“Oh, good!” said Sophie. “I knew I was cut out to be an aunt.”
The first task of the two new ambassadors was to conduct numbers of the kidnapped princesses to their homes. Some of them, like the tiny Princess of Tsapfan, lived so far away that their countries had barely been heard of. The ambassadors had instructions to make trading alliances and also to note all other strange places on the way, with a view to later exploration. Howl had talked to the King. Now, for some reason, all Ingary was talking about mapping the globe. Exploring parties were being chosen and trained.
What with journeying, and pampering princesses, and arguing with foreign kings, Abdullah was somehow always too busy to make his confession to Flower-in-the-Night. It always seemed that there would be a more promising moment the next day. But at last, when they were about to arrive in far-distant Tsapfan, he realized that he could delay no longer.
He took a deep breath. He felt the color leave his face. “I am not really a prince,” he blurted out. There. It was said.
Flower-in-the-Night looked up from the map she was drawing. The shaded lamp in the tent made her face almost more beautiful than usual. “Oh, I know that,” she said.
“What?” whispered Abdullah.
“Well, naturally, while I was in the castle in the air, I had plenty of time to think about you,” she said. “And I soon realized you were romancing, because it was so like my daydream, only the other way around. I used to dream that I was just an ordinary girl, you see, and that my father was a carpet merchant in the Bazaar. I used to imagine that I managed the business for him.”
“You are a marvel!” said Abdullah.
“Then so are you,” she said, and went back to her map.
They returned to Ingary in due time with an extra packhorse loaded with the boxes of sweets the princesses had promised Valeria. There were chocolates and candied oranges and coconut ices and honeyed nuts, but the most wonderful of all were the sweets from the tiny princess—layer upon layer of paper-thin candy that the tiny princess called Summer Leaves. These came in a box so beautiful that Valeria used it for jewelry when she grew older. Strangely enough, she had almost given up screaming. The King could not understand it, but as Valeria explained to Sophie, when thirty people all tell you you’ve got to scream, it rather puts you off the whole idea.
Sophie and Howl were living—somewhat quarrelsomely, it must be confessed, although they were said to be happiest that way—in the moving castle again. One of its aspects was a fine mansion in the ChippingValley. When Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night returned, the King gave them land in the ChippingValley, too, and permission to build a palace there. The house they had built was quite modest—it even had a thatched roof
—but their gardens soon became one of the wonders of the land. It was said that Abdullah had help in their design from at least one of the Royal Wizards, for how else could even an Ambassador have a bluebell wood that grew bluebells all the year around?
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