"There. Thou art safe from pestilent airs, whelp."

Allegreto looked down over his bright blue mask and tucked away his spare bag of herbs. "God grant you mercy," he said behind the scarf, the most courteous words he'd yet spoken to Ruck.

He answered with only a short nod. Allegreto looked foolish in his sapphire kerchief; foolish and young. Ruck wondered if it was possible to make a cuckold of a castrato—his mind pondered on the wordplay until he realized what he was thinking. He slapped Hawk overhard with the reins and yelled the order to move.

"Thou hast seen plague, then?" Allegreto asked from inside his muffle.

"Yea," Ruck said.

"I was but a child when it came again. My father took me into the country, away from the malignant atmosphere."

"Give thanks for that."

"How comes it thou art certain it touches thee not?"

Ruck rode in silence, watching the trees ahead for any sign of hazard.

"Hast thou a charm?"

"Nay. None of man's making."

"What, then?" Allegreto urged. "What protects thee?"

"Nothing." Ruck frowned at the sandy track ahead.

"Something it must be. Tell me." When he got no answer, he raised his voice. "Tell me, Englishman!"

"I know only that all about me died, and I lived," Ruck said at last. "In the last pestilence my man sickened. I stayed with him when the priest refused to come, but it never touched me."

"The hunchback? He sickened and lived? He is protected, too?"

Ruck shrugged.

Allegreto urged his horse a little closer. "By hap thy presence confers some immunity."

"Haps." Ruck looked at him with faint amusement. "Stay close, whelp."

He kept the company to a brisk pace, not caring to tarry long outside the sound of bells and habitation. But the mist yet lay heavy in the late morning, and Princess Melanthe demanded frequent rests from the sway of the litter. Ruck held to his austere outer composure, but he smoldered inside. He was regretting his decision to chance the Wyrale with such a small guard. This persistent vapor could hide too much. It seemed to cling, salty and still, hanging as close as Allegreto clung to Ruck. The company said little, but he could feel their nerves, and Allegreto was strung as tight as a lutestring. Only Princess Melanthe seemed careless of the atmosphere's malevolent influence. Ruck half wondered if she'd called the mist herself.

They left the forest to cross the marsh far later in the afternoon than he had intended. Moorland stretched away into white nothingness ahead. The vapor closed behind them. When the maid sent word forward that Princess Melanthe's falcon was restless and Her Highness wished to pause again, he threw Allegreto's reins to the sergeant-at-arms and dropped back to ride abreast of the litter.

"Your Highness, I pray you," he said to the litter's closed drape, "if it displease you not—I advise all haste to continue."

"Iwysse, then let us do so," she agreed in English, a disembodied voice from the curtain. "I will calm Gryngolet well enough."

Such an easy capitulation was not what he had expected. He was left with an unfocused sense of impatience, a restlessness that seemed to call for something more to be said.

"I mind your safe conduct, madam," he said, as if she had argued with him.

Her fingertips appeared, swathed in ermine, but she did not pull back the drape as the litter rocked along. "I give myself to your will, Green Sire," she answered modestly.

He gazed at the fine elegance of her fingers and looked down at his own mailed glove resting atop Hawk's saddle bow. The contrast, the delicacy of her hand set against his metal-clad, cold-leather fist, sent a surge of carnal agitation through his body.

In a low voice, past the hard rock in his throat, he murmured, "Passing fair ye are, my lady." He stared at the reins in his hand. "My will burns me."

As soon as he said it he wished it retrieved—repelled and aroused at once by his own boldness.

Her fingers disappeared. "Faith, sir," she said in a different tone, "me like not such runisch men as thee. Study thou on my gentle Allegreto and save thy love-talking for thy horse."

For a long instant Ruck listened to the steady thud of Hawk's hooves in the sand. Her words seemed to pass over him—coolly spoken, unreal.

Then mortification flashed through him, a fountain of chagrin. He closed his fist hard on the reins: his large and rough and runisch fist, green and silver in her colors, darkened with mud in her service, stiff with cold, with shame and passion.

"I am at your commandment, Your Highness," he said rigidly and spurred Hawk to the fore.

