Free Through a Dark Mist by Marsha Canham

the great hall and reached by means of a narrow catwalk that surrounded the chamber, never allowed in enough light to alleviate either the gloom or the dampness. Cooking and heating fires were built on an iron grate in the centre of the hall, the smoke left to its own initiative to find the exit cut in the ceiling. Smoky, dark, perpetually damp and malodourous, the early keep was not the pleasantest of places to live, an even less accommodating place to visit unexpectedly.
    Surrounding the keep was the bailey, an outer courtyard where the stables and pens were located. Protecting this was a high curtain wall, again of solid stone, forty feet high and twenty feet thick, with walkways all around to hold patrolling sentries. The outer wall was connected to the keep by a drawbridge, which could be raised against the keep wall at the first alarm to completely seal off the only entrance to the main tower. The outer wall was, in turn, surrounded by a moat and protected by a second drawbridge, guarded by a barbican tower built to hold a thick iron portcullis gate. The walls were also fitted with overhanging projections through which burning pitch or boiling oil could be poured, and were serrated with meurtrières —V-shaped vertical slots that gave the archers inside a wide range of movement to fire upon the enemy, but conversely presented a narrow, almost impossible target for returning fire.
    This was the crude but effective fortification Draggan Wardieu built and successfully defended during his long lifetime. His sons, William and Crispin, along with their sons and grandsons, built on additional courtyards, halls, palisades, gatehouses, and towers until the original keep occupied only a small, isolated corner at the northernmost end of the stronghold. Within the sprawling outer bailey, there grew a self-contained village of tradesmen. The castle boasted its own smithy, tannery, armoury, alehouse, and mill, as well as vast stables, barracks, gardens and fruit orchards, all within the barrier of the stone walls. Farmers and outside tradesmen had attempted, over the years, to construct dwellings within hailing distance of the forbidding castle walls. But the terrain proved to be so unforgiving, the moor so wet and bleak, the sea such a thunderous scourge against any fishermen who tried to tame her, that the huts of mud and wattle that cringed in the shadow of the castle walls lasted only a season or two before being abandoned into ruin.
    Only the immediate inhabitants of Bloodmoor suffered no lack of luxuries. The walls were thick enough and high enough to buffer the coldest and sharpest of winds. The castle was perched high enough on the cliff’s edge to mock the fury of the turbulent seas churning below. No one came to Bloodmoor uninvited. No one stayed unless they were wanted. And no one dared turn back once the huge iron-clad gates were swung closed behind them.
    “If you want me to leave, just say so. It is not very often my company bores a man to lethargy and great, vast lapses of silence. Frankly, I could better waste my time elsewhere.”
    The woman spoke with a low, sultry voice, emphasizing the more pertinent words with a moist, rolling purr of the tongue. Nicolaa de la Haye was a beauty and needed no confirming glances in polished steel mirrors to tell her so. The shocked look in men’s eyes was confirmation enough. The forthright rise in the front of their tunics was proof she was as desirable now, in her thirtieth year, as she had been in her thirteenth—the age at which she had left her first lover a gasping, sweating hulk of quivering exhaustion.
    There had been many lovers since then, some good, some bad. Some so exceptional she had maintained her affairs with them throughout the years, needing them as urgently and as frequently as some women required possets of henbane and opium to help them endure their dreary lives.
    Slightly taller than average, Nicolaa undulated rather than walked, and was proficient in