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tonight."
    Chrétien's face screwed into a puzzled frown. "Yet surely your lady would not be toiling with her hands. Surely that would distinguish her."
    "Or mayhap she is slyer than we think."

 
    CHAPTER 3
     
    The Normans rode out from the castle, their helms shining like mirrors in the early morning sun. Twenty knights in their hauberks, erect and proud astride their big war horses, rode with Alain in pairs across the wooden bridge into the village. With Chrétien d'Evreaux at his side, Alain rode at their lead. The handsome purple cloak he had taken from Fyren's corpse caught the wind, billowing behind him like a Viking sail.
    Thomas, his silver hair glinting like the discs on his Saxon hauberk, directed the Norman knights along the track of the stream that gurgled downhill. Dark peaks, first gently rounded, then suddenly steepening into stark crags, framed the grassy dale.
    "Down to where the beck joins the river, then back up into the fells," said Thomas. His hand waved in a wide arc to indicate the vast green space before them, outlined by the curve of the river.
    Without comment, Alain added the strange new terms to his knowledge of this strange land. Beck meant stream. Fells were mountains. It was almost like learning a new language.
    He raised his hand and drew his mount to a halt, letting his gaze sweep across the majestic valley and up to the knobby tops of the fells. He could not get enough of their rugged beauty.
    This land that rolled out before them was the richest land of his domain, now sown in oats, barley and rye, and bright with the new green of spring. Beyond on the fallow lands, black-faced sheep grazed. Farther up on the fells, the animals blended with the ragged grey rocks and cliffs, and sometimes were distinguishable only by their movement.
    His land. His demesne. He had waited long for this.
    Thomas pulled ahead, turning the armed knights to the west, then back again to the north, following upstream the track of another beck from where it intersected with the river. The trail grew more rugged, and narrowed as it passed between tall pines and ash trees and rambled near steep cliffs, forcing the knights to follow in a single line behind the steward.
    "An extensive forest," Alain said, when he could draw up beside Thomas.
    The steward nodded.
    "The hunting is good?"
    "Aye, lord. And adequate timber. None of the forest is being cleared, for the demesne is not in need of more pasture land. And little of it is suitable for the plow. We go there, now."
    "I do not want to be afield too long," he reminded the man.
    "Nay, lord. We shall return before sext. There is much to see, but the rest must wait, for the holding is large."
    "Very well. We shall take it a piece at a time."
    Thomas nodded pleasantly, not at all the way a man would who intrigued against his lord. Alain had seen enough conspiracy at court to know even the slyest of schemers gave away their intentions in their demeanor, if watched long enough. He had learned, when turning away at the end of an encounter, to suddenly turn back again as if something had been forgotten. One could see the oddest changes in a man's face, then.
    In Thomas, he saw none of those things. Neither keenly narrowed eyes nor trained emptiness. Yet he knew the man held secrets. Of all those in the castle, Thomas would be most likely to know the fate of the missing Melisande. And he, of all those there, would know how Fyren died, and whether plots still lingered in the hall's mysterious, aloof atmosphere.
    Slowed by the steepness of the slope and rocks dislodged by the hooves of the forward animals, the knights rode on. The horses, whuffing their great gasps of air, climbed, following in single file around the slope, now up, now down, sometimes nearly level. The sparsely scattered trees became a thick mat of deepest green spread before them.
    Alain's charger seemed to sense its master's excitement at the magnificent land and renewed its labors. Alain pulled ahead of the