Frollo had thought, every now and then as he worried what tricks the gypsies were up while hiding her away from him in their court while it lay hidden and out of his reach, that he couldn't be prouder of his apprentice. He knew, despite having no control and no way to even reach her, he'd never betray her. Then she handed to him not only the location of the Court of Miracles, despite how afraid she was that she herself had no knowledge. Then… then things couldn't possibly be better. Ever. She had found him their leader, practically thrown the man in jail herself.

Now though… oh, everything was almost too perfect for him to still be alive. That damned clown of a king was the very man knocking boots with her mother constantly. In fact, the stupid gypsy was the one who'd practically run Gaetan out on the streets in the first place.

Frollo decided to stop that line of thinking right there. He didn't have everything going right just yet and if he dwelt too much on causality, he'd have to thank the man.

He couldn't let him get ahead of himself. He still had problems he needed to fix and he needed them fixed immediately before they got out of control like they always did.

To make sure Gaetan didn't misinterpret his message, he stopped at a shop and bought her dinner on the way home, his hand on her back as much of the time as he could manage. Yes, she was his little dog and he loved her loyal little tricks. That was the way it was going to stay and no one was going to get in the way of him, his dog, or her tricks.

He petted Gaetan's ruffled hair and told her he'd be back; there were things he needed to do.

"You bought her dinner?" Esmeralda asked. All this time, she'd been worried about both of them and the only result she could see was that Gaetan's hat had turned around on her scruffy head and the kid was struggling to eat a sugary pastry with the dainty refinement Frollo had taught her. "Why don't I get any?"

Claude knew the answer and thought Esmeralda knew the answer too. Now he came up to a similar academic wall Gaetan had run into when she had explained how to handle similar matters. To be precise, he'd hit two walls at the same time. First, he had no idea how to explain his problem. He knew what it was: if she treated people kept in the Palace of Justice the way she'd treated him, he'd soon be out of a job with no one willing to dare break any laws, even drunk. She played worse mind games with him than he could ever conceive of. He had actually liked her for Godknewwhy in the beginning and he was prepared to keep up the marriage and keep her fed and happy and content well after she told him about the Court of Miracles. She, however, seemed to think it was a wonderful game of making him miserable and wasn't in the least bit ashamed about it.

The second wall was that he felt he couldn't tell her. Why would he be upset? The only reason they were married was because of what half of her people had done to his apprentice; emotions, especially his, were not to be involved, let alone talked about. He wasn't supposed to feel this way and he certainly wasn't supposed to talk about it.

Gaetan wasn't aware of those reasons, but she was well tired of Frollo's house having somehow turned into the brothel, complete with the nasty smell, the yelling, and sleeping under the table now and then. If this went on, there'd be knife-fights and someone would be arrested. If she didn't know how easily Esmeralda would distract Frollo and that she actually carried a knife with her, Gaetan would be fine with that.

Gaetan did know one reason, and hoped it wasn't the only reason he fed her: Frollo had no defense against Esmeralda. The marriage contract practically prevented him from touching her. He could, however, make her jealous and angry, and Gaetan was apparently the perfect tool for just such and undertaking.

"Because she deserves it," Claude answered.

"Where were you all this time?" Esmeralda asked.

"I'll tell you later, but right now I need your help," Claude said and lead Esmeralda out the door. "It's rather important, and I'm afraid it can't wait."

………………….

Claude was thankful for the later nights of summer. He could spend more time teaching people not to be idiots before they went and broke something—namely each other. Then again, this meant he was dealing with idiots instead of staying at home and waiting for them to kill themselves in the dark.

He escorted Esmeralda a few streets and then realized he didn't know where he was going. Pretending nothing was wrong; he decided he'd have to let idiots cause a big mess that he'd have to get them out of in order to pretend he didn't get himself into a smaller one. "I want you to go find your friend Clopin and both of you go to the Court of Miracles and deliver a message for me: that man is to be reinstated as whatever you people call your leader and both of you are not to be excluded from your gypsy anarchy."

"But it's not that simple—" Esmeralda protested. It wasn't fair, either. The little kid got presents and already owned a horse and he came home loving it more than he ever loved her… or showed it without trying to run away, at least.

"Well, of course I want you to remind them that I told them to," Claude said. "Do press that point.

