Once Upon a Castle - Jill Gregory [115]
Cador lay awake long after Tressalara’s breathing deepened and she drifted off, but his thoughts were much the same. He’d known her for a female the moment he’d pushed her up against the tavern wall. That had been quite a shock, and it had set him thinking of the missing princess. They were of an age. And her hands, although scraped raw, were soft and white beneath the grime, unused to hard physical labor. Definitely the hands of a lady.
Or a princess.
Certainly she had the coloring of the royal family. She might hide her hair beneath a cap, but there was no disguising those amethyst-colored eyes beneath winged brows. He smiled in the darkness. It couldn’t have gone better if he’d planned it. Princess Tressalara, heiress to the throne of Amelonia, had dropped into his hands like a ripe plum.
Now he would have to figure out exactly what to do with her.
5
In the Caverns of Mist two exhausted frogs squatted on the floor, eyeing one another balefully. No matter how hard they tried, they had each failed repeatedly in their attempts to clamber back up the table to where the huge spellbook lay open. The large, darker frog made one last attempt, only to flop gasping onto its back. The spots on its pale belly were curiously shaped, almost like small stars and moons.
“This is all your fault,” Illusius said between gasps, flailing his webbed toes in the air.
“Nonsense,” Niniane snapped, hopping fretfully back and forth in short, nervous arcs. Although human time meant little to a wizard’s apprentice, she was tired, her jumping muscles ached, and there was nothing to eat but a bug perched on a rock. She’d die before she ate bugs! It took all her willpower to keep her long tongue coiled neatly in her mouth.
“Oh,” she said with a sigh, “how I do wish we’d been turned into something that could fly. At least that way we could reach the table to read the spells and try to figure a way out of this fine mess you’ve gotten us into. And my poor princess is in terrible danger.” An idea came to her. “Illusius! See how that wand is tipped up at one end? If I got on the other side and you hopped on that end, you might be able to flip me up to the tabletop. Then I could hunt through the students’ handbook for a spell to free us.”
The darker frog hopped over to the wand and examined it. “It might work. But how do I know you’ll keep your word? You might just change yourself back and leave me croak!”
Niniane rolled her big, bulgy eyes at him. “You’ll just have to trust me.”
He didn’t move, just waited with his toes splayed out. “Oh, very well. Hop on.”
Before Niniane had even reached the wand, a curious thing happened. A puff of sparkling smoke twinkled through the caverns. When it cleared, she found herself in daylight, floating in a river’s shallows on a lily pad. She was, to her intense disappointment, still a frog.
“What happened?” Illusius croaked beside her.
“I don’t have the froggiest…er, foggiest notion.” She hopped a few feet to the reedy bank and looked around. “But at least I know where we are—the rebel camp where Cador brought Tressalara last night. Let’s find her and see what she’s doing.”
Illusius was facing the opposite direction, across the riverbank “I already have, Niniane. And you’re not going to like it one ribbit!”
“Who are you calling a pimple-faced boy?” Nidd shouted. How dare this newcomer try and make him a figure of fun before the others, especially Ulfin.
Tressalara had tried to ignore Nidd’s taunting earlier, but things had finally gone too far. For the past two weeks he’d made her life miserable. Today he’d managed to push her into the horse manure, making her spill her morning’s allotment of bread into it as well, and now he had splattered Cador’s saddle, which she had just cleaned and polished, with claylike mud.
If she didn’t stand up for herself now, he would, like all bullies, make her life hellish from dawn to dusk. She stood with her hands on her hips. “If you