Dragonfield by Jane Yolen Page B

could have been crowded into so small and homey a place has never been explained. Dun D’Addin is really only one great hill, a land cast off from its neighbors by its height. Folks there live On-the-Hill, By-the-Hill, Over-the-Hill, and ones still on the run from the law live Under-the-Hill and it gives them all a rather lumpish disposition.
    There are no main streets, only rough paths most often laced over with vines: thornbush and prickleweed and the rough-toothed caught-ums. The trees tend to grow sideways away from the hill, dropping the wrinkled and bitter fruit into the borderlands.
    Dun D’Addin is a place meant to be passed over or passed through or passed by on the way to somewhere else and that is why there is only the one inn, atop the hill, called—perversely—the Bird and the Babe, though it has little to do with either. It is in that inn, before the great central hearth, that the Hill’s resident rogues gather and try to outwit one another with their boasting tales. They are rather pathetically proud of their reputation for roguery, but it is really only of the smash-and-grab variety. True finesse is, I am afraid, quite beyond them as they found out one evening in front of the fire at the Bird and the Babe, to their eternal chagrin and everlasting regret.
    “There was an old fiddling tune called Nine Points of Roguery in the land I came from,” said slip-fingered Jok. “But of course that’s absurd.”
    “Why?” asked the innkeeper. He knew his role in these discussions. He had a positive genius for keeping conversation, especially brag-tales, flowing. That genius consisted mainly of asking one word questions at the right time.
    “Why? Because I can only think of five,” said Jok. “And you have to agree that I am about as roguish a fellow as you are likely to meet in the highways and byways of Dun D’Addin.”
    The men at the hearth fire chuckled, each of them silently thinking himself the greater rogue. And besides, Dun D’Addin’s highways were crackled with grass and the byways ruts of mud both in and out of the rainy season.
    The innkeeper used his silence to bless Jok. Chuckling men are drinking men, was his thought. He made his money without roguery but by supplying vast quantities of ale to the listeners and supplying to travelers a few straw pallets and a thin blanket for the night.
    One florid fat man, a stranger and obviously a merchant by his garb, put up his finger. It was missing the top knuckle. The bottom two signed grotesquely at the innkeeper. “Drinks around,” said the merchant. “I want to hear about these five points of roguery, especially from the mouth of a rogue.”
    “Point one,” said Jok, smiling and then sipping on his ale, “is the eye.” He winked at them all and they gave him a laugh.
    “Eye?” asked the innkeeper, right in rhythm.
    “The eye,” said Jok. “It must be clear and bright and honest-seeming, and never a wink between you and your Pick.” Then he winked again, more broadly this time, and laughed with them.
    The listeners settled back in their chairs. The fat man grunted as fat men will, rooting around in his own chair like a pig in wallow, but at last he too was ready. Jok, staring at him openly, patiently, waited to begin.
One: The Eye
    There was a man, a constant traveler and purveyor of goods not quite his own, if you take my meaning (said Jok), who through a great misfortune had been maimed in the war. But he turned this to his own profit, as you will see. A man who can do that could be king, though his kingdom be no more than a cherrystone and his people only ants.
    (Though his kingdom be no more than a muddy hill, said the fat man under his breath, and his people no more than rogues.)
    He had, in his travels, acquired a diamond the size of a knuckle and its original owner, the local high sheriff, was not pleased at its disappearance. The borders of the land were sealed and at every turning armed men were posted in pairs to search