He did not answer, but pushed away from the bed. She heard him cross the chamber. The door opened and closed. Before, each morning as he left, she had settled into the bed, satisfied and sated with their coupling, sustained on the wheaten bread and ale someone left on a trestle beside her, drowsing until he came again. She had not thought of where he went; she had not thought of anything at all with more than a torpid interest that passed into pleasing dreams.

But a small doubt crept into her mind, because he had not answered her when she had said she might never leave. The two Williams would be out there—unlikely they were singing her praises to his ears, or urging him to prolong her stay. She opened her eyes.

She sat up and swept back the bedcoverings. Chill air touched her skin.

Fool. Fool! No woman held a man with bed-play alone, not with his favorites whispering poison in his ears.

She had felt safe. She was safe. But if there was one lesson greater than any other Ligurio had pressed upon her, it was that to give a man what he wanted was to lose all mastery of him. Ruck was so sweet and stirring when he came, she had not sensed the danger until this moment.

She thrust her feet from the bed. There was no maid, of course. She had to serve herself as he did, but in rooting through the chamber chests she found a linen smock, stiff and unworn. It smelled very faintly of herbs. There were robes too, but she refused to appear in the raiment of the former lady of the castle like some resurrected ghost. She put on her own faithful gown and azure houppelande over the clean linen.

Her hair she could only cover with a kerchief, with no one to dress it for her. She found one clustered with jasper and chalcedony. All of the clothing in the chests was richly adorned with embroidery and gems. No poor knight's hold, this Wolfscar.

She thought of the minstrels who sojourned here at their ease, and narrowed her eyes. But she would move carefully. A man's favorites could be delicate matters, not subject to common reasoning with his wit, as the history of any number of kings could attest.

The stairwell from the lord's presence chamber opened onto the high end of the great hall. Melanthe heard voices and music and laughter before she reached the floor, but in this castle there were no convenient spying peeks to oversee the hall, or none that she could find.

She stepped into the doorway, then hastily pulled back. Ruck was there, seated at the table on the dais, facing away from her. He had a child on his shoulders, a half-grown babe with feet balanced on either side of his head and hands planted in his black hair as he bent over rolls and counters spread across the table. In her brief moment of view, Melanthe had seen William Foolet counseling with him, and minstrels all around the hall, some of them congregated about the dais, some at work, and one pair juggling a great wheel of apples up toward the roof.

Melanthe sat down on the stair out of sight. The fantastic aspect of it struck her anew. She felt unsure of herself, a somber crow at the feast. It would not be wise, she thought, to go to him amidst their smiles and laughter. Later, when he came to her alone, she could try to reckon how the Williams might have damaged her.

But she did not want to go back to the empty bedchamber now. She sat in the stairwell, listening to the easy talk, the murmurs of mirth. They spoke of lambing and the fish in the lake, things she knew but little of. She could predict what would happen if she stepped through the door. They would all turn and stare, and she must be her lady's grace the princess then, for she knew nothing else to be.

Quick small footsteps sounded on the wooden dais, and a little girl in gaudy-green appeared through the door. She put her plump hands on Melanthe's knees and leaned forward, dark-eyed and rapt, her black locks flying free of any braid. "Why hide ye?" she demanded.

Melanthe drew back a little. "Ne do I hide."

"Ye does. I saw you. But I found you!" She turned and wedged herself into the space between Melanthe and the wall, taking a seat on the narrow stair. She put her arms about Melanthe's neck and kissed her cheek. "I love you."

"Thou dost not love me," Melanthe said. "Thou dost not even know me."

"Ye are the princess." She said it with an enraptured sigh. "I am Agnes." She laid her head on Melanthe's shoulder and took her hand, toying with the rings. "I play the tympan and the cymbals. I haf a white falcon and lots of jewels."

Melanthe watched the small fingers trifle with hers. "Thou art a great lady, then."

"Yea," Agnes said. "I shall sleepen all the day when I be grown. Ne likes me nought to nap now, though," she added scrupulously. "I shall marry Desmond."

"Desmond. The porter?"

"He will be the king then."

"Ah," Melanthe said. "A man of ambition."

