The necklace burned her skin and the guineas her pillow as she lay to sleep the restless sleep of the young on the edge of adventure. Bess was a practical girl, she was, so neither had been left for some roe buck to nibble or rabbit to get tangled in or magpie to feather its nest with. Instead, she had stowed each away safely and then been left with the impossibility of using them in any way. She had not been more than an hour's trek from her village, so travel to another place to spend such riches was out of the question. Neither was she about to flash such glitter in her own home, for all to see and speculate upon. 

Bess had always been one to sleep the sleep of the good. Deep and true, she woke before the sun and went about preparations for the day, her time carved out as the sun rose, the remained shared with the village, the inn's guests, her family. But after her encounter in the wood, her sleep was restless, invaded as the caped man had invaded her glen. No longer had she rest in the wood. Instead, she could not bring herself to sleep past the beginning moonlight hitting her eye lids. Was the moon full? Had she missed it? Her heart raced when the night fell and every day was a search for a shadowed face, strong and young, with eyes so green that the color had to have been a trick of the eye. 

Had he been near enough, she might have battled her inner nature, her desire for something else, something more, the yearning her childhood of fairy tales and wood-filled wanderings had wrought within her heart. Such leanings of her nature had been given outlet by her secret mornings but now those mornings were no longer secret. They were secret meeting spaces for forest gods and men whose hands burned heat through the waist of dresses. With night, memory returned and he was slender as a new foal, hard as a sapling, soft as a kitten, and bristly as her hairbrush. He was so completely unlike her experience of man, not of the farm stock – rough and smelling of ale and sweat, nor of the more powdered nobility. Instead, he fit into her dreams as not one of them had. 

Yes – had he been near enough to her, she might have parsed him out and known him. Instead, with the half lit glimpses, the nearness of him under his cloak, the burst of energy as she attempted to escape his grasp, the glitter and his words about wanting to prove himself and her own safety, all conspired to make him dream-like in day and as real as her own hand in the night. 

She floated through the days, fed the day men and dreamt half awake of the night time one, until the moon could not grow full fast enough. She had a sore ear from her father pulling it as she'd almost burnt the stew, the necklace about her neck whispered all hours of the day, and her mind was muzzy after the nights wherein she stood and stared out of the window in her rooms which overlooked where the highway wended from inn toward the wood where she had met [i]him[/i]. 

The night the moon filled to the brim and spilled into her rooms, Bess almost slept through it as exhaustion had finally taken her. But the touch of light had become something of an impulse and she sat up with a gasp, hand to her breast. For a moment, the dream spread through her limbs and she thought she ought to wake up to check on the moon. But reality spread and before she could think, she had pulled her skirts about herself as well as a shawl and was out into the moonlight before the truth of what she was doing could register. 

The wood gleamed silver and onyx in the light from above. The girl's hair was in a braid against a shoulder and her shawl could not fully fend off the chill in the air. She narrowed her eyes against the glare as she stepped into her glen and looked about her. Had she missed him? Was it yesternight not this? She reached to the hollow of her throat and teased at the delicate chain there, at odds with the mean state of her clothing, wending it about her fingertips in worry while she looked about her for signs of his having already arrived and left. It was madness, this wanting to see him again, but she could not help herself any more than she could sleep at nights after having met him.