time a line of light appeared low in the sky. The light grew in intensity until they could see the form of a dark rider galloping toward them. All at once, the light bloomed in the sky, erupting in a shower of orange and red flames.
“To your horses,” shouted Bran as he came pounding up. “They’ll be wanting our heads for this. I fired the storehouse and granary both.”
“Did anyone see you?” wondered Iwan as he swung up into the saddle.
“It’s possible,” Bran said. “But they’ll have their hands full for a little while, at least.”
“Tsk,” clucked Tuck with mild disapproval. “Such a sad waste.”
“But necessary,” offered Iwan. “Anything that weakens them, helps us.”
“And anything that helps us, helps Elfael and its people,” concluded Bran. “It was necessary.”
“A holy waste, then,” replied Tuck. He raised himself to a fallen limb and squirmed into the saddle. By the time he had the reins in his fist, his companions were already riding along the edge of the field up the long rising slope towards Coed Cadw, a dark mass rising like a wall against a sky alive with stars.
As the news about what had happened spread throughout the Vale of Elfael, everyone who heard about the theft and fire of the previous nights knew what it meant: King Raven’s war with the Ffreinc had entered a new, more desperate stage. Burning the abbey’s storehouse and granary would provoke Abbot Hugo and the sheriff to a swift and terrible reaction. If an army cannot eat, it cannot fight, and the abbot’s army had just lost its supper.
“Sheriff de Glanville won’t be dainty about taking what he needs from the poor Cymry round about,” Scarlet pointed out after hearing an account of the previous night’s raid. “He’ll make a right fuss, no mistake.”
“I expect he will,” Bran agreed. “I’d be disappointed otherwise.”
“Will’s got a fair point,” Siarles affirmed. “De Glanville will steal from the farm folk. It’s always them he turns to.”
“Yes, and when he does, he’ll find King Raven waiting for him,” said Bran.
Bran’s reply stunned his listeners—not what he said—the words themselves were reasonable enough. It was the way he said them; there was a coldness in his tone that chilled all who heard it. There wasn’t a man among them who did not recognize that something had changed in their king since his return from the north. If he had been determined before, he was that much more determined now. But it was more than simple purpose—there was a dark, implacable hardness to it, as if somehow his customary resolve had been chastened and hardened in a forge. There was an edge to it, keen and lethal as stropped steel. Scarlet put it best when he said, “God bless me, Brother Tuck, but talking to Rhi Bran now is like talking to the blade of a spear.” He turned wondering eyes on the little priest. “Just what did you two get up to in the north that’s made him so?”
“It’s never the north that’s made him this way,” replied the friar, “although that maybe tipped the load into the muck. But it’s coming back home and seeing how things are here—all this time passing, and the abbot is ruling the roost and the sheriff cutting up rough and all. The Ffreinc are still here and nothing’s changed—nothing for the better, at least.”
Scarlet nodded in commiseration. “It may be as you say, Friar, but I say that little jaunt up north changed him,” he insisted. “I’ll bet my back teeth on’t.”
“Perhaps,” allowed Tuck. “Oh, you should have seen him, Scarlet. The way he peeled that hard-boiled earl—it was a gladsome sight.” The friar went on to describe the elaborate deception he’d witnessed and in which he’d taken part—the clothes, the hunting, Alan’s tireless translating, the young Welshmen and their willing and industrious participation, the breathless escape, and all the rest. “We were Count Rexindo and his merry band, as Alan says—albeit, his song makes it sound like a frolic of larks, but it was grim dire, I can tell you. We were tiptoeing in the wolf ’s den with fresh meat in our hands, but Bran never put a foot wrong. Why, it would have made you proud, it truly would.”
“And yet it all came to nothing in the end.”
“Saints bear witness, Scarlet, that’s the naked bleeding heart of it, is it not? We dared much and risked more to save King Gruffydd’s worthless neck,” Tuck said, his voice rising with the