Alexander, on the other hand, had his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and was using his own sword – his father’s sword, a fighting weapon that had already been blooded by him in the skirmishes with the Cornishmen, and since then in practice had grown used to his hand, and fought now as an extension of it.

And whatever of ambition or fear Madoc had at stake, Alexander already knew that, if he lost this fight, the duke would die also, and Alice, his sweet Alice, would be seized by the murderer and used without mercy to help him possess and control Castle Rose and its people for his own base ends.

The swords met, clashed, slithered, hacked and clashed again. Madoc, beating forward with both sword and dagger in murderous attack, managed to force the young man back and give himself a few precious seconds in which to pull away. He whirled the whistling metal round and over his head, testing the unfamiliar weight, and cursing as the jewels of the hilt grazed his hand, then brought it down to meet Alexander’s blade again as the prince lunged after him. Madoc’s dagger cut down at the stretched sword-arm, caught in the seam of the sleeve, and came away bloodied. He laughed, a brief breathless grunt of pleasure, and then, hand and eye adjusted, pressed forward again, urgent to finish the fight before the noise should rouse the sleeping castle.

One sleeper, indeed, could surely not fail to be disturbed. The duke was waking. He stirred, half turned, said something in a blurred undervoice, then subsided again on his pillows.

Neither man took any notice. Slashing, thrusting, dodging and leaping, first to one side of the bed and then the other, they fought, while the duke, sinking back into drugged slumber, lay without further sound or movement.

Alexander, forced back towards the doorway by the double attack of sword and dagger, and desperately conscious of being outweaponed, and so outfought, was also sharply aware of the servant’s body lying somewhere in the dim doorway behind him. To trip over it would mean his almost certain death, and he dared not, as he fought to parry both sword and dagger, take even one precious second to look aside. His left hand was out to feel for the jamb of the door, flailing behind him as he tried desperately to remember just where the body lay.

Another step back, as short as he dared make it, while Madoc’s face, suffused with rage and triumph, was thrust forward towards him into the light cast by the cressets in the corridor. It was the sudden change in those gloating eyes that warned Alexander that something new had happened. In the same moment, cool and infinitely comforting, he felt the hilt of a dagger pressed into his left hand.

Alice’s voice, as cool as the metal, was speaking. “Now, Mariamne! Help me pull poor Barty’s body out of the way. My lord needs room. Never mind the blood, woman! It’s only where I pulled the dagger out! Good. Now, quickly! Run, tell the guards to hurry, and rouse anyone else you see! Run!”