would change the nature of our relationship and you might decide you had to go. It just seemed easier to go on pretending I believed you to be who you said you were.” He paused. “I actually do have a sister named Ellice, but she’s much older than you.”
She grimaced. “I don’t know whether to be angry with you or not. I guess I’m not. It just feels funny, knowing I was pretending with you for nothing.”
“We were both pretending. It was a game. But there wasn’t any harm done. Except now that it’s out in the open that you’re a Princess, I’m afraid you might not want to have anything more to do with me.”
She laughed despite herself. “It doesn’t much matter what I want at this point, does it? I’m a prisoner of His Eminence, and so are you. We can’t pretend much of anything now. What do you think he plans to do with us?”
Thom shook his head. “I don’t know. He didn’t say. He brought me here and left me, and a little later he brought you here, too.”
“If he knows who I am, and he’s keeping me prisoner anyway, then we are in a lot of trouble. He can’t be planning anything good for either of us if he’s willing to risk all that.”
“No, I don’t suppose so.”
“This is all my fault,” she declared, sitting up next to him, resting her mist-encased hands in her lap. She was already trying to think of a spell that would free her from the bindings, running through the lessons she had studied under Questor’s tutelage. “If I’d stayed in my room instead of going back into the Stacks, none of this would have happened. I was so stupid it makes me want to scream.”
“So that’s where you were. I came looking for you earlier, but you weren’t in your room.”
“I didn’t want to tell you,” she admitted, giving him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry about that. I wish that I had.”
“It isn’t too late for you to do so now, is it?” he asked.
She smiled and proceeded to tell him everything she had been keeping from him. She even told him about Edgewood Dirk, despite her promise to the cat. It was necessary, she reasoned, given her present situation.
She had kept so much from him, she told Thom, because she was worried about involving him further.
“Also, I was worried about the same things you were,” she added. “I thought it would change how you felt about me, and I didn’t want you not to be my friend.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Funny that we were both so worried when there was no reason for it.”
“Funny peculiar,” she agreed, just managing to meet his gaze. Then she looked quickly away. “Anyway, I messed up.”
He looked away. “Maybe I was the one who messed up. Your getting caught might not have been your fault. It might have been mine. If I hadn’t come to your room looking for you and then gone prowling around out in the Stacks, His Eminence might not have caught me and found out about you.”
“Well, it doesn’t much matter now. It’s over and done with, and we can both take some share of the blame.” She swung her legs around to rest her feet on the floor. “Where are we, anyway?”
“One of the storerooms, down by the kitchen. There’s no way out; I’ve already searched. Even if there were somebody who might try to help us, the walls are two feet thick. We can yell all we want, but no one will hear.” He paused. “Any chance the Prism Cat might help us?”
She shrugged. “There’s always a chance. But Dirk thinks mostly of himself. I don’t think his attention span is all that long, either. If he knows we’re here and feels so inclined, he might choose to help us. But he might just as easily not.”
“Some friend.”
“I wouldn’t call Edgewood Dirk a friend. More on the order of a particularly nettlesome aunt or a nagging teacher.” She was thinking now of Harriet Appleton. But that wasn’t fair, she knew. She tossed the comparison aside. “Dirk is unpredictable,” she finished.
He shifted himself on the pallet so that he was sitting closer. “You told me how you happened to come to Libiris, but not why. You said you were escaping from your grandfather and hiding from your family so you wouldn’t have to come here. But why was your family making you come here in