De Bec cleared his throat. ‘It is your right,’ he muttered gruffly into his chest.
‘Indeed so,’ Guyon answered, ‘but one I exercise at my peril. I hazard that if I harmed so much as one hair of her head, I’d not wake up at all the next morning.’
Their eyes locked and held for a moment before the older man dropped his gaze to the smooth muscle of his mount’s shoulder, knowing he had gone as far as he dared with a man he did not know. Guyon turned his head. Distantly the hounds gave tongue in a new key, a sustained tocsin, belling deep.
‘Boar’s up and running,’ Miles said, jerking his courser around.
Guyon swung his own horse.
De Bec spoke abruptly. ‘Keep your eyes open, my lord. You have as many enemies among your guests as you have allies and when I see men huddling in corners and glimpse the exchange of silver in the darkness, I know that no good will come of it.’
Guyon smiled thinly. By disclosing his suspicions when he could have held silent, de Bec had accepted his new master, even if the man had yet to realise the fact. ‘I was not blind myself last night, but I thank you for the warning. The sooner this mockery of a celebration is over, the better.’ He set his heels to his courser’s flanks and urged him in pursuit of the dogs. De Bec wrenched the dun around and followed.
Guyon bent low over his mount’s neck to avoid the tangled branches that whipped at him. Shallow snow flurried beneath the chestnut’s hooves. The frozen air burned Guyon’s lungs as he breathed. His eyes filled and he blinked hard to clear them, and braced himself as the horse leaped a fallen tree in their path. Ahead he could hear the loud halloos and whistlings urging the dogs on and the excited belling of the dogs themselves.
The hunters pressed further into the depths of the forest. Thorns snagged their cloaks. Hoofbeats thudded eerily in the echo chambers created by the vaulted span of huge beeches, the daylight showing luminous grey through the fretwork of empty black branches. They galloped across a clearing, the snow fetlock deep, splashed through a swift-flowing stream, picked their way delicately round a tumble of boulders and plunged back into the tangled darkness of the winter woods. A branch snapped off and snarled in Guyon’s bridle. He plucked it loose, eased the chestnut for an instant, then guided him hard right down a narrow avenue of trunks pied silver and black, following the frenzied yelping of the dogs and the excited shouts of men.
The boar at bay was a sow, a matron of prime years, weighing almost two hundredweight. She had met and tussled with man before. A Welsh poacher had lost his life to her tushes when he came hunting piglets for his pot. The huntsmen had found his bleaching bones last spring when they came to mark the game. The sow bore her own scar from the encounter in a thick ridge of hide along her left flank where the boar spear had scored sideways and turned along the bone.
She stood her ground now, backed against an overgrown jut of rock, raking clods of beech mast from the forest floor. Her huge head tossed left and right, the vicious tushes threatening to disembowel any dog or human foolish enough to come within their reach.
Guyon drew rein and dismounted. The senior huntsman tossed him a boar spear which he caught in mid-air. It was a stout weapon, broad of blade, with a crossbar set beneath to prevent the boar from running up the shaft and tearing the hunter to pieces. A dog ran in to snap at the sow’s powerful black shoulder, was not swift enough to disengage and was flung howling across the path of the other dogs, a red slash opening in its side. Cadi barked and darted. She was a gazehound, bred tocourse hare, not boar, but her narrow-loined lightness made her too swift to be caught.
The men began cautiously to close upon the sow, their spears braced, knives loose in their belts, every muscle taut to leap, for until the moment she charged no man knew if he was her intended victim. It was exhilarating, the tension unbearable. She raked the leaves with her trotters, rolled her small black eyes and tushed the ground, smearing her bloody incisors with soil.
‘Come on girl, get on with it,’ muttered Hugh of Chester licking his lips. Another man whistled loudly, trying to attract her attention and waved his spear over his head. Ralph de Serigny wiped his mouth, a pulse beating hard in his neck. Walter de Lacey remained immobile, his only movement a darting glance of challenge at Guyon. Guyon returned the look with glittering eyes and crouched, the spear braced.
The sow paused, quivering; the massive head went down; the damp leaves churned. A squealing snort erupted through her nostrils and she made a sudden powerful lunge from her hams, straight at Guyon. Driven by her charging weight, the levelled spear reamed her chest. Guyon braced the butt against the forest soil, the muscles locking in his forearms and shoulders as he strove to hold her. The barbed tip lodged in bone and the shaft shuddered. Guyon heard the wood creak, felt it begin to give as the sow pressed forward, and knew that there was nothing he could do. The spear snapped. Razored tushes slashed open his chausses and drew a bloody line down his thigh. The sow, red foam frothing her jaws and screaming mad with pain, plunged and spun to gore him, the broken stump of the spear protruding from her breast. Guyon rammed the other half of the boar spear down her throat. A fierce pain burned his arm. Miles’s hunting knife found the sow’s jugular at the same time that de Bec’s spear found her heart.
Silence fell, broken only by the eager yelping of the dogs and the whimpers of the injured one. Blood soaked the trampled soil and snow. The chief huntsman whipped the hounds from the dead pig, his face grey. He darted a look once at de Lacey and Pembroke behind, and then away. They ignored him.
‘Are you all right?’ Anxiously Hugh of Chester laid hold of Guyon’s ripped sleeve to examine the pulsing gash.
Guyon nodded and smiled for the benefit of those who would have been only too pleased to see him seriously injured or killed and wadded his cloak against the wound to stanch the blood.
De Bec crouched beside the broken spear shaft and examined it. Then he rose and stalked to the senior huntsman and thrust the stump beneath his nose. The man shook his head, his complexion pasty. De Bec began to shout. Arnulf of Pembroke moved between the two men. Guyon shouldered him aside.
‘Let it go,’ he commanded. ‘There was a weakness in the wood. It could have happened to any one of us.’
‘A weakness in the w—?’ de Bec began indignantly, but caught the look in Guyon’s eye and realised that the young lord was totally aware of the situation. ‘Faugh!’ de Bec spat, threw down the shaft and stalked to his horse, muttering under his breath.
‘My lord, I did not know, I swear I did not!’ stuttered the huntsman, his throat jerking as if a noose was already tightening there.
‘Oh stop gibbering, man, and see to the pig!’ Guyon snapped and turned away. There was time enough later to grill him for details, and the wilds of these border woods was no place to hold an impromptu court with tempers running high and blood lust rife.
Miles picked up the shaft, saw how it had broken, and narrowed his eyes.
Guyon whistled Cadi to heel, stepped over a rivulet of pig blood and went to mount up.
Judith sat in the solar, distaff in hand, longing to set about her companions with it. They had offered her all manner of advice, both well meaning and malicious and had asked her some very intimate questions that made her realise how innocent she really was. All she could do was blush, her embarrassment scarcely feigned. The women’s curiosity was bottomless and avid and at least one of them with connections at court knew things about the groom that were better left unsaid. It did not prevent her from relating the information with grisly relish. Alicia parried frostily. Judith retreated behind downcast lids and wished the gaggle of them out of the keep.
Steps scuffed the stairs outside the chamber and the curtain was thrust aside. The women rose, flustered and twittering at the sight of the bridegroom whose reputation they had just been so salaciously maligning. Guyon regarded them without favour. ‘Ladies,’ he acknowledged, and looked beyond them to Judith. She hastened to his side. There were thorns and burrs in his cloak and a narrow graze down one cheek. There was also, she noticed, a tear in his chausses.
‘My lord?’
He reached his right hand to take hers, an odd move since his left was the nearer. ‘I need you to look at a scratch for me.’
‘Your leg?’ Her eyes dropped to his chausses.
