"An actual arrow, made by an elf?" Mairey Faelyn gave a properly astounded gasp, then oooed grandly. The children scooted in closer to her as she studied the barbed flint arrowhead in little Orrin's coal-begrimed palm. "Amazing!"

"Found it myself, I did!" The boy was perched with elfin lightness on a bale of moldering wool-sacks in the abandoned fulling mill, a changeling if ever there was one.

He was wearing Mairey's hat--her father's really--a tweedy, sagging-brimmed relic of his folklore field-collecting. It was dear and dilapidated, and reminded her of the wonderful years she'd spent following him into hip-narrow caves and weeping catacombs, collecting folktales and marvels from every part of Britain.

"Hey, I got three of 'em, Orrin!" Geordie leaped into the center of the pack, plucked back an imaginary bow string and shot an equally imaginary arrow into the sagging rafters. "Yep, the sky cracked open one night during a storm and 'n elf bolts fell right out of the clouds."

"Imagine that!" Mairey had seen hundreds of such arrow flints, had a very fine collection of her own in her library at Galcliffe College. And although she knew they had been hewn by ancient human hunters--not by elves and witches--she loved the folklore far better than the facts.

She loved the children's tales most of all. "Where did you find this very fine specimen, Orrin?"

"In the barrow field, last winter."

The Daunton Barrow. She'd heard of the ancient burial mound, but had never seen it. This was a coal town; the sacred site was probably a slag heap by now, but worth a visit.

"Is the barrow field far, Orrin? Will you take me there?"

"Oh, no, miss!" Orrin slid off the bale, shaking his head gravely. "We can't go there. It's a dragon's barrow!"

"A dragon! Here in Daunton?" She'd never heard of a worm tale this far west of the Bleasdale Moors. "Does he have a name?"

Orrin glanced around at his fellows and their smudged faces, looked past them to the open door with its afternoon glare, and then blinked back at Mairey. "Balforge."

Everybody gasped in delicious dread and then wrestled each other for a closer spot, primed for a whopping good story.

Orrin opened his mouth to continue, but Geordie, ever the brinksman, thunked a stone onto the floor, startling everyone and missing Mairey's toes by an inch.

"This here's one of his fangs!"

Orrin snorted. Everyone else oooed, Mairey loudest of all, though Balforge's fang was, in dull, scholarly reality, a primitive flint axhead. The wonder was that these children called it a dragon's fang. That was certainly worth a footnote in the book she was compiling on folk beliefs.

She picked up the axhead by its blade and the boys tumbled over each other to get a better look.

"Careful miss! Could be poisoned! Just like his scales!"

"They shoot out of him like quills when he's angry!"

"His wings are as wide as the sky!" Geordie wedged himself and his part of the story into the space beside Mairey. "And when he roars, he scorches the forest--"

"And when he gets hungry," Orrin said, eyeing Geordie and nodding sagely, "he eats virgins."

Mairey bit back a laugh, her fingers itching to write this all down. "Which are...?"

"Oh, very much like onions, my gran told me."

"Ah." Mairey rescued her notebook and stub of a pencil from under the dragon's fang and quickly wrote, Balforge: fire-breathing, poisoned-scaled, foul-tempered virgin-eater.

"And he lived right here!" Orrin stomped his foot on the planking. "'Neath our village. For ten-hundred years, way long before the mine came."

Mairey's chest filled up so fast with red-hot anger, her next breath was a billow of steam.

Bloody coal barons and their bloody mines.

Balforge was the product of Daunton's despair. A wicked, relentless beast with a heart as hard and black as the outcropping of coal that had bred Daunton's voracious mine.

She wanted to hug Orrin and Geordie and all the other boys gathered around her, but they would find no dignity in her sympathy, and might even run from the meddlesome stranger.

"What do you suppose gave Balforge such a foul temper, Orrin?"

"Treasure, miss," he said, spreading his arms to encompass the whole of the mill. "Had a heap of shiny gold and stolen silver and pirate's jewels that he was guarding--"

But then Orrin's tale seemed to dry up on his tongue, and exited his small chest with a rasping gulp and a whispered, "Bleedin' cockles!"

Suddenly every child had gone silent, their gazes fixed with Orrin's on something behind her. Something huge and terrifying, by the wide-eyed, gape-mouthed looks on their little faces.

She began to feel a niggling fear of her own, a compelling coldness catching at her ankles, a pinpoint of prickling heat between her shoulder blades. She rose slowly from the clinging tangle of boys, turned and tucked them behind her skirts.

