“With you,” he said, and when she stepped, he backed. Their spines touched, and sometimes their hips, and one more time, at the edge of the stone circle, by the outlier they called “The Forlorn Lover,” he moved away—a sudden lunge, and she was alone.

She looked back, and he was grappling something with both hands.

“Run!” he shouted. One of the worms was going for his face; he grappled it, but seemed off balance . . .

Pippa turned on her heel and whipped the sickle off her purse hook. Her arm was strong and her aim true despite the bad light, and she cut the writhing thing just under Jamie’s hands and her knife went through it as if it had been smoke, and Jamie stumbled. She caught his shoulders and pulled him back and they both fell in the soft turf, and the worms, barely visible in the ashy air, still stretched obscenely toward them.

Pippa got her bare feet back and rolled.

Jamie gave a great spasm and got his feet under him, caught her, and leapt.

“Holy Saint Michael and all the saints,” Jamie said in awe. “What the fuck was that?”

Pippa hit him. “I’ve never heard you swear before.”

Then, hand in hand, they ran the long way, around the standing stones, to warn the others.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Arles—The Red Knight

Gabriel awoke. Blanche was lying on his arm and his hermetical hand, and her hair seemed to glitter gold in the darkness. Gabriel smiled, and lay content for a moment gazing at her. He could hear Anne Woodstock moving, and he realized with a nearly hermetical impulse that he was in the castle of Arles.

In almost the same tendril of time he saw with revulsion that it was not Blanche’s hair that was glittering with gold in the darkness. Or rather, it was her hair, catching the light from his nonhermetical hand, which was glowing very faintly with gold.

Gabriel Muriens, the Red Knight, Duke of Thrake, Emperor of Man, cursed.

Blanche stirred. She turned her face to him, and snuggled gently but insistently against his side.

Arles.

The dragon Rhun was . . . dead seemed the wrong word.

Destroyed?

Arles was liberated, and on the plains under the high town, thirty thousand former bondspeople, the not-dead, now living, wandered at the point of starvation. Thousands of men and beasts had already died. More would die.

Gabriel lay and looked at Blanche by the light cast by his own skin, and just for a moment, the words formed in his mind.

Fuck you, God.

He smiled.

Or, be it according to thy will, he mused. Annoying as that might seem.

Blanche awoke. She looked at him, leaned to kiss him, flinched, and gasped.

“Oh, by the Blessed Virgin! You are glowing!” She sat up.

Gabriel was still gazing at her. He managed a smile.