Zaranda withheld a smile. The castle was a step or at most two above her own manor. It lacked flanking towers or crenelations and even at this range she could see that the dry ditch surrounding it was half-filled with trash. A fixed wooden bridge led to the gate, hinting that the baron's mechanics were not up to the task of keeping a drawbridge in repair. By her standards it was pretty weak beer. Yet she understood how invincible and intimidating it appeared to her untempered village warriors.
'I've seen enough,' she announced quietly, and slithered back down to the stream. The rest of the party- Stillhawk, Shield, Balmeric, and the three trainees-followed.
Chenowyn awaited on the far side, on the edge of a brushy and neglected woodlot. Zaranda had let her come because Chen refused to be parted from her. The shrubs on the low ridge made her sneeze uncontrollably, so she had consented to watch the horses. She amused herself by making ripples and tiny splashes appear in the water by force of will.
Jumping across the creek, Zaranda gave her a quick frown. She disapproved of Chen's playing unsupervised with her wild talents.
'So what do you make of it?' Zaranda asked her trainees.
They looked at one another and then back at her with anxious eyes. No one spoke.
After a moment, Balmeric said, 'We'll never cast it down with our ragtag army, lacking siege engines.'
Zaranda pulled a long face. 'I mislike 'never.' It's too big for my mind to hold.'
'Zaranda will find something magical to do,' Chenowyn pronounced proudly.
Zaranda grinned and ruffled her hair. 'Magic isn't the solution to all problems. At least, not my magic. But there is a solution.' She put hands on hips and looked challenge at the others. 'Well?'
'Attack the flank,' said Shield.
Balmeric uttered a bark of laughter. 'A castle's flank? Ho, that's rich. Even so great a moon-calf as you can plainly see the castle's round.'
'Zaranda says there's always a flank,' the orog maintained stolidly.
'So she does,' Byador said. 'But Master Balmeric's right-how can a castle have a flank?'
'Not all flanks are physical,' Zaranda said. 'Attend me. Even you, Balmeric; you've not seen so much of siegecraft as I have. The thing about sieges is, they seldom end with a successful storming. Ladders and engines and mines aren't what win them.'
'What does win them?' Janafar demanded, bursting with impatience.
Zaranda only grinned.
The man rode into the sunset down the indifferently kept-up road, which ran past the castle and on into Masamont. He sported a flamboyant plumed hat, ringleted dark hair that bobbed about his shoulders, grandiose mustachios, and a coat with a riot of colored ribbons pinned down the front. He wore a rapier through his sash and a yarting slung across his back. He cantered his mount, a striking palomino mare with a long and lustrous white mane and tail, up to the two spearmen who stood guard before the castle gate, and halted on the bridge.
'Greetings, gentles,' he said, sweeping off his hat and bowing long from the saddle. 'I hight Fyadros, the Incomparably Wonderful Bard, and this is Zizzy, the Wonder Horse.'
As if in greeting, the mare bobbed her head three times, making her forelock bounce, and thrice smote the wooden bridge with a dainty hoof. The guards gaped.
'What brings you this way, good bard?' asked one, too overawed by the splendor of this apparition to remember his obligation, as a member of a rural robber baron's entourage, to be rude and overbearing at all times.
'We seldom see the likes of you hereabouts,' echoed his companion, similarly stricken.
'Indeed, that's evident by the quaint way your jaws hang down to your hauberks,' the bard said. 'What brings me is my whim, which rules with a hand of iron; I come from here, and there, and everywhere. Just now I feel the winds of adventure blowing me to Zazesspur, whence I shall take ship for the wondrous realm of Maztica.'
The guards looked at each other. 'Do you think,' asked the one on the right, 'that you could stay a night or two? We don't get much by way of entertainment out here.'
'The village women hate us, the trollops,' the other said. 'They give us nothing we don't take at poniard- point.'
'Indeed? Such strapping stalwarts as yourselves?' The bard stroked his long chin and looked thoughtful. 'It could be that I might be induced to bide the night here, if nicely asked.'
The guard on the right turned and bellowed for an errand boy to go and fetch the chamberlain. While they waited, Fyadros entertained the guards with improbable tales of a halfling who attempted intimacies with a firbolg maid.
At length the great oaken gates groaned open behind them. A slight middle-aged man in a black robe stood there. He had receding dark hair, white-touched at the temples, and a wisp of mustache. A dirty, skinny boy peeked past a gate valve behind him.
'I am Whimberton,' the man said in a thin voice, 'chamberlain to Castle Lutwill and the ever-glorious, to say nothing of-victorious, Baron Lutwill. Who might you be?'
'He's a bard,' the guard on the right said.
'He has a Wonder Horse,' added the one on the left.
'I am of course Fyadros, the Incomparably Wonderful Bard, and being of generous disposition only mildly miffed at not being recognized at once, seeing what a backwater this is.'
'Of course I recognize you, good Fyadros,' the chamberlain said smoothly. 'It was only that poor light mo- mentarily dulled my sight. What might I do for you?'
'Your guards hinted you might care to beseech me to pass the night within and brighten your dull and meaningless lives with my stories and songs, which are, it goes without saying, incomparably wonderful.'
'Without saying,' agreed Whimberton with a nod.
'He told us this great story,' said the guard on the left. 'See, this halfling fancied a firbolg wench, so he took a bucket-'
The guard on the right poked him in the ribs with the butt of his spear. 'Enough! His Excellency the chamberlain don't want to hear that story! Least, not from the likes of you. You always get the punch lines wrong.'
'Do not!'
'Do so.'
'Be silent,' Whimberton said conversationally, 'or I'll have your backs scourged raw, roll you in rock salt, and heave you into the pigsty for the night.'
'I could, of course, abide in night's jeweled pavilion, shaming the crickets with my songs,' Fyadros said. The mare raised her head and whinnied as if in agreement.
'Be not hasty, fair Fyadros,' said Whimberton hastily. For all his languid manner he liked a ribald ditty as well as the next man, and entertainment lay pretty thin on the ground, out here in the sticks of strife-torn Tethyr. 'In the name of my lord and master, the ever-glorious and — victorious Baron Lutwill, I bid and beseech thee to enter these precincts, and stay and amuse us so long as your heart desires.'
The bard looked thoughtful, then nodded. 'I suppose I shall. Though 'amuse' is a paltry word for what I shall do to you.'
'You're half-elf, aren't you?' the chamberlain asked, studying him through twilight. 'We don't see many of them with such impressive mustachios.'
'I have many attributes,' Fyadros declared airily, 'and every one is unique and wonderful. Shall we proceed within?'
'To a certainty. Follow the lout; he'll lead you to the stables.'
'Ooh, I'm going to get you for this,' Goldie promised sotto voce as they passed through the torchlit gate in the ragged boy's wake. 'Zizzy, the Wonder Horse?'
'A spur-of-the-moment improvisation,' Farlorn the Handsome replied in a murmur audible only to the mare's great rearward-swiveled ears. He gave a quick surreptitious scratch of his thumb tip to his upper lip, where the glue that held his false mustachios in place made him itch. 'Now hush, lest you spoil our little game.'
In her fragrant covert atop the little rise, Zaranda felt a pang as she watched the gates shut. Whom for? she wondered. Farlorn or Goldie?
'They're in,' she said, sliding down the back slope on her rump.
