The Wild Hunt (40 page)

'And you have the gall to call me infuriating and stubborn!' she retorted. When he chose not to respond, she narrowed her eyes and, mouth set, reached for her vial of poppy syrup and laced his wine with it, adding a hefty splash of aqua vitae to disguise the taste. Her eyes brightened with tears at the memory of the last time she had poured him wine while he lounged in a tub and she contrasted it bitterly with the present. This time there was no brimming laughter, no electric charge of sexual tension. This time there was only fear-tinged determination and exhaustion.

Returning to the tub, she handed him the spiked wine. 'Speaking of needs,' she said, changing the course of her attack, 'the men at least will have to be released for harvest very soon.'

'Such as are necessary,' he agreed. 'I suppose I will have to hire mercenaries to replace them. I'll send to Ravenstow for the strongbox.' He took a gulp of the wine and choked on the underlying bite of the aqua vitae.

'Drink it!' she commanded, eyes fierce, cheeks flushed, terrified that he would discover the taste of the opium.

His lids flickered wide at her peremptory tone and then he smiled slowly. 'Dare I? he asked.

'Last time you shoved a cup beneath my nose and commanded me like that, you were hell -bent on torture.'

Judith felt her whole face scorch fiery red. 'I saved your life, didn't I?'

'Yes you did,
Cath fach
.' His look became quizzical. 'Why are you blushing?'

Judith's heart began to gall op. 'I'm not,' she croaked. 'It is the summer heat.'

Guyon gaped at her over the goblet rim with undisguised astonishment. Hot without it might be, but the keep wall s were several feet thick, the gaps filled with rubble and, even in the summer months, it was comfortable to have braziers in the private chambers.

'I'll fetch food,' she muttered breathlessly, and detached herself from his scrutiny to dive for the doorway.

Guyon shook his head and then ducked it beneath the water to wet his hair and clear his thoughts, wondering how on earth Judith had the temerity to suggest that his mind was not serving him as it should when her own was quite obviously addled. He continued his wash and, frowning, took another swallow of the wine. That remark about the heat had been a flustered idiocy, her exit rapid before he could investigate further; or at least, he thought, until she had invented a more plausible excuse for her blush.

It was after she had given him the wine. Until then she had been simmering at him like a cauldron on a blaze. After a moment, a glimmer of enlightenment caused him to taste the wine again and roll it experimentally round his mouth.

Smooth, high-quality Anjou and rough border aqua vitae and ... ! He spat it out into the bath water and swore with soft vehemence, staring with furious eyes at the curtain through which she had vanished. Anger sparkled along his nerve endings, an invigorating anger, buoying him up, subduing fatigue. Lace his wine, would she?

Judith returned with a tray of cold roast pigeon and fresh white bread, a new flagon of wine and an excuse for her previous flustered behaviour ready and credible on her tongue, for it was in part the truth. She intended saying that she had been swept by desire at the sight of him in the bath along with the association of pouring him wine, and knowing how tired he was, had not wished to burden him further. It was therefore with a mingling of vexation and relief that she discovered he had fall en fast asleep in the rapidly cooling water.

Eyes raised heavenwards, she set the tray down on a clothing chest, gave Cadi a firm, low command that flopped the bitch down on her belly at the door, eyes still cocked in distant hope on the food, and went to the tub to pick up the empty goblet from the floor.

'In Jesu's name, Guy, you might have gone to bed!' she complained with exasperation, then shrieked as Guyon surged from the water like a pike, seized her and dragged her down.

'And you might refrain from poisoning my wine!' he growled as she tried to thresh out of his hard grip.

'I wasn't, Guy, truly!'

'You deny there was poppy in that wine?'

'Only enough to give you a sound night's sleep. You need it.'

'You did it in deceit!'

'It was for your own good.'

'Ah yes, my own good,' he said silkily. 'Swaddle me up like a babe while you are at it.'

'Guyon please, you're hurting me!' Judith half sobbed, more afraid of the cadence of his voice than the grip on her arm.

'I ought to beat you witless!' he complained, but let her go. She floundered from the tub, the front of her gown drenched, the ends of her braids dark bronze and dripping. 'Don't ever try that trick on me again.'

