The sun was witness to the disaster.

It shone down with noontide ferocity on a valley bleached gold by summer, gilding the creamy fronds of tall grasses, rousing to jewel brightness the emerald of the younger growth. The light splintered through trees that overhung the place where a stream fed into a pool that softened the parched air with its moisture. The gold in the air turned the white mare standing fetlock-deep in the pool into a mate for Apollo’s steeds, while the great black stallion beside her became mirror-kin to the cheetahs of Africa.

It was a beautiful sight, Etienne of Navarre reflected wearily, but the fairest image of all was Isabeau as she stooped to refill the waterskins. He smiled bitterly, able to understand what drove the Bishop even as he hated and feared the man for his obsessive madness. Isabeau would never be his, not while Navarre continued to draw breath. So he had sworn and he was knight enough that his oath was his law.

"Etienne?"

Isabeau’s soft voice drew him back to the present and he moved swiftly to her side. No matter that they were being hounded by a man of God with a demon’s heart. They still had one another and their love burned bright enough for that to be all that was needful.

"We cannot stay here for long," he said, regretful of the need to be harshly practical when she was so near and so lovely. "The Bishop and his men will not be far behind."

"Etienne, Goliath is a great destrier and could doubtless carry you to the ends of the earth. Simone, however, is only a palfrey and the pace is punishing for her. She will founder and not even Goliath can outrun the Bishop’s hate when he has two to carry."

"We cannot stay." A simple fact, but, oh, so hard to accept.

Isabeau sighed. "I know, but I will not be responsible for Simone’s death. I will not serve loyalty with betrayal."

Navarre bit back the angry words that rose to his lips. Isabeau was not a warrior, and had never had to sell a few lives to buy a greater number. Not for her the harsh realities of war, yet there was steel in her pliant form and a hawk’s courage burned behind the dove’s eyes. She would buy another’s life with her own and count the cost as light. He loved her more and more each day, and each day his love was boundless.

"We will move on at a slower pace," he temporised. "Simone has royal ancestors. She will not fail us."

Isabeau smiled, knowing that she had wrung all the concessions possible out of him. A cool breeze rose suddenly and she shivered. The heat of the day was abruptly distant and the ever-present fear rose to choke her. HE was close; she could sense his cold presence, feel the obsessive gaze on her back. She had known that the Bishop desired her from the moment their eyes had met, but something in those dark depths had sent her soul into uneasy flight. There was something older and infinitely more bitter than darkness in those eyes, something that called softly to her in a sweetly seductive manner. She feared that nothingness and was determined to deny it.

"What?"

Navarre’s head swung around to gaze sharply at the horses. They no longer stood placidly in the cool water. Goliath had raised his head and was snuffing the air uneasily while Simone was pawing at the water and whickering. Their attention caught, the two people realised that the breeze was freshening rapidly, the gusts growing colder and wilder by the minute. Navarre ground out a curse as he reached for Isabeau. This was no natural wind!

"Come, we must try and escape." Even as he urged Isabeau towards the horses, Navarre knew a dread premonition that he was too late. The sunlight dimmed and when the knight looked up in startled dismay, he saw that dark, threatening clouds had suddenly appeared to obscure the sun.

"What is happening?" Isabeau cried out as she struggled to calm a terrified Simone.

"The Bishop," Navarre raged. "Who else could meddle with the land itself? Who else would dare?"

"Dear Lord preserve us," Isabeau sobbed as she finally settled into the saddle and urged a plunging Simone out of the water.

"If you must pray, pray that the horses can outrun this devilry! Now we shall see if the heathen Easterners speak the truth when they say that the wind birthed the horse!"

Goliath responded instantly to his command and hurtled out of the pool with a savage scream of defiance. Simone half-reared, her own nervousness translated into a shrill scream before she followed the black warhorse into a wild gallop. Navarre allowed the wild pace to continue for a couple of minutes as he scanned the surrounding countryside. There was no sign of any human pursuers; only the winter-bleak wind and sulphur-coloured clouds kept pace with them. Despite the fear that tore at his nerves, Navarre forced himself to rein Goliath in, knowing that there was no way Simone could survive such a headlong pace for any great length of time. To his amazement, the destrier fought the bit, persisting in the wild gallop. Used to instant responsiveness, the knight hesitated, wondering if Goliath’s animal senses to whatever danger was howling at their heels.

When Simone faltered and nearly unseated Isabeau before recovering and continuing on at the same pace, he knew that they could not go on in this manner. The mare’s white coat was heavily lathered and, even though she was several swords' lengths away, Etienne could see the raw redness of her wildly dilated nostrils. If they didn’t slow down, Simone would probably drop in her tracks, since her temperament was such that she would give her all for the rider she loved. Despite the warrior training that shrieked at him to continue, no matter what the cost, Navarre took a firm hold of the reins and fought to bring Goliath under control. The stallion was reluctantly beginning to obey his command when a terrified scream rent the air.

