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Page 96
safe company, of course. However, as the shirt fell away and exposed Walter's body, displaying several suppurating slashes and the horrible bruise on his shoulder, Sybelle suddenly thought that it was only by a miracle that the slaughter had not gone the other way. What if it were Walter who lay dead on the field before Monmouth keep? Did not the other men have wives, sisters, mothers? She could not find it in her to rejoice in their dying. She shuddered suddenly, remembering her mother's and grandmother's haunted eyes when their men went off to battle.
"What is it?" Walter asked, feeling the quiver that had run through her.
"Nothing," she answered. "Just the wet sleeve touched me. I am warm with work and with kneeling in front of the fire." And then, because he was looking at her doubtfully, not quite satisfied, she cast about in her mind for something to distract him and remembered an odd phrase in what he had said. "You understand that it was a great slaughter?" she repeated questioningly. "What do you mean? Where you not there?"
"I was," Walter replied, laughing ruefully. "I have been assured that I did my duty, but to speak the truth, I do not well remember the coming of the army or what took place after they came. When I first woke in Abergavenny the day after the battle, I thought I had been taken prisoner."
You were struck on the head?" Sybelle asked anxiously, getting hastily to her feet and staring into Walter's eyes. "Have you had other lapses of memory?"
"No, and I was not struck on the head. That is the odd part. I thought as you did, but my head was the only part of me that did not hurt. Also, Dai thought I must have seen stunned because it seems I rode into the keep, fell onto my cot, and did not wake all the time they moved me to a chamber, unarmed me, and sewed me up. He told the leech to look carefully at my head, and he did and said there was no sign of a blow on it. I felt it myself, also, and all seemed well."
"I cannot say I think much of that leech's knowledge," Sybelle remarked, looking down now at the bruise she had uncovered. She snipped another few threads and drew off the shirt, looked at the other bruises on Walter's bodynot that she could see them all because of the thick mat of hair that

 
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