LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      Northern Marches, Wales, 1188

      The night was dark and full of menace. Leon shivered, struggling to stay awake. It was the joining point of the night. The hour of beginnings and endings. It was an unholy hour to be out of bed; the black watch before cockcrow when men most often died, and demons walked.

      “Are you a knight?”

      A thin little reedy sound it was, echoing somewhere from the right. At first Leon thought he had imagined it, for there was something about old piles of stone like this that accumulated shadows and odd sounds, creaks and sighs of wind.

      Then it came again, eerie, alien, disembodied, drifting across the battlement, a voice soft as reeds twisting in the wind.

      “Are you a knight?”

      The point of his sword lifted a little.

      It was an intrigue. It must be. Soon it would be dawn—the hour for murder and mayhem. He exhaled softly. It was comforting that the gray of his cowl and cloak bled into the gray of the battlements, leaving no shape for the eye to catch. There was only the shine of captured light from his naked blade as he waited, listening.

      Glancing over his shoulder, Leon saw no movement, suspicious or otherwise, but his back prickled as if several thousand insects crawled up and down it. He swallowed hard.

      It took courage to ask calmly, “Who is this?”

      Silence.

      It was some rotten trick. None had played such since he was nine years old and he’d dared the raven in the hayloft that the other pages refused to face. It had known better than to meddle with him, and fled with a great rustling of straw and a clap of wings.

      “Is anyone there?” he asked the shadowed air and held his breath waiting for an answer.

      Nothing changed. No voice responded. No figure appeared from the doorway. He swallowed loudly. No harm was near. A very little light came up from below, not enough to light the steps. If any spirits dream-danced there, none spoke.

      He gave that some thought, then cleared his throat. He had been speaking French; he shifted to Latin. Nothing. “Who?” he demanded in Anglo-Saxon, and last of all, with fading hope, the old Gaelic of his childhood.

      “I am here.”

      That rocked him on his heels. The voice came from behind him now, the same voice, as if it were stalking him. He spun around, hands out, at hearing a light skipping step from the direction of the parapet. Closer, came the high piping tone of a child.

      “I said, Are you a knight?”

      Leon stared a moment, heart thumping. Shadows shifted and took substance. A glimmer. It was a girl, a highborn little girl in a white night rail, but lace dragged about one ankle and her lips and hands were muddied. She tilted her head to one side, studying him.

      “No,”

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