“Good man. You’ve done right. I’ll go. Just give me a moment to put something on, and get my sword. And perhaps – if my lady wakes to find me gone – and thinks her father is in danger –”

“I wakened Mariamne. She’s here with me. She’ll stay with your lady in case she wakes. Let us pray to the God we share that we need not alarm her, and that all this has been for nothing.”

“Except to ruin my wedding night!”

“Let’s hope you’ll be back beside your lady long before she wakes,” said Jeshua, and turned to call softly: “Mariamne? Come now.”

She had been waiting in the shadows some way along the corridor. As Alexander went for clothes and weapon she came quickly, stopped beside Jeshua for whispered question and answer, reached up to kiss him, then slipped silently into the bedchamber and over to her mistress’s side. Alice did not stir. Alexander, dressed and sword in hand, lifted a hand in salute and, as silently, left the chamber.

Jeshua had gone. Alexander, his doeskin slippers making no sound, ran along the corridor towards the duke’s room.

37

The duke’s rooms were on the south front of the castle, and to get to them Alexander had to reach the corner tower, feel his way (for there was no light on the tower stair) down a dozen steps of the spiral, and then find the door of Ansirus’ bedchamber. From the quick directions that Jeshua had managed to give him, he knew this to be the third door along, plain to see, as it was normally lighted by two cressets, one to either side of the archway.

What was also plain to see, as Alexander ran towards the pool of light thrown by the torches, was that the door of the duke’s chamber stood open.

And as he gained the doorway with a rush he saw three things. A man, presumably the duke’s servant, lying on his face with a dagger’s hilt standing in his back; the duke himself, asleep in the great bed and apparently undisturbed; and Count Madoc stooping over the sleeping form with a pillow in his hands.

A still, startled pause, then Alexander gave a breathless shout. “To me!” and flung himself forward. In the same moment he saw that the count was unarmed: on this secret mission he had come without his sword, and his dagger was lodged in the body of the man he had killed.

Alexander checked momentarily, and the moment was all that Madoc needed. He flung the pillow straight at Alexander’s face, and as the young man dodged aside he leaped back from the bedside and tore the duke’s sword and dagger down from where they hung on the wall. Then, with fury in his eyes, but showing all the terrifying control of the seasoned fighting man, he sprang to the attack.

Alexander, meeting that first rush, had all he could do to hold his assailant off. This was a very different matter from those other fights of his – so very long ago, it now seemed. The count was a big man, both angry and desperate, with more even than his life at stake, and how the fight would have gone in those first minutes if the odds had not been on Alexander’s side, it is hard to tell. But fate – or justice – worked against the older man. When he had stooped over his victim, ready with the smothering pillow, his eyes had been near the night-candle that burned beside the duke’s bed, and its little plume of flame still burned ghostly but blinding on his sight. And the sword he wielded was not his own: Ansirus’ weapon, being a sword for state rather than for killing, was both longer and lighter than his own accustomed blade. There had been no fighting in Duke Ansirus’ life for a great many years.