The Fell Sword

Chapter Fifteen

Harndon – Christmas Court

The Queen loved Christmas above all things, and she decorated the Great Hall of the palace the way her mother had decorated her childhood hall – with wreaths of ivy and balls of mistletoe. She visited jewellers and tailors and made herself as busy as she might to keep away her darker thoughts.

‘You’ll hurt your bairn,’ Diota said. ‘You’ve no business keeping yon secret from the King.’

The Queen shrugged. ‘I am my own mistress, I think,’ she said with some of her old spirit, but in truth, the daily sickness and the bloated feeling sapped her interest in sparring with her nurse. And her temper was sharp – sharper than usual. Weary anger was the mood of her Advent, and she resented this wicked intrusion on her life.

‘Baby is his business, too,’ Diota said. ‘And with the wicked lies I hear told every day in these halls, I would think you’d want to tell him he’s going to be a papa.’

‘There are things I want to know first,’ Desiderata said.

‘Beware lest the King want to know some things as well,’ Diota rumbled.

‘Nurse, are you – what-’ Desiderata spluttered.

Diota gave her a quick hug. ‘I ain’t impugning your bairn’s paternity, if that’s what you mean. I’m saying: just tell him.’

So a few days before Christmas Eve, after they shared a loving cup and he kissed her under the ball of mistletoe, she led him away to their bed, snug amidst a veritable castle of tapestries and warming pans.

The King moved quickly along his usual course of events and she laughed into his beard and slowed his rush to conclusion and finally forced his hand onto her belly.

‘Listen, love. There’s something stirring in there,’ she said.

‘Dinner?’ he asked with a low laugh.

‘A baby,’ she said.

His hand stiffened. ‘Are you – sure?’

She laughed. ‘I know what a milkmaid knows – and a little more. He’s a boy. He’ll be born in June.’

The King breathed silently by her in the darkness.

‘Say something, love,’ Desiderata said.

‘I cannot make a child,’ he said grimly. He rolled away from her.

She caught at his hip. ‘Yes, you can. And did.’

‘Madam, I am not a fool,’ he spat.

‘My lord, that court is still out. For I have never lain with any man but you.’

‘No?’ he asked.

‘Do you question me?’ she asked, and felt the root of her being and the foundation of her love melt like wax in a fire.

He sat up. ‘We should not have this conversation. Not now,’ he said carefully.

She sat up beside him. She found a taper, leaning across him so that, quite deliberately, her breasts trailed across his chest. She conjured the taper to light and set it in a small stick so that she could see his eyes.

He looked like a wounded animal.

Tears welled up, but she fought them, because something told her that she would only have this one chance to convince him they had a child before he would armour himself away – the bluff King, untouchable.

‘Love, look at my tummy. This is me. I would never lie with another – nor would I quicken unless I chose to.’ She leaned close. ‘Think of who I am. What I am.’

‘I cannot make a child. I am – cursed.’ He sobbed the last word.

She put a hand on his chest and he didn’t resist. ‘Sweet, I have power. I am as God made me. And I think – I think that I have overcome your curse.’ She smiled. ‘With God’s help, and the novice’s.’

‘Not my curse!’ he groaned.

‘Whose, then?’ she asked.

He shook his head and would not meet her eyes.

‘Husband, when the belle soeur worked her will on us – and made us whole-’ She paused, remembering the moment, and trying to grasp a little of the glory she had felt. The sense of release. She kissed him. ‘She cracked your curse, or shattered it. I can feel this.’

The King put his head on her chest. ‘If only you might be right,’ he said.

He fell asleep, and she lay awake, running her hand over his chest and trying to find the jagged ends of the curse, but the breaking had happened too long before, and she felt only the edge of the wound that the curse left in the world.

Later he awoke, and they made love.

And when she awoke with him, it was a day nearer Christmas, and she thought that perhaps everything would be healed.

A hundred rooms away, the Sieur de Rohan laid Lady Emota on a bed, and she sighed.

‘It is sin,’ she said. She pushed him away. ‘Can’t you just kiss me?’

‘What sin, when two lovers make one soul?’ he asked. He ran a tongue lightly across the top of her exposed breast, and she clenched her hands on his shoulders, which were hard with muscle – and he slid into the bed next to her, warm and solid and smelling only of cinnamon and cloves.

She kissed him, and breathed in the scent of him. And let his hands roam.

It was beautiful – and then it wasn’t.

He put a knee between hers and she didn’t like that. She pushed him away – hard.

