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pricklouse!” Hugh roared.
    The bowman giggled drunkenly. “My lord earl. Do we burn down the hall, or no?”
    Hugh looked as if he were about to choke on his fury. “Christ, man, use your head. Where will I sleep tonight if you fire the hall?”
    Laughing openly now, Raine turned and bellowed for his squire. “Taliesin!”
    A youth of about seventeen with russet-colored hair ran up, leading Raine’s sweating destrier. “Sound the trysting horn,” Raine told him. “We’re joining the king.” He fixed Hugh with a hard look. “But tell Sir Odo he’s to stay behind with a contingent of men. To help Earl Hugh secure the castle.”
And look after my interests
were the added words, unspoken yet understood by all.
    The squire glanced from one brother to the other. He had skin as fair as a girl’s and his smile was beautiful. “ ’Tis done, my liege,” he said, somehow making the mundane words sound as melodic as a song. But he did not scurry to obey Raine’s command. “Sire? What happened to the girl?”
    Raine was thinking about whether to send a messenger to tell Henry he was on his way. His attention focused on Taliesin’s face. The boy wore an odd look, a sort of worried smile. “What girl?”
    “The one that, uh … attacked you.”
    First Sir Odo, then Hugh, and now the boy….
Women,
Raine thought with a shake of his head. They could wreak more havoc than a Saracen ambush. He struggled to keep a smile off his face. “You stay away from her, Taliesin. You’re too young for that sort of trouble.”
    Taliesin’s brow furrowed. “But, sire, it’s not I—”
    But Raine had turned abruptly away as the sound of an agonized wail suddenly penetrated his consciousness. It had been going on for quite some time now, but he’d paid it no heed. He’d heard it so often in his life—the scream of a wounded man who knew that he was dying. Yet now Raine was suddenly possessed with a terrifying certainty that someday very soon, if he didn’t stop the fighting and the killing, that screaming man would be him.
    He gritted his teeth around an oath. Hugh was right, he was turning squeamish as a maid. “Tell Sir Odo to find the bloody priest and castle leech,” he said to his squire. “And either get that man healed, or get him shriven and buried.”
    “Aye. But, sire, about the girl—”
    “Taliesin,” Raine said in a calm, flat voice. “I gave you an order.”
    No one dared to disobey the Black Dragon when he used that tone. The squire dashed off, calling for Sir Odo. Hugh grasped the charger’s bridle, holding it steady forRaine to mount. Raine swung himself into the saddle and Hugh stepped back quickly as the spirited war-horse reared.
    Hugh laughed up at him. “Do try not to get yourself killed, big brother.”
    Now it was Raine’s turn to smile. “I won’t,
little
brother … and you can wager Rhuddlan on it.”
    Raine brought his horse under control and started for the gate. But as he crossed the drawbridge, he turned back for one last look at Rhuddlan. He had taken this castle. It was
his,
by God, a part of his past and all of his future. And it would remain his. No matter what he had to do to keep it.
    He felt an odd exhilaration. For the first time in a very long while, he had something to fight for.
    Arianna leaned against the rough wooden staves of a beer keg and rested her chin on her drawn-up knees. That big, ugly knight had disposed of her by locking her in the castle’s wine vault. It was part of the tower cellars, built deep underground within the motte. But the Norman had, with a kindness surely uncharacteristic for a man of his race, left with her the stub of a tallow candle.
    The small flame flickered forlornly, casting looming shadows on the stone walls. The room was stacked with barrels of wine and ale. The smell of yeast mixed with the tart tang of vinegar into a fumy aroma that made her head reel. She could hear the sounds of revelry from the great hall above. Drunken songs,