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Thirteen: The Tail End of Twilight

Marc could see little of the town as they dashed hastily down its narrow streets and alleys, the storm bearing down on them with unexpected ferocity. He hoped Falcon Wing had managed to get safely back over the reefs and into the open sea before the heart of the storm had overtaken it. As much as the wind was howling between the single story cottages of Dentos Crossing, some of the gusts threatening to bowl the three of them over, Marc couldn't imagine the ship's sails would be able to stay intact, and the storm must have been stirring the ocean half into a maelstrom.

He had to keep his muzzle lowered as they ran, watching their progress through the dark town from underneath his soaked eyebrows, because the wind kept blowing the rain straight into his nostrils. He'd never considered before then the advantages of having a human's downturned nose.

Dola led them up a street broad enough that two cars could have passed each other, though with little room to spare. It was lined on one side by buildings larger than most of the others they'd passed, many with two stories, beyond which Marc could see the river's tumultuous surface reflecting the increasingly frequent blasts of lightning overhead. Some of the buildings had signs hanging over their doors, the painted wooden boards visible only when lightning illuminated the dark street, hinges creaking as the wind pushed the signs back and forth.

Dola slowed as they approached the only three-story building Marc had seen so far, warm yellow candle and lantern light glowing from beyond all of its broad first floor's windows. Dola had hesitated in the downpour when she'd noticed two sturdy looking soldiers standing guard outside the building's front door, the two men evidently oblivious to the heavy rain drenching them as they scanned the street for potential threats. One of them studied Marc, Trent, and Dola briefly before apparently dismissing them as no danger and looking back up the street in the other direction.

"Is that an inn?" Trent asked, raising his voice above the constant patter of rain against cobblestone and tiled roofs.

"Yes," Dola began, "but..."

Trent was already hurrying past her toward the inn's door and the pair of soldiers. Marc hastened after his friend, assuring himself that if the soldiers were hostile, Dola would have let them know.

Trent was already inside the building by the time Marc reached the guards, who both gave him a cursory inspection as he passed between them. He was worried that they might stop him from entering because of the knives sheathed in his belt, but they let him pass unhindered, turning their attention swiftly from him to Dola as he pushed open the inn's door. Neither man said a word.

Rather than a plushly furnished hotel lobby like Marc would have expected to find in an inn back on Earth, he found himself at the edge of a dimly lit tavern that seemed to span the building's entire first floor. Small, round tables were spaced haphazardly among thick oak beams supporting the tavern's ceiling, each with a lantern in its center flickering from barely felt drafts. The floor was a mess, covered in peanut shells and stains from spilled drinks, but at least Marc felt no guilt for dripping all over it. There was already a small puddle growing around his feet.

"Move aside so I can get in, would you?" Dola said from behind him, and he hastily stepped away from the door, feeling chagrined as the other Oncan stepped in out of the rain. "Where did Trent go?" she asked, taking in the tavern's quietly murmuring crowd with a worried frown.

Marc pointed across the tavern to where the bare-chested sailor was talking to a short, broad shouldered man behind a bar set against the far wall. The man was shaking his head firmly while drying a ceramic mug with a torn rag.

Dola said something under her breath that Marc couldn't understand and began making her way toward Trent, her feline paws crunching over the scattered peanut shells noisily. Marc followed her, glancing around at the thirty or forty soldiers that filled the tavern, all eating and drinking at the tables and engaging in polite conversation. He didn't think those men or women were responsible for any of the stains on the floor. Several of them returned his glance with varying degrees of disinterest, and while one or two regarded him with angry looking scowls, he didn't think they meant him any harm.

"Getting us a room?" Marc asked Trent as he and Dola reached his friend's side.

"Yes." Trent nodded confidently, but he didn't take his eyes away from the bartender's hard stare. "We were just negotiating a fair price."

The other man's frown deepened. "No, we weren't," he said insistently, then turned to Marc. "Look, it's not in my hands. The entire Riversider has been reserved for the Right Guard. I've been told to direct any travelers to the East Walk on the other side of town."

"He wants us to walk all the way back across Dentos Crossing in this storm," Trent complained with a grimace. They could still hear the near constant rumble of thunder from beyond the tavern's windows, only slightly muffled by the thin panes of glass.

"I'm not permitted to make any exceptions," the bartended told him. He looked Marc and Dola up and down. "Besides, you won't be able to get any wetter than you already are."

Dola glanced around the room again, the many soldiers apparently making her uneasy. "We should do as he says. I remember the other inn; it's along the main road heading out of the eastern half of Dentos Crossing."

Marc shook his head, though not from any desire to dry off. "Hold on a second." He turned to the bartender. "You said the inn was reserved for the Right Guard?"

