The ballistae troops under the command of Sergeant Albert were making their slow way back to Kizdangengar. The schtick was that Sven and Willam were with the three ballistae: the reality was that they watched the trial of Bishop Geralt de Ramnerburg and his henchmen through spy holes in the ornamental molding between the wall and the ceiling. My boy and Father Garshom joined them since we didn't want to advertise their faces to the good bishop.

As for me, I followed Wren, who was wearing that killer white deerskin houppelande again. Queen Margo waited for the hobgoblin guard to bring the gagged and chained Bishop into the court. Only then did she invite the six of us to sit with her at the two-tiered court bench. This meant that Fox, Wren, and I left our seats behind the rail for our new seats at the top tier on the bench. I'm sure it was all deliberately staged by the goblins for the benefit of the bishop. The look on the man's face was exquisite when he realized the rulers of both the Green Elves and Zimlakuliku were watching the hearing, seated side-by-side with the queen.

There wasn't much to the hearing. The queen had already posted multiple copies of the interrogations of the four henchmen throughout Gorgurak. Justicar Salsa read out the most damning of their statements to the court. Salsa added the transcript of the Bishop ordering Wren's murder.

"Ordering the murder of a foreign princess and attempting to frame a high minister of Gogurak for that crime are grounds for war," Margo announced. "All humans who are not part of the Zimlakuliku delegation must leave in the next ten days. The border between Gorgurak and Nordweg is now closed, effectively immediately.

The Bishop's soldiers who did the footwork for the murder attempt will be executed by quartering immediately after this hearing. Following that, the Bishop of Tammerhof will be granted a partial commutation of his death penalty in consideration of his status as a priest. He will be stripped naked and every part of him shaved. He will exit this nation by walking barefooted while wearing a yoke and gag. Once he exits Gorgurak, he may be killed on sight if he ever returns."

Given that Bishop Geralt de Ramnerburg was both soft and round, walking to Nordweg would be its own torture. I doubted that he could walk more than a mile.

Our departure for Nordweg was dependent on receiving court-worthy clothes. While I waited, I was feeling like I wanted out of palaces and back into the forest. Since that wasn't possible at the moment, I settled for experimenting with Cat's scrying ball. The first thing I did was check on the king.

The king was suffering. He was going through the shakes. Griselda was overjoyed since none of them knew the medicine bottle was filled with apple juice. She thought he was approaching death. If the king died on his own, then she wouldn't need to murder him. Magus Keleher thought the same. I got lucky and found the magus conferring with the king's sick room attendant. Following him, I was finally able to track the magus back to his rooms. Now I knew where he slept.

I was able to confirm that Keleher also had one of the magic protection pendants. Removing him would require indirect magic or a physical attack. That was the bad part. The good part was Keleher's housekeeping. He was disorganized and careless. For example, there was a drawer in his desk filled with the king's jewelry. Stealing the king's possessions was a hanging offense. In another drawer, I found letters between Keleher and Sigurd, King of Osterius about progress in their plan to annex Nordweg. Just one surprise raid would be good enough to turn Keleher into gallows fodder.

Keleher's pendant forced me to use indirect magic. He was a ladies' man so I thought I would help him with that and cast charms of anti-impotence on all his braies. I also enchanted his eating dagger to make any food it touched into an aphrodisiac. That would get the magus off to a good start.

Next was the creation of an illusion which I confined to the ground floor of the palace so the maximum number of people could see it. It was timed to come out at midnight and last until just before dawn. The illusion had the head of the late Queen Eleanor on top of a shapeless body in a funeral shroud. While it was active every night, it would whisper: "Murder! Murder! Who will avenge my children?"

I built an auditory illusion of just footsteps running inside the palace, through hallways, and up and down stairs. I set this one to run between the dinner hour and midnight every day.

Last, and best, was another illusion. This one was not visual but auditory. It was the voice of a teenage girl reciting the love poem, "To his coy mistress." I let this illusion wander anywhere on the palace grounds. I did not embed any timing into it. It would function round the clock.

It took two more days for the clothes to arrive. Father Garshom opted for some austere floor-length houppelandes and a matching chaperon hat. My boy's houppelandes were deep blue, forest green, and pale yellow. He looked great in all three, though I could be biased in that assessment. Sven and Willam used what they brought with them.

The accessories held us up by one extra day. The reworked chain of leaves featured a new pendant of a wyvern with an emerald as big as a thumb mounted on it; however, the new masks stole the show. There was a simple utilitarian mask that was gilded leather. Then there were three more masks, one to match the color of each houppelande. These were on a brass base. The colored portions were enamel, and the decorative swirls and fimbriations were gold. All of the new masks covered just the scars on the left side of Cat's face. The masks had no laces. Cat kept them on through magic.

Just after lunch on the third day after the bishop's sentencing, Cat, Sven, Willam, and I left for Nordweg on the flying carpet that Storm Eagle acquired from the Sahkuhl. I don't know what the Elf King had to barter away to obtain it, but the price had to be steep. His gift of the carpet to Cat showed how much he cared for his foster son.