Read The Eye of Zoltar for Free Online Page B

her back in a month or two 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 quietened down after a while as she realised her mother meant it, and we were shown from the hall.
    ‘No one is curtsying me,’ she said in a kind of shocked wonderment as we walked unobserved down a bustling corridor in the palace. ‘Is that 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 as we walked up.
    ‘Guess.’
    ‘From the look of her,’ said Tiger, ‘an orphan servant, probably bought for indentured servitude within the palace and used for menial scrubbing duties or worse. Here,’ he added, fishing in his pocket, ‘I’ve got some nougat somewhere I was keeping for emergencies – and you look as though you could do with a bit of energy.’
    He handed her the nougat, which was mildly dusty from where it had sat in Tiger’s pocket. The Princess ignored it, and him.
    ‘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 bogey in my left nostril. Remove it for me, boy.’
    ‘Holy cow!’ said Tiger. ‘It’s the Princess.’
    ‘How did you know that?’ asked the Princess.
    ‘Wild stab in the dark.’
    ‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Princess.
    ‘Hold it yourself,’ said Tiger, sticking out his tongue.
    ‘I dislike that ginger 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,’ said the Princess, writing it down carefully.
    ‘If anyone finds out you’re the Princess,’ I said after having a worrisome thought, ‘I’d give it about an hour before we have to fight off bandits, cut-throats 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, aged 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 attached to 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.’
    I reversed the Royale out of the parking place and headed back towards town. The Princess, once past her fit of indignation at how hideously unsophisticated we all were, spent the time staring out of the window.
    ‘I’m not allowed past the castle walls,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’
    ‘It’s a billboard advertising toothpaste.’
    ‘Doesn’t it come ready squeezed on to 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 as a car had