Lords and Ladies

him that this wasn’t a proper activity for a martial artist, and he turned it into No. 19, the Flying Chrysanthemum Double Drop Kick.
    After a while he realized that he had been hearing something. It was vaguely rhythmical, and put him in mind of a grasshopper chirruping. It was coming from inside the castle.
    He turned carefully, keeping alert in case the massed armies of Foreign Parts tried to invade while his back was turned.
    This needed working out. He wasn’t on guard from things inside the castle, was he? “On guard” meant things outside. That was the point of castles. That’s why you had all the walls and things. He’d got the big poster they gave away free with Jane’s All the World’s Siege Weapons . He knew what he was talking about.
    Shawn was not the quickest of thinkers, but his thoughts turned inexorably to the elf in the dungeon. But that was locked up. He’d locked the door himself. And there was iron all over the place, and Mum had been very definite about the iron.
    Nevertheless…
    He was methodical about it. He raised the drawbridge and dropped the portcullis and peered over the wall for good measure, but there was just the dusk and the night breeze.
    He could feel the sound now. It seemed to be coming out of the stone, and had a saw-toothed edge to it that grated on his nerves.
    It couldn’t have got out, could it? No, it stood to reason. People hadn’t gone around building dungeons you could get out of.
    The sound swung back and forth across the scale.
    Shawn leaned his rusty pike against the wall and drew his sword. He knew how to use it. He practiced for ten minutes every day, and it was one sorry hanging sack of straw when he’d finished with it.
    He slipped into the keep by the back door and sidled along the passages toward the dungeon. There was no one else around. Of course, everyone was at the Entertainment. And they’d be back any time now, carousing all over the place.
    The castle felt big, and old, and cold.
    Any time now.
    Bound to.
    The noise stopped.
    Shawn peered around the corner. There were the steps, there was the open doorway to the dungeons.
    “Stop!” shouted Shawn, just in case.
    The sound echoed off the stones.
    “Stop! Or…or…or…Stop!”
    He eased his way down the steps and looked through the archway.
    “I warn you! I’m learning the Path of the Happy Jade Lotus!”
    There was the door to the cell, standing ajar. And a white-clad figure next to it.
    Shawn blinked.
    “Aren’t you Miss Tockley?”
    She smiled at him. Her eyes glowed in the dim light.
    “You’re wearing chain-mail, Shawn,” she said.
    “What, miss?” He glanced at the open door again.
    “That’s terrible. You must take it off, Shawn. How can you hear with all that stuff around your ears?”
    Shawn was aware of the empty space behind him. But he daren’t look around.
    “I can hear fine, miss,” he said, trying to ease himself around so that his back was against a wall.
    “But you can’t hear truly ,” said Diamanda, drifting forward. “The iron makes you deaf.”
    Shawn was not yet used to thinly clad young women approaching him with a dreamy look on their faces. He fervently wished he could take the Path of the Retreating Back.
    He glanced sideways.
    There was a tall skinny shape outlined in the open cell doorway. It was standing very carefully, as if it wanted to keep as far away from its surroundings as possible.
    Diamanda was smiling at him in a funny way.
    He ran.

    Somehow, the woods had changed. Ridcully was certain that in his youth they’d been full of bluebells and primroses and—and bluebells and whatnot and so on. Not bloody great briars all over the place. They snagged at his robe and once or twice some tree-climbing equivalent knocked his hat off.
    What made it worse was that Esme Weatherwax seemed to avoid all of them.
    “How do you manage that?”
    “I just know where I am all the time,” said Granny.
    “Well? I know where I am, too.”
    “No you don’t. You just happen to be present. That’s not the same.”
    “Well, do you happen to know where a proper path is?”
    “This is a short cut.”
    “Between two places where you’re not lost, d’you mean?”
    “I keep tellin’ you, I ain’t lost! I’m…directionally challenged.”
    “Hah!”
    But it was a fact about Esme Weatherwax, he had to admit. She might be lost, and he had reason to suspect this was the case now, unless there were in this forest two trees with exactly the same