"My lady, be it nought in our power to make His Lordship do anything!"

She stood up. "Nay, you have some unholy clutch upon him! What is it? Why should he withhold his name from those who could help him, if not to hide something? He is a baron, by God's bones, and he married a burgher's daughter as if he could do no better! You have battened upon this place somehow, a troop of worthless common minstrels, and he protects you by his foolishness, and you care not that you drag him down!"

"Madam." Ruck's voice arrested them all, cold and soft. "I asked you for love of me to esteem my people." He stood in the doorway, dressed in a black doublet and hose, a golden belt about his hips, his hair uncovered and his face angry and tired. "Ne do I demand obedience as your husband," he said in English, "but I expect of a princess the honor of your word that ye gave me nought a few hours since."

Melanthe felt a fire of mortification rush into her cheeks. She had promised—but the state of this place outraged her.

In the silence he said, "Ye does nought know what clutch they haf upon me, in troth, nor can knowen, did ye ne'er come on your home to finden it a charnel house. The death annihiled in this country, my lady; took it nought one in five or one in three, but nine in ten—of every living thing down to the sheep and the rats, for what sins I know nought." His breath frosted in the cold room. "Came I home from the household where I was fostered as a page, but the pestilence met us on the road." He gave an ugly laugh. "Ye speaks of warding. Oh, I was well warded. I had me full eight years of life and wisdom, lady, and dead men all about me. Ne did no passerby, ne friar nor knight, halt or linger, but stoned me for fear of my contagion if I approached them, but until I met this troop of worthless common minstrels."

"Then in faith," she answered coolly, turning to the window, "I wish thy minstrels as well as any men under God, for their great charity to thee."

The jealousy was there again, the envy of his loyalties to anyone but her. Her hands were freezing, but she refused to clasp or warm them, only holding them at her sides. She wished to explain, to tell him that it was his welfare and his rightful place that she would defend, but pride held her tongue, and the apprehension that if she made herself offensive to his men, it was she who might be sent away.

She was not accustomed to making herself agreeable to servants. To turn a smile and wiles on them to win affection...well, she had performed more difficult counterfeits for less, but already the need to deceive seemed a distress, an old and fatal misery. She could not, at that moment, even summon the will to begin it. She said no more. Instead she found herself turning to walk quickly to the door. She did not look up at her husband as she passed him. Lifting her skirts, she ran down the spiraling stairs, seeking the courtyard.

* * *

Ruck watched her from an arrowslit in the gate tower that commanded the whole of the meadow and the lake. His first foolish thought had been that she was leaving—but of course she would not, could not, alone. She would not have been able to find her way from the valley even if she had commanded a horse.

Knowing that, he had not followed her. He was hotly aware of Bassinger and Little Will; of how this impossible marriage must appear. Since his first warning of plague, he had thought of bringing her here for security, though more in his fantasy than in seriousness. Not once had it ever entered his head that he would bring her to Wolfscar as his wife.

But in the crisis, trapped between the hounds and the sea, he had gone by his secret way for the one place he could be certain of. He knew the decision now to be as witless as their exchange of vows—had realized it in full when he saw his castle and his people as they must look to her. Already she disdained them.

Nodding stiffly to Will and Bassinger, Ruck had left the ladies' chamber with its cobwebs and echoes, acting the lord just as if he had not cleared ditches and drunk ale and planted palisades shoulder to shoulder with the Foolet while Bassinger gave advice and complained of his back. Ruck did not wish to seem to chase her, but he could not face his old friends, either, or justify what he had done. Standing now in the empty garret, he felt utterly alone, as if he had executed his own banishment.

He leaned his forearms against the angled cut of the arrow embrasure, resting his head in the crook of his elbow so that he could keep her in his sight as she carried the gyrfalcon into the sheep pasture. She strode across the snow-crusted grass. A train of children followed, tramping behind with their arms swinging, until Hew Dowl chased them off to a proper distance. She was a hooded sweep of emerald green in the dirt-gray landscape, leaving the motley colors of the children and the austringer behind her. She stopped, and Ruck saw her beckon.

Hew ran to her, his shoulders stooped in reverent submission and his eyes fixed on the ground. As Ruck watched, she spoke to the austringer. Hew's head came up. His face was too distant to see clearly, but his whole body seemed to expand. He donned his glove and held out his arm to take the falcon. They talked for a moment, Hew raptly attentive as she handed him the jeweled lure.

