"I can't believe they still expelled us!"

Louise and Kirche were sharing a seat in one of the two carts that were slowly rolling eastwards from Tristain Academy of Magic. While both nobles were accustomed to riding horses, directing a cart was stranger to them and so hired teamsters were responsible for the actual driving.

"We saved the Staff of Destruction from being stolen!" Kirche agreed. "The headmaster's ingratitude is unbelievable!"

"The staff did get broken in the process," Yin Luang commented. Apparently it had hit the ground rather hard when Fouquet dropped it. Lousy craftsmanship in his opinion. "And he did state he would recommend that you would be made chevaliers. Whatever that means."

"It's a title of nobility," Louise explained snootily.

"Hmm. So Flame and I do all the work and you get all the credit. This all seems terribly familiar somehow..." He didn't seem particularly bothered by the idea though.

"How is it you're a monkey if you were born a man? Is it some sort of curse?"

"What part of being a monkey could possibly be a curse?" Yin Luang asked Louise in surprise. "You should really try it some time."

"Er, I'm not a shapeshifter so..."

"Pff. Give me a little time to figure out the details and..."

"There's really no need to go to the trouble."

"It's fine, I've always meant to work out how to shapeshift someone else and having a test subject will help a great deal."

"Familiar, I absolutely forbid you to ever try to change me into a monkey!"

The monkey sighed. "Alright, alright."

"And show me your normal body."

"What, all of it?"

"Well, ye- uh, no. Remain clothed."

Yin Luang did not move from his seat, his body simply expanded much as the girls had seen previously. Once again, the fur receded from his body but where before the skin left behind had been pale it was now a very dark brown, almost black. The red robe shrunk to a short vest that did nothing of substance to cover a broad and very well-defined male chest, although fortunately for the shapechanger's modesty blousy white pants covered his lower body. In some manner than Kirche could not identify, the straw hat was replaced with a white turban, decorated with a large square gemstone over his forehead.

"I hope that this meets with your satisfaction, master," he said in a deep voice that sent trembles through Kirche. She guessed that he was only slightly taller than her, but far larger. Why, she could almost lie upon him as if he were a bed...

"Eeeeee," Louise mumbled and blushed furiously.

"So you both live in the same part of Halkegina?" Yin Luang asked, apparently unbothered that Kirche took advantage of Louise's distraction to perch herself upon his knee.

"Why yes," Kirche agreed. "Our family estates have faced each other across the border between Germainia and Tristain for two hundred years."

"Get off my familiar, von Zerbst," Louise shouted, her perceptions catching up with the change in Kirche's seating. When words were not enough, she tried to scramble onto the man herself to throw the other girl off.

Yin Luang tolerated this scrambling around until Louise's foot, searching for a footing, came entirely too close to his groin. With a deep sigh he grabbed his master by the back of her blouse, hoisted her up in the air for a moment before placing her on his other knee, facing Kirche. "I am not a duelling ground," he said and placed one arm firmly around her shoulders to keep her from moving. "Why is it that you two can't get along?"

"A Zerbst stole away my great-grandfather's fiancee!"

"My great-great-grandmother was far too passionate a woman to be tied down to some second-rate Tristainian noble!"

"How dare you refer to the Dukes de la Valliere as second-rate!"

Yin Luang put his free arm around Kirche and firmly kept the pair out of arms reach of each other. "It seems a matter worthy of revenge, master," he agreed. "But may I suggest that the punishment fit the crime?"

"What?"

"Since the Zerbst family stole away a Valliere's woman, perhaps the Valliere should lay claim to a Zerbst woman." Yin glanced at Kirche and a sly smile flickered across his lips for a moment. "Conveniently, we have one right here."

Louise's eyes went wide. "B-b-b-bu..."

Kirche swallowed nervously and then smirked quietly. Louise would never go for it. "Mighty mage, I beg you," she pled holding up her hands, wrists pressed together as if bound. "Ravage not my lands and people, for I offer my body as tribute to you."

The cartdriver lost control of the team at that point and only frantic tugging on the reins kept the cart from crashing into a ditch. Yin Luang smiled broadly.

