good you could potentially do. We might be able to turn the tables and defeat the very forces that killed Mastrin and Lucretia,” Silvan pressed him. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow morning and let me know what you’ve decided.
“You probably haven’t toured the city ever, have you?” Silvan asked. “Here,” he scribbled a note hastily, and gave it to Kestrel, standing to reach across his desk. “Give this to Giardell, and he’ll arrange for you to have a guide give you a tour of the city today, so you can relax and enjoy seeing the sights.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kestrel replied, standing, ready to leave the office and the sight of the wise face across the desk, the face that made the arguments that compelled him to want to agree to do everything asked of him.
He walked to the door and let himself out, then handed the note to Giardell. “The colonel said to give this to you,” he explained.
Giardell read it momentarily, then handed it back. “Go down to the first floor and go to the last door on the left, on the street side of the building. Give the note to Alicia and tell her she’s assigned to take you on a tour today.”
“Just like that?” Kestrel asked, surprised at the ease of the delegation of the duty.
“Just like that, you’ll be on your way to being led around the city by someone who was born and raised here. She’ll show you things you’ll never think to ask to see,” Giardell confirmed.
“A whole day’s worth? How much is there to see?” Kestrel skeptically quizzed.
“You’ll find out if you go see Alicia,” Giardell told him. First floor, last door on the left,” he gave a motion as if he were brushing Kestrel away, but it felt as though it were a friendly gesture, urging him to go off to have fun.
Kestrel turned and walked down the hallway, wondering how much fun he could have as he contemplated a future with painful bodily mutilation, cultural alienation, and a dangerous immersion in the land of a foreign race.
Downstairs he proceeded to the proper door and knocked. There was a moment of silence, then the sound of movement, and then a muffled voice called, “Come in.”
“So you’re Kestrel?” the girl in the room asked. She was sitting behind a desk, a desk that was covered in paper, and she looked as though she were engaged in an effort to organize the mounds of information before her.
“Yes; how’d you know?” he asked.
“Colonel Silvan asked if I could lead someone named Kestrel around the city today,” she said matter-of- factly. She shuffled another pile of papers, then stood and looked at him directly. “Of course I told him yes — who’s going to say ‘no’ to the colonel? And then you’ve walked in, a stranger, so it seems logical that you’d be Kestrel.”
She had dark hair, unusually dark for an elf, and it was piled high atop her head in a style that Kestrel had seldom seen before. She was dressed in a uniform, a military jacket over a blouse, along with a matching skirt, something else that Kestrel had rarely seen. All in all, her appearance was of someone who seemed naturally inclined to work behind a desk, and who would want to work behind a desk.
“If you’ve got work to do, we don’t have to go,” Kestrel motioned to the piles of paper.
“I better go,” she said, without warmth. “The colonel must have asked me for a reason.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked, stepping around her desk towards him.
He shook his head at the question, thinking to himself that if he knew what there was to see, he wouldn’t need a guide. “I’ve only seen this base and the field where the archery competition was held,” he told her. “Anything else would be new to me.”
“Let’s go to the palace,” she said decisively, and she walked past him to the door, then out of the room without a backward glance, leaving Kestrel to hastily exit the room as well, closing the door behind him as he hurried down the hallway to catch up.
Kestrel had never had a tour before, and hadn’t known what to expect, but the next hour was not what he would have guessed a tour could be. He and Alicia walked side by side through the streets of the city, and never spoke a word to each other. Kestrel tried to ask questions about their surroundings twice, but received no answer from his guide, and so he passively walked beside her, looking about at the buildings and trees and people that were traveling through the city in the morning. He let his mind wander just as his body wandered, and his imagination worked to assign duties and missions to the people he saw. Some were easy, such as the woman carrying two large loaves of bread, or the small boy lugging a large pail of water away from a well.
But others were mysteries to him, such as the quartet of guards in splendid uniforms, marching in precise step along one narrow side street, no evidence of military or regal service needed in the area, or the elves carrying bundles of firewood towards a pile of timber on a street corner.
The day grew warmer as they progressed, and the sun rose higher in the sky above. Alicia stopped suddenly, and Kestrel stopped too, wondering what the reason was for the halt to their urban march. They were in a nondescript residential area, Alicia having swerved off a main boulevard for the first time.
“You go over there; I’ll be in here for a little while,” she gestured to a small courtyard as she directed him, then pointed at an adjacent building as she talked about herself.
“Is everything okay?” Kestrel asked.
Alicia didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she placed her hands behind her head, and within her hair, so that after a few moments of deft finger movements, the pile came off in her hand, revealing a daringly short haircut for a female elf, one that was little more than twice the length of Kestrel’s own. He stared at her in amazement, seeing her in a completely different way, her eyes suddenly appearing large and captivating, her ears prominently revealed, the delicate whorls enticing. She then pulled on one sleeve of her jacket, and tugged it off before she switched hands and juggled her hairpiece so that she could pull herself free from the other jacket sleeve as well.
She wore a sheer white blouse beneath the jacket, and her further transformation made Kestrel’s eyes bulge from his head in astonishment at the suddenly attractive profile she showed. “It’s too hot to walk through the city dressed like this,” she explained, her arms spread wide, each hand holding one of her removed items.
“This is my father’s building; I’m going to go in here and change into some cooler clothes, and then we can carry on,” she added, and as she did, Kestrel noticed the moisture on her blouse as it clung to her body, evidence of her warmth.
“I’ll wait there,” he agreed, dumbfounded, and ambled towards the courtyard as she turned her back to him and went into the building nearby. The neighborhood wasn’t seedy, but it wasn’t far from it, Kestrel judged, observing both the lack of maintenance of the buildings as well as the dress and the attitudes of the passers- by.
He sat on a stone bench and watched the leaves in the bushes tussle in the breeze, his eyes half closed, when he heard a sudden high-pitched scream, one that jerked him to his feet, and sent him running in panic towards the source, the building where Alicia was changing outfits.
He crossed the threshold of the doorway she had entered, and saw a dim, narrow passageway. He had no clue which direction to move towards, when he heard another scream, in a voice he thought was Alicia’s, coming from the upper floor of the building, somewhere in the back. He charged up the steps, and saw shadows in motion as he reached the upper hallway.
He ran down the hallway to the open door, where he saw the source of the shadows; two men were shoving and abusing Alicia, who was nearly undressed, pushing her back and forth forcefully between one another as though she were a plaything, a toy they could bat around the way a cat played with its prey at times.
Glancing around, Kestrel noticed a broom leaning against the wall next to the door he occupied. Without hesitation he grabbed the broom, and began to wield it as though it were a battle staff, rushing at and jabbing the handle at the two ruffians, knocking their heads, poking their stomachs, whacking their knees. The two were unprepared for the assault, one which Kestrel launched with ease, without even consciously considering the moves he was making. The stick flowed fluidly back and forth, even as the two assailants changed the direction of their action and came towards Kestrel, leaving Alicia slumped and dazed on the floor where they abandoned her.
The frontal assault on Kestrel never reached him. He furiously began to bludgeon the two men as they attempted to fight him, and their courage broke after only a few moments of focused attack. With arms covering their heads, they fled around Kestrel and out the door, the sounds of their stomping boots echoing down the hallway. Kestrel began to chase them, then heard Alicia softly moan as he departed the room. He stopped, turned,
