Free Dragon's Lair by Sharon Kay Penman Page B

always."
    "I was not claiming that he is bedding her," Thomas protested. "The lady has better taste than that. No, I meant that he is a member of the brotherhood."
    "I am probably going to regret asking," Justin said, "but which brotherhood?"
    "I call them the Guild of Emma's Admirers. They esteem Lady Emma with the fervor men usually bestow on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Be warned, Justin, for it might happen to you, too. One day you're fine; the next you're sighing at the sound of her name and writing verses of bad poetry in her honor."
    "Thanks, Thomas. I'll keep my guard up," Justin said lightly, wondering if his father had been a member of that brotherhood and wondering, too, if Thomas had always been so immune to the Emma's charms.
    ~*~
    Rhun was convalescing in the one-room cottage of Davydd's gardener and his wife, the castle laundress. He lay on a straw-filled pallet, a slight, pitiful figure under a worn woolen blanket. Justin knew the boy was sixteen, but he looked even younger, his face chalky in the meager illumination of a smoking rushlight. His head was bandaged in a wide strip of linen, smeared with ointment and soiled from handling. Lank brown hair stuck up around the bandage in spiked tufts, a splinted arm protruded from the blanket, and his chest rose and fell in the rapid rhythm of a troubled sleeper. Justin found himself thinking that the doctor who'd pronounced Rhun "on the mend" must have been besotted on mead at the time, for Rhun did not look to him like one on the road to recovery. In fact, he bore an eerie resemblance to a corpse, laid out before being sewn into a burial shroud.
    His caretakers hovered on either side of the pallet, ill at ease and watchful, almost as if they feared being blamed for their patient's poorly condition. Padrig stood by, unneeded, as Thomas and Angharad took turns interrogating the couple, and Justin listened to the ebb and flow of Welsh, reassured that the translations being offered for his benefit jibed so well with his own understanding of what was being said. In this alien land of so many strangers, so many suspects, it was good to know that he could place some trust in Thomas and his Welsh mistress. As much as he wanted to question Rhun, he was hesitant to awaken the youth, for sleep was Rhun's only refuge. He was still deciding when the young Welshman's lashes began to flicker.
    Rhun's eyes were dilated and dazed, and Justin realized he'd been given a potion for his pain. He seemed surprised to find so many people clustered around his bed. "You came back..." he murmured drowsily, smiling at Thomas, who seemed embarrassed at being caught out in a good deed and mumbled that he'd looked in on the lad earlier, wanting to see for himself how he was faring. When Thomas asked him again if he could remember any thing about the ambush, his denial was clear, unambiguous, and convincing. No, he said softly, almost apologetically, he remembered nothing. And Justin saw that his one witness to the robbery was going to be of no help whatsoever.
    ~*~
    The next morning, Justin and Thomas rode out to the scene of the ambush. Thomas had been there before, and so they did not need to put Davydd's grudging offer of help to the test by asking for a guide. The charred remains of the hay-wains had been dragged to the side of the road so travelers could pass by. Justin walked about in the ashes, finding a scrap from one of the wool- sacks, kicking at a scorched wheel axle. He looked in vain for ruts in the road, but was not surprised by his failure to find any, given the amount of time that had gone by since the robbery; rain and tramping feet had obliterated whatever clues there might have been. The site told him little about the crime, nothing at all about the whereabouts of the ransom.
    "It is an odd place for an ambush," he said to Thomas. "I assume they must have been waiting in that copse of alder trees over there. But we passed several spots that would have offered better cover. I