"And tell them that if they take too long deciding, or if they make the wrong choice, I'll be coming down to deal with matters myself. Now, I have a few more matters to clear up with Gaetan, but I should be there soon if you have any trouble." Trying to end the conversation there, he walked away, wishing he had a door to slam.

"But they'll kill me!" she yelled.

"Remind them not to, it'd really ruin my day," he said. Although, he had to admit, life would be quieter if it did happen.

……………………

Claude returned home to find Gaetan cleaning the table and the goat—for once—not on his furniture.

"Stop that and sit down," Frollo ordered.

Gaetan grabbed her rag and sat down in the chair Esmeralda sat in at dinner. Frollo seated himself in his own chair, not noticing. Gaetan preferred the chair, feeling as if she'd been chased out of it by Esmeralda and sometimes Djali.

"I'm going to tell you a little story; you like stories, don't you?" Frollo said.

Gaetan shrugged. Her mother's stories were pretty good, but Gaetan wondered about the endings. Esmeralda complained about the other fairytales and ruined them by insisting things be watered down and some completely changed. Then there were the stories the men at the brothel told, about fights with anything from a hundred other men to bears. Those were never fun. Gaetan preferred just having conversations, which Phoebus was good at, but they were pointless and had no entertainment value for others that she could see.

Frollo wasn't sure where to go from there. Most people either were interested in his stories, like Quasimodo, but seemed disappointed about how he told them, or were too scared to protest—or even shrug. Well, she didn't exactly say she didn't, so he might as well try. "When I was your age, I lived with my father and my mother. They lived happily together and I trained as a soldier and went to university during the warmer seasons to make them happy. But one day there were gypsies in front of my father's shop, yelling I their strange foreign language and they refused to leave until he threatened to bring the law into the matter. They finally left, but as he was cleaning up that night, they threw a lit torch through the window of his shop. Almost fifty people died." In truth, there were many incidents, some provoked, others spontaneous that the gypsies had perpetrated. All of them just made the gypsies look bad. Five days after he was born, there was a smaller fire and on the day of his baptism a shopkeeper was murdered by trying to break up a fight between a large gypsy family. Even if he paid no attention to the goings on in the city, his father constantly complained about them trying to cheat him and trying to frighten customers away in revenge, his mother complained that they filthy and recently she'd been proven right that they liked to seduce even the best of men—although she said 'young boys'—away from clean thoughts and sometimes even fidelity, and even Claude's teachers and commanding officers found a reason to dislike them.

"Gypsies will make any promises they think will get them their way. Your father has promised you will be a princess of his kingdom, has he not?"

Gaetan nodded.

"As much as I dislike thinking of you as a female, I want you to remember that title. Your father, your brother—God forbid you make the same mistake—your husband can take everything away from you. If you are not carefully, they will take not only what power you have over those gypsies, but they will take this job from you, they will take your money, your possessions, and even your freedom if you are not careful. I want you to make sure what is yours will remains so, even your power over the court.

"I am sending you there tomorrow to meet your family. Do whatever you feel is necessary to assert yourself as both heir and law there."

"But I don't want to go there," Gaetan protested. "Ever again."

"Oh, but you must. I need you to keep those gypsies in line. I have sent Esmeralda and your father to speak with them and make sure it is safe." He set his hand on her shoulder. His dog was getting ideas of walking itself, and that wasn't right. "You may be that man's daughter, but first and foremost you are my apprentice and that means you are my property. You do as I order, and you will aid me in whatever I feel will keep this city from falling into Godless anarchy. If I tell you to manipulate a few gypsies when you have all the right to do so, you will do it."

"I'm just here to be used against people?" Gaetan asked.

"Oh course you are, I wouldn't have it any other way," Frollo said, crossing his arms. She was not the kind of dog that women like Esmeralda held in their lap and petted all day or used as decoration. He was not going to have useless pets… well, he's find something to do with the goat, but he was not going to have any more useless pets. "I'd have fired you a long time ago if you hadn't been so competent. And now that you're the daughter of the leader of the gypsies, you're even more useful than I ever could have thought.

"Don't you dare go soft on me. I was tempted to get rid of he captain over that, I will certainly get rid of you if you start doing anything of the sort.

