A huge man in Tudor dress, all crimson velvet, gold chains, and great slabs of pinkish-yellow jowl, pushed between them like a wave of meat, wheezing winy apologies, the basket hilt of his sword bruising Farrell’s ribs. Farrell said grandly, “Nay, doth he bug you, sweet chuck? I’fackins, I’ll sock him right in the eye. No, I’ll challenge him, by God, I’ll call him out.” He stopped, because Julie was gripping his wrist tightly, and her hand was cold.

“Don’t even joke about that,” she said. “I’m serious, Joe, stay away from him.”

The pavane came to a languishingly dissonant resolution, and Farrell saw the musicians bow, the men comic in their conga-drum pantaloons, the woman making a curtsy like a silk dress falling to the floor. He began to ask Julie why he should beware of Garth de Montfaucon; but then he said, “Oh my,” as they came around the pavilion and he saw the dancers.

There were some forty or fifty of them—perhaps less, but they shone like more under the trees. The last flourish of the pavane had set their hands free to balance above them in the night, and the torchlight—Coleman lanterns hung from branches—made their rings and their jeweled gloves splash fire, scattering tiny green and violet and silver flames like largesse to the musicians. Farrell could not find any faces in that first wonder of brightness and velvet, cloaks and gold and brocade—only the beautiful clothes glittering in a great circle, moving as though they were inhabited, not by human heaviness, but by marshlights and the wind. The folk of the air, he thought. These are surely the folk of the air.

“What is it?” Julie asked, and he realized that he had pulled away from her and taken a step forward. Ben was standing beyond the far side of the circle, half-hidden by the vast crimson Tudor. He wore a blue, full-sleeved tunic under a black mantle lined with white, and a helmet with a wild boar’s muzzle for a crest. Bronze ornaments glinted at his throat, a short axe in his wide copper belt. As Farrell stared, taking another step, Ben turned his scarred shield of a face and saw him, and did not know him.