"Gah!" Louise screamed. "Stupid familiar! You're just trying to get her to seduce you again!"

"Quite the contrary." Yin Luang shook his head firmly. "Firstly because I'm the one who seduced her. Secondly because I'm quite evidently trying to get her to seduce you."

"What! Why!"

"You're too tense, master. A passionate tryst could only do you good."

Any further complaints were cut off as Kirche managed to lean forwards (Yin Luang's grip may possibly have slackened somehow) and bury Louise's face in her cleavage.

.oOo.

The edge of the Valliere estates were not more than a day or so from the Tristain Academy, but the actual seat of the family (a palatial chateau) was located a further three days travel away. Kirche and Louise had both kept an eye on Yin Luang at this, with Kirche adding that the Zerbst holdings were quite similar in size. From his reactions they could not tell if he was hiding surprise at the great expanse of the estates or simply didn't find land management on that scale to be at all unusual.

"You mentioned when you were first summoned that you were Champion of Rockfall," Kirche recalled. "Is that your home... region?"

"It's a sovereignty," Yin Luang answered. "Probably a little larger than either of your family estates but it's mostly mountains so there isn't a huge population. I have an estate there that's quite pleasent in the winter."

"So you're wealthy?"

"A little money here, a little there... it all adds up and land is a fairly stable investment until someone tries to take it away from you."

Louise blinked. "What happens then?"

"That's where the Champion part of the title comes into play." Yin Luang shrugged. "It doesn't happen all that often - Rockfall really isn't all that important to anyone who doesn't live there."

"How did you become their champion?" Kirche asked, leaning her head on his shoulder. SHe was pretty sure she wouldn need to flirt to induce him to seduce her again, this time while he was a him, but flirting was not a means to an end, it was an end in itself.

"Oh is it storytime already?" The black man smiled broadly, displaying dazzlingly white teeth. "This would have been... oh, about eight hundred years ago. I was running away from the Ice Witch of Tzatli at the time..."

"You were running away from someone?" Louise had somehow not envisaged her formidable familiar as being afraid of anything.

Yin Luang nodded solemnly. "There's always a bigger fish, master. Forget that at your peril. In any case, Rockfall seemed like a nice place to hide but I needed an ironclad cover. Fortunately, their lord was in dire need of a means to stave off an invasion by the neighbouring Prince. Traditionally, offering to settle such matters with a duel of champions is a face-saving gesture: the Chosen of the Unconquered Sun serve as their own champions and they don't lose very often. So I offered him a similar deal to that I offered you, master. I would serve him as his champion in the matter if he would adopt a child of my choosing to raise as his own."

"And you won?"

"Tore out her eyes and ate them," Yin Luang agreed cheerfully. "Then I took the form of a baby and put myself on the lord's doorstep in a basket. He got his independence and I got raised as his daughter for twenty years while the Ice Witch's temper warmed."

"Warmed? Don't you mean cooled?"

"No, her temper runs cold." Yin Luang frowned. "Master, have I offended any bitchy-looking blondes lately?"

Louise blinked and frowned. "Not that you've told me about."

"Hmm. I wonder why she was glaring at me when her coach went past."

"Which coach?" Louise looked around, having missed the passage of the other traveller while listening to the admittedly rather short tale that had been told.

Yin Luang leant back a bit and twisted his head to look back. "Ah, the one that's turned around and is chasing us."

"Urk."

"Master?"

"About as tall as Kirche, glasses like this," Louise traced triangular shapes over her eyes, "And a sort of pinched expression?" She thinned her lips menacingly.

"Yes, that's her."

"Aaaah! That's my sister Eleanor!"

Kirche tapped the carter on the shoulder. "We should stop for a moment."

"No, no we should speed up!" Louise suggested. Unfortuantely for her, the carter was far too sensible than to turn this into a chase where the pursuing mage could win by damaging the poor man's cart and harming his livelihood.

Almost immediately, a coach emblazoned with the heraldry of the Valliere family pulled alongside and the blonde that Yin Luang had described stormed out of the door almost before it had come to a halt. "Louise, you runt!" she snapped, lunging at the young de la Valliere. "What are you doing, sitting in the lap of that comm-!"

