and asked, “Tana, what’s wrong? Why this mood?”
The princess sighed. “I’m displeased that some stranger is sitting out there while I’m getting dressed. Can’t you send her away?”
Kahristra shook her head. “I can’t give her orders. She gives me orders.”
“What?” Tanalasta’s head snapped up, her brows drawing together in the frown that would always make her plainer than most women-and the very echo of her father the king.
“Yon woman,” the maid explained, lifting a finger to indicate the door that led out of the robing room into the retiring room beyond, where they both knew the unwelcome guest was sitting, “is a war wizard, and she’s here on your royal father’s orders.”
Tanalasta’s eyes widened in a mockery of incredulity. “So much I had guessed, but why? ”
Kahristra sighed. “There are certain suspicions that you might be endangered at this revel, if you aren’t protected.”
“You mean Vangerdahast is acting mysterious,” Tanalasta said disgustedly. “Again. He is the one who has suspicions.”
“Well… yes,” her maid confirmed, trying-not entirely successfully-to hide a grin.
“That man,” Tanalasta said, “is impossible! I wish someone would turn him into a frog, or a dragon would swallow him, or-or — something would happen to just take him out of all our lives!”
Kahristra shrugged. “In unfolding time to come, you just might get your wish. You can’t say plenty of folk haven’t tried. One of them is bound to succeed, some day.”
“You do realize,” the young man with the blazing yellow eyes said calmly, poised naked and magnificent above her, “that if we succeed in this, we must inevitably end up as foes.”
“Oh?” The hands of the lady merchant of Marsember tightened on his hips. “Does your Cormyr so firmly embrace fair Marsember, then?”
“As firmly as I’m embracing it now,” Terentane gasped, yielding to her hungry tugging.
“Well, now,” she snarled under his riding, through clenched teeth, “I suppose we will, at that. Years hence, I hope.”
“I hope so too,” Terentane panted-in the instant before the bed broke, beneath them, crashing to the floor.
Which groaned ominously, and started to cant, oh-so-slowly tipping as a worm-gnawed post gave way. Together, laughing wildly, the young man so powerful in his Art that Vangerdahast feared him, and the wily merchant twice his age who’d built her wealth into a rival of the Crown treasury, dashed out of the doomed room and down the stairs.
“ Must we use your rotting old boathouses for our trysts?” he protested, as they fell into each other’s arms again on a heap of old ropes at the bottom of the stairs, rats squealing and fleeing in all directions. Loud crashing through the wall beside them heralded the arrival of the shattered bed-piece by piece-onto the oar closet floor. Together they waited for the neatly racked oars, jarred loose, to topple… one, two, and then in a thunderous rush, many.
Between giggles, Amarauna Telfalcon told her newfound lover, “I–I thought it would be more romantic!”
He burst out laughing, and mirth conquered passion for a time.
They were oddly matched: an energetic mageling, rejected when he tried to join the war wizards by a Royal Magician awed by the strength of his untrained mastery of the Art and mistrusting his loyalty-and a ruggedly attractive, ruthless merchant shipper, owner of twenty cogs and caravels, a dozen warehouses in Suzail, and twice that many here in Marsember, who harbored no dream more burning than the desire to see Marsember free of Cormyr again. A Marsember ruled by its merchants-hard-working master merchants like the Telfalcons, meeting in council-rather than by corrupt nobles or sneaking, spying wizards.
When Terentane, the first man to look at her in a score of summers as anything more than a dupe to be fleeced or a rival to be shattered, reached for her again, Telfalcon playfully slapped his hands away.
“ This is supposed to get me ready to play at being this Yassandra? So just what, exactly, do lady war wizards do all day?”
“No, this was supposed to stop me getting nervous, and brooding over what could go wrong; remember?”
Amarauna turned a wooden cross-latch to let a door in the wall fall open-and oars come spilling out in a wooden flood. “Is it working?” she asked innocently.
Terentane’s sudden roar of laughter was so strong that it took him some time to master himself enough to pounce on her.
“Oh, you rogue! ” She laughed, as he caught her and whirled her around and down. “Come here.”
“Demands, demands, demands,” he growled, in a steadily more muffled manner.
So skillful was his tongue in the moments that followed that Amarauna finally relaxed, purring, eyes closing as she enjoyed the moment.
Then she heard a singing in the air that shouldn’t have been there, something quite different from the lapping and creaking of the boathouse, and her eyes snapped open.
She could not help but gasp. There, hanging in the air above them both like golden icicles, were nine glowing swords, long and keen, their points close enough for her to reach up and touch. “Terent?” she dared, trying to keep her voice from quavering.
“Nice, aren’t they?”
She managed not to shiver. “Yes.” When he made no reply, she asked, “You called them here?”
“Willed them here. Watch, but don’t move a muscle.”
Whatever reply Amarauna Telfalcon might have thought of making was lost in the hissing of blades as they sliced the air, falling just beside her bared skin, flats rather than edges touching her-two down each side, another two either side of her ankles, and the last “You young bastard! ”
“You old bitch,” he said affectionately-as the blades all slid silently skyward again, lifting in magnificent unison. “Let’s go kill war wizards.”
“Halt!” the war wizard ordered, as three Purple Dragons stepped out of darkened doorways to stand in front of him, drawing their swords.
The Knights kept on running.
“Get out of the way, in the king’s name!” Islif ordered, her voice firm and deep.
“ I speak for the king here!” the wizard snapped. “I say again: Halt! Throw down your weapons, and yield yourselves!”
“We seek the Dragondown Chambers!” Pennae shouted. “Where are they?”
“I gave you an order!” the war wizard thundered.
“I ignored it!” Florin roared back, with a violence and volume that startled everyone. “In Azoun’s name, wizard, I order you to stand aside! In Filfaeril’s name, I order you to assist us! Defy these orders at your peril! ”
“Nice,” Pennae said, as Florin’s bellow echoed away down the passage.
And then the Knights reached the Purple Dragons, and the wizard barely had time to howl, “We will not!” before swords were ringing off swords. Pennae rolled like a ball under a guard’s boots, and the Dragon fell helplessly on his rear, bouncing hard and sending the wizard staggering back.
Pennae launched herself into the air with a firm boot planted in the fallen Dragon’s stomach and her arms spread wide.
As Florin’s mighty swing numbed a desperately parrying Dragon’s sword hand and sent him staggering aside, and Islif did the same to the third Dragon, Pennae struck the wizard’s chest with one knee, driving him over backward. He received her grin and kiss just before he struck the stones hard enough to know no more-which was about the time Doust and Semoor tore off Islif’s Dragon’s helm and together ran him head-first into the passage wall and oblivion, and Florin’s solid punch felled his Dragon into similar unconsciousness.
“Oh,” Jhessail murmured, standing over the bodies shaking her head, “we are going to be in such trouble.”
Florin looked up, rubbing his knuckles, and growled, “I am beginning not to care.”
Seven more swords appeared in a winking whirl of drifting sparks to join the nine already hanging in the air. Terentane struck a triumphant pose that would have looked far grander if he hadn’t been young, pale, on the bony
