Millie the ghost was beautiful. Of course, she wasn’t a ghost any more, so
she was Millie the nurse. She was not especially bright, and she was hardly
young. She was twenty-nine years old as she reckoned it, and about eight hundred
and twenty-nine as others reckoned it: the oldest creature currently associated
with Castle Roogna. She had been ensorcelled as a maid of seventeen, eight
centuries ago, when Castle Roogna was young, and restored to life at the time of
Dor’s birth. In the interim she had been a ghost, and the label had never quite
worn off. And why should it? By all accounts she had been a most attractive
ghost.
Indeed, she had the loveliest glowing hair, flowing like poppycorn silk to
the dimpled backs of her… knees. The terrain those tresses covered in passing
was-was-how was it that Dor had never noticed it before? Millie had been his
nurse all these years, taking care of him while his parents were busy, and they
tended to be busy a great deal of the time.
Oh, he understood that well enough. He told others that the King trusted his
parents Bink and Chameleon, and anyone the King trusted was bound to be very
busy, because the King’s missions were too important to leave to nobodies. All
that was true enough. But Dor knew his folks didn’t have to accept all those
very important missions that took them all over the Land of Xanth and beyond.
They simply liked to travel, to be away from home. Right now they were far away,
in Mundania, and nobody went to Mundania for pleasure. It was because of him,
because of his talent. Dor remembered years ago when he had talked to the double
bed Bink and Chameleon used, and asked it what had happened overnight, just from
idle curiosity, and it had said-well, it had been quite interesting, especially
since Chameleon had been in her beauty stage, prettier and stupider than Millie
the ghost, which was going some. But his mother had overheard some of that
dialogue, and told his father, and after that Dor wasn’t allowed in the bedroom
any more. It wasn’t that his parents didn’t love him, Bink had carefully
explained; it was that they felt nervous about what they called “invasion
of privacy.” So they tended to do their most interesting things away from
the house, and Dor had learned not to pry. Not when and where anyone in
authority could overhear, at any rate. Millie took care of him; she had no
privacy secrets. True, she didn’t like him talking to the toilet, though it was
just a pot that got emptied every day into the back garden where dung beetles
magicked the stuff into sweet-smelling roses.