"Balforge," Orrin whispered.

Sweet silver acorns! The towering shape in the timbered doorway could truly have been Daunton's dragon--it was tall enough by half again as he stepped out of the afternoon sunlight that blazed crimson across his massive shoulders into the colorless shadows of the mill.

"Just a man, Orrin." Though Mairey wasn't altogether sure what sort of man she was looking at. He lacked barbed scales and poisoned fangs, and his wings were only a black greatcoat that draped to his calves, but that was demon fire dancing in his dark eyes as he swung his gaze across the trembling huddle.

Not a breath stirred, nor a muscle, as each of them, Mairey included, waited to be roasted and eaten.

The man made a sudden, growling grumble in his throat, sending the children screaming and running: the shooshing scatter of feet, of frantic wings beating against the sides of a cage.

Then the children were gone, and safe, and the mill tomb-quiet again, leaving Mairey alone to confront their poison-toothed dragon.

A wild-game hunter who had lectured at Galcliffe College once said that when facing down a fierce-eyed tiger in the jungle, it was best to stand stone-still and not to breathe at all. And that one should never, ever look the slavering beast in the eye, for that signaled a deadly challenge to him.

Well, she'd cut her teeth on dragons and manticores and hoary trolls, had translated the Bestiary from its twelfth-century Latin before she was ten. So she knew her monsters. She would easily be rid of this one--who was surely just the cantankerous landlord, here to banish the children from his property. Then she'd round up Orrin and the others, finish collecting her stories from them and be off to the next village.

"You're exceedingly good at frightening children, whoever you are." Mairey swept her father's hat off the empty grain cask where Orrin had thrown it, and crammed it onto her head. "Have you any idea how long it took me to gain their trust?"

"Have you any idea how long it's taken me to find you, Mairey Faelyn?"

Mairey stared at the shape in the doorway--at the dragon who knew her name. Before she could demand to know why or who he was, he was bearing down on her in a gait that thundered across the planked floor.

And there she stood like a stunned rabbit, a thousand and one questions knotted up inside her brain. She couldn't move at all, and just when it seemed the great beast would overtake her, he shifted his weight and coursed around her in a lingering circle, brimming her lungs with his startling scent of bergamot and saddle-leather, making her think absurdly of Sir Thomas Browne's observation that serpents copulated in slow, sinuous spirals, length against languid length, turning and turning against each other... just as Mairey was doing with this Balforge-incarnate, countering backward until she bumped against a strut and was forced to stare up into his coal-dark eyes.

"Who are you, sir?"

She'd never felt quite so much like a curio; so thoroughly and keenly appraised as his flinty gaze touched every part of her face: brow and lashes, the edge of her nose, her mouth. Then his jaw flexed and his frown deepened.

"Rushford," he said. His hair glistened midnight to his collar; his gaze was darker still. "Viscount Jackson Rushford."

Why would an imperious viscount named Jackson Rushford be looking for her? Something to do with Galcliffe College? Surely not a colleague of her father's. He didn't seem the scholarly type. More like a smuggler or Barbary pirate.

"I've never heard of you, my lord." And yet something about his name seethed in the pit of her stomach, some murky and roiling thing that made her certain she ought to know and fear him. That she ought to run home and shield her family from him. "I don't know what you could possibly want with me. And I certainly don't appreciate you standing so cl--"

"I want the Willowmoon Knot, Miss Faelyn." He closed the short distance between them, till his eyes glinted sharply. "And you're going to find it for me."

The Willowmoon.

Mairey's heart stumbled, thudded, and stopped. A clanging like an alarm bell began to ring so loudly inside her head, she could barely hear to think.

Hold fast, Mairey! Hold fast! Hold fast!

Hold fast to what, Papa? He'd told her that no one else knew of the Willowmoon--no one but the Faelyns! Certainly not this thieving dragon who had curled himself around her and was stealing the air right out of her chest.

Mairey took an amazingly poised breath, considering the violent rattling of her heart as it chugged to life again. And, against the big-game hunter's dire warning, she looked up and into the beast's eyes.

They were fathomless. Blazing crimson and licking yellow.

He must surely have heard her gulp.

"The Willow... which?" she asked in a little squawk. It was safer to look at the fiercely square line of his jaw and the deadly muscles flexing there, than to stray again to his eyes where the flames danced so hotly.

He raised her chin with his gloved finger--not sharply, with nary a hint of violence--but all the same causing her heart to rattle around in her chest again.

