"Do up my hair," she bid him. "The crespin net, I think."
In silence he took the comb and sparkling net from her lady-in-waiting and began to comb out the length of her hair, coiling it deftly.
As he worked, Princess Melanthe lifted her hand, beckoning to Ruck. He moved to the foot of the bed, lowering himself to one knee.
She laughed. "Truly, you’re the most courteous knight! Up with you. I prefer to see the faces of my servants better than the tops of their heads."
He stood up.
"I’ll lead your destrier into the lists tomorrow," she informed him. "See that the heralds know it. And you must wear my favor upon your lance for the entry—then I wish it brought to me for the time being."
He bowed.
"You speak English," she said suddenly.
"Yes, madam."
"Excellent. I’ll speak to you in English from time to time. I wish to recall it from my childhood. A lesson for you, Allegreto—always take care to understand a little of the language of your servants and dependants, that they may not take undue advantage of you."
Allegreto pinned her hair, placing the net over it with care. In a subdued tone he said, "You are the source of all light and wisdom, Your Highness."
"Sweet boy, I wouldn’t let Gryngolet have you for anything."
The shadow left his face. He began to knead her shoulders. Ruck lowered his eyes to the foot of the bed. He took a step back, withdrawing.
"Green Sire," she said imperiously, rejecting the youth’s attention with an impatient flick of her wrist. "Word has come to my ear that you’re merciless in combat and tourney."
Ruck stood silent. She looked at him full for the first time, scanned him from foot to chest to shoulders in the manner a hosteler might assess a horse. A very faint smile played at her lips as she looked into his eyes, holding him with blue-purple dusk and mystery.
"Excellent," she murmured. "Savagery amuses me. And what glorious feats of arms shall I expect to see executed for my favor?"
That answer he’d considered long and well, knowing the number who were sure to challenge him. "Ten courses with the lance," he said evenly, "five with the ax, and five courses with the sword will be my offer to any knight who strikes my shield. Please God, what glory I may gain is my lady’s."
"Well for that." Her smile took on a hint of humor. "My public esteem always stands in some want of luster."
The moment of self-mockery glittered in her eyes and vanished, lost in a graceful lithe motion as she lay back upon the cushions, beckoning for the wine cup held by one of her ladies. He wanted to look away, but it was impossible: the irony and obscurity and dark radiance of her held him.
Lancaster commanded Ruck as his prince and liege, but if she thought of that she gave no sign. She set Ruck square in the sorest dilemma a man could be placed—vassal and servant to opposing masters—though not for war or any great thing did she command him to declare a challenge for her on his own prince, not that Ruck could tell.
Yet he would serve. She was his sworn lady. Beyond doubt or motive he would obey her. It was not his place to ask for reasons, even if she didn’t remember him.
And she did not. When she looked at him so negligently, he was certain—almost certain—that she did not.
Two emeralds and thirteen years. But emeralds must be nothing to such as she, as he would have been, a ridiculous boy, no one and nothing.
He wore the green jewel on his helmet. He carried her falcon on his shield. Why had she asked for him, if she didn’t remember?
She bent her head to take a sip from the hammered goblet—and then paused before she tasted it. She stared into the wine for a long moment, her lashes black against skin of down and rose. When she looked up, it was toward the little group of ladies-in-waiting beside her bed, an emotionless sweep that remarked each one of them—and Ruck saw each of them in turn respond with the stone-silent terror of cornered rabbits.
She lowered her eyes to the goblet again, without drinking. "You will be valiant in my name tomorrow, Green Sire?" she murmured, glancing up at him over the rim.
He gave a slight nod.
"See that it is so." With a gesture she dismissed him. Ruck turned from the sight of Allegreto trifling with a ring on her finger.
At the door he stopped, looking back. "Your Highness," he said quietly.
She glanced up, lifting her brows.
He nodded toward Allegreto and spoke in English. "Nothing such as that could kill me."
"What did he say?" the youth demanded instantly. "He was looking at me!"
