He had amused her then, and flattered her—such a look, and from a boy who had not even anything to gain by it. She had noticed him. And when she had seen what mischief they were about, the bishops and priests, she had saved him, little though he appeared to know or thank her.

She had felt then a hundred years older than he, though she'd been only seventeen herself. She felt a thousand now— and yet new, in some strange way younger and more reckless than she had ever been. She felt, for the first time in her life, in love with a man.

Ligurio she had respected, loved in mind and in soul: teacher, father, companion, and lifeline. And before she had learned better, she had found friendship and a sparking attraction with the smiling Dane who had given her Gryngolet, but that memory was no peaceful one.

She gazed at the long shadowed teeth of the dragon stone, burying her cold nose in ermine. The Northman had taught her to hunt, disciplined her to the exacting task of training a wild passager trapped after its first moult, revealed to her the hours of freedom in a falcon's courses. She had not betrayed Ligurio with him, nor thought of it. It had not been more than a girl's infatuation. It had not had time to become more, before Melanthe had discovered the Northman slain in her own bed. The lady asleep with him put on a great shrieking show to find that the man beside her was murdered, just as if she had not slipped in the knife herself. Melanthe had been fifteen, Prince Ligurio's still-virgin bride, in wit as well as body. Her husband had had to explain it to her.

That was the first she had truly understood of Gian Navona's cold lunatic passion for all that Monteverde owned. For her. Before it, she had only known him as a courteous and clever man who sometime supped with her husband, and had once shown her a cunning hand trick of making a living flower appear in a bowl of glass.

In many ways, that was all she knew of Gian still. And yet he had made her what she was, as surely as Ligurio's careful lessons. Prince Ligurio taught her how to swim; Gian Navona was the sea—tide and current and storm, treacherous depth and smiling surface, and creatures dwelling beneath that haunted dreams. She learned never to rest, never to float, never to cling to what appeared solid. She learned that he would not abide her to smile upon any man.

The dragon stared back at her from black eyeholes. The long line of its teeth could have been a deathly grin. She wondered if it had amused Gian, to dispatch his own mistress to end Melanthe's innocence in seduction and blood. She wondered how far ahead he planned; if he had intended even then to sire a bastard on the woman and train him up to be another beautiful murdering viper, to castrate him and set him guard upon Melanthe, at her table and in her bed, tainting the very air she breathed with bloodshed. She wondered if he found it all some lurid jest, and sat alone in his palazzo and laughed.

Gryngolet, the Northman's gift—the white gyrfalcon had hated Allegreto from the day he had come into Monteverde, a boy with the mind and countenance of the fallen archangel himself. Melanthe also had hated him. He had the look of his mother on him—murderess—Melanthe could see her magnificent frantic face even now, tearing her hair in her fraudulent horror.

But Ligurio had commanded Melanthe to keep Allegreto close, for her life. Her husband was failing in health, and the balance was all, the eternal balance between Navona and Riata and Monteverde. Allegreto was an assassin to keep her from assassination, a bargain Ligurio had made with Gian to protect her, taking advantage of Navona's passion to guard her from other enemies who had less than no use for her alive. Her husband had accepted the boy, even been kind to him. Melanthe had suffered him, dreaming of the day she would be free.

Dreaming of this day, when she could put such memories behind her.

Gryngolet's bells jingled again, and the knight adjusted his arm. He made a low sound. His mouth curved, just visible above the crook of his elbow, a trace of his uncommon smile. Melanthe rested her cheek on the soft trim of her mantle, happily assotted with him. The comlokkest man on earth, the most honorable, humble, gracious, the strongest, the best-spoken, the finest warrior—she diverted herself with heaping extravagant merits upon his slumbering person.

He snorted, denying such exalted perfection in an ordinary man's sleep, lifting his hand as if to reverse his arm beneath his head. The move seemed to expire halfway. His gauntlet wavered, balanced in mid-arc, the heavy mail and leather curl of his fingers drooping, declining slowly sideways. The back of his glove came to rest on the stone with a soft chink.

She loved the sound of him. The sound of his armor, the sound of his breathing, the sound of his voice speaking English. Forsooth, she loved him.

