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while. In Varay, eating comes before anything else, even sex. I was still famished, Joy had enough of an appetite of her own, and it was almost suppertime anyway. I think the first thing Lesh did when we stepped through to Cayenne was to head for the scullery to tell the cooks that we were all back so double everything for supper. Meals in Varay are protracted enough to get away with that. You start with what’s already on hand while the extras are cooking.
    I told Joy about Pregel. I also told her that we had gotten what we went north for, but that there was still more work to do once we found out what to do with the, ah, relics. I didn’t give her any details of the quest … and I didn’t tell her where the old family jewels were at the moment. I wanted to save that until we were alone and I found out whether or not they were going to interfere with my love life. I was starting to worry about that.
    “I’ve been learning to ride,” Joy told me as we headed for the supper table. “Jaffa has been teaching me.” Jaffa was one of our new pages.
    “Any interesting bruises?” I asked, leaning close to whisper in her ear. Everyone was gathering for the meal, and that wasn’t the kind of question I wanted to share with all the help.
    “You’ll have to find that out for yourself,” Joy said, hurrying on ahead of me to the table.
    I kept dozing off during supper, and that’s something I never do, certainly not in Varay. Lesh carried most of the table talk. He told about our adventures, some of them, but he was circumspect enough to omit the parts that didn’t belong in the same room as food. I doubt that any of the Varayans would have been shocked at even the worst of it, but I still had a few civilized sensibilities and Joy wasn’t completely acclimated yet, and Lesh recognized that. When he got to the bit about the room full of jewels in the shrine up in the Mist—walls completely studded with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, with piles of precious stones almost waist-deep in the corners of the room—Lesh had everyone’s attention. Some of the castle folk even forgot to keep shoveling the food into their faces for a moment.
    What a letdown they’ll have when they find out that we didn’t bring any of those jewels back except the ones we had to have, I thought. They’re going to want to see some of those treasures, and they can’t see the two we have. Not with them lodged securely between my legs.
    Surprise.
    “How many did you bring back?” somebody asked Lesh.
    Someone else said, “Can we see some of them?”
    Lesh chuckled, and that opened my eyes. He looked my way and grinned, then he started digging into his pack. I hadn’t even noticed that he had set the pack next to the table. Glittering bits of precious stones tumbled out on the table, the stuff that dreams are made of back in the other world. Even in Varay, rather blasé about riches most of the time, the shiny gems drew oohs and ahs.
    “I didn’t know you were so quick with your hands, Lesh,” I said when he glanced my way again.
    “I got some too,” Harkane confessed, and then Timon blushed and nodded, so I knew that he had joined in on the grabbing.
    I grinned and shook my head. “Why not,” I said, and then I laughed. It seemed that I was the only one who had been too busy to grab a few extra goodies. Or maybe not, I thought then. Aaron was wearing the elf’s head. He probably didn’t think to grab anything extra either. Besides, he was still carrying that sea serpent around inside when we were in the room of jewels.
    Enough of that train of thought.
    “Have you liberators thought about what you’re going to do with all those jewels?” I asked. There certainly wasn’t much of a market for them in Varay.
    Lesh got an embarrassed look on his face and shrugged. The others just shook their heads.
        After supper, Joy and I headed up to the bedroom and I told her where the balls of the Great Earth Mother were. When I stripped to