“Not just him,” Neel argued as he petted Raat’s nose. He sounded a little defensive. “Bhootoom too.”
I rolled my eyes. The owl prince Bhootoom was even worse than Buddhu. He hardly talked, ate rodents, and could only fly backward. They were not exactly a crack team.
Apparently Sir Gobbet agreed, because within minutes of us coming through the wormhole, and Neel helping a limping Lal off of the pakkhiraj horse’s back, the minister ripped the paper crown off the monkey prince’s head and slammed it down on Lal’s perfect curls.
“There, we have a new Raja now!” announced the man unceremoniously.
“I graciously accept the honor,” said Lal.
Neel gently helped his brother sit down on a rock. “Better you than me, Bro,” he said, but his words were the opposite of the hurt expression on his face. I looked away, not wanting to see how upset Neel looked. I knew I was responsible for a lot of it, but I didn’t know how to undo what I’d done.
“Where are Mati and Naya?” I asked the monkey prince.
“Arré, top sekrit PSS meeting, yaar,” drawled Buddhu in his characteristic laid-back tone. “Beyond my pay grade, you know. Nice to see you, brother Lalkamal. Glad to see that little vacation in the tree trunk didn’t hurt you any, yaar!” Lal acknowledged Buddhu’s comment with a smiling nod.
“Thank goodness you are here, Raja Lalkamal!” Sir Gobbet sputtered. “And you too, Prince Neelkamal. You won’t believe what’s it’s been like since you’ve been gone.”
“I’ve been gone for a day.” Neel frowned. “What could have happened?”
“What could have happened, you asked? Oh, your princely brothers just hacked into the Thirteen Rivers satellite, interrupted the kingdom’s favorite soap opera, and started telling those terrible jokes on live national television!” Sir Gobbet wailed. “Just in the course of a day, they have lost the support of half the kingdom and turned the other half of the kingdom more in support of Sesha!”
“Arré, yaar, am I to be blamed if the people here aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate my banana jokes?” Buddhu said while scratching an armpit.
I petted the monkey’s furry shoulder. “Not many people are.”
“And what about the leaving of banana peels all over the capital city?” Sir Gobbet demanded.
“You didn’t!” I tried to keep myself from laughing. “Buddhu, no!”
“No one has any appreciation for physical comedy these days, yaar!” He wiped his fat tears with his tail. “Arré, there’s a real elegance in a classic pratfall!”
Obviously angry, Bhootoom hopped off his monkey brother’s shoulder to peck at Sir Gobbet’s turnip-shaped turban. Then, unbeknownst to the little minister, the little white owl spit out a giant regurgitated pellet of food on the man’s head. The rest of us looked the other way, hoping Sir Gobbet wouldn’t notice.
This seemed to make Buddhu feel better, because the next thing he did was jump onto Bunty’s back. He screeched a little, chattered his teeth. “Hey, tiger, what kind of key opens a banana?”
“A turnkey, a latchkey, an academic index—that’s a sort of a key, you know!” said Bunty.
“Dorky, hokey, malarkey?” drawled Neel, earning a dirty look and smothered laugh from me.
A donkey? asked the horse Raat into my mind. I patted the pakkhiraj’s neck. “Not a bad guess, buddy,” I said to him.
“Key lime pie!” shouted Lal, his handsome face beaming with confidence. Neel and I both gave him a funny look.
“What?” asked the younger prince, looking back at us with a confused expression. Sometimes Lal was so adorably clueless.
“Nothing! Nothing!” said Neel. I couldn’t help laughing but then swallowed down my chuckles when I realized Sir Gobbet’s face was going from red to purple with outrage.
I didn’t want the minister to get even more annoyed than he already was, so I said quickly, “Tell us, Buddhu, what kind of key opens a banana?”
Buddhu jumped from Bunty to me, then flipped upside down, hanging from my forearm by his tail. “Arré, a monkey of course!”
The animals and Lal all erupted in peals of laughter.
“Oh, that’s good. Puerile, but good!” laughed Bunty. Raat stomped his hooves with pleasure. Neel and I tried to contain ourselves, but it was a challenge.
“You see what I mean?” the minister sputtered.
Neel tried to stop laughing and look serious. “You’re right, it was a pretty terrible joke.”
“Enough!” sputtered Sir Gobbet. He beckoned to some other ministers, lords and ladies, and palace servants all crowding around the hideout entrance. “We must try to earn the goodwill of the people toward our cause once again.”
“All hail the new Raja, Lalkamal!” he and the other courtiers cheered.
Just then, Mati and Naya came bounding out of the hideout entrance as well. Naya threw herself into my arms for a hug, and Lal did the same to Mati. He practically fell over on top of her because of his sprained ankle.
“Whoa there!” Neel helped right his brother, putting a stabilizing arm under Mati’s shoulder too. I noticed that my cousin, who used special shoes because one of her legs was a little shorter than the other, was actually using a cane. This was new. I wondered if she’d been overdoing it.
“Try not to kill yourself, Bro, before you go off on campaign,” Neel was saying.
“But I just got here!” Lal’s eyes were glued to Mati’s face. “Do I really have to go on campaign right now?”
To my surprise, it was Mati who insisted. She gave Lal a stern look. “We’re never going to win against Sesha and the Anti-Chaos Committee without the support of the people.”
“It wasn’t my fault everybody hated my jokes, boss! Really it wasn’t!” Buddhu wailed. He and Bhootoom had been working for Mati and the resistance as spies for a while now. “Let us make it up to you!”
“You two can go with your brother on campaign and help him,” Mati told the owl and monkey princes. “But no more hacking into the satellite signal, and no more banana jokes, all right? And I want to hear that you personally apologized to anyone who slipped on those banana peels!”
Buddhu and Bhootoom looked down at the ground with sheepish expressions. Naya, softhearted rakkhoshi that she was, went to give them reassuring pets on the head. As she did, I realized that there was yet another animal sitting on her shoulder. Tiktiki One!
“What’s that goofy gecko doing here?” I asked. “The last time I saw it, it climbed up the Norse tree of life and disappeared!”
“Don’t be mean, Tiktiki One’s just a prototype,” said Naya defensively. “There may be some bugs in the system still.”
“I’ll say!” laughed Neel as the lizard flicked out a giant tongue, caught a fly in midair, and then swallowed it.
In the meantime, Lal seemed flabbergasted by Naya’s presence. “So you’re a rakkhoshi,” he said slowly, wrinkling his nose.
“Lal,” said Neel in a warning voice. “Naya is Kiran’s friend. And now mine too.”
Naya, cupcake of sunshine that she was, beamed at Neel’s words. I knew, even if Neel didn’t realize it, that she’d been a member of the flying fangirls gang that had once chased me and Neel, threatening to nibble on Neel’s feet. I also knew for a fact she cut out all of Lal’s and Neel’s pictures, not to mention those of Buddhu and Bhootoom, from the Kingdom Beyond celebrity magazine Teen Taal. So I’m sure Neel calling her a friend was the thrill of a century.