SEVEN

The Princess Changed

I looked at the king, who seemed as confused as I, then at the queen, who was blowing on her fingers as sorcerers often do after a particularly heavy spelling bout. Something had happened; I just wasn’t sure what.

That was when I noticed the princess, who had a look of confusion that was hard to describe. She stared at her hands as though they were entirely alien. The king had noticed her odd behavior too.

“My little pooplemouse,” he said, “are you quite well?”

The princess opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She looked as though she were going to cough up a toad or something, which is not as odd as it might sound, as that punishment is often bestowed upon disobedient children by their mother-sorcerers.

The princess opened her mouth again and found her voice. “Begging your pardon, Your Majesties, but I don’t half feel peculiar.”

“My dear,” said the king to the queen, “you have given our daughter the voice and manners of a common person.”

“My nails!” came a voice behind us. “And these clothes! I would not be seen dead in them!”

We turned around. The servant who had been ordered to remain had broken strict protocol and spoken without being spoken to first, one in a very long list of sackable offenses. The queen caught her eye and pointed to a mirror; the servant looked, then shrieked and brought her raw hands up to her face.

“Oh!” she said. “I’m so plain and ugly and common! What have you done, Mother?”

“Yes,” said the king, “what have you done?”

“A lesson to show our daughter the value of something when you have lost it.”

“That’s our daughter?” asked the king, staring first at the servant, then at the princess, who had started to pirouette in a mildly clumsy fashion, listening joyfully to the faint rustle of her pink crinoline dress.

“You haven’t—?” said the king.

“I most certainly have,” replied Queen Mimosa. “The princess has swapped bodies with the lowliest servant in the household.”

The princess in the servant’s body looked aghast. “I’ve learned my lesson!” she shrieked. “Turn me back, please! I will do anything—even shake hands with that hideous orphan person.”

She couldn’t even remember my name. I turned to the queen, impressed by her technical skill. “Remarkable, ma’am. Where did you learn to do that?”

“I studied under Sister Organza of Rhodes,” she said. “The good sister was big on the transfer of minds between bodies.”

“Please turn me back!” pleaded the princess again, throwing herself at her mother’s feet. “I will never again blame the footmen for my own stealing or demand that people be put to death. I won’t ever make fun of our poor royal cousins for only having two castles.”

“I may have to insist you change her back,” the king told the queen with uncharacteristic firmness. “I can’t have a daughter with lank hair and a pallid complexion. It might attract the wrong sort of prince.”

“Our daughter needs to be taught a lesson,” said the queen, “for the good of the kingdom.”

“There are other ways to punish her,” said the king, “and in this matter I will be firm. Return my daughter this instant!”

“Yes!” howled the princess. “And I promise never to pour weed killer in the moat again—I’ll even restock the ornamental fish with my own servant’s pocket money!”

“That was you?” said the king. “My prized collection of rare and wonderful koi carp, all stone dead at a stroke? I had my fish-keeper stripped of all honors and sent to work in the refineries—and you said nothing?” He turned to his wife. “I suppose it might be for the best,” he said wearily.

“What?!?” yelled the princess.

“Right,” said the queen, clapping her hands. “Miss Strange, I am entrusting you with our daughter’s further education. I hope she will learn from the experience of having and being less than nothing.”

“I won’t go,” said the princess. “I shan’t be made to wear old clothes and eat nothing but potatoes and do my own scratching and share toilets with other people and have no servants. I shall savagely bite anyone who tries to take me away.”

“Then we shall have you muzzled and sent to the orphanage,” said the queen, “and they will allocate you work in the refineries. It’s either that or going quietly with Miss Strange.”

These words seemed to have an effect. “I shall hate you forever, Mother,” the princess said quietly.

“You will thank me,” the queen replied evenly, “and the kingdom shall thank your father and me for delivering them a just and wise ruler when we die.”

The princess said nothing. The servant-now-princess spoke next.

“This is a very beautiful room, like,” she said. “I’d not real noticed before what with not being allowed to raise my eyes from the floor and all. Is that a painting of a great battle?”

“That one?” said the king, always eager to show off his knowledge. “It is of one of our ancestors’ greatest triumphs against the Snowdonian Welsh. The odds were astounding: five thousand against six. It was a hard, hand-to-hand battle over two days with every inch won in blood and sinew, but thank Snodd we were victorious. Despite everything, we were impressed by the fighting spirit of the Welsh—those six certainly put up a terrific fight.”

