He wasn't afraid of ghosts—he'd buried all his family in unconsecrated ground and found their only haunting to be the gentle, lost voices in his plague dreams. Poor silent Pierre didn't even have a voice to haunt dreams, unless his soul found one with the wild wolves that ran free in this place, the way he had never been able to run in life.

* * *

Melanthe slept. She kept trying to rally, rising to the weary surface and failing, losing herself again in the sweet dreamless warmth. With her wakening mind she knew she must not let sleep have her, but she had lost the will to fight it, falling back, luxurious collapse into rest and safety.

Full light flooded the tent, coloring everything with a rosy tint, when she finally held herself awake. The light shocked her; she made the effort to pull herself from the depths. It was difficult, as it had never been before. She had slept oversound, and the slumber still sucked at her.

The difference came slowly. She realized that she was alone. Without Allegreto's restless clinging presence at her side, without Cara's quiet rustle.

The whole camp was unusually quiet. Her Green Knight always did his best to restrain the men, she knew, attempting to serve his indolent lady by maintaining peace of a morning—little as he might approve of her slothful habits—but this morning he had succeeded well beyond his usual measure. There was only a faint chink of harness, none of the low talk and dragging sounds of packing and loading.

She must have outslept all. Or they were still confounded by the night's events and sat bemused. She sighed and stretched, enjoying the soft liberty of the furs.

Melanthe smiled as she thought of her knight, how he would lift that one dark eyebrow, conveying utter disdain while he spoke in the most courteous of phrases. He scorned her, this green man—scorned and still desired her.

It was a compound new to Melanthe. She was not accustomed to disdain, not at least from the men who wanted her. She might already have pursued the matter in some way, if not for Allegreto. And Gian.

Pulling an ermine about her shoulders against the icy air, she sat up. There was still no sound from outside, nor any scent of toast browning at the fire—nor even the scent of a fire at all.

The strangeness struck her. Her heart began to thump. The poisoned cockles—had any but the hunchback eaten them? Wild thoughts possessed her. Allegreto, nightwalker, assassin, capable of any butchery, had been driven half to madness by the fear she had roused in him. And this was wilderness, the knight had said, a place beyond the king's control, resort of outlaws.

She looked quickly around—but there—there was Gryngolet, sitting hooded and calm on her perch. Melanthe slipped her dagger from beneath her pillow and left the furs, shivering. She broke open a chest, ransacking it for something to pull over her nakedness. The azure wool of a heavy tunic prickled her skin through linen. Her hands had begun to shake a little, suddenly anticipating what nightmare she might find outside.

Covered, she knelt at the opening of the tent and listened. A horse blew softly, champing its bit, but there was no other sound of man or beast. She held the dagger at ready and pulled the drape slightly aside.

A few feet away she saw a man's mail sabaton, old-fashioned, with a blunted toe. An upright leg—through a slightly wider slit, she could see two armored legs—he sat motionless on a half-rotted log a few yards from the tent. She closed her eyes, fortifying her mind for any horror—a dead man tied into a lifelike position, a decapitated torso. She lifted her head a little and saw the hem of a green-and-silver coat of arms.

One toe moved, pushing a cockleshell a fraction of an inch, first one way, then the other.

Relief shuddered through her. She had half expected a bloodbath and bodies in the sand—she had not even trusted those greaves and knee poleyns to belong to a still-living man until she had seen the faint, ordinary movement.

It was her knight, then, fretted with her. Following on the surge of reprieve, Melanthe felt an odd spurt of good humor. Had she slept so late that he'd sent all the others ahead and stayed to scold her?

The idea pleased her, but she recognized the absurdity of it instantly. He would do no such thing—it was not his nature to openly rebuke his liege, and she had given him provocation enough. She found slippers and pulled them on, grabbed a mantle, and pushed aside the curtain, emerging from the tent.

His war-horse, its green-dyed coat long since washed to a handsomer gray, pricked its ears toward her as it stood by the log. The knight sat for a moment with no expression, his breath frosting, his helm in his lap. He looked up at her.

