“Because—unlike you—Piers only wants what is due him. No more, no less.” Alys prayed her next ploy would work. Her life—and Piers’s—depended on it. “Were I you, I would not be at all certain that the king will grant Bevan anything. Because Piers knows who Bevan’s true sire is—as do I.”
Judith Angwedd rolled her eyes. “Impossible.”
“Is it? Piers’s own grandfather seems quite certain of it.”
“Now you are inventing relatives for the bastard scum?” Judith Angwedd smirked.
“How quickly you seem to have forgotten about the man who was your wedding gift to Warin Mallory,” Alys said, her disgust at the woman’s self-absorption clear in her tone. “He is very much still alive, you know. Ira himself told us of the birthmark. I can hardly think it a coincidence, and I believe the king will share the opinion.”
This time it was Bevan who charged at her, and Alys was spared her life in the last moment by Judith Angwedd’s screech.
“Bevan, no!” She threw herself onto her son, causing him to stumble from his intended course. “If what shesays is true, we must be very deliberate and very clever with our next move.”
“He couldn’t know!” Bevan choked. “He’s never laid eyes upon John Hart!”
The room went grave quiet. Alys let her breath shudder out of her soundlessly.
Lord John Hart.The gray-haired old widower had been at Fallstowe’s winter feast. He had offered for Alys, the same night that she had been betrothed to Clement Cobb.
Judith Angwedd slapped her son’s face, and Bevan brought a hand to his wide cheek.
“Mother,” he whined pitifully.
“You don’t deserve even half of everything I have done for you,” Judith Angwedd spat. “You ungrateful, drunken idiot!”
Alys tried to keep her face composed when Judith Angwedd swung around to her, her flat chest rising and falling with great effort. She stared at Alys, stared with her hard, beady eyes so that Alys wanted to flinch and look away. But she would not.
“Bind her completely and lock her in the wardrobe. Put the beast’s crate in there with her.”
Bevan yanked Alys from the stool, tossed her to the floor, and straddled her. He began lashing her legs together from ankle to thigh, as Judith Angwedd stepped nearby to look down upon her.
“If you are such a fool as to think yourself in love with him,” she said coldly, “then you should know that it will be you who costs him his life.” She leaned down abruptly, her arm stretched out, and Alys closed her eyes against the blow she felt certain would come.
But there was only a sharp jerk near the bonds at her wrists, and so she opened her eyes once more to see Judith Angwedd turning away.
Bevan had secured her arms at the elbows, so tightly that Alys could feel her chest muscles on the verge of tearing. Then he forced her mouth open and replaced the gag deep between her teeth before picking her up by her restraints as though she was a sheaf of grain. He dropped her into the bottom of the deep wardrobe, her skull banging against the thick lip of wood. She heard Layla’s muffled scream, and then a moment later, the woven basket containing the monkey was tossed atop Alys’s head. The doors swung shut solidly, leaving her in complete blackness, and Alys heard the scraping of the lock.
It sounded like a blade being honed.
The forest rang with the sound of the soldier beating his sword against his shield, and Sybilla felt made of stone so still was she astride Octavian.
“Rebels, come out!” the soldier commanded in a voice that carried with it the hard experience of many battlefields.
Sybilla looked up at the undersides of the well-camouflaged dwellings hung in the trees. Not a whisper was heard from any of them, although around her on the forest floor, fires still blazed, pots bubbled, chickens scratched the ground where snow had been scraped away.
They would not deny her.
Sybilla took a deep breath. “It is Sybilla Foxe who commands you, Lady of Fallstowe Castle, and sister to Lady Alys. You are surrounded by armed soldiers. You will bring the girl to me—the runted child with the yellow hair. You will bring her to me now,or I will burn this village to the ground!”
The only reply she received was the wind in the branches,and then the sudden, muffled sound of perhaps a woman’s fearful sob.
Sybilla waited for a count of ten. Then she called out to the soldiers, “Fire the trees.”
Her men surged forward without hesitation, torches ready. They quickstepped through the village, going to the ground level huts and the bases of trees, kicking through and scattering piles of dried hay and thatching, touching their contagious flames to anything consumable. The smoke was instant, thick and black.
“Call your dogs off, you heartless bitch!” an old man shouted hoarsely, his bent and pointed backside the first thing appearing from the underside of one of the tree huts. A rope ladder unfurled beneath him and he began to climb down, glancing hatefully at Sybilla.“I said call them off!”
“You do not command me, old man,” Sybilla replied calmly as her soldiers never paused. “Where is the girl?”
