“That I do, Eto. That I do.” The man with the black beard circled her. He extended his hand to touch the diamonds. “What a beautiful dress—on a beautiful lady, of course.”
“Thank you,” she said icily.
Both men laughed.
“There now, little lady,” Jel said. “There’s no need to take that tone. We’re merely admirers.” He drew a dagger slowly out of one sleeve and took care to let it ring against the sheath. “So, why don’t we keep this pleasant, hmm? Hand your purse over.”
She took one slow step back. Jel followed equally as slowly.
“You really shouldn’t do this,” she told him. “I don’t think it will stay pleasant.”
“Is she threatening us?” he asked Eto.
“You know, I think she is,” his comrade replied and strolled past him toward the mouth of the alleyway. “And here we were being so nice to her. Right, Jel? Jel?”
He turned and his jaw dropped. His partner knelt on the ground, wheezing. Both hands clutched his groin—a gesture that had come rather too late—and he tried to catch his breath but failed miserably. Dotty folded her arms and stared at Eto. Her blood was thrumming now.
“I told you,” she said quietly, “that you shouldn’t do this. I told you it wouldn’t stay pleasant.”
“Why, you little—” He charged.
She waited until the last possible moment before she leapt sideways over Jel’s bent form. The daggers whipped out of their sheathes without a single sound and when she turned, the man had already surged into an attack.
He saw the weapons barely in time to throw himself sideways and she stalked after him. As he scrabbled for his blade, she tripped him. When he sprawled and his fingers located the hilt of the dagger and closed around it, a chunk of mud materialized from nowhere and covered both hand and knife. Eto screamed and the mud vanished, taking the knife with it.
Jel, who seemed to be under the very mistaken impression that he had the element of surprise, uttered a battle cry and lunged at her, knife-first.
He took a dagger to the forearm for his troubles and lost his balance to land hardf. The battle froze into a moment of shocked stillness.
Dotty stomped on his fingers to make him release his weapon and kicked it away. She wrenched hers out of his arm, eliciting a high-pitched scream, and bent slightly to look him in the eyes.
“What’s your name? Jel what?”
“Jel Estrim.” He scrabbled away on his elbows and his knees, trying to clap one hand over the wound in his arm.
“And you,” she said, rounding on Eto.
He had tried to sneak up on her, his hands extended to grasp her arms, but he held them up in surrender and leapt back with a shriek.
She stared at him for a moment and tried desperately not to laugh. “And you?” she asked when she was relatively certain she could keep her face straight. “What’s your surname, Eto?”
“Kleim,” he said before he winced. He had no doubt been determined to lie and had then forgotten to do so.
As she looked at the other knives, each of them disappeared into a ball of mud and crumbled to dust.
“Well, Mr. Estrim, Mr. Kleim. I suggest you leave before you make anyone else’s day unpleasant. In fact, I suggest you never make anyone’s day unpleasant like this again. If you do—”
“You’ll hunt us,” Eto snapped. He hauled Jel up and elicited a pained gurgle from his friend. “Yeah, we know.”
“Oh, I won’t only do that,” she said. “I’ll not only beat the crap out of you myself, I’ll track your grandmothers and tell them what you did.”
Both of them went white, and she sheathed her weapons again and brushed her dress off before she picked up the wad of paper.
“What are you doing?” Eto asked.
“I’m picking up after myself instead of littering,” she said, “because I am a lady.” She swept toward her destination without looking back.
Chapter Two
The park was, like everything in Insea, carved from the same single block of stone. Some of it was gray, some white, and some pinkish. In the park, it was a golden-white, fashioned into flower beds for real flowers and trees, with little streams running away from a fountain and four statues at the cardinal points on the circular path. Each statue depicted a figure—one orc, one elf, one dwarf, and one human. There were no inscriptions, however, to say if these merely depicted the races or were particular figures from history.
Dotty paused for a moment to look at the orc, a woman holding her arm up either to catch or release a falcon, her hair ornately braided and a leather strap with a claw around her neck. Her dress was nothing like she had seen in the orcish villages she had visited, but a great deal had changed amongst the orcs in the past few centuries.
She found a trash bin—which disappeared conveniently as soon as she had thrown the paper away—and sat on a bench to think things over. It occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely sure if she was annoyed that she had been mugged or amused at how the attempt had ended.
Lost in thought, she proceeded to fall off the end of the bench with a yelp of surprise when Justin said, “Dotty?”
He rushed to help her up. “Sorry! Sorry.” His wide-eyed gaze took in the dress, the hair, and the much younger avatar. “Uh…you look, that is to say…um, no disrespect meant—Tina?”
His girlfriend, who was eating a pizza-esque item, stopped chewing long enough to say, “Nah, it’s gonna be much more fun to watch you try to work your way out of this on your own.” She swallowed her mouthful. “Hi, Dotty.”
“Hello, Tina.” She looked at Justin again. “You were saying?”
He was, luckily for him, saved by the arrival of Lyle Stout, a dwarf she had traveled with during her first incarnation in the PIVOT world. It was strange to look down at him instead of being the same height, but she was more concerned with how much she had missed him. Without thought, she threw her arms around him and gave him a hug.
After a moment, she pulled away and realized he was staring at her like she might be a lunatic.
“Do I…know you?” he asked cautiously.
“This is Dotty,” Justin explained.
“How many friends do you have named Dotty?”
“Same Dotty,” Tina confirmed.
“Dotty is…a dwarf.” Lyle glanced at her feet as if searching for platform shoes. “She had a real figure the last time I saw her—nice, strong arms to heft a pick-ax and none of this wimpy elf or human business.”
“You’d like orcs,” Dotty said.
“I’ve always thought I’d like orcs,” he agreed and looked suspiciously at her. “Seriously, though, who are you?”
“Seriously, I’m Dotty. We first met in Berghold, you trained me on the way to Insea, and I fell into a coma after our fight with the elven riders. We interrogated a diplomat together—”
“Shhhh,” the dwarf said and waved his hands. “Nothing about that.”
She stared at him.
“For legal reasons,” Justin said gravely. “Councilor Marwitz was killed during the battle between the elves and the dwarven caravan. Multiple witnesses saw him stabbed by the elven commander.”