The sight of their young passion touched him, and left him feeling old and empty. He could not have intruded and stopped it if he had wanted to. He could not have moved.

Dylan wrapped his arms around Genith and tucked her head under his chin. As he pressed a kiss to her hair, his gaze swept the trees, and stopped at the spot where Marcus sat on his horse.

It was not clear to Marcus that he had been seen. Dylan made no move to release Genith, or to run for their mounts. Those young rebellious eyes filled with expression, however. They were not the eyes of a man who intended to release what he held.

Marcus read the resolve in them, and guessed that if he followed these two he would not be led to Llygad’s men. He wondered what oaths Dylan had sworn about Genith. As a bard, Dylan would know how to choose the words carefully.

Marcus looked upstream to where a horse and mule rested. Leonard had said that the ladies had stolen two horses, so one was missing. Nor had Nesta interrupted this little idyll. If she were here she would have. Whatever Nesta’s plans for Genith, they did not include permitting liberties with a bard. It must have been her horse that he started following in the valley.

Marcus looked at Dylan again, and at the happy girl nestled in his embrace. He sent his own message with his eyes, in the event Dylan could see him.

Then he turned his horse, and went back the way he had come.

CHAPTER 9

Nesta cursed. She did not mutter the profanities, but yelled them with the full force of her diminishing strength.

She cursed the snow, and the skittish horse, and the hare whose sudden appearance had gotten her thrown. She damned the King and the archbishop and the empty, silent valley quickly being obscured by darkness. She heaped the worst blasphemies on the ankle spearing her with excruciating pain as she limped along. The yelling helped clear her head from the dizziness that wanted to blot out her sight.

She fell again, and this time did not try to get up. Her ankle would not let her, and there was no advantage in doing so anyway. It would be completely dark soon, and already she was not sure in which direction she headed. Sitting in the wet snow, she wrapped her arms around herself and cursed some more.

The shout died on her lips as she caught sight of a moving shadow. Low and dark, it slinked across the glow of the snow a few hundred paces from where she sat. She squinted in that direction, and two tiny lights peered back at her. The nape of her neck prickled.

A wolf. She cursed again, a quiet whimper this time, and glanced around in panic. If there was one, there were others.