Chapter 757: Dame Sybyll Hanrahan
"Which one of ya is Cousin Hugo?"
The question couldn’t have been clearer but hearing it seemed to rob both men of their senses as they struggled to process what they’d heard.
Carwyn glanced back and forth between the woman in the doorway and young lord Hugo several times, trying to find anything to call a resemblance between the two people. Both were tall, but Hugo rarely drew himself up to his full six feet of height. The scholarly lord had spent too many years hunched over desks or ducking the abuse of ’proper’ noblemen to carry himself with the kind of posture that was expected of a knight and his bearing only added to the impression that he lacked the strength to speak up for himself.
By contrast, the woman in the doorway radiated physical power and dominance. The red dress she wore hugged a figure that was solidly built with wide hips and a full bust, but it was her toned, muscular arms that caught Sir Carwyn’s eyes along with the broad-bladed sword hanging from her waist that caught his attention more than anything. The hilt of her sword showed the signs of years of wear and use and when she moved, the weapon felt like a part of her body.
Unconsciously, Sir Carwyn rose, dropping a hand to the place where a sword should have hung at his own waist before he remembered, once again, that he’d been stripped of his weapons. Still, that didn’t mean he would retreat from his duty to protect his lord and while the enchanting woman’s words had been light and casual, the power and sense of menace she radiated, combined with the place where they were, was too much for the young knight to feel comfortable about.
While Carwyn focused on trying to determine if the other woman was a threat or not, all of Hugo’s attention was on her face. At a glance, she was a few years younger than he was, with the smooth, unlined features of a woman just entering her twenties.
When he first compared her features to her own, he struggled to find points of commonality, but the longer he looked, the more he realized that she possessed the same sharp, almost bird-like eyes and fierce brow that he’d seen not only in his own mirror but every time he looked at his half-brother Bastian as well. And while she’d avoided the prominent, hawk-like nose he’d inherited from a maternal grandfather, there was something about the set of her slender, curved lips that felt very similar to his own.
"I, I’m Hugo," the hawk-nosed knight said, placing a hand on Sir Carwyn’s shoulder to hold the man back as they faced the crimson-haired woman. "Whether I’m a cousin or not," he said with a heavy swallow. "That I don’t know."
"Yer Ian Hanrahan’s git, aren’t ya?" the red-haired woman asked as she strode into the room, closing the door behind her and trapping the men in the room with her by sheer force of presence. "So long as yer the spawn of that man’s seed, yer a cousin o’ mine," she said as she took a seat at the table along with them.