Judith took her courage in both hands. 'I'll make sure that next time you don't know!' she retorted. 'My only fault was that in my haste I did not disguise the taste enough.'

Guyon jerked to his feet in a swish of angry water. 'Dare it at your peril.'

'Threat or promise?' she asked with a saucy confidence she was far from feeling, aware that she was playing with fire and that one step too far would ignite a totally different conflagration from the kind she was nurturing now. 'Will you unlace my gown? It's soaked and I'll catch a chill .'

'Your own fault. Call your maids.'

'I can't. Helgund's sitting with Mabell and the child and if you glare at Elflin like that, you will terrify her, not to mention what Brand will do to you if he thinks you have been making improper advances to his wife.'

'What?' Guyon spluttered. He knew by now that he was being led a merry dance, but was too interested in its destination to halt the devious steps of its progress.

'Well , if I sent for Elflin and she saw you in that condition, the Lord alone knows what she might misconstrue. You know how timid she is of all men, saving Brand.'

'What cond--' Guyon followed the direction of her amused gaze, then flicked his own back to her face. Laughter was tugging at the corners of her mouth. She raised her eyes to his. They were round and innocent and she kept them on him as she raised her arms to remove her circlet and veil.

'Shall I leave that uncomforted, too?' she enquired with spurious solicitude. 'Or would you let me close enough to rub it better?'

'Judith!' Guyon choked, laughing despite himself. Half an hour ago he had been so weary and soul-sick that he could have lain down and died. Now the energy was flowing through him like a vigorous stream in spate. 'What am I going to do with you?'

'Get me with child?' she suggested, slanting him a provocative glance. 'Women are supposed to dote and soften when they are breeding.'

Guyon snorted. 'Since when have you ever done what other women are supposed to do?'

'There is always a first time. You might be pleasantly surprised.'

'For a change,' he said with a grin.

She gave him a lazy, answering smile. 'Unlace me, Guy?' she requested again.

He reached to the side fastening of her gown and began to pluck it undone. 'You are naught but a hussy, do you know that? Summer heat indeed!'

She stepped out of the drenched garment and turned in his embrace to twine her arms about his neck and meet his lips with her own. He reached for the drawstring of her shift. 'I have practised better deceptions,' she admitted impishly against his mouth. 'It's not knotted this time.'

'I did not think it would be,' he said wryly as the garment slid down from her shoulders and pooled at her feet and her body blended itself with his.

CHAPTER 29

Guyon stirred in response to a dazzle of light across his eyelids and squinted them open. The chamber was dim; sunlight lanced across the bed from a gap in the warped shutter. He moved his head and idly watched the motes of dust glitter in its bright rainbow bars. It took him a moment to remember where he was and why. Then came the familiar feeling as of a cold stone in the pit of his stomach, immediately dissolved by the awareness of Judith's body curled at his side, sleeping with the innocent abandon of the kitten that was her nickname. Hard to believe in the scheming seductress of the night.

He stretched and relaxed, smiling at the incongruity. Flowers and thorns. Sharp claws sheathed in soft padding. He turned towards her and nuzzled his chin on the crown of her head.

She murmured and nestled closer. Her lips moved in a sleepy kiss at the base of his throat.

He glanced beyond the luxurious comfort of his bed and wife to the shifting strands of light and the smile still on his lips became rueful as he realised that it was the first time in three days that he had woken at dawn instead of noon. As usual she had been right, he acknowledged. He had not known the depth of his exhaustion until he had succumbed to it, and succumb he had with a vengeance. The last three days had passed him by like distant scenes from an illuminated psalter and he an ill iterate turning the pages. He vaguely recalled rising to eat in the hall and speaking to people, although what he had eaten and what he had said were now a complete mystery. He also remembered going out to inspect the repair work on the curtain wall , but Judith had apprehended him with some specious excuse that had drawn him back within ... and inevitably to bed where, by unfair means, she had enticed him to stay.

Restlessly he shifted his position, aware of a need to be up and doing that was born of renewed energy, not dull -edged desperation. The grief, anger and guilt were still with him, but no longer intruding upon his every waking thought.

