Seraphima clips a leash onto Humphrey’s collar. “Sorry,” she says. “We’re still working on basic training.”
The dog looks up at her. “You’re so pretty. Your hair looks like the sun.”
She blushes and pats his head. “Thanks, Humphrey.”
I put down my rod and get to my feet. “So,” I say. “How have you been?”
Seraphima looks out over the ocean. “I keep thinking it was a dream. The crazy carriage without horses . . . and the indoor marketplace . . . and how Frump . . . well, you know. But it wasn’t a dream, Ollie, was it?”
I shake my head. “It was real.”
Her eyes light up. “Iwas real,” she whispers. “I never thoughtabout making my own choices before, I guess. I mean, when you’re a princess, why would you want to be anything other than that?” She leans toward me, conspiratorial. “Can I show you a secret?”
“Erm . . . yes?” I say.
Delicately she lifts the hem of her gown, hiking it to her waist to reveal a pair of blue breeches stitched to look like a pair of jeans. “They’re incredible,” she enthuses. “You can run and climb and dance in these—you can doanything—and you don’t have to worry about getting tangled up in your petticoats.”
I grin. “Oh, I know. I’m always tripping over my petticoats. . . .”
“Right?” she agrees. “I traded Scuttle a needlepoint trivet for his spare pair of breeches. And then it really only took a few hours of sewing to alter them to fit.”
“They look splendid on you,” I say.
Her eyes grow wide. “You won’t tell anyone, will you, Ollie? It’ll be our secret?”
Of all the characters here with me, Seraphima alone truly understands what it was to live in a world other than this book. Ironically, the one person with whom I had nothing in common is now the only one I can really relate to.
I suppose that means we’re friends.
“Have you ever been fishing?” I ask.
Seraphima blinks at me. “It’s not ordinary princess practice.”
“Good thing you’re no ordinary princess.”
A smile unfurls across Seraphima’s face. She glances down the beach in both directions, then drops Humphrey’s leash. He begins to run in circles, barking at the seagulls, while Seraphima unfastens the skirt of her gown and places it carefully on the sand. Dressed now in her bodice and her makeshift jeans, she crouches beside me as I pick up a worm.
“Ooh!” she cries. “Let me!”
I watch with no small amount of appreciation as she threads the hook through the worm. Who would have guessed that Seraphima is so bloodthirsty?
She stands, the rod in her hand and the worm wriggling. “Now what?” she asks.
Before I can answer, however, a breeze whips across the beach, whisking her skirt into the air like a kite. As I watch, it catches at her waist and wraps neatly around, fastening itself.
“That’s odd,” I say, the only words I manage to get out before being yanked off the beach and tumbled through pages and phrases and dangling participles that strike me in the face until I land, heavily, on the parquet floor of the throne room in the royal court.
It’s been so long since I performed the story that at first, I don’t realize what’s happening.
Why the devil is Delilah starting from the beginning? Why not just meet me on page 43, as is our custom?
I do not appear on the first page of the story. That is a flashback to my birth, and so while I wait for my scene—the one where Rapscullio, our villain, convinces me that I must find his daughter, who has been kidnapped and locked in a tower—I am usually alone with Frump.
But that’s not possible anymore.
Humphrey whimpers and moves from edge to edge of the page. “What’s going on? What’s going on? It’s the end of theworld. We’re gonna die. Wait! I know. I’ll chew through this wall. That’ll help.”
“Relax,” I tell him. “It’s not a thunderstorm. It’s just a Reader. All you have to do is sit next to me and look like a dog.”
