Taya gasped and looked at him sharply. He had entered with a limp, bearing a staff or cane in one of those dark, aged hands. Now she also saw an overdone black mustache, floppy as the feather and big and droopy as Strick's oversized blond mustache.

"Taya is in disguise. Taya, this man is in disguise. Please, just wait outside for a moment, will you? I need to impress on him the importance of his job in escorting you."

"Uh-oh, oh, all right," Taya said, who was accustomed to being asked to leave someone's presence and wait somewhere or other while more important things happened than a prince's mere bedwarmer, and hardly accustomed to thinking much for herself.

She rose, bulky and silly in yards and yards of S'danzo garb that hardly went with the lavishly proportioned red wig. The white mage's pneumatically overweight young assistantIreceptionistIfetch-and-carrier smiled at her and showed her along the corridor past that burly man who looked like a swordslinger, a wealthy mage's bodyguard, and was. Like the beyond-plump Avenestra, he wore garments of the color that had already come to be known as Strick blue.

"What'm I supposed to do with that?" the one called Skarth was meanwhile asking Strick. He gestured after Taya, Abruptly losing his limp, he paced with uncommon grace to lean on the back of the chair she had just vacated,

Across his blue-draped desk, the man all in blue told him.

"Uh." A withered old brown hand gestured. "No problem with that. Iffen any of these young jaybirds try to cock their combs at that fair young lass I'll whock 'em with my stick, I will!"

Strick winced. "Next time you consider a disguise that elaborate you might try to gain a lesson or a little advice from Feltheryn."

"Wh-oh, that actor? Not a bad idea, though. What did you find out about Tarkle?"