He fell sideways over the lodged sword, his exclamation of agony audible above the noise as he hit the ground on his injured side. He rolled onto his back.

The Green Sire stood above his liege, sword point at his throat. Lancaster lay weaponless, injured, felled—and still made no surrender. The crowd held its breath so still that the panting of the two knights seemed the loudest sound.

Her champion looked up at her, holding the sword steady. The blood on his face and hair was darkening, gathering dust; he looked like a devil risen from some pit, imploring her to save him.

"My lady!" The words were an exhalation of despair.

Melanthe lifted her plume and fanned herself. She laughed aloud, in the silence, so they could all hear.

"Yes, thou mayest have pity upon him," she said, with a mocking bow of her head.

Her knight pulled his sword from the duke's throat and flung it half across the list. As Lancaster sat up, the Green Sire fell on his knees before his prince, head bowed. He pressed his gauntleted hands over his eyes. Slowly, like a tree falling, he leaned lower and lower, until his hands and forehead touched the ground.

"Pax, my dread lord." His muffled voice was agonized. "Peace unto you."

Painfully Lancaster hauled himself to his feet, standing against the support of one of his attendants. Still in his helmet, he seemed to overlook the man in the dirt at his feet. He searched out Melanthe on the escafaut, and then turned his back to her, walking unsteadily out of the lists with his attendants clustering about him.

Melanthe rose and descended the steps. As she walked toward the gate, youths and men-at-arms and onlookers parted, gazing at her. She moved to the center of the dusty lists, where the green knight still knelt with his face to the ground, blood matting his hair and staining his neck.

"Green Sire," she said mildly.

He sat back, staring for a long moment at the hem of her gown. Then he wiped his gauntlet across his eyes, smearing blood with rust. He turned his face up to her.

All light of worship and chivalry was gone from his look. He was still breathing hard, his teeth pressed together to contain it.

She knelt and reached for his right arm, tying the jesses about the vambrace and mail. The heat of his body radiated from metal armor. Gryngolet's varvels made a silvery plink against his arm, the precious stones casting tiny sprays of light that played over steel, coalescing green and white as the rings came to rest.

On a level with him, she looked up from her task into his eyes. She could not have said what she saw there—hatred or misery or bewilderment—but it was surely not love that stared back at her from under his begrimed black lashes.

From the persistent tickle of recollection, memory sprang sudden and full blown into her mind.

Once, long ago, for a whim, she had pulled a thorn from this lion's paw. She remembered him, she remembered when and where, an image stirred more by his height and bearing and the baffled agony in his face than by his features. Just so he had submitted, disarmed of all defense, as they took away his wife and money from him.

He repaid her today, then, for that emerald on his helm. Whatever precarious place he had striven to gain in Lancaster's heart, with his fighting skills and command of men and vow to find glory, was vanished now. He knelt before her like a man dazed.

Apology sprang to her lips, regret for his maimed honor, his lost prince. It hovered on her tongue.

"Thou art a fool," she murmured instead, "to think a man can serve two masters." She lifted a varvel and let it fall against his armor, smiling. "A splendid fool. Come into my service to stay, be it thy desire."

He stared at her. A sound like a sob escaped him, a deeper breath, harsh through his teeth.

Melanthe rose. She extended her hand, touching his shoulder to make a gesture for the crowd. "Rise."

His squire brought the destrier forward. Melanthe took the silver lead. They smelled of sweat and dust and hot steel, the knight and his mount, perfumed with blood and combat. When he had mounted, she looked up at him.

"If thou art vassal unto me," she said, "I shall love and value thee as Lancaster never could." And with that snare set, she turned before he answered, leaving his hunchbacked squire to lead him from the lists.

* * *

"Away, away!" Melanthe held Gryngolet on her wrist, urging the flustered falconers of Ombriere to haste. "I will away!"

She turned her palfrey in the castle's empty courtyard, watched only by her own retinue and a few dumbstruck servants. Outside the walls the sound of the tournament was a distant rise and fall of temper, the tensions between soldiers and squires and townsmen flaring. Melanthe cared nothing for that—it was the duke's difficulty if he could not control his people—she only wanted escape from the tumult, releasing her own tensions in a flying gallop over the countryside with Gryngolet aloft before her.

