She shook her head, wrapping her cloak tight about her, and sat down on a rock. He produced a havercake from some unknown pocket and offered it to her. As Melanthe crunched on it glumly, he led the horse to the tarn and broke the surface with his heel. The sound cracked against the cliffs and reverberated back as jags of white splintered across the pond. There appeared to be no exit from the coombe, and no entrance, either, though she stared at the place she thought they had come in.

"Where are we?" she asked, brushing crumbs from her cheek.

He looked up, weariness written in all the lines of his face. With a faint smile he said, "In the fells beyond the frith, my lady. None can follow here."

The horse plunged its nose into the water and sucked. Melanthe thought of the pathless forest they had passed through so easily. She gazed at the bare branches around the tarn—and suddenly saw the pattern in them, the felled trunks and interwoven framework, one twig pulled down and anchored beneath another, a third twisted about its neighbor, a pair spread open, braided and pruned and pinned to the ground to start a new shoot, all growing together into a wall of thorn and wood.

"Avoi," she breathed. "It is a plessis barrier."

"Yea. And ancient, my lady. Since before the northmen came to this coast, before anyone remembers, hatz been kept so."

She looked at him. "What does it protect?"

He came to her and held out his hand. Melanthe took it, rising. He led her to a place that seemed impenetrable: only when he stepped into it did she see that she could follow. They walked through a dark hollow, skirting the downed trunks of trees. He climbed ahead of her into another cleft in the rocks, and offered his hand.

Melanthe gathered her skirts and let him hike her up. The space was barely large enough for both of them, with wind whining through the fissure of slate. He flattened himself to the towering sheet of rock and let her sidle in front of him, pulling her back against his chest so that she could see through the rent in the cliffs to the open country beyond.

"There," he said, and pointed.

The mountainside fell down so steeply from where they stood that she could not see the tops of trees except far below, where the forest swept to the valley floor. Ragged mists moved across, forming and fleeing, rising in wisps to flow up the cliffsides, blurring her view. At first she thought the valley empty, only more forest, and more, with the hint of a river running along the bottom and frozen waterfalls on the far side. She scowled against the wind-tears in her eyes, trying to follow where he pointed.

She blinked. What she had thought to be a waterfall seemed to be a tower; she blinked and it was a waterfall again, its lower cascade hidden by the spur of a ridge—but it had a strange slate formation at its source. Triangular; and another, a little lower, dark cones of stone, each with a bleeding white tail at its base...the mists drifted and broke apart, and suddenly, for one instant, she saw a castle, bleached white, turrets with battlements and slate-blue conical roofs, the glint of golden banner staves—and then it was only a misted cliff marked by icefalls once more.

"Do you see it?" he asked, bending close to her ear.

Melanthe realized that she had drawn a sharp breath. "I cannot say—is there a hold? The mist befools me."

"There is a hold." He put his hands on her shoulders. "Wolfscar."

"Depardeu," she said as the mist cleared again. "I see it!"

"This is mine, from six miles behind us to that second peak, to the coast on the west and the lakes east. Held of the king himself—and a license and command to fortify it with a castel." His voice held a note of defiant pride, almost as if he expected she might disagree with him.

Melanthe turned away from the icy wind. "Thou art a baron, then!"

"Yeah, we haf a baron's writ, to my father's grandsire and before. Did ye think me a freeman, my lady?" he demanded.

She slipped back from the crevice, down into a wider and quieter space between the rock walls. He came behind, the familiar chink of his mail compounded by the ring of steel as his scabbard hit the stone with each step.

She stopped and turned, smiling. "Nay. Bast son of a poor knight. 'Twas Lancaster thought thee a freeman."

He bristled, his eyes narrowing. But before he could speak, Melanthe said, "Why should we imagine more of thee, Green Sire? When thou wouldst not name thyself."

"I cannought," he said. He gazed at her grimly, his eyes dark in the shadow of the walls. He shrugged. "The letters patent be lost. My parents died in the Great Pestilence. The abbey—" His mouth curled. "They were to holden my ward in my non-age. And they forgot me! I went there when had I five and ten years, for I ne'er heard word nor direction, nor had aid of them. And the monks said I was an open liar and in fraud of them, that this land escheated to the abbey in the last reign, and ne'er watz revoked by the king. Ne did they e'en know of the donjon—" He set his fist on the stone. "My father's castel, that was seven years abuilding! To them is naught but impassable forest, and all else unremembered!"

