“I have a job to do,” said Brrr. “I’m sorry for your trouble with soldiers, but I can’t stick around and sort it out. I have an errand of mercy for the father of a dead friend.”

“You’re not going to leave us to face this human mob unarmed,” said Sakkali. “What kind of Lion are you, anyway?”

At which question the Lion discovered the rhetoric of silence.

In any case, the trolls were hardly unarmed, he thought to say (but didn’t); fellow Glikkuns were showing up from an alley here, a chapel gate there, supplied with pickaxes.

The local militia raised their muskets. The Glikkuns stooped to loosen cobbles from the roadbed. From the stove of some upper-story kitchen, out of sight, a teakettle hissed like a small storm of rain beyond the hills.

Once again, thought Brrr, my chief talent: wrong place, wrong time, wrong key. “Not my fight,” he tried to explain. “I have a promise to keep…”

Backing up, twitching his tail in consternation, he heard a holy sound of bells splashing from the steeple. Like the Lurlinists’ music, only pretty. Brrr had not heard such melodic resonance before, and it sounded notionally of resolution, somehow.

Yet all around the town square of Traum, the hands of worried citizens were clanging gates closed, making an iron music. Wooden garden shutters slapped into place and were barred from the inside: You could hear the oaken music of the slats dropping. The free passage of the high street and the market square, within moments, became a pen. A closed run for an enemy trapped within.

This is how a market town defends itself when it lacks an army garrison, thought Brrr, and only then did he realize he had been pad-docked, too.

Sakkali Oafish hadn’t bargained on this reception. Perhaps this was a new maneuver, invented recently. “You, Lion!” she bellowed. “You smash a wall before they slaughter us, every one!”

“But-but-I have business in Tenniken-” He wasn’t refusing, he wasn’t-so what was he doing?

A barred iron gate right before him in his face, and all the pitching against it, to no avail-for it was strong, and he only a cub-

Before he could shake the thought free, return to language, a shot rang out, or two. Brrr was lately familiar with gunshots in the woods, but here in the open, in a town built of stone and slate, the echo was terrible. Stupefied, he recoiled sideways, involuntarily, and he pitched into the stone arch of a covered well. Dizzied, dazed, he stood long enough to see Sakkali take a stone at her skull. She was brought solidly to the ground, like a sack of rice tilting over onto its side. He staggered and fell, and was sick on the cobbles.

“Here, here,” cried the other Glikkuns, a small citizenry of them in their gravelly tones. Sakkali-dead or alive?-no one could tell. Two small fierce trolls lifted her body with hoarse grunts like chortles. “Lion, to gate, to wall, for one, for all.” Two or three of them leaped upon him. They hauled Sakkali’s barrel-like form with them.