“Quick, then,” Will said. He turned to her. “Keep your bloody head down. Yell and you’re dead. Tell the darky that.” He wheeled round on Rhys. “One peep out of you and I’ll break your neck and your fucking harp.”

The donkeys were shoved into the cave and the screen hidden with branches. It was decided that cover was thicker at the hill’s lower end, and that they should make for it.

The descent began. Adelia was to look back on it as among the luminous times of her life.

Few girls had a childhood; the imperative was to grow into womanhood with a woman’s skills as quickly as possible. In Adelia’s case, it had been to learn how to be a doctor and then an anatomist. Training hadn’t been imposed on her-her foster parents had tried to make her take up some amusement, but she had resisted them; study was the thing.

Now here, on a journey down a sacred tor, for the first time, she was granted a gift, the childhood of a common country boy who had climbed trees and stolen birds’ eggs, who had scrumped apples from other people’s orchards and hidden from angry gamekeepers. Or perhaps because the danger was more than a clout on the ear, she became a soldier in enemy territory, using a landscape to escape discovery and get home.

Whatever it was, she loved it.

At the beginning they went fast, dodging from tree to tree in case someone in the hunt had sight and hearing as long as Toki’s. The blare of horns was louder now. Adelia could hear her name being shouted, the calls coming closer through the hot air.

Having exhausted the search of Wearyall Hill, Rowley was leading his men straight to the Tor.

“On your bellies, lads,” Will said quietly. To Adelia, he said, “You goin’ to give us away?”

“No.”

Just in case, he kept close to her, knife in hand. Two of the other men were paired with Mansur and Rhys, ready to silence them if they cried out.

Wisely, the hunt had gone to the top of the hill and begun circling downward in spirals.

The tithing and prisoners made for cover, crawling, feeling the reverberation of the hunt’s hoofbeats through their hands and knees.

It was wonderful; it was a game, it was the game; it was life at primitive level; it was how a species survived by craft and fear. For Adelia absorbed some of the terror of the tithing as they crawled, her back prickling with exposure, as if her life as well as theirs depended on concealment, all the while being filled with the joy of a wild thing using its habitat. She was a weasel undulating through the fragrancy of grass; she was a snake with sweet earth beneath her belly; a clump of tall, purple loosestrife was a hiding place, a patch of inhospitable gorse to be despised.

As the hunt grew closer, she became an outlaw among outlaws, her teeth exposed in a snarl, as if they had a knife between them. She’d never played hide-and-seek, but deep inside the dark, crumbling interior of a hollowed oak, she watched Rowley ride by within ten feet of her, crying her name-and she would no more have called out to him than a boar in its lair would have snorted to attract the hounds.

When he’d passed, she looked up to where Will was lying across a branch above her. Their eyes met with mutual respect, and she knew that whatever happened, he would not kill her now, just as he knew she was not going to betray him. They were feral creatures; together they had outwitted the hunt.

On a promontory with a view of the abbey and marshes, the tithing-for they were all frankpledged now-watched its pursuers set off for Chalice Hill.

“Rest a bit,” Will said, and nodded toward the abbey, from which came a faint plainchant. “They’ll be finishing terce any moment.”

So it was the third hour of daylight, one hundred and eighty minutes since Adelia had been introduced to Eustace’s cave, and not one of them she wouldn’t look back on without a ferocious joy.

As she waited, lying flat, Will on one side, Alf on the other, the primeval drained out of her and, with a pang of regret, she resumed the mind and shape of Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, Medica of the Salerno School, mistress of the art of death and agent to King Henry II of England, anxious friend to a missing woman, lover of a man who loved God and his king more than he did her…

“Here they come, look,” Will said as four black beetle-like figures emerged from the ruin of the church. “Bugger, I forgot as it’s third Friday of the month.”

For the beetles were not returning to the Abbot’s kitchen; one of them was walking toward the abbey pier, where the unmistakable shape of Godwyn awaited him at the oars of a rowing boat. “Off to Lazarus,” Will said. “Old abbot’s a-taking communion to them lepers.”

“Well, they’re not worrying about me,” Adelia said, slightly miffed at the abbey’s placid reaction to her and Mansur’s disappearance.

“Reg’lar as Christmas. Every three weeks, off he do go to keep them lepers’ souls in trim, nothin’ to come in the way of it.”

“Saint he is,” Alf said. “Buggered if I’d go.”

“Leprosy isn’t all that contagious,” Adelia murmured.

“What’s that mean?”

“You don’t catch the sickness quickly.”

“I ain’t bloody riskin’ it, I tell you that.”

“I’m sorry for the poor sods,” Toki said. “Fancy rottin’ away on a lump o’ mud as you can’t get off of.”

“But can’t they walk off it?” Adelia wanted to know. From up here the mosaic of sedge, reed, and fen woodland with their differing greens that surrounded the islands’ low humps looked firm enough, while surely those streams and lakes reflecting the enamel blue of the sky could be swum or waded.

“Not allowed,” Toki told her. “The law. An’ they ain’t got no boat.”

Abbot Sigward and Godwyn, apparently, when they visited that poor congregation, had to secure their punt to Lazarus’s landing stage by a lock to which only they had the key.

“As for walkin’,” Will said, “you don’t walk the Avalon marshes less’n you been born on ’em. Not then, neither. There’s quog devils out there as’ll grab your feet and suck you down, an’ you ain’t never sure where they are ’cos they’re shifting buggers, pop up anywhere them quog devils will.”

“Yet I’ve seen people on stilts…”

But stilt walkers, Adelia was told, never went that far out, being aware of the risk. Anyway, Lazarus inhabitants had learned by tragic experience not to try and escape.

“There’s more’n one leper as tried to get off ain’t never been seen again.”

The beetles that were brothers Aelwyn, James, and Titus moved about the grounds, carrying out odd jobs, netting trout from the pool for the fish stew-for it was Friday and only fish was on the menu.

On its promontory, the tithing waited with animal patience until the monks should withdraw into the Abbot’s kitchen and, while it waited, passed comment on the men it watched.

“Old Titus’ll be wanting his dinner soon, greedy bugger.”

“An’ his ale. Old abbot sent poor Useless off for getting drunk, but he don’t know the half of what Titus topes when he ain’t looking. Could drink Useless under the table any day, Titus could.”

“Look at old James potterin’ about. Bet he’s talking to hisself. Mad as a weasel, James is, an’ nasty with it when he’s roused.”

Will nudged Adelia. “Bet you don’t know as why Brother Aelwyn di’n’t want you and the darky messin’ about in the graveyard.”

“No. Why?”

“ ’Cos he’s got two babies buried in it.”

“Babies?”

Will smirked. “Babies. Oh, there was carryin’s-on with women in the old days, so they say, for all them monks was supposed to be virgins, an one of ’em had twins an’ old Aelwyn give ’em to her. Left ’em on the abbey’s doorstep, she did. There was a right to-do about it. Had to bury ’em in the monks’ own graveyard.”

“Dear God, how did the babies die?”

Will, with some reluctance, admitted that as far as was known, the twins had met a natural death.