For a taciturn fighting man with a reputation for never using two words when one would do the trick, Yarran did have a way of getting his points across, Festian reflected. And he wasn’t saying anything Festian hadn’t already thought. It was just—

It’s just that I’m too damned stubborn to ask for help easily. But Yarran’s right. If I can’t solve this problem on my own—and it seems I can’t—and I wait too long to ask the Baron for help, it will be too late. And then both of us will be drowning in horse shit.

“Well,” he said the mildly after a moment, “if you and Sir Kelthys both agree so strongly, then I suppose there’s not much point in my arguing, is there?” Yarran had the grace to look embarrassed, though it was obvious it took some effort on his part, and Festian grinned crookedly.

“Finish your chocolate, Yarran. If you’re so eager for me to go hat in hand asking for Baron Tellian’s assistance, than I think you’re the best choice to take the message to him.”

Another gust of rain pounded on the hall’s roof, and Yarran grimaced at the sound.

“He’s certainly tall enough, isn’t he, Milady?”

“Yes, Marthya, he is,” Leeana Bowmaster agreed, and the maid hid a small smile at her youthful mistress’ repressive tone. There was a reason for that repressiveness, she thought, and managed somehow not to giggle at the reflection.

“Pity about the ears though, Milady,” she continued in an impishly innocent tone. “He could be almost handsome without them.”

“ ’Handsome’ isn’t exactly the word I’d choose to describe him,” Leeana replied. Although, if she’d been prepared to be honest with her maid (which she most emphatically was not), she would have argued that the man in question was quite handsome even with the ears. Indeed, the undeniable edge of otherness they lent him only made him more exotically attractive.

“Well, at least he comes closer to handsome than his friend does!” Marthya observed, and this time Leeana chose to make no response at all. Marthya had known her since childhood, and she was only too capable of putting isolated comments together to divine her charge’s thoughts with devastating accuracy. Which was not something Leeana needed her—or anyone else!—doing at this particular moment. Especially not where the current object of their attention was concerned.

The two of them stood in the concealing shadows of the minstrel gallery above Hill Guard Castle’s great hall. Below them, Leeana’s father and a dozen or so of his senior officers had just risen to greet two new arrivals. Well, not new, precisely. They’d been living at Hill Guard for weeks now. But they’d been away for several days, on a visit to their own people, and Leeana was afire with curiosity, among other things. Even her father (who any unprejudiced soul must concede was the best father in the Kingdom) sometimes forgot to mention interesting political information or speculation to a mere daughter. Besides, the newcomers fascinated Leeana. She was a Sothoii. No one had to tell her about the bitter, eternal enmity between her own people and the hradani. But these two were utterly at odds with the popular stereotype of their people, which would have made them interesting enough without all of the political ramifications of their presence.

And, she admitted, Marthya was quite correct about how tall her father’s guest—or captor, depending upon one’s perspective—was.

“Welcome back, Prince Bahzell. And you, too, Lord Brandark.” Tellian Bowmaster, Baron of Balthar and Lord Warden of the West Riding, smiled with a genuine warmth some might have found surprising as he greeted his visitors. Tellian’s tenor voice was melodious enough, but it always sounded a bit strange coming from someone who stood six and a half inches over six feet in height. As was true of many of the oldest noble houses of the Sothoii, members of the Bowmaster clan tended to be very tall, for humans, and Tellian was no exception.

“It’s thankful for the welcome we are,” the taller of the new arrivals replied in a deep bass that sounded not at all strange rumbling up out of the massive chest of a hradani who stood well over seven and a half feet in his stockings. “Still and all, I’m thinking you might want to be making that welcome a mite less obvious, Milord.”

“Why?” Tellian smiled crookedly as he waved Bahzell and his companion towards chairs at the long refectory table before the fire blazing on the hearth. That hearth was big enough to consume entire trees but, like most fires on the rolling grasslands of the Wind Plain, it burned coal, not wood. “Those who believe I have even the faintest notion of what I’m doing won’t be bothered by it. And those who are convinced I don’t have any notion won’t like me any more just because I pretend to sulk when you cross my threshold. That being so, I might as well at least be polite!”

“A succinct analysis, Milord,” the smaller of the two hradani observed with a chuckle. At six feet two inches, Brandark Brandarkson was shorter than Tellian, far less Bahzell, and he dressed like someone who was as close to an overcivilized fop as any hradani could hope to come. But he was almost squat with muscle, and the shoulders under his exquisitely cut doublets and waistcoats were almost as broad as Bahzell’s. Despite his shorter stature, he was one of the very few people who came close to matching Bahzell’s lethality in a fight, which had been a handy thing, from time to time, for he was also a bard. Of sorts.

The hradani language was well suited to long, rolling cadences, and richly evocative verse and song. That was good, for during the darkest periods of their twelve centuries in Norfressa, it was only the oral traditions of their generally illiterate bards which had kept any of their history alive. Even today, bards were more honored among the hradani than among any other Norfressan people, except, perhaps, the elven lords of Saramantha, and Brandark had the soul of a bard. He was also a brilliant, completely self-educated scholar, and a talented musician. But not even his closest friends were willing to pretend that he could actually sing, and his poetry was almost as bad as his voice. He yearned to craft the epic poems to express the beauty his soul reached out to … and what he actually produced was doggerel. Witty, entertaining, trenchant doggerel, to be sure, but doggerel. Which perhaps explained his habit of writing biting, sometimes savage satire. Indeed, he’d spent years baiting Prince Churnazh of Hurgrum—something no one else had dared to do—and only the deadliness of the swordsman hiding beneath his foppish exterior had kept him alive while he did it.

Those days were behind him now, but his broad grin suggested that his inner satirist found the entire situation which had engulfed his friend and the Sothoii enormously entertaining.

Which Bahzell did not.

“ ’Succinct’ is all well and good,” the Horse Stealer growled at his friend. “But there’s enough as would like to see the two of us fall flat on our arses as it is, without us looking all happy to be seeing one another.”

“No doubt we should maintain a proper decorum in more public venues,” Tellian conceded. “But this is my home, Bahzell. I’ll damned well greet anyone I want any way I want in it.”

“I can’t say as I can fault you there,” Bahzell said after a moment. “Mind you, I’m thinking there’s more Sothoii would rather see my head on a pike over your gate than my backside in this chair in front of your fire!”

“Not many more than the number of hradani who’d like to see my head over your father’s gate in Hurgrum, I imagine,” Tellian replied with a wry smile. “Although at least you didn’t surrender an entire invasion army to a ragtag force of hradani you outnumbered thirty- or forty-to-one.”