of magic, I suppose.
Cam gave her a friendly push on the shoulder. “Let's have some of Janna's biscuits and talk about this later.”
“All right,” Meg said, pushing him back.
The air between them had lightened. Even so, they traveled the rest of the way to the farm without talking, absorbed in their separate thoughts.
 
Nort and Lex neared the city's north gates.
“You could call a griffin,” Nort suggested.
“The talons would cut you right open.”
“I meant we could ride on its back.”
Lex kept going. “They're simply not designed for that.”
Ahead of them, a crowd was gathering, shouting and running. Something was always happening in the city, Nort thought. “How about a cloud? You could get one to carry us.”
“They're made of air and water,” Lex pointed out. “We'd fall right through.”
“What about—what's going on?”
This crowd wasn't the usual. Everyone Nort and Lex passed looked terrified. Ahead of them, the gates of Crown were slowly swinging shut.
Nort snatched at a man's sleeve. “What's wrong?”
“We're under attack!” the man cried as he dashed away.
Nort and Lex hurried, but they were too late. The
gates closed. The sentries lowered the heavy bars to lock them.
“Now what?” Nort asked the wizard.
Lex's mouth twisted as he thought. The crowd swirled around them, almost knocking them down more than once. Suddenly the streets were empty except for the two of them.
“I wish we had Meg's scarf,” Nort said. “She told me it could float things.”
“There are other ways to float. What was the tenth thing you suggested just now?” Lex asked.
“Um, magic horses?”
“That's it!” Lex looked about. “We need a horse.”
All of the stables were locked tight, but Nort found a goat tethered behind a grimy house, and Lex said it would do. Nort had his doubts. When they pounded on the door, nobody would open it, so Lex magicked a silver coin into the house. Somebody within yelped gleefully and then was silent again.
Next the two boys hauled the goat around until they found a section of the city wall facing an alley. Nort had to hold the goat still while Lex set about enchanting it. The goat bleated pathetically.
“Climb on,” Lex said at last.
“On there?”
“We'll both fit,” Lex assured him.
Somehow they did, though the poor goat bleated the more.
“Up, goat!” Lex called. The goat made an odd noise and jumped—only to rise slowly toward the top of the wall.
Farther down the wall, one of the sentries caught sight of them and came running, lifting his crossbow.
“Move, goat!” Nort yelped.
They were over the top and starting downward when the sentry reached them. Lex flicked his fingers, and the crossbow turned into a stalk of celery.
“It's always food spells with you,” Nort said breathlessly as they climbed off the goat and ran. The goat ran, too, but not in the same direction.
Nort and Lex had gone only a little way when they caught sight of the invaders. A vast army spread itself around the castle of Greeve, the last of the soldiers tramping into place as the two boys watched.
“Lex?” Nort asked.
“Right,” Lex said, and called his sparks.
 
Earlier that morning, Dorn and Dagle had wandered around the castle for a long while, trying to find someone to give them a hot breakfast. Very few servants were about, and the ones the twins passed rushed by, unwilling to talk to them.
“We'll just have to fend for ourselves,” Dorn told his brother.
Dagle followed Dorn down steps and along passageways, sniffing the air for some sign of food.
The kitchens, when they reached them, were deserted. The brothers scrounged around, happily settling for leftover chicken and mashed potatoes when they couldn't find the eggs. They were starting their second helpings when they heard the commotion. “Here now, what's this?” Dorn asked a scullery maid who had made the mistake of appearing in the pantry.
She merely shrieked and scuttled away.
“Come, brother,” Dagle said.
The two emerged into the courtyard. Ahead of them, the chief housekeeper stood at the locked gate, a meager huddle of manservants around her. Dorn and Dagle approached.
“I told you, he's not at home!” the woman said shrilly.
“Open the gates,” a harsh man's voice said.
The housekeeper shook her head. “You may wait on the lawns. I'm not to open the doors when my master's away.”

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