[Some Kind of Love Song] Trouble
Title: pipe smoke
'Verse/characters: Some Kind of Love Song; Takashi
Prompt: coastal_physics: "a dewy morning, and a quiet pipe."
Word Count: 2768
Notes: Another partial expansion of river islands. After a merry chase.
This is the longest of the poll-responses so far. O.o; Sadly, it's still somewhat sketchy and hurried.
---------
He was obliged to clear the vicinity after the remaining nearby patrols returned. Especially after he just about tripped over the same wolf twice in the course of about seven minutes, and the second time she was quick enough on the uptake to get a good hard look at the face he was wearing and a full breath through her nose.
Forcing his heart rate down as much as he could, he summoned up a sheepish smile, scrubbed his hand through his hair. "I'm a little lost," he confessed, "I was supposed to go check over the horses that came in with the Prince Ruadhan, but I think I'm going the wrong way."
"Not entirely," the wolf replied slowly, rapid-fire calculations running behind her eyes. Her nostrils flared again as she tilted her head into the wind ruffling the back of his neck, then she straightened, shrugging. "Can you read Riverbirch maps?"
"I'm better with trade maps or the Tall-Pines," he replied, telling the truth because of the rides he'd hitched on the way in. "I've probably seen Riverbirch but no one's explained--"
She nodded, half-kneeling in the dirt between them and sweeping off a bit of the trail to use as a canvas. "You won't need much--just missed a few turns. Here's the trail we're on," as she sketched a wavy line, inviting him to join her on the ground.
After a second's calculation of his own, he did, dropping to both knees and winding his innermost tail even closer to his skin. He'd outjumped a cat a couple of days ago--he didn't think a two-legged wolf would be faster, and if he was wrong his third tail was all tied up in fire.
"Ah--there's my wrong turns," he said as the six-line map coalesced, and the wolf nodded, drumming her knuckle on the landmarks she'd described but not sketched out.
"It's too bad you haven't any nose," she remarked as they both rose and he scuffed the toe of his boot through the map politely. "It's easier to describe by scent and wind."
"I'll do my best," he told her, smiling with his lips over his teeth, and turned his back to retrace his steps. He could feel her watching him, and if she were--well, him, or the lady he was chasing, she'd go looking later to make sure he'd spoken truth.
So he did. Followed her directions and found himself in front of a corral full of tired-looking horses, several of whom glanced at him, visually cased him for treats or threats, and then went back to grazing.
Visions of stampedes danced briefly through his head, the probable sounds and the mad chaos of the camp as everyone started chasing angry, fox-spooked horses. Then the realities of likely tramplings and what exactly the lady who'd cut off his tail for being annoying might do if he stampeded her brother's horses for the sheer noisy joy of it reasserted themselves. Heaving a gusty sigh, he put a hand to the top rail of the corral and hopped it in one motion.
He'd never been more grateful for the screaming boredom. Weeks in a manor house without enough to do had put him in the stables more than once, and trial and more than one error had given him enough of an idea of how not to spook a group of horses that all he got in response was a huff of annoyance as he shooed a gelding out of his way.
They were tired and grouchy, enough so that he didn't notice a tall dun mare doing her best to take a chunk out of him with her teeth until the third time she tried and he actually had to think about dodging.
"What's with you?" he demanded, making a successful grab for her halter and tugging her head to the side a little so she'd put her ears back up. "Your friends don't mind me--" he continued as her ears flicked.
She snorted, but didn't shuffle her feet the way he expected her to. So he looked down.
"Oh," he concluded, ducking around to her good side so he could lead her towards the edge of the corral where he could cast a light without worrying about someone spooking. "Your foot hurts."
She wasn't quite limping--which was probably why she hadn't been caught as soon as the riders got in--but she really wasn't happy about putting weight on that foot. Once they got to the edge of the herd he ducked back under her neck so she could lean up against the rails, then, hand in full view of her near eye and taking something of a gamble, he cast a pair of smallish lights off two of his own hairs knotted into one of hers.
Orangey-pale globes burst into existence, silent fireworks; the caged heat of the initial reaction floated the lights up over her head, anchored to her mane, exactly the way he'd imagined it would.
When she didn't rear or shriek, he let out the breath he'd been holding, and reached down to pull at her foreleg. She snorted again--if her tone was anything to go by mocking him for his bad manners--and gave him the leg so he could get a good look at the underside of her hoof and the shoe she was wearing.