"That's right."

"As in the Royal Right?"

The balding bartender nodded and pointed to a table in a shadowy corner of the tavern, its single occupant sitting with the back of his chair nestled in the corner so that he had a clear view of the entire tavern. "That's him there," the bartender said, "Xacar Yavic Taurus himself."

Beside Marc, Trent whipped his head around to Dola and hissed under his breath so quietly that Marc could barely hear him, "As in the ambassador who is rumored to dabble in magic and might know a way to send Marc and me home and get Tolinom back?"

"Maybe," Dola muttered reluctantly, but Marc was no longer paying her, Trent, or the bartender much attention.

The Royal Right was looking straight at him, and for all Marc knew, the man had probably been keeping an eye on the three of them from the moment they'd stepped into the tavern. Taurus had a cap of well-tended white hair combed back over his head, not a strand of it gray, and showed the fine wrinkles of a man perhaps a decade past his middle years. Aside from his age, though, Marc didn't notice anything about the man that shouted "wizard;" he was clean shaven, wearing a finely tailored black vest over an equally expensive shirt that matched the royal blue color of the soldiers' tabards. Of course, real wizards and mages probably didn't always sport long, flowing beards and floor length robes like they did in the movies Marc remembered.

While Marc was studying the man, the Right was examining him in his turn, and he had to stop himself from shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other. Wizard or not, Taurus's gaze was more piercing than an arrow, seeming to see into Marc's soul and weigh and measure his worth without so much as lifting an eyebrow. Sensing an unspoken challenge in that stare, Marc was loathe to break eye contact with the man until Dola cleared her throat and touched his shoulder lightly to draw his attention.

"We'll go to the East Walk," she said.

"What? Why?" Trent protested, then leaned toward Dola and continued more quietly, unheeding of the nearby soldiers turning their heads toward the three of them. "If there's even the slightest chance this guy can tell us how to reverse whatever spell that dragon cast to bring us here, why should we walk away from it? The worst that can happen is that he tells us we're out of luck, right?"

"Or thinks we're nuts and takes us into custody," Marc muttered under his breath.

Dola was giving Marc a strange look, growing more visibly uneasy by the moment. "It's not that simple..." she began.

Trent rolled his eyes at her. "What's not simple about it?"

Behind them, the bartender set his polished mug on the wooden bar with a loud thump. "You three have already been here long enough for me to charge you, talking as if you have any option other than leaving. The Riversider is reserved for the Right Guard, and that's all there is to it."

"Corgal," the Royal Right suddenly said in a calm voice that somehow carried easily across the tavern.

"Yes, Master Taurus?" All traces of impatience left the bartender's voice as he replied to the Right.

Taurus was still watching Marc with that unwavering stare, as if waiting to gauge his reaction. "They can stay."

"As my lord commands," Corgal said with a shrug before turning back to his three dripping guests. "One night is a quil and a half per room. Did you say you wanted only one?" He eyed them suspiciously, but Marc wasn't sure if the bartender was at odds with him and Trent sleeping in the same room as a woman, or with Dola and him sleeping in the same room as a human.

"A quil and a half should be enough for a room for each of us," Dola argued.

"If you'd have tried the East Walk, it likely would have been." Corgal's smirk faded into wide eyed astonishment, though, when Trent pulled a big, shiny gold coin from his trousers' pocket, the pay given to him by Captain Lebram when they were leaving Falcon Wing.

"This should cover it, shouldn't it?" Trent asked.

Dola grabbed Trent's hand and forced it down to his side before he could put the coin on further display. "Put that away," she hissed at him, then pulled a flattened, brown leather sack from inside her tunic. "A quil and a half," she said to the bartender, opening the sack and rooting around in it with her fingers. She pulled out a small gold coin and a larger silver one, setting them on the bar in front of Corgal. "One room."

The two coins disappeared before Marc even realized the bartender had moved, swiftly replaced by a three-pronged bronze key. "Your room is on the second floor," Corgal said brusquely. "Turn left at the top of the stairs, and the door is the last on the left."

"I don't suppose you could send a few towels up?" Trent asked.

"For another licup, certainly." The bartender's confident smirk had returned.

Dola scoffed, laughing with little humor. "In that case, we can just make a pond out of your tavern." She took the room key and turned away from the bar when Corgal merely shrugged, clearly unconcerned over rain water marring the tavern's already filthy floor.

Trent made as if to move toward the Right's otherwise unoccupied table, but Dola grabbed the big man's wrist and pulled him in the other direction. "We should at least thank him for stepping in back there," he argued, then continued in a lower tone, "and maybe ask him a few questions."

