But Rollo had changed. He had seen how Chris and Marigold conducted themselves, as monarchs and as people; seen how they got what they wanted by being compassionate, and wise, and funny. And what they wanted were good lives for their subjects. As one of the subjects, he had benefited. Besides, he was about to become a father himself, and he had an idea of how he would feel if anybody stole his baby.
At that moment, the baby in question was asleep in the laundry basket inside an old hunter’s hut, the kidnappers’ rendezvous spot, deep in the forest, not far from the dragon’s lair. While the dragon’s incinerations could be unpredictable, both Boris and Vlad were too enamored of her to deny themselves the opportunity to be in her vicinity, even though they were on the lam. They figured no one would think they were reckless enough to endanger Poppy, their ace in the hole, by parking her so close to danger. They scoffed at recklessness. Reckless was their middle name. Who but reckless brutes would kidnap a princess? They were proud of their recklessness.
The Terrible Twos, Emlyn the laundress, and the two footmen were lounging around, drinking venti-size flagons of mead for breakfast, and congratulating themselves on a successful heist.
“No one suspected a single thing about me,” Emlyn said. “You should have heard me in my job interview with that harridan, Mrs. Clover. She thinks she’s so smart. I fooled her in a second, with all my talk of lemon juice soaks, and double rinsing, and hot stone pressing.”
“But all that’s true,” said Bartholomew, the punier of the two footmen. “You’ve always worked as a laundress. Your mother and your grandmother were laundresses. You’ve known all that stuff since you were a kid. So how is that fooling her?”
“Shut up,” Emlyn clarified.
“I’m sure you were brilliant,” said Fogarty, the other footman. “So was I in my interview. I almost matched the record for running upstairs with a tray of filled wineglasses. And I can bow so low, my forehead touches my knees. I could tell Mrs. Clover was impressed.”
Boris and Vlad had had trepidations about leaving such an important operation in the hands of amateurs, but being unable to negotiate with any of their old cohorts due to their own exile, they had had to take whomever they could find. They gave relieved sighs that it had gone without a hitch, banged their flagons together in congratulations, and took big gulps.
“Ah,” said Boris, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Breakfast of champions.”
Vlad winced slightly. Not only was Boris’s sleeve wet as well as stained, but his doublet was, too, and he needed a haircut, a bath, and a shave. Vlad knew that being a torturer didn’t require as much care and precision as being a poisoner, for whom cleanliness and meticulousness were requirements. One couldn’t exactly lick one’s fingers after a meal unless one was sure all traces of whatever poison one had been working on were completely washed off, could one? Boris, slovenly Boris, had always gone around with bloodstains on his shirt, his hair a mess, carrying a dirty ax. He said it was important for his image, but Vlad thought he was basically just a slob. Or a showoff.
Vlad, on the other hand, was fastidious about his grooming, with his black hair carefully parted in the center and slicked down with imported hair oil that smelled of licorice. He used it on his mustache, too. He found that it helped obscure the odor of the more disgusting ingredients in several of his poisons.
Though their styles were very different, they had made a good team with ex-queen Olympia. She had been so encouraging of their work and had supplied them with so many victims to experiment on that they still mourned her absence every day. When she was vanquished once and for all, the new king and queen had ascended the thrones and decreed that Olympia’s demise meant that Boris and Vlad were to never show their faces in Zandelphia-Beaurivage again. And forget about trying to sneak back in. All the guards would be required to memorize their portraits. King Christian gave the Terrible Twos until sundown that very day to leave for good.
Well! Vlad and Boris could hardly have been more insulted, but they kept their mouths shut while silently vowing revenge. And there was worse to come. Each of their children, who’d always been disappointingly ordinary in spite of the string of brutish and negligent babysitters they’d been tended by, refused to come with them for this permanent exile.
The Terrible Twos had had big plans for Phoebe and Sebastian. They were both meant to be their fathers’ successors, to follow in their fetid footsteps. Never mind that Phoebe and Sebastian had always found those footsteps repugnant and hadn’t the slightest intention of coming anywhere near them. Boris and Vlad weren’t used to hearing the word no. And to hear it several times in one day, first from the king and queen and then from their own offspring, was enough to make them wish they had brought some of their most vicious tools of havoc with them to their hearing.
And the reasons Phoebe and Sebastian had given—separately, but so alike—to their fathers! They said they’d done nothing wrong, they hadn’t been ordered into exile, they had no interest in torture and poison, and they didn’t want to have anything more to do with their own fathers, anyway.
What kind of flimsy logic was that?
All this only made the Terrible Twos more determined to get even with the king and queen. And maybe with Sebastian and Phoebe, too.
It had been a long wait, but they had finally done it. And didn’t it feel good!
One of the hardest parts of the kidnapping scheme had been deciding what to ask for as ransom. What they really needed was the means to go far away and set themselves up all over again. And finding a new location would not be easy. It was probable they would then need to remove the people filling the positions they would wish to usurp. It could all take time and effort, and be inconvenient. And expensive. So they’d asked for an amount with a lot of zeroes.
