He tried to conjure Isabelle's glowing features, tried to ask her to beg God to spare His children. Or if the pestilence must come again to castigate mankind, to let it take Ruck this time, so that he would not have to watch the whole world die around him once more. He was as wicked as any other; he deserved affliction as surely as the next man.

And yet he did not mean it. He could not see Isabelle in his mind, not anymore, and the willful flame of life burned stubbornly, deaf to fear and fueled by flesh—he realized amid his despair that he was hungry. The Princess Melanthe was in his charge, another link to human clay. She was worldly passion, hot desire—and like enough she would be glad to eat, as well.

* * *

He caught up Hawk's reins, untangling them from the brush. "Come, be no cause for us to biden here."

He said nothing of plague. She asked naught, only looked down at him from the pillion with strange innocence, as if she did not comprehend the truth of their situation even yet. She held the furs awkwardly about her shoulders, her fingers pale and stained with dried blood beneath their load of glittering rings. Her eyes seemed sooty dark instead of clear, tiny lines at the corners that he had not noticed before. The cold made her cheeks red, marring their smooth whiteness. With wonder he realized that she was not now so very beautiful as he had thought.

No longer a princess—only a woman, not even comely, but cold and apprehensive. And instead of repelling him, it made all his senses rise a hundredfold in response, hot greed to protect and possess her, things beyond honor or vows.

With a sudden move he turned his face away from her. He gathered Hawk's reins and led the horse out of the trees down to the ferry landing. Across the river Mercy, a mile distant, the castle of Lyerpool was a silent gray shadow; no ships lying in the water below it; no sign of life that he could discern on the other side.

"We moten cross while the tide runs in," he said, halting the destrier.

He raised his arms to her. She shifted her skirts, showing a flash of her white hose and green long-toed boots. She put her hands on his shoulders, but he barely felt that through his armor; his mind was fastened on the brief image of her boots and ankles, trimmed in silver and fine as an elven's slippers.

He released her instantly, but she did not move away, only took hold of his sword belt and stood beside him. The furs dropped to the ground.

He reached up and yanked the ties free on the bags, searching out her cloak. The emerald wool came loose in a puff of breeze as he dragged it down.

She still held to his belt, as if loath to let go. The shock of her lover's death, the sudden transition in circumstances from rich comfort to cold peril—he would not have blamed any woman who succumbed to distress. But since the fit had left her, she seemed subdued, even sleepy, indifferent to time or destination.

When she made no move away from him, he stepped back, disengaging her hand from his belt as gently as he could, careful not to crush her fingers in the metal of his gloves.

"Be nought fearful, lady," he said. "Put on the cloak and go aboard."

She seemed not to hear him. He swept the cloak around her shoulders and caught her up in his arms.

The raft was near to floating in the rise of the tide. His stride cleared a half yard of shallows as he sprang onto the boards. He set her on her feet, holding her muffled female figure steady as the casks and boards rocked beneath them.

"My lady—" He kept his hands on her shoulders. "Are ye ill?"

"Nay," she said remotely. "Where do we go?"

"Across the river, Your Highness."

"The monks—" Her eyes came to his, wide and dark. "Were they dead?"

He hesitated for a long moment. "Yea, madam. Dead or departed."

She seemed bewildered at that, like a child that had been asked an incomprehensible question. She turned away from him and sank down into a huddle on the boards.

Ruck watched her for a moment. "I will keep you, lady. I swear it."

He jumped ashore to unload their meager baggage and toss it onto the raft. Experienced in water passages, Hawk made no objection to being led into the shallows and onto the unsteady surface: the horse put his big hoof on the boards and pulled it off again, then came in one great splattering lunge that tipped the raft, grounding it at one corner. He stood splay-legged and wild-eyed, until Ruck dressed the horse in his chaufrain, with its blinding pieces that narrowed his vision.

Hawk calmed immediately, as if what he could not see did not exist. Ruck led him a few steps, refloating the grounded casks by shifting the horse's weight.