"It wouldn't be much thanks for all of us to drip all over his dinner table," Dola said, leading Trent and Marc to a small, empty table backed up against one of the tavern's oak columns near the center of the large room. She regarded the table's three ladder-back chairs with a slight grimace of distaste. "No stools. Small surprise." She took one of the chairs and spun it backwards, sitting on it with her legs to either side of its back rather than trying to thread her tail through its rungs.

Marc followed her example quietly, mindful of her mood's sudden deterioration, while Trent sat across from him heavily, the man's wet back squeaking against the chair's ladder rungs. Marc felt like a walking mop, his clothing only slightly wetter than the fur beneath it.

Trent gave Dola a sideways glance. "So what's got your fur in a knot?"

She folded her soaked, black furred arms over the back of her chair and glared at him. "If all three of us were human, he wouldn't have dreamed of charging us extra for towels."

"Well, you two do have a lot of fur to dry," Trent noted casually. "It probably takes you more than one towel to dry off, and they'd have to wash all of them afterward. I don't know if it would be worth however much he was asking, but I guess it would have meant a little more work for them."

"Do you really think they'd bother washing the towels?" Marc asked sardonically, looking down at the floor. He had wet peanut shells trapped in the mud caked between his feline toes.

Dola sighed, still clearly frustrated. "It's not just the towels. Tolinom and I tried to stay here on our way to Boendal, but they wouldn't give us the same price for a room as a pair of humans who came in before us. It was a different bartender, but he told us the only rooms left were larger and were all more expensive."

Trent shrugged. "Maybe they were."

Dola just shook her head. "We've had that sort of thing happen too often since leaving Bandarethe for it to be coincidence. We expected some humans to be a little prejudiced when we left, but I never realized how quickly it would get old." She glanced at Marc out of the corner of her eye. "Tolinom always took it worse than I did, but now..."

Marc shifted on his chair, both the awkward seating and the other Oncan's comment making him feel a little uncomfortable. "I guess I just don't know enough about your world to get offended," he said, shrugging a shoulder.

"Ignorance is bliss," Trent teased with a grin.

Marc laughed and shot back, "You would know," but his mood quickly sobered, and he finished with a sigh. "Actually, ignorance is getting old quick, too."

Trent just nodded somberly, and they sat for a moment in silence, the soldiers' quiet conversations blending with the thunder outside. Trent began drumming his big fingers on the tabletop. "So," he said, "if you knew this inn was unlikely to give us a fair deal, why didn't you take us to the other one, that East Walk, or whatever?"

"The Riversider was closer, since we were coming into town from the south instead of east along the road." Dola held her arms out to her sides, letting water drip from her elbows and the bottoms of her short sleeves. "I guess I wasn't concerned with much at the time, other than finding someplace dry as quickly as possible."

From Marc's position at the table, he had a clear view of the bar between Dola's face and Trent's shoulder, where soldiers occasionally brought their mugs for the bartender to refill. While Dola was talking, a young girl with long, wavy blonde hair stepped from behind the bar and approached their table timidly. She froze in place halfway between them and the bar when she noticed Marc looking at her and gulped, her frightened swallow audible even over the tavern's ambient murmur. Marc tried smiling at her reassuringly, but if anything, that only seemed to unnerve her further. He realized his feline teeth might not be the most comforting sight to a human child her age, so he toned his smile down a little.

The girl looked over her shoulder at the bartender, and Marc couldn't help but chuckle sympathetically when he heard her whisper, "Uncle Corgal..." in a pleading tone meant to carry. The bartender just made a shooing motion at her with one hand while he poured ale into a soldier's mug from a tapped barrel against the back wall, so she turned back around and, after gathering her courage with a deep breath, finished her trek to stand beyond arm's reach near Trent's chair.

By that time, Dola and Trent had noticed Marc grinning between them and had turned to watch the girl's approach. "Hi there," Dola said in a remarkably gentle tone after her recent frustration.

"Um..." That seemed to exhaust the girl's vocabulary. For a long moment, she stared up at Dola with her mouth agape as if she'd never seen an Oncan before. That was unlikely, Marc thought, if the girl worked in an inn, but maybe she'd just never been that close to an Oncan. Their bedraggled appearance probably didn't make them seem any less intimidating to her.

"Hello," Trent said to the girl with a crisp wave, almost a salute of his meaty hand, trying to get her attention off of Dola, whose frown was swiftly returning. "My name's Trent. What's yours?" The simple introduction might have sounded a bit condescending coming from anyone else, but even with his deep voice, Trent had a way of speaking that made it sound like one child talking to another on a playground.

