The crimson witch

held.
        Anyway, he brought back two pheasants.
        Kaliglia was content with devouring half the undergrowth in the immediate forest, snuffling and sniffling to determine what was good and what was tasteless, what was healthful and what was poisonous. He studiously avoided the basketball mushrooms that popped round heads up here and there and concentrated on berry bushes and rhubarb which he ate by the bale.
        Cheryn and Jake salvaged some of the berries before Kaliglia could mangle them or eat them himself. Cheryn roasted the fowls with her magics, causing a false fire of orange and magenta to spring up under the spit Jake had fashioned from sharpened sticks. The flames roasted the meat but did not char the wood. Soon, the aroma of cooking pheasant threaded the air and had their mouths watering. They took a bird each and used cutting utensils Cheryn created with her Talent, knives and forks of humming mind-patterns. Jake ate all parts of his bird, but Cheryn daintily concentrated on the greasy white breast meat, leaving the legs and wings.
        When they were finished and the dragon had come back to curl behind them as a wall against the wind, Jake said, “What is this Lelar like? I can hardly imagine him as evil as he seems to be.”
        “I've only seen him once,” Cheryn said. “Once when he thought to federate all Talenteds on both sides of the gorge, he threw a gala ball for everyone he hoped to sway to his way of thinking. He saw the Commoners as victims to be plucked, and he wanted aid from his fellow Talenteds to do just that. He had conquered the land to the sea and wanted to avoid a physical clash with the lands beyond the gorge (since his manbat army was greatly depleted and the number of Talented beyond the gorge was great). So the Grande Ball. I could recall it for you, implant in your mind the visions I remember.”
        “I'd see Lelar?”
        “Oh, yes. Just as I saw him. I was eleven then.”
        “What do I do?”
        “Nothing. Just relax, close your eyes, and try to free your mind from as much concentration as you can.”
        “Can do.”
        Kaliglia shifted and the ground roared. “Me, too,” he said plaintively.
        “Okay,” Cheryn said, “you, too.”
        She began spinning her magics, calling up old memories, giving them flesh and making them dance on the underside of her companions' eyelids…
         The great ceiling of the Grande Ballroom of the Castle Lelar had been finished at the cost of millions to the treasury of the monarch, and - it was rumored throughout the city of Lelar, among shopkeepers and laborers, drinking men and sober - had cost hundreds of lives. The room was nearly two hundred feet long and three hundred wide, and the ceiling that roofed it was on four great arches running the width, arches made of rough-hewn wooden beams bolted together with sturdy wooden bolts that studded the length of the rafters like black jewels, one every inch around the joints so that where the beams met it seemed as if a cluster of hard-shelled bettles nested, buzzing. At the peak of each of the arches was a circular window looking upon the heavens so that the teardrop moon shown yellowly down upon the stone floor.
         Cheryn stood in a darkened corner, watching the dancers.
         They hobbled by her, their fantastic costumes glittering, sparkling, rustling and clattering. Here a costumed knight danced with a lady dressed as a sleek cat, black fur catching hints of the moonlight and shining with cm almost phosphorescent magnificence. There, to her right, a man horned and cloved as a satyr danced with a wood nymph whose bare breasts jiggled with each beat of the throbbing music. The two-man Talented orchestra provided the accompaniment of a forty-piece orchestra. There were many violins, now and then a guitar, sometimes a harp. There were trumpets and oboes and bassoons and pipes of various kinds. A tuba oom-pahed now and again, and the drums filled in with a steady beating as of rain upon the glass panels in the ceiling.
         Cheryn worked her way among the crowd standing and laughing, drinks in their hands, around the periphery of the floor to the punchbowl. She ladled out a cupful of the brew and continued around the floor, secreting herself in another corner, eyes wide and watchful of the glory of the Grande Ball. She sipped the punch…
         The bare-breasted wood nymph spun by, light on her toes, her satyr with