The Jaguar Knights by Dave Duncan

simultaneously infuriated the nobility by insulting one of the oldest houses in the land and the burghers by squandering a fortune in tax revenue to dispose of a doxy he could have given to a gardener. There never was a man with such a gift for making enemies.
    But none of this ancient history explained Quondam.
    Someone rattled the latch, trying to open the bedroom door. Wolf was off the bed in a flash of steel, Diligence in hand. He flipped the bolt and kicked the door wide. It hit someone.
    Lynx swore in the darkness. He came limping into the light, swaddled in a fleece bedcover that made him look like some huge half-melted bear, wearing the bemused smile of an amiable drunk.
    “Stubbed my toe,” he muttered. “Need talk…like old times.”
    “Sit and be welcome.” Wolf closed and bolted the door again, saw him settled on the hob, poked up the fire. Lynx had no shoes, no lantern. “How did you get through the study?”
    “Mm? Painfully. This like old times, middle of the night?”
    “It is.” Wolf pulled up a chair and beamed at him happily. “Spirits, it’s good to see you again! Had another healing?” Lynx had not been drinking. Intrepid had scrambled his brains with a blizzard of elementals.
    He nodded vaguely. “Shoulder’s better.” He demonstrated moving his left arm, flexed his right hand, and then tugged the rug around him again. He was wearing nothing under it. “Swordsman needs his arms, Wolf.”
    “Hard to hold a sword with your teeth.”
    “Got no sword. Lost Ratter !” His face crumpled like a child’s.
    “You dropped her in the fight. We’ll get her back for you. Listen, I need your help. Can you think of any reason at all why anyone at all would want to kidnap Celeste?”
    Lynx was incapable of serious thought just then, but if he’d worked out an answer earlier he ought to remember doing so. He sniffed. “Lost my ward, too. What sort of Blade loses his ward? Oh, Wolfie! What am I going to do, Wolfie? Wander the world forever looking for her?”
    “Start by working out who took her. Tell me about her missing years.”
    “Huh?”
    Wolf sighed. “How did Amy Sprat become the Marquesa Celeste? When did she leave Sheese?”
    “Week after we did,” Lynx said, as if that was obvious.
    His wits would return by morning, but Wolf could never be patient when a job needed doing. In four years of captivity, the languishing Baroness must have rehearsed her troubles to her Blades, drunk or sober, and Wolf set to work to drag her story out of Lynx, phrase by phrase. It took an hour.
    A lecherous old chapman peddling pots in Sheese had discovered Amy Sprat, flower of the moors. Recognizing her burgeoning beauty and natural skills, he had taken her away with him and set her up in Lomouth as a source of revenue for him and a benefaction to the young men of the city. Seeing how she was being exploited, she had run off with a ship captain, who took her across the Straits to Isilond. From there, somehow, she found her way farther south, to Distlain. For the next five years or so, while Lynx and Wolf studied swordsmanship at Ironhall, Amy had learned a different trade. Her story, as told to and by Lynx, involved a huge cast of villains, johns, pimps, sugar daddies, blackmail victims, crooked officials, and outright suckers, with herself always the persecuted heroine. Wolf inferred that she had been more puppeteer than puppet, deliberately scaling the social ladder until she could pass for nobly born.
    A few months before Malinda’s abdication, Amy had returned to Chivial with the express intent, so she claimed, of snaring Crown Prince Athelgar. She had acquired a husband for respectability and appropriated the name of Celeste from the notorious seductress in the Isilondian murder scandal. Whoever the supposed Marqués was, it had been child’s play for Amy to dump him in Clag Street, out of her way, as soon as the Prince nibbled her bait. She claimed that the first thing Athelgar had done to