For darthlorexa

[babyofthegroup]

Recipient: darthlorexa
Author: cynjen
Pairing: Draco/Ginny

Conspirator

The night was speckled with stars above the hills surrounding the villa of Catus Bartemius Sessum, in Britain, close to the Musteculan country. Draco Malitius stamped his feet in the darkness against the benighted chill which permeated the whole of this damp island, it seemed to him, and pulled his cloak even more tightly to his body. His toes rubbed against his new sandals -- impossible to get good leather in the dregs of the Empire -- and he was thoroughly bored of waiting for his father to arrive from Lindum. The horses, his own and a replacement for his wearied father's, showed as pale splotches on the hillside, the only sounds those of the beasts chewing the cud. Draco imagined wistfully the feast waiting inside the villa, down in the valley. Earlier in the evening, lanterns had busied around the entrance, guests arriving for their esteemed patron's Saturnalian dinner. He'd watched the little lights bobbing to and fro in the winter twlilight, some slaves taking the horses and carriages away to the stables, others escorting the visitors inside. He and his father should have been amongst that throng hours ago, should now be joining in the year's most sumptuous feast, but still Marcellus Lucius Malitius had not come. When he had left on that trip three days ago, he had ordered Draco to await him here, explaining in no uncertain terms the embarrassment to the Malitius family if they were not seen to attend to their patron's wishes. Bartemius, procurator of that region, could not be offended, even if one's own politics moved entirely contrary to his. Or at least, Draco thought, dryly, not until one was in a position to do something about it. He was under no illusions as to the purpose of his father's journey; Lucius had every intention of deposing Bartemius and those other men of power who, as Lucius put it, "expose us to the barbarian hordes, daily conceding to them with treaties and gifts that which we strove so long to win by means of arms." This topic had rankled with Draco's father for as long as Draco could remember, but in recent times his rhetoric had grown more fervent, and his views were being voiced also by men who had previously been silent.

Looking back, away from the revelry below, along the path his father would take, he saw at last the glimmer of a lantern moving slowly towards him. Too slowly, he realised, for a horseman. He expected his father to be riding full-tilt, late as he was. Puzzled, Draco crept to the horses, grasped their bridles, and started to lead them to the cover of a wooded grove. Then, a whistle rang out, like the call of a wood pigeon startled during a hunt, but with no accompanying rustle of leaves, he knew it came from the man with the lantern. This was his father, the call a remnant of the games they used to play when Draco was young and his father taught him all the country pursuits. He whistled back, an owl call he had heard every night in Umbria, where their summer villa had an estate stretching as far as the eye could see. He mounted his own horse and led the other to where the lantern had stopped bobbing and now stood waiting. Lucius was shrouded in a large black riding cloak, but his horse was not there. "Turned an ankle coming off the road five miles away," he said tersely. "Useless animal, hardly fit for a wildman's breeches." He mounted the fresh horse Draco provided and immediately set off down the valley with no other word to his son.

They were greeted at the house by a slave in smart livery, an elf with curiously large ears and a usefully subservient manner. Draco had seen these creatures at many villas of Romans who had lived in the country for several years; it seemed they were a local breed which, unlike the vicious imps of Italia, took pride in being helpful and so were easily enslaved and far less likely to attempt escape than their human counterparts. This one took their cloaks and showed them through to the triclinium, filling their wine glasses without so much as a glance to reprimand them for being late. The dining room was a large, square room, with divans arranged in groups around tables stacked high with roast meats and bowls of exotic sauces. In one corner were musicians, a cantator singing an ode to a stag, in the centre of the room a female dancer, dark-skinned and naked apart from luxurious gold jewellery decorating her ears, neck, wrists and ankles, entertained the procurator himself. Garlands of winter branches, dripping with evergreen leaves, red and white berries, and the pale winter roses found in those parts, hung across the walls and ceiling, obscuring expensive mosaics of gods and wild creatures.

