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placed it next to the motionless Morcar on the bench and went to the door. Stepping out, she moved a little way along the stone wall to more inconspicuously survey the scene. The rain had completely ended and a fresh May breeze caressed her face and heavy, damp hair. The plait over her left ear hung so bedraggled that she loosed it and shook it free, then the other. Her damp, wheat-hued hair cascaded freely down her back.
    Keeping an eye on the Curfew Tower door in case Edmund should come stalking back from wherever he had gone so abruptly, she skirted a cluster of horses several hooded pages held and stepped back into a little, recessed wooden doorway in the stone wall. Despite her fascination with the continually shifting courtyard scene, she heard and felt a distant clattering and clanging through the door behind her. Intrigued, she turned and pressed her ear to it. As her shoulder leaned into the door, it creaked slowly open.
    Down a little flight of stone steps, a narrow courtyard met her startled eyes. A lone horseman on a huge, ebony destrier charged at a post attached to a rotating wooden arm which was mounted with a shield. He charged and wheeled and charged again madly slashing a big, two-sided sword at the swinging post and shield. The warrior was all in black, even his partial armor; a gauntlet on his sword arm, greaves on his shins, and a narrow-visored helmet on his head. His relentless path had churned the damp earth to mud; under his horse’s hoofs was a deepening black mire.
    Without thinking, Joan stepped inside the door and closed it on the busy courtyard behind her. Here, within these narrow, private walls, the knight wheeled and clattered to the post again. It was only the sort of quintain practice all knights like to use to prepare for battle, Joan realized, only somehow this was different. The rider seemed in deadly earnest as though a whole battlefield of war lay before his horse’s charging hoofs. The quintain spun wildly, and when the knight rode away to turn again, Joan moved farther down the steps.
    The man, even in proportion to the massive size of the black war-horse he rode, looked huge. As he bent forward for the next charge, Joan noted how his muscular chest, shoulders, and arms stretched his black, leather gambeson taut under the fine hauberk of dark chain mail molded to his body. The dull silver glint of armor over his brawny shins and left forearm and the conical helmet with narrow eyeslit echoed the slickness of his garments and the lathered gleam of the horse’s flanks. Only then did she note the rider’s right arm was tied closely to his broad chest in a sort of makeshift sling.
    Intrigued and certain the rider would not see her, as he never turned his head to glance her way through the narrow slit of his visor, she edged along the narrow stretch of wall to watch his next mad charge. She bit back a giggle; the scene was ludicrous as he rushed, hellbent on the metal swinging shield in a path of new-churned mud. But as the quintain clanged and swung and scraped to a stop again, the knight changed his violent tactic. A blurred black wall of horse and glint of furious rider came directly at her. She squealed and darted, slipping in the mud and hitting her head hard against the stone wall as they thundered past only inches away.
    When she glanced up, they had turned again and towered over her. She could feel the horse’s snorting breath, see each single link of chain mail as it shaped itself to the man’s powerful muscles.
    “By St. George, woman! No one is allowed here now! Damn you! You might have been killed!”
    Joan pressed her back and shoulders against the wall so close behind her and bravely flounced out her muddy, damp skirts.
    “The door to the Upper Ward above was unlocked, sir, and it is hardly my doing that both of you beasts changed your blood-crazed, muddy path all of a sudden. You should get a better helmet and watch where you are riding, I dare say.”
    She could feel