"Alright, no rock," he muttered, more to himself than to her, but she whickered a bit when he smoothed a finger around the edge of her shoe, feeling for a false resonance in the metal.
"You're making me wish I knew what I was doing," he told her, still feeling around, and she whickered louder, leaning in to him. "Also, you're heavy."
After a few more minutes' exploration didn't reveal anything, he gave up. She didn't seem to mind overmuch when he reached up to steal a couple of hairs from her mane. Winding the hairs through the ends of her shoe, he cast a two-layer for pain relief and quick healing. Small stuff, the sort any two-tail had long since mastered, and hopefully generic enough not to be immediately tagged as a fox's work.
Assuming it even got noticed, he reminded himself as he let go of her foot and she immediately put it down. Testing her weight, she gave him a look he couldn't identify by the lights, then headbutted him hard enough he almost went over backwards.
"You're welcome," he replied, rubbing his chest, then squinted into the rest of the corral, beyond the circle of his lights. "Anyone else have sore feet?"
Several snorts was his only reply, and he heaved a sigh. "I deserved that. I'm dropping the light now, not that you can understand me."
He bit through the hair holding the paired globe-lights aloft, added a tiny weight to the mare's trailing hair. As the globes dropped, he flicked a few air currents around to shoo them around the corral at fetlock level. The herd didn't seem to mind overmuch; one gelding didn't even bother moving his feet out of the way and let the lights bounce around between his legs a few times before they drifted on.
Takashi snorted himself at that, ducking under the gelding's neck, and left a tiny scent-tag in the gelding's mane as he passed. There were ways around wolves, he'd figured out, but one had to be deliberate about it, and more patient that he really wanted to be.
Four more scent-tags, a warm knee, a scratch on a flank and another sore foot put him on the forest side of the corral, which he took as a hint.
The navigable stream downhill of the corral he took as another hint. Dropping the two layers of two-legged, wrapping the tail he'd used for it around himself as a protective shell--which meant electrified, he'd learned his lesson about mere armour last week--he submerged everything but his head in the water and took off upstream.
--
It was past dawn when he stopped to rest, dragging himself up a dewy bank to attempt to drip-dry his fur and fluff out his tails. The air smelled green, in a way cities just didn't, and he let himself revel in it a little, because at the moment it also didn't smell of wolves.
Which was, somehow inevitably, when the breeze shifted and he smelled pipe tobacco. A good grade, if memory served, sweet and a little peppery in the nose. He swallowed the sigh building in his chest, flattening himself a little lower to the bank, and threw a tail's worth of hiding over his head. After a moment's thought, debating the effort involved in slinking back into the water and just trying to stay invisible, he remembered something.
Almost nobody who kept company with people who went fourlegged on a regular basis used heavy scents; it didn't matter if it was soap, perfume, or smokables. Anything that fucked with a sensitive nose was discouraged once word got around.
Which meant there were no wolves in whatever camp the pipe-smoker was allied with. Which probably meant that he'd happened across one of the camps of whatever other side was currently to hand--he had yet to run across any camp on her brothers' side that lacked wolves. Traders' boats frequently had nothing but humans aboard, but there was no boat anchored anywhere he could see, smell, or feel.
He stood up to stretch out his back, yawning as he did--the peppery taste of the smoke on his palate almost made him sneeze--and wandered over the rise to find the smoker. Assumptions had a tendency to get him nearly eaten, after all.
Walking without alerting someone to one's presence, even if the someone was human, was harder than it looked. Especially when one was too tired to just suppress the sound of twigs breaking under one's feet and instead having to step on moss or pick one's way across the top of age-fallen logs. But it was doable.
The pipe was lovely, carved out of a burl of wood and stemmed in something that shone red-gold in the rising morning light. The smoker wore armour with an ease Takashi couldn't imagine on a trader, his pouch tucked into a pocket in his chest-piece, not one on his belt or his thigh. Best of all, he was wearing one of the barons' colours threaded through the ties on his shoulders and the laces of his boots.
Takashi couldn't help the grin spreading across his face as he eased up on to two feet, most of a tail tied up in the change, he was so tired. Stretching invisible fingers over to tag the tobacco pouch, trying not to breathe on the man's neck as he did, he laid down a penny sized find-me on the leather. That done, he dropped back on to four feet, tail springing back where it belonged, and crept away to nest under one of the downed logs.