"The Willowmoon," he said evenly. That very short, very rumbly 'moon' brushed past her eyelids, made her hitch in a long breath that filled her lungs with his exotic scent. "You know the piece very well, Miss Faelyn."

Dear God! She wanted to run for the farthest hills--but running away from a wild beast only made it give chase. And, pinned between a solid post and Rushford's even more solid chest, she wouldn't get any farther than the reach of his powerful arm.

I'm going to lie through my teeth, Papa. Deny ever having heard of the Willowmoon Knot!

"Sir. Lord Rushford." He still had her chin caught up by his knuckle, was still staring down and deeply into her eyes--a tyrant used to having his own way. Let him try. His intimidation only raised her hackles and sharpened her senses. "I wish you all the best in finding your Willow Knotty thing. However--"

"However, madam?" All that earth-rumbling converged in her chest and settled low in her belly, a provocative terror.

"However, I--" Mairey faltered, but thought of her father and her promise, then boldly stated her unshakable position. "I can't help you."

There! The simplicity of fact. She couldn't possibly help him find the Willowmoon Knot. No chance in the world.

"Mmmmm...." A growl which he must have perfected underground, best suited for shaking mountains. His eyes took on a deadly, narrow gleam, even as he straightened and gave her a distant but oddly approving appraisal.

"You are clever, Mairey Faelyn."

She knew better than to take compliments from dragons. "I'm nothing of the sort, sir."

"Oh, yes--and worldly-wise to guard your precious treasure with your life."

"Treasure?" She laughed, "Ha, ha!" --having no other defense at hand. Now the man was talking of treasure! Could he mean silver? Please, God, no! "Sir, I have a train ticket, three pounds-ten in odd coins, and a Gladstone full of sticks, stones and feathers. Hardly treasure--unless you're a rag and bone man."

Which he didn't look like at all.

"Now, now, Miss Faelyn." His tsking scratched at her nerves; his smile frightened the life out of her. "You can drop your pretense."

"I'm not pretending--" She stopped because he had fit his finger to her lips, a searing brand.

"But you are, madam, protecting your knot of ancient, Celtic silver."

"My--"

"But it isn't necessary with me, Miss Faelyn. Your secret is mine now, and I will guard it as you could never do."

"I have no secrets, sir. Not from you or from anyone." Mairey's fingertips had gone cold as ice, though all the steamy heat of hell seemed to be pouring off the man, working its way through her jacket, through the too-flimsy linen of her bodice and her camisole, to the cleaving of her breasts.

"You've no secrets from me certainly. I know that you are Mairey Faelyn of Galcliffe College. Daughter and heir to Erasmus Faelyn. I know, madam, that you are an antiquarian. That you've been flitting around the countryside for the last two weeks on some inexplicable mission--"

"Collecting folk tales, sir!"

"Carrying that traveling case and wearing this remarkable hat." He slid his fingers along her jaw and through the hair at her temple until her hat came loose and fell to her shoulder.

Mairey made a feeble grab for it, but he held her pinned and paralyzed as the hat fell to the floor.

"Your father's hat, I'm told." That dark unreadable gaze lingered on her face, searching out her secrets. Knowing too much already.

Impossible. Where could he have learned of it? The jumbled legends of the silver lode rarely surfaced--every page of research on the subject was in her private library at Galcliffe, every fact was in her head. How did Rushford know? And how was she to turn his interest elsewhere?

"You've caught me, Lord Rushford: I am a scholar of Celtic folklore."

Rushford raised a brow but said nothing, sending her careening thoughts into even larger, more useless circles.

"And I don't mean to be rude to you, my lord, but I travel alone, collecting my folk tales, and as a woman I must be wary of strangers."

"Indeed." He nodded, an almost gracious tilt of his head, though triumph and a galling amusement shimmered in his eyes.

"Especially strangers who, for no reason at all, seem to know my name."

"Ah, but I've given you my reason, Miss Faelyn. We have a common interest: the Willowmoon Knot."

"And as a scholar of Celtic history and art and literature, I can assure you that you've gone to a lot of trouble for nothing." Mairey took a chance and ducked beneath his arm, past the warm, clinging folds of his greatcoat, then slipped behind the pole and collected her hat, before dodging her way to her travel case.

"Nothing, Miss Faelyn?"

She had escaped him but not the sensation of his gaze, which she could feel through her back as she retrieved her Gladstone from the floor.

