‘Ridiculous,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t even work for us. I’m here as a friend, and would be asking Boo to refund me once we get her home.’
‘But she is a sorcerer,’ said Hilda, ‘and even though her power might be diminished, we understand she can still spell – just with limited accuracy and duration. Give us twenty-five and you can take her away now and I’ll chuck in some B&Q vouchers and two tickets to the Nolan Sisters concert next month.’
‘Twenty-five?’ I echoed. ‘Out of the question. Houses of Enchantment don’t have that kind of cash and you well know it.’
The negotiations went on like this for about twenty minutes. We were both polite but firm, and I finally agreed at eighteen, which I thought quite reasonable. It was always possible Boo might make a contribution of a few thousand, although somehow I doubted it.
‘Excellent,’ said Hilda, filling out a form. ‘How will you be paying?’
I placed the twenty-thousand-moolah letter of credit that Moobin had given me on the table and slid it across. Hilda glanced at it.
‘That’ll do for her room service and bar bills. What about the rest?’
‘Eighteen, you said,’ I told her, ‘this is good for twenty.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we seem to have been talking at cross-purposes. I meant eighteen million.’
‘Eighteen million?’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Boo was once one of the world’s greatest sorcerers. The highest best offer was for eight million. Do you want to go away and raise the funds and then come back? I’ll have to warn you that if we don’t see any cash by Sunday, we withdraw our offer and take the best offer.’
‘Hang on—’ I began, but the Princess interrupted me.
‘We’ll pay now,’ she said, rummaging in my shoulder bag. ‘You do take all forms of currency, I take it?’
Hilda nodded and said that they took everything except goats ‘as there was something of a glut at present’ and the Princess presented her with the receipt I had received for the Bugatti Royale.
‘There,’ said the Princess, ‘this should cover it.’
Hilda looked at the note, which stated that we were owed the value of the Royale, signed by Emperor Tharv himself.
‘We don’t take receipts,’ said Hilda.
‘It’s not a receipt,’ said the Princess. ‘Technically speaking what you have there is a banknote. Any banknote is merely a promissory note issued by a government against its assets to enable the citizenry to more easily trade commodities. And by assets one might usually mean gold, although you could choose mice, turnips or tulip bulbs. Often you don’t need any assets at all – if the citizenry believe their national bank will remain solvent come what may, a simple promise is enough, backed by nothing more tangible than … confidence.’
Hilda looked at the Princess blankly, then at me.
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘we’ve had to endure her for a while now but the funny thing is, she’s usually right.’
Heartened by this, the Princess continued.
‘… and since that receipt is signed by Emperor Tharv, who is the Cambrian head of state, that note is legal tender to the value of one Bugatti Royale.’
‘But it’s a car,’ I said, ‘it’s not worth eighteen million.’
The Princess smiled.
‘Not quite correct. There were only seven Bugatti Royales made, and the last one sold at auction for over twenty million. The Bugatti is not so much a car, more an exquisite work of art you can take to the shops. You’ve been driving around in a Van Gogh.’
‘You like economics, don’t you, handmaiden?’ said Hilda, picking up the telephone.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Hello?’ said Hilda into the receiver. ‘I need to speak to the Master of the Sums.’
We waited for a few minutes while Hilda explained the situation, and after a minute or two she put her hand over the receiver.
‘The Bugatti Royale exchange rate stands at 19.2 million Cambrian plotniks,’ she said. ‘Would you like to take the deposed and penniless King Zsigsmund VIII in lieu of change?’
‘No, I’ll take a Volkswagen Beetle, please,’ I said. ‘One in particular. Pale blue, 1959 – the one Boo arrived in. The rest can be cash.’
Heading home
We stayed overnight in Cambrianopolis while Boo’s paperwork was processed. We had a good meal, a very welcome bath and slept in clean sheets for the first time in what seemed like an age. Talk between the three of us had been muted, with each of us lost in our own thoughts. We’d all be returning to our usual lives over the next few days. The Princess would go back to being a princess, I would return to Kazam and Addie would be dealing with her usual bread-and-butter tour work – taking eager and very dopey tourists into areas of high jeopardy, then attempting to stop them being eaten.
