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“Will you give her one or two of yours, then?”
    Hugh smiled. “I may allow her to borrow them from time to time.”
    He returned to his contemplation of the morning. The air was crisp. The farms and fields of Lingwood Manor lay quiet and still beneath a leaden sky. It was early fall. The harvest was partially complete and much of the land lay stripped and bare, awaiting the fast-approaching chill ofwinter. He wanted to get home to Scarcliffe as quickly as possible. There was so much to be done.
    Lady Alice was the key. Hugh could feel it in his bones. With her, he could find the damned green stone and unlock his future. He had come too far, waited too long, hungered too deeply, to stop now.
    He was thirty years old but on cold mornings such as this one he felt closer to forty. The storms inside him blew fiercely, filling him with a great restlessness, an inchoate need that he did not fully comprehend.
    He was always aware of the tempests that shrouded his soul but only in the deepest hours of the night or in the gray mists of dawn could he sometimes actually perceive the dark winds that drove him. He avoided such opportunities when he could. He did not care to peer too deeply into the heart of the storm.
    He concentrated now on the task that lay ahead of him. He had land of his own. All he had to do was hold on to it. That was proving difficult.
    During the past few weeks Hugh had begun to discover why the lands of Scarcliffe had passed through so many hands in recent years.
    It was a fact that in recent memory no man had successfully held Scarcliffe for more than a short span of time before losing it through death or misfortune. Some said Scarcliffe was haunted by ill omens, bad luck, and an old curse.
    He who would discover the Stones and hold fast these lands
    must guard the green crystal with a warrior’s hands
.
    Hugh did not believe in the power of ancient curses. He trusted in little else other than his own skills as a knight and the determined will that had brought him this far. But he had a healthy respect for the power such foolish nonsense often wielded over the minds of other people.
    Regardless of his own opinion of the irritating prophecy, he knew that the disheartened folk of Scarcliffe believedin the old legend. Their new lord must prove himself by guarding the green crystal.
    Since arriving to take possession of the manor less than a month earlier, Hugh had found the inhabitants who now called him lord surprisingly sullen. The good people of Scarcliffe obeyed him out of fear but they saw no hope for the future in him. Their gloominess showed in everything they did, from the lackluster way they milled flour to the halfhearted manner in which they worked the fields.
    Hugh was accustomed to command. He had been trained to it. He had been a natural leader of men for most of his adult life. He knew he could coerce a minimal level of cooperation from those he governed but he also knew that was not sufficient. He needed willing loyalty from his people in order to make Scarcliffe thrive for all their sakes.
    The real problem was that the inhabitants of the manor did not expect Hugh to last long in his position as lord. None of the other lords had survived more than a year or two.
    Within hours of his arrival, Hugh had heard muttered omens of impending disaster. Crops had been trampled by a band of renegade knights. A freakish lightning storm had done considerable damage to the church. A wandering monk who preached doom and destruction had appeared in the vicinity.
    To the people of Scarcliffe, the theft of the green crystal from the vault of the local convent had been an event of cataclysmic proportions. It had also been the last straw. Hugh knew that in their eyes it was proof positive that he was not their true lord.
    Hugh had realized immediately that the fastest way to gain the trust of his people was to recover the green stone. He intended to do just that.
    “Have a care, my lord,” Dunstan advised.