The girl wrenched her eyes from Dola to look at Trent's face. With the big man's three-day growth of brown beard and shoulder-length, rain slicked hair, Marc thought he looked like a thug, or a pirate, but evidently the girl found Trent's smile less sinister than an Oncan's. "Um, I'm Kicoba," she said quietly, glancing at Marc and Dola whenever they moved so much as a whisker.

"It's nice to meet you, Kicoba," Trent said, then nodded at the others as he introduced them. "These are my friends, Dola and Marc."

Marc tried a quiet, "Hello," but every time he said anything quietly, it came out half as a growl, and he didn't think his attempted greeting did much to calm Kicoba's nerves.

"They're your friends?" the girl asked, eyeing Marc uncertainly. He made sure not to show any teeth when he smiled that time.

Trent nodded. "Marc's been my very good friend for years, and Dola...well, Dola's not as scary as she looks once you get to know her."

"Hey!" Dola didn't seem to appreciate his joke, but Trent went on anyway.

"So, what can we help you with, Kicoba?"

"Oh! Um, I'm supposed to ask if you want anything to eat or drink. There's still some steak left, or chicken or pork chops, for a licup each, and ale or apple mead for a cup per mug." Once she began, the short menu left Kicoba's lips in a brief torrent.

"A cup for a cup," Trent said in a lilting voice, and both Dola and the girl gave him perplexed looks that he didn't seem to notice. "Well, Dola's in charge of our money. What do you say, Dola? Is a cup and a licup a fair price for a meal?"

"It's a little on the steep end," Dola began slowly, but Marc noticed a smile tugging at one side of her muzzle when she regarded their young waitress. "But I suppose eleven cups is fair enough for steak and mead." She pulled out her coin purse again and, after a little rummaging, held six silver coins out to Kicoba, three small and square with rounded corners, three circular and slightly larger.

"Steak sounds great to me, too," Marc said. His stomach had been rumbling at him in imitation of the thunder outside since the girl had listed the meat the inn had to offer. The scent of grilled steak, chicken, and pork lingered in the tavern from the meals Marc supposed the soldiers must have finished before he, Trent, and Dola arrived, but he'd given little thought to his appetite, with everything else on his mind. "I'll just have water to drink, though, if I could."

"I'll try the chicken," Trent said happily, "and I don't suppose you have any apple cider?"

Kicoba nodded. "We always have cider. You don't want any ale or mead, though?"

"Cider will be fine."

The girl pulled her lower lip between her teeth and looked up at the ceiling for a short moment, evidently trying to memorize their orders. "Okay. It shouldn't take long, since everything's cooked already." She hesitated before leaving, giving Marc and Dola one last nervous glance and leaning closer to Trent. "They don't really eat bad boys and girls, do they?" she whispered.

"Oh, for the love of Parol!" Dola threw her arms up in exasperation, flinging drops of water to her sides. She swung her leg around her chair so she could sit in it sideways and lean down close to Kicoba. "Who told you that?" she demanded angrily.

At that moment, lightning lit the darkness past the tavern's windows, its thunder clap shaking the floor beneath their feet. Kicoba stared at Dola with her eyes as wide as they could go, then spun and dashed for the safety of the door behind the bar. She was out of sight before the thunder faded.

Marc was half out of his chair, wanting to make sure the girl was all right. From the bar, Corgal was glaring daggers at the three of them, and Dola was glaring right back, probably suspecting that the man had something to do with telling Kicoba scary stories about Oncans.

Trent, however, was just watching Dola, his lips quivering on the verge of laughter. Finally, a giggle escaped, a strange sound coming from such a large man, and he broke into a laughing fit. "Nice going, wildcat," he said between chuckles.

Dola whipped her glare around to him. "What did you call me?" she asked, sounding like she was truly becoming angry.

"Oh, come on," Trent said with a big grin. "You know your reaction answered her better than any words could have. You looked like you were getting ready to replace your steak with an order of little girl."

"How do you expect me to react when I find out a child's parents have been telling her that a big, nasty Oncan will come eat her if she misbehaves? Try to guess how that girl will treat Oncans in another ten or twenty years if she grows up thinking we're monsters."

Trent scratched his earlobe idly, seeming unimpressed with Dola's temper. "True, it's worth getting upset about, so that's always an option." He inspected his fingernails as though checking for earwax, then began picking at them with his other hand. "Or you could stay calm and convince her with a few words that you're not a monster after all, so that dear Uncle Corgal doesn't feel the need to spit in our drinks."

"He wouldn't," Dola began, but she craned her neck to give the bartender a suspicious glance. "You don't really think he would, do you?"

Marc chuckled at the other Oncan's worried frown. "That's just an old joke where we come from: 'Don't tick off your waiter unless you want a surprise in your meal.'" He glanced at Corgal himself, only to find the man still glaring spitefully in their direction while he washed another mug with his tattered, ale stained rag. "Though in his case, it might prove truer than we would like."

