The Dread Wyrm

Chapter Seven

The Company

The sun was high and hot, but the last of the fog remained over the flat green fields south of First Bridge, creating an odd, sticky day. No breeze stirred the banners-and the commons, those that had taken the risk to attend, stood sullen in the damp heat, an unseasonable weather.

The broad jest began to circulate that the Galles would find it hard to find dry wood to burn the Queen.

The stands, and the long wooden barricades that marked the lists, were not empty. The stands were full of the gentry of the court, reinforced by the folk of the southern Albin-some hundreds of men and women dressed in their best. They were apprehensive-most had left home for the great day long before the King’s arrest of the Queen was even a rumour.

And many of the commons had come, as well. The barricades were lined, three or four deep. Many of the refugees who had fled the burnings in the city had gone no further than relatives north of First Bridge or on the Lorica road, where the city’s suburbs sprawled for three leagues, and unshaven chins and close bundled children spoke of many families who’d slept under the stars in order to see the King-or see the Queen burned.

But the mood of the commons was ugly enough. A squire was foolish enough to stop and make a great show of pissing on a fallen shield with the Queen’s arms. He was an Alban, a southerner, and he did it for the entertainment of his friends. He was badly beaten by a dozen ploughmen who didn’t see the world as he did.

Increasing numbers of peasants pressed in around the Queen until the King, or his deputies, sent a strong detachment of the Royal Guard to watch over her. The Guardsmen, however, were careful not to offend the people, and did nothing to move the crowd itself, which grew denser.

It became so dense that Blanche had a hard time penetrating it. She couldn’t have said when she went from being a laundry maid of some distinction to the Queen’s last handmaid, but when she understood what Edmund and the apprentices planned, she had slipped out of Master Pye’s house in her plainest clothes-her hair covered in an old wimple. She’d watched older women often enough to pass for one, although it hurt her pride. She bent her back a little, and waddled a little, and bound her breasts so that they were flat against her, wrapped her blaze of bright blond hair in a piece of clean old linen, and was transformed from the magnet of every male’s attention into an old thing of no interest to anyone. It troubled her how quickly she could be ignored, as an old woman.

She spent Easter night in a shed next to the palace. She made it into the laundry without being questioned because most of the Guard was away fighting the Occitans, and it was from Goodwife Ross that she learned that some of the King’s Guard seemed… different.

Twice now she’d visited the Queen-she’d become a poor creature who seemed broken into madness, except when you looked into her eyes.

So-at any rate-on Tuesday morning, Blanche was pushing through the press of the commons with a basket on her head. The press was so thick she might never have gotten to the ring around the Queen except that one of the King’s Guard saw her and smiled.

“Let her through!” he called in a Hillman accent. “Here’s a woman come to serve the Queen. Let her through, with God’s good grace.”

And the commons moved aside like the parting of the Dark Sea, and Blanche slipped past them to the barrier around the Queen’s seat-ducked under it and came to the Queen.

She bobbed a deep curtsey. “Your grace?” she asked.

The Queen turned her head. Her eyes focused.

She smiled. “Blanche,” she said.

Blanche hadn’t been sure until then that the Queen even knew her name. She curtsied again. “Your grace, I’ve brought you soap, water and some food.”

“She hasn’t eaten in four days,” one of the King’s men muttered.

The Queen put a hand to her throat. “I might try… to eat,” she said huskily. “The sun-has been so kind-”

The guardsmen muttered among themselves. She looked so… crazy, Blanche thought.

She looked even worse as she began to eat, seizing a loaf of bread and ripping pieces from it. Blanche had eight thick slices of bacon from a guardsman’s fire and a slice of very questionable pie that had cost her a copper and a kiss. The kiss had been greasy, too.

The Queen tore through it with wolfish intensity, glancing up from time to time-like a dog, Blanche thought. Or something that feared a predator.

Blanche had a soldier’s canteen over her shoulder-a heavy object of fired clay. She’d stolen it, in the first outright theft of her life. She handed it to the Queen, who drank off the entire contents without seeming to breathe.

She looked at Blanche and her eyes narrowed a fraction. “You should run,” she said. “You’ve been seen.”

Blanche curtsied. “Your grace, I am here for you. You should know that-”

“Run,” said the Queen. “I will not have your blood on my head. Now.”

Blanche ducked under the barrier, abandoning the basket and the canteen. The Queen’s intensity communicated itself to her.

But the press was still thick-and there was shouting. Men were moving, and suddenly she had a lane, and like a flash-

She was caught. There were four of them, big men in the archbishop’s purple livery. They knocked her down.

One said something, and the other three laughed, showing a mouth full of blackened stumps of teeth.

She expected help from the crowd, and when the men in purple reached for her, she screamed, but the peasants were cowed by the armour and the spears. Black Teeth slammed the top of his head into her forehead, so that the world spun. He laughed and pushed her again.

Her wimple came off, her glorious yellow-gold hair blowing in the wind.

There were fifty of them, the purple spearmen. They’d killed a man, and the crowd fled them, leaving them alone like an island of stone in a rising tide. A woman was screaming, and another man was trying to hold his guts in with his hands.

Her head hurt so much she wanted to throw up.

“It’s the Queen’s little bitch!” laughed a Gallish voice. “I’d know that hair anytime.”

“It’s been on every pillow in the Guard’s hall, or so I hear,” said another.

Hard hands closed on her arms.

She screamed again.

“Secure the person of the so-called Queen,” ordered a new voice. “Who is this tall slut?”

“One of the Queen’s women-”

“So-called Queen’s women. A lady?” asked the voice. She got her eyes open. It was de Rohan-she knew him from the corridors. “I think not.” He nodded. “Bring her.”

“Why?” asked the archbishop. Blanche knew him, too. She’d never heard him speak, but there he was, young and fat as a capon, with short-cropped hair almost exactly the colour of her own. “What do we want with the slut?”

De Rohan sighed as if he was surrounded by fools. “Your excellency, in an hour or so, when we lead the so-called Queen to the stake…” He paused. “We may experience some difficulties with her, and with the canaille. I would love to have a lever with which to move the so-called Queen.”

Blanche was pushed along. Hands fondled her-she was bruised by a vise-like grip on one of her breasts as a dozen soldiers pushed her to where de Rohan stood. They laughed.

He laughed.

He was standing at the gate to the barriers around the Queen. Two rather sorry-looking guardsmen stood there-not, she would have thought, the men who had been there a few minutes before. Both were slack-jawed and slack-eyed-possibly drunk.

The Queen, on the other hand, looked considerably better.

“Madame,” de Rohan said. “Are you prepared to meet your fate?”

“Is it not rather the fate that you have made me, my lord?” she asked. “Nor is it yet noon-the hour appointed for my Champion.”

“Any time from the first hour after matins until the middle of the day, madame.” His arm suddenly shot out and he took Blanche by her ear-the pain was incredible. She screeched.

“Do you know this pretty slip, Desiderata?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the Queen, sadly.

“Good. If you’d like her to live out the day-and not be the bedfellow of my servants for the next few weeks, until her spirit is a little less brazen-then you will obey me.” He shrugged.

The Queen’s eyes were gentle pools of brown looking at Blanche’s. “This is low even for you, de Rohan,” she said. “And I suspect that no matter what I promise you will inflict your child-like will on poor Blanche, who is guilty of no crime but loyalty to me.” To Blanche she said, “You should have run, child.”

Blanche found that she was crying. She wanted to be strong-as strong as she’d been for a week-but she felt helpless and abandoned and she knew what was to come. She knew it, as every woman feared it, and she couldn’t keep her tears and despair at bay.

“How I hate you,” she managed to say to de Rohan.

He didn’t even turn his head. “I expect-” His warm hand found her jaw and his thumb was suddenly under her chin, probing deeply into the side of her neck until the pain made her rise on her toes and scream. “I expect you’ll hate me more later,” he said, dropping her. “To much the same effect, really.” He looked at Desiderata. “Women are too weak for any purpose but to make babies,” he added.

“And even when we do that, you kill us,” the Queen said. “You might want to look, my lord. Your doom is nigh.”

For the last half hour, the fog had been reduced to a blinding glare of haze. Now, with nonnes not far away, there was a sudden flash of metal and scarlet in the middle distance.

De Rohan looked a moment and gestured to the archbishop. “The so-called Queen is safe enough,” he said.

“The canaille would save her, if only to spite me,” the archbishop said. His chairmen grunted under him.

“We’ve dispersed them,” de Rohan said. “And caught the go-between the Queen used with her lover. Let’s go and tell the King.” He motioned to his own black-and-yellow-clad retinue, and then he moved toward the King with something like unseemly haste.

“Hurry, de Rohan,” Desiderata called, her voice fey. “Hurry to your end.”

Twenty of the purple guardsmen remained. They used their spear points on anyone in the crowd who came closer than a spear’s length to the barrier. Men cursed them, but none had the spine to resist them.

Amicia left the column as they rounded the last bend in the road. The lists were clear to see, even in the odd hazy light. The heat was stifling, the damp oppressive, so that in two layers of linen she felt she might wilt.