“Look after her, won’t you?” said the queen to me in a more concerned tone. “I trust your judgment in how you educate my daughter, and whatever happens, you will not find the kingdom or me ungrateful. Bring her back when you think she is ready and I will restore their minds to the correct bodies. Protect her, Miss Strange, but don’t cosset her. The future of the kingdom may very well be in your hands.”

The princess had quieted down when she realized that her mother meant it, and we were shown from the hall.

“No one is curtseying to me,” she said in shocked wonderment as we walked unobserved down a bustling corridor. “Is this what being common is like?”

“It’s a small part of what being common is like,” I told her.

“Do you think that horrible servant will get my body pregnant?” she asked as we trotted down the steps. “I’ve heard about you girl orphans having no morals and having babies for fun and selling them to buy bicycles and fashion accessories and onions and stuff.”

“We think of nothing else,” I said with a smile.

Tiger and the Quarkbeast were still playing chess when we got back to the car.

“Who’s she?” said Tiger.

“Guess.”

“From the look of her,” said Tiger, “an orphan, probably bought for indentured servitude within the palace and used for menial scrubbing duties or worse. Here.” He fished in his pocket. “I’ve got some nougat somewhere that I was keeping for emergencies—and you look as though you could do with a bit of energy.”

He held out the nougat, mildly dusty from where it had sat in his pocket. The princess ignored it.

“I smell of dog poo, carbolic soap, and mildew,” she said, sniffing a sleeve of her maid’s uniform in disgust, “and I can feel a booger in my left nostril. Remove it for me, boy.”

“Holy cow!” said Tiger. “It’s the princess.”

“How did you know that?” she asked.

“Wild stab in the dark,” he said sarcastically.

“Hold your tongue!” said the princess.

“Hold it yourself,” said Tiger, sticking out his tongue.

“I dislike that redheaded nitwit already,” said the princess. “I’m going to start a list of people who have annoyed me so they can be duly punished when I am back in my own body.” She rummaged in her pockets for a piece of paper and a stub of pencil. “So, nitwit: Name?”

“Tiger . . . Spartacus.”

“Spart-a-cus,” The princess wrote it down carefully.

“If anyone finds out you’re the princess,” I said after a worrisome thought, “I’d give it about an hour before we have to fight off bandits, cutthroats, and agents of foreign powers. For now, you’ll take the handmaiden’s name. What is it, by the way?”

The princess seemed to see the sense in this. “She doesn’t have a name. We called her ‘poo-girl’ if we called her anything at all.”

I told her to take the orphan ID card out of her top pocket.

“Well, how about that,” said the princess, reading the card, “she does have a name after all, but it’s awful: Laura Scrubb, Royal Dog Mess Removal Operative Third Class, age seventeen. Laura Scrubb? I can’t be called that!”

“You are and you will be,” I said. “And that’s the Quarkbeast.”

“It’s hideous,” said the princess. “In fact, you all are. And why is there a disembodied hand on the steering wheel?”

“It’s a Helping Hand^™,” explained Tiger, “like power steering, only run by magic.”

“Magic? How vulgar. I am so very glad I inherited no powers from my mother.”

We climbed into the Bugatti Royale, I reversed out of the parking space, and we headed back toward town. The princess, once past her fit of indignation at how hideously unsophisticated we all were, spent the time staring out the window.

“I don’t usually see much beyond the castle walls,” she said in a quiet voice. “What’s that?”

“It’s a billboard, advertising toothpaste.”

“Doesn’t it come already squeezed onto your toothbrush every morning and evening?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Really? So how does it get from the tube to the toothbrush?”

I didn’t have time to answer; I stamped on the brakes as a car swerved in front of us. It was a six-wheeled Phantom Twelve Rolls-Royce, with paint work so perfectly black it looked as though one could fall into it. Only one person was driven around in the super-exclusive Phantom Twelve, and I knew that this was not a chance encounter.

An impeccably dressed manservant in a dark suit, white gloves, and dark glasses climbed out of the Phantom Twelve, walked across, and tapped on my window.

“Miss Strange?” he said. “My employer would like to discuss a matter that concerns you both.”

We were stuck in the middle of an intersection.

“What, here?”

“No, miss. At Madley International Airport. Follow us, please.”

The Rolls-Royce pulled away and we followed. The car would contain Miss D’Argento; like me, she was an agent. But she wasn’t just any agent—she didn’t look after movie stars, singers, writers, or even ordinary sorcerers. She didn’t even look after careless kings who found themselves temporarily without a kingdom and needing a public relations boost.

Miss D’Argento was the agent for the most powerful wizard living, dead, or, in his case, otherwise: the Mighty Shandar.