"As it pleases my lady."

The baroness bowed her head, but not before Grace glimpsed the smile that touched her lips.

As they rode north across the land, long shadows stretched to their right. They crested a rise, and Grace saw Calavere atop its hill. She guessed it to be about a league away, but that was mostly because she had yet to gain a good sense of any of the measures of this world, and in her mind any distance over a mile and less than ten was about a league.

They lost sight of the castle as they descended into a gulch. Granite 139 outcrops rose over their heads, and 135 was thick with vegetation. Grace suspected a botanist from Denver would have found the trees and shrubs fascinatingly deviant, but to her they looked a lot like pine and scrub oak. They reached the bottom of the gulch and headed up the other side.

Grace heard the sound the same moment Durge raised a hand, bringing the party to a halt. They sat still on their horses, listening. Then Grace heard it again: a low, rhythmic sound she could not place. Durge glanced at Garf, and the young knight's hand moved to the hilt of the sword at his hip. Grace swallowed, startled by the hard look on Garf's face. For all his good humor, at twenty-two years of age he was a man of war.

The sound drifted again on the moist air, although it was difficult to tell from which direction it came. Aryn cast a look at Grace, her blue eyes concerned. Lirith's own eyes were closed, as if she were listening for something. Grace opened her mouth to ask a question, but a look from Durge made her clamp it shut again. Maybe the Embarran's fear of brigands was not so impossible after all.

Durge dismounted from Blackalock. Grace watched as he took three steps forward along the path. Then the bushes to his left exploded, and a black ball of fury burst forth.

It was upon Durge before Grace even realized what it was. The horses whinnied and leaped back. The bear reached out huge paws to engulf Durge. The knight curled up and fell to the ground. Aryn let out a muffled cry of terror.

"No!" Grace shouted, but she wasn't certain if her lips really formed the word. She reached but a hand, but Durge was impossibly far away. Out of the corner o1 her eye she saw Garf leap from the back of his warhorse and draw his sword. Then there was an136 * mark anthony For a horrified second Grace thought it was a second bear. Then the 140 beast let out a trumpeting cry, and she realized it was Blackalock, Durge's charger. Eyes wild, the horse reared onto its hind legs, then brought sharp hooves down on the bear's humped back. The bear snarled and scrambled around, but Blackalock had already galloped away. Grace knew that chargers were trained for battle, but she had not understood what that meant until now. Shandis trembled beneath her and would have bolted but for Grace's death grip on the reins. Aryn was struggling with her own mount--although Lirith's horse stood stock- still, the witch's hand pressed against its neck.

Durge staggered to his feet. He reached over his shoulder and drew his Embarran greatsword from the harness strapped to his back. Blood streamed down his face, but he stood straight, and his motions were quick and deliberate. Grace understood; when he fell it was not because he was severely wounded, but rather as a defense mechanism.

Bears wouldn't attack creatures they thought were already dead--wasn't that how it worked?

Except there was something wrong with this animal. Wild bears were supposed to be afraid of people, but this creature opened its maw, exposing gigantic teeth as it roared. It started after Blackalock, then abruptly turned to face Durge. That was when Grace saw the bare patchesin its pelt. Over large parts of the bear's body the thick fur had been scorched away, and the skin beneath was blistered and oozing. So it was injured, burned in a brush fire, perhaps. And there was no telling what an injured animal would do.

No more than ten seconds had passed since the bear had burst from the underbrush. It took a lumbering step toward Durge. The Embarran backed away. Garf approached cautiously from behind the bear, sword raised, face grim.

137 was impossible to say. The bear spun arouhd, hackles raised, and roared at Garf. Grace could see past its monstrous teeth into the deep pit of its throat. Garf lifted his sword.

"No, Sir Garfethel!" Durge shouted. "Don't move!"

141.

Durge's words came too late. Garf thrust with his blade. The sword sank deep into the bear's chest--so deep it seemed the animal should have died instantly--but the bear did not fall. It let out a horrible shriek, then lunged forward, ripping the sword out of Garf's hand. Garf stared as the bear fastened its jaws on his shoulder.

