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emanations that she sensed coming from the girl? Tentatively, delicately, Meggie sent out a feeler into Little Helewise’s mind.
    The girl was dreaming. Effortlessly, Meggie slipped into the dream with her. Ninian was there, laughing, teasing, his bright eyes shining with love. He had his arms around Little Helewise, squeezing her in a tight hug. Meggie sensed where the dream was leading to and prepared to detach herself – such things were private. She would just give it a few more moments . . .
    Two things happened simultaneously, combining to send out a jolt of power that pushed Meggie’s questing thought right back inside her own head: she picked up something else – although in that alarming instant she had no time to evaluate what it might be – and Ninian bent his dark head to close his mouth on Little Helewise’s, sending out a shaft of sexual energy as powerful as a lightning strike.
    Well
, thought Meggie, rubbing ruefully at her aching head,
that serves me right for being nosy
.
    She lay back on the pillows, drawing up the covers against the cold. Nobody would be up yet, and the fire in the hall would be lifeless. There might still be some glowing embers in the kitchen hearth, but it was some time still before Tilly, or perhaps Ella, would rise and get a proper blaze going. Everyone was asleep except Meggie.
    She wished,
wished
that she could bring herself to disobey Josse and do what she so longed to do: set out, all by herself, and spend some precious days of solitude in her mother’s little hut in the forest. From there, too, situated as it was, she would be free to slip away to visit the precious, powerful Black Madonna figure, hidden in her secret niche in the crypt beneath St Edmund’s Chapel, close by Hawkenlye Abbey.
    But Josse had forbidden them all to travel unaccompanied in these dangerous times, when hungry villains and outcasts roamed the woods and the deep, lonely places. For Meggie, who had lived in the Great Forest all her life, it was especially hard to face the fact that an environment she knew and loved like a mother could present danger, especially to one like her, but she knew there was a grain of truth in her father’s fears. People had indeed been attacked in isolated houses; households had been robbed, vandalized; girls and women had been assaulted, or so the darkest rumours whispered. Meggie was utterly confident that she would be perfectly safe in the little hut, for, apart from other skills she possessed, such as how to wield a sword and how to detect when an attack was coming even before the attacker was aware of it, she knew how to hide the hut so that even those who were familiar with its location could not find it.
    It was a skill she had learned from her mother. It pained Meggie to remember, but sometimes Joanna had felt compelled to disguise the hut’s location when Josse came looking for her.
    Oh, Meggie thought, oh, but there were things about her mysterious mother that she would never understand.
    Now, of all times, she really needed the peace and privacy of the little hut. Of late she had been beset with both dreams and waking visions of her brother Ninian, and the overriding message that they left in their wake was the urgent, driving need to get in touch with him and tell him he must come home.
    Why?
she wondered as she curled deeper inside her blankets. Why now, and not before? As soon as he had gone, for example, or when her father and Helewise had returned last autumn after their unsuccessful attempt to find him? There had to be something else; something over and above the fact that his family all missed him so acutely; that they worried about him so much more now that they knew the place he had been sent to by Gervase de Gifford – his mother’s address in Béziers – was in the middle of a ferocious war.
    Why do I feel so compelled to send word to him?
    What she needed, she knew, was to open herself in deep meditation