Still, a few loyal outposts held their castles, kept their garrisons manned. Kept their faith. They would die, of course. By sword or starvation, they would die or be subsumed.
The fitzEmpress captains went out before the main army like locusts upon a field. They ate their way through the countryside, and everything fell before them. The good and the bad, the chaff and the wheat, and no one kept count anymore.
And then, in August, the news went out: Prince Eustace, heir to the throne, was dead.
August 1153
The Nest, Northumbria, England
“It’s all gone, my lady. The entire harvest. Wheat and rye, both crops, withered.”
Gwyn looked up at her William, her balding, beloved seneschal, who sat opposite her at the table. He brushed all five strands back over the slope of his head and frowned at the parchment scroll he held aloft, the report just received from the eastern manors. He was simply repeating what he’d already said, thrice already.
Gwyn nodded wearily and looked out the window. No breeze came through the wide, fourth-story window, only hot, dry air and the small voice of a child playing some game.
“Sell the harps,” she said flatly.
“My lady! They were your mother’s!”
“Have Gilbert prepare the wagon. To Ipsile-upon-Tyne,” she said, referring to one of Everoot’s chartered towns. “Take it to Agardly the goldsmythe. His serjeantry includes providing travel for Everoot’s goods, and he knows every minstrel from the River Clyde to the Thames. They’ll fetch a middling price.”
She heard the parchment ruffle to the table. “Enough for wheat for the year,” William murmured, “if they both sell.”
She nodded. And that was it. There was nothing else to sell.
The child’s voice faded away, but Gwyn kept staring out the window, ashamed by the realisation that this worry was not the thing that assailed her heart the deepest. The deepest cut came from the knowledge that she had betrayed Pagan a year ago.
A bribe to the prison guards a week after her return to Everoot had resulted in half the money being returned in clipped coins and no news of him. “Dead,” said her messenger. “Surely dead.”
The news almost killed her. Which was as it should be, an eye for an eye, a life for a life.
Forget.
She gripped the edge of the table in front of her. God alone knew how she’d tried to banish the memories of that night almost a year ago when the world was dowered with magic and a pagan invaded her soul, but her dreams were wayward. They awakened her each morn, pulsing wet heat between her thighs and knifing pain through the centre of her heart.
Please God, give me some penance to do that will settle all these debts.
“Or let me die,” she whispered.
William looked over. “My lady?”
She shook her head. It was all death and destruction this hot, swirling summer. Henri fitzEmpress’s armies had invaded in the winter, as Marcus predicted, and ravaged the countryside, cutting a deliberately vicious swath through the south and west, collecting submissions as they went.
South, west, and east, the world she knew was falling to bloody pieces on the sword of an army that was slowly, inexorably, moving north. Towards Everoot.
And she could do nothing. Animals had to be fed, fish had to be caught, and crops had to be tended, even though most of the hardiest men had been sent to fortify the king’s armies.
It was left to the women and young to reap the harvest, to prepare and store it for the coming winter. Which was promising to be a long one. The dog days of July had come and bitten hard. They might kill as many as the wars. Dust rose up at the mere thought of a walk, and the wheat shivered dry husks onto the heads of those trying to bring the awful harvest in.
It could be worse, she reminded herself firmly. She could be going through all this while wed to Marcus fitzMiles. Or warded to him. She’d rather sell pasties at the fair than be bound to Marcus.
But the king’s chivalrous and long-standing promise to her father had held firm a year back, despite Marcus’s awful threats. Or perhaps because of them. Pride was a powerful goad even for her gallant king.
However it came, though, Everoot was still in Guinevere’s hands, unless and until it dripped between her fingers like melting ice. The summer drought was burning through the earldom’s already-meager resources. Even Mamma’s harps would be but a bucket of water against the inferno.
“And there’s word of the Welsh matter,” William said, his dour tone even more gloomy than usual. “Another steward has gone a’missing on the Welsh manor by Ipsile.”
The estates on the Welsh Marches were infamous for running off stewards. Or killing them off. And no one knew why. Gwyn dragged her head up through the heat. “Dead?” she asked wearily.