Dola swung her leg back around and straddled her chair again without a word, staring unhappily at her crossed arms. "I never used to be so touchy," she muttered after a brief silence.

"You've had a rough few days," Marc said. Leaning forward against the back of his chair, he took a deep breath that was half yawn and let his eyes close for a moment. "We all have." He was surprised that he didn't ache very much. After the long climb to the top of Dentos Falls and the hour or so spent walking to the inn, he shouldn't have been able to sit upright, especially with that being his first day on his feet for half a week. Or ever, really, when he thought about it. He felt worn out, sure, but he didn't think he would collapse any time soon, especially once he had something to eat.

Trent went back to drumming his fingers on the table. "We should just tell Taurus over there what's happened to us and see if he can help."

When Marc opened his eyes, he saw Dola glancing at the soldiers around them to make certain none of them were looking their way. "After dinner," she told Trent quietly.

The big man shrugged. "Sure, but I don't know why you're so reluctant. As soon as he helps us, Marc and I will be home, you'll have Tolinom back, and we can all go on with our lives."

Dola's eyes darted around again when Trent mentioned Tolinom's name, as if she didn't want the soldiers to hear it. "It's not that simple," she said again.

Marc frowned, wondering if Dola and Tolinom had been on bad terms with the law before the dragon's magic had brought him there. She'd had her guard up ever since she noticed the two soldiers standing sentinel outside of the inn's front door.

Whatever the source of her misgivings, though, and as much as Marc hated to admit it, he had to agree with her. He couldn't imagine why a dragon would want to drag Trent and him out of their world and into its own, if that was really what had happened. He couldn't imagine what part the invisible presence back on Earth played in everything, and he'd been trying his best all day not to imagine what might have happened to Brandon. Everything that had happened since his flight to Brazil had been interrupted was too bizarre, though, for some wizard to solve with a snap of his fingers.

Dola was right. Their situation wasn't as simple as Trent seemed to be hoping.

Then there was the problem of the Prophecy of the Wanderer...

Marc gratefully looked up when a serving girl at least twice as old as Kicoba walked up beside Trent with a platter full of food, the delicious aroma of hot steak distracting him before his thoughts could go any farther along their troubling path.

"I should apologize for my sister," she said while leaning forward to set the circular tray in front of them, and Marc had to look away from her when her white blouse's neckline offered another distraction. "Our cousin Kenner was turning the roast when Mother sent Kicoba out to check on you, and he's always been too ornery for his own good," she went on, oblivious to Marc's embarrassment. "He told her that rubbish about...well, you know, Oncans and bad children and all, right as she was leaving the kitchen. I hope you can forgive her. She didn't mean any harm."

Dola sighed. "I'm the one who should be apologizing. I didn't mean to react as strongly as I did." She was still frowning, but her frustration now seemed directed more toward herself than at anyone else. "I hope I didn't frighten the girl too badly."

The serving girl grinned. "It can't have been that bad. As soon as we told her why you were offended, she gave Kenner a good kick in the pants. Nothing he didn't deserve, I can promise you that." Her grin smoothed into a more polite smile. Marc was a little bit surprised that the Riversider didn't have any bouncers to keep its customers in line with such a pretty waitress working there, but then, the soldiers in the tavern all seemed remarkably well behaved, even if more than one pair of eyes had turned toward their table since the serving girl had arrived. "Kicoba wanted to come out and tell you how sorry she was herself, but I didn't want to risk your food in her hands. She can be a might clumsy when her mind wanders."

Marc had to smile at the girl's accent. It was similar to Dola's, but much stronger, as if English was her second language. He wondered how he could hear their accents at all, if they were both really speaking Tsuravi and their words were being translated by the Bridge of Babel. "Tell your sister that no harm was done," he said, and she returned his smile.

"She'll be glad to hear it. I'll be right back with your drinks."

When she turned back toward the bar, Trent said, "Thank you," in a way that somehow made her blush furiously, the freckles on her cheeks almost seeming to glow. Marc had never understood how his friend was able to do that. It only took Trent a word or two to turn an innocent conversation into shameless flirting.

They were all too hungry to wait for the serving girl's return before they dug into their dinner. Served on the big tray without individual plates, the three of them had to lean over the table slightly to reach their meals, but Marc was relieved that the food had been served with fairly familiar silverware: three knives and as many dual-pronged forks. He'd been worried that people in that foreign world might have used equally foreign eating utensils, and he'd never even gotten the hang of chop sticks back on Earth.