"Now, I am going to make sure the Court of Miracles will be safe for you to visit. If anything should happen tomorrow, though, I want you to make your way straight her or to the cathedral. You'll be safe from anything there."

Frollo left the house in silence. Gaetan waited for the door to close fully before smiling, despite his warnings. To him, she was nothing more than a hungry ferret to release into a mill to rid it of rats with any tricks or sharp points she had, but to her it was still a compliment. He found her useful to keep around, not a nuisance or a burden. Perhaps someday she'd be with her mother again and she would think the same thing, only better because her mother loved her.

Perhaps someday…

………………..

"Your husband does this just to inconvenience us," Clopin grumbled as he and Esmeralda walked down the tunnel to the Court of Miracles.

"It could be worse," Esmeralda said. "Five minutes later, and you and Giselle would have really been annoyed that I showed up."

"If I didn't want to image of Frollo doing such things in my head, I'd swear I'd repay the favor," Clopin complained, waving the torch he held.

"Halt!" someone yelled in the darkness. They leapt from a high ledge and landed dramatically in front of both of them, splashing loudly in the sewage. "Who goes?"

"Felipe, you could hear me complaining a mile off," Clopin snapped. "Look, Frollo decided to send us here to deliver some stupid message of his." Clopin held the torch so as to shed light on Esmeralda as well. Proving that he was with Frollo's wife would hopefully prevent any physical conflicts. Or at least postpone them.

"He knows I'm here," Esmeralda said, in case Felipe was thinking of hiding her body and thinking the aftermath would be amusing to watch.

Felipe was not a friend of either of them, but he at least tried to keep his trouble-making to a minimum. He had no skill at avoiding getting caught, and yet he couldn't keep his mouth shut when used as a decoy. Everyone preferred that he stayed at home and found something actually useful to do. Apparently, he'd annoyed a few people and been given guard duty, a job which required getting caught and being able to say whatever you felt. Felipe slowly considered Clopin, then Esmeralda, then went back to slowly grinding his rusty mental gears about Clopin. "Go away," he finally said.

"But—" Esmeralda tried.

"We're supposed to let soldiers in," Felipe said. He was skinny and his weapons were hidden where he usually carried them and the tunnel was wide, but both of them knew that as unskilled as he was at avoiding confrontation, he could not only put up a fight other people immediately regretted getting into, but he was also good at warning others. "We don't have to be likeable and we don't have to do anything else. Go away."

"Felipe, I don't think Frollo—" Clopin tried.

"He's not here, is he?" Felipe teased.

"He is now," a voiced boomed around the dark tunnel.

Felipe jumped at the voice and then ran off, most likely intended to disappear until he was sure people had forgotten about the incident, as was his usual strategy to avoid anything from confronting his wife to doing much work.

"Who was that?" Frollo asked, joining the remaining gypsies in the torchlight. He began shaking his feet to rid them of as much sewage from his shoes as he could.

"Just some moron," Clopin said. "Ow!"

Frollo had grabbed Clopin's earrings, which he'd taken to wearing again, now that Giselle was able to care for Prince. "When I ask you about someone, I want names. Am I clear?"

"I think you taught this to my kid," Clopin replied. "His name is Felipe. He has no last name. He tends to steal chickens, well, he tries to. I think you tangled it in my hair."

"Much better; you two are coming with me," Frollo said, grabbing Clopin and Esmeralda by their shoulders and led them into the Court of Miracles.

"Are you mad?" Esmeralda asked.

"Not in the least," Frollo answered. "Yet."

"I wish you'd told me what you were doing before I went through a window," Clopin muttered.

"I'm going to ignore that for now," Frollo scolded. He dragged both gypsies up to the top of the gibbet, all others giving him as much room as they possibly could while still being able to watch, in case whatever Frollo was going to do was important and they'd need to remember it later, or maybe he'd just drop money.

Frollo released Clopin and Esmeralda and considered how he should start his speech, but gave up after three seconds. "If this stupid plan is going to work, I can't have you heathen ostracizing anyone! I want all of you where I can conveniently find you and I want to know who is in charge of this underground nuthouse, so that I know exactly who hasn't been keeping you people in line by noon tomorrow. I don't want to come back here again. Are there any questions, regardless of how simple these instructions are?"

Someone in the crowd waved their hand and then shouted something in Spanish.

