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distracting as her scent.
    She flounced past him, stopping long enough to scratch a scruffy hound behind the ears and murmur an encouragement that set the beast’s entire body wagging, then laid him out, legs up, on his back.
    “Good lad, Rollo.” And then the woman took off across the bailey, trailing the enchanted hound in her wake. “The keep is this way, my lord.”
    Feeling too much like the hound himself, Alex caught up with his ward in two strides, only to become a part of her growing entourage.
    “What shall I do with the feast, my lady? There’s food everywhere in the kitchen.”
    Feast? What bloody feast?
    The woman stopped and studied Alex for the briefest moment before she turned slightly from him and whispered something to the anxious young man, never shifting her eyes from his own, as though he would allow the woman her secrets.
    “Oh, aye! Consider it done, my lady. Thank you!” Then the young man sped away, his apron strings flying.
    She started off again, but Alex caught her arm. “Feast, madam?”
    Her eyes tracked his, stars of mutinous brightness in the moonlight. “Venison, a turnip custard, a lumbarde, sorrel soup…”
    “I didn’t ask the menu. What sort of feast? Why?”
    She sighed as though he could never understand. “Your arrival interrupted what was sure to become another of Rufus’s drunken brawls, my lord.”
    More than a drunken brawl, to be sure. “So what did you just tell the boy?”
    “That he could distribute the food to anyone who was hungry. A common malady here at Carrisford, my lord.” She stood with her shapely hip against her palm, daring him to reverse her order, so obviously certain that he would do just that.
    So utterly incorrect. Better to keep her off-balance. “Now to the keep, madam.”
    She drew up her mouth into a confused frown,then nodded and ducked through an archway into a small inner ward that was moonlit and smith-iron blue, bordered by the three-storied stone keep itself, and flanked by timber-picketed walks along the wall towers.
    The woman was stopped by three more of her frantic people, efficiently answered their questions, then led Alex past a well house and a neat, rain-glinted garden before starting up a short, wooden-roofed staircase that ended abruptly at a thick, closed door.
    “Jasper!” The lady rattled the latch. “’Tis me, Lady Talia!”
    The door opened a crack to still another elderly, wiry bearded man, this one wearing an ancient helmet. The remains of her army, perhaps?
    “Thank the good Lord, my lady!” The old soldier threw open the door and pulled the woman inside, only to give her what must have been a bone-cracking embrace. “Leod said you were safe, but there’s nothing like seein’ for m’self! Were many killed this time?”
    This time. Such a telling phrase.
    “None, Jasper,” she said, throwing Alex a disdainful, disbelieving glare as he followed her inside the guardroom. “At least none according to His Lordship, here.” She tsked. “My new guardian.”
    Jasper glowered at Alex, tucking his frown upinto his moustache and brushing a light powdering of grey off his sleeves and his thin shoulders. “The devil, you say?”
    “He might well turn out to be the devil, Jasper,” the woman said, taking off the old man’s helmet and handing it to him. “But just now he’d like to see his chamber.”
    Jasper snorted. “His what?”
    “Yes, Jasper. His Lordship will be staying here, in the keep.”
    A very pointed statement, rife with secret meanings.
    “But the children , my lady! Rufus never even…I mean, all the others—”
    “Yes, I know, Jasper. But the solar will have to do for tonight. We’ll make His Lordship comfortable, won’t we? If you’ll follow me, my lord.”
    She flashed Alex a completely false smile as she grabbed an oil lamp off the neat worktable and started up the circle of stairs, muttering under her breath—doubtless cursing him and all his kin.
    She’d already opened the door by