An instant before Eleanor de la Valliere's hands could close upon her errant sister, Yin Luang's voice uttered a single sharp syllable: "Kiai!" The noblewoman shrieked as she was bowled over backwards by the cry and dropped into the mud of the road.

"Your sister is very rude," Yin Luang observed in a mild voice as he lifted Louise from his knee. Kirche sensibly scrambled off before the familiar vaulted off the cart.

Eleanor's wand came to her hand the same moment that Yin Luang, once more a red-robed monkey wearing a straw had and wielding a silver rod, landed next to her.

"What...! Where did that man go."

"Foolish child." Yin Luang twisted the rod in his paws, stretching and pulling at the implement as he spoke gently. "I am not without pity, should you apologise for your attempted assault upon my master."

.oOo.

"Y-y-you... defeated Eleanor!" Louise exclaimed after her mud-soaked sister finally collapsed against the wheel of her coach and decided that yes, now would be a nice time to have a nap.

Yin Luang nodded wisely and then held up one finger. "I do not understand your surprise Master. It is not as if she laid a finger upon me."

This was indeed true. Yin Luang had simply walked slowly towards the oldest Valliere sister occasionally uttering battle cries that had smacked the mage's wand from her hand on the occasions she had recovered it, or bowled her over back into the mud. This had gone on for some time, with Kirche, the carters and even the coachman frozen in the appreciation of a not unattractive blonde being repeatedly thrown into damp, clinging mud.

Louise had simply been frozen in horror.

"Mother will kill me," she concluded. "Goodbye cruel world."

The monkey frowned. "That would be unfortunate. Why do you believe that your mother will react badly?"

Louise gave her big eyes. "Eleanor will tell her all about this!"

A nod. "Well there is a simple solution to that: we should speak to her first. The first report is generally given more credibility that that given later."

"How does that help!" Louise wailed.

Kirche wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulder. "Here you are, returning home after capturing the dread thief Fouquet when your sister attempted to assault you for no explained reason. Your familiar spoke to her and she fell over in the mud: fainted perhaps. After all, it's not as if Yin Luang touched her."

"That would work," agreed Yin Luang.

"But Eleanor is a wind mage! She can fly home faster than we can go with these carts!"

"Pff." Yin Luang waved off the objection. "You fellows! Load all of Miss von Zerbst's possessions on this cart with Miss de la Valliere's."

"But the horses aren't going to be able to pull the cart if you do that," protested one of the carters, although he did start walking towards the second cart.

"Don't worry, they won't have to." Yin Luang pointed one finger at the coachman. "Get Miss de la Valliere back into the coach immediately. It is possible she has been taken ill!"

The coachman gave him a confused look and then turned to Louise who gathered enough self-possession to nod imperiously. "Please take care of my sister, Jon-Pierre. She may be suffering the same ailment as Cattelya."

"umm... of course, Miss Louise," the coachman said deferentially. "And may I say that you are looking very well today."

Louise's expression warmed slightly at the support implied by that compliment. "Thank you, Jon-Pierre."

With Yin Luang's help - no one, by this point, was surprised that a monkey not even waist high on the diminutive Louise can carry more than a large man - the girl's possessions were consolidated quickly onto one cart. "Now unhitch the horses, if you please."

The carter hesitated. "Um... what you going to do to my cart."

"Well, first all I'm going to buy it from you."

"You're what?"

"What's a fair price?"

"Uhm... two hundred and fifty new gold," the man asked tentatively. Even Kirche knew that that was far too much.

Yin Luang laughed. "I like your nerve, young man." He pulled a pouch out of his robes. "There's about three hundred in there. I trust that that will also pay your friend there's wages with enough for a drink or two besides."

"Yes sir, that's very kind."

"Now unhitch your horses from my cart."

"Where did you get three hundred new gold?" Kirche asked quietly.

"Louise's sister donated to the cause," Yin Luang said straight-facedly.

"You picked her pocket!"

"She donated it to the cause," the monkey repeated seriously. "It's important to have our story straight before we tell it to anyone else."

