"Nay, you are fresh as the dawn." He brushed back the tawny hair from off his forehead, and the lines about his mouth softened. "I have news from the west." "Ah!" "We gather and spread like fire in a forest. The mountain men are with us, ready to roll down from the hills with hauberk and sword. In two months Malgo will have sent the bloody cross through all the west." The golden thread ran through the girl’s white fingers; the beads of her rosary rattled; she seemed to be weaving the destiny of a kingdom into the device upon her banner. "How is it with us here?" she asked him. "I have a thousand stout men and true camped upon the cliff. Levies are coming in fast, like steel to a magnet. In a month we shall outbulk a Roman legion." "And Gilderoy?" "Gilderoy and Geraint will give us a score thousand pikemen." "The stars fight for us." Fulviac took her lute from the carved bench and began to thrum the chords of an old song. "Spears crash, and swords clang, Fame maddens the world. Come battle and love. Iseult-- Ah, Iseult." He broke away with a last snap at the strings, and set the lute aside. "Bear with me," he said. Her dark eyes questioned him over her banner. "I offer you the first victim." "Ah!" "Flavian of Gambrevault." An indefinite shadow descended upon the girl’s face. The inspired radiance seemed dimmed for the moment; the crude realism of her thoughts rang in discord to her dreams. She lost the glimmering thread from her needle. Her hands trembled a little as she played with the scarlet folds of the banner. "Well?" "A lad of mine bears news--a black-eyed rogue from the hills of Carlyath, sharp as a sword’s point, quaint as an elf. I sent him gleaning, and he has done bravely. You would hear his tale from his own lips?" She nodded and seemed distraught. "Yes. Bring him in to me," she said. Fulviac left her, to return with a slim youth sidling in behind him like a shadow. The lad had a nut-brown skin and ruddy cheeks, a pair of twinkling eyes, a thatch of black hair over his forehead. Bred amid the hills of Carlyath, where the women were scarlet Eves, and the land a paradise, he had served in Gilderoy as apprentice to an armourer. Carlyath’s wilds and the city’s roguery had mingled in him fantastic strains of extravagant sentiment and cunning. Half urchin, half elf, he stood with bent knees and slouched shoulders, his black eyes alert on Fulviac, his lord. The man thrust him forward by the collar, with an eloquent gesture. "The whole tale. Try your wit." The Carlyath lad advanced one foot, and with an impudent southern smirk, remarked-- "This, madame, is an infatuated world." Thus, sententiously delivered, he plunged into a declamation with a picturesque and fanciful extravagance that he had imbibed from the strolling romancers of his own land.