She had even hosted a centaur or two-a gray-bearded character named Archala who drank too much, somehow found his way upstairs, and, owing to a hangover and the structure of his knees, could not descend the steps in the morning. They had to lower him from the landing by ropes and pulleys, or, she feared, he might have been there forever.

Then again, even the boy to be knighted this very evening had been no model of good manners, Enid thought. Despite his somber front and his protests, his "by the gods, Bayard, I'll do better," the lad's past behavior flirted with felony, and Lady Enid believed that the straight face she saw in the halls of Castle di Caela knew far more than it was telling.

The boy's guest list was a checkered one-interesting, to be sure, but not entirely respectable. Some of them Enid knew only by legend. Most, however, she knew firsthand and well. In some cases, all too well.

There was Sir Andrew Pathwarden, the boy's father, for starters, drowsing over there at the table, long red beard spread like a fan across the mahogany. The old fellow was fatigued and well wined after his long ride from Coastlund, still in his muddy traveling armor. A mastiff curled and snored at his feet, and though Enid did not believe that such loud and canine presence was necessary, she said nothing, unsure of how etiquette up in Coastlund might be disposed to dogs. She believed, however, that the old man, though famous for his courage, was not all that used to delicate behavior.

Alfric Pathwarden, Sir Andrew's eldest son, slouched in an equally muddy heap beside his father, red and lumpish in the candlelight. The boy scowled and rubbed his sleeve. Though by now he should be well into a knighthood of his own, Alfric had only this month become his father's squire.

It was a situation, Enid noted, very much like having your brother escort you to a dance for the simple reason that nobody else has asked you.

How old was Alfric now? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? She could not remember, but it was far beyond graceful age for squirehood. To look at the way he kept his father's armor, it would yet be a while before someone arranged a ceremony like this for the oldest Pathwarden boy.

All the more reason to send a page to Sir Andrew's quarters. Best make sure the old man was comfortable, since he had been left to his eldest son's sorry devices.

Enid's own father, Sir Robert di Caela, sat to her left. Impeccably dressed, placed tactfully away from the other guests, he swirled his wine idly in the bottom of his pewter cup. Since he had handed the governance of Castle di Caela to his son-in-law in order to "free himself for the manly pursuits" of hunting and writing his memoirs, Sir Robert no longer paid attention to much of anything that went on about him. His mornings were slept away, his afternoons were taken with grooming himself, insulting the guests, and the practice of falconry. Of an evening, most embarrassingly, he ranged forth in full dress armor, pursuing the younger and prettier of the castle maids until he would drop over from exhaustion in the hall and be carried to bed by stout courtiers who had lost at the evening's gaming.

Enid had seen the memoirs in question and could quote them in their entirety: "I was born in the house of my fathers," they went.

Meanwhile, the quills, ink, and papers, purchased in monumental volume six months before when the old man handed over control of the castle, were stacked head high on his desk, gathering webs and dust.

At least he was seldom embarrassing before sunset.

Rumor had it around the castle-and even Bayard had come to believe this-that the streak of "distraction" that ran in the di Caela family had run after Sir Robert and caught him brilliantly.

"Sooner or later, Enid," Bayard claimed of late, "your father will fancy he is some sort of reptile or amphibian. The next thing we know, we shall be calling him down from sunning on the battlements or murking around in the moat."

Enid replied that all her father was really missing was a sense of something to do-a place at the heart of the castle.

To which Bayard answered, "'Something to do' is not always there for the taking." He would sigh or grumble then and throw his supper to the very fat dogs.

Enid fingered the pendant at her throat. Once a thing of dangerous magic in the hands of the Scorpion, now an artifact of the old di Caela curse, it had been rescued from the collapsing Scorpion's Nest high in the Pass of Chaktamir. Rescued by her father, on the gods knew what kind of impulse-perhaps as a trophy, perhaps as an heirloom, perhaps to remind him how his days were once occupied.

Gold and large and pentagonal, it had a corner for each of the ancient elements: earth, air, fire, water, and memory. The elements that the learned now tell us are no more elemental than grass or light or the bulging dogs under the tables.

The pendant almost killed her once, which was another story. Now, drained of its magic, it was ornamental, ceremonial, bearing no power but the power of remembrance.

Already some were forgetting that it had been magic to begin with.

Some of the Knights Enid knew by reputation only. Sir Brandon Rus was a distant cousin, a young man of twenty-two or -three. He was traveling alone on his first quest, far from his mother's encampments in the Virkhus Hills. Throughout Solamnia, Brandon had won. a reputation as a hunter. If the stories were true, his arrows were said to have missed only twice in the last seven years. Once (or so it goes) the wild shot missed the deer at which the lad had aimed, only to pass neatly through an assassin lurking in the bushes behind the animal.

The other time was much earlier. Indeed, according to some stories, it never happened. Brandon himself maintained he had missed only once. Nonetheless, some stories said twice.

Looking at Sir Brandon, Enid conceded that, given her father and her distant cousin, she was hardly the one to accuse the Pathwardens of quirky family ties. Though there was nothing objectional about Sir Brandon, he seemed just a little too taken with lore. There was nothing all that wrong with insisting on "thees" and "thous" in the old forms of address, or on the complex series of salutes with which Solamnic Knights of old greeted one another. Nothing, that is, except that none of the other Knights saw the point in going through the whole entangled ritual, and most of the younger knights had quite forgotten when to bow, if they ever really knew in the first place.

Brandon, on the other hand, lived for the history and ceremony of the Order. In the first night of his stay at Castle di Caela, he had buried them all in amenities and protocols. The morning was not much better.

Indeed, the boy must have known every legend about every Knight, for he told Enid half of them over a long, mortally boring breakfast, droning on about Huma and Vinas Solamnus while Enid's cousin Dannelle stood behind him, poured tea, and made faces at her over his shoulder.

So he continued, bludgeoning the guests with his talk, until even Bayard was ducking into dark corridors to avoid him.

Sir Robert had finally quieted the boy by asking him if he were the new dance instructor.

It was good that her father had done this before the other guests arrived. Sir Andrew would have thrashed the boy for his simple "damned eastern prissiness."

Now Brandon sat subdued at the main table, sober and bleak despite his conversation and bright tunic and polished breastplate.

He was like a castle chaplain without religion.

He was removed as far as possible from Sir Robert di Caela (who, it was rumored, had whispered threats against the young man's life). Brandon amused himself in a long discussion of lore with Gileandos, the Pathwarden tutor- Gileandos, whom Sir Robert once called "the most thoroughly educated fool on the planet." Enid tried not to listen to what they were saying, but Gileandos had lost much of his hearing in an accident the year before, when an alembic in his room exploded too near his left ear. Both he and Brandon were rather loud. Their discussion was obscure, almost gnomish, ranging over the little-known achievements of great Solamnic Knights in the past, over the magical properties of the weapons they carried, the armor they wore, the orbs and staves and wands they found on their way.