He looked into his father's eyes. "And in love, my lord."

Gian's thumb moved over his cheek. "You have your mother's comeliness," he murmured. "And my wit. We'll look far higher for you, sweet son. Let her have her English clod, or take her as your mistress. But no—" He grinned, tilting his head back. "No, I forget, you're a virgin still, poor Allegreto, on account of playing the role I gave you. And did well at that, too, as Lady Melanthe informed me with some wrath. Let me find a woman to teach you pleasure first, lovely boy. Then you can decide if this sour little milkmaid will satisfy you." He stepped back, disengaging himself gently from Allegreto's still clinging hold, and gave him another kiss.

"So touching!" the princess said viciously. She stood up. In the last shafts of light from the window, she was only a black silhouette against it, her hair haloed, sunset sparkling on the golden net and buttons lined down her sleeves. "Where have they taken the body?"

Allegreto shrugged. "The charnel house, I suppose."

"Fool! You should have found out!"

"My lady, I made sure he was dead and left him with the doctor and one weeping squire. I wasn't required to follow him to the grave!"

"You're certain of this poison," she said.

Allegreto lifted his brows. "I put a misericorde in his heart, my lady," he said. "He did not bleed."

She made a faint sound in her throat. Cara was afraid for her mistress suddenly; afraid she would swoon, afraid Gian would see and kill them all in his jealousy.

But Princess Melanthe only stared for a long moment at Allegreto. Then she said, "I'll not have him thrown in a pauper's grave. He will be buried properly, by a priest, in a church. There will be a stone made, marked by that name the king called him. I wish a chantry endowed for his soul." She moved toward the door. "Find him, Allegreto, and see to it. Tonight."

Gian caught her arm. "My lady," he said coldly, "you pay him such respect?"

"He prayed too much," she said. "I don't wish some tedious ghost haunting me with aves and hosannas." She pulled her arm from his hand. "And I do not care for restraint, from you or any man, Gian. Do not touch me so again."

He smiled down at her. "You're an unruly little dragon. I wouldn't have you slip your couple."

"Hold me with love, Gian," she said smoothly. "That works best."

"No, my dear," he murmured. "The fear that comes of love works best."

"Then I'm on a long leash," she said, sweeping from the chamber. "Come, Cara—why stand there like a gaping trout? See that Allegreto does my bidding." She paused at the door. "And pay no mind to this talk of looking higher for him. Marry your English squire—and if you're clever, you'll still have Allegreto panting after you as Gian does me. And then we may rule the world, I promise you."

TWENTY-FIVE

There were voices. It was a great well of stone, its compass lost in darkness, echoing, with shadows that moved and hulked across the curving wall.

He had no body. He could see and hear, but the voices made no sense. It had been only an instant's shift, a blink between crowds and color and the poison cup in his hand, then strangling death and this place. A deep horror possessed him. He was in Purgatory; demon-haunted; he had died without shrive or absolution of killing a man.

One of the demons counted. It was invisible, but he could hear the clink of its claws with each tally. "Two hundred and fifty," it said with a lurid satisfaction.

Was that his sentence? So many years? Fear drowned him. He tried to speak, to plead that Isabelle had prayed for his soul, but he could not speak. He had no tongue. He remembered that there had been no prayers. Isabelle was dead, as dead as he, burned for heresy.

The well echoed with fearful murmurs, with scrapes and footsteps, and then a great crash that thundered and rolled about him. He heard something come toward him splashing and dripping, and wanted to scream with fear of what monster it would be to gnaw and tear at his flesh for two hundred fifty years.

"He does look dead," the monster said in bad French. "A merry poison, this. I could make good use of it in my art."

"What, to physic your patients to death and bring them out again! Dream, you mountebank—you couldn't buy it in a thousand years."

Allegreto's reverberating voice shocked him. Like a demon-angel, the youth floated in the air, appearing and vanishing. He hadn't expected Allegreto to be here.

"I'd have him wake." Now it was his squire John Marking. "Never did I contract to be party to murder."

