From the Primer, Princess Nell's ride to the Castle of King Coyote;

description of the castle;

an audience with a Wizard;

her final triumph over King Coyote;

an enchanted army.

Princess Nell rode north into an explosive thunderstorm. The horses were driven nearly mad with terror by the cannonlike explosions of the thunder and the unearthly blue flashes of the lightning, but with a firm hand and a soothing voice in the ear, Nell urged them forward. The cairns of bones strewn along the roadside were evidence that this mountain pass was no place to dawdle, and the poor animals would be no less terrified huddling under a rock. For all she knew, the great King Coyote was capable of controlling even the weather itself and had prepared this reception to try Princess Nell's will.

Finally she crested the pass, and none too soon, as the horses' hooves had begun to slip on a thick layer of ice, and ice had begun thickly to coat the reins and to weigh down the animals' manes and tails. Working her way down the switchbacks, she left the high fury of the storm behind and pushed into masses of rain as dense as any jungle. It was well that she had paused for a few days at the foot of the mountains to review all of Purple's magic books, for on this night ride through the mountains she used every spell Purple had taught her: spells for casting light, for choosing the right fork in the road, for calming animals and warming chilled bodies, for bolstering her own failing courage, for sensing the approach of any monsters foolish enough to venture out in such weather, and for defeating those desperate enough to attack. This night ride was, perhaps, a rash act, but Princess Nell proved equal to the challenge. King Coyote would not expect her to make such a crossing. Tomorrow when the storm on high had cleared, he would send his raven sentinels winging through the pass and down into the plain below to spy on her, as he had for the last several days, and they would return with dismaying news: The Princess had vanished! Even King Coyote's best trackers would not be able to follow her path from yesterday's campsite, so craftily had she covered her real tracks and laid false ones.

Dawn found her in the heart of a great forest. King Coyote's castle was built on a high woodland plateau surrounded by mountains; she estimated she was several hours' ride away. Staying well clear of the high road taken by the messengers from the Cipherers' Market, she made camp under an overhanging rock along a river, sheltered from the chill wet wind and safe from the eyes of the raven sentinels, and lit a tiny fire where she made some tea and porridge. She napped until the middle of the afternoon, then rose, bathed in the bitter water of the stream, and untied the oilcloth packet she had brought with her. It contained one of the costumes worn by the messengers who galloped to and from the Cipherers' Market. It also contained a few books containing enciphered messages– authentic ones dispatched from various stalls in the market addressed to King Coyote's castle.

As she made her way through the woods toward the high road, she heard massed hoofbeats rolling by and knew that the first contingent of messengers had just come over the pass after waiting for the storm to pass. She waited a few minutes and then followed them. Turning onto the high road out of the dense woods, she reined in her horse and sat for a moment, astonished by her first sight of the Castle of King Coyote.

She had never seen its like in all of her travels through the Land Beyond. Its base was as wide as a mountain, and its walls rose sheer and straight into the clouds. Galactic clouds of lights shone from its myriad windows. It was guarded by mighty stockades, each of them a great castle unto itself, but built not on stony foundations, but upon the very clouds themselves; for King Coyote, in his cleverness, had devised a way to make buildings that floated on the air. Princess Nell spurred her horse forward, for even in her numbness she sensed that someone might be watching the high road from a window high in one of the castle's glittering oriels. As she galloped toward the castle, she was torn between a sense of her own foolishness in daring to assault such a mighty fortress and admiration for King Coyote's work. Faint clouds of diaphanous black oozed between the towers and stockades, and as Princess Nell drew closer, she saw that they were actually regiments of ravens going through their military drills. They were the closest thing King Coyote had to an army; for as one of the ravens had told her, after he had stolen the eleven keys from around her neck,

Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels

Contentment signify, for fools

Like Princess Nell; but those

Who cultivate their wit

Like King Coyote and his crows

Compile their power bit by bit

And hide it places no one knows.

King Coyote did not preserve his power by armed might but by cleverness, and sentinels were the only army he needed, information his only weapon.

As she galloped the final miles to the gate, wondering whether her legs and back would hold out, a thin steam of black issued from a narrow portal high in one of the floating stockades, thickened into a transparent ball, and dove toward her like a plunging comet. She could not help flinching from the illusion of mass and momentum, but, a stone's throw above her head the cloud of ravens parted into several contingents that whirled around and struck from several directions, converging on her, passing around her so closely that the wind from their rattling wings blew her hair back, finally reforming into a disciplined group that returned to its stockade without a look back. Apparently she had passed the inspection. When she reached the mighty gate, it was standing open for her, and no one was guarding it. Princess Nell rode into the broad streets of King Coyote's castle.

It was the finest place she had ever seen. Here gold and crystal were not hidden away in the King's treasury but were used as building materials. Green and growing things were everywhere, for King Coyote was fascinated by the secrets of nature and had sent his agents to the farthest reaches of the world to bring back exotic seeds. The wide boulevards of King Coyote's city were lined with trees whose arching limbs closed over the ashlars to form a rustling vault. The undersides of the leaves were silver and seemed to cast a gentle light, and the branches were filled with violet and magenta bromeliads the size of kettles, making a sweet sharp smell, aswarm with ruby-throated hummingbirds and filled with water where tiny fluorescent frogs and beetles lived.

The Messenger's Route was marked with polished brass plates set among the paving-stones. Princess Nell followed it down the grand boulevard, into a park that encircled the city, and then onto a rising street that spiraled around the central promontory. As the horse took her toward the clouds, her ears popped again and again, and from each curve in the road she enjoyed a sweeping view over the lower city and into the constellation of floating stockades where the raven sentinels soared, coming and going in flights and squadrons, bringing news from every corner of the empire.

She rode by a place where King Coyote was adding on to the castle; but instead of an army of stonemasons and carpenters, the builder was a single man, a portly gray-bearded fellow puffing at a long slender pipe, carrying a leather bag on his belt. Arriving at the center of the building site, he reached into his bag and drew out a great seed the size of an apple and pitched it into the soil. By the time this man had walked back to the spiral road, a tall shaft of gleaming crystal had arisen from the soil and grown far above their heads, gleaming in the sunlight, and branched out like a tree. By the time Princess Nell lost sight of it around the corner, the builder was puffing contentedly and looking at a crystalline vault that nearly covered the lot.