Having come to this insight, she felt that she must proceed with great care. She found herself somewhat bewildered by it; unable to reconcile such an intangible force with all of her plans and designs.

She ought to be thinking. The whole world would not die of plague; it had not the first time, nor the second, and it would not this time, either. Pestilence came now by fits and starts, killing five here, fifty there, no more than one or two in another place. She could not suppose that God would elect to erase the names of Navona and Riata from the earth merely to save her trouble.

Iwysse, she doubted that God had much use for her at all, in spite of her abbeys. She was unrepentant. She was pleased to look at the sleeping masculine form of her knight. She sore desired him in a most sinful and earthly way, and she was not the least sorry for it.

Her foremost care had been to arrive safely and without interference at Bowland Castle, where amid the native Englishmen, any agents sent by Gian or Riata would be easy to discern and dispatch. But she found that this ambition had now palled, replaced by an acute desire, amazing in its quaintness, to remain in the wasteland with Sir Ruck d'Somewhere, the lord—and his father before him—of imaginary places.

She smiled wryly, thinking of the quick pride with which he'd refused her offer of lands. He spoke himself well enough, like a gentle man, but she remembered his wife—a burgher's daughter if there had ever been one—and was inclined to agree with Lancaster's guess that the Green Sire's splendid tournament armor hid a man baseborn. He had almost admitted as much, had he not, in refusing her?

It was a sign of her corrupted nature, she supposed, that she did not care a whiff for his birth. Haps he was misbegot of some knight too poor to provide for him, but Lancaster was overharsh in judging him a freeman—no son of villeins would be endured by the men-at-arms as their master, far less tolerated by the knights and ladies of court.

Nay, he had gentle manners: a quiet dignity about him, even now in his shabbiness, and a nobleman's way with a good horse. He was a poet of sorts. He had been brought up in a lord's household, of that she felt certain, though in the end it made no matter. She was the Earl of Bowland's daughter, wife to a prince, cousin of counts and kings. As well fall in love with a monk or a merchant, or a cowherd, for that, as with this obscure and humble knight.

Ligurio had taught her many things, but inordinate tenderness and renunciation had not been among them. She was not accustomed to denying herself any worldly richness or temporal pleasure, unless it be in sure disfavor to her own interests. If she had not taken lovers, it was not for virtue or self-constraint, or even concern for the skins of the many men who had offered themselves, but because of the terrible weakness such a union must create.

It was strength that she needed, not weakness. She had meant to use him, this chivalrous, nameless warrior. She had meant to make him love her if she could, daze and blind him, bind him without mercy to her service. She would need such as he, to protect her and act for her.

And she had done it. He had mistrusted her, accused her of witchery, reserved something of himself in spite of his sworn allegiance—but she was certain of him now. She cared nothing that he spoke of this wife of his, beyond that it proved the unlimited bounds of his loyalty once he gave his heart. She would free him of that vain covenant when the time came.

For now she was charitable as she had never been, yielding her own wish to his welfare. She would not repay his service with encumbrance, his honor with dishonor. She would not be the ruin of him, but the making. And haps if she was so, if she gave him the opportunity to rise that Lancaster had denied, if by her support he made a superior marriage to some lady of her choosing and gained land and a higher place, if she educated his children and sponsored them to a better elevation yet...

She gazed across the cold barren space between them, two yards and forever. If she did all that for him, then haps her life would not be without some worth in the end, or so vain in the years to come as it seemed now to be.

* * *

Ruck woke to the music of hunting horns. With an oath he rolled over and shoved upright. He'd been so deep in sleep that for a moment he blinked in the morning light and stared about himself, unable to recall this place.

Then he saw the princess curled in her mantle, slumbering in a drooping huddle against the wall. She had not woken him.

"Christ's love!" He staggered to his feet. He'd slept the night through like a dead man.

A horn called again, a mote and a rechase—and he realized that the sound had been reverberating in his dreams since before he'd come awake. Another followed: relays, he thought, with the quarry sighted. Two motes more, to call the berner with the hounds, and a distant yut yut yut in answer.