Raw, but bearable and probably a burden for life.

Lady Mabell had died on that first night. God rest her soul, since it had not had much rest on this earth. Judith had been tearful about that, although he suspected the tears were more a relieving of tension than any deeper grief for the dead woman. The child still lived. His fever was gone and he had stopped passing blood, or so Judith told him. She kept the babe from his sight and he had no desire to go and see for himself -not yet; perhaps never.

He thought of the incident with the spiked wine.

He had always known she was mettlesome, but sometimes she was almost too quick for him to handle. Get me with child, she had said. He was not sure that he could imagine Judith soft and doting. It was not in her nature, or at least not yet.

Perhaps children would gentle her, but he doubted it. Kittens did nothing to make a cat less feral. In fact the reverse.

The sound of a horn interrupted his ruminations: a hunting horn, but the notes were not in the sequence that summoned the dogs or blew the mort and they cut through his sense of well -being.

He bolted upright in the bed and reached instinctively for his sword. In that same instant, Michell de Bec clashed aside the curtain without courtesy or preamble and strode into the room.

'My lord, it's de Lacey,' he said curtly. 'He's got lightweight siege equipment and an army of Welsh behind him and he's about to storm the wall s.'

'De Lacey?' Guyon repeated. Beside him, Judith sat up, the sheet clutched to her breasts, her eyes filled with sleepy bewilderment.

De Bec wiped his hand across his beard and looked sick. 'We did not see them before. There was a thick mist at first light and they concealed themselves among a flock of sheep being driven up to the keep.'

'Sheep?' Guyon slanted his constable a look.

'Sheep?' he said again and gave a bark of bitter laughter at the irony. 'Do you think it is the same flock, perchance? Thirty pieces of silver?'

'My lord?' De Bec looked at him sidelong.

'Hell 's death, Michel!' Guyon shouted. 'He gets out over the wall without being seen and returns in the same wise. God in heaven. I ought to blind every last man on duty. It's quite obvious the bastards have no use for their eyes!' He flung back the bedclothes, tossed his sword on top of them and began swiftly to dress.

'Cadwgan's men, I suppose?'

'I do not know, my lord.'

'God's teeth, what do you know?'

De Bec swallowed. 'They came on us from the west, from across the border, my lord. I do not think they are part of the Shrewsbury force.'

Guyon pulled on his chausses. 'That doesn't make them any less likely to murder us all ,' he said in a voice that was husky with curbed temper. 'How far are we outnumbered?'

'About three to one, my lord, but half of them at least are little more than bare-legged Welsh rabble.'

'Don't underestimate them,' Guyon said sharply.

'They might look like peasants, but they fight like wolves, and a weakened keep, like a new lamb, is game for their sport.' He gave his constable a calculating look. 'They won't sit beyond a couple of days for a siege - it's all got to come on the first or second assault. If we can beat them back so that they lose heart, then we have a chance.'

'The women ...'

Guyon followed de Bec's gaze. Clothed by now in a clinging white wool en undertunic, her hair spilling to her thighs, Judith was a sight to rouse the lust of any man in battle heat and rank offered no protection when Walter de Lacey was leading the assault.

Judith unsheathed Guyon's long knife from his sword-belt. 'I can look after myself,' she said quietly, holding the knife in an accustomed, confident grip.

Guyon opened his mouth to tell her not to be so ridiculous, but snapped it shut again. There was no point in warning her that most Welshmen were adept dagger-fighters and that she might strike once and succeed by dint of surprise, but not again. Probably she knew it already, but the die was cast and it was too late, whatever happened.

'The women will have to take their chance with the rest of us,' he said to de Bec as he struggled into his hauberk, feeling that it was a prison and punishment rather than security. He looked round at Judith again and held out his hand for his swordbelt. She fetched it and he stroked her cheek lightly with his knuckles.

'Organise the servants as best you can, love.

The women can care for the wounded and boil up whatever we have - pitch, oil, water. Let the men douse whatever is burnable and carry supplies to the battlements. I'll send you word in more detail when I've seen for myself how the situation stands. At all costs, Judith, keep them from panicking.'