A Princess of Landover Read online

  BY TERRY BROOKS

  SHANNARA

  First King of Shannara

  The Sword of Shannara

  The Elfstones of Shannara

  The Wishsong of Shannara

  THE HERITAGE OF SHANNARA

  The Scions of Shannara

  The Druid of Shannara

  The Elf Queen of Shannara

  The Talismans of Shannara

  THE VOYAGE OF THE JERLE SHANNARA

  Ilse Witch

  Antrax

  Morgawr

  HIGH DRUID OF SHANNARA

  Jarka Ruus

  Tanequil

  Straken

  GENESIS OF SHANNARA

  Armageddon’s Children

  The Elves of Cintra

  The Gypsy Morph

  The World of Shannara

  THE MAGIC KINGDOM OF LANDOVER

  Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!

  The Black Unicorn

  Wizard at Large

  The Tangle Box

  Witches’ Brew

  A Princess of Landover

  THE WORD AND THE VOID

  Running with the Demon

  A Knight of the Word

  Angel Fire East

  Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life

  To Shawn Speakman,

  for Web Druid services expertly rendered

  and valued friendship freely given

  So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day had made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

  There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought about it afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  CONTENTS

  Other Book By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  It’s All Happening at the Zoo

  Unexpected Consequences

  Strange Creatures Like Herself

  Father Knows Best

  Froggy Went A-Courtin’

  Misunderstandings

  Flight

  Misery Loves Company

  Grandfather’s Eyes

  Edgewood Dirk

  The Princess Is Missing

  Libiris

  His Eminence

  Back in the Stacks

  They Seek Her Here, They Seek Her There

  They Seek That Princess Everywhere!

  The Voice in the Shadows

  Revelations

  Cat’s Paw

  Misdirection

  Sadly Mistaken

  Frogs, Dogs, and Throgs

  The Lesser of Two Evils

  Braveheart

  Till Death Do Us Part

  Demons at the Gates

  No Place Like Home

  Déjà Vu

  About the Author

  Copyright

  IT’S ALL HAPPENING AT THE ZOO

  The crow with the red eyes sat on the highest branch of the farthest tree at the very back of the aviary, dreaming its dark and terrible dreams. Had there been substance to those dreams, they would have scalded the earth and melted the iron bars and steel-mesh netting that held it prisoner. Had there been substance, they would have burned a hole in the very air and opened a passage to that other world, the world to which the crow belonged and desperately needed to return. But the dreams were ethereal and served only to pass the time and grow ever darker as the days wore on and the crow remained trapped.

  The crow was Nightshade, Witch of the Deep Fell, and she had been absent from Landover, trapped in her current form, for more than five years.

  She thought about it every day of her captivity. She sat on this branch, aloof and apart from the other birds, the ones that lacked the capacity for critical thinking, the ones that found some measure of happiness and contentment in their pitiful condition. There was nothing of either happiness or contentment for her, only the bitter memories of what had been and what might never be again. Her lost world. Her stolen life. Her true identity. Everything that had been hers before she sought to use the girl child of the King and Queen for her own purposes.

  Mistaya Holiday, Princess of Landover, was the child of three worlds—and of parents who knew nothing of what she needed or what she could become, who knew only to keep her from a destiny that would have made her the witch’s own.

  Even the sound of her name in the silent roil of the witch’s thoughts was like the burn of acid, and her rage and hatred fed on it anew. It never lessened, never cooled, and she was quite certain that until the child was dead or hers once more, it never would. She might be kept a prisoner in this cage for a thousand years and might never regain her true form, and still there would be no peace for her.

  In her tortured mind, the witch replayed the last moments of her old life, the way it had all been, had all ended, and had suddenly become the nightmare she now endured. The child had been hers: subverted and won over, committed to her new teacher of dark magic. Then everything had gone wrong. Set against the girl by circumstances and events beyond her control, she had tried to make the child understand and had failed. Confronted by the child’s parents and allies, she had fought back with magic that had somehow been turned against her. Instead of the child being sentenced for insubordination and disobedience to banishment in a foreign world, she had been dispatched instead, made over into the form of her familiar.

  She had tried endlessly to reason out what had happened to make things go so wrong, but even after all these years she could not be certain.