Isabeau! Superb horseman though he was, Etienne nearly overbalanced as he swung around in the saddle and sought the reason for his love’s cry of terror. Goliath had shied away from the terrible sound and only instinct honed by a lifetime of riding kept the knight on his back, as the stallion fought to put as much distance between himself, and the glowing ball of light that had fallen from out of the sky to engulf Isabeau.

For a moment, Navarre thought she was on fire; that the Bishop had managed to summon up some vicious counterpart to the Greek fire had seen used in distant wars. The agony which lanced through his heart at the thought swiftly died when he saw that she was not being consumed by the eerie red and purple flames. Although they curled and danced around her as a real fire might, there was no sign of blistering on her fair skin and her hair streamed out behind her, untouched. The very unnaturalness of the sight was almost worse than the real fire would be, however, and Isabeau’s enormous eyes were filled with terror when they met his.

Sick at heart and filled with an overpowering rage against the human devil who had to be responsible and who was playing this evil game with them, Navarre urged Goliath to come alongside Simone. That was easier said than done. Battle-hardened and brave as a lion Goliath might be, but fear of fire went deeper than any degree of training and it was some time before Navarre managed to bring him close enough to Isabeau for them to be within touching distance. Another problem was Simone. The palfrey was in an agony of terror that was being constantly fuelled by the bright tongues of flame which flared out from her rider and threatened to engulf her, as well. Unable to comprehend the simple fact that there was neither heat nor pain, the mare was sunning out of control.

Fearing that she might stumble and throw Isabeau, Navarre attempted to reach for her bridle, intending to slow their headlong flight. Unfortunately for such plans, Simone was unwilling to allow anything to come near her, seeing an enemy in everything. After two unsuccessful tried, Navarre was forced to give up when the palfrey chose a path that wound along the side of a steepening hill and that was barely wide enough for a single horse as it was. Heart in his mouth, he had to be satisfied with dogging her track, the heartstopping ride made even more precarious by Goliath’s reluctance to have anything to do with the vivid sparks and flames that detached themselves from Isabeau’s speeding form and fell back towards them.

Eventually, as his fear had known it must, disaster pounced. Simone shied at one errant flame too many and lost her footing. There was an instant when horse and rider seemed frozen in mid-air, suspended over a sheer drop that ended in a rock-strewn valley. Not for nothing, however, had Simone’s ancestors been the finest horses in Spain. With a herculean effort, she managed to find a single hoofhold and, with a last desperate surge of strength that was awesomely evident, she literally threw herself further up the hillside and back on to the narrow path. For Isabeau, it was too jarring a movement. With a cry filled with as much rage as fear, she parted company with the saddle and flew off into space.

Her cry was echoed by the one torn from Navarre, a scream of anguish from a man taught from birth never to betray his feelings. Dear God, she will be dashed to pieces against the ground! There was no way he could save her, no miracle she could conjure up out of thin air that would leave her safe and unharmed. Unable to look away, even though he knew what he was shortly going to witness, he followed the line of her flight through the air.

"If I cannot have you, then no man shall, and cursed shall be the one you chose above me!"

Hearing the familiar voice, even above the strong wind, Etienne looked around wildly, expecting to see the Bishop nearby. There was no-one in sight. Immediately the words ended, however, there was a sudden increase in the brightness of the flames surrounding Isabeau. This time her screams were of pain and Navarre raged anew at his helplessness. Was it not enough that she would soon be broken and lifeless against the earth? Did the man’s frustration need to have her suffer even more before she hit the ground? Unable to stand the sound, Navarre dropped the reins and clapped his hands over his ears, not bothering to brush away the hot tears of grief that came unbidden from his eyes.

At first he thought it was her suffering that was causing Isabeau’s screams to sound inhuman, that it was his tears that were making her outline shift and blur before his eyes. When the illusion persisted, he took his hands away from his ears and rubbed at his eyes fiercely. What witchcraft was this? He was no longer seeing a woman falling to her death. Instead a formless mass of dark golden light pulsed within the mesh of red and purple flames. Even as he murmured a childhood charm to ward off the devil under his breath, the golden light seemed to explode and from out of its heart soared a bird.

Of Isabeau, there was no sign.

Staring after the bird – a hawk, he saw after a moment – Navarre was not immediately aware of the fresh danger which now threatened him. It was Goliath’s sudden plunge to one side, nearly sending him in the same direction that Isabeau had gone, which brought his attention back to his own situation. Gazing around wildly, he immediately saw what had so alarmed his horse. The mass of red and purple flames had not vanished along with Isabeau. Instead it had gathered itself into a roiling ball of flame and had hurled itself at him. Goliath’s swift lunge had made it miss, but even as the man watched, the fireball unbelievably swerved in its course and reoriented itself on him.

