She leaned back, as if to look at him more closely. “Really?”

He got up. He was overcome with her—the palpable reality of her, her smell, her unwashed hair and the taste of her mouth and the clove she’d just chewed and what that said.

“State secret,” he whispered.

She licked her lips. “I know who your parents are,” she said.

He froze. She felt the tension in his muscles, and he took a step for the door, but it was as if he was in the aethereal. He meant to step to the door, but instead he was holding her. Her warmth went through his hands. Without a conscious thought, he pulled the veil off her hair and put a hand behind her head. Her kirtle opened at the side, and fit like a glove, but he managed to find the skin where her shoulder met her neck.

“Swear, damn you!” she said. She pushed him hard enough that he fell back across the chest. “Or leave,” she said.

“That hurt,” he said, and meant it. “I swear on my sword that any baby we make will be reared as my own.” He caught his breath. “I’m only promising so that you won’t hurt me again.”

She laughed.

The taper gave up—a last flare of light that showed her laughing at his discomfiture, and then darkness. The moon was on the other side of the tower, and her window was closed and shuttered. There was some rustling.

“I feel I should tell you—” he said to the darkness.

“Stop talking,” she said, very close.

Her lips found his.

After a pause, she said, “It’s side opening, I’ve already unlaced it.”

His hand finally found bare skin…

Chapter Eighteen

Gilson’s Hole—Sauce

The first wave of boglins hit their new defences just after first light. It wasn’t really an attack or even a probe—the boglins had a hard time with the marsh and the ditch at the base of the ridge was worse, already filled with swamp water. They milled about and threw sling stones—a new trick—and made skittering noises.

Then they began to move off into the newly forested land west of the Hole.

By then, the camp—well back from the barriers, between the old village and the old fort—was awake.

Sauce took a pair of lances to the top of the first wall of earth and Mag came up behind her.

Without any drama, she pointed a finger at the ground to the north and there was a flare of heat—the sort of shimmer that warm rock can give on a hot summer day.

Mag smiled. “I have sewing to finish,” she said. She went back to camp.

Young Phillip—one of her Morean knights—looked a little pale.

Sauce made a face. “I used to think Tom was the scariest of the bunch,” she said.