But she had Gelfred with her. He rode with her to an enclosure full of horses. There were two Royal Guardsmen there who seemed to think very little of his dismounting with a beautiful woman.

“You won’t be leaving this way,” he said. He smiled. “God be with you, my lady.”

She handed him her reins, bobbed her head, and began to walk towards the back of the royal box above the stands. There were a dozen Royal Guards here at the back, and a small mob of other liveries-servants in almost every conceivable heraldry, with trays and bottles and linen towels over their arms, and a double dozen of various soldiers all eyeing each other with malice.

Amicia entered her palace and began to work. It was a simple enough beguiling-few men wanted to stop a beautiful woman from going where she would, anyway, and those who would stop such a woman were even easier to dissuade, their lust a weapon with which to deceive them. Her beguiling was subtle and strong. She watched her body move over the grass, and saw them notice her and saw men smile, one to the other…

She passed the guards. Behind them were two sets of wooden steps into the royal box, equidistant to right and left. But under the box was a small chamber-a retiring chamber that Amicia suspected had been placed there so that the King could be moved out of sight-if required.

She passed into the chamber as if it was hers by right.

“Bless you, Gelfred,” she whispered.

She stood as close to directly beneath the King as she could manage.

She sighed. The wood was too dense, and blocked her aethereal sight completely, or at least too much for such a delicate working.

She passed back through the curtain, and past the guards. Men looked, and saw, or did not see, but now she passed among them, her will adamant, her face radiant.

One man sighed, and another groaned. But no one moved to stop her.

It was fifty paces to the end of the tall bleachers. She walked all the way, painfully aware that she had the eyes of a dozen men on her slim back. But no one shouted.

She passed the end of the bleachers. Out here, away from the pavilions and the enclosure for spare horses, the noise was greater. Above her in the stands, hundreds of ladies and gentlemen sat, eating morsels and drinking wine.

She turned and began to climb the steps. She climbed until she was parallel with the royal box. She could see a man in red who was probably the King, but long rows of people separated them, and his head bobbed back and forth.

The whole path from her position to the King was blocked with seated spectators.

She took a deep breath, and steadied her working. Then, to the first woman in the row, she said, “I’m sorry, I need to get to my father.”

The woman stood to let her pass, frowning.

“There’s someone coming,” her husband said. The man was short, and wide, and wore too much gold. “By God-it’s a whole team in red. Is it the King’s men?”

Amicia couldn’t help herself. She turned and looked.

Down at the entrance to the stands, fifty feet below her, there were ten knights and ten squires, all in brilliant steel armour-plate over maille, often edged in laten or bronze or brass.

She could see the Red Knight and the Green Knight, too. And Ser Tom.

The trumpeter was there as herald, dressed in the company scarlet with the lacs d’amour on his tabard.

Everyone in the stands was on their feet. Whether luck, fortune or God-she had her moment, and she scrambled along, no more interested in stealth, with the instinct of the pickpocket when a distraction is made available. She pushed and pressed almost recklessly.

The marshal strode across the lists. The crowd hushed.

Amicia pushed on.

The Red Knight’s herald raised his trumpet from his hip, and it unfurled with the white dove on a sun-in-splendor of the Queen.

The crowd roared.

The sound was so loud that it startled Amicia and she almost let her working fall. Her heart was pounding-

She wondered in the calm fastness of her palace what it was like to be in a closed helmet with nothing but the fear and all that sound, and all the hopes of thousands of people on your armour-burdened shoulders.

She reached out in the aethereal with her sight, and saw.

First she saw the Queen. The Queen burned like a small sun-bright gold, un-alloyed, undimmed. She was in a sort of pen at the base of the stands, and the wood of the barriers surrounding held a working on it-a curious and not particularly stable working.

Nearer at hand, she saw a group of men moving quickly-a young fat man with no talent whatsoever, and by his side a grey man who flickered with potency.

“Ah, yes,” she thought.

She glanced at the King, who was warded-ten times warded. He was covered in wardings, like a prisoner draped in chains. Amulets and sigils, runes and bindings were on him layer after layer. She had never seen anything like it, and suddenly-for the first time-she felt overmatched. For some reason she had expected a single, potent work-an internal mirror or a secret working that locked the target up as surely as a prison. Both Harmodius and the Abbess, in her head, remembered such working and had remedies.

But this tangle of cluttered thaumaturgy, with superstition, blind chance and careful science all mixed…

She looked again. It was like looking at the tangled remnants of a skein of linen after a kitten had attacked it.

Nor was she sure that the King’s will was in any way affected by it all.

He was merely… warded.

Nicholas Ganfroy had practised for a year for this moment. His trumpet rang out, loud and clear, piercing the tumult of the crowd.

Into his split second of crowd-silence, he roared the Red Knight’s challenge.

“He who styles himself the Red Knight bids defiance to any wight so craven as to pretend that the gracious Queen of Alba, high Desiderata, is other than the King’s own wife; loyal, faithful, and true. And he offers to prove this assertion on the body of any so bold in his blood or wanting in brains that will maintain her unfaithfulness, or will offer to exchange blows. And the Red Knight maintains he offers battle for no pride in his own prowess, but only to see justice done. And if no knight will offer to uphold the charges against the gracious lady Queen, the Red Knight demands her instant release by the law of arms, the Rule of Law of Alba, and also the Rule of War of Galle.”

Ganfroy’s lungs were as brazen as his trumpet, and he’d practised, shouting into basements and wine cellars. His words carried clearly.

There was obvious consternation in the royal stands.

Amicia was no more than an arm’s length from the Archbishop of Lorica, unnoticed in the press. The archbishop, and the Sieur de Rohan, had just returned, hurriedly climbing the steps to the royal box-Amicia was interested to note that the archbishop was already sweating. She had also marked the thin, threadbare man in the badly dyed scholar’s scarlet as a hermeticist-his person carried two wards and a sigil.

Amicia was an observant woman, and she noticed that he wore a third device around his neck-a complex net of thin strands of dirty linen. It held no power, but the King wore a similar such amulet.

“Send the guard and have him taken,” shouted the archbishop. His words were received with hoots and catcalls from all the gentry seated nearby.

De Vrailly was grinning as if he’d just won a prize. “It is the mercenary-the sell-sword. The Queen must have bought his services.” He shook his head. “I understand him to be a good man of his arms, and his harness seems good.” His handsome face split in a wide grin. “Ah, God is good! An answer to my prayers. God has sent him that we may have a fair trial.”

De Rohan was trying to burrow through the close press towards the King. “Your grace-your grace!” he called.

Amicia was six feet from the King, below him, caught up amidst the press of Galles and Albans who followed the court.

Someone groped her.

She ignored her assailant and entered into her bridge. There, she was interested to find, she wore the same kirtle in the aethereal that she wore in the world.

She found the King in the aethereal. She saw the welter and tangle of his protections and wards and curses and she bit her aethereal lip in frustration.

She prayed. And curiously, as she prayed, she thought of her Abbess, that towering figure of wit and good sense, power and character-the old King’s mistress, and a potent magister.

What would she have done?

Amicia moved her focus back, looking over the crowd around the King. She was looking for a link-a thread of gold or green that might connect any one of them to the King.

She didn’t see any such.

It was possible, of course, that the King was acting of his own accord. The Prior didn’t believe that though, and neither, apparently, did Gabriel.

She sighed, completing her prayer, and tried another tack. She looked at the King not as a hermetical practitioner, but as a hermetical healer. As her Order taught.

As quick as thought, she was praising God inside her head, and acting.

De Rohan clasped the King’s hand. “I have ordered the arrest of the herald, and his knight,” de Rohan said.

The King nodded heavily. “Yeess,” he said slowly. His head barely raised off his chest.

“Sire!” De Vrailly pushed de Rohan roughly. “Sire-do not listen to him!”

The King made no movement.

“Stand down, de Vrailly. No one doubts your honour. But the King needs no champion in this.” De Rohan gave his most placating smile.

The archbishop put a hand on de Vrailly’s armoured elbow. “Do not presume-” he began.

The King’s head shot up, as if he’d been stung by a hornet. For a moment he had a look of wild insanity.

Then his eyes focused.

De Vrailly was no longer looking at the King. “De Rohan, by all I hold sacred-I will strike you down with my own right hand if you impede the cause of this quarrel. The herald-presumptuous as his speech might be-has every turn of the right. We must fight, or be found to have lied. I am ready, armed in every point. What possible exception can you make to the law of war, de Rohan?”

The King stood.

A ring of silence spread out from his person, like the ripples of a pebble tossed in a pool of water.

His voice was low and rough, as if unused. “Do I understand that the Queen has a defender?” he asked slowly.

He took a step-an unsteady step. De Rohan clasped his elbow.

“Get the King a cup of his wine,” he said to an attendant. “Your grace-”

But de Vrailly’s face was mottled with anger, and he pushed de Rohan-quite roughly. They were both big men-de Rohan had, after all, been de Vrailly’s standard bearer and was reckoned by some the best knight after de Vrailly himself. But de Vrailly’s anger was like an angel’s wrath, and he moved de Rohan as if he was made of paper.

