“Spoilsport.”
“I sure hope so! What about you, Eliathanis? Are you with us or not?”
After a reluctant moment, the White Elf nodded. “Not that it will do any good.”
“Hey!” Kevin shouted with all his breath, and the others stared at him as though seeing him for the first time—”Remember me? I get some say in this, too!”
“All right, Kevin,” Lydia said, a little too cheerfully. As though she’s humoring a child! Kevin fumed. “What do you say?”
What could he say? No matter what Count Volmar had said, Kevin knew he certainly wasn’t the leader of this group! “I say,” the bardling grumbled, “we go to Westerin.”
Kevin reined in his horse without even being aware he’d done it, staring in sheer wonder.
“Westerin,” he breathed.
Oh, he had been taught his geography as a child. He knew that the walled city lay at the junction of two trading routes, on a wide, fertile plain fed by a tranquil river. But hearing about it and actually seeing it were two very different things! Westerin was a beautifully picturesque sight beneath the dramatically cloudy sky, the thick, crenellated wall that girded it broken at regular intervals by pointed towers topped in bronze that gleamed like gold in the shifting rays of sunlight.
The city was also much larger than the bardling had ever imagined—no, no, he thought, it wasn’t merely large, it was enormous!
Particularly, Kevin added wryly to himself, compared to quiet little Bracklin.
The others were riding on. The bardling urged his horse after them. trying to ignore Tich’ki’s mocking, “Boy acts like he’s never seen a city before.”
Well, all right, maybe he hadn’t! What of it?
With an indignant sniff, Kevin straightened in the saddle, doing his best to pretend there was nothing at all amazing about those thick stone walls towering over them as they approached, nothing at all amazing about the mass of buildings he glimpsed through the open gates.
But for all his attempts at keeping calm, the bardling’s heart had begun pounding wildly.
Westerin. Westerin!
Why, the very name rang with adventure!
Despite Eliathanis’ worries, they had no trouble at an getting into Westerin. In fact, the city guards hardly glanced their way, waving the party inside with bored indifference.
Kevin struggled to copy that indifference. But how could he possibly keep from gawking? The street up which they were riding was wide enough to hold them easily even if they had been riding abreast And it was paved with cobblestones! Only the innkeeper of the Blue Swan back in Bracklin had been able to afford those expensive things.
And how could Kevin not stare at all the buildings? He’d never seen so many in one place. He’d never dreamed so many could exist! They seemed to have been set out helter-skelter, as though each owner had put his house wherever he wanted it, without worrying about how the whole thing was going to look. The casual jumble of buildings created a maze of smaller streets branching out in all directions.
Kevin shook his head in confusion. Not only was there no pattern to the way the buildings were laid out, no two houses looked alike. Some of those he glimpsed were small, low to the ground, looking somehow meek amid all the bustle, of the homey, wattle-and-daub sort familiar to him from Bracklin, even if their roofs here were of red tile rather than thatch. Other houses were eccentrically painted half-timbered buildings, their upper stories leaning drunkenly together over their narrow streets, only wooden props keeping them apart. Kevin gave up trying to be aloof and stared openly when he saw a row of out and out mansions of beautifully worked stone, some of them, amazingly, three or four stories high.
And the people! There must be thousands here inside the encircling city walls, all of them speaking a jumble of languages. Their tunics and gowns and cloaks were a dazzling confusion of colors: red, blue, gold, even some hues he couldn’t name.
And despite the White Elf’s uneasiness, not all those folks were human. In one block alone. Kevin saw two haughty, elegant White Elves stride arrogantly by, acting as though humans didn’t even exist, a couple of more relaxed people whose not-quite human features and ever so slightly pointed ears revealed them as half-elven, three hulking guards who almost certainly were nearly full-blooded ogres, even a pair of Arachnia dressed in priestly robes, chittering together in a language that seemed made up only of consonants.
Rows of shops lined the street, and the air rang with the cries of merchants bawling out their wares in half a
