Tor’s breaths powdered the air before his gray suede nose. Dominique San Juste spied a village just ahead, settled like a giant’s stone tossed amidst a thatch of forest. A fortuitous discovery, for he was weary, peckish, and he’d already once caught himself dozing.

      He knew Tor would not stop should his master fall in a dead sleep to the soft pillowing of fresh-fallen snow. Dominique imagined the elegant white Boulonnais might be waiting for that very incident. The stallion would suddenly notice the loss of weight upon its back and, without pause, pick up into a gallop and be off, never to be seen again.

      He leaned forward and gave Tor a reassuring smooth across his withers, then scratched the sensitive spot just below his long feathery mane. “Not yet, my fine one. When this mission is complete, I promise you the freedom you desire. You have served me well over the years; you deserve as much. Mayhaps we shall someday find that which has been lost to you?”

      In response, Tor lifted his head and tamped the air with his nose. At the stamp of an agreeing hoof, spray of snow sifted up, coating Dominique’s face with a fine kiss of January cold.

      Unseasonable, this heavy snowfall. And the frigid chill. There was something amiss in this fine and darkened moon-glittered world. Since the morn of the New Year, Dominique had felt the odd fissure between nature and the mortal realm. But he could not explain it any more than he could reason his acceptance of this bizarre quest he now found himself embarked upon.

      One final mission and then he, too, would find the freedom he desired. The Oracle had promised as much. If that is what the ghostly figment of an innocent-faced boy who had been appearing to him over the past few years really was. Could be a damned ghost, for all Dominique knew. Didn’t resemble any child—living or dead—he had known. Oracle was as good a title as any.

      Leaning forward once again Dominique smoothed his palm over the bald spot on Tor’s forehead, reassuring in a manner he knew Tor understood. Perfectly round, the wound never did heal, though it did neither fester. It merely remained pink and moist, as if waiting. Waiting to become whole once again.

      “We both seek wholeness,” Dominique whispered, then straightened, and closed his eyes.

      Another battle last night. Mastema de Morte had been executed; his troops had retreated behind the safety of twelve-foot-wide battlements. Word told that a mysterious knight clad in black armor had arrived midcombat. Deftly, he’d woven his way through the clashing, battling men, right up to Mastema de Morte. One swift blow had cut through leather coif and flesh and bone to sever the man’s head from his neck. That done, the black knight had turned his mighty black steed and galloped away in the same mysterious manner that he had appeared.

      He’d done the same less than a week ago, when Satanas de Morte had laid siege to Corbeil for no more reason beyond boredom and the need to see fresh blood purl down the groove in his sword.

      The black knight sounded more myth than legend to Dominique. But he was not the man to dispute the tale. Especially not in these troubled times, when the common man needed a vision of heroics to cling to in the face of certain death.

      ’Twas rumored the de Mortes served the English king who occupied Paris in his never-ending attempts to possess French soil. The French king, Charles VII, who had been crowned but two years ago thanks to the ill-fated Jeanne d’Arc, had yet to banish all the English from Burgundian France. After almost a century of fighting, these were surely the blackest years yet.

      But at this moment in time Dominique did not care for any man other than himself. He was on a mission. The finding of this legend.

      Tor’s lead took them dangerously close to the prickles of a bushy gorse. Dominique’s spur caught up on the spiny branches that splayed out over the path. At contact, a cloud of iridescent particles coruscated into the air.

      Dominique eased Tor to a stop and dismounted. “Not at all favorable,” he muttered, as he slapped at his left calf with a leather-gloved palm. The platelets scaling the back of his gauntlet chinked with the motion. “It’s been too long.” Another slap released a generous cloud of glitter from his lower leg. The accursed dust permeated all clothing, even his leather boots and braies.

      A few stamps of his feet and finally, the last of the renegade particles dispersed. It besprinkled the ground and lay upon the moonlit snow like diamond dust.

      He had to be cautious. Dominique was destined for the first tavern that offered fire and food. It wouldn’t do to wander in and seat himself in a dark corner only to begin to coruscate.

      Then rationality overtook peevishness. Anger served no man but to draw him farther away from his own soul. Besides, anger was for the dawn.

      Drawing in a deep breath of icy air, Dominique lifted his face to the eerie white moon sitting low and fat in the sky. It hung as if a pearl framed between the black iron latticework of a twisted, leafless elm. Midnight. ’Twas the time of the faeries.

      The first time he’d ever heard that phrase—the time of the faeries—Dominique had been nursing watered ale in an ash-dusted tavern, sharing a table with a grizzle-bearded old man. With a bristle of his shoulders, and a hearty swallow of his own ale, the man had then nodded toward the door, where the moonlight seeped through cracks in the boards. “’Tis the time of the faeries,” he’d said, as if imparting great wisdom.

      And so, Dominique had walked outside, lifted his face to the moon, and had decided that indeed midnight and all its mysterious darkness was a time of magick.

      “The stroke of midnight finds the Dragon of the Dawn at his weakest,” Dominique muttered now. He closed his eyes and drew upon the moon’s glow as if it were the sun and cast beams of heat upon his face. “Avoid the dawn. Triumph beneath the moon.”