The Wild Hunt

'I won't ... What did you say?' Her fingers ceased their nimble twirling. Her eyes opened upon him, wide with shock. 'Huw, dead?'

'At the hand of Robert de Belleme and his gutter sweepings. Huw's pack-load of sables was brought to myself and Judith as a blood-smirched wedding gift.' Sparing her nothing, he gave her the details.

'He was my father's best friend,' she whispered jerkily when he had done. 'They were boys together ... Oh sweet Virgin!'

Their bodies closed again of necessity as Guyon grabbed hold of her, afraid that she was going to faint. She leaned her cheek against his jerkin, shivering, sick to the soul with grief and fear and shock.

'Promise me, cariad, ' he murmured, stroking her hair.

She made a little movement against his chest.

Her fingers gripped his arms.

'Promise me.'

'What good is an oath given under duress?'

Rhosyn replied shakily. 'I could give you my word and it would be worthless.' She uttered a desolate laugh. 'Welsh oaths always are.'

'Rhosyn ...'

She pushed gently away from him and, having wiped her eyes, poured herself a cup of mead. 'I might be fickle, Guy, but I am not about to step deliberately within de Belleme's ring of fire. I will swear you this much honestly: that I will not stir from here until after the child is born and only then by necessity. And I will send to you for an escort.'

Guyon studied her through half-closed eyes but did not seek to persuade her further. He had her concessions in his grasp and was not going to jeopardise them with bitterness and anger.

'Very well , cariad,' he said quietly. 'I do not suppose I would care so much were you not so cursedly independent.' He sat down beside the fire and picked up the mead that Eluned had poured for him earlier.

Rhosyn stared at him in the firelight. With his Welsh clothing and dark complexion he might have been of her own race and class - no barrier but the fire's glow between them. It was a bittersweet illusion. Merchant's daughter and marcher lord, already married for the sake of convenience and dynasty. He looked tired, she thought. The shadows beneath his eyes were not all the result of the dull light.

'Does your wife know your whereabouts, Guy?'

He took a swallow of mead, swirled its golden surface and looked at her with rueful amusement.

'She may have a suspicion,' he admitted. 'For sure, if I am not over the drawbridge come dawn, I'll have to deal with a hell cat ... and not for the reason I can see on your face.' The amusement became a wry chuckle. He drank the remainder of the mead and did not offer to elucidate.

Rhosyn swallowed the temptation to ask. If Guyon was on this side of the border after dark, dressed in native garments and murmuring about scorching the devil's tail, then it was best to know nothing. 'What is she like?'

'I think she would surprise you.' He put down the cup to fondle the cold thrust of Gelert's nose at his thigh. 'God knows, she certainly surprised me ... and continues to do so.'

'Is she pretty?'

A curious, casually spoken woman's question with tension lurking beneath the surface.

'Not as you are pretty, cariad, but striking in her way, I suppose, or she will be when she grows into her bones. She's a child Rhos, man-shy and half wild.'

Rhosyn knelt at the hearth and felt the heat glow on her face. She had thought about him at the time of his marriage, imagined him abed with his unwanted young Norman bride and wondered if the skill s of the bedchamber and sweet grass meadow had stood him in good stead then.

'I have not bedded her,' he said into the small silence of her thoughts. 'She has the frightened eyes of a lass half her age. She knows nothing of men except what her father was and her uncle is.'

Rhosyn turned her head in surprise.

'Even if she opened to me for the sake of duty, it would be little less than rape. She is as flat as a kipper before and behind and the crown of her head scarce reaches to my armpit.'

'Jesu, Guy!'

'Wishing you had not asked?' He gave a mocking smile, then shook his head. 'The match is not entirely a disaster. Judith has abilities beyond most young women of her station.'

Rhosyn lifted her brows. Guyon laughed, this time with genuine mirth. 'It is not given to every wench to be able to handle a dagger, or hone it to perfection on a whetstone. She has a wicked sense of humour, too. I would not put it past her to grease a slope for the joy of seeing someone slide down it - probably me. I do not believe I shall grow bored - if I live. Walter de Lacey would dearly love to dance on my grave and rule in my stead and Robert de Belleme merely bides his time. Fool that I am, it offends my sensibilities to murder the pair of them in stealth as they would do to me without a qualm of conscience.'

Rhosyn considered him. He had spoken lightly, but his eyes were hard and the fine mouth was set in a straight grim line. She realised how trivial her own complaints must seem when set against his various burdens. Crossing the space between them, she laid her hand on his shoulder and her cheek to his in a wordless embrace, her black hair spilling down over his rough jerkin and hood.

His own hand reached to grip hers, long-fingered and graceful. She wished suddenly that the child she carried should inherit those hands.

They sat like that while the silence of the night settled around them. Rain thudded against the hafod wall s, rhythmic and heavy. Guyon closed his eyes, meaning only to rest them for a moment and instead fell asleep.

Rhosyn gently, stealthily, disengaged her hand from his and stared at him. Vulnerable and slack-limbed, his jaw was fuzzed with dark stubble, his eye sockets smudged with weariness.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she remembered the time she had first seen him. She had been a bride of fifteen with her proud new husband indulgently buying her trinkets in Hereford. Guy had been nineteen then, awkward with his limbs, still filling them out but even then, coltish and immature as he was, his beauty had been striking. He had not noticed her then, nor yet in the times that she visited his father's keeps with her husband and her father. Not until four years ago when, widowed, she had personally bargained with him over the price of the wool clip.

His wide brown eyes, so melting and innocent, had almost been her downfall . She had believed that innocence until realising belatedly that she was being ruthlessly manoeuvred into a corner from which the only extrication was agreement to his price. Yr llewpart du, they called him - the black leopard - and, like a cat, there were claws beneath the soft pads and the tuned instincts of a hunter.

She had not let him catch her; not then, nor when she went to his bed, and especially not now.

She rubbed her sleeve over her damp eyes and gave a small , self-deprecatory smile as her practical merchant's mind surfaced from the maelstrom of emotion in which it had been bogged down. She took his cloak and spread it across a stool to dry and prepared a small costrell of mead, her movements brisk but silent. In an hour, she would wake him and he would go, and their meshed worlds would slide apart like two sword blades gliding off each other in a spangle of sparks.

She sat down again when all was done and took up her distaff, and listened with pleasure to the slow, even rhythm of his breathing while she wondered idly what had brought him over the border in so clandestine a fashion.

Twenty miles away and some hours later, wondering was also the preoccupation of another who waited, vacillating between terror and rage at Guyon's continued absence. Judith's emotions were raw. The very touch of a thought agitated them to agony.

It was almost dawn. A glimpse through the arrowslit repeated several times this last hour had revealed the sinking stars and a milky glimmer to the east. The words she hissed as she peered out on the imminent morning were hot with fury and filled with guilt lest she was cursing a dead man to hell for his tardiness. The thought of him staring sightless into the dawn, his body sword-cloven caused her to whirl from the arrowslit with a gasp.

Eric and the others had ridden in through the postern shortly before midnight. She would not have known of it had not Melyn yowled to be let out, thus disturbing her from a restless sleep. The arrowslit which looked out on