Chapter 1
In which a prince goes missing
Long before I ever went dragon-hunting or sailed the South Seas, I went on a quest in my own land, the Wild Forest. But the adventure actually began in High Morroway, a small kingdom almost lost in the towering, snowcapped mountains that lie between the Forest and Erythroth.
It all started on a cool spring night, with the frogs singing in the ponds. Liasis, the Crown Prince of High Morroway, had stayed up long past his bedtime, reading about the goblin wars by the light of a single candle. When a sudden sharp breeze whirled in the window of his tower room and snuffed the candle out, he yawned. Lighting it again seemed like too much work so very late at night, so he set the book on the table by his bed and pulled the blanket up over his ears.
Outside his door, something creaked. It was the noise that usually woke him in the morning -- the floorboards creaking as Farancia, the maid, brought him a pitcher of hot wash-water.
Liasis rolled over to look towards the door. It was open, and the faint starlight showed a dark figure.
Prince Liasis might have been half asleep, but he knew he wasn't dreaming. He stretched a hand out from under the bedclothes to the table by the bed. His fingers groped over the smooth leather of the book's binding and the cold metal of the candlestick. They touched the odd, lumpy packet that was the present he meant to give his stepmother, Queen Demansia, for her birthday in the morning.
The gift was a fish made from scraps of tin and copper wired together. When you held it up in the sunlight, hanging on a couple of fine threads, it seemed to twist and shimmer like a real fish leaping up the waterfalls in the spring. Liasis hoped it would please his stepmother. She still didn't seem very happy in High Morroway, and, although of course she would never take his mother's place, he felt very protective of her, as if she were a timid young aunt.
Liasis had bought the fish from a pedlar girl he met on the road when he was out riding two days before. She had made it herself, and he thought there was a bit of the girl's own spirit in the shimmering fish -- free and wild and full of joy. Demansia needed to feel that happiness.
But the tin fish wasn't what Liasis wanted. His fingers found the hilt of his dagger and closed around it. He always kept the dagger by his bed, not because he was afraid of enemies, but because it had been a gift from his own mother on his ninth birthday, his last birthday before she died, four years ago. He slid the blade out of its sheath.
"Who's there?" Liasis demanded.
The dark figure said nothing, but it took a step closer. As Liasis swept the blankets back and sat up, knocking everything clattering off the table, whoever it was flung something towards him.
A net. He saw the glitter of its strands as it settled over him, covering him from head to toe even as he tried to beat it off. It was like the nets used for fishing in the mountain lakes, but far, far finer, as though it had been knotted out of spider-silk. There were odd, glittering things caught in it. Fish scales? Liasis flailed his arms frantically and yelled for help, but his room was at the top of the empty east tower. He'd liked the privacy, the feeling that the whole tower was his own place. Now it meant that no one could hear him.
The strands burned cold where they touched his skin, rather like the feeling you get when you grab frosty metal in the winter. And then they tightened, as if they were shrinking around him, pulling his arms to his sides, binding his legs together, constricting his chest so that he felt he could hardly breathe.
"Help!" he gasped, much more faintly now. "Somebody!"
Nobody came. After one abrupt jerk, as if his attacker had almost moved to help him, the person just stood there, watching.
Prince Liasis fell to the floor, thrashing and twitching. The floor felt... different. He felt... different. He made a dash for the door, fast as an arrow on his stomach, but the dark figure swooped down and grabbed him around the neck, flipping him into -- a sack. A rough, dark, musty-tasting sack. The sack began to bounce, as though the person carrying it was walking quickly, and then to jounce as the person ran down the spiraling staircase.
Liasis couldn't remember what had happened to his dagger. He tried to grope around for it, but he couldn't feel his arms. He was paralyzed, he thought, but no, he could thrash about violently, so he couldn't be paralyzed. He couldn't feel his legs. He could feel -- sack, all over his body, rasping on his smooth scales.
Scales.
Liasis opened his mouth to scream, and all that came out was a faint, hissing breath. He flailed frantically from side to side, as though he could somehow smash his way out and back into his own body, but all that happened was that the person gave the bag an angry shake, stunning him into stillness.