Princess Melanthe turned. "Why, he said that in his devotion to me, Allegreto, he could defeat any man. A most handy green knight, don’t you think?"
* * *
As the knight departed, Allegreto leaned near her shoulder, laying his head next to hers. Melanthe lifted the cup of wine to his mouth and said, "Share with me."
He drew in a light breath—and she felt the barely perceptible withdrawal in his muscles. "My lady," he murmured, "I prefer the sweetness of your lips."
She tilted her head back, allowing him to trace his mouth down her throat. With a languid move she held out the cup of wine and lay full back on the pillows. Cara lifted it from her hand with a deep courtesy, smiling that soft smile of hers, serene as a painting of the Virgin Mary. Though Melanthe closed her eyes, she could hear the light rustling and whispers as her gentlewomen retreated, well-trained to recognize her inclinations.
Allegreto put his mouth against her ear even before the ladies had quit the solar. "Donna Cara," he said. "I told you to be rid of her. Send her away tonight."
Melanthe lay with her eyes closed. She bore his hands on her, her senses refined to catch the last instant that she must suffer his touch. The moment she could be certain they were alone, she flung his arm away and sat up.
"And I told you to kill no one. Tomorrow your back will feel the worse for it."
He hiked himself up to sprawl against the heap of pillows, impudent. "You know none of your men will touch me. They love my father too well."
"The duke will lend me his guardsmen for the task, I’m sure." She left the bed and stood by the chest, gazing down into the goblet of scented wine. The candle beside it shuddered, reflecting a sinuous half-moon in the dark liquid. "It’s a warning."
"It can be nothing else, Your Highness." He rolled to his side and lay propped on his elbow, only daunted enough to give her a deferential address. "Bitter almond." He drank a deep breath. "From here I can smell it."
She gave a humorless smile. "You’re not so perceptive. I couldn’t detect it myself but from within the cup."
"It must have been Donna Cara. She’s sold herself to Riata and betrayed you. Perhaps no warning was meant, but a bungle. Stupid Monteverde bitch, she would blunder such work. Send her away, I tell you."
"Cara!" Melanthe laughed, scorning that. "Your mind is occupied past reason with the girl. By your notion, one moment she’s subtle as a viper and the next so stupid as to poison me with bane in my wine, as if I couldn’t smell it there!"
"She’s an idiot. Give her to me, and I’ll teach her to be sorry for her treachery, so that she’ll not forget the lesson. She’s not even worth the killing."
"Not worth killing? Why, Allegreto, you must be feeling unwell."
He grinned. "Only languishing in tedium. I’d like to torment a Monteverde. It would be a change from these tiresome Riatas who die so easily."
"Your malice masters your wit. Recall that she’s my cousin."
He turned onto his back and crossed his leg, looking up at the canopy. "My malice is bred in me. A Navona must hate anyone of Monteverde." He glanced toward her with a wry smile. "Excepting you, my lady, of course."
Melanthe gazed again into the poisoned wine. She moved her head to bid him rise. "Take it to the garderobe. The cup will sink. I want no use of it again."
"Yes, my lady." With youthful agility he rolled to his feet and made a flourishing bow. "A Riata to Hell and
a few fish to Heaven—I call that a fine day’s work for one garderobe."
* * *
The duke had overcome his scowls. Amid the call of trumpets echoing high in the clear cold air, he greeted Melanthe cheerfully as he drew rein beside her palfrey. "Good morn, my lady." He glittered in azure and scarlet, his shield emblazoned by the lions of England quartered with the fleur-de-lis of France. At his side a Moorish soldier walked a real lion on a leash of silk. "A place of comfort is prepared for you on the scaffold, if you’ll honor us."
"Thank you," she said. "I’ll come there when I will."
"I pray it be soon, for my pleasure in your company."
"When I will," she repeated mildly.
He bared his teeth in a grin, "I look forward with delight to that moment, madam. And to these contests."
Melanthe contained her palfrey’s restless attempt to touch noses to his bay war-horse. "You’re armed to take a part in the combat, my lord." She nodded in approval. "I’ve never seen a prince of the blood enter the lists before. I commend your valor."