"Satan’s work," he growled to himself.

For a moment his hand rested on the pommel of his sword, but he was unsure as to whether steel would be of any use against this enemy. Fire could melt down even the finest steel if it were hot enough and he was reluctant to find out just how hot this particular fire was. While it was true that it had burned Isabeau when it first struck her, the same might not be true now. Once again the fireball launched itself at him. Any thoughts Navarre might have nursed about meeting the enemy face to face, as it were, came to nothing as Goliath gathered himself up and leapt to the right. Again, the fireball missed its target, albeit by a hairsbreadth. Navarre hastily grabbed for the reins as the black stallion abruptly wheeled and threw himself up the side of the hill, following the path at a pace that brought the knight’s heart into his mouth. A glance back over his shoulder to where the fireball had recovered itself and was curving around to follow them was enough to prevent him from pulling Goliath into a more organised pace.

He could hear the fireball’s approach, although there was none of the hissing and spluttering a real fireball would have made. Instead there was an almost musical note, a sweet humming that made him think of a wasps’ nest, heavy with the sound of hate on a summer’s day. He risked one quick glance behind him and saw with fatalistic calm that not even Goliath’s prodigious show of speed could save them. Before the thought had fully formed in his head, the stallion had swerved off the path and gone plunging over the edge.

Etienne’s single shout of mingled fear and defiance died away into the echoes and he realised that he had. Yet again, sold his magnificent steed short. Goliath was not running blindly from the flames. His change of direction might have been sudden but it was not a headlong flight. Navarre shifted his weight in an effort to help his stallion’s surefooted plunge down the steep side of the hill. From this angle he could see that the fireball had overshot once more and was curving around in an effort to find them. Any hope he might have nurtured died when the unnatural creation shot off the track and began to follow them down.

This time there was no escape. Despite a valiant attempt by Goliath, they were unable to alter direction fast enough to fool the fireball. The last clear memory Navarre had before the red and purple flames claimed him was the sound of Goliath screaming his defiance at their unseen enemy.

To awake was to remember pain and then to discover that it was still a part of him. Navarre opened heavy eyelids, wincing as the westering sun shone directly into his eyes. He moved cautiously and found that the initial protests that shot through his body faded almost immediately to a dull ache deep within his bones. By some miracle of God, however, there seemed to be no serious injuries and he slowly levered himself back to his feet.

A bass snort caught his attention. Goliath stood a short distance away, his flanks heavily laced with dried sweat, but seemingly none the worse for his recent ordeal. Navarre did his best not to stagger as he made his way over to where the horse pawed at the barren ground. Although he tossed his head and moved restlessly, the stallion made no real effort to evade the knight and Navarre was soon back in the saddle, doing his best to ignore the numerous aches and pains that plagued his entire body. There would be time enough to coddle himself once he had made sure that there was no further danger to be evaded.

To his intense relief, there was no sign of any flaming ball of flames, supernatural in origin or otherwise. To his intense pain, the same was true of Isabeau. He found Simone after only a few minutes of searching and managed to catch her once she discovered anew that Goliath was more than a match for her. A swift examination revealed her tack was undamaged apart from where she had stepped on the reins and broken them, but Navarre took cautious heart at the lack of blood or scorch marks. Deep within his mind, however, was the image of the hawk flying free and Isabeau vanishing. Had whatever arcane knowledge the Bishop conjured up consumed even bone and gristle, leaving nothing but fine ash and bittersweet memories to torment the man who had been freely given what the Bishop sought to steal?

A shrill scream rent the air, bringing Navarre’s head snapping round until he belatedly recognised its inhuman origin. He ducked reflexively as something hurtled towards his face, turning to watch the hawk as it soared back up into the sky and then wheeled around to come in his direction once again. Some lordling’s lost pet, mistaking him for a route back to the domesticity that would be all it knew? He dismissed the thought almost immediately; no jesses trailed out from those wicked talons and the bird was making no attempt to temper its speed as it approached him, which a bird expecting a welcoming arm would have done. This was a wild bird, acknowledging no man as master. Once again he saw the hawk fly away from the vanishing remains of the Isabeau and he was consumed by a wave of fear and hate. More of the Bishop’s malice?

