As the Heir and his Best Friend—both in love with the same girl, of course—battled their way through throngs of evil henchmen attempting to keep them from claiming the Heir’s rightful place as the Duke of Dorking, Alberich had to admire their stamina, if not their style. In the conclusion to the first act, the Heir plummeted off the top of a “cliff” to flatten half a dozen evildoers, then engaged four at once, sword-to-sword, and after being disarmed, defeated his enemies with a bucket. In the second act, the Heir and the Friend, ambushed in a Peasant Hovel, made the most creative use of a ladder, a table, and a stool that Alberich had ever seen. In fact, what they most closely resembled was not a pair of fighters at all, but a pair of ferrets trying not to be caught. In the third act, the Best Friend met the end that Alberich had expected from the first, after yet another acrobatic exhibition, dying in the arms of the Heir and bravely commending the Heir and the Girl to one another, with the Heir vowing revenge once again—

:You know,: Kantor commented, :I’d steer clear of that man. People trying to kill him seem to keep missing and hitting his friends instead.:

But it was in the fourth act that something entirely unexpected happened, and it had nothing to do with the script.

Now, Alberich had noticed something a bit odd just before the play began. In the front benches, just off to one side, was a group of young men in clothing far finer than anyone else here was wearing. When the action started, he quite expected them to begin jeering and catcalling, but to his surprise, they did nothing of the sort. In fact, they were quiet and attentive to a degree all out of keeping with the quality of the drama unfolding. And it wasn’t as if they weren’t used to better fare, either; he recognized two of them from having seen them moving in the fringes of Selenay’s Court.

Now, that was odd. So odd, in fact, that he felt a tingle of warning and kept his eye on them all during the play.

Then came the fourth act, and the “Grand Climax and Exhibition of Sword-play with Astonishing Feats of Strength and Skill, Never Before Seen on Any Stage” which was laid in the Grand Hall of the Duke of Dorking’s Castle. The Heir’s enemies held both the Heir’s real parents and his True Love captive and were engaging in a spot of gloating.

And the Heir swung in over the heads of the front of the audience on a rope.