"I’ll break a lance or two, God willing. My lady will recall that there’s a challenge in her honor."
Melanthe smiled serenely. "I recall it."
"Your champion is renowned for his skill." He shook his head, careless. "I’ll attempt him, but I hold small hope of winning any prize in a joust with the celebrated Green Sire."
His casual tone was meant to give her surprise, she saw, for he looked at her with a glance that did not quite match his jocular indifference.
"But you’re his liege, aren’t you?" she said. "I’m amazed that you undertake to meet him at all."
"A short match only, for your amusement. With blunted weapons, he needn’t fear to fight his master." He turned his horse, saluting her. "I ’ll open the jousts and return to your side as soon as I may, my dear Princess!" With a swirl of bright color, he circled and rode rapidly forward, his men and squires and even the lion running behind him to keep up.
The assassin’s body had been pulled from the river this morning and hauled away to be buried nameless in a paupers’ graveyard. Allegreto spent the day in the public stocks for his trouble, dragged bodily out of her bedchamber by Lancaster’s men, a small instructive exercise that Melanthe had arranged for him.
She could not trust Allegreto’s malicious counsel, but neither could she wholly trust Cara, as comely and credulous as her gentlewoman’s dark eyes and soft, simple features might be. Any member of her retinue could succumb at any time to treachery or cajolery—the Riata were masters of both.
The murder had brought no more than a brief respite anyway—a moment’s reprieve and then the poisoned wine, to remind her. She was still watched by some creature of the Riata, and with a sharper threat, for now she did not know who it was.
All she knew certainly was that they would see her dead before they saw her married again, carrying her rights with her to a man who would assert her claim to Monteverde. Such a one as Lancaster, ambitious and powerful—or, worse for the Riata by a thousand times—Gian Navona.
The true house of Monteverde had already died with Ligurio. She had not given him an heir, only a black-haired daughter, and even that poor hope was lost, smothered in the nursery. He had done what he could to protect Melanthe. He had taught her what she knew: subtlety and corruption, Greek and Latin and astrology, charisma and cunning, strength—he had taught her the lion and the fox; the chameleon of all colors.
All colors but white. Ligurio had trained her to trust no one and nothing, to lie of everything to everyone. And so at the end she had lied to him, too. He had died in the belief that she would take refuge in the veil, retiring to the abbey he had founded in the hills of Tuscany, safe in a comfortable retreat with Monteverde’s lands and fortune rendered up to the mother church, invoking all the heavenly power and earthly greed of the men of God. She knew the bitter gall it had been to him to see his house die, but better passed to Heaven than into the hands of his enemies.
Her last gift to Ligurio had been her promise to do as he wished. Gift and lie. She had loved him like a father, but he was gone. She betrayed both Heaven and her husband. The church would not have Monteverde or Melanthe—but neither would Navona or Riata have them, either.
She could not live a nun. She could not spend her days praying for her dead. They were too many—likely she would not be able to remember all their names, and would get into a great argument with God over the matter, and expire of black melancholy.
Nay, if she must live inside walls for her protection, then let them be walls of her own choosing, this one time.
* * *
The tournament procession poured out into the great level meadow where a field of color lined the entry to the lists: vivid tents, some orange, some blue and scarlet, some formed like small castles flying pennants from their peaks. Each bore the owner’s arms a shield hung at the entrance. When Melanthe halted before a tent of green trimmed in silver, the cheering nearby suspended entirely, creating a void, a space of silence within the music and the throng.
Her green knight stood beside his war-horse, outfitted in full armor, sending silver sparks into the sunshine from the green metal. As she drew up, he bowed on one knee, his bared head bent so that she saw only the tousle of black hair and the tan leather-padded edge of his gambeson against his neck. "My liege lady," he said.
"Rise, beloved knight," she murmured formally.
