He let the ribbon drift down, and watched her snatch it deftly out of the air before adding dryly, "It would gladden my heart if more elven females would emulate your good judgment in such matters."
"I want nothing to do with male elves, either," Lark said bluntly.
He smiled, faintly amused by her presumption. "You'll have no quarrel from me on that score; it's hardly the service I require from you."
The girl shook her head. "I owe a debt of honor to Texter. It's him I'll serve, and no other."
"Is that so?" he asked mildly. "Whom would you serve if your tawdry past became common knowledge? The working-class respectability so dear to Master Dyre would demand you be summarily dismissed and loudly denounced. You'd be hard-pressed to find another position among respectable folk."
She regarded him with a mixture of anger and uncertainly, but said nothing. Merely watched him, eyes larger and darker. Waiting to hear her fate.
Elaith smiled pleasantly. "You wish to leave your past behind. Commendable." Time to twist the knife. "Also understandable. I can see how this knowledge could color your working relationship with an upstanding man like Texter."
"You son of a snake," she said softly.
Elaith's smile never faltered. "I'll ask you one more time: Who are you working for?"
A long, heavy silence followed as Lark wrestled with herself under his interested eye. Then she took a long breath and squared her shoulders.
"You," she said heavily.
The elf took her at her word. How could he not? The portrait of Texter had shifted again, and his own handsome face gazed out of the frame, amber eyes gleaming over a smile of supreme satisfaction.
The rumble and roar of falling timber was all around, unseen in swirling, choking dust.
"Taeros!" came a familiar Roaringhorn bellow. "Malark!"
Taeros knew Beldar was nearby, somewhere that way… but "that way" was all dust, fallen wood, and leaning beams.
Lanterns and candles had crashed down everywhere to start little leaping fires, and their flickering glows showed Lord Hawkwinter a swaying, swinging chaos of ropes and beams. Smoke was rolling and eddying energetically-and all around him wood was screaming.
Taeros wouldn't have believed splintering, rending wood could scream, but then, he hadn't known it could groan, either.
It was doing both right now, even more loudly than the frantic, sobbing screams of women blundering about in the alarmingly leaning labyrinth of pillars and sagging balconies. Men were shouting and coughing, and at least one fool had drawn a sword and was slashing wildly as he came staggering through the dusty gloom, as if sharp steel could slaughter dust.
As Taeros struggled to his feet, the remains of someone's chair and table falling away from his bruised shoulders, a balcony tore free and plunged to the stage with a thunderous crash. In an instant, the man waving the sword was smashed into a bloody smear on those shattered, bouncing boards.
Taeros saw that sword, still clutched by the severed ruin of a forearm, clatter to the floor near Malark, who was having troubles of his own amid much splintered furniture. Then roiling dust hid Lord Kothont again.
Curses and thuds heralded someone wearing a splendid scarlet-and-gold tunic, not Malark's emerald gemfire, who came stumbling out of the dust. The man clawed his way past Taeros, trailing a stream of curses and half-dragging someone long-haired and presumably feminine whose slender shoulder slammed into Beldar with force enough to stop a Roaringhorn bellow in mid-roar, and leave Beldar retching on his knees.
Well, at least Taeros now knew where that friend was. He turned toward Beldar, but Another balcony fell, with a splintering, floor-shaking crash. And then another.
Taeros fought for balance on floorboards that were suddenly rising and falling like waves rolling into the harbor.
The next crash was a long, rolling, ear-hammering chaos, and Taeros saw a ceiling-beam, wreathed in flames, plunge to the floor. Dust rose like a wall.
As the echoes of its rolling faded, he became aware that someone was shouting-someone familiar. Beldar had found his breath again.
"Get out! Come on! We've got to get out!"
Taeros turned, staggering as loose boards shifted under his boots, and then glanced back. Had Malark-?
Other patrons were thundering past, running blindly. Some slammed into already trembling pillars and reeled sideways or fell senseless.
Flames flared as a fallen curtain ignited, and Taeros could suddenly see the stage again, where blood lay in pools and still, huddled forms were sprawled under tangles of jagged wood.
"Malark?" Taeros shouted, peering at where his friend had been. Dust swirled thickly there, but he thought he saw a glimmer of green.
He started forward-and fell hard as something else collapsed, far off in the gloom, and the floor bounced and rippled again.
More grandly garbed folk came running out of the smoke and dust, wild-eyed and staggering. Among them, a woman who wore a tiara and dripped with jewels was cursing like a sailor as she tried to twist and tear free of three or four terrified serving-girls who were clinging to her long sleeves and trailing gown.
"Let go!" the woman spat. Cloth tore with a long snarl of protest, baring her legs, and a mewling trio of maids crashed to their knees in the wreckage.
Weeping with fear and rage, the woman ran on, spraying jewels in her wake like hailstones. Across much dust and chaos, Taeros finally caught sight of Malark's familiar grin-directed not at him, but at a servant-lass who was clinging to him, sobbing and trembling.
As they emerged fully from the dense smoke, Lord Kothont put her gently away from him and gave her a little shove in the direction of the door. She stumbled, then caught herself and darted toward safety. Malark nodded in satisfaction, then reached down to pluck up one of the three terrified maids.
And then, with a crash like the hammer of Gond coming down on his Greatforge, three or four ceiling-beams came down right in front of Taeros, hurling him helplessly back, arms flailing, into-something hard yet yielding that cursed as it collapsed under him.
"Hawkwinter?" whoever it was snarled. "That you?"
"Beldar!" Taeros gasped, fighting for breath. His arm was numb, one of his knees was burning as if afire, and "Up, and out of this!" Beldar growled, rising up under Taeros like a harbor wave. His snarling strength hauled them both to their feet, and they swayed together as more beams fell. Then the young flower of House Roaringhorn snatched, heaved, and broke into a stumbling run, Taeros Hawkwinter bobbing along on his shoulder like a sack of meal.
"Malark-"
"Can fend for his bloody self," Beldar panted. "Much good we'll be… to him… flat as… fish-heads underfoot… on the docks. 'Sides, have you ever known Malark not slide out of anything?"
Taeros couldn't find breath for a reply as he was hustled along, bouncing jaw biting his own tongue repeatedly, but he didn't have to. Malark would come out unscathed. Malark always did.
He couldn't stop coughing.
On his knees on the dirty cobbles, Taeros hacked and spat and heaved, shoulders shaking, until a grim-jawed Beldar slapped his back hard enough to drive him nose down onto the stones, which promptly rattled and shook hard enough to numb a Hawkwinter chin and send its owner rolling helplessly over onto his side, still coughing.
"What was-?" he managed to ask.
"The last of the Slow Cheese," Beldar Roaringhorn snapped, in a voice that promised brutal death to someone, and soon. "Going down flat."
"M-Malark?"
"Under it, somewhere." Beldar thrust something under his friend's nose.
Taeros blinked at it, fighting for breath.
"This," Beldar growled, "was stuck to a spar that was flung into the air just after I carried you over here-and damned near skewered me coming down. It was stuck there with blood."