olive-faced man perhaps five and forty years old, very splendidly dressed insomber, glowing colors, and well mounted on a light, fast gray, surely partArab, thought Cadfael. The man had plenteous black hair coiling under a plumedcap, and a clipped black beard framing a long-lipped mouth. It was a narrow,closed face, subtle and suspicious. On the other side rode a lady of about thesame years, thin and neat and sharply handsome, dark like her lord, and mountedon a roan mare. She had a pursed, calculating mouth and shrewd eyes, beneathbrows tending to a frown even when the mouth smiled. Her head-dress was of themost fashionable, her riding habit had the London cut, and she rode with graceand style, but the very look of her struck with a coldness.

And in between these two, dwarfed and overshadowed, there paced a tiny,childlike creature on a palfrey too large for her. Her touch on the rein waslight, her seat in the saddle listless but graceful. She was sumptuouslyarrayed in cloth of gold and dark blue silks, and within the burden of herfinery her slight form seemed cramped and straitened, like a body coffined. Herface gazed ahead, beneath a gilded net heavy with dark-gold hair, intoemptiness. A softly rounded face, with delicate features and great iris-grayeyes, but so pale and subdued that she might have been a pretty doll rather than a living woman. Cadfael heard Mark draw in startled breath.It was a shame to see youth and freshness so muted and bereft of joy.

This lord, too, had noted the nature of this place, and of those who hadcome out from it to see his niece go by. He did not, like Domville, spurdeliberately at the offense, but swung his mount the other way, to give theinfected a wider berth, and turned his head away to avoid even seeing them. Thegirl might have passed by without so much as noticing them, so deep was shedrowned in her submissive sadness, if the child Bran, all shining eyes, had not