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Bellowing with rage, Beson came off the wall, shaking his head to clear it, and charged Peter, who had folded the cylinder of metal into his own right hand. The Lesser Warders stood staring at this unexpected development with stupid wonder. Neither thought of interfering; they could believe what was happening no more than Beson himself.

Beson ran at Peter with his arms outstretched. Now that the prince had gotten his fist weight away from him, Beson had no more interest in the sort of free-for-all swinging and hitting he thought of as "boxing." He meant to close with Peter, grapple with him, drive him to the floor, land on top of him, and then choke him unconscious.

But the space where Peter had been emptied with magical suddenness as the boy stepped aside and dropped into a crouch. As the squat, troll-like Chief Warder went past, trying to turn, Peter hit him three times with his right fist, which was closed around the metal cylinder. Hardly fair, Peter thought, but, then, it wasn't I that brought this piece of metal into it, was it? The blows did not look hard at all. If Beson had been watching a fight an had seen those three quick, fluttering punches thrown, he would have laughed and called them "sissy punches." Beson's idea of a real man's punch was a roundhouse blow that made the air whistle.

But they weren't sissy punches at all, no matter what the likes of Beson might have thought. Each was driven out from the shoulder, just as Peter's boxing instructor had taught him in their twice-weekly classes over the last six years. The punches were economical, they didn't make the air whistle, but Beson felt as if he had been kicked three times in rapid succession by a very small pony with very big hoofs. There was a flare of agony across the left side of his face as his cheekbone broke. To Beson, it sounded as if a small branch had snapped inside his head. He was driven into the wall again. He hit it like a rag doll and bounced back buckle-kneed. He stared at the prince with obvious dismay.

The Lesser Warders peering through the hole in the door were agog with surprise. Beson, being beaten by a boy? It was as unbelievable as rain would have been coming down from a clear blue sky. One of them now looked at the key in his hand, thought briefly of going in there, then thought better of it. A man could get hurt in there. He slipped the key into his pocket, where he could later claim to have forgotten it.

"Are you ready to talk reasonably now?" Peter wasn't even out of breath. "This is silly. I require only two small favors of you, favors for which you can count on being well and amply repaid. You-"

With a roar, Beson flung himself at Peter again. This time Peter was not expecting an attack, but he managed to pull back anyway, the way a matador pulls back from a bull which charges unexpectedly-the matador may be surprised, perhaps even gored, but he rarely loses his grace. Peter did not lose his, but he was wounded. Beson's nails were long, ragged, and filthy-more like animal claws than human nails-and he liked to tell his Lesser Warders (on dark winter's nights when a gruesome tale seeme required) about the time he had slit a prisoner's neck from ear to ear with one of those thumbnails.

Now one drew a bloody line down Peter's left cheek as Beson flailed his way by. The cut zigzagged from temple to jawline, missing Peter's left eye by hardly half an inch. Peter's cheek fell open in a flap, and all his life he would bear the scar of his encounter with Beson there.

Peter grew angry. All the things that had happened to him over the last ten days seemed to slam together in his head, and for a moment he was almost-not quite, but almost-angry enough to kill the brutish Chief Warder instead of just teaching him a lesson he would never, never forget.

As Beson turned, he was rocked by left looks and right jabs. The jabs would ordinarily have done little damage, but the pound and a half of metal in Peter's fist turned them into torpedoes.