‘Make way, slut,’ he said. ‘You want it.’

He pushed her down. She bit him, and he struck her.

She tried to fight him.

She cried.

He laughed. ‘What did you think you were here for?’ he asked her.

She turned to weep into the pillow, which smelled of him, and he slapped her. She pulled the bed clothes around herself, and he pulled them off again. ‘I’m not done with you yet, ma petite.’

‘You!’ she managed. ‘You – false-’

‘It is no crime to fuck a whore,’ he said.

She choked.

‘Like mistress, like maid,’ de Rohan said. ‘Don’t worry, my little putain. When the court finds out what your mistress has done, no one will even notice your fall from grace. Besides – you have a body made to satisfy a man.’ He cooed over her, using warm love terms again.

For a little while.

N’gara – Mogon and Bill Redmede

The woods were full of snow, and there was something else there – something that moved at the very edge of Redmede’s senses, something too fast to see, too small, or too quiet.

Mogon ran east, her heavy feet carving great triangular holes in the snow. The elk ran lightly, and sometimes he skimmed the surface of the snow. They would stop from time to time, and Redmede would hold the amulet in his hand and watch the fire in its depths. They followed the spark – east and north.

After full dark, they crossed tracks that showed clearly in moonlight – tracks of a man with a hand sleigh. Redmede rubbed his beard. ‘That’s Nat Tyler,’ he said. ‘I know his tracks.’

Mogon waggled her mighty head. ‘It is too cold for me to think well, man. Does this other man mean something?’

‘No idea,’ Redmede admitted, but when he tested the amulet, he found that Tyler’s tracks diverged at a sharp angle from the true line to Tapio.

They ran on.

By the height of the moon, Redmede estimated it was midnight by the time they found Tapio. His body hung high in a tree, because he was impaled on one of its shattered branches. His blood flowed down the old oak.

‘Sweet Christ,’ Redmede said.

‘Very like,’ Tapio whispered. ‘Onssse again, Man, I will owe you my life.’

Mogon shook her head. ‘What will we do?’ she asked. ‘I can manipulate the powers. But how to reach him down from the tree?’

‘Can you lift him?’ Redmede asked. ‘With sorcery?’

Mogon nodded. ‘If I can make my sluggish brain work, yes.’

In the end, Redmede climbed the tree and cut the branch that impaled the Faery Knight while the red blood flowed over the old wood and didn’t freeze. He put the irk – tall as a man but light as air – across the rump of the great elk, who grunted.

‘Can’t carry the both of ye. Sorry.’

Redmede got his rackets off his saddle and put them on his feet. He already missed the warmth of the beast.

Tapio raised his head. ‘You both have my thanksss.’

Mogon bowed her head. ‘It was Thorn?’

Tapio Haltija laughed, and something bubbled in his chest. ‘We must go quickly if you two care to sssave my worthlesss carcasss. It wasss not Thorn. It wasss the ssshadow of Asssh.’

Mogon growled and made a fearful growling deep in her throat that raised the hackles of Redmede’s neck. ‘So – my brother was correct.’

‘Ash?’ he asked.

Mogon shook her head. ‘We have twenty miles to walk before we find warmth and safety, and this night is full of terror, even for one such as I. Let us go.’

Redmede could never recall more than the impression of enormous fatigue and the cessation of warmth. They walked, and they ran – when he lost feeling in his feet, he ran for a while until they hurt, and then he walked again. The woods around them snapped and cracked in the dense cold which came down like a hermetical working, vast and suffocating, and sat over the whole of the forest.

When the first light showed in the east, Redmede was so tired he wanted to lie down on the snow and sleep, but he knew where that would lead.

It was the great Warden, Mogon, who flagged first. She began to wander – in fact, she appeared drunk, and she wove about and made little grunting noises.

Tapio, who had not made a sound in many miles, raised his head. ‘Man! ’ he hissed. ‘She needs fire, or she will die. Very – suddenly.’

Redmede knew how to kindle fire. And the threat seemed to ignite him – he gathered wood as fast as his feet would carry him, and he found a birch tree, down and dead and still clear of the snow, and he pulled off his mittens, hung them around his neck, and froze his hands stripping the bark. He stripped a mountain of bark, and he piled it under all the branches he’d found – where two dead spruce trees lay across one another at the end of a clearing.

Mogon was keening, and otherwise immobile.

