Hugo shook his head. 'It does nothing except frighten you and make you feel that all the world's sins are at your door,' he said roundly. 'Keep your herbs and your crystal and your real skills, the ones you have used to make my father well. Keep your medicines and throw away your spells, Alys. There is real danger for you when you play with them. Not because they are true -for they are nothing but nonsense to frighten peasants! – but because they give your enemies a handle on you. Throw away the magic and keep the medicine.'

'All right,' Alys said reluctantly. 'I agree. Unless I have need of them, unless I have need of that power, I will stop.' She thought of the figures in her purse, stuffed deep in the mattress in her room. 'I never know whether it works or not,' she said honestly, I was sure I had hexed you and Catherine, and now you tell me it is your own tastes.'

He nodded. 'We were always like that,' he said. 'No spell on earth could make me use a woman so if it were not to her taste as well as mine.'

'I will throw it away,' Alys said. 'I should never have started but for that ordeal. I was afraid and I wanted some power – at any price.'

Hugo tightened his arm around her shoulders. 'Don't be frightened,' he said, his voice low. 'I love you, I will protect you. You have my power around you now.'

He took her hand and turned it palm upward. As if he were sealing a bond he planted a kiss in the centre and folded her fingers over. She took his hand to do the same for him. She kissed each fingertip one by one, as if to bless them, as if to keep them whole. Then they sat by the fire until the darkness of the arrow-slits started showing pale.

'I must go,' Hugo said.

Alys held her face up for his farewell kiss. He took it in both hands and kissed her lips, and then very gently, both eyelids. 'Sleep,' he said and his voice held a tenderness she had never heard from him before. 'Sleep and dream again of the time I will be with you night and day and no one will come between us.' 'Soon,' Alys whispered. 'I swear it,' Hugo said.

'I want to be your wife, Hugo,' Alys said softly. 'I want to belong here, as you do, without question. And I want to have your son, as I said in my dream.'

He chuckled. 'Marriage is something else, my darling,' he said softly. 'You and I were made to be lovers, we should be together. But marriage is business: land, property, dowry. Not for lovers like us. I want you to freely love me, to freely be mine. Not marriage, my darling, but long nights and days of love; and a son for me. Now sleep and dream of it.'

He kissed her again and went from the room. Alys stayed for a moment, listening to his soft steps down the stair and then went into the women's room and quietly closed the door.

She looked swiftly around. None of them had stirred, they were still all four deeply asleep. Noiselessly she crossed to her pallet on the floor and fumbled among the straw, pushing her arm deep into the bed. At last she found it and drew out the little purse with the three candlewax figures. She threw her cloak around her shoulders and went, barefoot, to the door.

The stone stairs beneath her feet were icy cold. She passed like a ghost out of the doorway and towards the gate which guarded the drawbridge. The soldiers were sleeping, there was no danger to watch for. Alys tiptoed across the bridge, her feet numb, and went to the moat-side.

She thrust her hand deep into her purse and pulled out the first doll she found. It was the Lady Catherine doll, grotesquely ugly with its monstrous sexuality and bursting belly. Alys shuddered as she held it in her hand and then she tossed it into the moat.

She had expected it to sink, to sink down into the green water and disappear. No one ever drained the moat, no one fished with nets. All sorts of rubbish and offal were thrown into it every day. Alys had thought the little dolls would sink to the bottom and no one would ever find them. Or if they did, the wax would be blurred and broken, and no one would ever think they were anything but candles, wastefully dropped by some negligent servant.

The little wax doll sank beneath the freezing water, and then, as Alys watched, it bobbed up again. Lady Catherine's mocking, ugly smile stared at Alys. The little candlewax eyes looked at her. 'No!' Alys cried aloud. 'Get down.' An icy breeze rippled across the moat. The wax doll bobbed in the waves. The face of Lady Catherine seemed to smile as if she was enjoying Alys' fear.

'Sink, damn you!' Alys dropped to her knees on the frozen bank, leaning out towards the bobbing doll. 'Sink down! Go down!'

The fitful little wind blew the doll closer inshore. 'Go down!' Alys breathed. 'Drown!' At once she caught herself. 'Oh God! I didn't mean that!' she said. In a frenzy of sudden anxiety she reached out towards the little doll. 'I meant the doll to sink, that's all!' she said, as if she were explaining herself to the darkness all around her. 'I didn't mean drown. I just want to be rid of it.'

The breeze was taking the doll away. At the same moment Alys heard someone hammering on the outer gate: servants coming to work, demanding admission.

Alys bunched up her nightshift in one hand and stepped into the glassy cold water. She gasped at the icy touch and reached out towards the little doll. It bobbed out further, just beyond her reach. 'I've got to get it,' she said.

She gritted her teeth and stepped out a little deeper. The water was swirling around her knees. Her feet were aching to the very bones with the cold. Something slimy and icy flickered across her calf. 'I've got to get it,' she said again.

The doll bobbed out further. Her little waxen white head turned away from Alys as if she were obstinate, as if she were playful.

'Come here,' Alys said. She clamped her teeth together to stop them from chattering, the cold seemed to be eating away at her feet, her legs, and now up to her thighs as she stepped further out.

The little doll bobbed in the winter dawn breeze and the face turned back to Alys. The doll was smiling at her.

Alys took one step further out and the little doll's smile widened as if it were about to burst into tinkling, malicious laughter. Her little arms came out above the water, she reached towards Alys. Alys stretched, her fingers just fractions of an inch away from the little wax hands. Alys took one more step forward and then stumbled on the greasy rubbish of the underwater bank of the moat. She heard the doll's tiny peal after peal of laughter as the steep side of the moat suddenly plunged downwards and fell away beneath her feet. Enticed into the depths of the moat Alys dropped like a stone into the slimy icy water, her scream cut short as water rushed into her mouth. Her hand closed over the little doll, her other hand was clenched on the purse. She thrashed helplessly in the water.

Alys had never learned to swim, she sank and then bobbed up gasping for air in a frenzy of panic. When her face broke free of the water she snatched at a breath but then choked helplessly and felt herself going down again.

The cold was her enemy. The icy green waters of the moat were eating her, her legs had gone numb and her thrashing thighs were powerless. Deep in her belly the cold moved in. Alys sank beneath the water and came up, coughing and retching. She opened her mouth to scream and a wave of icy green water swept into her face.

'No!' Alys cried out. She snatched for a breath but it was water she gobbled and it rushed into her lungs and weighed her down, thrust her under the surface. Alys choked and retched and breathed in a lungful of water. Then suddenly there were a pair of hard hands on her arm, and then under her armpit.

'Got you, wench,' a voice said from far away. Painfully, Alys was dragged from the water and beached, whooping and vomiting on the bridge. 'There, lass, there,' the man said. He flung his cape around her and rubbed her roughly, drying her and warming her at the same time.