"Without horses how do you intend to get the cart to my home?" asked Louise nervously. "It's sixty miles - Eleanor could be there by morning if she rushed."

Yin Luang jumped onto the front of the cart and raised his staff. "If you would both sit on the cart then I shall demonstrate for you."

Brilliant blue light formed a mandala around the monkey's head, like an eccentric halo. A second blazing circle erupted around the cart and then both occult diagrams began to slowly rotate in opposite directions. "Witness now the power of a celestial sorcerer!"

Feathers sprouted from the air above the familiar, joining together to form tremendous wings, hundreds of feet long. From the base of the wings, two long taloned feet reached down and lifted the cart off the road and up against the headless body that was still forming between the wings.

"Now if someone doesn't mind pointing me in the correct direction," Yin Luang declared cheerily, "We can be at our destination in time for afternoon tea."

.oOo.

Afternoon tea was a tense meal for the Valliere family. The reason for this was not the second daughter of the family - Cattelya was delighted that her younger sister had returned home and enchanted with her new familiar, who played up to the attention shamelessly.

Nor was it the presence of a von Zerbst, one of the family's hereditary enemies, at the table. As an important and sophisticated noble family, Duke Gaston de la Valliere and his family were entirely accustomed to sitting down and dining with nobles that they despised utterly. In fact, were it not for the family history involved, Kirche thought she would probably have been more welcome than most Tristainian nobles: she, after all, was not a rival for power within the kingdom.

The source of the tension was unmistakeably the Duchess. While her husband had embraced Louise with enthusiasm almost equal to Cattelya and blustered angrily about her expulsion after hearing that she had distinguished herself against Fouquet, Karin de la Valliere's only positive reaction so far had been an offhand mention that she was pleased Louise had successfully summoned a familiar.

"I really cannot understand why Eleanor would have collapsed," she said with great precision. "She has never shown signs of Cattelya's illness."

"She seemed rather tired," Louise observed, which was strictly true although it omitted the reason. "Perhaps we should ask when she arrives if she has been overworking herself at Oriz."

"Oh my," Cattelya said thoughtfully, petting Yin Luang's head as he sat on her lap. "It may be that Eleanor has been more affected than I thought by the end of her engagement."

"Eleanor's engagement was ended?" Louise sounded surprised by the idea. Having met Eleanor only briefly, Kirche suspected that the fiance in question had ended the arrangement with a degree of relief, even if it would have meant losing a connection to one of Tristain's most powerful families.

The duchess sipped from her tea cup, earning an appreciative look from Yin Luang who knew exactly how difficult it was to express menace with such a mundane gesture. Everyone else at the table tried not to meet the Duchess' eye. "It would have been best for you to bring Eleanor with you, Louise, so that she could recover at home."

"Yes mother. I was uncertain how smooth the ride would be while travelling so swiftly. Had it been rough then she might have suffered as a result." Louise looked down shamefacedly. "I should have had more faith in the spell."

"Twenty minutes to arrive here from the edge of our estates is rather a remarkable pace," Louise's father noted. "It's most of the distance to the capital, after all. Perhaps you could teach it to your aging father to spare his bones the long ride?" he 'hinted' heavily.

"I..." Louise hesitated, this not having been something that had been considered when the three of them composed their story. "I am not sufficiently familiar with the spell, father. Yin Luang, would it be practical to teach my father the spell that you used?"

The monkey scratched at the hair on his chin. "Unfortunately spells of the Sapphire Circle are not possible for an unaugmented elementalist," he observed thoughtully.

Gaston looked irritated. "What in the world are you talking about?"

"The magics that I practise are naturally somewhat different from those taught by Founder Brimir," Yin Luang explained. "I see no reason that you could not learn similar spells of the Emerald Circle which are commonly used by elemental sorcerers but unfortunately I don't happen to know any travel spells of that Circle."

"You seem to be quite an unusual familiar," Karin observed in a neutral tone. "Given that familiars do not generally speak and do not cast spells, I must wonder if you are instead some imposter taking advantage of my daughter."