As the princess stood back, Hew hid the lure and struck the hood, removing it. For a few moments the gyrfalcon sat motionless on the man's upraised arm; then it bounded free.

Ruck lost sight of the bird. From his arrowslit he could only gaze at Melanthe as she shaded her eyes and followed the flight. It felt mockingly suitable that he stand hidden, staring out at a narrow view from this crack in stone-thick walls. He grew angry at his own cowardice as he thought of it. Afraid of her contempt, afraid of his own friends—ashamed of his home.

He thrust back from the embrasure and paced across the garret, the bare planks reverberating beneath his feet. For twenty years the haunted frith-wood and fate had protected Wolfscar; there had been no need of a garrison or armed watch and none to man the towers anyway. He had not reopened the mine, he had not reclaimed the road; he had done nothing that might draw attention, waiting for the day when Lancaster his prince would call for the Green Knight and ask him what reward he would have for some marvelous deed—and then, Ruck had dreamed, he would reveal himself, and say his claim, and Wolfscar would be his without dispute, without abbots or haughty monks or any question of right.

It was all a boy's fine fantasy, built of the songs the minstrels sang, of Gawain and Lancelot, adventure and glory, of troth and loyalty between a man and his master.

He had long ago learned the way of the world. But he had been committed by then, and making a name with Lancaster, and there were tournaments and war—if not as glorious as the adventure of his imagination, at least opportunity for advancement and future, until Lancaster had dismissed him. Because of her.

Princess Melanthe could purchase Wolfscar ten times over. Ruck would have been more of a saint than he was, he reckoned, if the thought had not crossed his mind. But he could hardly stay apace with his own feelings. Outside, he had been bewildered and humbled by her vow to be his wife, but here—here, he did not want to give up his sole mastery, he did not want to explain himself and his life, he did not want to submit to her authority, he did not want everything he was to depend on her, he did not want to give her up, he did not want to deny her anything, he did not want to sleep alone again— and he did not, did not want her to leave him.

He returned to the arrowslit in time to see Gryngolet pounce upon the lure that Hew threw down on the frozen grass. It was a simple method, the usual way a towering falcon would be brought down. In its very simplicity, with plain Hew making in to the bird like any countryman's falconer, the sight brought the image of Melanthe lifting her jeweled gauntlet and lure, unbearably vivid, the sky and the bird and the fire of emeralds and white diamonds as the gyrfalcon came to her hand. She had been weeping and laughing, beautiful and not, a dream within the compass of his touch.

He watched her as she bewitched Hew into a hound in human shape. The man heeled to her with panting devotion, nodding and gazing and nodding again as she spoke. While the gyrfalcon ate, he pointed about the valley, obviously discussing the hunting.

Ruck felt his heartbeat rise. If she thought to hunt the bird, then she did not wish to leave anon. He wouldn't have taken her even if she desired to go, not until he could better assure her safety, but he had not relished a quarrel with her about it.

He rolled on his shoulder and put his back to the tower wall, leaning there and staring at the gash of light that fell across the floorboards from the defensive slit. The stone was so frigid that the cold seeped through his doublet to his body, but he did not move. He knew he was not thinking clearly. Weariness misted his wits. Had it been warfare, he would have distrusted any humor or inclination now, holding himself back from hasty action.

But it seemed that he had done naught but hold himself back for all of his life. Hard-won habit ruled him: he had only to think of her to want to couple again, and his next thought was that he must not—and only in the eternal struggle to conquer his bodily passions did it come to him that there was no longer a contest to win.

He stared so hard at the patch of light on the boards that his eyes began to water.

He had made a particular study of the sin of lust, with careful questions to the priests, and a certain amount of reading in confession manuals when he could examine one in French or English. He felt himself rather a master of the subject. Even on marriage, the religious did not always agree among themselves, which meant there was a little space for preferring one set of advice over another amid the thickets of clerical admonition. All admitted that there was no sin if the intention was purely to engender children, but a few maintained that any pleasure at all in the marriage bed could not be without sinful fault. Others judged that the conjugal debt was a pious duty between spouses to prevent incontinence, and the marriage act only a deadly sin if there was excessive quest for pleasure—with many fine computations of what might constitute excessive pleasure.