“That’s enough,” Dia replied. “That’s more than enough.” She looked at the others. “Well?”

Marc nodded. “I think you girls can take them down.”

Mags blinked. He had halfway suspected that the boys were thinking of challenging the mercenaries—but the girls?

Lydia gurgled a chuckle. “They’ll never know what hit them. And they will be utterly humiliated.”

Mags blinked again. “There a reason why yer wantin’ t’ do that?” he asked carefully. It seemed to him to be a very odd sort of thing to want to do. If they knew those arrogant young men, if one of them had been bullied by the mercenaries, that would be different. But of course, they didn’t, or they wouldn’t have been asking him so many questions.

They all exchanged glances. It was Jak that answered.

“These fellows that are supposed to be merchant princes,” he replied. “The ones the mercenaries are guarding. They’re no more merchants than my pet hound is. Princes—maybe. But why they are here—they’re looking us over. Testing us. Call them spies in diplomatic clothing. They’ve got some of their lot testing the Heralds and the Guards to see what kind of fighters they are. But we want them to discover that if it comes to a fight, it won’t be just the Heralds and the Guards that they meet.”

“So we’re going to challenge them,” Dia said, with her little chin in the air. “And we are going to humiliate them. And they will go home knowing that they had better make peace, because they truly do not want war with us, not when the women will fight at the sides of the men, and just as fiercely.”

Mags gazed at them all with enormous respect. His initial vague impression of them had just gotten an abrupt shift.

Lydia nodded, her green eyes twinkling. “And before you ask, yes, our parents know about this. And with the proviso that we could do this with a minimum of damage to ourselves, they agreed it was a good idea. It is one small part of a larger plan, you see.”

“It was my father who saw how they were testing the Heralds and the Guards and sensed something more was going on,” Jak said, motioning to a servant to bring them all more spiced cider. He waited while the servant poured, and then until the man was out of earshot, before resuming his conversation. “He came to me to find out if we thought there was anything we could do to help. And so you have it—” He spread his hands wide. “Master Soren and our parents are not at the highest level of rule—but my father says that gives them a broader scope, so to speak. They see things that the ones that sit in Council might not.”