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confusing us.”
    “Probably so.”
    The walls carried the echo of their laughter. Stephen resumed his round-shouldered study of the chessboard. Drake stretched onto his side, clamping callused fingers into tangled hair. “Oh, to straddle our legs on either side of a greased saddle and ride the sun-kissed palfrey from moonrise to sunrise.” Drake reached over and used his last-standing white knight to take black’s castle.
    Tipping his black king over, Stephen groaned defeat. He flipped onto his back. Drake followed suit with tankard balanced on belly. Together they stared up at the ceiling. This had been their third game. Drake had won two. They were both sloshed to the gills.
    “Do you think this is the bed where Nelda and William … well … where they …?”
    “None other.” Drake shivered at the thought.
    “As for me,” Stephen said, “I admire the rounded hillocks, the color of a glorious sunset in late summer, along with the gentle ravine that separates the two.”
    “You’re a bosom man.”
    “I am.”
    Drake drank and passed the tankard to Stephen. “’Tis the lower grasslands and the central massifs, which slide gracefully into extended rills, that I crave.”
    “You’re a leg man.”
    Stretching onto their sides and mirroring each other down to the crooked right and left legs, they cleared the board and set it up for another game.
    “When we go on crusade …” Stephen hesitated. “Neither of us has been tested on a real battlefield.”
    Immediately after his coronation, Richard planned to raise money, fleet, and men for a long sojourn to the Holy Land where Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and leader of the Saracens, had overrun Jerusalem nearly two years ago. Upon receiving news of the invasion more than a hundred days after the event, Richard took the cross in Tours, as did Drake and Stephen.
    “I, for one, can hardly wait.”
    “Whereas I,” said Stephen, understanding the true nature of war, “can.”
    Drake studied his brother’s profile. “Aye, but consider the alternative. You would make a poor monk.”
    Stephen looked up and said without regret, “Not uncommon for a second son, even a second son by three breaths, to dedicate his life to the Church.”
    Drake said nothing, mostly because he believed in neither Heaven nor Hell, mortifying his brother to no end.
    “William could find a position for me as canon,” Stephen went on. “In ten years, maybe as little as five, you would have to call me Bishop fitzAlan.”
    “Not likely.” Drake lined up his chessmen. “Pious, you may be, but in addition to praying before God’s altar, you also pray before Aphrodite’s.”
    “My first religion.”
    “Then I see you as neither canon nor monk.” Drake grunted his irritation. “Do you really believe William would let you stay behind in England?”
    Organizing a crusade was no small undertaking, and in the intervening months, Richard had waged war on his father King Henry. Nearly a year and a half had gone by since Richard vowed to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims and return it to Christendom, and another year might easily pass before he embarked on the holiest of pilgrimages.
    Stephen shrugged. “We can make a wager.”
    “How much?”
    “Our first pay?” Stephen ventured.
    “Done. In two years’ time … less … your skin will burn under the hot Jerusalem sun.”
    “I’ll take that bet.”
    Drake opened with white queen’s pawn. “Making you the fool.”
    “Provided mine is on the same side of the wager.” Stephen countered Drake’s move.
    “Leaving no payoff for either?”
    “I suppose I can serve God just as well at Solomon’s Temple as Winchester Cathedral. A knight I am destined to be. To stand beside my king. To slaughter the infidel. And to defend God’s dominion.”
    Drake stared at his brother. Stephen was waiting for him to make his next move. When he didn’t, he glanced up.
    Unfolding a grin that did not erase the suspicion amassing in his