He needed to sleep, very, very badly. But he built a spiderweb of warning spells and potential fire around his nest before he slept, just in case the human was the sort of idiot who went off to smoke near the crocodiles.
--
It was sometime in the afternoon when he woke again, belly gnawing intently on his spine and the find-me a bright spot in his head. Stretching extravagantly, deliberately popping every vertebrae, even the ones in the base of his tails that technically weren't really there, he rolled himself up onto two feet, boots coalescing around his toes. Pressing his hands to his lower back, he popped every vertebrae again as he considered the bright spot in his head. As his neck finished popping he threw himself into the air in a raven's skin.
The camp was easy to find from the air, and he settled in a maple's arms while he looked around for breakfast. And yesterday's dinner. And lunch. And--he was hungry, more than a little, and dropped down faster than most human eyes could track to spring across a wooden bench's span on four feet and catch up a man's briefly abandoned metal bowl in his jaws and run for an empty tent's lee.
He could hear the bowl's original owner demanding to know which of his seatmates had stolen his food as the man returned to the bench, and tried not to choke on laughter and food using the same throat.
After returning to get a refill on the bowl, eating it in plain sight wearing an illusion that made everyone who saw him see the man next to him, no matter what side they were looking from, he tucked the licked-nearly-clean bowl neatly into the clean dishes stack, stretched one more time, and went looking for the kitchen stores.
Two weeks passed. The cooks had taken to leaving out appeasements every time they set up and broke down camp, and while they didn't work as intended, he was hardly going to turn down an unobserved meal.
At least until one of the cooks overspiced a meal one setup to try to disguise the poison-lizard meat used for the offering.
Fourteen men came down with the runs that night, several others escaping because they couldn't stomach the food at all, and one man nearly died because he'd lost his taste for bitter years before and ate most of the leftovers. Takashi had been one of the hungry, watching the cooks with narrowed eyes behind his skin's disgust, looking for the guilt behind the horror.
He didn't find the right man. Or if he did, the man was either stupid enough not to make the connection or felt not a drop of guilt. He took to enchanting the spice containers, so that a tap became an unintentional upending, a shake half the time a tap and the other half another upending, and the salt looked like it was flowing when it was actually trickling.
Several of the boatmen took to stealing raw ingredients--he joined them, though sometimes just to case the place through someone else's eyes--and it was eventually established that anything green might be overgarlicked but that was the worst of the offenses, and anything mashed was almost certain to be bland. No matter how carefully it was watched, meat would be burnt, or half-raw, or so thick with spices as to be inedible.
The baron's fight wasn't going well, if the rumours were anything to judge by, and the camp was heading down the river in leaky boats, towards the big camp he'd left to the wolves. He snuck down ahead of them several times, laying more scent-tags whenever he found horses and humans wearing the right sort or no allegiance colours at all.
He even tagged a wolf once, snuck the spell into the grizzling on the muzzle and beside the spell to see in the dark.
Successfully mixing half the camp's salt supply into the powder kegs and another third into the leakiest of the boats' bilges was something of an anticlimax after that. He'd been holding his breath the entire time, waiting for the wolf's eyes to focus and a flash of teeth to come for his throat.
And then some poor bastard salt-glazed the barrel of his mortar trying to put a hole in one of the things that lurked in the river and it was all he could do to keep from falling into the water from laughter. It took a few minutes to calm down enough to fake the successful firing of another of the mortars, stuffing a fireball straight down the river-thing's throat through its open mouth, but he did it.
Couldn't resist shrugging into an appropriate skin to clap a commiserating hand on the poor bastard's shoulder after the boats were landed again, before he wandered off to find something to eat. The leftover oats from that morning should still be untouched--and there was yelling, and a flash of fire he hadn't expected.
Ducking out of sight, then winging up to a tree branch, he draped a see-me-not across his feathers and tried to work out what was happening.
Now that--if he was reading colours correctly--was the baron, surrounded by a technical honour guard but followed by--ahh.
He fell backwards off the branch, flipping over in midair to land on four feet and make a break for the newly formed ranks of the baron's followers, companions in the man's defeat. Because that was the Prince Donnel, flanked by wolves on one side, and his sister on the other.
Shrugging into the back row of the baron's lot, he put on a thin, disguising skin, barely thick enough to keep the men to either side unaware that he was a stranger. She'd see through it as soon as she laid eyes on him.
He couldn't help grinning when he saw her looking his way, and instinctively ducked out of sight when she tensed up, hands rising, as their eyes met.
