'The elm bark settled your belly then,' the old lord said approvingly. 'The baby will do well with you, Alys. No jade's tricks of miscarriages, eh?'

Alys gleamed at him. Outside the lightning smashed the darkness and the thunder roared in reply. A woman down in the body of the hall screamed.

'No, my lord,' she said brightly. 'Not if my skill can prevent it. You will have a fine babe on your knee when the spring comes in.' Hugo nodded. 'I'll drink a toast to that,' he said. There was a sharp flash of lightning and a loud clap of thunder. One of the serving-wenches screamed in fear and dropped a tray of meat, and the dogs, who had been cowering beneath the trestle-tables, dashed out into the hall, snatched up the bones, and cowered back into their shelters again. Alys laughed gaily.

'This rain will beat down the wheat,' Hugo said gloomily. 'We may lose some unless it blows over swiftly and the wheat can recover and stand tall again.'

The old lord nodded. 'Summer storms never last long,' he said encouragingly. 'This one will blow out overnight and in the morn you'll see a bright yellow sun to dry out the wheatfields.'

'We must go out when they cut the wheat,' Alys said. 'And celebrate harvest home.'

A page stepped up to the dais to speak to the old lord. He leaned back in his chair to give an order. Hugo spoke across him to Alys.

'Perhaps you had better stay home,' he said. 'You were not pleasantly greeted last time you went out to the fields.'

The lightning flashed like a sword into the hall. Alys met Hugo's narrowed judging gaze with a brilliant smile which did not waver even when the roll of thunder drowned out his words.

'I care for nothing!' she said, her voice very low. 'Not with the storm raging all around us! Come to my room tonight, Hugo, come to my room and I shall take you for a ride in the storm which you will never forget. My sisters go out to play on nights like this and I would be with them. You have forgotten my power, Hugo, but when I stretch my hand out there is nothing which can stop me. I do not fear these village people with their patches of land and their pig in the sty and their hive of bees. I do not fear anything they say nor anything they can do. I fear nothing, Hugo. Come to my room tonight and see how it is to play with a thunderstorm.'

Hugo lost his hard, critical look and was breathing swiftly. 'Alys,' he said longingly.

'After supper,' Alys commanded. She turned her head from him. David was at her side and the server of meat bent his knee and proffered the silver plate.

'Give me plenty,' Alys cried over the rumble of the storm. 'I am hungry. I shall eat all I need. Give me plenty!'

Supper was concluded swiftly, the noise of the storm made talk impossible, and even the least superstitious were edgy and fearful. For a little while the thunder slackened as it rolled off up the valley. But at the head of the valley by the great waterfall it turned and came raging down the river's course again, gathering speed and blowing the waters of the river out of course, flooding over their banks. The women did not choose to sit in the gallery where the windows rattled with the wind and the fire spat and hissed with falling rain. They went early to their beds, Ruth sleeping on a truckle bed in Catherine's room, holding her hand against her night-terrors. Alys laughed openly at the thought of it, flung open her door to Hugo, and then barred it behind them.

He had caught her mood, his eyes were shining. He waited for her to command him.

'Drink,' Alys said, handing him the wine with a small pinch of earthroot. She drained her own glass. 'And strip, Hugo, my sisters will only take you skyclad.'

Hugo dragged his clothes off slowly, the earthroot spreading through his body, making his limbs heavy and uncontrolled. Alys could see his dark eyes go blacker yet as the pupils dilated with the drug. 'Alys, my witch,' he slurred.

'Lie on the bed,' she said in a whisper. 'They are coming, my sisters. They will come at the next roll of thunder. Listen for them, Hugo! When the lightning splits the sky they will tumble down from the clouds, screaming and laughing, their hair streaming behind them. They are coming now! Now! Now!'

Alys stood naked before the arrow-slit window, her arms outstretched. ‘I can see them,' she said. 'Across the brightness of the sky they're coming, Hugo! Here, my sisters! Here I am! Take me out in the storm to play with you.'

The wind gusted through the arrow-slit. Alys, burning up with guilt, with desire, with feverish excitement, laughed madly as the rain lashed her body. 'Oh, that is good!' she said. The cold, hard rain stung her nipples, in a thousand prickling blows. 'Oh, so good!' she said. She turned to Hugo, driving herself beyond caution. 'Let's go outside,' she said recklessly. 'To the top of the round tower.'

'Outside,' Hugo said thickly.

Alys threw her dark blue cape around her nakedness, and put a blanket around Hugo's shoulders. He stumbled as she led him across the gallery, down the stairs and across the lobby to the round tower. The old lord was still in the hall, there was no one in the guardroom. Alys and Hugo slipped through, and up the narrow dark stairs, past the old lord's room, past Hugo's chamber above it, and up the stairs and out to the top of the tower.

In a sheltered corner the pigeon coops were battened down to keep the messenger pigeons safe. Alys wanted to release them – to fling the precious birds out into the random winds so that they would be tumbled and lost and never find their way home. Apart from the coops, the roof-top was empty, slate-floored and inhospitable, a tower pointing upwards into the very vortex of the storm. The air was howling around them, the wind buffeting them so strongly that their words were whipped from their mouths and they were deafened with the hurrying gale. Alys stepped across to the parapet and looked down.

The walls were high and straight as a plumb line. Alys could barely see the foot of the tower where it grew, like some strange crag, from the sheer rock of the cliff above the river. As the lightning flashed, Alys could see the cliffs, shiny and wet in the darkness as they fell away, in a sheer drop down to the river bed. Each crag was as pointed as a pike, and below them the river crashed and foamed over more sharp rocks, breaking in waves of black water and white spume. Alys let her cape fly out behind her and turned her face up to the drenching rain.

'They are here!' she yelled. 'My sisters are taking us to play with the storm! Can you feel them, Hugo?'

The wind had torn Hugo's blanket from his shoulders and whipped it away like a ribbon. The rain lashed his stocky white body. He flung his head back and laughed as the wind tore against him and the rain poured down on his nakedness.

Alys pressed against him, squeezed his thigh between her legs as they stood, drenched in the storm. The lightning dazzled them for a moment and then plunged them into blackness.

'Feel my sisters,' Alys said urgently. 'We are riding in the storm with them. See how the winds pull and throw us around. We are out in the storm, tossed by the air, bruised by the lightning. The storm is our lover. Be the storm, Hugo! Be at one with the storm and take us all.'

The earthroot was twisting and turning Hugo's brain. His body was icy from the rainwater and burning from his own heat and the earthroot fever. He savagely snatched up Alys and pressed her against the turret wall and forced himself into her. Alys, her body crushed against the stone wall, her shoulders and head above the parapet in the full force of the storm, laughed aloud.

'You are the storm, Hugo, you are the storm!' she cried. 'Love me into madness. I have thrown away everything for you. Everything is lost for you!'

Hugo buried himself into her, withdrew, thrust forward again. At every move Alys was pushed nearer and nearer the edge of the turret wall where it dropped down from full height to waist height. Below them the river was in a spate of deep dark water and wind-lashed foam. Alys saw the movement into fatal danger and laughed again. Deep inside her, desire and madness were building together. She clenched her legs around Hugo's waist and leaned back on the wall. Hugo, blind to everything but his fantasy of witches and storms and magical lust, forced himself into her again and again.