“Your grace-the Red Knight, the sell-sword, has been paid by the Queen to defend her. And I am happy-indeed, delighted”-his face bore anything but delight-“to engage this wastrel on your behalf.”

The King’s eyes went back and forth. “The Red Knight?” he asked, his voice plaintive. “Oh, sweet Christ.”

Inside the King’s aura, Amicia felt the wave of pain pass over him.

Out in the lists, the Red Knight changed horses. He did nothing showy-he merely dismounted easily from his riding horse and remounted a huge roan war horse with nostrils so red that he appeared to breathe fire. Then he took a lance from his squire and raised it in the air.

The herald blew his trumpet again. “For the second time, the Red Knight challenges any child born of woman to meet him, steel to steel, in the lists. He maintains the right of the Queen, the chastity of her body, the purity of her heart. Let any who stand against her beware! My knight offers a contest of the weapons of war, until one shall be defeated, or dead.”

The crowd roared in approval.

The Red Knight began to ride to the head of the lists, lance in hand.

The King was seen to bite his lip. His face writhed as if inhabited by snakes.

De Rohan glared at de Vrailly. “Your grace, this is mere foolish posturing. Let me press the order of arrest.”

De Vrailly looked at his former standard bearer with utter contempt. “You are not only a caitiff but a fool,” he said. “By God and Saint Denis, D’Eu was right about you. If you do not let me fight, these people will go to their graves believing their Queen was innocent.”

De Rohan and de Vrailly locked gazes-Amicia could see that each thought the other a fool.

Amicia also noted-with shock-that de Vrailly burned like a second sun in her alternate, aethereal sight.

Out in the lists, a dozen Royal Guardsmen stood sullenly under the royal box. A man in de Rohan’s livery was gesticulating at the Red Knight.

De Vrailly turned to the King. “You must let me fight-for your honour!”

The King’s eyes went back and forth like those of a trapped animal.

At the base of the stands, the Queen sat on a stool in her plain grey kirtle, her golden-brown hair lank but her face at rest. She looked at her champion-and then up into the royal box.

“Even now, I pity him,” the Queen said.

Blanche-over her first terror-cursed. “Pity who, your grace?” she asked. The coming of the Red Knight-Master Pye’s friend, and Ser Gerald Random’s and thus a good knight in her books-gave her hope, and Blanche had desperately needed some hope.

The Queen smiled. “The King, of course, my dear.”

“Christ on the cross, your grace! Why spare the King any of your pity? He’ll have no mercy for you.” Blanche looked down the lists and clapped her hands. The Red Knight’s near twin-the Green Knight-was cantering along the lists, entertaining the crowd, and shouting insults at the Galles.

The Queen was serene. “Those who have known pain should have mercy on others,” she said. “There sits my husband-whom I swore to defend ’til death do us part.” She frowned. “I find it hard to make room in my heart for him. But I would not wish his fate on any man.”

Blanche sighed. “Beyond my likes and dislikes, I suppose, your grace,” she said in obvious incomprehension.

The Queen raised a very sage eyebrow. “My gallant defender is the King’s son,” she said.

Blanche’s white hand went to her throat. “Jesu Christe!” she said-a true prayer and no blasphemy. “The Red Knight is the King’s by-blow?”

The Queen frowned.

Blanche cast her eyes down. “Apologies, your grace. I’m a laundress, not a courtesan-er-courtier.”

The Queen flashed her a smile. “You are no courtesan,” she said. “And you made me smile.”

The Red Knight clasped gauntlets with the Green Knight and then rode down the lists towards the Queen. The whole of the crowd, gentle and common, was on their feet.

Amicia watched a servant bring a cup. She needed no potent workings to know that the cup held poison. Or some poppy or other sleeping stuff.

There was no one around her to help her, and she knew of no way to affect this in the aethereal, without giving away her working. So she pushed past a pair of purple-clad guardsmen. Her path was eased by a sudden movement of the archbishop, who was looking at the red-clad lawyer.

“Just see to it,” the archbishop hissed.

His eyes went right past her, but his bulk opened a path until she was able to put her hip into the serving man. He didn’t fall, but the cup of wine soaked Du Corse.

She stepped back-her heart beating overtime. Heads turned, but every head looked at the serving man.

He was red in the face, protesting his innocence.

De Rohan struck him with the back of his hand, his two rings cutting furrows in the servant’s cheek. Amicia flinched.

The King shook his head vehemently.

De Vrailly stood his ground. “I am your Champion!” he said. “If I do not fight then you are admitting the charges are false.” His accented Alban carried.

“Free the Queen!” shouted a bold onlooker.

The cry was taken up.

The archbishop leaned over and whispered in the King’s ear.

The King turned. He was pale-but in control of his face.

The King stood straighter. “De Vrailly,” he said. “For what it is worth, I believe my wife is innocent. Will you still fight?”

De Vrailly spat. “Bah!” he cried. “I’ll prove her faithlessness and the murder of my friend D’Eu on this Red Knight.”

The archbishop made a signal.

The King shook his head. “Very well,” he said, with real regret.

De Vrailly began to walk down the steps to the lists.

The archbishop followed. As the King began to follow the archbishop to the lists, Amicia did her best to move along with him, an arm’s length away.

The man in red looked at her-right at her.

He was in the midst of a working. Magicking a silver chalice-a chalice of water.

He went back to his working, the traces of his fingers and his symbols leaving marks in the aethereal. She lacked the kind of training that would tell her what he was doing-another poison?

Suddenly his eyes came back to her-now wide with realization.

She had no idea what gave her away.

The Red Knight walked his horse to the base of the steps as if he had nothing to fear from the Galles or the purple soldiers waiting there. The marshal of the lists had beckoned him, and now stood with a sword in one hand and a set of gospels in the other. All eyes were on him.

Amicia moved a few inches closer to the King and the archbishop, and readied her shields.

The archbishop took the chalice, held it aloft, and began to pray loudly.

Most people fell silent-many fell on their knees, and Amicia joined them because it took her out of the sight line of the man in the scarlet hood. In front of her, a Gallish squire brought out de Vrailly’s magnificent war horse. The knight himself checked his girth and stirrups before turning and kneeling before the archbishop.

The Red Knight dismounted and knelt, too, a good sword’s length between himself and the Gallish knight.

The prayer came to an end.

The marshal went to the Red Knight. “Do you swear on your honour, your arms and faith, to fight only in a cause that is just, and to abide by all the law of arms in the list?”

The Red Knight didn’t open his visor, but his voice was loud. “I do,” he said.

The marshal went to de Vrailly. “Do you swear on your honour, your arms and your faith, to fight only in a cause that is just, and to abide by all the law of arms in the list?”

“I do,” de Vrailly said.

Both men rose.

“Stop!” roared the archbishop. He took the chalice. “The Red Knight is a notorious sorcerer. Have you any magical defence about you?” he shouted. “I accuse you! God has shown me!” And he flipped holy water from the chalice at the Red Knight.

It sparkled in the air-a brilliant lightshow of red and green and blue.

Amicia moved from her knees even as the crowd gasped.

The marshal frowned. “It is against the law of arms to bear anything worked with the arts into the lists,” he roared.

The Red Knight started back. He was on his feet-

The marshal struck him lightly with his mace of office. “You are barred from the lists,” he said.

Amicia heard the Red Knight grunt as if in pain, but she was already moving. She took the chalice from the archbishop’s hands as smoothly as if he was cooperating with her in a dance, and upended the contents over the kneeling Gallish knight even as she placed her own working-a true working-to make the water show anything hermetical. The man in the red hood had merely faked the effect with an illusion.

In front of five thousand people, de Vrailly glowed. If the Red Knight had sparkled with faery light, de Vrailly burned like a torch of hermeticism.

The flame of the holy water hitting de Vrailly was so bright that a hundred paces away, Wat Tyler had to turn his head to keep the dazzle from his eyes. He cursed as he lost his target.

The other Galles were speechless. Amicia stepped back-but the man in red saw her. “She-” he began.

And then he pursed his lips, looked at the archbishop, and said nothing.

The crowd was clamouring.

The marshal had not been bought or paid for-he struck de Vrailly with his mace. “You, too, are barred from the lists,” he said.

De Vrailly’s visor was up-and his face worked like a baby’s. He knelt there as if unable to move.

It was Du Corse who took charge. The crowd-both gentle and common-was restless. Commoners were beginning to challenge the lines of guards on the edge of the lists, and the twenty or so purple-liveried episcopal guards around the Queen were not looking either numerous or dangerous enough. He sent a page for his routiers and made a motion to his own standard bearer.

The archbishop was still stunned by the apparition of de Vrailly, the King’s Champion, suffused with a sticky green fire that could only mean a deep hermetical protection-cast, of all things, by the Wild. Satan’s snare.

In front of them, a line of knights appeared behind the Red Knight. A Green Knight put his hand on the Red Knight’s shoulder, and behind him was a giant of a man in a plain steel harness and a surcoat of tweed, and then another giant, this one blond, bearing the differenced arms of the Earl of Towbray.

The Green Knight stood forth.

“I will stand for the Queen,” he said. His voice carried.

