"Speak, indeed? As if I had not been speaking these five minutes. Well nigh had I stuck my poignard in your ribs to teach you to mind your superior officer. What think you of this business?"
"Think?" the Sparhawk's disappointment burst out. "Think? Why, 'tis past all thinking. Courtland is shut to us for twenty years."
"Well," laughed Von Orseln, "who cares for that? Castle Kernsberg is good enough for me, so we can hold it."
"Hold it?" cried Maurice, with a kind of joy in his face; "do you think they will come after us?"
Von Orseln nodded approval of his spirit.
"Yes, little man, yes," he said; "if you have been fretting to come to blows with the Courtlanders you are in good case to be satisfied. I would we had only these lumpish Baltic jacks to fear."
Even as they talked Castle Kernsberg floated up like a cloud before them above the blue and misty plain, long before they could distinguish the walls and hundred gables of the town beneath.
But no word spoke Joan till that purple shadow had taken shape as stately stone and lime, and she could discern her own red lion flying abreast of the banner of Louis of Courtland upon the topmost pinnacle of the round tower.
Then on a little mound without the town she halted and faced about. Von Orseln halted the troop with a backward wave of the hand.
"Men of Hohenstein," said the Duchess, in a clear, far-reaching alto, "you have followed me, asking no word of why or wherefore. I have told you nothing, yet is an explanation due to you."