He simply stood his ground, and stared at them, hoping to unnerve them with his silence.
Stalemate. They stared at him, not sure what to do since he wasn't reacting to their taunts in the way they were used to. He stared at them, not daring them to start anything, but not backing down either.
Robin made a movement toward the slit in her skirt that concealed her knife. He put his hand on her wrist to stop her.
Unfortunately, that movement broke the tenuous stalemate.
"Yah, Rune's a slut an' her friends'r sluts!" said the first one, loudly. "Right, Hill, Warren?" He grinned as the other two nodded. "Hey, boys, I gotta idea! We got our fill'a her_so how 'bout we get a taste'f her friend, eh? They say Gyppo women is real hot _"
And he made the mistake of grabbing for Robin_who had fended off more bullies in her time than there were people in this village. As she launched herself at her would-be molester, Kestrel sprang at the one grabbing for him.
Fighting off assassins for most of your life tends to make you a survivor; it also teaches you every dirty trick anyone ever invented. Kestrel turned into a whirlwind of fists and feet, and Robin was putting her own set of street-fighting skills into action. He hadn't wanted this to turn into a physical confrontation, but the bullies had forced it on him, and now they were going to find out that the odds of three large men against a tiny man and woman had been very uneven_but not in their favor.
He kicked the legs out from beneath the one nearest him by slamming his foot into the fools knee before the man had a notion that he had even moved. The bully went down on his face and started to scramble up, putting his rear in perfect target-range. Kestrel followed his kick in the rump with one to the privates so hard that the bully could not even scream, only gasp and double up into a ball. Robin had already done the same to the fool who had grabbed her, except that she hadn't bothered to knock his legs out from under him first. And she hadn't hit him with the knee, either; he was expecting that. He had backed out of knee range, laughing. She had snap-kicked him as she had intended all along, and the laugh turned into a gasp as she put her full weight behind the kick. She had followed up her foot to the groin with a backhanded blow in his face with the hilt of her dagger that put him to the ground with a bleeding nose and a few less teeth.
They both converged on the third bully, the one who seemed to be the leader, slamming him up against the side of the wagon before he had quite comprehended the fact that his two friends were no longer standing.
They knocked the breath out of him, and Robin had her dagger across his throat before he could blink. Kestrel grabbed his wrists and twisted his arms back while he was still stunned, holding him so that no matter how he moved, it would hurt. And the more he moved, the more it would hurt.
"Now," breathed Robin, as the bully's eyes bulged with fear and the edge of her blade made a thin, painful cut across his throat, "I think you owe us an apology. Don't you?"
Kestrel jerked the bully's arms so that they wrenched upwards in their sockets. He gasped, and nodded, his eyes filling with tears of pain. Now the very fact that nothing of this confrontation could be seen from the square or the houses around it worked in their favor. So long as no one missed these fools and came looking for them, if things went well.
Then again_they probably won't come looking for someone who might be beating the pulp out of two strangers. No one wants to know what these three are doing, I'll bet.
"I also think it would be very wise of you to make that apology, like a gentleman, and say nothing more about this," she continued. "Don't you?"
Frantically, he nodded, his eyes never leaving her face. The bloodthirsty expression there would have terrified a denser man than he.
"Just a few things I want you to think about, before you make that apology," she said harshly. "You might have what you think is a clever idea, about claiming how we attacked you, after we drive off." She shook her head, as he broke out in a cold sweat. "That would be a very, very stupid idea. First of all, you'd end up looking like a fool. Why, look how small we are! We weigh less than you do, the two of us put together! Think how brave you'd look, saying that two tiny people attacked you and beat you up, and one of them a girl! You would wind up looking like a weakling as well as a fool, and everyone from here to Kingsford would be laughing at you. What's more, they'd say you can't be any kind of a man if you let a girl beat you up. They'd say you're fey. And they'd start beating you up, any time you left home."
The sick look in his eyes told Kestrel that her words had hit home, but she wasn't finished with him.
"There's another reason why that would be a very, very stupid idea," she continued. "We're Gypsies. Do you know just what that means?"
He shook his head, very slightly.
"That means that we have all kinds of ways to find out what you've been doing, even when we aren't around. It means we have even more ways of getting at you afterwards_and all of them will come when you aren't expecting them." Her eyes widened, and her voice took on a singing quality_
And Kestrel sensed the undercurrent of music in the mind, music that could not be detected by the ears, the music he only heard when someone was using Bardic Magic.
Robin's voice matched that music, turning her sing-song into a real spell, a spell meant to convince this fool that every word she said was nothing less than absolute truth. "We'll come in the night, when you're all alone_catch you on a path and send monsters to chase you until your heart bursts! We'll send invisible things, night-hags, and vampires to your bed, to sit on your chest and squeeze the breath from your lungs while you try to scream in pain and can't! We'll come at you from the full moon, and set a fire in your brain, until you run mad, howling like a dog!"
The bully was shaking so hard he could hardly stand now.
"Or_we'll wait_and one night, when you're sitting at your ease _"