Liasis heard a door open, the one that let out from a lower floor of the tower on to the castle wall. He felt the person carrying him lean out through one of the crenels, the gaps in the battlements from which archers would shoot.
Someone whistled. There was an answering whistle from below.
"Here," said a voice. "Remember, you promised he wouldn't be hurt. You promised nobody would be hurt." Liasis couldn't recognize the voice; he couldn't even tell if it was a man's or a woman's. It was strangely distorted, distant and rumbling.
"I did," said another voice. "And I keep my word. Tell me, has the potion started to work?"
"If it hadn't, I wouldn't be doing this. I always keep my promises, too. Did you bring the rest of the mixture?"
"There's a jar, corked and sealed with wax, down in the grass at the foot of the tree where we met. You can fetch it from there in the morning. There should be enough for half a cupful once a day for two weeks, and that will be all that's needed."
"Can I trust you?"
"It's a bit late to ask that now." The second voice laughed, hollow and booming. Liasis was almost certain it belonged to a man. He, if it was a he, was echoed by a chorus of hooting, screeching, cackling laughter, until that second voice said, "Silence!"
There was silence, broken only by the first voice saying, very faintly, "I'm sorry, Your Highness."
And then Liasis was falling, plummeting towards the ground.
The castle was a collection of towers and narrow little yards all jammed together, with a high wall that had always looked to the prince like a strap tying up the bundle of towers. It was perched on top of a rocky crag in the heart of the mountainous kingdom. It had no moat, no water to catch him and save him. He was going to die when he hit the stones...
The sack stopped falling with a jerk as someone caught it out of the air. Hooves rapped on stones as the man urged his mount away. Even these ordinary sounds were oddly altered by the change to his body, seeming further away and deeper than they should be. The prince could hear something else, too, like the pattering of many soft feet.
In his sack, Liasis bumped against the horse's side. He felt horribly, horribly sick. He didn't think snakes could throw up. He hoped they couldn't, at least.
--
In Morroway Castle the next morning, the maid who came to wake Prince Liasis wasn't too surprised to find him gone. It was a beautiful day, the sort of day when everyone, prince or peasant, would want to be outdoors. Farancia picked up his nightshirt, which was dropped untidily on the floor, and the blankets, which were all over the place. Then she saw the things from his table, scattered across the room.
Her foot touched the dagger, lying where it had fallen, half under the bed.
Anyone would have known for certain that something was wrong, then. The prince always wore that dagger on his belt.
Farancia took the dagger and the tin fish and went down all the long stairs to the solar, which was a bright, sunny room where the royal family gathered. King Boiga was there, eating fried trout and scrambled eggs, with Queen Demansia, who was nibbling a piece of toast and looking nervous. But the queen always seemed to look nervous. It might have had something to do with the fact that most of the servants in the castle thought she wasn't good enough for their king. After all, she hadn't even been born in High Morroway.
Quietly sipping a cup of tea in a corner was a stranger, a tall, brown-skinned woman with piercing green eyes above a narrow, beaky nose, in which she wore a ruby. She had gold rings in both ears and two black feathers tucked into her long, untidy black hair. The woman took her name from those: Rookfeather. She was a minstrel, who tramped the roads of the world carrying songs and stories and news from one kingdom to another.
Prince Notechis, the king's brother, was there too, carefully checking over his fishing-flies, made of bits of feather and fur tightly bound to sharp hooks. He sucked a pricked finger and said, continuing an argument that had begun before the maid came in, "But it just isn't safe for the queen to go out riding in the forest right now, Boiga, you know that. You know how the people feel about her. Remember how someone threw an egg at her last time she rode through the town?"
"Just boyish high spirits," growled the king. "And when the knights catch the person who did it, they'll get the spanking a boy deserves, even if they turn out to be a granny of a hundred and three."
Prince Notechis rolled his eyes and gave the little, blackhaired queen an apologetic smile. "It isn't her fault, but she is a foreigner, and your people don't trust her. They think you should have married someone from High Morroway. There are people who -- I hate to have to say this, brother -- but there are a few people who suspect Demansia of wanting to get rid of poor Liasis, so that when she has a baby herself it will be heir to the crown."
"No, never!" the li...
