“Full trouble!” Tress snapped, striding out of her alcove to wave a warning to all of her bodyguards. By then Windstag had spotted the reason he’d just gotten up from the floor-the bare-bodied dancers up on the distant stage. He promptly kicked a chair out of the way with a wicked grin, with no heed at all for what might become of its half-drunk occupant.
When the others at that table shouted at him angrily, he flung the half-full bottle in his hand into the face of the loudest one, then used that freed hand to pluck up the table and overturn it on all their heads, roaring with laughter.
Men sprang up on all sides, some of them just bolting away from the unfolding trouble, and others to find room to snatch out sword or dagger.
“Hah, so it’s blades, is it?” Dawntard snarled. “Well, we know that game!” Behind him, a dozen bodyguards and well-wishers drew steel in singing unison.
“That table, that one, and that one!” Windstag bellowed, pointing at the three tables closest to the stage-at one of which Delnor sat, huddled in his seat and staring at the drunken nobles in open-mouthed horror. “They’re ours, now! Get clear of them, or die!”
Arclath was waiting, with sword out and a rather dangerous smile growing across his face. Windstag’s roar brought the wealthy merchants at the other two tables to their feet, too, some of them busily snapping orders to their own bodyguards.
“The Watch!” Tress barked at someone. “Get the Watch! Now!”
Then Windstag let loose a wordless shout of exultation and charged.
Dawntard and Sornstern hastily joined in, and all the intruders were trotting and lurching forward, shouting and hacking furiously and wildly at everyone and everything in their way. Someone threw a chair, someone else hastily drained a bottle and then hurled it-and the Dragonriders’ erupted.
On the stage, some of the mask dancers screamed and fled, others cowered, and the one at the front with the coins in her hair, bare as she was, crouched down behind the prowboard as if it were a castle rampart and she were a warrior awaiting the right moment to spring over it into battle.
A merchant screamed and gurgled as he was hacked at, another shrieked as a sword seeking his life sheared away one of his ears, and bottles shattered against pillars and tables, showering the surging men with glass as patrons slipped, fell, swore, and stabbed at each other.
A large, much-scarred sailor went down, a richly dressed merchant staggered away weakly spewing out both his dinner and all the wine he’d drunk, and a club bouncer threw a chair at a noble he couldn’t reach, felling two bodyguards who got in its way.
As if that had been a signal, the air was suddenly full of hurtling chairs. With many wounded groaning and sagging, men slugged each other with fists and bottles and dagger pommels, bodyguards rushed to hurl aside anyone who got too close to their clients, and tables got upended.
Merchants fled in all directions, and Tress and her staff seemed to have vanished. Resistance melted away from in front of Windstag and Dawntard and their hard-faced bodyguards.
Leaving a panting, wild-eyed palace messenger, a few merchants who were more angry than frightened, and the coolly unruffled Lord Arclath Delcastle between the sword-swinging intruders and the stage.
“Stand aside, unwashed vermin!” Windstag roared.
“Go home, drunken disgraces!” Delcastle snapped back. “You stain the families you belong to, and will answer to the king for it!”
“Yes!” Delnor shouted desperately. “Leave this place, in the name of the king!”
Ignoring Delcastle, Windstag sneered at the palace messenger. “And who are you to call on the Crown for aid? Jumped-up commonborn lout! When our day comes, we’ll not have to put up with the likes of you! We’ll just order you beheaded and sit and sip wine and watch from the farruking palace windows as you scream and wet yourselves and die!”
“Since when,” Arclath Delcastle inquired icily, “did your drunken lawlessness have anything at all to do with anyone’s rank or birth? Windstag, you’re a bully and a coward, and-”
With a wordless roar of rage, Broryn Windstag went for Delcastle, six bodyguards at his side. Almost casually one of them tripped Delnor, and he hit the floor hard, gurgling out a vain plea. Arclath Delcastle cursed as he ducked, darted, and slashed as swiftly as any mask dancer, buying himself room to spring up onto the stage.
“That was a palace messenger, you fool,” he spat at Windstag. “You’d better start for the docks right now, before-”
“Before what?” Kathkote Dawntard sneered. “You think a noble lord will face the slightest punishment for felling some palace lackey who dared to offer us violence? Without every noble in all Cormyr rising to rid themselves of all courtiers-and any Obarskyr foolish enough to stand up for such dross, too?”
“Not that we should leave any noble witnesses to this little unpleasantness,” Windstag snarled. “Kill him!”
He was pointing at Delcastle.
“Carve him apart, so there won’t be enough left for even the keenest war wizard to enspell and interrogate, then snatch the dancer and bring her. Search those rooms back there, and haul out all the other dancers, too! I find I’ve a hunger for more than dancing!”
There was a general shout of mirth as everyone joined in his bawled laughter, and men with drawn swords rushed the stage.
Across which Lord Arclath Delcastle raced and spun and sprang and hacked like a wild thing, seeking to just stay alive.
One man reeled back, blinded by a blood-spurting cut across the forehead; another clutched at his punched throat and crashed to his knees, choking; and a third staggered back and fell heavily off the stage, clawing at where Delcastle’s slender sword had burst through his shoulder.
But by then Delcastle battled a vicious storm of steel, beset on all sides by men made wild by drink and wilder by bloodlust and eagerness to impress their noble masters.
“A rescue!” he shouted, parrying desperately. “Anyone! A rescue!”
A man in front of him shrieked and fell, his toes pinned to the floor by a dagger that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Then the man beside him toppled, his eyes bulging in astonished pain, as something very hard struck him in the back of the head.
By the time that man fell, Delcastle’s attackers were turning to see who his ally was-the person the beset lordling was already grinning at as he went right on fencing for his life.
It was the mask dancer-who wore only sparkles, sweat, and copious spatters of blood-none of it her own. She’d tossed aside her mask, her hair swirling free, and there was a blood-drenched, dripping sword in one of her hands and a clean dagger clutched pommel-foremost in the other.
She faced them, panting-and promptly sliced the face of a bodyguard who’d foolishly lowered his sword to leer at her.
“Kill her!” Windstag roared drunkenly. “I can rut with her corpse!”
Heads turned as his men stared at him in disbelief, even in the midst of furiously clanging steel.
“W-well,” the nude dancer hissed at him, “now that we all know how certain noble lords prefer to spend their dallying time …”
“Get her! Get her! Get her!” an enraged Windstag bellowed loudly enough to make the roofbeams echo. “Kill them both! Kill them all!”
He sprang onto the stage, his bodyguards hastening to follow. Windstag and his men came up from behind the men fighting Arclath Delcastle and crashed into them, shoving them helplessly forward in sprawling chaos.