Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda by Joel Rosenberg

beneath him, but he tensed up, and forced them to lock in place.
    He quickly handed Leria down, releasing her as soon as he decently could. It wasn’t right, after all, that somebody like him should be touching someone like her.
    She still took his breath away.
    It wasn’t just the regular features, the pert little nose and full red lips, the golden hair, bound up for travel, leaving her long neck bare. It wasn’t even the way that she had felt in his arms, her tongue warm in his mouth.
    No. It was the way that she had always treated him and Pirojil and Durine like they were real people, and not just blood-spattered instruments. More: it was preposterous, silly little things, like how she couldn’t keep her hands from tending a campfire at night, or how, when she awoke in the morning to find him asleep — or so she thought — across her doorway, she would shake her head and smile.
    (Erenor often said, in muttered conversation with Pirojil that Kethol pretended not to hear, that it had been a foregone conclusion that Kethol would fall in love with the first woman who smiled at him, but that wasn’t true. Kethol had been in service to the Cullinane family for years, and had guarded both the late Emperor’s adopted daughter and his wife, and all of them had smiled at him, often, and while he certainly had liked them all, not one of them haunted his dreams by night.
    (Then again, what Erenor said and what was true only coincided by accident.)
    Pirojil was down almost as quickly as Kethol was, and was at his side, with Erenor not far behind. The two of them made an unlikely pair — Pirojil, large, misshapen, and ugly; Erenor almost a caricature of a wizard, with a lined, bearded face partially concealed in the hood of his gray robes.
    Appearances were sometimes deceiving.
    Kethol hoped that appearances were sometimes deceiving, although he couldn’t for the life of him understand why somebody didn’t take a quick look at him and start shouting, “Imposter!”
    There was a commotion along the ramparts, but the soldiers over by the main gate and the stableboys and house girls in their noontime game of touched-you-last quickly disappeared from sight, the soldiers quietly ducking into the guard shack, some of the children running for the darkness of the stable, others disappearing behind the bulk of the keep itself.
    Erenor shook his head and laughed. He had an easy laugh, a laugh that sounded sincere, a laugh that probably was sincere every now and then, if only by accident. Kethol had just had to get used to that about Erenor, although he didn’t have to like it, and he didn’t.
    “Standing orders,” Erenor said, “are often obeyed when they consist of making yourself quickly absent when a flame-breathing dragon plops down out of the sky.”
    “Shut up,” Pirojil said. “Just get the bags unhooked,” he added, although it was hardly necessary — Erenor’s nimble fingers were already working on the straps.
    *It wouldn’t bother me at all if you were to do that a little more quickly,*Ellegon said.*Or maybe a lot more quickly.*
    While there was a good chance that the keep was secure, it was vanishingly unlikely that there was nobody in the town below greedy and reckless enough to try to earn the standing Pandathaway Slavers Guild reward for bringing Ellegon down. Dragons were rare in the Eren regions in general, and unknown — well, almost unknown — in the Middle Lands in particular.
    Even now, it was entirely possible that nervous fingers were, somewhere, unwrapping a hidden arrow or crossbow bolt, and dipping its tip in a forbidden pot of dragonbane extract before nervously fitting it to a taut string.
    “You’re worried about being shot at, I take it?” Erenor asked.
    *No.*The dragon’s head curled on its long neck to eye the wizard, its dinner-plate – sized eyes yellow and unblinking.*I just love getting poisoned, don’t you?*
    “I’d say sarcasm ill becomes you, Ellegon, but actually, I