His eyes widened in surprise when he took the first bite of his T-bone, and he looked across the table when Trent let out a delighted moan around his mouthful of chicken. "I think this has to be the best steak I've ever had," Marc said after swallowing. Trent nodded his agreement enthusiastically, carving another chunk out of his chicken breast.

Dola shrugged noncommittally as she chewed. "It's not bad, I guess."

"Not bad?" Trent exclaimed, the words muffled by his food. "I don't know about your steak, but this chicken is delicious! I was expecting something dry and stringy from a medieval tavern like this, but this is as good as anything I ever had back home."

"It's just standard roast chicken, but I'm glad you like it," their waitress said as she reappeared beside Trent, setting three ceramic mugs on the table. "Is there anything else I can get for you all?"

Marc shook his head and mumbled, "I'm good," around another bite of steak, and Dola politely said, "No, thank you," but Trent held a hand out to keep the girl from leaving until he swallowed the food in his mouth.

"You never told us your name," he said with a lopsided smile.

The serving girl blushed again, but met Trent's smile with a grin of her own. "I guess I didn't," she said, then walked back to the door to the kitchen without another word, leaving Trent chuckling and Marc holding a furry hand over his muzzle to keep himself from spitting out his steak while he laughed. Even Dola was smiling in amusement.

Watching the girl's departure over his shoulder, Trent didn't straighten in his seat until the door swung shut behind her. "I like her," he announced while spearing his chicken again with his two-pronged fork.

As their meal went on with little further conversation, all three of them focusing on satiating their appetites more than on each other, Marc's amused smirk gradually faded to a pensive frown. His thoughts kept circling back to the Prophecy Dola had told them about. She'd said that it foretold that a creature called the Wanderer would one day destroy the world.

Ordinarily, he would have dismissed the fact that a disembodied voice had twice called him "Wanderer" as simple coincidence. After all, a wanderer was just someone who traveled without a clear destination. That certainly applied to him, true, but it could also be applied to Trent and Dola, neither of whom knew exactly what they needed to do to get everyone back where they belonged. Anyone could be a wanderer in some respects.

But not just anyone had had a vision two and a half weeks ago in which someone tried to free a destroyer of worlds. He couldn't remember every detail of the vision any more, but he knew that it had seemed like he was the person the others had been trying to rescue, lying on the ground with his eyes closed. After being named "Wanderer" by the invisible presence that had spoken to him briefly before the vision, and knowing what Dola had told them about the centuries old Prophecy, Marc's vision made a kind of horrifying sense. Except for one thing.

Marc was no villain.

He had no reason to wish any harm on Dola's world, and couldn't begin to think of any circumstance that would make him want to destroy it. All he wanted was to find a way home, but if it was for some reason necessary to destroy this world to get back to his own, he would just be stuck. That didn't make any sense, anyway. Earth hadn't been destroyed when he'd been sent into Tolinom's body. At least, he had no reason to believe it had.

Taking a draught from his mug of water to wash away the unsettling thought, Marc closed his eyes, knowing that his mind was wandering as it always did when he was tired. He had only been away from his family for a few days, of which he'd only been conscious during one, but already he was getting homesick. He wondered what had happened to his own body since he had been placed in Tolinom's. Had Tolinom been transported between worlds to occupy Marc's body, or had Marc's body simply collapsed and died without a soul to fill it? He shuddered, a shiver running down his spine.

"Did it just get chillier in here?" Trent asked, and Marc looked up at him from across the table, thinking his friend had simply noticed his shiver. Trent was staring into his half empty mug of cider, though, idly swirling its contents.

Dola shrugged sleepily, pausing with her last bite of steak on the way to her mouth. "It's as warm as ever," she said.

"I just got goose bumps," Trent explained, but he dismissed them with a shrug of his own. "Guess it's just a late reaction to the rain." By that time, though, Trent had nearly dried off.

Marc wished the same could be said of him. A puddle of water had spread around Dola and him in three feet in every direction, but his fur was still more than damp enough to explain his own chill.

"Is that a mandolin?" Trent asked suddenly, and Marc followed his friend's gaze to where a soldier was walking down the stairs behind Marc into the tavern carrying what looked like a small guitar with a triangular base.

"I think that's a lute," Dola said as the soldier sat at a table with two other men and plucked a few discordant notes. "What's a mandolin?"

"A musical instrument in our world," Trent explained without taking his eyes off of the strumming soldier, "though there aren't many where Marc and I are from. It's a fairly cultural instrument; I always wanted to try playing one." He pushed his chair back, making its legs squeak against the wet floor as he got to his feet. "I wouldn't mind giving the lute a shot, either." With that, he made his way across the tavern to the lute player's table.

"Wait," Dola protested, half rising out of her seat until Marc put his hand on her forearm.

