They stood side-by-side on the dais a little longer, looking out at the dancing. Once again, John noticed that the moonlight shining in the windows had not changed its angle—and yet he must have been here in this hall for hours. The tension behind his eyes had tightened to a dull ache. He wondered how long it had really been since he left the smithy at midnight. There were no churches here. No bells to ring him through the day. Without them, his sense of time was crippled.

Quite suddenly, like a drip of icy water running down his back under his shirt, it struck him that he was not the only one. No one had any clear idea of time in this place, none, that is, apart from the fear of the seventh All Hallows’ Eve…

Why, he might have been in this gloomy hall for weeks. Or months.

Sir Thomas Lene swung toward him, breaking the silence with an air of relief. “Ah, here is the Queen to give you her decision.”

John turned from the windows. The Queen came up the dais steps, gave him her hand in greeting, and settled with a murmur of velvet into her chair while Sir Calidore took up his position behind her on her right.

“Bestow on me your pardon for holding you so long in doubt, Sir John-a-Dale,” said the Queen.

Or was she spinning out the time intentionally? He spoke gruffly: “Have you an answer for me?”

She glanced at him with an uplifted eyebrow. “Ah, John, I pray you, have patience with us; it is hard for us to bend our minds to business at a time of festival like this.”

“It is always a time of festival here,” and John knew as he said the words that they must be true.

“Oh, fie!” The Queen struck her hands together. “Do you hear him, Calidore? And we have toiled so long over this Gordian Knot of his!”

John shut his eyes for a brief moment. He wanted to get outside. He wanted to be in the free air and the rustling silence of the wood. He wanted to be home again in the smithy with his face red and sweating from the heat of the furnace. Oh, God have mercy, and he wanted to see the sun again, and stand outside the door of his own house in the yellow haze of late afternoon pouring a dipperful of cold water on his head while the bell tolled seven o’clock.

But first he had a promise to keep, to a woman ten times the worth of this one. And it would not do to insult her who alone might help him.

“Forgive me, madam,” he said humbly. “I will hear what you have to say.”

“You wish to arrange a ransom for your Joan Weaver—”

“Janet Fuller, madam.”

“For some such lady. And you wish us to pay it for you.”

“It would be a deed of charity, lady. But I—”

“Charity!” she interrupted, with such a twist in her mouth that John wondered how he had ever thought her beautiful.

“Madam, I say, if there is some way I may repay your kindness, let me hear it. But as I told the Witch, I am only a smith, and I do not know that I have aught of value to give.”

The Queen stilled and looked at him with her lips slightly parted and a hungry look on her cold and distant face. “Ah, John,” she said at length, “you have indeed something of very great value to give.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “And what would that be, madam?”

She let her eyes drop and picked at the gold-bound border of her fan. “No matter. You would only refuse me.”

Again, that sense of delay, of playing for time. John swallowed his impatience and said, “I will hear any offer.”

With sudden decision she laid the fan down on the table by her chair, clasped her hands, and leaned forward. “Yourself, John. Give me yourself.”

He stared down at her with slackened jaw.

“Enter my service. Stay with me in Faerie and—I think I may promise you that your Jane will go free.”

“Stay in Faerie?” he rasped, hardly recognising his own voice.

“For but a short while.” The Queen smiled. “Two hundred years or so by mortal reckoning. Then home you go, to your village and your Jane.”

“Janet,” he corrected her again. “But in two hundred years she will be dead, lady. Mortals do not live half so long.”

“Do they not?” The Queen frowned. “Well, what is the trouble with leaving her in the Dark Tower while you earn her freedom? The time will go tediously for her there, no doubt, but she will live and keep her looks as a nightingale.”

John swallowed in an effort to ease the ache in his head. Poor Janet! Even if he trusted the Queen to keep her side of the bargain, could he really leave her in that place for two hundred years?

—And to spend another moment in this house—! John choked the thought down and tried to think coolly. This was the first real hope he had found. True, as he told Sir Thomas, there were duties waiting for him in the Dale. But even Parson Plumtree would tell him that his duty to Janet took precedence.

He looked around the hall—at the dim-burning candles, the milling knights and ladies, the moonlight that never moved. “Two hundred years?”

“’Twill pass in a twinkling,” the Queen assured him with a thin-drawn smile. She lifted the cup from the table at her side and held it out to him. “Are we agreed?”

He took the fragile green stem with hesitant fingers, wishing for more time to think, wishing his head did not ache so. Surely, if Janet could be freed so easily, he ought to agree?

In the last moment he recalled Alf’s words. “Bite no sup. Drink no cup.”

He lifted his mouth from the rim. “Tell me one thing, madam.”

The Queen bowed her head in assent.

“Why do your servants fear the seventh year?”

With a sharp resounding twang a string broke somewhere in the musicians’ gallery. The other instruments stuttered into silence. The dancers faltered to a halt. John looked down into the hall and thought he saw the fay-woman named Columbell staring at him with pale and parted lips from the midst of a grey shadow.

The Queen rose from her throne and smiled the smile that did not touch her eyes. “John-a-Dale, why do you concern yourself with these things? Fay-matters for fay-folk. Content you, sir, and drink the cup.”

“I am content.” With a decisive click John set the cup down again on the small table. “Not even for Janet’s sake will I bind myself to a service I do not fully understand.”

A murmur of talk rose up to smother the silence in the hall, but it was clear his question had been unforgiveable. Now that everyone’s eyes were off them, Gloriana pinned him with a hot and haughty glare. “Sir, you must not hope to receive my help for nothing.”

“No. That is well; I am content.” He shifted restlessly. Now the decision was made, the door outside, the path through the forest, the road back to Middleton Dale tugged at him fiercely.

“Foolish mortal! You will never see her again.”

“Perhaps not.” John shifted again and almost involuntarily moved toward the dais steps, the homeward path. “But I will seek the Rose a while before I despair.”

“The Rose!” Her voice lilted into a low fury. “The Rose comes at a price, too, John-a-Dale! Do not imagine you will buy it any less dearly!”

John only bowed. “Will you let me leave, lady?”

She sank back into her chair. “Go as far as you like. I care not.”

John backed down the steps, unable to keep from grinning. “God keep your grace.” Then he wheeled around and all the way back over the black-and-white tiles to the massive double doors at the other end of the hall, he lengthened his stride until he was almost running.