Red’s face was like a carving in stone. He ordered me to leave, but I would not go until John was taken up, and wrapped in a cloak, and laid across his horse. And so we all rode home, I in front of Ben, with a makeshift strapping around my ankle, which now burned like hot coals. Dusk was falling, and the men who walked at front and end of the small procession bore torches. Nobody was talking. I wanted somebody to say, it’s all right. I wanted somebody to tell me, it’s not your fault. But it was my fault. I had come here, and made these people my friends, and now an innocent man had died because he had to protect me. On such a fine spring day, he should have been thatching a roof, or putting cattle out to graze, or playing on the grass with his son. Not guarding some crazy girl while she cut bundles of thorns. He should have been safe. Now he was dead. And I could see that Lord Hugh, riding straight backed, leading the horse that bore its master’s broken body, had strapped to his saddle the two rolls of starwort I had harvested, before the rockfall had destroyed the place where it grew. The price of that small harvest was his friend’s life. Such was the burden on him, such the weight of the Fair Folk’s command, that even after this he was obliged to help me. He did not allow the pain of it to show on his face, for he had erased from it any sign of feeling. In the torchlight it was like a mask of ashes, with blind holes for eyes. Ben wept openly, his grief plain for all to see, and many of the men riding there were red-eyed. Not Lord Hugh. He hid his pain deep inside, as deep as the dark secret place at the bottom of a well.

Perhaps I had forgotten that Margery was a Briton too. I soon remembered, as we rode into the courtyard, and saw her face, still sweet, still calm; but aged suddenly, so you could see the tracery of little lines about eyes and mouth that she would have as an old woman. They bore her man’s body inside, and upstairs to be washed and laid out, and she said not a single word. Nobody was looking at me; or rather, everybody seemed to be carefully not looking at me. Ben lifted me down, and I found I could not walk on the ankle, which had swollen up alarmingly. So he carried me indoors, but nobody seemed particularly interested in helping me, so I made my way to my room, leaning on the wall with one hand, hopping on one foot, as the other sent spasms of pain up my leg and through my back and into my bursting head. I bolted both doors and sat on the pallet hugging Alys and staring into the dark. What was this pain, compared with Margery’s?