"You'll only draw more attention if you try to stop him," he told her, and she slowly sat back down, though she kept her eyes on Trent's broad back, looking troubled. "Don't worry. If there's anything Trent knows, it's music." Even as he said it, though, Marc felt an inexplicable surge of anxiety wash through him, though Trent seemed to be chatting amicably enough with the soldiers.

"Why should I care if we draw attention to ourselves?" Dola asked, her casualness just a little too deliberate to believe.

"That's a good question," Marc said with a quiet laugh. He leaned toward her over the table so that he could speak low enough that the soldiers around them wouldn't be able to overhear him. "You've been acting like a rabbit in a fox's den ever since we came here, and I don't think it has much to do with the racist bartender. Is there something Trent and I should know, Dola?"

Once again her eyes darted around to make sure no one was looking in their direction. "I haven't been that obvious, have I?" she whispered.

"So there is a reason you don't want the soldiers to notice us," Marc pressed.

"It's complicated," Dola said reluctantly, but that was enough of an admission for Marc. "Look, I'll tell you about it later, all right?" She flicked her eyes toward the nearest tables of soldiers, and Marc let the subject drop, understanding her hint. She didn't want the soldiers to hear whatever she had to say.

A loud, vibrant chord sounded from the lute behind Marc, and he twisted to see Trent with the instrument in his hands, saying something excitedly to the soldiers at the table, who were all nodding appreciatively. Marc couldn't hear their conversation from where he sat near the middle of the tavern, but the lute's owner laughed at something Trent said, shaking his head when Trent tried to hand the instrument back to him and gesturing for the big man to go on. Grinning happily, Trent pulled a chair up to their table from an empty one, sat, and began strumming the lute experimentally, laughing and joking with the soldiers every time he hit a note that didn't fit his chords. Before long, he was confidently strumming a swift rhythm and chord sequence that Marc thought he recognized from a light rock song back home, though he couldn't remember its name. The soldiers around Trent thumped their mugs against their tables and applauded in surprised appreciation.

Marc just shook his head and laughed. He'd always known Trent was a musical prodigy, able to learn to play any instrument he could get his hands on, but sometimes his friend still amazed him. Marc had never been able to so much as whistle a coherent tune, even before he'd been given lips too fuzzy to whistle at all.

"I wish he wouldn't get so friendly with them," Dola said uneasily, while Trent switched from chords to a swiftly plucked melody. "Any one of them could be a thief or a murderer."

"Guarding the king's right hand man?" Marc said incredulously. "Why would you think something like that?" he asked, wondering if Dola might not be more than a little racist herself.

She just gestured at him dismissively. "You don't understand the Eyralian court system," was her only vague explanation.

Any further questions Marc might have asked were brought short by a loud, high pitched, operatic falsetto coming from Trent, eliciting raucous laughter from the soldiers around him. That noise should never have been able to come from a man of Trent's size. The big man broke into laughter as well when his high note ended, shaking his head and assuring everyone whose attention he'd gathered that the note had been a joke.

Then, after strumming a chord on the triangular lute and humming a droning note to get his voice in tune with the instrument, Trent began to sing in a lilting, quiet voice. The song sounded to Marc almost like a Celtic lullaby.

"Star light, star bright, the first star tonight,

Will you lend me your sight in the tail end of twilight?"

Dola's ears stood straight up at the sound of Trent's voice, and when the big musician followed the verse with a complicated string of flowing notes from the lute, she turned to Marc and hissed urgently under her breath, "What is he doing?"

Marc chuckled quietly at her, though he didn't understand her sudden concern. "We call that singing where Trent and I come from."

She swung her head back to the table at the base of the stairs where Trent was playing. Nearly every soldier in the tavern was watching his unexpected performance. "We have to stop him," Dola whispered, but she made no move to do so.

"Why?" Marc asked, frowning. "It's just Trent being Trent. You don't have any laws against music, do you?"

"No, of course not," she said without shifting her stare away from Trent. "It's not that. He's not--"

Dola's sentence dropped off when Trent shifted into a swifter rhythm, managing to tap a drum beat against the lute's belly while strumming a fast sequence of chords. His next verse matched the song's new expression, somehow sounding urgent despite the unalarming lyrics.

"Catch the moonlight in your fingers, weave it in the milkiest way.

Sew me a cloak of the heavens while bluest night overcomes day.

Dance with us over the river while owls and crickets serenade.

May the dance go on forever, may our celebration never fade."

"He's not singing in Tsuravi," Dola said while Trent closed his eyes and began playing so many notes on the lute that he sounded like at least three musicians with their own instruments rather than only one.

