“You’re telling me that for the last year, you have been dreaming of eating my daughter?”
“Yes,” Theobald said softly, and despite the fact that he was half a head taller and a couple stones heavier than Egelric, he suddenly found the man quite intimidating.
A very handsome young steward—Sigefrith was almost jealous for a moment—showed him up to the sitting room at the top of the stairs, where he found, to his great delight, Eadgith sitting alone with young Haakon.
“Oh, dear!” she cried softly, thrusting her sewing aside and leaping to her feet.
“I hope I didn’t call you away from anything—or anyone—too important,” Alred said as Sigefrith came in.
“Only Cenwulf. I could use a joke or two after sitting all afternoon with that grim prophet.”
Sigefrith threw open the door to his study, where, he had been told, Egelric was waiting for him. “Egelric, Egelric!”
Egelric looked up from the book he was reading and grinned at him. He rose to bow, but he only had time to lay the book on the desk before Sigefrith grabbed him in a hug.
“Theobald!” Sigefrith cried happily. “I thought I spied two red-headed giants riding up the road. Where’s your complice?”
“We met Caedwulf on our way in and the boys ran off to play somewhere.”
As soon as he stepped into the kitchen, Alwy understood why the hand Gunnilda had sent to tell him to come up to the house had also told him he should wash up on the way. The Duchess herself sat at his kitchen table. He only wished he had cleaned his fingernails. He would try to remember to hide his hands under the table.
“Sit down, Alwy,” Gunnilda said. Her face looked grim.
Bertie ran with the other boys down the stairs and out into the court, but he stopped when he caught a glimpse of green and red and blonde flitting past the gatehouse and out onto the road.
Though she scarcely realized it, his years of being a watchful elder brother to Baby had led to a continuing awareness of her presence when she was nearby, and a vaguely troubling consciousness of her absence when he did not know where she was. And he had learned to identify a glimpse of her in a crowd or across a court, even when only out of the corner of his eye.
Iylaine walked down the corridor to the stairs, but she paused before going down. Behind that door, she thought, was the ladder to the roof of the southwest tower. She didn’t think any of the boys were up there, since the view was better from the northern towers. She heard no one coming… she would just go see.
From the roof she had a view of the whole scene, and not merely the slender portion that she could take in through Gwynn’s window. It was breathtaking. The sky glowed a murky red, as if a sinister alien sun had set in the northern horizon, and below the sky was the roiling smoke, and below the smoke was the fire.
To Lady Gwynn’s great delight, Iylaine had spent much of the day in her room, although she had spent most of it staring out the window. Iylaine could scarcely be bothered to help Gwynn with her sewing or to chat with her dolls, for she was busy watching Selwood burn.
The lightning of the evening before had set the northern hills afire, and no rain had come to extinguish the blaze. Since then the wind had driven it to the southeast, where it had burned through the Baron’s old farm and was now devouring the great forest beside it.
“Alas! If only her cakes were as tender as her sensibilities.”
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