* * *

As Cara prepared Melanthe's bed, she said, "My lady's grace took pleasure in the cockles this morn?"

Melanthe looked up from painting silver gilt on Gryngolet's talons. Her pot gleamed in the light of the half-closed lanthorn. "Nay—I had not the stomach for cockles this day. I made a present of them to our knight."

Cara gave it all away—all of it—in the instant of horror that crossed her features. It was gone in a moment, but too late. They both knew. Cara sat still as stone.

Melanthe smiled. "Dost thou suppose he will enjoy them?"

"My lady—" The maid seemed to lose her voice.

"Thou art a very foolish girl," Melanthe said softly. "I believe I shall loose Allegreto on thee."

Cara wet her lips. "My sister." She whispered it. "They have my sister, the Riata."

Melanthe hid a jolt of shock at the news. "Then thy sister is already dead," she said. "Look to thine own life now."

"My lady—ten years have I served you faithfully."

Melanthe gave a quiet laugh. "Naught but a moment it wants, to turn treacherous." She placed a careful brush stroke. "Yes, I believe I shall have Allegreto kill thee. Not tonight. I'm not certain when. But soon. Thou hast served me faithfully for such a span of years, I shall be kind. Thou needst not to beware it long."

Cara was sitting on her knees, staring at the pillow in her hands, panting with fear. Melanthe stirred the silver paint and continued with her task.

"Thou dost love thy sister greatly," Melanthe said in a mild tone.

Cara was shaking visibly. She nodded. A single teardrop of terror gathered and tumbled down her face.

"Such love is ruinous. Thou placed thy own sister in jeopardy by showing it. Now you are both doomed."

Cara's hands squeezed rhythmically on the pillow. Suddenly she turned her face to Melanthe. "You're the spawn of Satan, you and the rest of them," she hissed low. "What do such as you know of love?"

"Why, nothing, of course," Melanthe said, placing a careful stroke of silver. "I take good care to know nothing of it."

SEVEN

Allegreto's dread of plague was such that the youth forewent his place with the Princess Melanthe and bedded down so close to his living talisman that his hand curled, childlike, around Ruck's upper arm. What his mistress thought of this desertion was left unsaid. Ruck did not see her. As usual, she left her litter only after her tent was pitched, shifting from one silken cage to the other without showing herself.

As Ruck lay in the dark with the fire fading, staring upward into nighttime oblivion, he had a bitter thought that it might have been to his advantage that Allegreto had left the tent, if Ruck had possessed foresight enough to discourage this inconvenient transfer of the youth's attachment to himself—and if she had liked such runisch men as he. But she did not, and Allegreto went quickly to sleep in the blue mask, firmly holding to Ruck's arm, as effective as any governess in protecting his lady.

Not that she required protection, beyond a scornful tongue and that mocking laugh.

Ruck attempted to form a prayer, asking forgiveness of Isabelle and God for his carnal lust. But his prayers were never of the inspired kind; he could not think of much more to avow than he was full repentant and would do better.

Not that he ever did do better, for every confession day he had a penance laid upon him for lusting in his heart after women. Sometimes for the mortal sin of easing himself, too, which he would have done now, at the price of barring from communion and any number of Ave Marys and hours on his knees before the altar, if Allegreto had not had such tight hold of his right arm. He was not a godly man; his mind went where it would and his body had limits to its rectitude, but he had dishonored himself, and Isabelle, too, this day.

He had the Princess Melanthe to thank for saving him from committing real adultery—and that only because she liked not runisch men. It was no virtue of his own that had saved him. If she were to rise and call him now into her tent, he would go.

He felt sullen and ashamed, thinking of it. He should get away from her. He should go home, having nowhere else pressing to go at the moment.

* * *

He slept badly, dreaming plague dreams, old dreams, in which he was lost and searching. The howl of a wolf woke him, shaking him out of uneasy dozing. He lifted his head. The fire had gone to dead coals—there was no sign of a guard. The wind had come up, blowing off the vapor. By the height of the moon over the moorland, it was three hours to dawn. Pierre should already have woken him to share the last and most arduous watch. With a silent curse Ruck slipped out of his warm place. Allegreto's hand fell away from him.