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Richard refrained from cackling, and Edlyn gave him full credit for that. “If you would accept my hospitality further,” he said, “my men and I would be pleased to have you stay.”

Edlyn wanted to see how Hugh would react. Would he accept as graciously as Richard had offered? More horsemen crossed the drawbridge at that moment, though, and she heard the call, “Mama, Mama.”

Picking up her skirts, she ran toward the two boys perched behind two of Richard’s men, and Hugh and Richard watched her go.

“I steal what I want,” Richard said. “But if I stole her from you, I still wouldn’t have her.”

Richard was going to talk! Hugh trembled with anticipation. His adversary was going to tell what had happened during the long hours Hugh had been incarcerated in the dungeon!

Hugh waited, breathless, and Richard scowled. “Oh, stop looking so avid. You know she cleaves to you only.” He rubbed the bump on his forehead as if remembering how he got it. “You’ll be safe here tonight, and so will she, although she’s expressed her opinion of the condition of the solar, so I doubt she’s going to want to sleep there.”

Hugh lifted his eyebrows.

“Juxon was a pig,” Richard said bluntly. “This demesne deserved better than a man who fed his belly and twanged his tool and let everything else go to the devil.”

Remembering the squalor of the great hall, Hugh asked, “You mean it was this bad before you got here?”

“It’s better than it was. We’ve done much work.” Richard took Hugh by the elbow and turned him to face the keep. “See that loose stone on the second-story wall? We filled it in. Juxon apparently wanted a window, so he knocked out part of the wall in the great hall.”

“Nay.” Hugh couldn’t believe the man had been so stupid.

“Aye.” Richard confirmed it. “’Twas good for us when we besieged. Once we made it through the gate—rotted wood and no problem at all—we tossed some ladders against the keep and took it through the window.”

Hugh staggered at the idiocy of it. Even a small castle such as this was worth holding. “He didn’t deserve this place.”

“None of them deserve anything.” Richard’s lips drew away from his teeth in a terrible parody of his usual grin. “The older sons, they toss away their inheritance while we younger sons starve.”

Hugh didn’t answer. He didn’t approve of Richard. How could he? Yet he comprehended Richard’s ire only too well.

Richard shook Hugh’s arm. “When this rebellion is over, I have no doubt the royals will have won. The king will be released, and he’ll send somebody—you, probably—to take this castle back from us. He’ll give it to Juxon, and the place’ll be a ruin in twenty years.”

It was true. Hugh knew it was true.

“My lord Roxford, you have the prince’s ear. Speak to him.” Richard shook Hugh again. “Speak to him! There are worse tenants than I and my men, and we would swear loyalty to the king and never waver.”

“The prince would never give a demesne to a gang of outlaws,” Hugh said. “He wouldn’t trust you to do his will.”

“You trust me.” Richard grinned with true mirth this time. “You trust me to let you and your men and your riches go in the morning.”

Hugh looked again at the hole in the keep to avoid admitting anything to Richard.

“Talk to the prince,” Richard said. “That’s all I ask.”

Wynkyn slept soundly on the floor beside the fire in Castle Juxon’s great hall, despite the little moans of discomfort he gave in his sleep. Edlyn tucked a rug closer around his neck and stared into his face, so smooth even in the shadows of the night. Allyn and Parkin slept one on either side of him. He was their new hero, and they couldn’t stand to be separated from him.

He was her new hero, too; he had protected and cared for her sons, and he would always have a place at her side.

Around the fire in concentric circles lay snoring, twitching bodies. Closest to the heat were all the men who had been wounded or who were ill. Beyond that were the healthy, the young, and the vigorous. For some reason, there seemed to be few of those among Richard’s men. When earlier in the evening she had told the sick to line up and she would treat them, a constantly increasing number of men had complained of head pain or chest pain or joint pain—all inexplicable, of course.

She should have thought of them as knaves and rogues, evil men who preyed on helpless travelers and relieved them of their worldly goods. Instead, they reminded her of her sons. Those pathetic eyes, those well-guarded whimpers, those tales of discomfort they would tell only her. And no matter what she gave them—an herb, a warm drink of wine, or just a cool hand on their forehead, they proclaimed themselves cured and thanked her with gifts.

They presented bolts of cloth, rings, and a lady’s saddle. All stolen from those unlucky travelers, but precious nonetheless, and all given with sincerely stammered gratitude. She accepted everything with thanks and a smile. The plight of these men she understood too well. They had no women who cared for them. They’d cut themselves off from their mothers and sisters by their plundering ways. They had no place in society, so they made one for themselves, and this place, she feared, would be the eventual home of her landless sons—if they were allowed to train as knights.

Hugh and Richard, united in their disgust of such unmanly behavior, had held court on the far end of the great hall, and Edlyn would have given much to know what topic so animated their conversation. Politics probably. She snorted. To men, such matters took precedence over the welfare of their knights.

Over their own welfare, too, for Hugh still bore the marks of battle on his face and he never sought her services.

But now everyone was abed: Hugh in the solar, Richard in a corner of the great hall. She should be in bed, too. She should go into the solar, with its broken door and its musty bed, and climb in beside her husband and sleep. Only she was too tired to swive, and Hugh was too new a husband not to want to.