Up to you, Bill Redmede. Fate of the world. Smile when you say that. Tinder box – there it is. Char cloth – good. He laid a piece of the black cloth on his flint and snapped it along his stele. They were warm from being carried next to his body, and the sparks flew.

The char cloth lit. He thought of Bess, that night in the wet woods, and he blew on his sparks and his glowing embers and pressed them into his dry tow. It was cold – but it was dry – and in a moment, he had fire.

He threw the whole burning clump onto his pile of birch bark.

There was pungent smoke . . .

For a moment, he thought that it wasn’t going to light.

And then the birch bark’s resin thawed enough to catch, and light and heat exploded into the world – the only magic that Bill Redmede knew how to make, except perhaps a little with a bow. The fire rose and licked at more bark.

‘Nice work, boss,’ said the elk – even as it shied away. Nothing in the Wild loved fire.

The two dead spruce trees caught from the branches and the bark and the fire rose.

Redmede finally had to take Mogon by the hand and lead her to the fire. She would barely stir.

But in minutes, she was herself again.

‘Be sure and roast Tapio on both sides,’ she said.

The elk turned and presented its other flank to the fire – and then Mogon shook her head.

‘One more effort. Thank you, man. You are a useful ally. I missed my moment. I should have built a fire, and I-’ She shook her head again. ‘Do you know that fire scares me? I cannot remember when I have been this close to one, naked to it.’

She did, however, douse the fire.

And they ran into the cold morning, towards the Hold.

It was late morning when they entered the tunnel, and the heat of the Hold almost suffocated Redmede. But willing hands plucked their lord from the elk and bore him away, and Tamsin placed a warm kiss on Redmede’s cheek that burned there like faery fire until he met his own lady-love at the door of their own hut.

She threw her arms around him. ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.

Ticondaga – Ghause, Amicia, and Ser John

The road along the lake was yet another military road built by the Imperial legions, and it was good stone covered in good gravel. The wagons moved well, even in snow, until they reached the Break, a three-mile stretch where low limestone cliffs had collapsed into the lake, wrecking the road and forcing a wide detour into the Wild. Those three miles of paths and rutted cart tracks took them two days; they made camp at the edge of a frozen swamp that nonetheless seemed to move, and no one from the lowliest squire to Ser John himself went to sleep.

The woods were alive, despite the season. Ser John’s outriders brought in deer, and a cold-slowed boggle; they saw a hastenoch, one of the monstrous armoured elk, across a beaver swamp, and every archer in the column cranked his crossbow.

Something low to the ground, black as night and fast, tracked the column, and on the fourth night, despite torches, fires, and doubled sentries, they lost a horse. In the cold light of a frozen morning, the poor horse’s shocking wounds suggested that the black thing was huge and very hungry. And that it could fly. The horse had landed a blow and there were long black feathers in the snow.

On the fifth evening, the advance guard caught a pair of Ruk crossing a frozen stream. The giants had to be careful of their footing, and the scouts began to pelt them with crossbow bolts.

As the rest of the company came up, the soldiers crowded to the stony bank and shot volleys of bolts. The men were excited – charged with spirit, animated, eyes glittering as they spanned and shot, spanned and shot, and the men-at-arms awaited the inevitable moment when the giants rushed their tormentors. But the twenty heavy crossbows made short work of the monsters. The larger went down last, screaming with rage, and yet the final look welded to its broad features was one of baffled puzzlement, like an old dog confronted with a strange new thing.

The men fell silent.

Sister Amicia rode up the column, looked at the dead creatures in the stream, and then at Ser John.

‘They had to die,’ he said defensively.

Amicia met his eye and he flinched. ‘If they’d got among us-’ he said.

She pushed a tendril of hair back into her hood. ‘Ser John, I will not debate military matters with you.’ More quietly, she said, ‘But the Ruk are as biddable as children, and I could have sent them about their own business as easily as you killed them. They were ensorcelled. I can feel it.’ She shook her head. ‘It is a crime,’ she added. ‘A crime to make them into tools, and a crime to murder them.’

The soldiers around her were dismayed, and they reacted in all the ways men react when dismayed. Some grew angry. Others turned their heads away.

Ser John shook his head. ‘Listen, sister. I understand – the Wild is not a simple enemy. But neither can we stop to bargain with the Wild.’

‘Men are always in a hurry,’ she said. ‘And they kill what they do not understand.’

The next day, Amicia said mass. It was odd, to say the least, for many of the soldiers to take communion from a woman, but it was odd to be in the Wild in mid-winter and Ser John made no scruple to kneel and take the host from her hands. Her mass was well attended.

