“Shh! What do you hear?”
The Duke’s soft voice silenced the drowsy hum of the adult conversation. Even the little children paused for a moment in their play. Alred had the bard’s gift for drawing the attention of a crowd.
Oswald had been careful to lower his knife every time he heard a creaking tread on the stairs, not wishing to add a severed finger to the tally of the night’s indignities. But with the passing hours, the woman had come down to the kitchen and gone back up to the bedroom so many times that he had finally made up his mind to stop looking.
And that, of course, was when she finally came in.
From the road Oswald had seen only a thin plume of smoke straggling up from the chimney and disappearing at once into the swirling flurry of snowflakes. There was a fire in the house, but not the heartily burning Yule log he had been looking forward to through hours of riding hunched against the cold. There was no light downstairs, and from the front the only candlelit window he could see was Matilda’s.
“It could be Eirik in a cloak,” Diarmait said, abruptly reawakening an argument that Egelric had—to his relief—thought closed. “Some of those men look rather tall.”
Muirgius bellowed, “It isn’t Eirik, for the love of Macaille! Brass-Dog never arrives but he’s standing in the prow, and the blond hair of him flying like a yellow flag!”
“I do not keep any medicines of value in this room.”
The head turned slightly, revealing a profile thin and sharp as a crescent moon. “You do keep books.”
“Scared you, did I?” Eadred laughed. “I didn’t think anyone was in here.”
“No.” Finn leaned across the bed and laid his knife back on the tray. “I was just making a precaution.”
“I had the key,” Eadred pointed out. He held it up to flash in the candlelight before dropping it onto the tray beside Finn’s.
For five days and four nights Sadb had been Queen of her domain. She sat up so late at night that she burned her costly wax candles down to stubs, and in the morning she lazed in bed until her back was sore. She slouched and belched and scratched herself. She ate honey straight from the jar with her finger. For supper. She left her hair loose and went breezing about the house without petticoats when she liked; and when she did not like, she obliged her maid to pin her curls into a hundred ringlets, donned her wedding dress, and dined at the head of her empty table wearing every last blessed ring, bracelet, and necklace she owned.
Matilda Cild had learned to walk beneath an ancient oaken table, by wandering between the knees of the earls, knights, and generals seated round. She must have tripped and toddled then, but the men who had raised her had taught her to step smartly like a soldier, even at such mundane moments as when answering a knock at the door.
And yet no soldier, Alred thought, had ever looked so fine and full and deliciously quivering from behind.
Colban had thought the halls seemed oddly quiet as he had come down.
A small crowd had gathered in a corner of the court, near the great door of the southern tower. A clear space remained before it, however, and glimpses of red tunics and polished mail flashed beyond the duller grays and blues of peasant woolens. The Royal Guard was holding back the crowd.
Eadred woke with a sloppy snort. “My lord!” he gasped reflexively, and then, as he heaved himself to his feet and smoothed the wrinkles out of his tunic, he added, “Dunstan!”
“The devil take you and feed you to his kittens!”
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