Very slowly and sheepishly the soldier put away his veils and looked up. It was still the same face, with the same blue eyes that were either utterly innocent or deeply dishonest, or both, but it was a smoother and more educated face. A different sort of soldierliness looked out of it. “That damned djinn enchanted me, too,” he said. “I remember it now. I was waiting in a wood for the search parties to report back.” He looked rather apologetic. “We were hunting for Princess Beatrice—er, you, you know—without much luck, and suddenly my tent blew away and there was the djinn, squeezing himself in among the trees. ‘I’m taking the Princess,’ he said. ‘And since you defeated her country by unfair use of magic, you can be one of the defeated soldiers and see how you like it.’ And next thing I knew, I was wandering about on the battlefield, thinking I was a Strangian soldier.”

“And did you hate it?” asked Princess Beatrice.

“Well,” said the Prince, “it was hard. But I sort of got on with it and picked up everything useful I could and made a few plans. I see I shall have to do something for all those defeated soldiers. But”—a grin that was purely that of the old soldier spread across his face—“to tell the truth, I enjoyed myself rather a lot, wandering through Ingary. I had fun being wicked. I’m like that djinn, really. It’s getting back to ruling again that’s depressing me.”

“Well, I can help you there,” said Princess Beatrice. “I know the ropes, after all.”

“Really?” said the Prince, and he looked up at her in the same way that as the soldier he had looked at the kitten in his hat.

Flower-in-the-Night nudged Abdullah, softly and delightedly. “The Prince of Ochinstan!” she whispered. “No need to fear him!”

Shortly after that the castle came to earth as lightly as a feather. Calcifer, floating against the low beams of the ceiling, announced that he had set it down in the fields outside Kingsbury. “And I sent a message to one of Suliman’s mirrors,” he said smugly.

This seemed to exasperate Howl. “So did I,” he said angrily. “Take a lot on yourself, don’t you?”

“Then he got two messages,” said Sophie. “What of it?”

“How stupid!” said Howl, and began to laugh. At that Calcifer sizzled with laughter, too, and they seemed to be friends again. Thinking about it, Abdullah could see how Howl felt. He had been bursting with anger all the time he was a genie, and he was still bursting with anger now, with no one except Calcifer to take it out on. Probably Calcifer felt the same. Both of them had magic that was too powerful to risk being angry with ordinary people.