The company marched away as the red ball of the sun peeked above the mountains to the east across the lake.

About the time the bells would have been sounding for nonnes at Lissen Carrak, they rolled into a heavy snow shower.

Amicia drew on her second hood, and Ser John reined in beside her. ‘We’re less than a day from Ticondaga,’ he said. ‘Can you foretell the weather?’

She steadied herself. ‘I can try,’ she said. She reached out-

She gasped. ‘There is something malevolent – in the woods.’ She paused. ‘Virgin protect us – they’re ahead of us and around us-’

Ser John loosened his sword in its sheath. ‘How close?’

She shook her head. ‘Let me pray,’ she said.

‘Stand to!’ shouted Ser John, rising in his stirrups.

Conversation stilled. The wagons halted. The Etruscans leaped onto their wagon beds and untied heavy ropes and then lifted wooden shutters into place, making their four wagons into small fortresses full of crossbowmen in the twinkling of an eye. Horse harness jingled, and the bowmen spanned their weapons.

‘It is north of here, moving-’ She paused. ‘Moving west. I hid myself. Ser John – it is- There is already fighting. Hurry.’

‘What kind of fighting?’ he asked.

‘People are under attack,’ Amicia said. ‘Come!’

She rode ahead.

‘Damn it!’ Ser John cursed. ‘Cover her!’

Amicia bolted away and was lost in the soft curtain of snow, and the vanguard of the column cantered after her.

‘Contact!’ shouted a man in the main column, far behind him.

‘Shit,’ Ser John said. He heard crossbows snapping away. Behind him.

The convoy was his duty, but the belle soeur was his friend.

‘Follow me!’ he roared, and galloped into the snow after the mad nun and her palfrey into a snowfall that got worse by the second.

Men were riding hard, struggling to get frozen fingers into steel gauntlets as they rode through blinding snow, and none of them had their visors closed. It was a recipe for disaster.

He heard Amicia’s shout. Then she said – quite distinctly – Fiat lux.

He almost lost his seat at the burst of light. Behind him, a mounted knight and his horse went down on the road. It was as if he was at the centre of the sun.

Something hit him in the head, and darkness brushed his face – he felt a burning, and his sword arm acted. He connected – the thing screamed, his horse reared under him and he managed to get his visor closed by slamming his chin down onto his breastplate as the winged darkness descended again.

He cut at it, wondering what in the name of hell he was fighting.

‘Trolls!’ shouted one of his knights.

Ser John had time to think that whatever he was fighting was no troll.

He put his spurs into his mount as he was struck a third time – his horse burst forward, and he passed behind Sister Amicia, whose hands were the centre of a circle of radiance. As he rode through it, the black thing vanished from around his head and he caught – in the interrupted peripheral vision of his visor – a glimpse of a wing with barbed black feathers.

There were two trolls in the road, towering over a red puddle, and then he struck two-handed and his great sword shattered – but so did the nearest troll’s arm. The thing roared, its bottomless violet gullet illuminated by Amicia’s working.

Its other fist knocked him from the saddle and he landed heavily. All that saved him was the snow, and even with a foot of the stuff over the rock, he hit hard, there was pain in his back and his head struck a projecting stone hard enough to deform his helmet.

He had no idea how long he’d been out and he made himself move. His back screamed. He couldn’t rise to his feet, but had to roll onto his stomach and get to his knees, and with every heartbeat he was conscious that the two trolls were just a horse length away in the snow. Men were screaming, and blood was pouring out of his nose.

Another wave of brilliant golden light. The nearest troll turned and counter-cast a purple-green fog, and where the two workings met they sparkled like metal struck with a hammer on the forge and there was a long crack like lightning striking close by – except that it went on and on. Ser John, who was old in the ways of pain, got his left foot under his left hip and pushed himself erect. His horse was screaming, down the bank, its shrill neighs speaking of pain and panic.

His pole-axe was on his horse, and he didn’t think he could negotiate the deep snow. So he drew the heavy dagger at his hip, and ploughed forward towards the nearest troll, all the while cursing himself as a fool.

The one he’d wounded was face down in the road. That made him smile despite the pain.

The second one was fully engaged with a blur of gold – the noise the two made was like a hundred savage dogs fighting. Ser John couldn’t make out who his new ally was, but he stumbled forward – turned his whole body to look north, in case there was a third – and the black shape descended from the sky.