  The other birds avoided the crow with the red eyes. They sensed that it was not like them, that it was a very different species, that it was dangerous and to be feared. They kept far away from it and left it alone. Now and then, one of them erred and came too close. That one served as an object lesson to the others of what might happen if they failed to be careful. It was never pretty. It was seldom even quick. The other birds tried not to make mistakes around the crow with the red eyes.

  Which was the best that Nightshade, Witch of the Deep Fell, could expect if she failed to escape.

  Vince stood at the edge of the enclosure and studied the odd bird just as he had been studying her for the better part of the five years following her abrupt and mysterious appearance. Every day, right after he got off work—unless there was a pressing reason to get home to his family—he stopped for a look. He couldn’t have explained why, even if pressed to do so. Woodland Park Zoo was filled with strange and exotic creatures, some of them species so rare that they had never been seen in the wild. The crow with the red eyes was one of these. Whether she was truly a species apart or simply an aberration was something ornithologists and experts in related areas had been trying to determine from the beginning, all without success. It didn’t matter much to Vince. He just found the crow intriguing and liked watching it.

  What he didn’t much care for was the way the crow seemed to like watching him, those red eyes so i
ntent and filled with some unreadable emotion. He wished he knew its story, but he never would, of course. Crows couldn’t talk or even think much. They just reacted to the instincts they were born with. They just knew how to survive.

  “How did you get here?” Vince asked softly, speaking only to himself, watching the bird watching him.

  It had popped up at the local animal shelter, not there one day and there the next, come out of nowhere. He still wondered how that could be possible. The shelter was a closed compound, and birds didn’t just fly in or out. But this one had. Somehow.

  The experts had tried to trap it repeatedly after it had been transported to the zoo, hoping to get close enough to study it more carefully. But they should have thought of that before they released it into the aviary. All their efforts had failed. The bird seemed to know their intentions ahead of time and avoided all their clumsy attempts to get their hands on it. They had to content themselves with studying it from afar, which they did until more pressing and fruitful pursuits had turned their heads another way. If the bird had not been a bird, but one of the big cats or lumbering giants of the African veldt, it would have gotten more attention, Vince thought. There would have been more money for research, more public interest, something to drive the effort to learn its origins. Vince knew how things worked at the zoo. The squeaky wheel got the grease.

  Vince watched the bird some more, perched way up there in the branches, a Queen over her subjects. So regal. So contemptuous, almost. As if it knew how much better it was than the others.

  He shook his head. Birds didn’t think like that. It was stupid to think they did.

  He glanced at his watch. Time to be getting home. The wife and kids would be waiting dinner. There was a game on TV tonight that he wanted to see. He stretched, yawned. Tomorrow was another workday.

  He was walking away, headed for the parking lot and his car, when something made him glance back. The crow with the red eyes was watching him still, following his movements. Vince shook his head, uneasy. He didn’t like that sort of intense scrutiny, especially not from a bird. There was something creepy about it. Like it was stalking him or something. Like it would hunt him down and kill him if it were set free.

  He quit looking at it and walked on, chiding himself for such foolish thinking. It was just a bird, after all. It was only a bird.

  UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

  Headmistress Harriet Appleton sat straight-backed at her desk, a huge wooden monstrosity that Mistaya could only assume had been chosen for the purpose of making students entering this odious sanctum sanctorum feel uncomfortably small. The desk gleamed gem-like beneath repeated polishings, perhaps administered by girls who had misbehaved or otherwise fallen afoul of the powers that be. Surely there were many such in an institution of this sort, where fair play and justice were primitive, possibly even passé, words.

  “Come in, Misty,” Miss Appleton invited her. “Take a seat.”

  Said the spider to the fly, Mistaya thought.

  Wanting nothing so much as to tell this woman exactly what she could do with her suggestion, she nevertheless closed the door behind her and crossed to the two chairs placed in front of the desk. She took a moment to decide which one she wanted, and then she sat.

  Through the window of the headmistress’s office, she could see the campus, the trees bare-leafed with the arrival of December, the ground coated with an early-morning frost and the stone and brick buildings hard-edged and fortress-like as they hunkered down under temperatures well below freezing. New England was not a pleasant place for warm-blooded creatures at this time of year, and the buildings didn’t look any too happy about it, either. Hard to tell with buildings, though.

  “Misty,” the headmistress said, drawing her attention anew. She had her hands folded comfortably on the desktop and her gaze leveled firmly on the young girl. “I think we need to have a talk, you and I. A different talk than the ones we’ve had previously.”