The princess sat with the baggage. Ruck cast off the hempen line, took up a pole, and shoved, pushing them away from the shallows. The raft spun gently. He walked to the other side and poled there.

They drifted into open water. He unlashed the great oar that propelled and steered the unwieldy vessel, letting it swing loose between the thole-pins. When he looked up to make certain of the princess, he saw that she had settled herself against the bags, her cloak wrapped about her. She was gazing into the water.

He grasped the thick paddle with both hands and put his back into rowing. The next time he looked toward her, she had fallen fast asleep.

The raft spun slowly across the river, carried sometimes upstream on the tide, and sometimes downstream on a wayward current. Ruck could not guide the vessel with the skill the monks had used: even with the great oar, the casks drifted at the mercy of the water, so that it took a long time to cross. The incoming stream and a wind off the sea overbore the current, propelling them up the estuary, away from Lyerpool and the priory. Ruck thought he saw a figure moving in the village, but he could not be sure, and soon enough even the castle was lost to sight.

He took a landing where it came. Along a shoreline of coppice and reeds, the raft hit bottom. He poled it in as close as he could, and still had to wade through a spear's length of shallows.

The princess seemed reluctant to wake, huddling herself closer when he knelt and spoke to her. He pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to her forehead, but she was cool, her skin chapped with wind, not fever. "Ne may I sleepen?" she mumbled plaintively when he touched her. "I want to sleepen a little while."

He did not disagree, just picked her up and carried her again. The motion seemed to revive her a little; she sat in the sandy clearing he'd chosen for their camp with her arms clasped about her knees. She watched him silently as he slogged back and forth, moving the bags ashore.

Then, as he knelt to fetter Hawk, she turned sharply, her eyes on the shoreline of the Wyrale. "Listen!"

Ruck hurled himself to his feet, grabbing his sword. As he stood, he heard bells, dreamlike and soft; and at the same moment saw the white speck flash against dark trees.

"Gryngolet," she whispered, with her eyes fixed on the distance.

Almost as if it heard the longing in her voice, the pale falcon soared upward, turning black against the sky, and dipped into a wheeling curve toward them. It skimmed across the river with powerful fast beats, striking upward again, spiraling above them until it was naught but an atom in the winter-blue heights.

"She waits on us!" The princess sprang to her feet. "The lure—before she rakes away!"

Ruck dropped his sword. Both of them pounced upon the bags, tearing through them for the falcon's furniture. Ruck found the hawking-pouch, proffering it with a muttered prayer of thanks that he'd brought it. She snatched the prize from his hands.

White leather it was, embroidered in silver and jeweled like all the rest of her possessions. Emeralds caught the sun and sparkled on her gauntlet as she thrust her hand into the heavy glove. Even the lure itself was decorated with tiny gems at the ring and fastened along the shafts of the heron's feathers, with one splendid diamond blazing on the body.

She looked up. Ruck watched her face as she followed the falcon's tower. He had thought her not so beautiful in the unsparing light of day, but he found himself mistaken again. Witchlike, she had transformed herself to loveliness once more, as the falcon changed its nature from earthbound to sky-free in one leap.

He turned to find the bird and could not see it, the black speck gone so high it was beyond sight. Her hand swept upward. The sun took the lure as it arced over their heads, scattering brilliant light. Hawk pricked his ears at the faint rush of the cord and feathers spinning through the air. The princess kept her face to the sky, her arm outstretched against the blue, her gauntlets sparkling, green fire and silver flying from her fist.

She called her falcon, spinning the lure; a carol of love, half laughter—and the bird came, dropping hard from the sky.

Ruck heard the stoop before he saw it. The bells screamed one long, high note as the falcon hurtled downward, a prick on the blue that became a dot, a lancet, an arrow bolt, a scythe, its wings bowed close in two thousand feet of fall. The lure rose to it, aflame with emeralds.

At the instant of strike, a fan of white burst open, wings spread wide against the glitter as the hit sent a crack of sound echoing across the water; the lure shot downward and the falcon threw up into the air, jesses dangling. The lure impacted the ground, spraying sand, and sailed off again under Princess Melanthe's hand on the cord.