His indignation at that seemed greater than at being disavowed himself. But Melanthe saw instantly the heart of the blow. "Thou canst not prove thy family?"

He leaned against the rock face, his heel braced on it. "They all died."

"All of them?"

He contemplated his knee, his head down. He nodded, as if he were ashamed of it.

Melanthe frowned at him. They were of an age—if his kin had perished in the first Great Death, he would have been no more than seven or eight when he was orphaned. "But—from then, till thou went to the monks at ten and five—who cared for thee?"

He looked up, with his trace of a wry smile. "My lady—come thee now and greet them, if thou wilt deign."

* * *

Plunging into the valley of Wolfscar, carrying Gryngolet on her wrist once again and clinging to Ruck with the other arm, Melanthe felt a stir of superstitious wonder. She had traveled with him in wilderness and desert, so she had thought—but this place seemed farther from church and humanity with each step.

The way down was a slide and slip into murky trees that groaned with the wind in their tops. She stiffened as she heard the distant howl of a wolf—or was it a woman's scream? The shriek went on and on, changing pitch from low to high, growing louder as they descended, but Ruck gave it no notice. They made a sharp turn and abruptly the wail was a roar; the wind through a pile of slate teeth, transforming again to a living screech as they passed it.

"God save us," she said below her breath.

He squeezed her wrist. She was glad that he had tightened his hold on her, because in the next twisting in their progress, she looked up over his shoulder and near leapt from the pillion in her recoil.

It was a huge face; thrice taller than the destrier, staring at her with baleful black eyes out of the depth of the tree-shadow. She made a choked sound in her throat, but neither horse nor master made a sign of fear; they moved steadfastly downward, and at a different angle the face became stone and bush and branch, an illusion of reality.

She remembered the strange fusion of dream and waking of the night before, the silent woodwose they had sailed with, the boat that seemed too small to bear them and the horse safely...she began to doubt what sort of guardians watched over him.

The ground became gentler. A cold mist enfolded them, a sudden pale blankness, with only the next bush, the next tree trunk looming out of it and vanishing. The horse put its head down as if it smelled its path the way a hound would. Melanthe shuddered, hiding Gryngolet under her cloak as the mist sent the chill to her bones.

As she sat huddled as close within her mantle as she could, her fantasy began to imagine that she heard music. She told herself that it was the wind, another illusion like the scream she could still hear from above them. And yet it had form and melody; it was a song that she knew, or thought she knew, sweet and sad and beguiling. The horse's hooves beat in time to it. Ruck said nothing; his head seemed to nod in the same rhythm, his hand loosened on hers—she thought that he was falling asleep, the direst lapse of all with such enthralling spirits.

She grabbed his shoulder and shook him hard. "Wake!" she hissed. "In God's name, wake up!"

"Avoi!" He started upright. He lifted his head and jerked it back, neatly smashing her nose as he reached for his sword.

Melanthe yelped, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain. She put her hand over her face, blinking back tears. When she got her sight back, the forest was silent but for the high wind and the sound of Hawk's hoofbeats.

"On guard!" she whispered. "Thou moste not let thyself sleep, or they shall have thee!"

He took a deep breath, gripping the pommel of his sword. "Whosome shall haf me?" he asked in a bewildered tone.

She shook him again, until his armor rattled. "The fays," she said. "If they have thee not already. Didst thou hear the tune?"

He seemed to come a little into his wits. "You heard music?" His hand loosed the sword. "What melody?"

"I know not. Fairy music, sweet and slow."

He grunted, looking to the left and right into the mist. Then, to her dismay, he idly began to whistle the selfsame air. Hawk's ears pricked, and his pace increased.

As the mist thinned, the distant flute took up his tune again. The path dropped below the fits of the wind, into a calm that seemed warm after the driving chill of the vapor. The fluting music seemed to always recede before them, never closer, never farther. She did not know if it was some prearranged signal, or if the fay folk themselves put the whistle in his head and gave the weary horse a new energy to stride forward. It was such a mournful and familiar tune...