Draco's father strode purposefully to the procurator's table, and bowed low to him. Draco hung back, watching the dancer as she turned her attentions to the other men reclining nearby. Draco recognised Cassius Cornelius Mellis, sent from Rome at the same time as Lucius, but in no other way his father's equal. The third man around Bartemius' table had shocking red hair, like a barbarian, and, although dressed in a toga, had an unusual clasp of beaten copper, depicting a dragon in flight. Cornelius noticed Draco standing by and jovially waved him over. As he brushed past her, the dancer smiled pleasantly and he thought she then danced closer to him than she did the other men. "Well met, old friend, well met," Cornelius greeted him with great enthusiasm. "This is a joyful Saturnalia, is it not? Peace in the land and such fertile fields as I've not seen in the whole empire! And all thanks to our great friendships with the Mustecula clan, I'm sure you'll agree. This is Percival Musteculan, who has been a great, great help to Catus Bartemius in establishing treaties between the two sides. Percival, this is Draco Malitius, son of the great businessman Marcellus Lucius, a man who will no doubt profit well from the years to come, eh, Draco?" Draco smiled weakly and shook the barbarian's hand. He was more than a little shocked that it had come so far as this; members of the clan eating at the top table.

Percival was a grave young man with a slight squint. Although the slave was still dancing in front of him, he did not seem to notice her, while, even while he was speaking, Cornelius' eyes had slipped past Draco onto her body. Instead, the barbarian addressed Draco. "It has indeed been a fruitful time for all of us. We were not accustomed to fighting, and are much pleased to be farming once more." He suddenly sat upright, looking at something to his left. "My mother," he murmured, then stood. "The Queen of the Mustecula Clan, Marian, approaches. Would you care to meet her?" he asked both Draco and Cornelius.

"Delighted!" Cornelius said, while Draco groaned under his breath, about to turn to his father and ask him to somehow extricate them from this awful situation. A glance back showed that Lucius and Bartemius had moved over to another table and were engaged in listening to a storyteller. Peals of laughter rang out from that group and with Cornelius' hand firmly gripping his shoulder, it seemed ever more unlikely that he could go anywhere else. The dancer, on the other hand, though only a slave, had already moved away to a more likely audience.

The woman, Marian, was unpleasantly forward in speaking, he found, and she had a strange tone and accent which he disliked intensely. "My daughter, Ginevra," she said, "sister to six brothers, as brave a girl as any warrior in our clan." He glanced at the child, a pale scrap of a thing in an old purple dress that did her no favours at all, being both too big and too dark for her complexion. Her hair, the same alien orange as the other members of her clan, was hanging loose in a most unladylike way, but the lamplight caught it in glimmers, and after a few moments, he realised he was staring at it and stopped, but she didn't seem to have noticed. The mother was still going on about something; thankfully Cornelius appeared to be listening, at least. He let his eyes drift back to the girl; there was a strength to her arms he had not originally imagined could be there, and the hand holding the wine glass had calluses he recognised like his own. She knew how to hold a spear, he thought. Did she know how to use it?

Marian and Cornelius were deep in conversation when the girl turned to Percival and asked, lightly, "Won't you ask the musicians to play something more lively?" A small smile passed between them, and Draco saw an uncanny family resemblance in their chestnut-brown eyes. "Won't you accompany me on that errand, princess?" Percival replied, and she giggled. Draco looked away, sure that the pair had forgotten his presence, but the man bowed briefly and excused himself politely. Ginevra bowed also, and he felt a mocking in the depth of it, but as she raised her head he felt her frank gaze sweep up his body and almost, he blushed. Then she was gone.

Finding himself alone, Draco took a long sip of his wine and looked around the room. There was no-one he particularly wished to speak to, as most of the assembled dignitaries were far older than himself. Now that he had warmed up after his extended wait on the hillside, he rather thought fresh air would be a good idea, and slipped out into the garden. Here candles guttered in a chill breeze, but under the colonnade he was sheltered from both the cold and prying eyes. He cradled his glass, savouring the scent of the last drops of wine, and gazed at the weather-beaten bushes and plants in the centre of the garden. He imagined Bartemius' dancer dancing privately for him, her breasts grazing his chest, her legs wrapped around his waist. He leant back against the garden wall and closed his eyes, imagining the taste of her skin -- like gold, he thought, rich and soft.

He was startled out of his thoughts by a touch on his arm. His eyes flew open and about and immediately found the red-haired girl of the Mustecula Clan leaning against the wall next to him. She smiled sweetly at his discomfort. "Night's cool air heals many an ill," she said.

"What?" he stepped away from her, his manners long since fled.

She remained composed. "I wonder what ill has befallen you, that you do not wish to stay in the warm?"

"No ill, before you came along," he said, pulling his robe straight and preparing to go back inside.

"Really?" she asked, pushing herself off from the wall to block the path back to the house. She put one hand up to his shoulder. "You don't need to be alone?"