Marc tilted his head at her questioningly. "What do you mean? He's singing in English, the same language he and I have been speaking since we came here."

Dola shook her head, still without pulling her eyes from Trent as he jammed on the lute, oblivious to the bewilderment in his audience's stares. "I've never heard this language before," she said. "It's...eerie."

Marc thought Trent's song was more lively and upbeat than eerie, though for some reason his heart was beating unusually hard, and the fur on the back of his neck kept trying to rise inexplicably, only held down by his wet shirt and tunic collars. He tried to ignore his strange uneasiness, scratching his head at the base of his ear thoughtfully. "Maybe the Bridge of Babel doesn't work on music?" he suggested, though he had no idea why that would be the case. It would mean Dola and the soldiers were all hearing Trent's lyrics as untranslated English, though, if they had been right about the Bridge being some sort of translating spell.

Dola just shrugged wordlessly, and Trent's instrumental refrain shifted again to a more driving version of his original verse.

"Come rain, come hail, throw your wrath at our sail,

But know that we'll prevail in the tail end of twilight."

Trent repeated the new melody on the lute once more before ending the song on the same notes that he'd sung the words, "tail end of twilight," then looked around himself as if remembering for the first time that he wasn't alone in his bedroom jamming on his guitar. He cleared his throat uncomfortably when the soldiers around him just stared at him without saying a word or offering a single clap of applause. "Afraid I forgot the rest of that one," he said casually. "I haven't played it much since I composed it back a couple years ago."

"In what language were you singing?" The calm question came in a steely voice that carried across the tavern clearly in the silence left in Trent's song's wake. The Royal Right was regarding Trent with an all too casual interest.

Trent blinked at the other man's unwavering gaze, then glanced around at the waiting soldiers' faces staring back at him. When his confused eyes settled on Marc for a brief moment, Marc could only shrug, though Dola gave the slightest shake of her head beside him.

Trent looked back at Taurus and gave the Right a lopsided grin. "That was Elvish, my lord," he said, imitating the way the bartender had addressed the Right earlier.

"Elvish," Taurus repeated blandly. One of his soldiers chuckled quietly. Another muttered something under his breath to the men at his table.

Trent nodded, his moment of confused uncertainty evidently forgotten. "High Elvish, to be precise, though the nuances of the different dialects aren't easy to distinguish." He set the lute on the table in front of its owner, his confident grin never faltering.

After the silence stretched on for several more anxious moments, the lute's owner barked a laugh and pulled the instrument to his side. "The man's got skill with a lute," he said, "but can't think up decent lyrics, so he just sings gibberish." The other soldiers at the table began laughing as well.

"Gibberish?" Trent sounded sincerely indignant, but his grin only grew wider. "The Elves aren't going to be happy when I tell them you said that." The laughter spread throughout the tavern, the mystery of Trent's foreign song solved as far as the soldiers were concerned. "No, really," he went on, laughing himself now, "they take this sort of thing very personally."

"Don't worry, you have a great voice," the lute's owner said, reaching up and clapping Trent on the shoulder companionably. "All the same, you might want to let your fingers do the singing for you in the future."

Trent just smiled and nodded, taking the soldier's jests good naturedly as he made his way back toward Marc and Dola's table.

Marc glanced at Taurus while his friend wove between the tavern's tables. The Right watched Trent's progress with that same veiled stare, his soldiers' joviality never touching him. His expression offered no hint about his thoughts.

"Well, that was weird," Trent said, sitting heavily in his chair across from Marc.

"You've got that right," Dola agreed, but Trent shook his head. He didn't seem to be referring to his song being unintelligible to his audience.

"I haven't had stage fright that bad since I played Ebenezer Scrooge in my fourth grade Christmas Pageant. My heart's still racing."

"Mine, too," Marc said, frowning in confusion. He could offer no reason for his blood to be pumping so furiously, or for his hackles to keep trying to lift his damp shirt off of his back. He somehow felt as if unseen eyes were spying on him, but in such a crowded room, why should he feel uneasy at being looked at? "So that was you having stage fright, huh?" he asked, trying to take his mind off of his disconcerting rise of adrenaline.

Trent grinned and opened his mouth to answer, but before he had a chance to speak he was cut off by a man's shrill scream coming from beyond the Riversider's door. Lightning lit the tavern's windows, and the scream merged into the lightning's crash of thunder as the door burst open and one of the soldiers stationed in the storm outside stumbled to his knees in the threshold. "We're under att--" was all he managed to say before three loud thunks interrupted him, like tree branches slapping against a wet bale of hay.

The soldier fell forward on his face, four black fletched and shafted arrows buried in his back.

The silence that had smothered the tavern's laughter lasted only an instant before chaos broke loose.