Allegreto stood sullenly under the arched entrance to the hall, waiting for a horse, one of his eyes turning black from his morning in the town stocks. He had not had a difficult time of it; no taunting of a foreign stranger could equal the excitement of a tournament, but he glared at Melanthe all the same.

Her greyhound strained against its leash as Melanthe felt her heart strain for the open country. She had seen herons and ducks by the river; yesterday Lancaster had given her his leave to take what she could—and if he regretted it now, she was beyond having to care. The falconers, two underlings left behind to mind the mews, finally secured their drum and swung up double onto a thin poorly horse, carrying a trussed chicken in a bag in case the hunt should have no success.

Melanthe reined her palfrey toward the gate. Across the bridge and through the barbican—and she could turn away from tournaments and courts and crowds and pretend she was alone with the open sky. Alone, as Gryngolet flew, but for the escort of hunters and falconers that chased the bird's wild courses.

Melanthe, too, was followed. Allegreto and Cara and a Riata rode behind her; Lancaster and Gian Navona and the ghost of Ligurio hounded her; and another hunted her now—the image of a man in green armor, bending slowly to the ground with his hands covering his eyes.

All of them her constant companions, ever in pursuit, never lost to sight. Spur her horse as she might, she was only free as the falcon flew free—until she killed, or was called back again to the brilliant jewels and feathers of her lure.

FOUR

A witch, she was.

Ruck stood beside one of the shadowed columns in the cathedral, staring blindly at the scaffolding beneath a newly installed stained glass window.

He felt robbed. He felt utterly pillaged.

Where was his lady, his bright unblemished lady, lovelokkest of all, who made the blood and boredom and solitary days worth bearing? He hadn't asked that she be with him. He had never thought he was that worthy, but he had held himself to her standard—when they laughed at him, when he hurt for a woman's body to the point of despair, he cleaved to the impossible measure that she set by her own perfection.

He had dreamed about her in his bed or on the cold ground; he saw her beside the Virgin in the churches. He even imagined her with Isabelle in the nunnery, praying for his soul, both of them together, both of them the same, fair blue eyes and fair blond tresses and a face too lovely for any woman on earth...

He turned his head and rested his bandaged temple against the pillar. The cut across his skull burned. His cheek stung and throbbed in spite of Pierre's salve.

The reality of Princess Melanthe had been like a bucket of ice-cold water thrown in his face. He was angry at himself, but he reserved his deepest fury and disgust for her—the witch—she probably had ensorcelled him. How else could he have managed to forget what she was?

The Arch-Fiend's whore, that was what she was, curling like a silken tiger on the bed with her Satan's cub caressing her. He could not even find the image of fairness anymore. It had vanished from his soul, blasted by the sight of sable hair and eyes the color of unearthly twilight, the deep strange inner hue of hellish flowers. He recognized them now—but he had not remembered them so vivid-dark, or her coldness so numbing.

She had laughed. He could hear it still, like an echo in the empty cold air of the cathedral, floating above the endless murmur of the priests' chantries. The sound was branded on him. He had stood with swordpoint to the throat of his gallant liege, who had fought on wounded, unbowed, with no thought of submission—and she had laughed.

The windows glowed with the last faint light of day, spreading colored radiance over the floors and columns, subtle warmth in the soaring blackness. Beyond the cathedral walls he could hear faint sounds of celebration. A few knights came and went in the nave, kneeling to cleanse themselves with prayer, and one youth had been keeping solitary vigil in the Lady Chapel for hours. Ruck stayed to himself, using the pillar for a prop when his cushion grew too uncomfortable for his knees.

Outside of duty and the exercise yard, he spent most of his waking hours in chapels or cathedrals or churches of one sort or another. At first it had been the hardest effort of his knighthood—tedious to the point of screaming agony—but after thirteen years he had come to peace with the cold stone spaces and the fact that his knees could not support hours on the cushion. He stood now more than he knelt, sparing his frame for the field and fighting, sparing his soul with a regular confession of this small sin. He never even got a real penance, the priests being sympathetic in the matter.