He stared at her, completely baffled. She met his gaze without blinking. "I...I don't know what you mean," he said. "Is this some barbarian custom?"

She smiled, and moved so that her body was separated from his by a hair's width. "I believe it is not only 'barbarians' who engage in what I am proposing," she whispered, and leaned up and kissed him.

His mind whirled. Her tongue grazed his teeth. He saw the light in one of the high windows of the villa flickering as slaves moved past the kitchen's cookfire. Her lips were very warm and still carried the scent of wine. Shrieks of merriment came from the house and he thought of the dancer still entertaining the men within. The hair's width between them had shrunk to no width at all, and he was very conscious of his own nipples pressing outwards in the cold. His wine glass dropped from his hand and landed, cracking on the paved floor.

Finally her lips left his. She sank back on her heels with a sort of sigh. "What's the matter?"

"I..." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pulled himself together. "Women do not behave so in polite society," he said coldly, and pushed passed her roughly on his way indoors.

Before he had reached the triclinium, he smelt a bitter scent in the air. The cook must have burnt the sweets, he thought, holding his breath as he passed the kitchen. Even with his breath held, though, the smell grew stronger the further he went into the house. He looked into the door of a private room on his right and saw Bartemius slumped in his chair, his eyes closed. A flash of gold showed the dancer, too, sprawled on the floor, her head on her master's lap. Draco looked quickly away.

At the doorway to the triclinium, he paused. Music still flowed from the room, but the general hubbub of men talking had died away. He wondered if already the party had dissolved, but his time in the garden had not been that long, and there had been no-one bidding their farewells when he had left. He felt in his belt for his wand, and drew it, even as he thought how embarrassed his father would be if he appeared with a drawn wand a a formal feast. He need not have worried. As he stepped into the room the people arrayed before him were all clearly dead, whether reclining still at table or collapsed where they had stood. In the corner the minstrels played on, though they no longer smiled and sang. He knew the enchantment as one placed on mice and other dumb animals to force them to perform tricks. Amusing as a diversion, the animals did not live long. Over all hung the source of the burning stench -- a green, hideous skull with a snake for a tongue.

For a moment, Draco could not move.

Behind him someone screamed. He turned, it was Ginevra, she too with a wand out, but pointed at him. "What is this?" she shrieked.

"It's not me!" he said, angrily. "I just found--" He stopped, suddenly realising that his father must be here. He started running from table to table, and then he saw that Ginevra was copying him, lifting faces to see exactly who had died. "My father's not here," he said at last.

Ginevra stopped where she was, next to her mother's body. She looked at him with eyes full of tears. "Why has he done this?" she asked, quietly.

"Why has he done this now?" Draco thought.

Together, they slipped away into the darkness. Walking beside the road, but not on it, they headed south towards the Mustecula's land. The ground was uneven underfoot and Draco frequently stumbled over brambles and loose stones. Ginevra, ashen-faced, slapped her hand over his mouth every time he grumbled, but listened without interrupting as he told her, in between large gulps of air, about his father's plans for Roman Britain. "But I don't understand why he's started like this," he said. "He left his friends in Lindum, a day away north. He's never going to succeed by himself."

He couldn't see Ginevra's face as she walked in front of him in the darkness. After he had stopped talking, she too was silent for a while. Then, "He can't be alone," was all she said.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, he pulled her hand and forced her to stop. "We can't keep this up all night," he said. "I need to stop for a while."

Ginevra nodded. "When we get to the woods," she said. "We're so exposed out here."

"Nobody's coming," Draco said. "Nobody's passed us all night. They're all dead."

"Except the killers," she said, and that was the end of that. He sighed and followed her on.

They reached a grove of trees just as Draco thought he couldn't walk any further. His feet were blistered and bruised, his legs stung by the scratches and stings of the undergrowth. Ginevra chose a suitable tree and climbed up until she was hidden from sight from the road. He took a moment to lean against the rough bark, but her, "What are you waiting for?!" quickly spurred him to climb. When he caught up with her she motioned him to sit down. "I'll take the first watch," she said, and his eyelids were already starting to droop.

A while later he started to shift in his sleep and came awake with a start when he started to slip off the branch he was sitting on. Ginevra was a shape in the darkness further along the same branch, her legs hanging either side, her eyes cast down to the ground. Her hair still lay down her back like a sheet, and it was still the most interesting thing about her. Draco carefully manoeuvred along the branch so he was sitting directly behind her.

