Commander Cherrystone was bloody pissed. Everyone else, all his old friends from the Academy, were either lazing about on City street corners, patrolling, nominally, or actively engaged in putting down insurrections, but he?
He was sent off to the godforsaken desert through the godforsaken mountains to watch over a decaying royal family with no real power composed of five frivolous, overly romantic spinster women; a bored, aggrieved, and dramatic widow; a nonsensical elderly woman; two feckless, sensitive, vague prepubescent boys; a half-seductive ten year old nymphette, and an angular, cross green witch.
The Witch's resistance to their arrival hadn't been expected; the dark head and the green pointed face poking out the tower window like a turtle from its shell, and then she came pounding downstairs and stalking outside to argue with him. Cherrystone, an old-fashioned man with five sisters, a wife, and several daughters, all of them as vain, silly, and prone to useless shrieking as Sarima's sisters, was rather shocked at the audacity of this green woman, who matched wits with him and even threatened him without flinching.
"This isn't a request, it's an order," he told her.
"This isn't a suggestion, it's a warning," she responded evenly.
She was determined and she was, or had once been, a spy. She tried to garner from him the purpose of his mission, she was certain the Wizard planned to eradicate the Vinkusians, she remembered the campaign against the Quadlings (which, coincidentally, his father had participated in) and she hated all the soldiers for it. She was his own age, the age of Sarima and Two and Three, roughly; but she seemed so much older, as if she'd been through several lifetimes in thirty years. She was, he'd gleaned, probably the mother of the flabby little boy who followed him and his men everywhere, which he allowed merely because it irritated her.
She annoyed him persistently with her barely veiled contempt and revulsion for him and he wished his orders were to capture her, too. She could do with some torture, he thought.
Commander Cherrystone hated the Vinkus.