'Verse/characters: Some Kind of Love Song; Takashi
Prompt: coastal_physics: "a dewy morning, and a quiet pipe."
Word Count: 2768
Notes: Another partial expansion of river islands. After a merry chase.
This is the longest of the poll-responses so far. O.o; Sadly, it's still somewhat sketchy and hurried.
---------
He was obliged to clear the vicinity after the remaining nearby patrols returned. Especially after he just about tripped over the same wolf twice in the course of about seven minutes, and the second time she was quick enough on the uptake to get a good hard look at the face he was wearing and a full breath through her nose.
Forcing his heart rate down as much as he could, he summoned up a sheepish smile, scrubbed his hand through his hair. "I'm a little lost," he confessed, "I was supposed to go check over the horses that came in with the Prince Ruadhan, but I think I'm going the wrong way."
"Not entirely," the wolf replied slowly, rapid-fire calculations running behind her eyes. Her nostrils flared again as she tilted her head into the wind ruffling the back of his neck, then she straightened, shrugging. "Can you read Riverbirch maps?"
"I'm better with trade maps or the Tall-Pines," he replied, telling the truth because of the rides he'd hitched on the way in. "I've probably seen Riverbirch but no one's explained--"
She nodded, half-kneeling in the dirt between them and sweeping off a bit of the trail to use as a canvas. "You won't need much--just missed a few turns. Here's the trail we're on," as she sketched a wavy line, inviting him to join her on the ground.
After a second's calculation of his own, he did, dropping to both knees and winding his innermost tail even closer to his skin. He'd outjumped a cat a couple of days ago--he didn't think a two-legged wolf would be faster, and if he was wrong his third tail was all tied up in fire.
"Ah--there's my wrong turns," he said as the six-line map coalesced, and the wolf nodded, drumming her knuckle on the landmarks she'd described but not sketched out.
"It's too bad you haven't any nose," she remarked as they both rose and he scuffed the toe of his boot through the map politely. "It's easier to describe by scent and wind."
"I'll do my best," he told her, smiling with his lips over his teeth, and turned his back to retrace his steps. He could feel her watching him, and if she were--well, him, or the lady he was chasing, she'd go looking later to make sure he'd spoken truth.
So he did. Followed her directions and found himself in front of a corral full of tired-looking horses, several of whom glanced at him, visually cased him for treats or threats, and then went back to grazing.
Visions of stampedes danced briefly through his head, the probable sounds and the mad chaos of the camp as everyone started chasing angry, fox-spooked horses. Then the realities of likely tramplings and what exactly the lady who'd cut off his tail for being annoying might do if he stampeded her brother's horses for the sheer noisy joy of it reasserted themselves. Heaving a gusty sigh, he put a hand to the top rail of the corral and hopped it in one motion.
He'd never been more grateful for the screaming boredom. Weeks in a manor house without enough to do had put him in the stables more than once, and trial and more than one error had given him enough of an idea of how not to spook a group of horses that all he got in response was a huff of annoyance as he shooed a gelding out of his way.
They were tired and grouchy, enough so that he didn't notice a tall dun mare doing her best to take a chunk out of him with her teeth until the third time she tried and he actually had to think about dodging.
"What's with you?" he demanded, making a successful grab for her halter and tugging her head to the side a little so she'd put her ears back up. "Your friends don't mind me--" he continued as her ears flicked.
She snorted, but didn't shuffle her feet the way he expected her to. So he looked down.
"Oh," he concluded, ducking around to her good side so he could lead her towards the edge of the corral where he could cast a light without worrying about someone spooking. "Your foot hurts."
She wasn't quite limping--which was probably why she hadn't been caught as soon as the riders got in--but she really wasn't happy about putting weight on that foot. Once they got to the edge of the herd he ducked back under her neck so she could lean up against the rails, then, hand in full view of her near eye and taking something of a gamble, he cast a pair of smallish lights off two of his own hairs knotted into one of hers.
Orangey-pale globes burst into existence, silent fireworks; the caged heat of the initial reaction floated the lights up over her head, anchored to her mane, exactly the way he'd imagined it would.
When she didn't rear or shriek, he let out the breath he'd been holding, and reached down to pull at her foreleg. She snorted again--if her tone was anything to go by mocking him for his bad manners--and gave him the leg so he could get a good look at the underside of her hoof and the shoe she was wearing.
