She threw his hand off her shoulder and drew herself up into a blaze of hauteur. The knight with the blade took her elbow in his left hand and pulled her to his side. “What, knave, do you lay your hands on the Queen’s grace?” he snapped. Then, to the lady: “Madam, but a word, and I’ll bid him outside, to draw and make full proof of his villainy.”

John stood speechless, but the Queen’s anger slipped away as quickly as it had come, and she shrugged away from the knight with a thin smile. “Put up your sword, Calidore. I think you mistake me for another, sir,” she added to John in the sleepy low voice of a fay-woman.

John pulled off his velvet cap and bowed, with an attempt at courtliness which he prayed did not betray him for the country clown he was. “Pardon me, lady. I did mistake you for another.”

“Your sweetheart?”

“Yes, madam.”

The lips thinned again. “Ah, happy lady!”

Indignant, John set his jaw. Was she mocking him? He glanced at Sir Calidore for aid, but the long slender gentleman had thrown his head back and stared at him down his long slender nose. A pearl teardrop swung in his ear, and his mustaches bristled upward in the haughtiest Spanish style. There would be no help from that quarter.

John said to the Queen, “Happy? No, madam, the unhappiest maid in the world, a prisoner of the Witch of the Dark Tower. I am come to beg your help in freeing her.”

Queen Gloriana tilted her head. “You are very bold, sir, to come to my house at a time of festival with such a boon.”

“Madam, my errand admitted no delay.”

A tinkle of laughter. “Ah, you are a man who knows his mind. Very well! We shall come to an agreement, you and I.”

Make no covenants. John heard the echo of Alf’s warning in the back of his mind, and glanced involuntarily toward the foot of the room, where double doors led to the path home. “What manner of agreement have you in mind?”

“You are of a jaundiced complexion, sir. I mean that I will sit down and hear your boon, but only when we have danced.”

She put out her hand with a smile that did not reach her eyes. John hesitated, loath to trust her, and Sir Calidore reached past him and caught the offered hand. “Madam,” he said reproachfully, “you had promised to dance with me.”

“Faith, so I had. Well! You will tread a measure with Columbell, Sir John-a-Dale, and then you will dance with me, and after that we will speak. Columbell!”

It was as if the Queen’s own shadow turned with a rustle of grey velvet to show a pale face under a white-and-silver mask. “Madam?”

“Will you dance with this gentleman?”

Uncertain how to refuse, John bowed and offered his hand. The grey woman dropped chilly fingers into his and they went out onto the floor to take their places in the set, followed by the Queen and Sir Calidore, who whispered together as if well-pleased.

“The tiend?” Calidore cried softly, as if in surprise.

The Queen laughed. “Hush, sir!”

“Faith, madam—” and Calidore’s voice died away as he led her to the head of the room.

Columbell glanced at them over her shoulder and said in a voice as lifeless as her hand, “Sir, it is a great proof of valour to come here in the seventh year. Or else of foolhardiness.”

John glanced at her with a vague sense of threat. “Valour? I deserve no such praise, lady. Nor no such censure either. It was told me that in the seventh year debts are called up—but I owe no debts here.”

Her hand closed on his with an odd earnestness. “See to it, then, that you undertake none. But it is a risk, sir, it is a very notable risk. Why dare it?”

“The maid I meant to wed is a prisoner in the Dark Tower.”

A shudder ran down to the fay-woman’s hand. “Sir, you have chosen a terrible foe.”

The music began and Columbell quickened into slow life, casting down a couple, circling and returning. It was a dance John knew from summer evenings on the village green; he had no trouble in following the steps. “I did not choose her for a foe,” he told Columbell as they stood waiting for the second pair to cast and circle. “She made the choice when she stole my promised wife.”

“A faerie knight,” Columbell murmured, “is none so constant in adversity. You love her truly, then?”

John changed places with the fay-woman. “I hope I do.” Then, with a pang, he remembered those bitter moments of anger before he and Janet had parted. “But I have been a poor lover, I think, until now.”

He would have left it there, but she looked at him with a question in her eyes, and it dredged the truth out of him. “I have promised to marry her, and therefore I have come to find her. But she injured me, and I was not kind.”

They took hands for the circle. Columbell seemed to be considering his words, and at last she murmured in such a low voice that John could hardly hear under the sound of the music: “I had a love. He swore truth, and was false.”

John glanced down at her. “Lately?”

“So far as lately can be said here, it was lately.”

“I pity you, lady.”

The grey eyes behind the grey mask looked at him without anger. “And I pity you, John-a-Dale.” They cast down again, and then once more to begin the new set. Columbell said: “He was all kindness, and no faith, this love of mine. If he had been a little less kind, and a little more dutiful! I could have wished nothing better from him.”

They changed places.

John said slowly, “Perhaps, if she were here, Janet would wish the opposite.”

Columbell did not speak again, and John felt he had been wandering in the circles of that slow and stately dance for an endless time when they finished and bowed to one another. But when he glanced over at the diamond-paned windows and saw that the moon still shone at the same angle, he decided that less time must have passed than he thought. He bit back his rising impatience.

There was a gentle touch on his arm. Columbell again.

“There is little I can do for you or your Janet.” She rose up on her toes to whisper into his ear. “But if ever you are in need of help in Faerie, call my name three times. If I hear, I will come.”

She did not wait to hear his thanks. Instead she turned her back on him, and the grey of her dress blended into the shadows of the hall and disappeared.