By this time the duke was entirely flustered. "How can one woman be responsible for so much chaos?"

"I say she practices," said Dean Porfirio. Like Garth, he was in the duke's court solely in the capacity of witness. "But her husband here assures me it's purely a natural talent."

Something whizzed through the air and hit the wizard at the back of the head, knocking his conical cap off. "My Garth never said any such thing about me," Zoli announced, hefting a second peach. "He knows better." She sauntered back to the ranks of her accusers while Dean Porfirio recovered his hat and plucked bits of fruit out of his hair.

"Did you disrupt this girl's Maiden Morn?" Janifer quizzed her.

"Yes," Zoli admitted freely. "You'd've done the same, in the circumstances." She explained the details of Goodwife Eyebright's plot against Ethelberthina.

The good duke was appalled, but compelled to press on with his examination: "Then you admit to assaulting Ludlow Pennywhistle with the flung body of Bursar Tailings?"

"Sometimes I don't know my own strength." Zoli giggled. "Sometimes I do."

"And did you thereby recklessly endanger the life of this troll?"

"I wouldn't say that. I recked plenty. I knew Ethelberthina wouldn't let him come to harm. She knows what sunlight does to trolls, so she swept her cloak over him the instant he hit the water. None of us had cloaks who claimed we did." She gave the wizard a nasty look.

"Yes, but when she threw her cloak over him, that betrothed them, according to the laws governing Maiden Morns."

"What do you want, law or justice? If I hadn't tossed the troll, then by the same laws, she'd be hogtied to that piece of work instead." She nodded at Ludlow. "The troll's a better deal."

"But it's not legal for trolls and humans to marry!" the duke exclaimed.

"Well, they're not married; they're only betrothed." Zoli shrugged. "You're the duke; unbetroth them."

"I don't have that authority."

"But you do have the authority to bother me with all of these silly lawsuits, don't you?" Zoli challenged. "Is this what we pay our taxes for? Especially Ethelberthina."

The duke's moustache began to twitch in an unsettling manner. "You… pay… taxes, child?" he asked the girl.

"Ever since the Swordsisters' Union bought up most of my stock of Mama Ethina's Elixir of Equality," she replied. "It turns dragon-scale armor so brittle that it shatters on contact with a feather."

"Nothing can do that to dragon-scale armor!" the duke objected. "That's why the king's men all wear it."

"Nothing could," Lily said, stepping forward, her alchemist's robes rustling softly over the stones. "But now something can; something Ethelberthina invented, and that's why she's independently wealthy." She patted the girl on one shoulder and added, "It's not turning lead into gold, but close. Fellow alchemist, I salute you."

"Fellow alchemist, do you have anything that might shatter my stupid betrothal?" Ethelberthina asked.

Lily smiled. She was a beautiful young woman, with her mother's dark coloring and her father's home-loving nature. When she first entered Duke Janifer's service, many court gossips hissed that he had not hired her for her brains. The whispers stopped when Lily demonstrated that she had also inherited her mother's elementary yet effective way of dealing with rumormongers.

"As a matter of fact," she said, "I do. And it will settle all of these silly lawsuits besides."

"Will it?" Duke Janifer gazed at Lily in awe. "Huzzah! Tell us what it is, I beg you!"

"Nothing fancy; just trial by combat. Oh! To the death. It must be to the death. You can't get anything really settled unless someone dies."

The hall fell silent, including the spectators.

The sound of Zoli's sword rasping from its sheath broke the quiet. "Suits me," she said amiably.

"It would." Bursar Tailings huffed like an overweight dragon. "Me fight a retired swordsister? Might as well ram a chisel through my throat and save time."

"Do we have to?" Ludlow whined.

"Not if you drop the charges," Lily said. "No charges, no case; no case, no need for any sort of trial."

"Good enough for me," said the troll. "Consider 'em dropped."

"Me, too," Ludlow said eagerly.

"After what she did to us?" Goodwife Eyebright snapped. Her hand, grown strong and swift in the ministering of domestic justice to her helpless brood, shot out and grabbed him by the ear. "If it weren't for her and her prodigal troll-flinging, we'd both have what we wanted by now."

"I don't care." Ludlow squealed and squirmed. "What good's a dowry if I'm dead? You want your kid married off so bad, you fight the tin-plated bitch!"

"All right," said Goodwife Eyebright. "I will."

"Did I miss anything?" Garth Justi's-son asked Dean Porfirio as he sidled along the row of benches ringing the duke's arena. Normally the sand-covered enclosure was reserved for riding exhibitions, but today it had been hastily judged the best site for the upcoming trial-at-arms.

"Not a thing." The wizard reached into a paper cone filled with salted nuts and munched primly. It was amazing how fast word of the combat had spread, fetching still more people to the ducal palace grounds. With the crowds came hucksters of every stripe. They seemed to swarm out of the ground, like maggots in meat, which coincidentally was what some of them were selling.

"Sorry I took so long," Garth muttered, sitting down. "I had to teach Ludlow some manners. He might be walking normally by next Market Day, if he finds an ice pack. No whelp calls my Zoli a bitch and gets away with it."

The wizard stuck the paper poke under Garth's nose. "Nuts?"

"Fair enough, she is that. But only a little, and I think our Lily caught it from her. Trial by combat to the death, no less! What was going through that girl's head?"

"Probably the notion that she could save you a lot of legal woes. She believed they'd all drop their cases because no one would be fool enough to fight Zoli." The wizard ate some more nuts. "Never underestimate fools."

In the center of the sand-strewn ring, Duke Janifer stood between the two combatants and nervously asked, "Ladies, are you certain you wouldn't like to reconsider?"

"I would," Zoli said. "It's not combat, it's bloody murder. I've eaten seafood that had more hope of killing me than this idiot." She gestured scornfully at Goodwife Eyebright. "Plus, she looks ready to drop her calf any second now. One needless death on my hands is bad enough, but two?"

"Will you withdraw?" Duke Janifer turned to Goodwife Eyebright, entreating her with his eyes. "Pleeease?"

Ethelberthina's mother stood herself up a bit taller and held the sword she'd been given as though it were a carpet beater. "I'd sooner die."

"I was afraid you'd say that." The duke sighed, shrugged, and tossed a bright orange kerchief high into the air. As he dashed from the arena he called back over one shoulder, "When it hits the ground, start fighting!"

The audience gasped and held its breath. Zoli went into her preferred fighting stance, grim and silent, eyes fixed on the floating kerchief. Goodwife Eyebright, on the other hand, began jabbering the instant the bit of cloth left the duke's hand.

"My gracious, aren't you in a hurry? I'm sure it's not going to take you long to kill me, but don't you worry about that. Nor about the poor, innocent, unborn babe I'm carrying that never did anyone a bit of harm. Nor about all my poor little lambkins that'll be left orphaned and helpless, oh no, don't you give any of them a second thought! Mayor Eyebright will probably remarry quick enough, and then they'll have a stepmother, and who knows what she'll be like? But don't you fret over it, you've done your duty, you don't have to bother your head about whether they'll be decently clothed and fed and who'll tuck them into their cold, lonesome little beds of a winter's night with not even the comfort of a loving mother's kiss on their tiny, tear-stained faces, no. Don't you concern yourself over their bitter tears or their heartbreaking sobs or their-"