"Nay," she said, as if that were self-evident. "I must go out to the stable and bid Blackie farewell." She ran off.

Lady Imeyne was going, and the steward, and Lady Eliwys was somewhere nursing a peasant who was ill. And Gawyn, for some reason that was obvious to Agnes but not to her, wasn't. Perhaps he had gone with Eliwys. But if he hadn't, if he were staying here to guard the manor, she could talk to him alone.

Maisry was obviously going. When she brought Kivrin's breakfast she was wearing a rough brown poncho and had ragged strips of cloth wrapped around her legs. She helped Kivrin to the chamberpot, carried it out and brought up a brazier full of hot coals, moving with more speed and initiative than Kivrin had seen before.

Kivrin waited an hour after Maisry left, until she was sure they were all gone, and then got out of bed and walked to the windowseat and pulled the linen back. She could not see anything except branches and dark gray sky, but the air was even colder than that in the room. She climbed up on the windowseat.

She was above the courtyard. It was empty, and the large wooden gate stood open. The stones of the courtyard and of the low thatched roofs around it looked wet. She stuck her hand out, afraid it had already begun to snow, but she couldn't feel any moisture. She climbed down, holding onto the ice-cold stones, and huddled by the brazier.

It gave off almost no heat. Kivrin hugged her arms to her chest, shivering in her thin shift. She wondered what they had done with her clothes. Clothes were hung on poles beside the bed in the Middle Ages, but this room had no poles, and no hooks either.

Her clothes were in the chest at the foot of the bed, neatly folded. She took them out, grateful that her boots were still there, and then sat on the closed lid of the chest for a long time, trying to catch her breath.

I have to speak to Gawyn this morning, she thought, willing her body to be strong enough. It's the only time everyone will be gone. And it's going to snow.

She dressed, sitting down as much as possible and leaning against the bedposts to pull her hose and boots on, and then went back over to the bed. I'll rest a little, she thought, just till I'm warmed through, and was immediately asleep.

The bell woke her, the one from the southwest she had heard when she came through. It had rung all yesterday and then stopped, and Eliwys had gone over to the window and stood there for awhile, as if trying to see what had happened. The light from the window was dimmer, but it was only that the clouds were thicker, lower. Kivrin put on her cloak and opened the door. The stairs were steep, set into the stone side of the hall, and had no railing. Agnes was lucky she had only skinned her knee. She might have pitched headlong onto the floor below. Kivrin kept her hand on the wall and rested halfway, looking at the hall.

I'm really here, she thought. It really is 1320. The hearth in the middle of the room glowed a dull red with the banked coals, and there was a little light from the smoke-hole above it and the high, narrow windows, but most of the hall was in shadow.

She stopped where she was, peering into the smoky gloom, trying to see if anyone was there. The high-seat, with its carved back and arms, sat against the end wall with Lady Eliwys's slightly lower, slightly less ornate one next to it. There were tapestries on the wall behind them and a ladder at the far end of the wall up to what must be a loft. Heavy wooden tables hung along the other walls above the wide benches, and a narrower bench sat next to the wall just below the stairs. The beggar's bench. And the wall it sat against was the screens.

Kivrin came down the rest of the stairs and tiptoed across to the screens, her feet crunching loudly on the dried rushes scattered on the floor. The screens were really a partition, an inside wall that shut off the draft from the door.

Sometimes the screens formed a separate room, with box beds in either end, but behind these there was only a narrow passage, with the missing hooks for hanging up cloaks. There were none there now. Good, Kivrin thought, they're all gone.

The door was open. On the floor next to it was a pair of shaggy boots, a wooden bucket, and Agnes's cart. Kivrin stopped in the little anteroom to catch her already ragged breath, wishing she could sit down a moment, and then looked carefully out the door and went outside.

There was no one in the enclosed courtyard. It was cobbled with flattish yellow stones, but the center of it, where a water trough hollowed out of a tree stood, was deep in mud. There were trampled hoof and footprints all around it, and several puddles of brown water. A thin, mangy-looking chicken was drinking daintily from one of the pools. Chickens had only been raised for their eggs. Pigeons and doves had been the chief meat fowls in the 1300's.

And there was the dovecote by the gate, and the thatch- roofed building next to it must be the kitchen, and the other, smaller buildings that the storehouses. The stable, with its wide doors, stood along the other side, and then a narrow passage, and then the big stone barn.

She tried the stable first. Agnes's puppy came bounding out to meet her on its clumsy feet, yipping happily, and she had to hastily push it back inside and shut the heavy wooden door. Gawyn obviously wasn't in there. He wasn't in the barn either, or in the kitchen or in the other buildings, the largest of which turned out to be the brewhouse. Agnes had said he wasn't going with the procession to cut the Yule log as if it were something obvious, and Kivrin had assumed he had to stay here to guard the manor, but now she wondered if he had gone with Eliwys to visit the cottar.

If he has, she thought, I'll have to go find the drop myself. She started toward the stable again, but halfway there she stopped. She would never be able to get up on a horse by herself, feeling as weak as she did, and if she did somehow manage it, she was too dizzy to stay on. And too dizzy to go looking for the drop. But I have to, she thought. They're all gone, and it's going to snow.

She looked toward the gate and then the passage between the barn and the stable, wondering which way to go. They had come down a hill, past a church. She remembered hearing the bell. She didn't remember the gate or the courtyard, but that was most likely the way they had come.

She walked across the cobbles, sending the chicken clucking frantically over to the shelter of the well, and looked out the gate at the road. It crossed a narrow stream with a log bridge and wound off to the south into the trees. But there wasn't any hill, and no church, no village, no indication that that was the way to the drop.

There had to be a church. She had heard the bell, lying in bed. She walked back into the courtyard and across to the muddy path. It led past a round wattle pen with two dirty pigs in it, and the privy, unmistakable in its smell, and Kivrin was afraid that the path was only the way to the outhouse, but it wound around behind the privy and opened out onto a green.

And there was the village. And the church, sitting at the far end of the green just the way Kivrin remembered it, and beyond it was the hill they had come down.

The green didn't look like a green. It was a ragged open space with the huts on one side and the willow-edged stream on the other, but there was a cow grazing on what was left of the grass and a goat tethered to a big leafless oak. The huts straggled along the near side between piles of hay and muck heaps, getting smaller and more shapeless the farther they were from the manor house, but even the one closest to the manor house, which should be the steward's, was nothing but a hovel. It was all smaller and dirtier and more tumbledown. Only the church looked the way it was supposed to.