"What a load of codswallop! I hope you haven't been using that line on everybody."
"I'm perfectly serious."
"In my experience," the hippogriff rider said, "sincerity is vastly overrated, and only peripherally related to the truth." "Every word I say is true."
"Being male, you would believe that, of course." Her eyes gleamed as brightly as twin emeralds lit with green lasers. Releasing his shoulder, she slid her fingers into a hidden pocket in her dress. Then she touched his cheek. "Who are you? What are you? Is the ring real?"
"Will le Fey. A confidence trickster. So far as I know it is not." Will's face turned red and he stumbled and almost tripped.
His partner laughed. "Oh, la! If you could only see yourself." Her breath was warm in his ear. "You are not the only one with a ring, 'sieur clown."
With a quick grab, Will closed his hand tight about hers. "This ring?" He saw the hippogriff girl's eyes widen with alarm. "Does it work by contact? Will it work for me? Who and what are you?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes. Yes, obviously, it does. Alcyone. A thief."
She broke away from him. Almost brutally, Will caught her back, and they rejoined the dance. He was terribly aware of the feel and warmth of her waist under his hand, separated from him by only the thinnest scrap of silk It called to him. He pulled it close. Her body was soft without being fleshy, muscular without being thrawn. It was tense as well; it resisted his embrace, without being able to escape it. "You still wear the ring. If you doubt I love you, just ask."
"If I cared," Alcyone said hotly, *I would have asked already."
"Look. We seem to have gotten off to a bad start—"
"Do you think?"
"—but that doesn't mean we can't—"
"Yes, it does. That is exactly what it means." They were at the edge of the dance floor now. She stopped dead in her tracks and held out a hand to the nearest male, a fop in a Green Knight costume. "Thank you," she said, though he had not asked. "I'd love to dance." Perforce, Will surrendered his salamander to her knight. Away they spun.
For a second, Will contemplated the terrace full of beauties, lovelier than flowers, any of whom would be delighted to dance with him, flirt with him, dally with him till dawn. Save only the single woman he wanted most. What were the odds of that? It was as if he'd been cursed by a Maxwell's imp of the perverse, capable of inverting all probabilities, of turning a cold room hot and a warm one frigid, of making terms of endearment loathsome to the ear of his beloved and rejection only make him desire her the more.
In the distance, meanwhile, the dancing bear waved to get his attention.
Maintaining his outward aplomb, Will ducked and dodged his way through the crowd. Outside the ballroom, at the buffet tables, he asked a servitor for directions to the gent's. "Past the chafing dishes and to the right," the dwarf said with a shadow of a bow.
Will fled, almost blindly.
After he'd vomited into the toilet bowl, Will removed his domino and the Pierrot costume faded to nothing. He rinsed out his mouth, splashed water on his face, and combed his hair. There were two gold smudges on the jacket of his tux. He dabbed at them with a dampened washcloth and tried to regain his calm. He was weary and achy and he suspected he was coming down with a headache.
Will took out his Hermes phoenix-leather rune-bag and removed a razor blade, a cut-down McDonald's straw, and a vial of pixie dust. He chopped the powder on the granite countertop, laid it out in two lines, and snorted up both.
It was as if somebody had opened the Gates of Dawn: Energy flowed back into him. The thought of a moonlit room full of beautiful sylphs all competing for his attention no longer filled him with dread.
Donning his mask again, Will left.
A bear waited for him outside the door. It leaned against the wall, arms folded, alongside a modest Rembrandt etching in an elaborate gold frame. "Caught you at last." It placed its domino in a jacket pocket and became Florian L'Inconnu.
"I saw you talking to the witch from Political Security." Florian took out a silver case and flipped it open. "Smoke?" When Will shook his head, he removed a cigarette, tamped its end against the case, and placed it jauntily in his mouth in a complex and thud combination of motions that Will was certain he could, with practice, duplicate.
Almost too late, Will assumed his mooncalf halfwit persona. "Witch? Oh yes, her. Was she really with the polits? I think she wanted to cuff me and haul me off to her dungeon."
"You're safe here, whatever your offense may have been. They wouldn't dare arrest anybody over whom House L'Inconnu has extended its protection—a status that encompasses all our guests, of course."
"I'm not sure I fall under the heading of guest. Shorty implied I did not."
"Shorty? If you mean Hrothgar Thalwegsson, I'd advise you with all my heart not to use one of Mother's whimsical little informalities in his presence. Even I couldn't get away with that. But Hrothgar's made of solid stuff. You'll like him when you get to know him."
"He sicced Zorya Vechernyaya on me."
Amiably, Florian said, "I've already spoken to him about that. I promise it won't happen again." He gestured with his cigarette. "I see you now wear your ring with the stone inward."
"It was attracting too much attention." Will bowed curtly. "It has been pleasant chatting with you," he lied. "But now I must be going."
Behind him somebody cleared his throat.
Will turned.
Three rows of teeth like daggers. A lion's body. Shaggy red hair. Blue eyes. A hound's ears. A quilled back. The bearded face of a man. A handlebar moustache. The tail of a scorpion. So grotesque were its features that Will could not immediately assemble them in his mind to make up one creature. Then it all fell together. A manticore.
The manticore grinned a grin as wide as the sun. "You're not leaving just yet, chum. "His breath stank of rotted meat. "Not until the boss says you can."
Will stuck his hands in his trousers and jingled the coins insolently. Under cover of this, he reached down deep within himself to where the dragon lay, quiescent but alert, and asked: What should I do?
They've got you boxed in. Pretend you don't notice. Play along. Wait for your chance.
"I'll go where I want and when I wish. As for your threats..." He snapped his fingers under the monster's nose. "That for them!" The manticore snorted.
Despite his bravado, Will was terrified. With the dragon's help, he might be able to take Florian. But not the manticore. Manticores were notoriously savage. Gustave Flaubert had written of one, "The gleam of my scarlet hide mingles with the shimmering of the great sands. Through my nostrils I exhale the terror of solitudes. I spit forth plague. I devour armies when they venture into the desert." No one alive could say for sure that he had meant those words metaphorically.
Will was royally fucked.
Within him, the dragon whispered, Be patient.
"Here is our problem," Florian said, taking Will's arm. "We find ourselves in a state of quantum uncertainty. Either you are, as Hrothgar believes, a fraud, or else you are His Absent Majesty's rightful heir." He walked Will down the hall, away from the ballroom. "Perhaps it's the romantic in me, but I should like to believe in you."
"Believe what you wish. I am neither fraud nor heir."
"Yes, yes, yes. There are three possibilities at work here. One is that you are a con man, pure and simple. In which case you will be easily resealed without my having to get involved in the matter. The second is that you're an innocent caught up in the machinations of a con man and in so deep over your head that you can see no alternative but to thrash onward, in hopes of reaching the tar shore. In which case, I am prepared to offer you full amnesty and gainful employment. You are obviously a clever fellow, and as you can see" — he nodded toward the manticore — "I have uses for extraordinary individuals. Take my offer and 1 swear upon my very name that you will not regret it." Will said nothing. "No? Then we come circling back to the third and most piquant possibility. I realize that the odds of your being the true king's by-blow are slight. Ahhh, but if you are, if you are..."