"Absolutely nothing, my lord--because, I've never in all my studies heard of your Willow Knot. So, you see, we have no secrets between us. No common interests. Nothing. But I do wish you well on your quest. Now, sir, I have a great lot of evidence to collect from those children you frightened away, and all before night falls. So if you'll excuse me--"

Without a whisper of warning, Rushford was behind and above her, closing his hand over hers around the handle of her travel bag.

"Enough of your prevaricating, Miss Faelyn," he said too softly and too close to her ear. "We will discuss the Willowmoon Knot. And we will do it now."

"Please sir, I have nothing more to say to you." Mairey tried to pull away, but she met Rushford's chest in the curve of her back, her hip against his. Oh, but the underbelly of this poison-barbed dragon was steamy warm.

"I've come too far and too long for this charming dance you're doing. It won't dissuade me. You and I are going to strike a bargain."

"If you don't let go of me, sir, the only thing I'm going to strike is you!"

"And you, my dear, have underestimated my intentions." Rushford turned her sharply. "I've searched for you these two weeks--traveled mudded byways and goat paths, through sorry mining towns like this one."

"Chasing your fancies--"

"Chasing you, Miss Faelyn. And a crest of silver knot-work, no larger than my palm." He held out his hand between them, a powerful and sinuous scape of dark glove-leather, clutched round an imaginary shape that caused Mairey's pulse to rise and her skin to prickle. "Ancient, struck in the Celtic form--or so I'm told. But I needn't go on. You are the Willowmoon scholar, Miss Faelyn. I know that for a fact. You're the only one in all the world who can find this treasure for me. And you will."

Mairey felt exposed, stalked by a shadow who seemed to know her most sheltered secrets. She tucked her courage into the deepest part of her heart and then looked up from the broad fist that Rushford had now made of his hand. He was watching her from beneath his savage brow, waiting as a wolf awaits an unwary hare.

Rushford. Why did that name terrify her even more that his knowledge of the Willowmoon? She felt blinded and dizzied, confused.

"Are you an avid collector of Celtic antiquities, Lord Rushford? Is that why you're so willing to believe in your fanciful bit of silver crestwork?"

"Hardly that." He pulled off his gloves as though he planned to stay to tea. The afternoon sun had tracked through the mill's clerestory windows and across the floor like a druid's clockwork, and now branded its blazing brightness onto the fine broadcloth of Rushford's shoulder.

A man who tamed fire.

"Are you an archeologist?" she asked, drawn by his broad, work-bronzed hands, his able fingers as they fisted his gloves. "Are you looking to pillage treasures closer to home, now that Egypt's have all been plundered to near extinction?"

"You know very well why I want the Knot, Miss Faelyn." His gloves went into his pocket. "The very same reason that you want it."

He couldn't possibly. "Then I wish you luck, Lord Rushford."

"I don't need luck, Miss Faelyn." He was smiling like a dragon with a belly full of virgins. "I have you."

That simple statement of possession, with its immutably present tense, nearly felled her.

"Sir, if the Knot does exist--if it ever has--and if it should miraculously find its way into your keeping, what could you possibly gain from it?"

"Silver, madam."

The glade of the Willowmoon. Mairey closed her eyes and was there among the willows, her village tucked safely below, her sisters playing in the fallen leaves, her father's grave and her mother's.

"You must be deep in debt, my lord, if a few ounces of silver can add so very much to your coffers." Mairey tried to be glib, but her words clung like feathers in her throat. "Melt down your auntie's silver sugar basin and save yourself a lot of trouble."

"I could care less about the Knot's history or its meaning, Miss Faelyn--only that on its face is a map that will lead me to an even greater treasure. A network of silver-laden veins so pure that it glitters from its bed in the forest floor."

Dear, God! Mairey suddenly knew with terrifying clarity why the man's name had rocked her off balance.

Rushford Mining and Minerals. Tin and coal.

And silver.

Jackson Rushford was a mining baron! She knew the name as she knew the devil's. A spoiler of willow glades and villages. A thief of souls and childhoods.

He must never have it--not the Willowmoon Knot nor the vein of silver, nor her village that nestled in its shadow.

"Mere legend, my lord Rushford," Mairey said evenly, surprised that she could look him so plainly in the eye when her world was spinning out of control. "Smoke and shafts of light, nothing more."

"And where there is smoke and light, Miss Faelyn, there is always fire." He was too close again, his eyes too dark and smiling. "And we shall walk through it together."

Excerpt Copyright © 1999-2002 Linda Needham