At his back, Tom Lachlan raised his visor. “And I,” he said.

Ser Michael didn’t dismount, but he snapped his great helm off his head and let it hang from the buckle. “And I, your grace. My father is attainted, but I am not. There are many knights here to fight for your wife today, your grace. I am a peer of Alba. I demand justice.”

The Green Knight did not raise his visor. He merely saluted the marshal. “Try your holy water on me,” he said.

The marshal took the empty cup-and held it out to the archbishop.

The man in the red hood made his working-while the archbishop’s own secretary frowned in disgust so plain that Amicia noted it.

Amicia did nothing to prevent his casting. The archbishop’s hands moved with an ill grace.

The man in the red hood choked. The water flew, and did nothing but make the Green Knight’s surcoat wet.

“Choose your champion!” he called, his voice mocking.

Amicia would have grinned, if she had not been so afraid.

Because, of course, Gabriel was a very creature of magick. And so, he had turned the working himself. His skill towered over Red Hood’s the way an eagle towers over a squirrel.

The archbishop turned on his two secretaries.

Du Corse frowned and looked at de Rohan as the crowd roared its approval of the Green Knight. “Someone must fight him,” he said.

De Rohan rolled his eyes. “Just take the lot,” he hissed. “We have the men. Surround them and take them.”

Du Corse shook his head. “Nay, cousin. Someone must fight.” He looked at the commoners pushing against the guards. “Or we’ll all be dead before nightfall.”

“Very well,” de Rohan said. “You.”

Du Corse smiled a hard smile. “No,” he said.

“L’Isle d’Adam, then.”

Du Corse nodded. “But-” he said. “No. I recommend that you fight your own battle, de Rohan.”

De Rohan’s eyes narrowed.

Behind him, the King moved. Heads turned again.

“Yes,” the King said. “You have been her loudest and most constant accuser, de Rohan. Take up your cousin’s sword.”

A chair had been brought for the King. He was sitting by the lists now-more alert than many of the Gallish knights had ever seen him.

Amicia began to edge away from the royal box.

One of de Rohan’s yellow and black men-at-arms was pointing at her. She saw the man, and she steadied her working, which had slipped as she had moved in the real.

The man’s gaze slid off her even as she sat suddenly between two Alban families in the lowest bench of the stands. There was no room for her, but men on either hand instinctively made space.

The black and yellow man-at-arms looked her way, and then his attention-and everyone else’s-was on the lists.

Inside the Green Knight’s helmet, Gabriel Muriens tried to distance himself from the heady brew of excitement and pure fear that rose to choke him.

His heart was beating like a hummingbird’s wings, his chest felt tight and his arms weak.

“It is easier to face Thorn in desperate combat than to do this with five thousand people watching and everything on the line,” he thought.

“I volunteered to do this,” he thought.

“I don’t know this knight,” he thought.

All his thought had been bent on de Vrailly. And when he had admitted that Gavin was the better lance, he had freed himself from all of the anxiety of the moment, and settled for the petty stress of command.

And now it was all on him anyway. His mind multiplied his fears.

And he wondered how and why de Vrailly had been disqualified.

I should be relieved, he thought.

Instead, his lance felt like lead, and the points of his shoulder ached as if he’d jousted all day, and his great helm seemed to suffocate him.

But there was Toby, checking his stirrups, and Gavin, of all people, holding his shield.

“You bastard,” Gavin said. He wasn’t really smiling. He was mad as hell. “You always get your way.”

“This was none of my doing,” Gabriel said.

Gavin pulled the straps of his jousting shield tight over his arm harness with more emphasis than was necessary. “No, of course not,” he said. His tone didn’t give away whether he believed his brother or not.

“Gavin, I would not cede the lists to you and then take them away,” he said.

“Really?” Gavin asked. “Then go with God and win. Even if you did, brother, I hope you win.” Gavin slapped him on the shoulder. Gavin-on the ground-looked at Toby. “Who is riding for the King?”

“Marshal called him de Rohan.” Toby shrugged.

“I don’t know any of these Galles,” Gavin admitted.

“Anyway,” Gabriel said, a little pettishly through his great helm, “I’m not fighting de Vrailly.”

Gavin nodded. “That’s why I’m not pulling you off your horse and beating you with the butt of your own lance,” he said. “You as nervous as you sound?”

Gabriel swallowed with some difficulty.

“Give him water,” Gavin said. “Your man’s in the saddle. You have a better horse. He’s taller. He’s got a very long lance. You know the trick we practised in Morea?”

Gabriel drank the water. He didn’t quite feel like a new man, but he felt better. “You think?” he asked.

“His lance is five hand-spans longer than yours, and his arms are longer as well,” Gavin said. “This is not sport-this is war. There are no tricks. If it were me, I’d lace my helm lightly so he could pluck it off without hurting my neck.”

Deep in his helm, Gabriel laughed. “You made me laugh, Gavin. For that alone, I thank you.”

“Marshal’s telling us to lace up.”

“Tell him I’ve been laced up an hour.” Gabriel made his horse rear slightly, and the crowd shouted.

“Get him,” Gavin said.

Bad Tom leaned in. “Just fewkin’ kill him,” he said. He smiled. “Be a right bastard and put your fewkin’ iron in any way you can and don’t show off or fewk around or act like yersel.” He grinned.

Gabriel looked at the marshal. He had his baton over his head, and was looking at the King.

“The moment I have him,” Gabriel said, “go for the Queen.”

“Even if he has you, boyo,” Bad Tom said. “I can see Ranald fra’ here.”

The Green Knight flicked his lance at all of his friends.

He half reared-exactly as the baton dropped his horse’s front hooves were touching the ground. Ataelus exploded forward.

Gabriel had the sensation that time, rather than stopping, was sliding. As his adversary accelerated, Gabriel lowered his lance point too far, seated the butt of his lance in his lance rest, and let his point drop below the level of his own waist like an utterly inept jouster.

Any strike at the opposing horse was a foul.

Everything was moving so fast, yet in the hoof beats before the crossing of the spears, Gabriel felt the entanglement. The world about him was like a lattice of ice crystals-an infinite connection, man to man, thought to thought, earth to horse to lance to plot to consequence.

He was in it.

De Rohan’s lance was firm and solid, the steel tip all but invisible as they closed.

In practice, Gabriel had made this work once in three tries.

In the half a heartbeat that the spearheads passed one another, Gabriel used the cut-out corner of his shield as a fulcrum to lever his spear point up. His rising spear shaft crossed the oncoming might of the longer shaft, and struck it-hard.

His motion had been a trifle late, and the Gallish lance caught the bottom left of his great helm, slamming sideways into his head-he relaxed as much as his inner tension would allow, tried to be the jouster that his dead master-at-arms had wanted and that Ser Henri had derided, flowed with his adversary’s blow and in the second half heartbeat his own point caught his adversary in the shield, just over his bridle hand-

His solid ash lance exploded in his hand-and he was past, the royal box a blur on his left as Ataelus hurtled down the lists. He was the best fighting horse Gabriel had ever had-he slowed without a touch of the rein.

There were no barriers down the middle, because this was a war joust.

And his adversary was already coming at him.

Of course-his lance had not broken. He was choosing to fight continuously, instead of allowing his opponent to re-arm.

Gabriel dropped the butt of his lance as Ataelus reared and pivoted on his rear legs, front legs kicking. Ataelus let out an equine battle cry, a great scream that filled the air, and then they were straight to a gallop.

Gabriel drew his long war-sword across his body. He still had his shield. There was something amiss about his adversary-but the man had his spear in its rest, and the point was coming, held across the charging horse’s crupper in the proper way for fighting in the lists-

Five strides from contact, Gabriel gave Ataelus the slightest right knee and spur, and the horse turned-more of a gliding sidestep-

– and then another.

The lance tip now had to track a crossing target-

Gabriel caught the oncoming lance-off angle, if only slightly-on the forte of his long sword and flipped it aside with an enormous advantage in leverage and Ataelus took one more stride, just threading diagonally past the onrushing white charger so that the two knights passed, not left to left as de Rohan intended, but right to right.

De Rohan tried to raise the butt of his lance-

The Green Knight’s pommel smashed into his visor. It did no damage beyond a spectacular flash of sparks-but the pommel slid to the shield side, crossing de Rohan’s neck even as Ataelus turned on his front feet so that the two knights were crushed together for an instant.

The Green Knight’s arm locked on de Rohan’s head and he crashed to the dust as the Green Knight’s sword arm swept him from his saddle like the closing of an iron gate, wrenching him over the seat of his high saddle and staggering his horse, too, so that it tottered and fell a few steps on.

Ataelus, fully in hand, finished his turn.

The Green Knight let Ataelus come to a halt. Twenty feet away, de Rohan clawed his jousting helm off his head and drew his sword. It was clear that his left hand was injured, and blood dripped from his gauntlet and arm.

De Rohan’s sword went back. He spat. “Fuck it, then,” he said.

Tom Lachlan and Ser Michael and ten other knights began to ride along the north side of the lists. No one was watching them. Only Ser Gavin stayed in his brother’s box. He was watching the Green Knight with the intensity of a cat watching a mousehole.