It was a great deal more than either of them would have paid in ransom for their own offspring—who were, at that moment, worth exactly nothing to them. But a princess, even a very small one, was certainly worth more than their own ungrateful and defiant progeny, wasn’t she?
“So what do we do now?” Emlyn asked. “Just wait?”
Vlad stroked his mustache and sighed. Dealing with flunkeys could be so tedious. How seldom brains and brawn went together.
6
BACK IN THE THRONE room, a sort of hysterical yet icy calm had descended. Ed, Swithbert, Magnus, and Wendell were helping Rollo and his men search the castle while Chris and Marigold tried to think clearly about what to do next. This was hard to do while they were suppressing screams.
“Do you know where your fathers went when they were exiled?” Christian asked Phoebe and Sebastian.
Phoebe shook her head. “Not precisely. But I bet it wasn’t too far away.”
“My father always liked the idea of being close to the dragon,” Sebastian said. “They’re both pretty big dragonphiles. And since they weren’t ordered specifically to leave the kingdom—just never to show their faces here again—I think they stayed deep in the forest, right where they already were. They’re lazy. Lots easier than moving if they didn’t have to.”
Chris said, “So we should start scouring the forest.”
“But carefully,” Sebastian said. “We don’t want to push them deeper into hiding.”
“Of course. Maybe, instead of stampeding them by sending Rollo and his guards out, we could go unobtrusively, just you and me. Who’s more motivated than we are?”
“Me,” Marigold said. “You’re not going without me.”
From the set of her jaw, Chris knew it was useless to argue, and he’d already made her mad enough. He nodded and said, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Or me,” Phoebe said. “I’d like nothing better in all the world than to be there when we catch them. Then they’ll earn a punishment worse than exile, and nobody would deserve it more.”
Sebastian, Chris, and Marigold gaped at Phoebe, at her furious face and clenched fists. Evidently they hadn’t grasped her full feelings. But now they were way mor
e clear.
“Well,” Marigold said. “I guess we are the four most motivated people in the kingdom, so we should all be in on it. How soon can we get started?”
“Right away,” Christian said. “As soon as we change into some clothing that’s warm and dark-colored, and arm ourselves.”
Phoebe swallowed hard. She had grown up in a house filled with terrifying instruments—sharp, pointed, and stained with unidentified secretions. She’d vowed never to touch any item designed to do deliberate harm to another person. “No, thank you,” she said softly. She knew it wasn’t proper etiquette to disagree with the king, but she wasn’t going to carry a weapon.
Chris looked into her wide gray eyes so intently that she wondered if he was going to insist. Then he nodded, intuiting her reasons, and said, “All right. Just bring your wits. Sometimes that’s the most effective weapon any of us has.”
Phoebe blinked away tears. Nobody could have asked for a wiser, more sensitive monarch than the citizens of Zandelphia-Beaurivage had. With those few words, he had earned her eternal loyalty. She was going to help get baby Poppy back if it killed her.
“We’ll meet back here in fifteen minutes, ready to go,” the king said, then went off to get ready.
After explaining their reasoning to a disapproving Rollo, who had no choice but to comply, the four of them rode on black horses across the castle’s drawbridge into a bleak and chilly landscape. The bulk of the storm had passed on before dawn, but a dreary, unspringlike drizzle still fell, soaking them through. However, they burned with enough outrage and determination that they didn’t yet feel the cold.
The horses kicked up great gobs of mud onto their riders as they raced toward the Zandelphia-Beaurivage Bridge, which led to the forests on the Zandelphia side of the river.
Christian knew those forests upside down and backwards. He knew where the dragon’s lair was and where the Tooth Fairy’s palace was; he knew where the leprechauns minted their gold coins and where the talking trees were. If the Terrible Twos were anywhere near the lair, he would be able to find them, even though the dragon was always an unpredictable obstacle.
After about an hour’s worth of riding, Chris halted his horse, and the others stopped beside him. By now they were not only wet, but cold and tired, and some of them (not telling who) were wondering if they were on a wild-goose chase.
“We’ll go on foot from here,” Chris said. “We’re near the dragon, where we suspect the Terrible Twos might be, so we’ll have to divide up and quarter the territory. And do it quietly. We don’t want them to hear us coming.” He gave them their assignments and then said, “We’ll meet back here as soon as we’ve all finished looking around. If you find something, don’t try to do anything alone. Come back here and we’ll make a plan.”
It had all sounded very sensible, even possible, when the king was explaining it. Organized and tidy. But really, when you’re slogging around in mud and rain in the gloom of a thick forest, it made no sense at all. It was almost impossible to see anything through the dense trees.
Phoebe floundered and stumbled, not even sure she was still in the section she was supposed to be searching. Her motivation—which had been very high when she was inside a nice warm throne room—was rapidly evaporating. Or maybe freezing was more accurate. Her feet were so cold, she could hardly feel them, and she was soaked through to her underwear.
She blundered ahead a few more muddy feet, tripped over a tree root, and fell against something. At first she thought it was an unusually big tree, but on closer examination, she realized it was a cabin made so cleverly from logs that it appeared to have grown out of the forest floor. Carefully, she felt her way around it, looking for a way to peek inside, stopping from time to time to press her ear against the wall, listening, and hearing nothing. Which could have meant only that whoever was inside was being very careful and very quiet. Every window was completely curtained, which was no help.