  She reached for a folder, virtually the only item on the desk aside from the telephone, a stone image of an owl, and a school cup filled with an assortment of pens and pencils. There was a framed picture, as well, facing away from Mistaya. Although she was interested in who might be in the picture, she could not see without standing up and walking around to the other side of the desk, something she would under no circumstances do.

  The headmistress opened the file and made a point of shuffling through the pages it contained, even though Mistaya was quite certain she had already read it enough times to have memorized the contents. Miss Appleton was irritating, but no fool.

  “This is your third visit to my office in less than three months,” Harriet Appleton pointed out quietly, voice deliberately lowered in what Mistaya could only assume was an effort to convey the seriousness of the situation. “None of these visits was a pleasant one, the sort I like having with my students. Even more distressing, none of them was necessary.”

  She waited, but Mistaya kept quiet, eyes locked on the other’s sharp-featured face—a face that reminded her a little of Cruella De Vil in that dog movie. Were there no beautiful headmistresses in the schools of America?

  “The first time you were sent to me,” the headmistress of the moment continued, “it was for fomenting trouble with the grounds crew. You told them they had no right to remove a tree, even though the board of directors had specifically authorized it. In fact, you organized a school protest that brought out hundreds of students and shut down classes for three days.”

  Mistaya nodded. “Trees are sentient beings. This one had been alive for over two hundred years and was particularly well attuned to our world, an old and proud representative of her species. There was no one to speak for her, so I decided I would.”

  The headmistress smiled. “Yes, so you said at the time. But you will remember I suggested that taking it up with either the dean of students or myself before fomenting unrest among your classmates might have avoided the disciplinary action that followed.”

  “It was worth it,” Mistaya declared, and sat up even straighter, chin lifting in defiance.

  Harriet Appleton sighed. “I’m glad you think so. But you don’t seem to have learned anything from it. The next time you were in this office, it was the same story. You didn’t come to me first, as I had asked. Once again you took matters into your own hands. This time it was something about ritualistic scarring, as I remember. You formed a club—again, without authorization or even consultation with the school teaching staff—to engage in a bonding-with-nature program. Instead of awarding patches or other forms of insignia, you decided on scarring. An African-influenced art form, you explained at the time, though I never understood what that had to do with us. Some two dozen scars were inflicted before word got back to the dean of students and then to me.”

  Mistaya said nothing. What was there to say? Miss Applebutt had it exactly right, even if she didn’t fully understand what was at stake. If you didn’t take time to form links to the living things around you—things besides other students—you risked causing irreparable harm to the environment. She had learned that lesson back in Landover, something the people of this country—well, this world, more correctly—had not. It was exceedingly annoying to discover that the students of Carrington Women’s Preparatory were virtually ignorant on this point. Mistaya had provided their much-needed education in the form of a game. Join a club; make a difference in the world. The scarring was intended to convey the depth of commitment of the participating members and to serve as a reminder of the pain and suffering human ignorance fostered. Moreover, it was accomplished using the sharp ends of branches shed by the trees that were part of the living world they were committed to protecting. It made perfect sense to her.

  Besides, the scarring was done in places that weren’t normally exposed to the light of day.

  “I didn’t see the need to bother anyone about it,” she offered, a futile attempt at an explanation. “Everyone who participated did so voluntarily.”

&nbs
p; “Well, their parents thought quite differently, once they found out about it. I don’t know what your parents allow you to do in your own home, but when you are at Carrington, you have to follow the rules. And the rules say you need permission to form clubs or groups actively engaged on campus. The students are underaged girls, Misty. You are an underaged girl. You are only fifteen!”

  Well, technically, perhaps. If you measured it by how she looked. Her real age was a matter of debate even in her own home. There was the age you were physically and there was the age you were mentally. There was the number of years you had lived and the extent to which your mind had developed. When you were born from a seedling nourished in the soil of a land where magic was real and a part of you, the commonly accepted rules about growth did not necessarily apply. No point in getting into that, however. Miss Harriet Half-Wit would never understand it, not even if Mistaya spent from now until the end of next year trying to explain.

  “Which brings us to the present and the point of this third visit,” the headmistress continued, shaking her head to emphasize the point. “Even I didn’t think you would ignore my second warning about not acting on your own when it had been made clear to you that it would not be tolerated under any circumstances. What were you thinking?”