Irene, at length perceiving this, flipflopped in girlish fashion and started offering support. “After all,” she said consolingly, “it’s not forever, even though it seems like it. Only two more days before the danger’s over. Then we can all faint with relief.” Dor appreciated the support, though he might have preferred a less pointed summation of his inadequacy.
He made it. The day of King Trent’s return came, to Dor’s immense relief and Irene’s mixed gratification and subdued dismay. She wanted her father back, but had expected Dor to make more of a mess of things. Dor had escaped more or less unscratched, which she felt was not quite fair.
Both of them dressed carefully and made sure the Castle Roogna grounds were clean. They were ready to greet the returning royalty in proper style.
The expectant hours passed, but the King and Queen did not appear. Dor quelled his nervousness; of course it took time to travel, especially if a quantity of Mundane trade goods was being moved.
Irene joined Dor for a lunch of number noodles and milk shakes; they tried to divert themselves by spelling words with numbers, but the milk kept shaking so violently that nothing held together. That fitted their mood.
“Where are they?” Irene demanded as the afternoon wore on. She was really getting worried. Now that she had a genuine concern, so that she wasn’t concentrating her energy to embarrass Dor, she manifested as the infernally pretty girl she could be. Even the green tint of her hair was attractive; it did match her eyes, and after all, there was nothing wrong with plants.
“Probably they had stuff to carry, so had to go slow,” Dor said, not for the first time. But a qualm was gnawing at him. He cuffed it away, but it kept returning, as was the nature of its kind.
Irene did not argue, but the green was spreading to her face, and that was less pretty.
Evening came, and night, without Trent and Iris’s return. Now Irene turned to Dor in genuine apprehension. “Oh, Dor, I’m scared! What’s happened to them?”
He could bluff neither her nor himself. He put his arm about her shoulders. “I don’t know. I’m scared, too.”
She clung to him for a moment, all soft and sweet in her anxiety.
Then she drew away and ran to her own apartment. “I don’t want you to see me cry,” she explained as she disappeared.
Dor was touched. If only she could be like that when things were going well! There was a good deal more to her than mischief and sexual suggestion, if she ever let it show.
He retired and slept uneasily. The real nightmares came this time, not the sleek and rather pretty equines he had sometimes befriended, but huge, nebulous, misshapen creatures with gleaming white eyes and glinting teeth; he had to shake himself violently awake to make them leave. He used the royal chambers, for he was King now-but since his week was over, he felt more than ever like an imposter. He stared morosely at the dark hoofprints on the floor, knowing the mares were waiting only for him to sleep again. He was defenseless; he had geared himself emotionally for relief when the week expired, and now that relief had been negated. If the King and Queen did not return today, what would he do?
They did not return. Dor continued to settle differences and solve problems in the Kingly routine; what else could he do? But a restlessness was growing in the palace, and his own dread intensified as each hour dragged by. Everyone knew King Trent’s vacation had been scheduled for one week. Why hadn’t he returned?
In the evening Irene approached Dor privately. There was no mischief about her now. She was conservatively garbed in a voluminous green robe, and her hair was in disorder, as if overrun by weeds. Her eyes were preternaturally bright, as if she had been crying more than was good for her and had used vanishing cream to make the signs of it disappear. “Something’s happened,” she said. “I know it. We must go check on them.”
“We can’t do that,” Dor said miserably.
“Can’t? That concept is not in my lexicon.” She had grown so used to using fancy words, she now did it even when distracted. Dor hoped he never deteriorated to that extent. “I can do anything I want, except-“
“Except rule Xanth,” Dor said. “And find your parents.”
“Where are they?” she demanded.
She didn’t know, of course. She had not been part of the secret.
He saw no way to avoid telling her now, for she was, after all, King Trent’s daughter, and the situation had become serious. She did have the right to know. “In Mundania.”
“Mundania!” she cried, horrified.
“A trade mission,” he explained quickly. “To make a deal so Xanth can benefit. For progress.”
“Oh, this is twice as awful as I feared. Oh, woe! Mundania! The awfullest of places! They can’t do magic there! They’re helpless!”
That was an exaggeration, but she was prone to it when excited.
Neither Trent nor Iris was helpless in nonmagical terms. The King was an expert swordsman, and the Queen had a wonderfully devious mind. “Remember, he spent twenty years there, before he was King. He knows his way around.”
“But he didn’t come back!”
Dor could not refute that. “I don’t know what to do,” he confessed.
“We’ll have to go find them,” she said. “Don’t tell me no again.”
And there was such a glint in her bright eyes that Dor dared not defy her.
Actually, it seemed so simple. Anything was better than the present doubt. “All right. But I’ll have to tell the Council of Elders.”
For the Elders were responsible for the Kingdom during the absence of the King. They took care of routine administrative chores and had to select a new King if anything happened to the old one. They had chosen Trent, back when the prior monarch, the Storm King, had died. Dor’s’ grandfather Roland was a leading Elder.
“First thing in the morning,” she said, her gaze daring him to demur.
“First thing in the morning,” he agreed. She had forced this action upon him, but he was glad for the decision.
“Shall I stay with you tonight? I saw the hoofprints.”
Dor considered. The surest way to banish nightmares was to have compatible company while sleeping. But Irene was too pretty now and too accommodating; if he kissed her this night, she wouldn’t bite. That made him cautious. Once Good Magician Humfrey had suggested to him that it might be more manly to decline a woman’s offer than to accept it; Dor had not quite understood that suggestion, but now he had a better inkling of its meaning. “No,” he said regretfully. “I fear the nightmares, but I fear you more.”
“Gee,” she said, pleased. Then she kissed him without biting and left in her swirl of perfume.
Dor sat for some time, wishing Irene were that way all the time. No tantrums, no artful flashes of torso, no pretended misunderstandings, just a sincere and fairly mature caring. But of course her niceness came only in phases, always wiped out by other phases.
His decision had one beneficial effect: the nightmares foraged elsewhere that night, letting him sleep in peace.
“Cover for me,” he told Irene in the morning. “I would rather people didn’t know where I am, except for the conjurer.”
“Certainly,” she agreed. If people knew he was consulting privately with an Elder, they would know something was wrong.