"Alright, no rock," he muttered, more to himself than to her, but she whickered a bit when he smoothed a finger around the edge of her shoe, feeling for a false resonance in the metal.
"You're making me wish I knew what I was doing," he told her, still feeling around, and she whickered louder, leaning in to him. "Also, you're heavy."
After a few more minutes' exploration didn't reveal anything, he gave up. She didn't seem to mind overmuch when he reached up to steal a couple of hairs from her mane. Winding the hairs through the ends of her shoe, he cast a two-layer for pain relief and quick healing. Small stuff, the sort any two-tail had long since mastered, and hopefully generic enough not to be immediately tagged as a fox's work.
Assuming it even got noticed, he reminded himself as he let go of her foot and she immediately put it down. Testing her weight, she gave him a look he couldn't identify by the lights, then headbutted him hard enough he almost went over backwards.
"You're welcome," he replied, rubbing his chest, then squinted into the rest of the corral, beyond the circle of his lights. "Anyone else have sore feet?"
Several snorts was his only reply, and he heaved a sigh. "I deserved that. I'm dropping the light now, not that you can understand me."
He bit through the hair holding the paired globe-lights aloft, added a tiny weight to the mare's trailing hair. As the globes dropped, he flicked a few air currents around to shoo them around the corral at fetlock level. The herd didn't seem to mind overmuch; one gelding didn't even bother moving his feet out of the way and let the lights bounce around between his legs a few times before they drifted on.
Takashi snorted himself at that, ducking under the gelding's neck, and left a tiny scent-tag in the gelding's mane as he passed. There were ways around wolves, he'd figured out, but one had to be deliberate about it, and more patient that he really wanted to be.
Four more scent-tags, a warm knee, a scratch on a flank and another sore foot put him on the forest side of the corral, which he took as a hint.
The navigable stream downhill of the corral he took as another hint. Dropping the two layers of two-legged, wrapping the tail he'd used for it around himself as a protective shell--which meant electrified, he'd learned his lesson about mere armour last week--he submerged everything but his head in the water and took off upstream.
--
It was past dawn when he stopped to rest, dragging himself up a dewy bank to attempt to drip-dry his fur and fluff out his tails. The air smelled green, in a way cities just didn't, and he let himself revel in it a little, because at the moment it also didn't smell of wolves.
Which was, somehow inevitably, when the breeze shifted and he smelled pipe tobacco. A good grade, if memory served, sweet and a little peppery in the nose. He swallowed the sigh building in his chest, flattening himself a little lower to the bank, and threw a tail's worth of hiding over his head. After a moment's thought, debating the effort involved in slinking back into the water and just trying to stay invisible, he remembered something.
Almost nobody who kept company with people who went fourlegged on a regular basis used heavy scents; it didn't matter if it was soap, perfume, or smokables. Anything that fucked with a sensitive nose was discouraged once word got around.
Which meant there were no wolves in whatever camp the pipe-smoker was allied with. Which probably meant that he'd happened across one of the camps of whatever other side was currently to hand--he had yet to run across any camp on her brothers' side that lacked wolves. Traders' boats frequently had nothing but humans aboard, but there was no boat anchored anywhere he could see, smell, or feel.
He stood up to stretch out his back, yawning as he did--the peppery taste of the smoke on his palate almost made him sneeze--and wandered over the rise to find the smoker. Assumptions had a tendency to get him nearly eaten, after all.
Walking without alerting someone to one's presence, even if the someone was human, was harder than it looked. Especially when one was too tired to just suppress the sound of twigs breaking under one's feet and instead having to step on moss or pick one's way across the top of age-fallen logs. But it was doable.
The pipe was lovely, carved out of a burl of wood and stemmed in something that shone red-gold in the rising morning light. The smoker wore armour with an ease Takashi couldn't imagine on a trader, his pouch tucked into a pocket in his chest-piece, not one on his belt or his thigh. Best of all, he was wearing one of the barons' colours threaded through the ties on his shoulders and the laces of his boots.
Takashi couldn't help the grin spreading across his face as he eased up on to two feet, most of a tail tied up in the change, he was so tired. Stretching invisible fingers over to tag the tobacco pouch, trying not to breathe on the man's neck as he did, he laid down a penny sized find-me on the leather. That done, he dropped back on to four feet, tail springing back where it belonged, and crept away to nest under one of the downed logs.
