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“Oh yes, sir, Lord Puck, sir,” she breathed.
I didn’t bother to protest.
We strolled off through the tents, preceded by Puck’s knee-high page, his scrawny body in inverse proportion to his booming voice. The campsite whirled with activity more like a Brazilian street festival than ever. Striped and patterned tents glowed from within. Bewitchingly merry music played. Everywhere people had donned flamboyant costumes that looked vaguely martial. Clearly, understated was not a consideration. Everywhere they danced—whirling, jigging, swinging each other about. Puck grinned in delighted bonhomie at it all.
“Will Lord Rogue be at the dinner?” I tried to sound casual.
“Great Titania, no!” Puck giggled. “Rogue has no use for Falcon’s war. Won’t come near it. Why Falcon had to go elsewhere for sorcerous aid, you know.” He squeezed my arm companionably, then pointed in delight at some gremlin creatures, hands and feet locked to make themselves into a living wheel, rolling by singing a jingling song.
The confines of Lord Falcon’s tent were relatively sedate. His dining tent, I should say, as he appeared to have several color-coordinated tents arranged in a little complex at the top of a hill with a magnificent view. Seemed to me like a magnificent target, too, but what did I know about military strategy?
A long table was elaborately laid with crystal and gold. The people there similarly glittered in wild costumes, giddily telling each other stories of what heroes they would be. In this situation, where people weren’t talking directly to me, I could hear the sounds of the language better. If I focused in and dipped lightly over their thoughts, I got the sense of it, but otherwise it was more background music. Puck ditched me immediately after his page announced him—not me—leaving me to fend for myself like a disappointing blind date, while he showed off his truly outstanding uniform.
Only one other female was present that I could see, though it was difficult to tell with the various conversational groups around the mostly empty table and people trickling in still.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I squelched the part of me that longed to take refuge in kneeling. I’d break that bit of programming if it killed me. Another part of me—an original part—would rather be back at the tent experimenting with breaking the lily’s influence than standing here as just another wallflower at the junior high dance. Clearly this was why I’d spent more of my life in laboratories than at dinner parties.
With one of their hive-mind decisions, the conversational groups dissolved and people sat. I moved toward a chair only to have a fair-haired man in wild purple with legs like stilts seize it, giving me a glass-green stare that made me shrink apologetically. I’d already lost this game of musical chairs. A frisson of dread shook me. Surely they wouldn’t try to make me kneel.
“Lady Gwynn, your seat is there,” Lord Falcon growled from the head of the table. I cringed at the censure in his voice. I ducked my head and hesitated in the direction of his sharply pointed finger, toward the lone empty chair near the foot of the long table. “Puck—I thought you were going to train her!”
“Not I, myself, and learn she did,” Puck returned happily. “But that doesn’t make her any more one of us than any foreign sorceress could ever be.”
“We need Rogue for magic, is who we need, not this dubious prize.” Falcon frowned at me as I made the long walk down one side of the table.
“You may as well ask Titania herself to kneel at your feet as get that to happen,” Puck returned with a jolly laugh.
Trying to hold my head high, proud sorceress not cringing slave, I rounded the foot of the long table and slid into my chair several seats up. The group fell to feasting and toasting as soon as I sat. I sighed to find nectar in my wineglass. The stuff tasted not unlike fermented Hawaiian Punch.
“Lady Gwynn, the fantastic foreign sorceress, are you?” said the man to my left. “I’ve heard tales of your exploits!”
“As have I,” said a gentleman across from me in blush pink with contrasting puce medals. “I heard she defeated an army of barbarians at the Plain of No Trees all by herself.”
“With only a bracelet of bells and a feather for tools,” said the man on my left, in a more sedate navy color that was, however, meticulously decorated with thousands of little silver sailing ships.
“And turned their ships into swans that then turned and ate them to a man!” This from the blush-and-puce man’s companion, who wore a startling combination of Christmas red and green.
They rattled on about my supposed exploits while I nibbled my way through the various portions laid before me. It seemed my PR team, whoever that might be, had been busy. None of the company seemed to need any direct information from me to fuel their excitement, so I decided not to contradict their impressions. Couldn’t hurt to be thought more than I was. Also, their words had that curious meaningless quality, like so much white noise. Shallow social talk that lacked any real thoughts behind it.
“Is it true, Lady Sorceress, that you defeated the Black Dog?” My companions all stared in delighted horror at Blush & Puce, who gazed at me with tantalized curiosity, glass in one hand, dripping crimson tartlet in the other.
“Blessed Titania, man,” the gentleman on my right sputtered. “Watch your mouth!” It almost went by too fast, but I nearly caught the real name he pronounced. Shhlynnnsomething.
“Oh, pish tosh! Don’t be a superstitious old fart!” Several others chimed in, squelching the protestor. As one they turned their bright insectile eyes on me, awaiting my answer. I carefully licked my fingers clean while I thought. I tended to agree with the superstitious by now, and cast a wary eye at the night beyond the open tent flaps.
“I believe I may have met him. But I think it would not be accurate to say I defeated him.”
“You are not eaten, Lady Gwynn, or don’t appear to be,” said Navy Man with a lewd eyebrow waggle.
“Or perhaps hedideat you—and thus you seduced him with your sweet flesh.” Blush & Puce giggled.
“In that case she would be missing more than a few of her marbles.”
“Nonsense,” said another voice. “Stories to frighten children with.” This was from the woman who sat several places down. The intervening men leaned back so she could bend her imperious gaze on us. Her hair was braided tightly enough that I couldn’t make out the color.
“He seemed real enough to me, lady,” I said.
“I imagine it would, to someone like yourself.”