But there certainly could be people inside. Phoebe needed reinforcements. She only hoped she could find her way back to the meeting place, and that there would be somebody there when and if she did.
She did, but there wasn’t, not for a long, shivering time. And then everybody came back at once, as bedraggled as she was, and more discouraged.
Through chattering teeth, Phoebe described what she’d found, and hoped that she’d be able to find it again.
“I know exactly what it is,” Chris said. “It’s that old hunter’s cabin that finally got so dilapidated, even hunters wouldn’t stay there anymore. I should have thought of it.”
“Well, let’s go find out. Come on!” Marigold, who had always had a terrible sense of direction, grabbed his hand and began pulling him the wrong way.
“Over here,” he said, straightening her out and setting off.
By the time they located the cabin again, the drizzle had stopped, though the trees still dripped so much, it might as well have been raining. Yet there was a little more light to see by.
“We’re going to have to open the door, you know,” Sebastian whispered. “There’s no other way to know what’s in there.”
Abruptly, Marigold stepped forward and pushed the door open so hard, it banged against the wall. At least, Phoebe thought, we know nobody’s hiding back there. That was small comfort as they all jumped away from the doorway in case somebody, or something, came hurtling out.
All was silent.
Marigold peered around the door frame from one side, and Chris from the other. All was still silent.
Then Marigold took action, marching into the one-room cabin and yanking the curtain off a window, allowing more light in. “It’s empty.” Her voice quivered. “Poppy’s not here.”
The others entered, looking around at the crude table and chairs, the single rumpled bed, the ashes in the fireplace.
“But somebody was,” Sebastian said. “And not too long ago, either. There are still a few embers in the hearth, and there are fresh footprints on the floor.”
“And look!” Phoebe bent to retrieve a tiny yellow bootee from under the bed. “Do you recognize this?”
Marigold grabbed it and pressed it to her heart. “It’s Poppy’s! I knit it for her myself. I recognize all the mistakes I made. I’m not a very good knitter, but I wanted her to have something her own mommy had made. Because I never did.”
“Neither did I,” Phoebe said quietly.
Chris looked grim and left the cabin. When he came back in, he was shaking his head. “It’s too messed up and muddy out there for any good tracks to show. And besides, all of our own footprints have made it even messier.”
“We should have brought the dogs!” Marigold exclaimed. “Bub’s an excellent tracker. At least he used to be.” She felt a wave of remorse at having neglected Bub so badly right up until the moment she needed him. She wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t even want to help her.
“I’m afraid soft royal living may have blunted his edge,” Chris said. “It’s been a long time since he’s had to track down anything that mattered. And he’s older. He may not be as sharp as he once was.”
“We have to try!” Marigold exclaimed. “We have to go get him. And the other dogs, too. They’re still part of the family, even though I’ve been so terribly inattentive and neglectful of them.” Perhaps it was foolish of Marigold to think that she could make amends to all of the dogs at once. But she also thought, What could be the harm in trying to kill two birds with one stone? Or two stones with one bird, as Ed would say.
Lucky for her, the dogs—being more generous and forgiving than people were—would almost certainly take whatever they were offered, be happy with it, and understand the impulse behind it.
They all mounted up and rode back to the castle in a frantic rush. When they got there, they were so covered with splattered mud, the guard at the drawbridge didn’t recognize them and almost didn’t let them back in. Only after ex-king Swithbert and Rollo had been summoned to identify them were they permitted entry—and
the guard spent the rest of that day and the next waiting to be sent to the dungeons for not recognizing his own king and queen. Even though the dungeons were no longer used for their original purpose, those who had lived under the previous regime had not forgotten the punishments that unpredictable monarchs could decree.
Old fears die slowly.
At the same time that Chris, Marigold, Phoebe, and Sebastian were trying to get back into the castle, the Terrible Twos were reminiscing fondly about those good old unpredictable days. If only Olympia were still around, they wouldn’t be camping out, crammed together in a leaky tent, with a goat for company. The goat was necessary, to provide milk for the baby, but her hygiene wasn’t the finest, making her not the most fragrant tent-mate. Emlyn and Fogarty had tried to convince Boris and Vlad to stay in the hunter’s cabin, which, though dilapidated, was at least dry and more spacious than the tent.
But the Terrible Twos had insisted that the cabin was only a temporary measure, a place to assemble and wait out the storm. As soon as the rain let up a little, they needed to get somewhere less obvious, less well-known, and less sneak-up-uponable.
“So now what?” Emlyn asked. “Your ransom note asked for a certain amount—a very big amount—but you didn’t give any details. How are we supposed to get it?”
“Ah,” said Vlad, smoothing his mustache. “That’s all part of the plan. The not-knowing builds up anxiety in the distraught parents. We want them ready to agree to any kind of terms, no matter how extravagant or outrageous. We want them in the palms of our hands.” As he said that, both he and Boris flexed their hands—his, long and elegant; Boris’s square and meaty—as if remembering the good old times when those hands had been busier than they were at the moment.