He lifted a strand of her hair between two fingers. "Why didn't you do anything with this?"

"What do you mean?" she snapped, her eyes leaving on the road below them for only a moment.

"You must have seen the Roman women, the way they wear it," he persisted. Even in the moonlight, a flash of copper shone as he twisted the strand into a little curl.

"What a ridiculous thing to be thinking about at a time like this." There was a pause, and he thought for a moment she wouldn't answer. Suddenly from below there was the shriek of a house elf, and through the branches he saw a horse galloping past, its rider clinging on by the mane, cloakless, his toga streaming out beyond the horse's tail. Draco couldn't for the life of him see the house-elf, until Ginevra took a sharp breath. He followed her gaze down; directly below them, the creature was stumbling along after its master, one leg dragging, one perky ear missing. He had hardly taken in the scene when he felt a tug as Ginevra's hair slipped through his fingers and she was dropping silently from branch to branch to the roadside. He scrambled down hastily, but stopped short when he saw what she was doing. The elf had clutched in one tiny fist the severed ear missing from his head and Ginevra was trying to pry it from him. All the while the elf still side-stepped to follow the man who had ridden off without him, but blood had caked down his face and still dripped to soak into his filthy uniform.

"Who is your master?" Ginevra was asking him, quietly, repeatedly. The elf shook his head rapidly from side to side and pulled away from her even harder.

"He won't tell you if he's been told not to," Draco said. "I've heard that these new slaves are very literal in interpreting orders. From the livery I'd say he was Bartemius'."

"No," she said looking the elf squarely in the face. "He belongs to that rider. I think he was just told to pretend he was part of Bartemius' household." The elf's eyes widened, then shut very tightly. Ginevra let go of him.

She stood, grimly wiping her hands on her dress. The elf hobbled off, but only a short way down the road, he fell and didn't pick himself up again. Ginevra pulled her hair quickly into a tail then round on itself somehow to form a knot. "We wear our hair loose to show amity," she said. "We tie our hair back for war." Their eyes met. She was serious.

The first thing she did was smear his face and hair with mud from the roadside, then her own. "You near shine in the dark," she told him, but fondly, almost. Then, as a second thought, "Do you know how to fight?" she asked.

"Of course!" He was affronted. "My father first took me on the hunt in Umbria when I was only four summers old! I have slain stag with arrow and boar with spear and net!"

"Do you know how to fight men?" she asked. "They have more wiles than beasts of the land, and are better armed, besides."

Draco stared at her. Then, sullenly, he admitted he had not. "Although I did have some training with a sword and staff," he added, "when I was young." She shook her head. "That will have to do, then."

She took her wand and with it broke two strong, straight branches from a silver birch. They each stripped one bare of twigs and bark, and Draco sharpened the ends to points. Thus armed, they set off again for Musteculan country. The sky in the east turned grey, then white as the sun rose behind thick cloud. Ginevra insisted they walk even further from the road, to keep in cover.

They had been walking forever, Draco thought, when they came across the rider who had passed them in the night. He was strung up in the trees, neck crushed, eyes popping, and Draco shuddered at the sight. Ginevra, on the other hand, grinned wickedly. "We're in Mustecula country now," she said. "My brothers have a rare skill for booby-traps."

Draco felt sick. "I thought you people were farmers," he said.

"Who told you that?" she wondered as she climbed the tree to take a closer look at the dead man. "We're warriors and hunters. Only a few people bother to farm."

"Percival," he said. "Was he one of them? A farmer, I mean."

"Hmm. Yes, I suppose he would've been, if he hadn't got caught up in politics. Not very good eyes, you see. Can't aim a spear if his life depends on it." She paused. "Which it won't, now."

She dropped down beside him with a letter in her hand. "Look what he was carrying," she said, giving it to him. The seal was one Draco recognised at once, the same skull and snake which had hung so threateningly over the dead feast. He slit it open with a finger and read the letter, which was very short. 'Eastern region complete. Will arrive at Lundinium as planned.' He frowned and passed it back to her. She chewed on a lip as she read it, too. "If they're wanting to get to Lundinium, they'll come this way too. I wish we knew how many." And with that, she turned on her heels and set off again south.

