Guy was long accustomed to knighted men sneering down upon Guardsmen, thinking their extravagant employ made them nobler than those who sacrificed to keep the daily peace. Wendenal was no knight, but he had that familiar haughtiness. Guy had mistaken it for a more innocent disdain.

Simon pulled wet streaks of his own moustache out of his mouth. “I’m not as smart as you, so don’t be stingy. Just tell me. How can they get rid of you?”

Behind him, the main castle gate swung open, letting in a cluster of horses and men and banners, and trouble. And answers.

“By taking away my support,” Guy realized. “By turning you against me, turning my men against me. De Lacy’s lie is the proof, and it’s just the beginning.” He watched the arriving men parade into view. “There’s something bigger to come.”

Strangers marching into the castle was no curiosity anymore. Every corner of the lower bailey had been claimed for another contingent of men sent to help at the funeral, as if the Nottingham Guard were a limbless, blind baby. Guy would have been insulted if he’d cared about such prideful things. He’d already lost command of the prisons to the Derbyshire men, thanks to Wendenal.

But this new group’s arrival had a more arrogant flair than most, each man drenched in importance and entitlement. Ten of them in total, six men in obsessively shined armor, three servants, and in their middle was the man unquestionably in charge. An insultingly virile man who caped himself in a bear fur, poised perfectly upon his blood black destrier, scrutinizing the bailey not as a visitor but as a man summing up an acquisition. His emblem was that of the bear and the ragged staff—men from Warwickshire.

Ordinarily, Guy should have been alerted of any important visitors. Instead he watched from afar the appearance of Hamon Glover—the ale barrel that someone had accidentally assigned as castellan—who clearly expected this Warwick host. Guy watched Glover greet them quickly and then escort them toward the bridge to the middle bailey.

It was only an hour before Guy’s men reported the details back to him. The man in the bear cloak was the Earl of Warwick’s son, Waleran the Younger, Captain of the Warwick Guard. And every snippet of whisper breathed the same warning. “He was summoned by his father,” a reliable stableman confided, “and expects to stay. Seems he expects to be put in charge, actually.”

The man being set up to replace Guy as captain.

That was yesterday.

Today, Guy was summoned to the Sheriff’s council a full hour after it had begun.

“I see you’ve decided to join us,” Wendenal announced, to quiet the others. Waleran the Younger was there, in all his youthful ferocity, amongst a motley crew of other important faces.