Nell came through the crowd. She had no choice, and men cursed and women screamed at the two horses.

“I can save them,” Amicia said.

“Get on my horse,” Gabriel said. “Don’t be a fool. There’s no more you can do today. Other people can bandage them, and we’re about to be taken. Taken! Amicia!”

He got up on Ataelus, and extended his hand—his good right hand.

Behind him, his bees set upon the soldiers and the crowd somewhat indiscriminately.

“You’re the Green Knight?” asked a pretty blonde woman. She was so pretty, that with his life at stake and Amicia hesitating, he still saw her.

“Sometimes,” he answered.

She became bolder, and caught his stirrup. “Are you going to the Queen?” she asked. “I’m one of her women. A laundress.”

He could see no evil in her. “Nell!” he shouted.

Nell reached down and without a shade of his hesitation, grabbed Amicia’s hand and dragged her across her saddle.

Gabriel might have laughed, except he was too tired and too angry. He reached for the blonde woman as he turned his horse, got his good hand under her armpit a little more roughly than he had intended, and put his spurs into poor Ataelus, who deserved nothing of the kind.

The blonde woman squawked, and then he had her. She got a leg over the saddle even as Ataelus exploded into one of his bursts of speed.

A knot of men-at-arms and mounted soldiers burst out of the smoke, the crowd, with the bees at their heels.

Gabriel looked back. They were riding through the camp Ser Gerald Random had built for the visiting knights. Half the pavilions were empty, and some held squatters. But there were streets of wedge tents and streets of round pavilions, and double-ended pavilions for the richer lords, with cross streets so retinues could move about. It was like a clean, neat, festive military camp, and the tents stretched away for a third of a mile. The ropes—guy ropes and pegged wind-ropes—often came well out into the streets making it, in fact, a riding nightmare, even without twenty armed pursuers.

He locked his left arm across the young woman in front of him. “If I have to fight,” he shouted, “just fall off. Don’t stay.”

She didn’t answer.

Ataelus was a fine horse—the best, really—but he was not fast. His pursuers hadn’t made multiple passes in the lists, or been awake since dark morning.

They began to gain rapidly.

Nell, despite her smaller horse, had no such troubles—she was small, Amicia was thin, and they were drawing away from Ataelus and from the pursuit.

I’m going to be captured, Gabriel thought angrily.

He had a thought—glanced into his palace and was saddened to see that the golden thread was gone from his ankle.

Not so much gone, as a mere slip, a spider web filament.