We were waiting outside the Clearance House twenty minutes before it was due to open. I’d tried to raise Kazam on the conch again, but still nothing. The good news was that my Volkswagen had been found, repaired, filled with fuel and returned the previous evening. We had spent an amusing half-hour trying to squeeze Rubber Colin inside the car, only to give up and instead lash him on to the roof rack. Addie had returned the half-track to the hire company, and we were very glad we’d taken out the Additional Collision Waiver as it was in a considerably worse state than when we hired it.
Boo did not seem particularly happy to see us, and stepped blinking into the daylight as soon as I had signed the paperwork.
‘You shouldn’t have paid the ransom,’ she said as soon as she saw me. ‘If no one paid, the kidnapping business would collapse in an afternoon. You’re all fools.’
‘It’s good to see you again too, Boo,’ I said. ‘This is Addie Powell, our friend and guide, and this is Princess Shazine of Snodd.’
‘A Sister Organza switcheroo?’ asked Boo, staring at the Princess and prodding her with an inquisitive middle finger.
‘My mother did it,’ said the Princess.
‘Once, I knew the Queen very well,’ said Boo, raising an inquisitive eyebrow at the Princess. ‘A good woman until she married that idiot your father. Ask her if she remembers the incident with the squid.’
‘I will,’ said the Princess, who seemed to have become immune to the insults her father’s name attracted.
‘Right,’ I said as soon as we were in the car, Once Magnificent Boo deferentially allowing the Princess to sit up front, ‘let’s get out of Cambrianopolis before someone changes their mind.’
Luckily, no one did, and an hour later we were heading back towards the border. Barring bad traffic or a breakdown, we’d be back at the palace by lunchtime, and the Princess and the handmaiden could be changed back.
‘I used to think Laura Scrubb was the ugliest girl I’d ever seen,’ said the Princess, staring in the courtesy mirror at the face she’d been using for the past few days, ‘but I’ve got to quite like the snub nose, shortness of stature and lack of any agreeable bone structure.’
‘You’ll soon be yourself again,’ I said, with mixed feelings. The Princess in Laura’s body and I had got on really well, but I wasn’t sure how that would translate once she was back to being beautiful and rich and influential once more.
As we drove towards the border I related everything that had happened over the past four days. I told Boo all that I could recall – leaving out the bit about Gabby – and expected her to make comment, ask questions, or say ‘Ah-ha’ or ‘Really?’ or ‘Gosh’ or something but she didn’t say anything until I’d finished.
‘At least it explains why there’s a rubber Dragon strapped to the roof,’ she said at last. ‘I was wondering about that. Where’s the Eye of Zoltar right now?’
I told her it was in the old saucepan in her footwell, and she drew her feet away.
‘Has anyone touched it?’
‘No.’
‘Keep it that way. It’ll be nothing but trouble. If I were you I’d drop it down the first disused mi
ne shaft you come across.’
I explained why we needed it, and that we’d hold a conclave to discuss everything when we got home. Boo merely shrugged at this and muttered darkly about ‘meddling with powers you could not possibly hope to comprehend’.
We passed a road sign alerting us that the border to the Kingdom of Snodd was ahead.
‘Thirty minutes,’ said Addie, who would be picking up her next group from the tourist office, where we first met her.
‘About time,’ said the Princess, ‘I’m really beginning to miss being me.’
I ran over my speech to Queen Mimosa as we drove along. About how I felt the Princess had progressed from being a spoilt brat of the highest order to someone who could, and would, think of others. On second thoughts, I probably wouldn’t need to say anything at all – the Princess would simply open her mouth and speak, and the Queen in her wisdom would know.
We first spotted the smoke when we were still some way from the border. We thought at first that it was the result of a minor border skirmish or something. When I mentioned it to Boo she leaned forward in her seat.
