Like a pale pearl set in ebony, Yeoland the Saint had been established again in her bower of stone. The room was even as she had left it that misty summer dawn. Prayer-desk, lute, and crucifix were there, mute relics of a passionate past. How much had befallen her in those packed weeks of peril; how great a guerdon of woe had been lavished on her heart! Love was as the last streak of gold in a fading west; only the stars recalled the unwavering lamps of heaven.
The cliff-room and its relics tortured her very soul. She would glance at the Sebastian of the casement, and remember with a shuddering rush of woe the man in whose arms she had slumbered as a wife. Death had deified him in her heart. She remembered his grey eyes, his splendid youth, his passion, his pure chivalry. He gazed down on her like a dream hero from a gloom of dusky gold. The bitter ecstasy of the past spoke to her only of the infinite beneficence of death. The grave yearned for her, and she had no hope to live.
Those drear days she saw little of Fulviac. The man seemed to shirk her pale, sad face and brooding eyes. Her grief stung him more fiercely than all the flames nurtured in the glowing pit of war. Moreover, he was cumbered with the imminent peril of his cause, and the facing of a stormy fortune. His one hope lay in some great battle in the woods, where the King’s mailed chivalry would be cumbered by the trees. He made many a feint to tempt the nobles to this wild tussle. The cliff stood as adamant, a vast bulwark to uphold the rebels. Yet Nature threatened him with other arguments. His stores were meagre, his mouths many. Victory and starvation dangled upon the opposing beams of Fate.
If Fulviac feared procrastination, Richard of Lauretia favoured the same. Wise sluggard that he was, he curbed the vengeance of his clamorous soldiery, content to temporise with the inevitable trend of fortune. His light horse scoured the country, garnering food and forage from the fat lands north of Geraint. Time fought for him, and the starving wolves were trapped. Sufficient was it that he held his crescent of steel upon the hills, leaving unguarded the barren wilds that rolled on Gilderoy towards the east.
A week passed, dull and lustreless. The forest waved dark and solemn under the autumn sky; no torrents of steel gushed from its sable gates; no glittering squadrons plunged into its shadows. The King’s men lay warm about their watch-fires on the hills, fattening on good food, tingling for the trumpet cry that should herald the advance. Richard of the Iron Hand smiled and passed the hours at chess in his great pavilion pitched on the slopes towards Geraint. Simon of Imbrecour held the southern marches; Morolt and his northerners guarded the west.