"Perform, right," he said, turning back to the children's table and scooping up three of the items from the vegetable bowl. They looked like the potato-things he'd juggled for Greb and Grib, only bigger. A higher-quality food than they gave the slaves, no doubt. He tossed one of the potatoes into the air—

A heavy hand slapped against the side of his head, knocking him flat onto the floor. He caught a glimpse of the potato he'd tossed rolling under the table as he dropped the other two beside him. "Do you deaf, human?" the drunken Brummga screamed. "She tell you perform. Not eat. Perform."

"I was performing," Jack protested, rolling over onto his back and pushing himself up onto his arms into an almost-sitting position. "I needed—"

He saw the foot coming, but there was no time to do anything but get ready for the impact. The kick slammed a glancing blow onto his left shoulder, and he rolled with it, spinning around nearly onto his stomach in the process.

"I was performing," he repeated, scrambling back around onto his back again.

His leg swiveled around as he did so, his left foot catching the bottom of the tablecloth and sliding underneath it. And as it did so, he felt a sudden ripping of the tights at his ankle. There was a surge of weight there—

And Draycos was gone.

Jack looked up at the Brummga standing over him, a tangle of conflicting emotions swirling through him. He'd been wrong: there was indeed one person in the room who cared whether he lived or died. Draycos, poet-warrior of the K'da, was loose and ready to protect him from this murderous slab of meat.

But rolling in right behind that thought came the deeper reality of the situation. Draycos couldn't risk his mission and the lives of his people for Jack this way. Even if he took out this one Brummga, there were way too many others in the room for him to handle.

Had he gotten so caught up in these senseless attacks on Jack that he wasn't thinking straight?

And then, even as his racing mind tried to sort out what to do, he felt something tug at the sole of his shoe. A dragon's claw, digging deftly into the thick rubber there.

Into the secret compartment where Jack's spare comm clip was hidden.

That fact had just enough time to register before the drunken Brummga grabbed his arm and hauled him up onto his feet again. "Now you perform," he repeated, shaking Jack back and forth and then shoving him back against the edge of the table. "Not eat. Not throw. Perform."

"Certainly, sir, at once," Jack promised. "Let me just put the food back first."

Before the Brummga could object, he dropped to his knees. Grabbing the two visible potatoes with his left hand, he stuck his right arm under the tablecloth where the third one had disappeared. He just hoped Draycos hadn't kicked it somewhere else.

He hadn't. The potato was right where he'd expected it to be.

And as his hand closed around the escaped vegetable, he felt the cool metal of the comm clip against his palm. Draycos, anticipating him perfectly, had balanced the device right on top of the potato.

The Brummga behind him was rumbling warningly. "I've got it," Jack assured him quickly as Draycos melted onto his hand and slithered up his sleeve. "See?" he added as he stood up, palming the comm clip and showing the potato to the drunken Brummga. "Let me show you."

He turned back to the table and replaced the vegetables. The children, he noted without surprise, were watching the whole thing with excited glee. They were here to eat, and to play, and to be entertained.

And whether Her Thumbleness's new toy did magic tricks for them, or whether he simply got himself beaten to a pulp in front of them, they would be happy. A

show was a show, after all.

"Now, let's see," he said, rubbing his neck where the Brummga had been squeezing. Under cover of the movement, he attached the comm clip to the inside of his harlequin tunic and clicked it on. "Brolach-ah mischt heeh simt, was it?"

" 'Do the under-the-cup trick now,' " Uncle Virge's voice murmured in his ear.

Jack grimaced. So that was what she'd wanted. No wonder his attempt to juggle had gone flat. "Right," he said briskly. "One under-the-cup trick, coming right up."

Gathering together three empty glasses, he snagged an acorn-sized nut from a bowl on the table and slipped it under one of the glasses. "Now watch very carefully—"

He did the trick twice, both times to the great and loud amusement of Her Thumbleness and the other Brummgan children. "Crastni miu simt cumos alekx,"

Her Thumbleness said when he'd finished, banging her spoon on the table.

" 'You may now juggle for me,' " Uncle Virge translated.

Jack sighed to himself. Now he could juggle. She could have had the same thing three minutes earlier and saved him a beating in the process. But no. What Her Thumbleness wanted, how she wanted it, when she wanted it, and nothing else.

"Yes, Your Thumbleness," he said, setting aside the glasses and again picking up the three potatoes.

It was going to be a very long night.

CHAPTER 15

The night turned out to be a lot longer than he'd expected.

Earlier, he'd been surprised that the whole Chookoock family seemed to have dropped in for dinner. Now, with Uncle Virge's running translation, he was able to catch enough bits and pieces of conversation to figure out what was actually going on.

It was, it seemed, Her Thumbleness's High Day.

He never did nail down whether it was her birthday, or some other kind of anniversary, or even just the day they all celebrated her favorite color.

Whatever it was, though, it was a big deal around the Chookoock household.

And Her Thumbleness was playing it for all it was worth. After dinner came a huge dessert that looked like a sentence of death by chocolate and ground-up tree bark. Apparently, the idea was to make as much of a mess as possible while eating it. Her Thumbleness and her friends did that part very well.

After that came game time, with the chocolate-smeared children and a few of the adults gathering in an underground room about the size of a regulation basketball court. The games generated nearly as much noise as the whole crowd upstairs had been able to produce, with the added feature of bone-crunching thuds and wallops as the kids ran into each other.

They played a number of different games, with a whole range of different types of balls. The nearest Jack got to figuring out the rules to any of them was that whenever one Brummga had a chance to run into another one, he did so.

That, and whenever Her Thumbleness came to the sidelines for a break her new court jester had better have a trick or something ready to amuse her.

Under the circumstances, it was impossible for him to slip away to go computer hunting. Standing at the sidelines, listening to a couple of the adults breathing loudly behind him, he wondered if the party girl was ever going to run out of steam.

He thought that moment had finally come when the children dropped their balls and disks and toss-bladders in the middle of the court and all came jogging back to the sidelines. But no such luck. After the games, apparently, Her Thumbleness had scheduled a sleepover with several of her closer friends.

They headed upstairs again, jabbering away in a dozen different conversations.

Jack trudged along behind them, bone-tired but trying hard not to show it. If Her Thumbleness's new toy didn't work the way she wanted it to, she would almost certainly send it back, and he couldn't afford that.

Besides, even a Brummgan kid on a massive sugar high couldn't keep up this pace forever. Eventually, she and her friends would have to give up on the fun and frolic and get some sleep.