"I forgot? I? I didn't hear you reminding anyone!"
"If you don't all pipe down and let me have my say," Zaranda said sweetly, "you'll find out why newts so seldom interrupt conversations."
Zaranda could no more turn anyone into a newt than she could turn the hetman's house to solid gold. Under the circumstances, she didn't feel constrained to point that out.
Still fingering his neck, Moofar glared accusingly at her. "You allowed yourself to be taken."
"Of course I did," Zaranda said. "You were starting to get notions. I saw you needed a little talking to, and I wanted to be sure I had your undivided attention."
She raised her head and looked around the common. The mob drew back as if her gaze were hot to the touch.
"You should be ashamed of yourselves," she told them. "We come to your village to teach you to protect yourselves, to throw off the yoke the bandits and the tax collectors of the self-proclaimed nobles have laid upon you all. Yes, we did so for pay; but what we've had from you so far is little more than what spoils you recovered from the bandits-which you would never have gotten without our help. Thanks to us, you need never again cower in your houses at first sight of riders approaching. And this is how you treat us."
The villagers looked suitably contrite. Zaranda was just warming up.
"But that's not truly what you have to be ashamed of. Oh, no. With your newfound abilities, your new sense of power, all you could think of doing was marching down the river road and afflicting your neighbors with the same depredations you've been suffering at bandit hands all these years. Is that worthy?
"We did not come here to help you conquer. We came to help you become unconquerable. Now, do you let us get on to the next stage, or do you throw away everything we've all worked for, here and now?"
Silence ruled. "It, ah," Osbard said. "Well, it could be we've acted a little hastily."
"Could be and is. Now-look at me, Osbard!"
The village chief raised his head as if an anvil were tied to his neck. "Where is my apprentice, Chenowyn?"
The little bi-the spitfire called up a blight of invisible things that stung like hornets," Osbard said. "We tied her in a sack and threw her in a woodshed."
"Good for her. Now, let her go. And if she's harmed, someone I might name will spend the rest of his days wriggling on his belly in river muck and catching water striders with his tongue."
Osbard turned to the village troops, "Are you deaf? Release the girl at once!"
"And while you're at it," Zaranda said, "best let the rest of us free. Me in particular, the way you folk wave torches around."
The villagers hustled to release the captives. Looking entirely abashed, Ernico clambered up on the pile of firewood to cut free Zaranda's hands.
"We never meant to hurt you," he muttered.
"I'm sure that would have been a great comfort had you got the bonfire lit."
She stepped down the pile of wood as regally as a queen descending from her throne. Chenowyn came hurtling out of the darkness, red hair streaming, and caught Zaranda in a fearful embrace.
"Oh, Zaranda!" she sobbed. "I was so scared. You wouldn't really have let them burn you, would you?"
Zaranda hugged her and kissed her head. Then she turned and gestured with one hand.
The torch, which Moofar had somehow managed to hang on to through thick and thin, went out. A beat, and then the bonfire blazed up, untenanted, flames reaching high as the old oak's top.
"No," she said.
"What have we here?" Farlorn Half-Elven asked with a sardonic lift of his eyebrows. "A proclamation?"
"So it would appear," said Zaranda, sitting cross-legged in the oak tree's shade. She held up the papyrus the little village girl had found nailed to a sweet-chest-nut tree on the Sulduskoon's bank, four furlongs up the broad, slow river. It was a benchmark of the burgeoning Star Protective Company's success in the region that a child so young could venture so far from the village. Although in truth, had the girl not made so momentous a discovery, she likely would have faced a spanking for straying such a distance without the escort of a brother or sister old enough to wield a spear-which would have been purchased with wealth gained from the revived trade among villages in the limited area under Star's sway.
It was a sleepy-warm noonday in the midst of the month Eleasias, commonly called Highsun. In fact, most of the two-score trainees under instruction at the moment would already be bedded down under shade for their midday naps had the little girl not run into the village shouting and waving her discovery. Siestas were not a luxury Zaranda Star could indulge in. Midday break was time for her, between bites of lunch, to continue instructing Chenowyn. And likewise Shield of Innocence, who had become her apprentice in matters military.
She finished chewing a mouthful of apple and read aloud: " 'Be It Known By These Presents-' This is really spelled abominably, but I'll spare you the details. "Known by These Presents that in the interests of maintaining the Safety and Welfare of the Nation of Tethyr, acting under the authority of the city council of Zazesspur, Baron Lutwill, Ruler of These Lands, Decrees that the Taxes owed by the Inhabitants of these same Lands, and due one Week hence, shall herewith be Doubled.'"
The villagers growled. Farlorn's look was a superior smirk, Stillhawk's stern, and Shield sat beside Zaranda thrее a stone statue-which was approximately how the three would've greeted news that Zaranda had been made Queen of Faerun, or that a rogue planet was about to smack into Toril. Chen lurked on the outskirts, sitting in the shade of an eave and drawing magic symbols in the dust with a twig, waiting for all this boring military talk to be done so her time could begin. Zaranda lowered the parchment. "It goes on in that vein, if anybody need hear more."
"What authority has the Zazesspurian city council?" burst out Janafar, a young woman trainee from the village of Dunod two leagues inland from Tweyar. Seated near Zaranda, she was small of stature and trim, but broad shouldered and muscular withal, rather like a compressed version of Zaranda herself. Her honey-colored hair was restrained by a red bandanna. She was quickly becoming adept with spear and short sword, and displayed a positive genius for small-unit tactics.
"The same as anyone," Zaranda said. "All 'authority', consists in the expectation that, if they order you to bend your necks, you'll bend them."
" 'The Nation of Tethyr,'" quoted Byador, shaking his dark, shaggy head. He hailed from Masamont, biggest and most prosperous settlement in the vicinity. His long frame was already rangily powerful, though still gawky with adolescence. He had grown up shooting a short bow, and under Stillhawk's tutelage was learning to handle-and hit targets with-a powerful longbow brought from the forest of Tethir by a Star-escorted caravan. "It's a long time since we heard that."
"I think we're getting a glimpse at the pretensions of Baron Hardisty," Zaranda said, "not to mention his intentions. Now, what can you tell me of this Baron Lutwill?"
Byador snarled and spat. "Loot-well, we call him. He's a bandit and nothing more. But a powerful one, with a hundred men-at-arms to serve him, secure behind stone walls in a castle whose keep throws its foul shadow across Masamont."
Zaranda looked around at her audience, which now included most of her trainees, as well as no few villagers drawn from their naps by the commotion. Her current class, which included Ernico, Fiora, Rudigar, and Bord from Tweyar, comprised not recruits but cadre, the likeliest youths from the villages that had made compact with Star, who would serve as nuclei for other self-defense forces as the protective company began to expand across Tethyr. While it was not part of their regular curriculum, more and more of them had begun to forgo their own siestas to sit in on the lessons Zaranda gave Shield.