"A man of what?" Agnes looked up at her. "Oh. Are you sad?"

Melanthe shook her head.

"You weep, my lady."

"Nay. I do not."

"I love you." Agnes climbed into her lap and put her face into Melanthe's throat. "Ne do nought weep."

"I do not."

"Why do you weep?" The girl's voice was muffled.

Melanthe held the small body close to her. "I'm afraid," she whispered. She drew a breath against fine black hair, as if she could drink it like some fragrant long-forgotten wine. "I'm afraid."

"Oh, my lady, be nought." Agnes hugged her. "All be well, so long as we bide us here as my lord commands, and go nought out beyond the wood."

NINETEEN

They had pleased Ruck, those days that she spent tumbled in his bed like a dozing kitten. He would have thought she was ill, but that he knew her for a master in the art of idle slumbering, and she awoke well enough when he came.

While she had stayed in his chamber, Wolfscar was his yet. He spent the days in ordinary work, in spring plans and lists of repairs, the most of which would never get done, but he did not have to make explanations or excuses to her. She had asked nothing, but only besought him in bed with her blunt and unhende wooing.

He did not dislike it. A'plight, he lived all through the day in thought and prospect of it. His clearest memories of Isabelle were of bedding her, and those were dim, overlaid with years of throttled desire and fantasy. But he did not think that any woman on Earth or in imagination could compare with Melanthe, her black hair and white body, her sleepy eyes like purple dusk, the feel of her as she used him, mounting atop him in her favored sin. To have seen her so was worth a thousand years of burning to him. If he went to Hell for it, he only prayed God would not take away the memory.

Still, nothing about her came as he expected it. When finally she had left the bed and appeared in the hall, he was girded for her queries and objections. He saw her look about. He had grown taut in readiness for her censure—saw dust and decay that he had never noticed before.

But he was forwondered once again by his liege lady. She did not speak of Wolfscar's unkept state at all. She smiled at him like a shamefast maid, looking up from beneath a kerchief. She became modest; at night she withdrew from him and eluded his kisses. In the day she went about with a crowd of small girls. It was as if she had arisen from her spelled sleep transformed, turned from a haughty princess into a nun's acolyte.

Will Foolet was terrified of her. Bassinger was not daunted to speak to any person alive—he would have sung his lays to the Fiend himself given the chance—but even he gave her a wide breach. All three of them, Ruck and Will and Bassinger, had heard her speak her mind about Wolfscar and its history.

The others gathered around her, enslaved as easily as she had vanquished Hew Dowl and Sir Harold. Will was complained of and called a hard taskmaster, only for directing that the ground-breaking begin in the fields. Performing before her lady's grace, their first new spectator in a decade of years, was much to be preferred.

Ruck and Will rode out alone to the shepherds and lambs, making rain-soaked notes of the fences and fodder, and lists of needed work. They ordered the labor by its importance, for never did they have enough bodies or skills to carry out all that cried to be done. Before there had been willingness and ready hands, at least. Now the fields and the bailey were empty, and Ruck walked into the hall to find it full of tumbling and singing before Melanthe.

He lost his temper. Flinging his wet mantle from his shoulders, he strode into the middle of the clear space, halting a pair of somersaults before they were begun. The music died.

"Is a feast day?" Ruck glared around him. He threw his cloak onto the floor, sending droplets from it to spatter on the tile. "How be it that my gear is drenched and my rouncy in mud to his belly, while ye maken mirths and plays? Am I your lord or your servant?"

Everyone fell to their knees. A tympan tinkled in the stunned silence as a small girl crawled from Melanthe's lap and knelt, holding the belled drum before her.

"Thorlac," he snapped to one of the poised tumblers. "Stable my mount. Simon, take Will's. Stands he outside in the rain with the order of laboring. Nill no one be seen in this hall nor heard to singen or playen until Lent is passed. Eat in the low hall, and give ye thanks for it."

At once the great room emptied, light footsteps and shuffles and the odd note of a justled instrument. Only Melanthe was left, sitting on a settle drawn near the huge chimney. The gems on her kerchief gleamed as she bent her head, rubbing one hand over the back of the other.