‘That’s not the border,’ she said, ‘it’s farther away.’
‘Hereford?’ I asked.
‘Closer than that,’ said Boo. ‘Perhaps the palace.’
‘The palace?’ echoed the Princess, and urged me to drive faster. The palace was only ten miles from the border, and as we crested the last rise and the Kingdom was spread before us the Princess’s home came into view. And what we saw was neither expected, nor welcome.
‘No!’ cried the Princess, and put her hand to her mouth.
I stopped the car at a lookout spot where several other people were already watching, and we climbed out. The royal palace was on fire, and a long pall of black smoke drifted across the land. There was a small explosion in the castle, then another.
‘My lovely palace,’ said the Princess. ‘I do hope Mummy and Daddy got out okay.’
‘The powder magazine must have blown up or something,’ I said.
‘Don’t be a clot,’ said Boo. ‘The palace is under attack. See there, landships on the move.’
She was right. Far in the distance we could see the unmistakable rhomboid shape of King Snodd’s defensive landships moving across the land, one of which exploded into fragments as we watched. Beyond the palace, another distant smudge of smoke was drifting into the sky. They – whoever they were – had attacked Hereford as well. I think I felt anger rather than fear, and concern over my friends and colleagues.
‘Who would dare attack us?’ said the Princess. ‘A sneak attack by, what, Midlandia? But why? My cousin is the Crown Prince and the one I was most likely to marry. Our kingdoms would have been joined peacefully in the fullness of time.’
‘It’s not Midlandia,’ said Boo in a dark tone. ‘Look down there,’ she went on, pointing towards the Cambrian–Snodd border. The Cambrian artillery, which had been pointing towards the sky as we entered the country, was now pointing across the River Wye towards the Kingdom of Snodd. Tharv had mobilised his troops to defend his nation, although quite how well they could do this wasn’t clear. As we watched, we could see a single Snoddian landship heading towards the border.
‘Boo,’ I said, ‘can you do a fingerscope?’
‘Of a sort.’
She made two circles with her middle fingers and thumbs and then uttered a spell. In an instant there was a lens in each of her encircled fingers, and we crowded around her shoulder to see the Snoddian landship close up. It was badly battle-damaged, and from the forward hatch there fluttered a white flag of truce – whoever was in the landship was attempting to escape. This was a defeated army on the run. There was another explosion at the castle.
‘Oh!’ said the Princess, clutching her chest in pain. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’
She dropped to her knees and tried desperately to regain her breath.
‘She’s frightened,’ said the Princess, ‘I can feel her.’
‘Feel who?’ asked Addie.
‘Me – her – Laura, the Princess. She’s running. Running for her life!’
I held her hand and squeezed it, and she looked up at me with the same expression of confused realisation I had seen on her face when her body was swapped.
‘This is bad,’ said Boo, ‘and I think this war is all but lost.’
As if to punctuate her words a huge explosion tore through the palace, flinging masonry and rubble in all directions, and as we watched the remains collapsed in on themselves in a massive ball of dust and debris.
I looked at the Princess, who was silently sobbing on the ground, and then at Boo, who shook her head sadly.
‘It’s over,’ she said, ‘I can feel it in the air. A collective sadness, a negative emotion that is disrupting the background wizidrical energy. I’m sorry, ma’am, but your parents, the King and Queen, are both dead.’
‘Oh no,’ she said in a quiet voice, as tears welled up in her eyes, ‘and my little brother Stevie?’
‘Of this, I know nothing.’
‘What about Laura Scrubb?’ she asked. ‘And my beautiful and elegant body?’
Boo shook her head sadly, and the Princess nodded, accepting what she knew to be the truth, that she could never truly be herself again. But with the King and Queen dead, her real body destroyed and the Princess’s little brother’s whereabouts unknown, this could mean only one thing.
‘Your Gracious Majesty,’ I said to the Princess, bowing my head, ‘rightful ruler of the Kingdom of Snodd, you have my loyalty above everything. I wish only to serve, and serve well.’
