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And now here he was, prepared to strip Hugh’s castle and rape Edlyn until she died.

Roaring like a wounded bull, he lifted his sword. “Nay!”

Richard lifted his sword, too, and in a clear voice he called, “Nay, indeed. We’ve come to protect Lady Edlyn and all she claims as hers—and you, Lord Hugh, are hers.”

Hugh halted his charge before it began. Hope struggled into being. With Richard’s men on their side, there was a chance they could defeat Pembridge.

From the look on Pembridge’s face, he knew it.

“Will you fight?” Hugh called. “Or will you run?”

Pembridge swung savagely on Hugh. “I’ll fight, and if I die, I’ll see you in hell beside me.”

22

“He almost did it, master.”

Hugh looked up from his mat by the fire in the solar. Wharton stood above him, still ashen and shaking. “Who almost did what?”

“Pembridge almost took you to hell with him.”

“He was a good fighter.” Hugh shrugged, testing the binding on his broken collarbone. “But he wasn’t fighting for what he loved.”

“And you were?” Edlyn’s soft voice sounded on the other side of the mat, and Hugh turned his head to gaze on his wife.

She had the soft, gentle bearing of an angel who brought surcease to the suffering and health to the ill—a bearing at odds with the woman he knew her to be. “That ill-begotten knave was right about one thing,” he muttered. “You are a resourceful woman.”

No one had to tell him that it had been Edlyn who had thought to shoot stems and leaves of blister vine into the fires to drive the archers away. Her strategem had totally disrupted the battle, and with the addition of Richard’s men on Hugh’s side, Pembridge’s forces had been defeated.

It had taken an hour before the fires had burned away the blister vine’s dreaded miasma and the winds had cleared the air enough for Hugh to reenter his own castle. He had used the time to thank Almund and Dewey and Wharton, and all of his men and even Richard’s thieves. But the delay had seriously dampened his victory celebration, especially when, on hearing of the success of Edlyn’s herbal warfare, Richard had laughed so hard he collapsed unconscious on the ground.

Further investigation had proved the man was suffering from broken ribs administered by a well-swung mace, but his chortle still rang in Hugh’s ears.

Hugh’s grimace didn’t go unnoticed. “Why won’t you let me move you into our bed?” Edlyn asked, not for the first time. “It’s huge. There’s more than enough room for you and Richard, and it would be so much more convenient for me to care for you both.”

“I am not sleeping with that man,” Hugh declared.

“Amen.” Richard’s voice, while determined, was weak. He lay propped up on the pillows, almost as white as the linen under his head, but not even pain could undermine his insolence. “I can sleep on a mat instead. There’s no need for me to deprive the master of the castle of his bed.”

That sarcasm made Hugh want to smack his former enemy and new ally.

But he didn’t have to. Edlyn flattened Richard’s pretensions of health. “Nay, you can’t,” she said. “I don’t like the look of that chest wound, and you’re not moving until I say so.”

Only Richard wouldn’t stay flattened. He merely sounded amused. “She is a tyrant, isn’t she, Hugh? When I marry, I’ll wed an obedient woman.”

Hugh remembered similar fantasies of his own. “In my experience, you get what God gives you.”

If a voice could be described as strutting, Richard’s could be now. “My bliss will be the envy of all my new neighbors.”

Hugh grunted. “You assume a lot on the basis of one battle.”

But Richard assumed correctly, damn his eyes. Hugh would ask Prince Edward to give Richard his castle. Then Richard would have to gain the acceptance he sought among the nobility, and it would be no easy thing to get from barons and earls who had been held at sword point and stripped of their possessions by that grinning shallow-pate in the bed.

More uncomfortable than knowing he would do his best for Richard was having Edlyn know it, too. She thought Richard was a good man given to kind deeds, and Hugh couldn’t bring himself to disillusion her—even when he thought she was manipulating him. Now she smiled at him in a manner that reminded him most restively of the empty days since their last mating and mocked the empty nights until they were alone once more. Sinking down on her knees beside him, she arranged the pillows under his head.

He was baffled by her charm and couldn’t help smiling back. “So, wife, how did you like your first taste of battle?”

“It was as ugly and as dreadful as I imagined.” Still she smiled, her expression belying her words. “And if I’d had a weapon, I’d have fought those mercenaries with my own hands.”