men, only himself. Which was unacceptable. They would all leave, or none.
But either way, Rardove had best look to his back, for the Irish tribes were going to come down from the hills and besiege his castle from Lent until Yuletide. Then Finian himself would burn it to the ground, if he had to drag his bones out of the grave to do so.
Chapter 2
“This shouldn’t take long,” Senna de Valery murmured as she passed under the gates of Rardove Keep as the sun went down. It was four days after her ship had dropped anchor in Dublin and left her to her fate.
It had been a slow, long ride and Senna held her silence for most of its length, listening to the sounds of her new world: the host of riders accompanying her, creaking saddles, muffled voices, wind sighing over the Irish earth. Most of her time, though, was spent calculating how much money this business alliance would provide, if it came to fruition.
It was fresh hope, and that was practically priceless.
Forty sheep followed somewhere behind, the first installment of her bleating business proposition. Atop their sharp little hooves, her sheep carried the softest, most absorbent wool west of the Levant, a strain Senna had been perfecting for ten years, ever since she took over operations of the business from her father.
Wool was highly lucrative business. The fate of a dozen lesser crafts and a few minor princedoms rested on its commerce. Entire fairs in France were dedicated to the trade, sending coveted wool from England through the rich southern markets, straight to Jerusalem and beyond.
Senna wanted to nudge her way in to this market. If the wool being moved through the trade halls now fomented merchants’ enthusiasm, Senna’s strain would make them salivate. It was more absorbent, more silklike, more lightweight than any other wool out there, and required little mordanting to make dyes take.
She knew she had something special with her stinky, furry little sheep. She was simply running out of coin.
Rardove could give it to her. He had money that could save the business, the one Senna had spent the last ten years building up, while her father recklessly, relentlessly, inexhaustibly, gambled it away.
She stared hard ahead, trying to pierce the evening mists, eager for her first glance of Rardove Keep. Such purposeful peering had the added benefit of distracting her from the stench rising from her escort of burly, damp, leather-clad riders.
“Are the mists always so thick?” she asked the closest rider, pinching her nostrils as she moved closer to hear his reply.
He grunted and snorted back a sneeze. Or perhaps he said, “Most there’s ’bout.” Either reply was equally illuminating.
Senna lifted her eyebrows and said “Ahh,” in a bright, cheerful voice, then reined a few paces upwind.
She could feel the eyes of the burliest soldier boring into her back. Balffe was his name, the captain of Rardove’s guard. A block-chested warrior with a face like old sin, he hadn’t taken his eyes off her for two days. And it wasn’t leering, either; it was more like loathing, which was ridiculous, because she’d done nothing to him.
Yet. She passed him an evil glare over her shoulder. He glared back.
Never mind the soldiers. She turned forward. Lord Rardove was the only one who mattered. It was of no account that she’d heard he was lordly in his manner or fair as an angel in his face, because she wasn’t in the market for a husband. She was in the market for a market.
As they drew near Rardove Castle, wraithlike villages began revealing themselves through the fog, first as pale splotches through the mist, then as dark splotches upon the earth. Small, huddling huts and waterlogged fields bespoke poverty, as did the thin villagers who stared sullenly as they passed.
She began immediately estimating the number of villagers per wattle-and-daub hut, calculating how much fatter and richer they would be if her scheme was successful. They might even become prosperous. She wished she had her abacus to hand. It was so much easier to tally numbers with the device.
It was so much easier to tally numbers than to calculate the goodness of building an alliance with a man who thought it wise to starve the people who fed him.
The horses’ legs moved through low-lying evening mists as they passed under the portcullis into the outer bailey. The air was cool. Sunset flamed in fiery red sweeps across the horizon. Through the glaring haze, all she could discern was