With the metallic note of armor, he came to his feet. She extended her free hand. Without raising his eyes to hers, he moved near and went down again on one leg to offer his knee as a pillion stone. Melanthe stepped from the saddle to the ground, lightly touching his bare hand for an instant.
The knight rose. Melanthe soothed Gryngolet with one finger as he brought the huge destrier near her, its caparison of emerald silk and dragonflies rippling at the hem as the war-horse moved.
Having prompted this little play herself, Melanthe saw with wry relief that the twisted unicorn’s horn, a yard long, had been replaced by a less threatening pointed cone upon the stallion’s faceplate. The destrier’s eyes were hidden behind steel blinders. It blew softly and chewed at the bit as the knight attached a silver cord to the bridle, presenting the lead to her with another bow of courtesy.
She hadn’t really expected to be left holding this enormous beast herself, but the broken-backed squire moved away to help his master with pulling the helm and aventail over the knight’s head, quickly smoothing any crimp out of the mailed links that fell over his shoulders. Melanthe realized with some surprise that he seemed to have no other servant. He pushed up the visor with his fist, keeping a cautious eye on his horse as he pulled on his gauntlets.
The uneasy moment passed without incident. He caught up the looping reins. His plated gauntlets were so thick that his fingers seemed set in their half curl, clumsy and skillful at once.
For the first time he looked directly at Melanthe. He said nothing, but there was a level strength in him, something quiet and open, without evasion. He seemed to wait, without expectation, with immeasurable steady patience in his green eyes. As impenetrable and beckoning as the silent shadows of a forest, and yet flickering with hints of secret animation: with its own mysterious life and will.
Unexpectedly Melanthe found she had no ready word, no deceptive smile to return. She felt—as if she had been falling...and under his calm regard found herself caught up from the endless drop and placed on solid ground.
The horse threw its head, ringing bells. She shifted her look, the first to break away, and nodded to the knight.
He swung up into the tourney saddle, adjusting his body against the high curve of the cantle. The little squire brought the lance. With a move that held the grace of countless repetitions, the hunchback swung the heavy spear aloft in an arc. The weapon slapped into the knight’s waiting hand, slipped down against his open palm, and couched in the rest. At the spear point the bells of Gryngolet’s jesses rang their hunter’s music.
&nb
sp; He took up his shield with the image of the hooded falcon and looked down on Melanthe. Sunlight caught the large emerald at the base of his green plumes.
"Tell me your real name," she said in English, in a low voice.
She heard herself ask it, heard the intensity of her own voice—standing amid the crowd of onlookers, not even knowing herself why she should care to know.
His armor masked him now; all she saw was his shadowed face within the helm and visor. She thought he would not answer—he had sworn to be nameless, and yet there was no smell of subterfuge about him: an impossible contrast, new to her and unsettling in its strangeness. She felt a bizarre rush of shyness to have pressed him, and turned her face downward.
"Ruck," he said.
She looked up, uncertain of the English word.
"As the black ravens call," he murmured in his own language. His mouth lifted with a half-smile. "Ruck, my lady. It’s not a fair name, such as yours, but crude and rough."
There was no presumption, no bold arts of love or offers of certain delight. Only that half-smile, rare and sweet, and vanished in a moment—but Melanthe saw then in him what Allegreto had claimed to see: a man’s hunger beneath the reserve.
He sat mounted with his shield and lance, a warrior geared for combat. An uncouth rough name he might bear, but his armored figure aroused a thought in her that was stunning in its novelty.
She was no longer married. She might take a friend—a lover—if she pleased.
In the same moment that she thought it, she knew the impossibility. Nothing had changed. Gian Navona had grown smoothly savage over the years of waiting for his prize. He tolerated no gallant by her—any man who could not be discouraged in his attentions would meet his fate by some insidious means, so subtle that only gossip and evil tales followed Melanthe. So subtle that she had learned to befriend no one and smiled upon no man, cold as winter now in her heart.
She turned that icy disfavor upon the knight, so that anyone who watched would see her do it. "I care nothing for your uncouth font-name," she said, as if he’d been too dull to understand her. "What is your court, knight?"