It did not take them long to reach Ginevra's village. A collection of huts and houses, mostly wattle and daub, one or two stone-built, but small, lay clustered in a large clearing in the wood. The village was already awake and Draco saw children collecting hen's eggs, and adults tanning hides and forging iron. The women wore their hair loose, and everyone's clothes were sheepskin, hide and fur. Heads turned towards the two of them, filthy and strangely dressed, with their flimsy birch staves as walking sticks. Ginevra suddenly let out an ululating call. "The Queen is dead!" she cried. "The Queen is dead!"
Immediately she had a crowd around her, and one man pushed through it.

"Explain, Ginevra," he said, firmly, he face as white and his hair as red as hers.

"Mother was killed, and Percival too, at the feast, Bartemius and all his guests," she said, her voice shaking slightly. "There is a plot, to kill us all. Illiam, they will come this way, perhaps less than a day away." She thrust the letter into his hand. The people in the crowd talked loudly to one another, angry and afraid, but Draco's attention was on Ginevra and her brother.

"We'll be ready for them," Illiam said to her, and then to the villagers, "The Queen is dead. We must arm ourselves for war."

The people of the Mustecula Clan knew what that meant. Each went to his or her house, put on their thick, leather armour, and their toughest boots. They cleaned their swords and staves and spears until they shone, fletched their arrows, oiled their bows. Draco followed Ginevra and Illiam to their home, one of the wattle and daub constructs with no special decoration to indicate it housed the royal family. Inside they sat around the table by the cook fire, and Ginevra explained the whole evening through. She didn't obscure anything, and told of her seduction attempt without blushing. At the end of the telling, Illiam turned to Draco, thoughtfully.

"Your father's allies; at least one other was at the villa of Bartemius last evening -- he died in Gurgy's trap on the road. Why have not more passed through here since then? He may have been the messenger, but even riding more slowly others could have easily overtaken you."

Draco shook his head, numbed by the long night of fear and cold. He looked into the fire and caught himself dozing off, even as he tried to compose a reply to the barbarian's question. He stirred once as Ginevra laid a fleece over him, then slept soundly for a long time.

He was awoken by raised voices close by. The fire had burned low, only flaring under the cool draught from the hut's entrance.

"Frederick! They're coming! Ronald's raising the alarm!"

Draco leapt out of his seat, sleep dropping from his mind as swiftly as it had come. He looked wildly around the room, found only the staff Ginevra had made for him in the night, and ran out into the village. Noone was around. No children running between the houses, no sound from the smithy or the animal pens...

"Hsst!"

He spun round, looked up, saw a hand waving frantically from up a tree. He sprinted to it and was half way up when three sets of friendly hands pulled him the other half. The hands belonged to Ginevra, now dressed in barbaric furs, and two men who looked exactly alike; more of Ginevra's brothers, no doubt. They were well armed with knives tucked into their belts; also many small wooden pots lay in a bag strug to the branch above, which smelt strongly of dead mouse. "What are those?"

"A concoction of ingredients," said one of the men, infuriatingly.

"Secret, of course," said the other.

"But what is it for?"

"So curious!" the first man said, raising an eyebrow.

Ginevra laughed quietly. "Stop your teasing, Frederick. Draco, they are merely toys my brothers have invented for putting off the enemy. When thrown in battle they have a most unusual effect, made even more potent by fire."

Draco scowled. "Is a battle commencing? I see no enemy."

"They are coming," Frederick said, coldly. "Our scouts have seen them on the road."

"Our brother Ronald was first watchman," Ginevra said. "He raised the alarm, and now has gone back to aid in setting traps, where Illiam is. Our other brother, Charlach, has gone south for aid from the other clans." She seemed to be counting a roll in her head; Percival dead, the remaining brothers all accounted for.

"How many are there?"

"They will get through the traps."

Draco lifted his spear to a throwing stance. It tangled in the branches behind him so that he nearly tumbled to the ground.

"Perhaps we should have sent him to the hide-away with the children..." Gurgy said, even as he grasped Draco's shoulder to keep him upright. "You should have a man's weapons, Roman," his brother added, and handed him a short-handled knife. "For close fighting, don't throw it away."

"He knows how to fight." Ginevra's voice was soft as she looked away into the distance. "He will fight when the time comes."

He had barely time to smile at her when, from below came the noise of horses stampeding, men screaming with bloodlust and fear, and, worst of all, the smell of fire. Immediately Frederick, Gurgy and Ginevra were leaping from tree to tree like squirrels, and it took Draco a moment to see that they were moving to surround the oncoming men, and pelting them with the curious mouse-boxes. As each hit they disintegrated in a cloud of acrid smoke, leaving the men caught in it disorientated and rubbing at their eyes. Villagers on the ground, mouths covered with thick woollen cloth, threw themselves into the fray, knives flashing. Draco suddenly realised he was supposed to be amongst them, and, equally quickly that he did not have anything to tie around his face, and as soon as he joined the fighting, he would be struck down, surely. He chose the only sensible option left to him, and fled.