‘And I,’ said Addie, giving a low bow, ‘humbly request leave to be your personal bodyguard.’
‘I, too, am at your disposal, Your Majesty,’ said Once Magnificent Boo, ‘in matters magical or wherever I can serve. Loyal, like us all, until death.’
‘Loyal,’ we affirmed in unison, ‘until death.’
The new Queen stared up at us from where she was sitting, still on the ground. We’d not had confirmation that Laura Scrubb had gone, but something inside the Princess knew it was true. A small part of her that had stayed with the real Laura until her death, perhaps to guide her back in when the mind switcheroo was over.
‘Okay, then,’ she said, taking a deep breath, and wiping away her tears, ‘I accept all the responsibilities of my birthright, and will not rest until the perpetrator of this foul deed is brought to justice. But I will not be calling myself Queen until I am once more in full command of my lands and people. Help me up, will you? I think I’ve got cramp.’
We helped her up and sat on a bench, all four of us, and watched the black smoke drifting across the distant countryside. The Princess broke the silence.
‘Jennifer,’ she said, ‘I should like you to be Royal Counsel.’
‘With respect, ma’am,’ I said, ‘I’m only sixteen. That’s a job usually reserved for grey hair – someone with experience.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the Princess, ‘you have plenty of experience, and what’s more – I trust you completely and know you will always do the right thing. You accept?’
‘I accept, ma’am.’
She thanked me, smiled, and looked at her hands. The left was still raw and calloused from the previous owner’s years of toil, and the other was the hand of the ex-stoker, with ‘No more pies’ tattooed on the back, and held on with duct tape. It wasn’t an ideal situation, and as far as we knew it, a first for royalty.
‘This is my body now, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I think it is.’
‘Then I’d better start looking after it. Tell me, Jenny, am I horribly plain?’
I looked at her pale, sun-starved face, her brown hair, which was still lank with undernourishment, and her dark-rimmed eyes.
‘It’s not the outside that counts, ma’am.’
Aftermath
It was too dangerous to cross the border until we knew more about what was happening, so we stayed put. I tried over and over again to reach Kazam on
the conch, but with no success.
The road to the border was soon packed full of refugees, vehicles and medical personnel tending to any wounded who had managed to escape across the border. Tharv, true to his cherished principles of unpredictability, had welcomed the refugees from the Kingdom of Snodd, and from the garbled reports of the inrush of displaced citizens, we managed to piece together broadly what had happened.
The Snoddian Royal Family were, as we had feared, killed when the Palace was destroyed. But it was worse than that: the victors had displayed their heads upon poles outside the shattered remnants of the palace, and fed their corpses to wolves, for fun. We also learned that the war had not been solely against the Kingdom of Snodd. Of the twenty-eight nations within the unUnited Kingdoms, all but nine were now overrun, or had surrendered. Information was scarce but it seemed that Financia had been spared owing to the fact that it was a centre of banking, the Duchy of Portland Bill had been defended successfully thanks to their deep moat, and the seagoing nation of the Isle of Wight had been away conducting sea trials in the North Atlantic.
It was hard to describe the chaos in which we found ourselves as we walked up to the border. Homeless people had grabbed what they could before fleeing, and mothers desperately searched for husbands, their children clinging on tightly with a look of numb terror upon their faces. There were casualties, too – soldiers with appalling wounds being treated as best they could – and among all this, the Cambrian Gunners lay waiting, their weapons trained upon the invaders, poised to return fire if attacked.
For the invaders were there, sitting outside the Snoddian customs post on the other side of the River Wye, doing nothing, awaiting orders. The larger members of the group were six in total and each about twenty-five feet tall, dressed only in a loincloth and heavy battle bootees. The Trolls’ skin was covered in elaborate tattoos, each had a dead goat decorating its copper war helmet, and their small, cruel eyes stared at us greedily.
‘Trolls,’ hissed the Princess when we saw them, ‘I hate Trolls.’