He needed to sleep, very, very badly. But he built a spiderweb of warning spells and potential fire around his nest before he slept, just in case the human was the sort of idiot who went off to smoke near the crocodiles.
--
It was sometime in the afternoon when he woke again, belly gnawing intently on his spine and the find-me a bright spot in his head. Stretching extravagantly, deliberately popping every vertebrae, even the ones in the base of his tails that technically weren't really there, he rolled himself up onto two feet, boots coalescing around his toes. Pressing his hands to his lower back, he popped every vertebrae again as he considered the bright spot in his head. As his neck finished popping he threw himself into the air in a raven's skin.
The camp was easy to find from the air, and he settled in a maple's arms while he looked around for breakfast. And yesterday's dinner. And lunch. And--he was hungry, more than a little, and dropped down faster than most human eyes could track to spring across a wooden bench's span on four feet and catch up a man's briefly abandoned metal bowl in his jaws and run for an empty tent's lee.
He could hear the bowl's original owner demanding to know which of his seatmates had stolen his food as the man returned to the bench, and tried not to choke on laughter and food using the same throat.
After returning to get a refill on the bowl, eating it in plain sight wearing an illusion that made everyone who saw him see the man next to him, no matter what side they were looking from, he tucked the licked-nearly-clean bowl neatly into the clean dishes stack, stretched one more time, and went looking for the kitchen stores.
Two weeks passed. The cooks had taken to leaving out appeasements every time they set up and broke down camp, and while they didn't work as intended, he was hardly going to turn down an unobserved meal.
At least until one of the cooks overspiced a meal one setup to try to disguise the poison-lizard meat used for the offering.
Fourteen men came down with the runs that night, several others escaping because they couldn't stomach the food at all, and one man nearly died because he'd lost his taste for bitter years before and ate most of the leftovers. Takashi had been one of the hungry, watching the cooks with narrowed eyes behind his skin's disgust, looking for the guilt behind the horror.
He didn't find the right man. Or if he did, the man was either stupid enough not to make the connection or felt not a drop of guilt. He took to enchanting the spice containers, so that a tap became an unintentional upending, a shake half the time a tap and the other half another upending, and the salt looked like it was flowing when it was actually trickling.
Several of the boatmen took to stealing raw ingredients--he joined them, though sometimes just to case the place through someone else's eyes--and it was eventually established that anything green might be overgarlicked but that was the worst of the offenses, and anything mashed was almost certain to be bland. No matter how carefully it was watched, meat would be burnt, or half-raw, or so thick with spices as to be inedible.
The baron's fight wasn't going well, if the rumours were anything to judge by, and the camp was heading down the river in leaky boats, towards the big camp he'd left to the wolves. He snuck down ahead of them several times, laying more scent-tags whenever he found horses and humans wearing the right sort or no allegiance colours at all.
He even tagged a wolf once, snuck the spell into the grizzling on the muzzle and beside the spell to see in the dark.
Successfully mixing half the camp's salt supply into the powder kegs and another third into the leakiest of the boats' bilges was something of an anticlimax after that. He'd been holding his breath the entire time, waiting for the wolf's eyes to focus and a flash of teeth to come for his throat.
And then some poor bastard salt-glazed the barrel of his mortar trying to put a hole in one of the things that lurked in the river and it was all he could do to keep from falling into the water from laughter. It took a few minutes to calm down enough to fake the successful firing of another of the mortars, stuffing a fireball straight down the river-thing's throat through its open mouth, but he did it.
Couldn't resist shrugging into an appropriate skin to clap a commiserating hand on the poor bastard's shoulder after the boats were landed again, before he wandered off to find something to eat. The leftover oats from that morning should still be untouched--and there was yelling, and a flash of fire he hadn't expected.
Ducking out of sight, then winging up to a tree branch, he draped a see-me-not across his feathers and tried to work out what was happening.
Now that--if he was reading colours correctly--was the baron, surrounded by a technical honour guard but followed by--ahh.
He fell backwards off the branch, flipping over in midair to land on four feet and make a break for the newly formed ranks of the baron's followers, companions in the man's defeat. Because that was the Prince Donnel, flanked by wolves on one side, and his sister on the other.
Shrugging into the back row of the baron's lot, he put on a thin, disguising skin, barely thick enough to keep the men to either side unaware that he was a stranger. She'd see through it as soon as she laid eyes on him.
He couldn't help grinning when he saw her looking his way, and instinctively ducked out of sight when she tensed up, hands rising, as their eyes met.