Had they all died? Their voices and faces kept slipping away from him. His nose hurt. He was dimly surprised to have a nose. He tried to open his eyes to see if the monster was gnawing on it, but he only had eyes sometimes, and other times not.

They were demons, he thought. Demons with voices and faces that he knew. He refused to answer them when they demanded that he wake. It was the Devil calling him. If it called in Melanthe's voice, then he would be sure it was the Devil.

The monster touched him, cold and wet. He tried to jerk back, his head hitting stone—he had a head suddenly, because it hurt. He'd never thought of this. He knew that his dead soul would be like a body so that it might be tortured for his sins, but he had not imagined it would be by single parts, with the rest still gone.

The wet thing licked over his face, a loathsome cold tongue, water in his eyes and on his chest. He had a chest. And a heart. The Devil spoke in the voice of a maid.

"Wake now, my lord." It was the gentlewoman who had served Melanthe. He could see her through slitted and dripping eyes, and felt sorry that she had died, too. Wolves, he thought. Wolves had eaten her. "Try to wake," she said. "Drink this."

He turned his head away. "De'il," he mumbled, the word barely passing his throat. "Deviel."

"He's alive," Allegreto said. "Are you satisfied?"

He could not make sense of it. Alive. Dead. Purgatory, and these were his demons. He didn't think the worst could have begun yet, for Melanthe was not among them, but he had no doubt that she would come and take delight to torture him. She had smiled as he drank her poison, knowing that she killed him.

* * *

Allegreto returned from the river, beckoning to Cara from the door at the top of the stairs. She was glad to leave this awful place, abandoned as it seemed to be by the monks who had built it, indeed, by God Himself. The great round cellar still held a few ale-kegs, but the water well dominated the brewery, a black pit as wide across as a castle turret.

She hurried up the arch of stone steps, leaving the water bucket full and one candle burning for their prisoner. Allegreto closed the heavy door, barred and locked it.

"I'll walk with you to the lodge," he said. "There's a horse, and a guide to take you back."

She followed him up the wide, sloped passage. At the outer door he opened the wicket and doused the candle. They both ducked through the small door.

A half-moon was rising, shedding light on the empty monastery. Buildings rose about them in black and gray bulks. She pulled her hood over her head and lifted her skirt as he led her across a grassy plot. Her footsteps echoed softly as they passed onto the paved cloister.

A half-year past she would have been terrified out of her mind to walk here in the silence and emptiness. But Allegreto was with her, and not even the ghosts of dead men could frighten her. An old monastery on a summer night, only abandoned because the monks had preferred some better place, held nothing so fearsome as he was.

He walked ahead of her, noiseless, turning through another passage where the moonlight shone in a pale arch at the other end. They followed the overgrown road to the gatehouse, and Allegreto gave her his hand to help her over the slanted timbers of the half-fallen door.

He let go of her instantly. But he stopped, facing Cara in the starlight. "Is it true—or did you say it for my father?"

She couldn't look into his face. Since they had left Bowland, she in Princess Melanthe's household and he in Gian's, there had been nothing but the briefest dealings between them, messages passed for her mistress and no more. She was safe with him, she knew; she did not even fear ghosts with him beside her, but Guy had been given a place with the princess as a yeoman of horse. He was well within Allegreto's reach.

"No," she lied. "No, I just said it, so that—" She stopped.

"So that my father would not force you." Mortification hovered in his voice. "I wouldn't have—I didn't, did I? I could have said yes to him."

"Let us not speak of this." She started past, suddenly fearing him as she had not before, fearing that they were alone here in the empty dark.

"Are you betrothed to him?"

"No." She said it too quickly, too breathlessly. That was to protect Guy, but she had no lie to protect herself if Allegreto chose to constrain her by strength.

"Do you think I'll kill him?" he said. "I won't kill him."

She stopped and looked back across a distance of a yard. He propped his foot on the warped and canted door, the moonlight on his shoulders. "I only wondered if you would go home with us."

"Of course. My sister."

In a silken tone he asked, "Will Guy save and keep your sister?"

"You sound like your father."

"How not? I am his son. And Navona alone can steal your sister safe from the Riata."