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
