Still furious enough to kill, she strode away. “I will walk back to the castle. If you insist on staying with me, keep well away. I do not want to know you are there. I do not even want to hear your horse’s hooves on the ground.”

CHAPTER 14

All is arranged. Sixty men will ride with us. I called the feudal summons from some of the farms, so the defenses here will not be depleted.”

Paul sank onto a bench as he gave his report. He had not washed or changed, and his garments and curly black hair showed the sweat and dust of an afternoon of hard riding. The recent visits to the farms had not caused his condition, but rather the earlier hours in the saddle beside Marcus’s.

Marcus understood why his friend’s eyes appeared dull, and his manner tired and subdued. Making the summons, even part of it, meant that they were going on war footing. The order had been a tacit acknowledgment on Marcus’s part that Carwyn and his bandits would not be easily suppressed.

He had taken the step after seeing the results of their raiding on the western edge of his estate, and after receiving a messenger from a midland lord saying they had grown bolder in the southern valleys as well.

Marcus gestured for the attending servant to give Paul some ale. Paul downed the whole cup and wiped his beard on his sleeve. “Been a while. Since an army was formed here, that is.”

A long while, Marcus thought. Not since his father had gathered one in anticipation of Mortimer’s siege. The young men receiving the call to service during the next few days would remember coming as boys to claim the bodies of their menfolk from that bloody yard. The images of that massacre would be in everyone’s head.

The last summons had resulted in disaster. Marcus decided it was a good thing that he was not superstitious.

“Do you think word of the betrothal will change things?” Paul asked. “I can’t see them disbanding because of it, myself, no matter what Stratford thought. He doesn’t know the Welsh, does he?”

Not as well as Paul did. Although Paul could trace his lineage back to a Norman archer who had come with the Conqueror, most of the men in his family had married Welsh women. Paul probably had as much Welsh blood in him as Nesta.

“His plan sounds good. Sounds right,” Paul continued. “But it leaves out too much that he doesn’t comprehend, seems to me.”

It certainly did. First and foremost, it left out the tenacity and intelligence of Nesta verch Llygad. “I do not think they will disband.”

“Ah, well, maybe it will at least delay things a bit. Confuse them. It feels as if winter will come early, so—”