“Do it,” he whispered.

In the royal box, the King got to his feet. He towered over his courtiers, and he put his hands on the rail of the enclosure and leaned forward as if he would jump the rail.

Gabriel saw his knights move towards the Queen and he made a decision. He backed Ataelus a dozen steps.

Fifty paces away, Gavin said, “No. No, Gabriel.”

The Green Knight unbuckled his great helm, pulled the lace under his chin, and dropped it in the sand. And then he dismounted.

Gavin shouted, “No! Just kill him!”

The Green Knight-now only in a steel cap over his aventail-walked carefully across the sand towards his opponent, who held his great sword over his head.

A hundred paces from the King, Wat Tyler drew his great yew bow all the way to his ear. He raised the head of his arrow four fingers’ breadths above the head of his target. A dozen people saw him.

No one stopped him.

He loosed.

The Green Knight moved forward, passing one foot past the other like a dancer, his shoulders level.

He pressed straight in, not pausing for the usual circling.

Again, just as he pressed into de Rohan’s measure, he felt the entanglement.

He almost flinched. As it was, he was a fraction late catching de Rohan’s great blow-instead of rolling harmlessly off his rising finestre like rain off a good barn roof, the two swords crossed at the hilts, and he was weaker at the bind.

De Rohan pushed.

The Green Knight slammed his pommel, two-handed-into the exposed chainmail of the back of de Rohan’s neck even as the Gallish knight snapped a rising cut into his torso, cutting his beautiful green silk surcoat and bruising him.

De Rohan staggered back.

Tom Lachlan was a horse-length in front. He had his horse well in hand and unlike Gavin, he trusted his captain to kill the Gallish knight and move on with the plan of the day.

Bad Tom had no need to wait around while the Galles and their rats came to their senses. Nor did he have any hesitation about killing Albans. Hillmen had been killing Albans for fifty generations.

He put his spurs to his horse when he was almost a lance length from the first episcopal guardsmen. His black beast seemed more to leap than to gallop, and his lance slew one guard, passing through his crushed breastplate and destroying the hip of the man next to him before the horse was in among them, his hooves like four warhammers.

Had there not been nine more knights behind Tom Lachlan roaring his cry-“Lachlan for Aa!”-it might have been possible for the twenty or so guardsmen to rally and fight back. Or perhaps not.

Five of them were messily dead before Michael’s mace crushed a helmet.

He set his horse at the barrier surrounding the Queen and, armoured knight and all, the gallant animal leaped. He landed and his mace licked out to kill the sergeant who, with more loyalty than might have been expected, had moved to put a spear in the Queen. Blanche had the other end of his spear. She was spattered with his death.

Chris Foliak’s horse made the leap, too, and the dapper knight reached down a hand.

“A rescue, your grace,” Foliak said. He didn’t await her answer, but pulled her over his saddle.

Ser Alcaeus, a more prosaic man in every way, had lifted the gate to the barrier with his sword.

“Bring Blanche!” the Queen shouted, but the knights were all turning their horses, and Blanche had already slipped under the barrier-rescuing herself was her specialty, and the gore of a dozen dead guardsmen might haunt her memory later, but for now she was free, and running. She ran for the end of the lists. Something was happening in the middle-she’d lost track of the fight when the rescue started.

Thorn stood in the deep woods, a trebuchet’s throw from the walls of Ticondaga, watching the castle and events therein through the lens of the awareness of fifty insects slaved to his will.

He had moved on from moths. And Ghause was far too busy working to defeat him to watch for his simpler intrusions.

Yet even as she shored up her castle’s hermetical defences and turned his workings, her attention was elsewhere, and Thorn followed her as avidly as the moths followed a candle, waiting for her to make her great working. He had been ready for days-indeed, Ser Hartmut and Orley importuned him daily about his promises of breaking the castle’s defences. The castle had sent out messengers through hidden passages.

Thorn cared nothing for any relief force. Ghause, his target, was focused on the Queen in far-off Harndon. He wished he knew why, the more easily to predict her actions. Six months, she had laid a working of such power and complexity that Thorn readily admitted he had underestimated her.

She was powerful.

But she had made an error. She had compounded that error. And now, as she watched the Queen’s rescue in her crystal, he watched her.

Ser Hartmut and Kevin Orley were away to the south of the castle, storming Mount Hope, or so they claimed, intent on taking the one piece of ground that would overlook the castle walls.

Thorn felt Ash’s imminence before it happened.

He became as two men-a pair of fools, dressed in faded, tattered motley.

Both men were juggling arrows.

And laughing-the sort of horrible, derisive laughter that bullies use to torment victims in the back alleys of the world.

Tyler’s arrow slammed into the King.

The King fell.

Ash began to caper-both of him. “Beat that!” he said. “Do you not think that the silken girdle that binds the robe of Alba is ripped asunder?” His two bodies laughed, and their laughter was a cacophony and a polyphony of laughter. “She thought it was about the woman!” Ash roared in delight, and slapped all his thighs. “I lied to her, and she believed me!”

Thorn shuddered in distaste, wondering to what he had tied himself. “Tyler is more my creature than yours,” he said.

Both heads turned. “There are no creatures. The wonder of the thing is that they do it to themselves.” The laughter barked out, mad and high. “Oh, we shall have merry times. Look, Thorn. For all their work, we have just erased Alba as if it had never been-with one arrow.”

One of him turned a somersault and the other began to juggle swords.

“But the Queen…” Thorn began-and then he saw it, too.

“The Queen has only a few hours to live,” the Ashes chortled. “She’ll be killed by her own!”

De Vrailly could not face humiliation, or people. He walked away-past the royal box, past the horse enclosure at the back, and then west to his own beautiful white pavilion.

There was no one there to disarm him-no wine, no water.

He knelt on his prie-dieu.

He raised his arms, and then, almost without volition, he screamed, “WHY?”

Amicia rose as she saw de Rohan knocked from his horse. No one would pay her any mind, whether she was be-spelled or not, and she slipped lightly along the bench, cursed by those who needed a better view.

She was still ten men away when the arrow struck the King. Instantly, she reached out in the aethereal.

She had healed him before, and had today wiped the drug from his body, so she bounded after him into the dimming darkness of his inner sanctum. He had no talent and so his sanctum had no form-

The arrow had struck below his heart. Even as she reached for the damage inside him, and tried to slow the tearing of his great heart, he was going.

Amicia knew what was at stake-the peace of Alba, the lives of innocents. She did what she would not otherwise have, what she had been taught never to do.

She followed the fleeting shadow that was leaving the sanctum, trying to hold it with one aethereal hand while her other hand bound the damaged vein that gushed blood into the cavity of his body and his lungs.

For a long breath, all seemed to be in balance. And then she realized that all her balance was a lie, and she was following him down into the darkness.

She had made a terrible error.

There was a near-riot around the Queen’s barriers and men were running around the King’s box-it was hard for Gabriel to assess what was happening twenty paces away while keeping his focus on de Rohan.

“The King is hit!” shouted a man.

A woman screamed.

Gabriel felt the ring on his finger burn and a great store of his ops torn away from him.

Amicia.

De Rohan read his body language aright, and attacked, a flurry of mighty two-handed strokes. That Gabriel guessed they were fuelled by desperation took nothing from their intensity.

De Rohan cut from his shoulder-right, left, right, like a strong boy practising at a pell. But de Rohan was the match for any knight. His blows were too hard to ignore, and fast-as fast as Mag’s stitches in fine linen.

Gabriel gave a step. Then another-his second cover.

The third fast blow came with a deception, a reversal.

Part of it hit his skull cap, and he was stunned. But he’d trained to fight when stunned, and his body continued-his left hand grabbed the blade of his sword and he raised it, making any further smashing blows difficult to throw and pointless.

And now it was Gabriel who was desperate.

He could feel Amicia-slipping. Somewhere…

He lost de Rohan’s sword and thrust desperately with his own, and hit something even as he took another blow in the side-this one under his arm. It drew blood, de Rohan’s point pricking through his chain mail.

With terrifying clarity, he realized that whatever was happening to Amicia was severing her link to him. And his invulnerability.

De Rohan cut-a flashy lateral cut from the hip that snapped up to be almost vertical. Gabriel counter-cut.

He and de Rohan came together crossed at the hilts, and de Rohan tried to control his sword at the bind, pushing hard. He had an instant of initiative and he let his sword roll as he stepped, and he slammed his free left hand into de Rohan’s face.

Blood flowed-

De Rohan’s blade licked out-creased his cap and cut into his forehead-again. The flow of blood almost blinded him.

But his experience of near death at the hands of an assassin in Morea steadied him. The wounds to his forehead were not killing blows. His vision functioned.

De Rohan was very strong, even with his hand wounded. And he threw strong blows.

“I’ve given him too much time,” Gabriel said in the calm of his palace. He took an instant-no time at all, in the real of the fight-to push all the ops he could easily find-straight down his link to Amicia.

Then he lowered his sword-all the way to Coda Longa.