"Felipe…" Clopin groaned.

"What did he say?" Frollo asked.

"He asked why you're wearing a dress."

"Fine. If anyone else has any questions, they can direct them to my wife," Frollo said. "I'm leaving, but I had better not hear of you people making anything more complicated for me after this."

……………………

Claude noticed, at a very young age, that life liked to throw strange occurrences at him. After a few more years, he learned that every one of these strange occurrences was caused by something else, which, in turn, was caused by something before that.

He never grew up into the man that his parents wished for, some well-muscled soldier whose stories of his own exploits would make women melt into his clothes or some other metaphor that sounded both ridiculous and unsanitary to him and alluring to others. Instead, Claude liked to watch, and, when people didn't bore the hell out of him with complete irrelevance of the nothingness in their lives they were obsessed with, to listen. Most strange occurrences were caused by someone having what they and their equally dimwitted friends thought was genius, but anyone smarter than a chicken could point out at least a dozen flaws in the plan.

Claude had made it a grand hobby of his to learn how different dimwits, individuals and groups, worked, and to find ways to prevent the bud of their idiocy blossoming into a city-wide disaster. The problem was, dimwits were dimwitted and yet their tiny minds still insisted on a type of logic, most of it made up and contradictory, but they'd follow it off a cliff.

Idiots were easy to predict, which was why Frollo occasionally stocked the barracks stables with cranky donkeys when he heard horse thefts were on the rise. Women rarely did anything and those who did tended to be easily dealt with if you treated them like men. That left him with the only problem he could not predict: gypsies. They had a strange sense of loyalty, half thought he was playing a game, the other half thought annoying him would make him stop arresting them, and they all thought it was unfair the French had a set of laws they had to listen to and couldn't just rifle through people's homes and walk off with what they wanted.

Gaetan's awkward parentage had turned out to be a blessing, however. True, he'd practically been handed a broken gift, but he'd sent Esmeralda and whateverhisnamewas to fix it. He didn't need to figure out several thousand pagans who thought it was more important to properly separate laundry than to respect property rights of people already living in the city. If anything happened, he now knew exactly whose ear to pull on until he got every answer he wanted about anything any one of them committed. He also had a way to keep the gypsies in line form the inside, and was very sure he'd inspected the situation form all angles.

Gaetan was loyal and dutiful, more than most soldiers. He could make her think like him and he could make her think it was all her own opinions. She wanted to be his ally and would side with him in a dispute between him and her family. But his little dog could be sent to sniff with the feral packs and play. Frollo had seen real dogs before, one establishing itself as alpha, even females, and then letting all the other dogs run around according to their own canine whims while it napped and not moving until one dog transgressed and asserting its power of the troublemaker to convince them and all other dogs that what had happened was a seriously bad idea no one should think of committing again. Gaetan would tell them to remember she was his apprentice as well as the King's daughter. They could try whatever they liked to get rid of her, but in the end, he'd win. If they attacked, he'd have them all killed. If they took away her power, she'd leave and give them hell. If they chased her away, she'd make them regret it. If they kicked out her eager father, Frollo would be having a bad day and when he had a bad day, Gypsies began to consider moving to another country.

Frollo had thought he had come up with every possible action any of the gypsies could possibly come up with, including deciding to have a little discussion with him over being so concerned about their welfare, with some bricks as guest speakers. For the first time since the New Year began, he felt comfortable and prepared for whatever insanity had decided to invite itself into his city start making itself at home.

This idea wouldn't manage to last the day, for just after he'd sent Gaetan to bed, telling her that if she ever felt upset, to run to the cathedral and to tell them all that either they'd agree to her terms or regret their own, Esmeralda entered the room.

She threw open the door and leapt from the doorway to him as soon as she noticed him in the hallway. She knocked him over on the floor, but this time her show of affection was a hug that seemed more like trying to strangle him while having missed the distinction between 'neck and 'waist.'

"I love you!" she said cheerfully, rubbing her face against his.

Frollo wondered what he was expected to do and what specifically she wanted and whether it was okay to enjoy himself despite the fact that his wife was crushing his kidneys and grooming him like her goat, who had decided to join in on the celebration, leaving him to know exactly what it was like to be a salt lick. Unbeknownst to him, the disaster of good-intentions was just beginning.