'Let's go!' hollered Tasslehoff happily, leading the way as the three companions skipped like children over the awakening landscape toward the plaintive sound of the pipes. Shrieking with delight, Tasslehoff plucked a milkweed pod and blew the silky down into Flint's face. Giggling, the red-faced dwarf gave Tas a playful shove that sent him tumbling in a merry ball down the slope. Head thrown back in laughter, Tanis scooped up the hapless kender and tossed him onto his broad shoulders.
They all pressed on toward the grove.
Stumbling through the ring of trees, they spotted Selana, her robe thrown open, revealing a tight tunic that came past her knees. Head thrown back joyously, she was dancing a jig in the center of a circle of six goat- men.
One of them poured a mixture of white and red wine into her open mouth, which she gulped happily.
Spotting the companions, the wild and frolicking half-man, half-goats waved them forward with their human arms, kicking up their hooves. In moments, the three travelers joined in the revelry, linking arms with their hosts and capering through the woods.
'Tasslehoff, Flint, Tanis, my good friends!' cried Selana, drawing them all up in a heartening embrace. She waved her hand to include the satyrs. 'Meet my new friends, Enfield, Bomaris, Gillam, Pendenis, Kel, and Monaghan! Isn't their music enchanting?' she asked, her expression dreamy. 'Play that little welcoming ditty again,' she pleaded.
'Anything for you, dear Princess,' rumbled the satyr named Enfield, his voice a beautiful bass. As one, the gathering of six goat-men tilted their short-horned heads and pressed wooden pipes to their lips. A lilting jig issued forth.
Happily entranced, Flint snatched a proffered jug of wine and raised it on his arm, smacking his stained lips as the rosy liquid dribbled through his beard. He passed the jug to Tanis, who sent it along to Tas.
Pendenis clapped the kender's small shoulder. 'Life is too short to be serious, eh, little friend? Come, climb upon my back, and I will show you the merriment that awaits us in the heart of the woods.'
'Let's all go!' cried Flint, swinging himself onto Kel's back. Although he was usually suspicious of riding any beast, at that moment the dwarf could not imagine a more lively mode of travel. Ducking, Gillam charged Tanis playfully from behind and tossed the laughing half-elf onto his goat posterior. Selana, astride Enfield, led the way.
Singing all the bawdy songs they could remember, they rollicked like children, carefree and uninhibited in
nature's nursery. Dancing, drinking, and romping as they had never done before, they immersed themselves in the satyrs' world of joy and pleasure, free of remorse, guilt, and conscience. They vanished into the woods behind a curtain of privacy.
Tanis was the first to awaken in the stillness of the grove. Ashes smoldered in the firepits, and a sliver of pink sunlight was rising on the eastern horizon. He could not for the life of him remember what he was doing here, but something about the scene felt very, very wrong.
For one thing, his noggin felt like an overripe tomato. And for another, Tasslehoff was sprawled across his legs. The half-elf gently shook the kender. The kender just blubbered in his sleep, rolled away, and curled his slender frame around a large rock.
Several feet away, the dwarf lay on his back, snoring loudly, an empty wineskin dangling from his whiskery lips. 'Flint!' Tanis hissed.
Flint snorted into wakefulness and spit out the skin. 'Huh? Who's there?' Wincing, he put a hand to his temples and squeezed his eyes shut again. 'Whoever you are, please saw off my head, and be quick about it!'
'This is serious,' chided Tanis.
'So who's joking?' Flint grumbled, opening his eyes at last and sitting up. 'What happened? Where are we?'
Tanis shook his head.
'Satyr hoofprints!' groaned Flint. 'We were bewitched by the pipes!' He looked around the grove frantically and spotted the kender's curled form. 'There's Tasslehoff, but where's the princess? Do you suppose they kidnapped her?'
Both men jumped to their feet and raced around until they found the sea elf princess behind a shrub. She was still breathing; in fact, she was smiling broadly in her sleep, her indigo robe spread out beneath her. Her tunic was twisted around on her body, and her hair was disheveled, with sticks and dried grass poking from it.
'Thank the gods she's safe,' sighed Flint.
Tanis rubbed his face wearily. 'I don't know about you, but I have no memory of what happened.' He looked at the sleeping princess. 'We'd better wake her up and get going. The gods alone know how much time we've lost.'
'Time isn't the only thing we've lost,' piped up Tasslehoff, suddenly behind them. 'Check your pockets. Selana's shell light is gone.'
Tanis and Flint both pulled out their pockets and opened their pouches: empty. 'Blast it!' cried the dwarf. He looked at the dagger on Tanis's hip, and felt the axe strapped to his own and gave a sigh of resignation. 'At least they left our weapons.'
'With those magical pipes, they probably don't have much need for defense,' said Tanis, finding his bow and quiver of arrows in the low branches of a tree.
Oddly, it was the kender, his pouches of valuables untouched, whose face burned with fury. He stomped his foot. 'They may throw a good party,' he stormed, 'but I'm not very impressed with satyrs as a race, I'll tell you! Imagine the nerve of taking what doesn't belong to you!'
'Imagine that.' Flint whistled softly.
Chapter 10
The thing that annoyed Delbridge most about the tiny cell he was in was the damp, putrid smell of rot that even fresh straw could not overcome. He tried inhaling in small gulps through his mouth for a while, which helped, but also gave him a sore throat.
He hated the boredom, too. The cell was dark, as there was no window, not even a crack around the door, so he had long since lost track of time. For a while he kept busy counting the stone blocks on the floor by feeling them with his fingers, but he also encountered other things-things that disgusted him by the very touch-so he stopped and lost count at thirty-three. He listened to the sound of water dripping in the distance and counted drips, too, but he gave up at nine-hundred-seventy-two when it began to rain and the drips turned into an indistinguishable torrent.
Eventually someone opened the huge wooden door, but Delbridge's eyes were so unused to light that he could make out no more than a vague, man-shaped outline in the glaring doorway. He tried questioning the person, to crawl after him, but whoever it was only growled and flung something on the floor and slammed the door in Delbridge's face. On the cold stone blocks he found a piece of stale, fuzzy bread and a water skin whose contents smelled like the inside of the animal the container was made from. Even the corpulent Delbridge was not hungry enough for that.
Just keeping his mind on the petty things that annoyed him became his chief occupation, because the alternative was thinking about the really big things, like his predicament. His sheer helplessness left him panicky. He had never before been caught in a situation out of which he could not lie, cheat, steal, or wheedle; he simply did not know how to respond to a crisis where he had no apparent options.
When would someone come so he could explain away this terrible mistake? The day before, he had appeared before Lord Curston and seen a vision of disaster befalling the knight's only son. This imprisonment had to be
