Lady Vorpatril's smile sharpened. "Dresses are weapons, my dear, in sufficiently skilled hands. Permit us to introduce you to the rest of our ordnance team." She gestured toward a door at the far end of the room, through which presumably lay more utilitarian work rooms, full of laser scanners and design consoles and bolts of exotic fabrics and expert seamstresses. Or magic wands, for all Roic knew.

The other woman nodded. "Do please come this way, Sergeant Taura—we have a great deal to accomplish today, Lady Alys tells me..."

"My lady?" Roic called in faint panic to their disappearing forms. "What should I do?"

"Wait here a few moments, Armsman," Lady Alys murmured over her shoulder to him. "I'll be back."

Taura too glanced back at him, just before the door eased silently closed behind her, the expression flitting over her odd features seeming for a moment almost beseeching—Don't abandon me.

Did he dare sit on one of the chairs? He decided not. He stood for a few moments, walked around the chamber, and finally took up a guardsman's stance, which by dint of much recent practice he could hold for an hour at a stretch, his back to one delicately decorated wall.

In a while Lady Vorpatril returned, a pile of bright pink cloth folded over her arm. She shoved it at Roic.

"Take these back to my nephew and tell him to hide them. Or better, burn them. Or anything, but do not under any circumstances allow them to fall into that young woman's hands again. Come back in about, oh, four hours. You are by far the most ornamental of Miles's armsmen, but there's no need to have you lurking about cluttering up Estelle's reception room till then. Run along."

He looked down on the top of her perfectly groomed head and wondered how she could always make him feel four years old, or as though he wanted to hide in a large bag. For his consolation, Roic reflected as he made his way out, she seemed to have the same effect on her nephew, who was thirty-one and ought to be immune by now.