“I was a complete caricature of a baby-dyke-in-training and didn’t even realize it until I caught myself in the middle of a daydream of rescuing Melissa from a stalker and then smooching her passionately . . . my family didn’t talk about things like that so I didn’t even really understand the names my beloved classmates were calling me. I did know they weren’t well meant, you bet I did.”

“Was it possible to be that naive in 1998?”

“For a while, if you were a lonely introspective only child of a single mother who was extremely religious, with no friends except your gymnastics coach. And she was terrified of being hit with ‘inappropriate conduct’ accusations by a hysterical parent. Everyone knew before I did, except my mother and she was deep in denial.”

“Wasn’t as much of a problem for me,” Rigobert said, with a reminiscent smile. “It might have been hellish if I were swish, but—”

“Yeah, you’re even more butch than I am,” Tiphaine said sardonically. “Football star, right?”

“Not dumb enough for football. Basketball, track and field, karate, and fencing club. I was such a model of blazing macho hotness even the straight guys wanted me,” Rigobert said. “Ah, high school, the amount of action I—”

“Now you’re boasting . . . wait a minute, do you realize our speech patterns just lost twenty-five years?”

The other baron shook his head. “You’re right. Best not to dwell on the past . . . it was just seeing Lioncel looking so damned young. And looking so much the way I did at that age . . . though I’m pretty sure he’s straight, come to that.”

“He is,” Tiphaine said definitely.

A conversation about stumbling upon him and a servant girl in a linen closet back at Montinore Manor came to mind; Delia had found it hilarious and she’d thought it rather embarrassing.

“Lioncel’s greatest ambition is to be a gallant knight and a good baron, and I think he’s going to achieve it,” she said instead.

“He’s a fine boy, all three of us can be proud of him, but . . . they scare me, sometimes, the Changelings. No offense.”

“None taken. I’m a borderline case anyway. I can remember the old world, bits and pieces, particularly the last couple of years before the Change. I simply don’t, usually, unless it comes up the way it did just now. The last twenty-three years or so have been a lot more fun than my childhood anyway, on the whole.”

“It’s Changelings raised by Changelings who really give me that odd feeling, and Delia’s seven years younger than you; she is a Changeling and no mistake. From time to time I look back on the way we set things up in the early years and think . . . what have we done?”