They stood yet a moment at the foot of the crag, then she who was dressed as a worker among the vines or a herd to drive and watch the flocks turned in silence and began to descend the moonlit boulder-strewn declivity. She was light of foot, quick and dexterous of movement. Garin, who was now Elias of Montaudon, moved beside her. They came down the steep hill, bare and blanched by the moon. The dragon had no outpost here; did he plant one, the archers upon the town wall might sweep it away. But the shafts would not reach to the wood—there perhaps they might hear the dragon’s breathing. They went without speech, and with no noise that could be helped of foot against stone.... Here was a slight fringe of pine and oak. They stood still, listened—all was silent. They looked back and saw Roche-de-Frêne and the castle of Roche-de-Frêne bathed by the grey night. “Cap-du-Loup and his men hold in this quarter,” said the woman in a low voice. “We had a spy forth who got back to us three days since. Cap-du-Loup’s tents and booths are thrown and scattered, stony ground and seams in the earth between the handfuls. He does not keep stern watch, not looking for anything of moment to descend this way. Hereabouts is the ravine of the brook of Saint Laurent, and half a mile up it a medley of camp-followers, men and women.” She had not ceased to move as she spoke. They were now in the midst of a spare growth of trees, under foot a turf burned by the sun and ground to dust by the tread, through half a year, of a host of folk. Some distance ahead the night was copper-hued; over there were camp-fires. They were now, also, in the zone of a faint confused sound. They moved aside from the direction of the strongest light, the deepest, intermittent humming, and came, presently, to the brook of Saint Laurent. It flowed through a shallow ravine with rough, scarped banks. Down it, too, came faint light and sound, proceeding from the camp of followers. “Our aim,” said she in peasant dress, “is to be found at dawn among that throng, indistinguishable from it, and so to pass to its outermost edge and away.” They were standing above the murmuring stream. Overhead the wind was in the pine-tops. There were elfin voices, too, of the creatures of the grass and bush and bark. All life, and life in his own veins, seemed to Garin to be alert, awake as never before, quivering and streaming and mounting like flame. “I am Elias of Montaudon,” he said. “I understand that, and how to play the jongleur, and that if peril comes and stands like a giant and questions us, I am no jongleur of Roche-de-Frêne nor allied there—” “Say that you are of Limousin.” “I have not dropped from the sky into the camp of Cap-du-Loup, but have been singing and playing, telling japes and tales, merry or sad, vaulting and wrestling elsewhere in the host—” “With the men of Aquitaine. Say that in Poitou Duke Richard himself praised you.” “And should they question me of you?”