The hawk was flying out of the sun, now, and its shadow flashed huge before it, rushing across Goliath’s bulk, and along the length of Navarre’s body. It was the shadow that faltered first, speed translating itself into a disintegrating hesitancy. Navarre looked up cautiously, wary of a trap, but the bird did indeed seem to be in difficulties. The effortless flight had become a kind of stuttering hover, the erratic beats of the wings failing to maintain height and speed. He felt an odd tug of sympathy as the raptor landed on the ground, a keening nose issuing from widely parted beak. Suffering would seem to be a law of nature on this day.

He blinked, wondering if the fading evening light was playing tricks on his eyesight. Something… surely the outlines of the hawk were less defined against the dark rock than they had been? Shaking his head and rubbing his eyes with his free hand, he looked again, feeling a familiar sense of dread grip at his insides. There was an odd blurring of the bird’s outline. In the dying light he was almost ready to swear that there was a kind of suffused glow that outlined every feather, as though the hawk were made of darkened glass and lit from within. Common-sense dictated that he should urge Goliath away from this place of tragedy and black magic, but the knight had seen and lost too much to submit to such a mundane tyrant. He stayed, and he watched.

She arose out of the fading hawk-form as a single pure flame would dance out of paper suffering the deadly kiss of fire. Like a sword pulling free from the forge, she was naked of everything besides her spirit and courage. Navarre’s mind froze in horrified embarrassment for a long second, then he plunged past such things and swung himself out of the saddle, automatically pulling his heavy cloak loose from the packs strapped behind. Richly embroidered wool of the finest quality, it would do to cover her decently until she could rummage through Simone’s packs for something more appropriate. He smiled broadly as he approached her, glad to see that whatever spell had been cast had had only limited power. He had only taken a few steps before he saw her answering smile suddenly fracture into an expression of indescribable terror. Then the heat struck him.

Once, when he had been very young, he had overbalanced and nearly fallen into a vat of newly smelted ore in the forge on his father’s estate. The swift action of the blacksmith had saved him, bit for an instant he had hung suspended over a cauldron of hellish heat. At this moment he felt as though he had tumbled into an invisible cascade of such molten fury. Every part of him seemed to be on fire and he expected to see the skin on his hands flake off and blacken before his very eyes. The pain was truly indescribable, any unmanly scream that might have been torn from his throat was extinguished by the sheer strength of the feeling. Navarre stumbled forward, then fell like a disjointed puppet, not feeling the impact of the stony ground on skin that was somehow, unbelievably, still unscarred.

A wave of darkness swept across his vision. Navarre’s instinctive fear – that the pain or burning was destroying his eyes – was allayed when he found that the black veil was only temporary, but panic refused to draw far away when the spasms of oblivion returned again and again, each time for a little longer. Gradually he realised, though the hammering panic, that there was a core of red-gold within that darkness, and that with every return of darkness that tiny ember of light grew stronger and closer. He feared the approach of that fire. His fear fed his anger and, as the last rays of the sun flared up and vanished behind the horizon, Etienne of Navarre raised up his heavy head and howled his anger and hate to the darkening sky.

Isabeau would have screamed if it had occurred to her that it would do any good. Feminine instinct already knew that the time for such displays was either long gone or not yet come. Only the smallest whimper slid past slightly parted lips as she watched her chosen love transformed into a huge black wolf.

It came to her that she should be afraid. Of Etienne? The very thought was an absurd blasphemy! And yet this wasn’t Etienne, not the oh-so-proper yet oh, so very vulnerable, knight with a gentle heart that she had fallen so wildly and so disastrously in love with. This was a wild animal, with a beast’s instincts, that moved towards her on beast’s paws. The fear rose up like a cloud of dark incense and then just as suddenly evaporated. She had seen the eyes of the wolf – and they were Etienne’s eyes. With a sob of mingled joy and sorrow, she threw herself toward to embrace the great beast. Deep within its throat rose an answering whimper.

"Almighty God, what are we to do?" Isabeau sobbed.

Silence answered her, as she had secretly known it would. Devout Christian she might be, but she knew that miracles were rarely for the asking. They had to be earned and sometimes the coinage was bitter. For herself, she would bear any curse, since its very existence would underline the Bishops’ continued frustration. But for Navarre to suffer as well… that was truly unjust. Navarre’s only crime had been to be what she had dreamed of all her young life, of being the ideal made impossibly, dizzyingly real. Of being unutterably beautiful and exquisitely attainable. To strike against her did have a perverted kind of logic to it. To strike against Navarre was merely empty spite.

"You will not have me!" she screamed into the silent sky. "I would rather be wed to this wolf than suffer your foul touch on my skin. God or no God, I shall have vengeance on you for this act, Bishop! Cower in your evil lair and fear the sound of hawk and wolf for ever more!"

The night folded itself around them protectively. In a distant cloister, a cleric damned beyond all redemption suddenly shuddered as he recalled the cold, anticipatory smile of a demon….