In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,119

have? They would not have been able to rest any easier with her out of their sight once she knew what they were about. Short of staking her down hand and foot, he doubted they could have kept her away.

He had agreed, no less reluctantly, on the need to include Dafydd ap Iorwerth and Robin in their confidence. The former had listened and accepted their intentions with little more than a curse and a hard glare at his own broken arm; the latter had been almost too excited to keep a dry eye.

“I knew it!” Robin had cried, looking at his brother with pride bristling from every pore. “I knew you would come after her! I knew you could not, in the name of chivalry and honour, abandon our princess to her fate.”

Eduard had smiled dryly and avoided making contact with Ariel’s eyes. Sparrow had snorted something about reading too much poetry and becoming addled by too many faery stories, which had set the pair of them, squire and seneschal, arguing over the principles of knighthood.

“These towers,” Eduard asked, fresh from his encounter with Jean de Brevant, “they have only one way in and one way out, I suppose?”

Henry shrugged. “Unless you are a bird and can fly up to the windows, aye. Only the one entry way.”

“When I was a child,” Robin said wryly, “I used to believe Sparrow could fly.”

“With vines between my toes and the wind at my back, I can indeed fly almost anywhere,” Sparrow agreed belligerently. “But these walls are bare and smooth, and the only wind is the devil’s breath. Not even I, Young Staunch, could live up to such expectations.”

“There are passageways connecting each tower,” Henry added, leaning over the table and sketching an invisible diagram with his finger. “Access tunnels for the guards and porters.”

“Porters?”

“Food carriers, dung collectors, the whores who move back and forth from one barracks to the next. Each tower has its own forebuilding and guardroom—” He sketched both roughly. “The postings change—while I was there, at any rate —thrice per deum, with most of those who come off duty going only so far as the nearest gaming table or barrel of ale. If there is any weakness at all, it is during this changing of guards, when one is perhaps arguing with another over a toss of the dice, or a man has had a particularly good whore beneath him and grudges the need to hurry away.” He cocked an eyebrow in Ariel’s direction and smiled tightly. “My pardons for my bluntness, sister dear, but you did insist we not curb our tongues on your account.”

“I must suppose it is only the voice of experience speaking,” she allowed, returning his smirk with equal aplomb.

Sedrick sighed. “Aye, well, experience or no, all of this will be for naught if Brevant brings a troop of guards with him the next time ye meet. How do ye know ye can trust him? How do ye know he is not, even as we speak, spilling his guts to the governor and setting a pretty trap for us all? He sounded none too happy to be dealing with ye.”

“How he sounded and how he looked at the gold were two different matters,” Eduard remarked. “A man honest in his greed will usually be honest in his dealings until the purse runs dry. Moreover, the marshal seemed confident we could keep him on our side, and that should be reason enough.”

“Brevant,” Ariel murmured, glancing at Henry. “Why does the name sound familiar?”

“Because we have been using it freely this past hour?” her brother suggested wanly.

Ariel frowned. Something was there, nagging at the edge of her memory, but Sedrick was speaking again and it slipped out of reach.

“On our side or not, eager for our gold or not, if he has balked over such a trifling thing as carrying a trinket inside his cheek, how do ye plan to convince him to carry us?”

“Mayhap he will not have to carry us at all,” Sparrow said. “Merely stand aside as we pass. We still have the marshal’s letters, do we not, or were they lost in Rennes with the nags?”

“We still have them,” Eduard admitted grimly.

“Well then? Why were they written if not to be read?”

“What letters?” Dafydd asked, bewildered.

“My uncle anticipated we might encounter some difficulties along the way,” Henry explained. “He wrote letters to state we travelled under his seal of protection. They also state we are en route to Radnor Castle, there to