Amicia was on her bridge and yet she was drowning, and there was neither calm nor focus, and her world was utterly black. She had let go of the King-he was gone into the grasp of death, and in her fear and anguish Amicia feared that she, too, was already dead and her disembodied soul was struggling futilely, as she could no longer make any contact with the real.

But something was keeping her anchored on her bridge. She could feel its aethereal planks under her feet.

It was utterly black around her, but as she struggled against the dark she saw a flash of pale light-the light of the sun, from the ring on her finger.

She found the strength to pray.

The bridge under her feet began to give way.

She was in the midst of death. She had gone too far-too far, too far.

For some reason she looked up.

Above her, in the contradictory way of the aethereal, there was light that never entered the depths where she was. Above her was God’s light, and she was deep into death’s darkness. The darkness seemed heavy and potent, and she imagined that she was past the point from which she could return to air and light, except-except-

Gabriel’s sword snapped up, low to high, a rising head cut that turned slightly in its last hand’s breadth.

De Rohan snapped a strong cover, throwing a hard blow at the flat of Gabriel’s sword.

The Green Knight’s sword snapped aside-driven hard to the outside.

Gabriel turned it, as he had always intended, the pommel rotating under his hand as the blade rotated on top of it, the point transcribing the base of a cone and the cross guard turning in place until the Green Knight’s sword had changed sides of his adversary’s blade in the beat of a faery’s wing.

Gabriel reached in with his left hand, caught his own sword point and the middle of his opponent’s blade in the same grip. Ruthlessly, he used his own left hand as a guide, his sharp blade cutting his glove and his hand as his point-neatly guided-slid through de Rohan’s left eye and into his brain.

De Rohan was dead long before his knees hit the ground.

Before his head followed his knees, Gabriel was in his own palace and his hands formed a pillar of fire-

Amicia reached up towards heaven and grasped the rope of green fire that rolled down and took it. Only as her hands closed on it did she know what she had grasped-her working for Gabriel’s invulnerability, which she held in her guard. She was voiding it.

She might have let go, but high in the light of the aethereal, Gabriel pulled. And out of the shadow of death, she rose.

She found her bridge-she perceived herself as under it, drowning in power, in potentia, and she swam-she had never seen power like this-

He was on her bridge. He grasped her by both hands and lifted, and she had her feet on solid ground. The aethereal was more a dream state than a physical reality-she had, simultaneously, never left her bridge and now more fully occupied it.

He looked at her. “Your bridge is a particularly complex metaphor,” he said. “I don’t think I could fall off my palace, but then, I can’t see how I’d get back in, either.”

She laughed-the sheer embrace of life. She reached out into the real. She wanted the real, and breath, and hope-

The King was still dead, two arms’ lengths away, and the archbishop was bent over his body. Behind Amicia, out in the sandy length of the lists, the Green Knight stood over the body of his dead foe.

For a moment, everything was balanced.

Then the archbishop raised his head. “They killed the King!” he shouted, in passable Alban. His vaguely pointing hand was accusatory. And it pointed in the direction of the Green Knight, standing over his adversary.

Du Corse put a small horn to his lips and blew.

The man in the red hood raised a small shield. It was the first open display of hermetical talent of the day and people screamed. There was a stampede from the stands-above her, the men and women in the topmost rows began to fight to get out, and the stands moved-first resounding like a drum and then developing a motion-a swaying-

Amicia got off the lower rung of benches, hiked her kirtle, and ran. Ser Gelfred had told her to make for the western end of the lists, the red pavilion. It was hard to miss, and she was not afraid to stretch her legs. Hundreds of people-half the gentry of the home counties-were running.

But behind her, before she could go ten full strides, the stands began to collapse. Screams of fear changed to animal pain.

Amicia stopped. She looked back, into the cloud of dust. The length of a horse away, to her right, the archbishop was clear of the ruin of the royal box and the stands and was giving orders-his voice had a hint of hysteria, but men and women were obeying. Du Corse was using the spear in his hand to push men into line, making a box of foot soldiers around the archbishop.

A heavy arrow fell from the sky and struck a Gallish foot soldier to the ground. The arrow struck the top of his head and went through his helmet and through his skull.

Nor were the soldiers the only targets. Someone was dropping arrows into the screaming survivors of the collapse of the stands.

She smelled smoke.

Ser Gabriel stood alone in the middle of the lists. It took him too long to fully recover his senses, and he felt exhausted-the pain in his back from the moth, the sudden drain of ops-

It took him too long to register that the stands had collapsed, were afire, and someone was shooting into them. More than one man.

“Fuck,” he said distinctly.

His plan was shredding away into chaos. He’d lost Amicia in the dust-and now, smoke-and he suspected that Bad Tom and Michael were doing exactly what they’d planned-riding like fury for Lorica.

His plan hadn’t included being on foot without a horse in the middle of a disaster.

Habit made him wipe his blade clean. Only the last four inches had tasted blood, and he used de Rohan’s surcoat.

Sheathed his sword. He did these simple tasks while his senses took in the chaos around him and he tried to make sense of it.

He could feel Amicia was casting. He felt her work almost directly, so closely were they linked.

She was healing.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

But he could sense where she was.

Amicia was a woman who believed things, and let her beliefs shape her actions.

She knew the possible consequences of lingering. But she was a healer, and hundreds of people were injured-maybe thousands. She made herself turn and go back to the stands. She found a middle-aged woman with a broken arm, and mended it, and helped the woman find her daughter, a child-neck broken but horrifyingly still alive.

This is why God made me, Amicia thought. She prayed, and as she prayed, she worked.

Wat Tyler continued to drop arrows. No one stopped him. In fact, people ran from him as if he’d attacked them, or merely averted their eyes.

When he’d dropped his last heavy arrow, he turned to find a dozen men and two young women watching-watching as if it were something entertaining.

“It’s time we strike back,” he said.

“Against the Galles?” one of the women asked him.

“Against them all, honey.” Tyler wished he had more arrows. He’d never really thought he’d get the King-the fucking King. And he’d always imagined a hundred enraged men-at-arms coming at him like dogs on a wounded hart. Not this-a half-empty field and no foes. A hundred yards away, the collapse of the stands had shattered any organization, and he had done his part.

He turned to leave. His handful of new recruits were still loosing arrows-he could see one, even now, skidding in the air because Luke had plucked his string. He looked back. “I’m a Jack,” he said. “We mean to pull all the nobles down and have a government without them. Any of you want to come-it’s a hard, thankless life. And when they recover from today, they’ll hunt us like wolves.” He grinned. “Except that we bite back.”

One man muttered that he’d just killed innocent men and women.

“No one is innocent,” Tyler spat. “They take our land and our silver and years off our lives. Kill them all, comrade. The babes and the mothers, too.”

The prettier girl-the one with almond eyes and red-blond hair and a fine wool overgown-started kirtling up her skirts. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I can use a bow, too.” She didn’t smile-she looked grim as death. “I’m Lessa,” she said.

“You’re too fine to make a Jack,” he said.

“Try me,” she said. She didn’t toss her head or flirt. Out on the sand, the archbishop’s men were becoming visible as the dust settled and Tyler wished he had a dozen more arrows.

“I live with beggars and I move fast and if you slow me, I’ll leave you,” he said to her.

She shrugged.

Two of the men nodded. They were more his usual recruits-thickset, stubby-fingered ploughmen in thick wool, who stank of unwashed bodies from a yard away. They had heavy staffs and big leather bags.

“Take us, too,” one said. They looked like enough to be brothers.

“Sam,” said one.

“Tom,” said the other.

Tyler liked the looks of both of them. “It’s a hard life,” he said.

“Try pushing the master’s plough,” said Sam. “Let’s kill ’em all.”

Tom clearly liked the looks of the girl.

Tyler winded his horn. Some of the episcopal soldiers looked his way, but he had to give the signal or some new clod would die.

Then, without another word, he ran north, into the clear air. There was a tree line past the black smithery, about two hundred paces. His rendezvous point.

He was a little surprised when he looked back to see five of them follow him.

The stands were well-ablaze. At the north end of the stands, a crowd had gathered-as best he could tell, they were pulling survivors from the smoke and broken timbers.

“Where’s the Queen?” the archbishop demanded. “Get her, and put her to death.”

What Du Corse might have hesitated to do an hour before now seemed to make better sense. He blew his horn three more times, and more and more of his men-at-arms began to rally. His standard bearer appeared, and his squire, and he mounted. The smoke troubled his war horse-he got a dozen lances behind him.

“Follow me,” he said.

They only had to ride a hundred paces for him to see they were far too late. The Queen was gone-her guard massacred.

Du Corse’s men-at-arms-Etruscans and Galles and a few Iberians-crossed themselves and muttered.

At his elbow, l’Isle d’Adam was standing in his stirrups. “Where did the arrows come from? The arrows that killed the King?”

A desire to protect the archbishop-the kingdom’s chancellor, after all-had kept Du Corse from acting. Now, though, he realized that no one had gone for the King’s killer.

“North,” he said. “My impression is that the arrows came from the north.” He caught l’Isle d’Adam’s bridle. “No-time for that later. They have the Queen.”