It was the only time in her life that any man but her husband or her father had not risen to greet her. That jolted her, made the empty, trampled clearing of marsh grass stranger yet, eerie in its silence and the blank way that he looked at her.

"They have fled," he said. Then he seemed to come to himself and stood with a metallic sound. "My lady—I beg your forgiveness."

"Fled?" she echoed. "All of them?"

She stared around the barren camp. The only horse was his. They had ransacked the supplies and taken the animals, leaving bags and bundles broken open.

"Allegreto?" she asked breathlessly.

His brows drew together. "He is gone, madam."

She gripped the dagger, holding her hands pressed over it. "Gone."

His scowl deepened. He nodded, watching her.

"He is gone?" She could hardly bring herself to speak. "How long?"

"I know not. Two hours I was absent, before dawn." He made a slight gesture toward the ground. "The tracks—they scattered apart from one another. Your maid, also. This talk of plague—it inflamed a terror."

She was alone. Free. She had done it. But she had not meant to do it so completely.

She met his green eyes and saw everything he thought of her. She let him think it. In his armor he stood perfectly still, black-haired and silent, a solidly potent presence on this empty moor.

Allegreto was truly gone. He had left her.

"Where went he? What will happen to him?" She stared at the horizon.

"I cannot say which marks are his, Your Highness. We can wait here. Mayhap he will grow frightened and return."

Melanthe kept gazing at the horizon, the empty horizon.

"I would seek him for you, my lady," he said, "but I cannot leave you alone."

"Do not leave me!" she said.

He dipped his dark head. "Nay, Your Highness."

She looked about her again. It was so strange: she had never in her life been alone—never without attendants, never with one man, not even in her husband's bedchamber where his pages always slept on pallets beside the bed. The sky suddenly seemed bigger, dizzyingly huge, the moorland vast.

"God shield me," she whispered. How beautiful it was, how quiet, only the wind and the wild fowl speaking far off at that strand of silver light where the sky came down to the land.

"By hap they will all come into their senses and return to us," he said.

She realized that he was trying to reassure her. She turned to him. "Nay—they will not, between fear of plague and retribution."

"Then they live outlawed," he said simply.

His plain view of things seemed oddly befitting in this place, but she said, "I cannot comprehend Allegreto as an outlaw."

He did not return her faint smile. In his expression she saw the truth of what he thought of Allegreto's prospects in the wilderness.

"What threatens?" she asked quickly.

He hesitated. "Bogs and quicksands," he said at last. "Brigands. Poison water." He shifted, making that faint armor noise. "I heard wolves in the night."

She pulled her lip through her teeth. "Melike not to linger here," she said, changing to English because it somehow soothed her to hear him speak in his own tongue, a thin common thread between them.

"I ne like it nought myseluen," he agreed, shifting language in response as he always did, "but we shall dwell here for today, so that they moten come again to us if they so will."

Melanthe shivered in the wind, pushing her hands beneath her mantle. "Thou art too merciful," she said. "Traitors deserven no such indulgence."

Ruck watched her hug her arms about herself. He narrowed his eyes. "Indulgence they shall nought have, Your Highness. But it were your lo—" He almost said "lover," but it curdled on his tongue. "—your courtier who unnerved them." It was she herself had been the one to set the seal on the party's panic, with her spiteful games, but he did not say so. "Away from Allegreto, they mayen think well again."

She stared toward the horizon. She seemed smaller somehow than she had seemed before to Ruck, the cloak bundled around her, less elegant and imperious.

"Allegreto," she echoed, as if her tongue were not her own. She made a sound of frenzied laughter, and then stopped it, biting hard on her lower lip. Her knees seemed to give beneath her. She sat down on the ground and stared at the horizon, rocking. Then she leapt up again. "I see him!"

Ruck turned sharply. He squinted, scanning the moor—and saw the flicker of yellow motion. "Nay, Your Highness. It be no more than a plover bird." He looked back at her, but she had already sagged to the ground again. One lock of her dark hair had escaped the golden net that confined it, flying across her cheek in the cold breeze. He feared she was sickening in her mind for her lover—she seemed so lost and bewildered.