Then the young knight screamed.

The world ceased to move except for the bear and Garf. The bear shook its massive head, and Garf fluttered limply, like one of the little string men Grace sometimes saw the village children playing with. The bear tossed him to the ground, placed a paw on his stomach, and almost casually tore at his flesh. His screaming stopped.

Just when she thought it would drive her mad, the moment shattered.

Durge rushed forward and with both hands plunged his greatsword into the bear's back. A cold part of Grace appreciated the surgical precision of the blow. Yes--between two ribs, angled toward the midline, past the lung. She could see the moment the tip pierced the bear's heart. The creature's entire body went limp, and it rolled onto the ground. The bear gave one heaving breath. Red foam bubbled around both of the blades embedded in its body. Then came the stillness of death.

"My lady ..."

The words were not shouted, but they caught Grace's attention all the same. She tore her eyes from the carcass of the bear. Durge knelt beside a crumPled, bloody form. He looked up at Grace.

"My ladv. I think you had best come here."

Everything had changed; the idyllic ride through summer had vanished.

Durge started to reach toward Garf, then pulled his hand back. Grace understood. There was nothing the knight or his sword could do. This 142 was her battle now.She slipped from Shandis's back--the motion was easy, as if she had known how to do it all along--and approached the two knights, one kneeling, one lying on the ground. She was aware of Lirith following after her, and of Aryn sitting atop her mare: rigid, staring forward, her face as white as surgical gauze. Then Grace reached the two men.

Fear clamped her heart like a pair of cold, steel forceps, but only for a second. If Garf was to have a chance, then he could mean nothing to her. He was just another nameless victim pulled from a wrecked car or an overturned bus and wheeled on a gurney into Denver Memorial Hospital's Emergency Department. She would put him back together, then head for the Residents' Lounge to have a cup of bad coffee and watch Elizabeth Montgomery's antics in a rerun of Bewitched on the blurry television.

She crouched beside the patient, and the metallic scent of his blood filled her skull, triggering a chain reaction of instincts. "Get me four units of 0-neg. Stat."

"My lady?" Durge said, his brown eyes confused.

She shook her head. Of course. This wasn't the ED. This was a wooded valley three miles from a medieval castle on another world from Earth.

But it didn't matter. It was what she and the doctors, nurses, and PAs did that mattered, not the walls, not the trauma rooms not tbp nan-ip of the niane- 139.

"My lady, I don't think he's breathing'."

Grace bent over the patient. She was aware of a great deal of blood, and of wounds to the right shoulder as well as the chest and abdomen.

However, she did not focus on these things.

ABC. Airway, breathing, circulation.

She had repeated the words so many times during her internship and residency that they might as well have been cut into her brain with a scalpel. What she did in these first few minutes would affect 143.

everything that came after--whether the patient lived or died, whether he would be whole or paralyzed, whether he would be himself when he woke up or a braindamaged vegetable.

Grace moved through the prescribed steps. She stabilized his head between her knees, tilted his head back, and forced his jaw open. She slipped a finger into his mouth, past his pharynx, into the trachea.

Just before the larynx her fingers encountered a soft, wet mass. His airway was obstructed with a plug of blood and mucus. That wasn't good--it meant injury to his lungs--but she couldn't think of that, not until its time. She freed the plug and heard the rasp as air flowed into him--he was breathing again.

Next step. She pressed her ear against his chest and listened. There were no breath sounds on the right. Her suspicion was correct; the right lung had been punctured and had collapsed. She needed a chest tube, but she didn't have the tools. Maybe in the castle she could fashion something, but not here, not now. Fortunately, the breath sounds on the left were good. One lung was working. That would have to be enough until they got him back to the castle.Grace turned her attention to the source of the blood. Third step: Breathing did no good if there was ^ blood in his arteries to carry oxygen. She had to ^op the bleeding. Now.

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