“Aye, m’lord.”

“For your sakes 1 hope it is.”

“M’lord?” Lanny asked next. “Could we not have you name as well?”

“Trebor Smada.”

“Trevor Smada,” I mispronounced.

“That is Trebor, lad! Not . . . whatever it was you said. You would do well not to get my name backward.”

1 was thinking that missing only one letter hardly consisted of getting it backward when suddenly two coins were spinning into the air, one toward each of us. Lanny caught his in the air with one hand. It     took     me two     hands and some

juggling, but at least I didn’t disgrace myself by dropping it.

And then, of course, I did drop it. I bent down, red-faced, and picked it up.

Smada was already on his way down the road. “That’s to seal our contract. Perform well and faithfully and there will be more. Much more.” He started cantering away. Lanny shouted after him.

“Lord Smada! How will we know these men with the

horses?”

Without even slowing down, Smada boomed back over his shoulder: “Take the first two horses from anyone seeking Trebor Smada!” he shouted and then was gone around the bend.

Lanny and 1 were the ones really around the damned bend. We had bought the whole thing. We spent the next houi congratulating ourselves for having conned a job right off. Idiots! Stupid, trusting, numskulled idiots!

Oh, there had been a con, all right. But we hadn’t even seen it. We just stood there on that road, like the dumb shits we were, waiting to die.

It was a couple of hours before anybody showed up on the road. Somehow Lanny and I managed to spend that time getting deeper into trouble. It started off innocently enough, though. We were just sitting there grinning at each other and noticing how pretty everything was.

Because it really was. I mean, gorgeous. The sky was so blue, the trees so green and pretty. Everything. The woods, the smell of the air. Even the dust of the road was somehow just right. ¹

Us, too. I felt terrific. I felt healthy and . . . pure. I had even lost my desire for cigarettes. Well, my craving, anyway. After a while we noticed our clothes were different than they had been. The same, too. That is, they looked the same. But different. More realistic. Zippers, for example, had been replaced by buttons somehow.

It was neat.

In fact, I realized I felt as good as I ever had. I felt like I belonged. Oh, we had no excuses.

A thought occurred to me after the first half hour.

“Lanny?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think this is the Horseclans world.”

Lanny laughed. “Of course it is. It’s perfect.”

“I know. That’s the trouble.”

Lanny laughed again. “What do you think it is?”

“I dunno. A movie.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what it feels like.”

It did. It was too perfect. And I should have started to get scared right then with that thought. And maybe I did feel a little something, but then I got sidetracked when Lanny started talking again. This time it was about how we had to establish ourselves right away with these “peon types coming up the road.” The idea, according to Lanny (and, to be fair, I liked it, too), was that we had to set these dudes straight. These and all the rest we met. Two kinds of people in this kinda place: the nobles and the gophers. And we were in no mood to gopher anything. Therefore we had to let everybody know right away that we expected to be treated like the upper-crust types we were.

“And,” Lanny added, “what’s the best way to get treated with respect?”

“Overtip the bartenders?”

“C’mon, Felix. Be serious.”

“Sorry. How then?”

“Act like you expect it, dummy. Act like you’re used to giving orders instead of taking them. You know, a little arrogant.”

Which made perfect sense to me. i was already a little arrogant, feeling as good as I did.

So, anyway, that’s how Lanny and I managed to get in trouble before anything even started.

Like I said before: no excuses.

An hour later they came around the trees riding at a slow walk. They looked tired and dusty and out of breath. About like Smada. Only these guys were a helluva lot less impressive. For one thing, Smada had been a big guy. Hard to tell when somebody’s sitting a horse, but I’d guessed he was at least six three and two hundred fifty pounds or so. These guys were short. Five eight tops. We probably outweighed them by twenty pounds each.

They didn’t even look particularly suspicious when we stepped into the road and held up our hands to stop them.

But why should they have been scared? They had no way of knowing how stupid we were.

They weren’t too bright, either, thank God. They were off their horses and gratefully guzzling from the wineskins we offered before even asking who we were. I tasted the wine myself in turn. We had left with Robert Mondavi Table Red.

This was something awful and realistic. The riders seemed to like it well enough.

And then the shit started.

It didn’t take much. One second we were all standing there smiling and drinking and the next second there were swords flashing in the sun. We didn’t even get around to mentioning about taking their horses. We just introduced ourselves and told ’em who we worked for.

Gordon, the only one whose name I got, choked on his swig of wine. He stared at us.

“Trebor Smada?”

“The same,” replied Lanny smugly. “We’re his personal guards.”

And then the one closest to me, not Gordon, had his sword out and was swinging with both hands right at my head, and I ducked instinctively and yelled, “Hey, watch it!” and stepped inside his guard and grabbed his wrists and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, prick?”

And you know what? He just stared at me for a second. Totally unbelieving. But why shouldn’t he be surprised I hadn’t just immediately attacked back at him? He didn’t know anything about stupid twentieth-century young-punk parking-lbt slugfests. He didn’t know anything about would-be posturing machismo. He lived in this world. If you fought then you fought. And if you won you lived and the other guy died.

In his world you didn’t spend twenty minutes first standing around saying, “You better watch out, buddy, or else,” while you took turns shoving each other in the chest until other friends came in to pull you two apart.

He was going to kill me. Just like that. And the fact that I didn’t seem to know that startled him. Which is probably why when he ignored my idiotic grip on his wrists and flicked his blade at my face he didn’t do it hard enough to cut my head off.

But his edge cut the shit out of my cheek. I stepped back and put my gloved hand up there, where the cheek stung. My glove came away bloody, and I lost it.

Which is what saved my life. I could just as easily have run away screaming. Instead 1 got mad and lived.

My sword was suddenly in my hand, bigger than his, and so was I, and swinging at him. There was a burst of sparks and a godawful clang I’d never heard before outside of a movie, but 1 didn’t stop to think about it—I just swung again, swung so hard and missed him so completely that 1 lost my balance and fell forward just as his first thrust sliced through, not my skin, but my hair.

That scared me. It also pissed me off. I growled and screamed and leapt to my feet, swinging again as hard as I could. He blocked me easily enough, parried me well the second time, but I was just too strong for him. Too strong and too mad and too scared and too adrenaline-zapped to be stopped. I broke down his guard with the sheer force of my blows. Broke his guard and then a rib and then when he stood there staggering I laid into him with both hands toward his throat, but I was too excited and too a-jumple to get it right. My blade got turned in my hand, and the flat of it hit him in the nose with a mighty whack and he sat down right where he was and keeled over.