"Mother!" Louise squeaked indignantly and then shrank back when her mother raised one eyebrow.

"I am particularly concerned at the convenience of your arriving the day before the royal party calls here on their return from Germania."

"The Queen of Tristain has visited Germainia?" exclaimed Kirche.

"It is Princess Henrietta who has made the visit," the Duke grumbled. "For no reason that she or Cardinal Mazarin have chosen to divulge."

"Were any assassin or foreign agent to threaten the Princess while she was our guest, the disgrace would be considerable, even before the consequences for Tristain were considered."

"My familiar is not an assassin!"

Yin Luang cleared his throat. "I have carried out assassinations in the past, Master. And as I have no attachments to any causes within Tristain it wouldn't overly concern me were you to order me to do so again on your behalf."

Kirche started. She had thought that she was accustomed to the shapeshifting sorcerer but this was a facet that she had not expected. Then again, since he admitted to being ancient there were doubtless an enormous number of things that she was unaware of about him.

"Your statement does nothing to persuade me that you are anything but a menace, Mr. Yin Luang." The Duchess placed her cup very deliberately on its saucer, the clink of the china sounding uncannily like a sword being drawn.

"Under normal circumstances, that is precisely what I am, your grace." Yin Luang bounded from the lap of the startled Cattelya and picked up the tea pot, pouring himself a cup. "It is my custom, you see, to remain a free agent and to pursue whatever goals and activities please me without regard for title or allegiance. Now at this time, I have of my own free will contracted to serve your daughter as a familiar, but there is no reason or evidence in the world for you to believe that any more than there is evidence of perfidity on my part."

"So I should not place any faith in you?"

"You may place faith wherever you wish, your grace. But there are no facts within your reach to support either conclusion so you will have to judge by what you think best."

"And if I conclude that you would be better destroyed?" Karin de la Valliere asked without the least break in her demeanor.

Her daughters gasped in horror. "Mother!" Cattelya protested. "Surely Louise could simply send him away while the Princess is here."

Yin Luang sipped from the tea cup. "Then one of us will probably be nursing a bruised ego by sunset. And while past history suggests that it won't be me, modesty reminds me that you hold yourself like an accomplished warrior." He met her gaze.

The duchess considered this for a moment and then the corners of her lips quirked up fractionally. "I would be interested in the outcome," she admitted almost girlishly. Was Kirche imagining it or was there a hint of pink in Karin's cheeks?

.oOo.

The Duke and Duchess did not make an appearance at dinner. From the way that they had departed from tea, Kirche personally suspected that they would be entirely too busy in their quarters - Yin Luang seemed to habitually have that effect on people. Cattelya sat at the head of the table with Louise to her right and Kirche at her left. Yin Luang sat cross-legged on the table, a small plate in front of him.

"So are you and Louise close friends at the Academy?"

Kirche giggled at the idea. "Oh the family rivalry got in the way of that. I teased her terribly, I'm afraid."

"Then how did you become friends?" Cattelya asked.

"Oh we're not." Kirche grinned broadly. "I'm Louise's concubine!"

Both pinkettes blushed furiously.

"That's not -"

"Oh my!" Cattelya clapped her hands against her cheeks and switched her gaze from Kirche to Louise. "Oh how sweet! It's just like in Inigo Montoya and the Pirate Queen of the South Seas!"

Louise hesitated and then blinked. "Is that a new book, sister?"

"It is!" Cattelya agreed. "I thought that it might be a little too... but as you have a lover now you must be old enough." She leaned over and threw her arms around her sister. "You've grown up so fast!"

"Then I can borrow it?"

"Of course, come to my room after dinner and we can read it together." Cattelya looked over at Kirche and smiled. "You can come as well Kirche, it'll be fun."

The busty girl blinked. Louise's sister was supporting the idea? She looked the older girl over for a minute, noting again the resemblence to Louise. If the younger girl developed in the same areas then she'd definitely be interesting. Not as beautiful as Yin Luang, but Kirche quietly admitted to herself that she was probably never going to encounter anyone equal to that measure and there were other things to look for in a lover.

"I'd be pleased to," she said honestly.