“Shut up!” Bevan insisted again.
Alys smiled at Bevan. “Bevan’s true sire is alive and well and in this very chamber. Judith Angwedd dined with him only last night.”
“Take care with your claims, littlest Foxe,” Edward warned sternly. “I will not have a peer maligned by gossip or hearsay.”
“As my presence must assure you, I am willing to stake my family name on what I know, my lord. Bevan Mallory’s true sire is Lord John Hart.”
Alys would have never dreamed that a man would be foolish enough to attack a woman before the very king, but Bevan charged at her in that moment, his face a swollen mask of hate and rage. His meaty fingers reached for her, and Alys screamed, several nobles shouted, the court agent called out—
And Layla lunged at Bevan, her hands circling in a blur, her teeth bared in a primal and very deadly scream. The monkey landed on his face, clawing, biting, and Bevan grabbed Layla, tried to push her off while he screamed and screamed.
“My face! My face!”
Alys rushed forward, feeling more than seeing Piers at her back. She beat Bevan’s hands away while Piers seized his arms, and then Alys was pulling at Layla, who clung to Bevan’s tunic. Alys at last succeeded in separating themonkey from the man with the sound of rending fabric, and the left side of Bevan’s chest was laid bare to the sunlight filtering through the high windows of the chamber.
Barely touching the inside of Bevan’s left nipple, and as big as a fist, a raspberry colored patch stained his skin. Two rounded humps at the top, a tapering point at the bottom.
The shape of a heart. And Alys thought in that moment that it was the only one the evil man would ever possess.
She gasped and held the trembling Layla to her breast as she stepped back and watched the guards separate Piers from Bevan. Alys looked down and saw that Judith Angwedd had collapsed to her knees on the floor, her face frozen in shock and fear. Her bulging eyes blinked repeatedly.
“You fucking pig,” Bevan shouted at Piers. “I had you bested. I had you!”
“You’ve never bested anyone in your life,” Piers spat as the guards shoved him away and stood as barriers between the two men. “You and your mother are naught but scavengers.”
One guard lay hand to the hilt of his sword, and nodded at Piers in warning. Piers lifted his chin in answer and came to Alys’s side, and when his forearm braced against her lower back, Alys wanted to melt into him and weep.
“Good girl, Layla,” Piers whispered, and scratched the monkey’s head. Alys could feel the solid rise and fall of Piers’s chest at her shoulder and for the first time since her mother had died, she felt she had come home.
After several moments, the guards had the scandalized crowd and Bevan under control, and Edward rose from his throne.
“John Hart!” the king called out. In moments, a tall, gray haired bear of a man, whose face Alys now recognizedwas an older, sagging replica of Bevan’s, reluctantly stepped forward at the urging of two guards. “Do you deny that this man is your son?”
John Hart’s eyes narrowed. But then perhaps thoughts of defiance left him. “I have never claimed him,” was all he would concede.
Edward ignored the strangled murmurs of the audience who were all but swooning with the excitement afoot at a simple morning court.
“Bare your chest, Lord Hart.”
The man hesitated for a long moment. “May my dead wife forgive me.” He began to slowly unlace his tunic, only far enough so that he could pull down at the neckline, revealing a faded burgundy patch, like bloody angel’s wings, beneath sparse gray chest hair.
The crowd was oddly silent, as if they were witnessing an execution. Perhaps it was only now that they realized the gravity of the situation beyond the mere sensation of gossip.
Lord Hart returned his tunic and then suddenly looked to Piers. “I am sorry for your plight, Lord Mallory. I knew naught of you before this day, and I have had no hand in any of the wrongs done to you. I vow now before the king, it was never my intention to acknowledge this viper’s offspring as my heir. She was trying to woo me with Gillwick as late as last evening, when she accosted me in the dining hall, but rather would I take my own life than give either of them my home or my name. Your father was a man who lived his convictions. I regret that I have never.”
Alys knew her mouth was hanging agape when Lord Hart turned to the king, assumedly to receive Edward’s next command. She noticed with a pang of sympathy that the man had refused to meet her eyes.
“Is that all you have to witness, Hart?” the king asked.
John Hart nodded once, his mouth set, his cheeks flushed and quivering. Alys could not help but think the man might not survive the humiliation he’d been dealt, and she was amazed at the idea that only weeks ago, this lord had been a guest at Fallstowe, with intentions of taking Alys for his own wife.
“Your wishes as to your estate have been duly recorded. You are dismissed,” Edward said mercifully.
John Hart bowed low and then turned on his heel and strode quickly down the aisle, his head up, despite the onlookers who followed his exit, gaping openly at him.
The king remained standing, and once the chamber was properly silent, he spoke. “I have arrived at my verdict. Lady Judith Angwedd Mallory, for your perjury, kidnapping and imprisoning of a peer, and false witness in order to hold lands, I hereby strip you of your title as Lady of Gillwick, and sentence you to one year in prison.”
Judith Angwedd cried out faintly as the guards approached her.