“Who has the Queen?” l’Isle d’Adam asked.

Du Corse wrinkled his nose. “This Red Knight, I assume.”

L’Isle d’Adam tugged his beard. “And where is de Vrailly?”

Du Corse shook his helmeted head. “I haven’t seen him since the marshal dismissed him,” he said.

Jean de Vrailly knelt in his pavilion, before his triptych of the Virgin flanked by Saint George and Saint Eustachios.

“You lied,” he shouted. “You are no angel of God!”

And then he hung his head and wept.

Blanche wasn’t lost, but the collapse of the stands took her by surprise, and she was so close that a splinter went into her thigh-she shrieked, and then she was down-in a long moment of clarity she realized that it was not as bad as it felt; more the shock of the appearance of a dagger-like piece of wood in her leg than real pain. Carefully, she pulled the wicked splinter out.

Blood soaked her grey kirtle instantly.

The sight of the blood made her vision tunnel, and she tasted salt and bile.

I will not throw up.

Rough hands caught her under her shoulders.

“All right now, mistress. You’ll be all right now,” said a male voice.

She started to scream.

Another pair of hands caught her legs. “Quiet, now, mistress,” said the other man. He was a priest, and seemed an unlikely assailant.

She protested, and they ignored her, grunting as they carried her. They took her past the fire, around the eastern end of the wreckage where the smoke was clear.

There was a woman-a very pretty woman-there in a stained yellow kirtle. She had flowers in her hair. There were a dozen men and women on the ground around her, and the two men carried Blanche closer and put her down gently on the packed dirt.

The priest bowed. “Another for you, lady,” he said.

The woman in yellow knelt by Blanche and said a prayer. She pulled Blanche’s kirtle and her shift up to her thigh, put a hand on the bleeding hole ripped by the splinter, and closed it.

Blanche moaned, not in pain, but the expectation of pain. But there was none.

The woman in yellow smiled at her.

“You healed me!” Blanche said. Of course she’d heard of such things. The reality was-beautiful, somehow, despite the screams and the clawing of smoke at the back of her throat and the running feet.

“Two children, lady-under a beam,” begged a smoke-blackened man.

The lady rose, made the sign of the cross, and followed the man into the fire.

The dust of the collapse of the stands was beginning to settle, but the smoke was now everywhere, and the mild breeze seemed to push all the smoke to their end of the lists but despite the smoke and his anguish, Gabriel made himself run. He had reserves, and he burned them, running for the place most likely to find his horse. And perhaps his brother.

And against all odds, Gavin was there, and so was Ataelus.

“You are a fucking idiot,” Gavin said, and then wasted twenty heartbeats crushing him in an embrace. “What would you have done if I’d ridden away? Grown wings and flown?”

Gabriel felt like crying-he’d never been so glad to see Gavin in his life.

“Tom’s long gone. Five minutes or more. We need to get clear before the archbishop gets his head together and has us taken. Their constable has gathered twenty men-at-arms and he’ll have more, no doubt.” Gavin was fussing with his mount’s girth.

“Gavin, I have totally misplayed this.” Gabriel found himself staring at Nell, who was handing him his reins.

“Tell me another time. In the name of God, get on the horse.” Gavin suited action to word and got his armoured leg across. “Have I mentioned what an idiot you are?”

Nell grinned, and vaulted onto her own rouncy. “Toby rode with the knights,” she said.

The box-barriers on three sides-protected them from view, at least for a moment.

“Come on!” shouted Gavin.

“Amicia’s-”

Gavin put the spurs to his horse and rode out of the box, headed east into the smoke.

Gabriel turned to his page. “I’m going for Sister Amicia,” he said.

She nodded-and drew her sword.

Gabriel smiled. “God bless you,” he said. He didn’t even think about it.

Nell followed him as he turned south, towards the stands. The archbishop was in the middle of a knot of armoured men, and being moved-quickly-to the north, out of the smoke. Thousands of men and women and children were running, but the space of the lists themselves, because of the barriers, was mostly clear, and Gabriel rode along the lists, over his fallen enemy’s forgotten corpse, and towards where he could feel the pulse of Amicia’s working.

There was shouting behind them. Armoured men on horseback had noticed them.

Nell pointed. “Black and yellow coat armour,” she shouted.

Gabriel wished he was not in harness, or on a war horse. But Ataelus was the best big horse he’d ever known, and he put on a pretty burst of speed-a tremendous spurt for a heavy horse-and they rode around the end of the wreckage of the stands. There was a crowd-a thick crowd, perhaps a thousand people. Bodies lay on blankets, and there were men-and women and children-in blood-soaked bandages, a long line leading to a small circle-

“She went into the fire!” said an old woman. “She’s a living saint, sent by God himself!”

A hundred people were on their knees. Others collected the injured-and the dead.

They were not just the dead of the collapse of the wooden stands, either. Here was a young boy with a heavy war arrow that had ripped his soft flesh, and there, a toddler trampled to death by panicked people. Her mother had her in her arms and raised her to Gabriel.

“I stepped on her-oh, Jesus save me, I stepped on her, and she’s dead.” She had the misery in her voice of the inconsolable.

A man shouted, “Soldiers coming!”

A woman screamed.

“Hold the horses,” Gabriel snapped and dismounted, cursing the deep pinprick in his left underarm and all the pain in his hand-and head.

He went into his palace and determined that he had little more than his reserves of ops and that his wounds were nothing-and that Amicia was indeed deep in the burning wreckage.

He set his feet and cast-a wind

water-

and a cloud of bees.

He wove gold and green into a net, and cast all three at once.

Then he followed Amicia into the smoke.

The two children were the two Amicia had slipped past when first she climbed the stands-days ago, it seemed. The beam was the structure’s main supporting beam, and it pinned them across their broken legs-massive fractures.

The fire was an inferno, hell come to earth.

As a little girl, Amicia’s village had a bonfire for All Hallows. She could remember it-the making of it, the anticipation, and her horror as she saw its power, not just in the real, but the aethereal. Fire. Fast, and ruthless and without intelligence.

The fire had all the fuel of the royal box-hangings, painted with oils, and tapestries and wood partitions, furniture and beams and bleachers. It had an aethereal component, too. Someone-something had pushed the fire.

The two children were heartbeats from death with the smoke and fire-and the girl could not stop screaming. Her brother had already fainted.

Amicia lacked the potentia, after healing, and a foolish struggle with death, to both lift the beam and hold the fire. But her trust in God was so absolute that she drained herself, holding the fire at bay, while four brave normal men-a father, and three of his servants-heaved with futile intensity at the beam. The father was weeping openly at his own impotence.

“Why?” he screamed.

Amicia pushed on the flames.

Something on the other side pushed back, and laughed.

“Got you,” Gabriel said at her shoulder. He put his hands on the beam and it moved.

A sudden gust of wind, like the back of a storm god’s hand, slapped the fire away from Amicia.

She was knocked to her knees-instantly soaked to the skin, and steam rose, scalding, and stopped on her shield.

The bigger servant pulled the girl clear.

Gabriel grunted.

The father, his fine clothes ruined by smoke, got his son by the shoulders and pulled, and the boy screamed, denied the mercy of oblivion as his broken legs were wrenched from under the heavy wood.

They retreated the length of a house, and Amicia knelt. “Give me-” she demanded.

Gabriel put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m out,” he said. “Now get on my horse.”

“You saved us all,” the man said. “I’m-oh, my God-”

“Get on my horse-Nell!” he shouted.

The crowd had thinned-men-at-arms could be seen on the other side of the smoke.

Nell came through the crowd. She had no choice, and men cursed and women screamed at the two horses.

“I can save them,” Amicia said.

“Get on my horse,” Gabriel said. “Don’t be a fool. There’s no more you can do today. Other people can bandage them, and we’re about to be taken. Taken! Amicia!”

He got up on Ataelus, and extended his hand-his good right hand.

Behind him, his bees set upon the soldiers and the crowd somewhat indiscriminately.

“You’re the Green Knight?” asked a pretty blonde woman. She was so pretty, that with his life at stake and Amicia hesitating, he still saw her.

“Sometimes,” he answered.

She became bolder, and caught his stirrup. “Are you going to the Queen?” she asked. “I’m one of her women. A laundress.”

He could see no evil in her. “Nell!” he shouted.

Nell reached down and without a shade of his hesitation, grabbed Amicia’s hand and dragged her across her saddle.

Gabriel might have laughed, except he was too tired and too angry. He reached for the blonde woman as he turned his horse, got his good hand under her armpit a little more roughly than he had intended, and put his spurs into poor Ataelus, who deserved nothing of the kind.

The blonde woman squawked, and then he had her. She got a leg over the saddle even as Ataelus exploded into one of his bursts of speed.

A knot of men-at-arms and mounted soldiers burst out of the smoke, the crowd, with the bees at their heels.

Gabriel looked back. They were riding through the camp Ser Gerald Random had built for the visiting knights. Half the pavilions were empty, and some held squatters. But there were streets of wedge tents and streets of round pavilions, and double-ended pavilions for the richer lords, with cross streets so retinues could move about. It was like a clean, neat, festive military camp, and the tents stretched away for a third of a mile. The ropes-guy ropes and pegged wind-ropes-often came well out into the streets making it, in fact, a riding nightmare, even without twenty armed pursuers.