At the edge of the forest, he saw flaming arrows shooting up into the air, and small tussles of fighters spilling into the clearing. He himself ran for the cover of the nearest hut, then another, his aim the house of the Musteculan chief family. Clothes, he thought to himself, appropriate clothes, a better weapon; he cursed himself for sleeping through the preparations, he cursed Ginevra and her brothers for thinking him weak. He would fight, he swore. When he was prepared for it.

A sudden wind swept through the village from the north, riffling the straw roofs and sweeping arrows before it. Draco crouched by the wall of the smithy, he eyes trained on the forest, when from above it came a wild roar like nothing he'd ever heard before. A massive green shape, the size of a dozen horses, with wings scaled and tail whipping, flew above the trees. From its gigantic maw came fire, in thin jets, which seared the ground and set the forest blazing. Draco felt himself scream, but the sound could not have come from his mouth, for now his ears were filled only with the sound of his blood. He ran. He ran for his life.

The creature had swung round before Draco stumbled at the entrance to the next building, a stone storehouse. At least, that was how it had seemed at first, as the wind from the north was replaced by a strong southerly. But as he rolled onto his feet he saw that where he had expected green, the monster was black, and where he had seen thin jets of flame, the animal breathed clouds of fire.

The dragons clashed with a roar of heat and light and noise that shook Draco again off his feet. All he could see as he scrambled into the storehouse were flashes of black and green and red, as droplets of dragon blood sprinkled the ground. Wherever they fell, they left scorch marks; on grass, on flesh, on stone. Nothing could compare to the two beasts, screeching like eagles, as they fought overhead. The village was on fire, and smoke soon obscured the sky. It billowed into the building with him, fanned by the giant wings beating the air. Draco crawled into a corner, choked, and passed out.

He awoke, now, to silence. His body, bruised and bloodied, nearly refused to let him stand, but resolutely he pulled himself to the door. Night had fallen, but under the dim light of the moon he saw the village, wrecked, and the forest still smouldering. His first thought was relief; then he remembered Ginevra.

It took him several hours to search all the bodies. When he found his father's, he paused. Lucius was not burned, though soot darkened his pale hair and skin, but had died of a spear wound in the side. For a moment, Draco remembered their first boar hunt, being taught the spear-hold, the stance, the throw. It was his father's man, Goyle, who had moved his hands to the right positions and arranged his aim so that it would be true. He remembered his father looking on, smiling. What had he been smiling at? Draco breathed a deep breath, and as he exhaled, walked away.

Ginevra was sitting on the bank of a stream. As he approached, she glanced at him, then quickly away. He saw her legs burnt through to the bone; she was washing them, and had ripped up her cloak for bandages. He sat down beside her, and she said nothing.

He broke the silence. "I haven't seen anyone else alive," he said.

"They have gone west, after the dragon." Her eyes shone at those words, and he paled.

"The dragons! But look at what they've done!"

"The green is dead. But the black! He came for us, to save us. Without him we could not have won."

"Without him..." Draco shook his head. "This is not winning, Ginevra. This was just a coup, a band of men with ideas and swords and nothing else."

"They had a dragon," she said. Her voice hardened. "But so do we. And now we have the Iceni and the Angles with us, and we will make no more parlays or treaties or gestures of goodwill. We will have our land back."

"But the rest -- the men like Bartemius -- they don't want to enslave you... You're mad. You're--" He had started to stand, his hand sliding on the muddy bank, but as he did she seemed to slump and half-slipped into the water. "Ginevra!" he called, pulling at her arms, dragging her bodily onto dry ground. Her eyelids fluttered, then opened wide.

"I'll be all right," she said, matter-of-factly. "I just need some new legs."

He felt a queer hot sensation behind his eyes and blinked furiously. "I'll make you knew legs," he promised. "We just need a good wood-turner."

"But everything here's burnt!" she protested.

"We'll go to somewhere else, the north or the west where there's oak and elm and apple as far as the eye can see!"

"How will we get there?" she murmured, her eyes closing.

"I'll carry you," he said, and kissed her.