The Conqueror

Her blood pounded as she stared at the clear blue sky. Wispy white sweeps of cloud dimmed the blinding blue brightness of the autumn sky. Cold dirt clumped under her fingernails. The inside of her nostrils burned hot and freezing cold with each breath.

She couldn’t turn dirt another moment. She was too restless. She needed to walk the walls.

She scrambled to her feet, tugged on her skirts, and started for the battlements. She was moving at a rapid clip, head down, when she slammed into something hard.

“Uugghh!” exclaimed a voice. Alex staggered back a few steps, gripping his stomach and grimacing.

“Sir Alex,” she gasped, and hurried forward. “Are you all right?”

He backed up a few more steps, holding out his hand, warding her off. “Fine, my lady.”

She drew back and straightened her skirts, swirling them about her ankles. “What a nice evening.” She said the polite nothing with her eyes averted. She did not want to see Alex, not with her suspicions about his suspicions floating through her mind.

“’Tis,” he replied tonelessly.

“Yes, ’tis.” She bent her head and started forward again.

“Been on any rides lately?”

She turned around slowly. “No.”

“Ah. I just wondered if your horse had come up lame.”

“No,” she said more slowly than she had turned. “Why?”

Alex shrugged. “No, I didn’t think so. I saw him gone from the stables, that is all.”

Faint dread spread in a cold flood through her stomach. “I like to ride, sir. Has my lord some problem with that?”

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. “Nay.”

“Then I cannot see where it should concern you.” She lifted her head in an icy pose and started walking away.

“If you hurt him, you will be sorry, Guinevere.”

She stopped but did not turn. He didn’t say anything more, and she started walking again, fighting not to clutch her chest, to hide her hammering heart.

“I have heard riding clears the head,” he said to her back. “Especially when it aches.”

It took all her reserves not to pick up her skirts and run.

Griffyn set his men loose on the Nest and its environs like worker bees of restoration and repair. A few began preparatory work on the crumbling stone of the castle’s defensive walls, but most were sent to the fields.

October was for ploughing, the last of the year. Fighting men tended to fight, unless otherwise occupied. Practice with lance, falchion, and sword was a frequent device Griffyn used to stave off boredom and keep their fighting skills honed to a razor’s edge, but ploughing was even better. It was more demanding, and more importantly, it was a joint effort. A common purpose tended to blur the divisions that led to bloodshed. His men were going to live here. They were going to build families together. Best to start now.

As he was trying to do.

He was aware of Gwyn wherever she went, in the kitchen gardens with Cook, talking with Raashid and William of the Five Strands—she’d insisted he stay on—about marling the fields of a distant manor, greeting a messenger or, most often, walking and talking with one of the multitude of women who inhabited the Nest.

Where did they

all come from? he wondered as he helped haul stone on the walls the next afternoon.

“A bevy of breasts and giggles,” Fulk gruffed when Griffyn brought it up. But Griffyn had seen him stop sweat-inducing labour to help one of those bright lights traverse a set of stairs, so he was not a reliable gruff.

Then again, it did appear Gwyn had adopted every orphaned or dispossessed waif from the River Clyde to the Ouse. They were everywhere, their bright gowns and winsome smiles making his men drop hammers and scatter handfuls of nails. And always, there was Guinevere, her voice carrying over the bailey, indistinct in words but bright in tone, her red or yellow or emerald green skirts floating over the cobbles as she hurried here and there.

He threw another wet shovelful of mortar onto a stone, aggravated with himself. Everything he’d been fighting for his whole life was here in front of him. But instead of reveling in it, he spent hours each day searching through dark, cobwebbed rooms.