He locked his left arm across the young woman in front of him. “If I have to fight,” he shouted, “just fall off. Don’t stay.”

She didn’t answer.

Ataelus was a fine horse-the best, really-but he was not fast. His pursuers hadn’t made multiple passes in the lists, or been awake since dark morning.

They began to gain rapidly.

Nell, despite her smaller horse, had no such troubles-she was small, Amicia was thin, and they were drawing away from Ataelus and from the pursuit.

I’m going to be captured, Gabriel thought angrily.

He had a thought-glanced into his palace and was saddened to see that the golden thread was gone from his ankle.

Not so much gone, as a mere slip, a spider web filament.

So much for invulnerability.

He leaned into the ear of the woman in front of him. “I need you off,” he said.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He reined Ataelus in, turning to the right. Ataelus understood immediately, and when a little of his heavy speed was shed, he pivoted on his hind legs, almost fully stopped-and the woman slid to the ground with real agility, catching her skirts and rolling.

Nice legs…

Gabriel had his sword in his right hand and his reins in the left. There were at least a dozen men coming at him. But they were spread out over a furlong, and none of the leaders were knights.

They were on the main street of the northern knights’ camp-where the Red Knight and his company would have been in other circumstances. Gabriel could see the red pavilion that was his rally point-he was south and west of it, too far away to do any good.

He had no curses left. He went through the first six men without taking a bad blow-his own actions had been a blur of covers and short, vicious counter-cuts-and the seventh man was all alone and Gabriel reached out with his injured left hand, caught his bridle, and pulled as he back cut with his sword from a high left guard, parrying the man’s boar spear.

The pain was briefly intense as he pulled the horse’s head over-until the horse rolled, crushing its rider.

“That was stupid,” Gabriel said aloud, aware he’d just maimed his own hand.

In that moment, a red thunderbolt struck the rear of the men coming at him. Gavin-in his coat armour-had it all-the red surcoat, the panache, and the magnificent horse barding of red silk-and he looked like an ancient god of war as he struck the pursuers with a war hammer, killing and dismounting men with every swing.

Gabriel sat and watched his brother rout a small army. It was a brilliant feat of arms, and all Gabriel could manage was some desperate panting.

Gabriel backed Ataelus, looking to see if any of the men he’d dismounted were coming at him from behind. He turned his horse, and the blonde woman was astride one of the armoured pages, with a dagger at his throat.

He didn’t take her threat seriously, and he struck her in the side with his armoured fist.

She killed him. One push from her slim hands and he was dead.

She turned her head away and rolled off him.

“The rendezvous is this way,” Gavin said with some brotherly sarcasm. “Unless you’ve found more maidens to rescue? Christ, you have.”

Gavin saluted with a shockingly bloody war hammer. “Your servant, fair maid.”

The blonde woman put a hand to her mouth.

Gabriel put his own hand on hers. “Let’s see if we can manage the mounting better on a second try,” he said.

“You fair pulled my arm out of the socket last time,” the woman said reproachfully.

“I promise to do better,” Gabriel said.

“Who’s he?” the woman asked, pointing at the gore-besmattered knight. The pursuers had baulked-facing Toby and Michael and Ser Bertran.

They made the mistake of charging while he got the blonde woman back onto his horse. Ser Danved appeared from a maze of tent ropes like a trick rider and unhorsed a knight-knocking man and horse to the ground from side-on. Ser Danved was a big man, and he and his horse cut the whole column of pursuers-the men who’d passed his one-man ambush were at even odds with Ser Michael and Ser Bertran and young Toby, and were quickly unhorsed. Gavin charged into the midst of the fight, and panicked horses burst into the tent lines and men went down in all directions as their horses crashed through standing tents, and the melee became general.

“I’m Blanche,” the woman said. “In the pictures, the girl’s always behind the knight.”

Gabriel had to laugh.

It took another sharp fight to get clear of the camp; the whole of the casa, pages and archers included, proved a match for the disorganized Galles, and cut their way free.

“We could just cut our way in and get de Vrailly,” Gavin said. He was in high spirits.

“What, and just leave the Queen where we found her?” Gabriel cocked an eyebrow.

The Queen was on a good palfrey. She was as pale as milk.

They’d taken every horse of every man they’d unhorsed, so that they were like a moving livestock show-Ser Danved’s joke. Nell and the other pages were driving a herd of war horses, all still saddled.

“In a day or two, someone is going to raise an army,” Gabriel said. “Gelfred says this Du Corse has three hundred lances, and de Vrailly had the same last year.”

“More,” said Gavin.

Ser Michael swore. “And Albans who should know better-I saw men who were my father’s knights. I put Kit Crowbeard on his arse not fifteen minutes ago-the traitor.”

“Kit Crowbeard?” Gabriel asked.

“One of my father’s retinue knights. His professionals.” Michael frowned. “Did Ranald’s people save my da?”

“Ask me when we link up with Ranald,” Gabriel said. “I told him to keep his men away from the lists unless… well, he must have.” Gabriel looked south. “I hope he did. Otherwise, they’re all taken.”

Bad Tom nodded. “Aye, I didn’t linger to watch, but they were disarming the Royal Guard as soon as they could.”

Gabriel signalled a halt.

“Everyone change horses,” he ordered. He dismounted and held out his good hand to help Blanche, who ignored him and slid to the ground with neat athleticism.

“I must go to my lady,” she said. She ran off along the road.

Gabriel stretched his back and watched the distant camp. “Where’s Gelfred?” he asked Tom.

Tom Lachlan just shook his head. “No one came to the rendezvous,” he said. “Mind ye, we had to go find you!”

Gabriel winced. “Not my finest hour.”

“You found yersel’ a nice piece. You should keep her,” Tom said, in his friendly way.

“Or,” Chris Foliak put in, “if’n you don’t want her-”

“Gentlemen,” the captain snapped, “if you are quite through-”

“He’s just like himself,” Ser Danved said loudly to Ser Bertran.

“I need a rouncy or two for the ladies. Unless Nell plans to take the good sister all the way to Lorica.” He managed a smile at Amicia. “What happened?” he asked.

“The King?” she replied. “Oh, Gabriel…”

Blanche ran back to them. She curtsied in the dust of the road with a fine straight back.

“Look here, Captain,” she said. “Sir.”

Gabriel managed a bow which made his back burn as if a fire had been lit under it.

“My lady-the Queen-she can’t go much further,” Blanche said. “She’s too proud to say, but she could birth at any moment.” Blanche looked around. “You’re all a fine lot-any of you fathers? Blood and fighting brings on the birth, so they say.”

Gabriel was still watching the camp.

There was movement. They had the fire out, and he saw the glint of armour.

“Eight hours of light left,” he said. Nell brought him Abraham, his oldest and calmest riding horse. He swung into the saddle. “Nell, you’re a peach,” he said.

Nell blushed.

He rode along the column to the Queen, sitting with her back against a small tree. She looked serene-and deathly pale.

Gabriel dismounted on willpower alone and managed a creaky bow. “Your grace-I can’t stop here any longer or we will all be taken or killed.”

Her marvellous brown-gold eyes met his. “I know,” she said. “Blanche loves me, but she’s trying to mother me.” The Queen extended a hand and Gabriel got her to her feet. “I can keep him in for another few hours-days, if I must.”

“You are a woman of power,” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“I healed you last year, when the arrow struck you,” he said. “That’s how I know. I wonder if you could share some of your ops with us-with me and with Sister Amicia.”

The Queen nodded. “Of course-whatever I can do.”

Gabriel reached out and touched her and entered into her palace-a veritable fortress. He’d never seen a palace so well guarded. In the middle of it rose walls of solid, shining gold-pure gold, so well fitted that he could scarcely see where each gold stone fitted to the last.

She led him-slim and lovely-through a doubly barred gate and into the citadel.

“Is it true-that my love is dead?” she asked.

Gabriel nodded. “Killed by an arrow,” he said.

She took a deep breath-even in the aethereal, and pursed her lips. “Later, I will see if I will mourn,” she said.

In the midst of her citadel-a storybook citadel with trellises of fruit and birds on trees-there was a well, and she dipped clear water-pure ops -from the well and gave it to him, and he drank.

“This is never a good idea in the romances,” he said.

“I would like to laugh,” she said. “I would like to run amidst flowers and feel love again.”

Gabriel finished the dipper. Then he reached out a hand and found Amicia and beckoned to her, and she came, stepping through the walls as if they were not there-because she had been invited-and the Queen gave her the dipper to drink.

And Amicia took the potentia and worked it, and healed the wounds in his side and armpit. She rubbed her thumb across the back of his left hand and frowned.

“Perhaps tomorrow,” she said.

And then Sister Amicia walked along the column, healing small hurts of men-and horses.

Tom shook his head. “She’s-” He looked around and hung his head.

Gabriel sighed. “Yes,” he admitted. “Now, let’s get out of here, before something goes wrong.”