This time he was more ready. The dagger flicked out and feathers fell to the ground – there was a discordant shriek that pierced even through the awesome sounds the troll and its adversary made.

The great black bird-thing stooped, wings spread, and a thick line of molten gold came out of the snow and struck it in the middle of its black breast. It – exploded.

Ser John was knocked flat. This time, he didn’t lose consciousness and so he was aware as the whirlwind of the fight passed over him. The troll planted a foot by his head, and Ser John rolled, fuelled by desperation, and he plunged his dagger in behind its hip with both hands driving the hilt. The steel shrieked-

Ser John felt his leg break, saw the armour buckle as the troll’s foot flashed out and caught him, but he didn’t lose his grip on the dagger, sunk like a piton in rock, and he fell pulling on the hilt with two hands.

The troll toppled. It fell across him, and its arm struck his chest, denting his breastplate and snapping ribs in a cascade of raw pain.

But he saw the troll’s end with almost religious clarity. He didn’t pass out – that mercy was denied him – and, instead, he was almost preternaturally aware as the troll went into the snow, the heat of its body sending up a cloud of steam and suddenly there was a golden bear in its place gripping a club, or perhaps a warhammer, and it struck so rapidly that its motions were a blur, and so hard that stone chips flew as if the great bear was a mason shaping marble.

There was a final, sharp crack, and the troll shrieked and turned to sand and rock.

The enormous bear stood over Ser John.

‘That was unexpected,’ it said. ‘I think p’raps you saved me.’

Or perhaps Ser John merely imagined that the bear said that. He expected to die.

It raised its hammer again.

The convoy reached the scene of carnage – three dead knights, Ser Anton badly wounded and the others all torn to shreds, and three damp sand-spots, and what appeared to be tens of thousands of black feathers.

Sister Amicia stood over Ser John, who was once again able to speak. She’d flooded him with healing and he was alive. Willing hands got him into a wagon. He was cold – cold all the way through. It had taken time for the bear to break him loose from the dead stone that had been a living troll.

‘We rescued bears,’ Ser John said. ‘Sweet Christ, sister – you risked us all to save some fucking bears.’

‘Some day they may save you,’ she said, more sharply than he’d heard her speak. ‘Now lie quietly.’

‘What was the thing with the feathers?’ he asked her.

She paused. ‘A Bargest,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think they were real.’

The men of the convoy were still in shock. A wave of boggles had struck the column and been defeated, but the shock of the attack and its aftermath – the dozen golden bears trotting along the flanks of the column while Amicia begged the bowmen to hold their shafts – had left men shaken, and some had gagged at the ruin of the knights killed by the trolls.

Amicia had kept them going – she wasn’t sure what else to do, and Ser John was so badly hurt that she feared to wake him, and the knights were all too young to take charge – Jarsayans with too little appreciation of the north.

And they all trusted her.

So she kept them moving – the reaction after the fight left men cold, and short of halting and gathering wood, the only recourse they had was food and movement. She ordered them to eat and men did, as if taking orders from young nuns was part of their military training. And when they’d eaten their bread or their bacon or whatever each man had, she ordered the column forward and they marched without much complaint.

Liveried cavalrymen met them – the light-armoured horsemen that Northerners called ‘prickers’ for their long spurs. They wore the Earl’s livery and they were entirely respectful.

‘Lady said there was a convoy in trouble,’ their officer said after a bow to Sister Amicia. ‘I’m Ser Edmund, sister.’

‘Your lady was right.’ Amicia was very proud of her little army – proud that they’d held together, proud that they hadn’t shot a golden bear by mistake. ‘But we won our skirmish.’

Ser Edmund nodded. ‘Didn’t think your lads looked beat,’ he said. ‘Damme! Is that John Crayford? He looks like shit.’

Alicia raised an eyebrow. ‘He’s had all the help I can provide,’ she said.

Ser Edmund nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure we can do better at the castle. I’d best be taking command, eh? You must have been terrified.’

Amicia thought of a number of replies, and settled for one she’d learned from the old Abbess. ‘Not at all,’ she said. And turned her horse and rode on, leaving the Earl’s officer sitting in the middle of the road.

Ser John was next aware when he was surrounded by stone – arches everywhere, and a pair of armoured men in green and gold livery.

‘Careful, there,’ Amicia said. ‘If those wounds open-’

‘Of course, sister!’ one man said.

Ticondaga was built on the same scale as Lissen Carrak – all grey stone and red brick rising into the heavens like a cathedral of war. The courtyard itself was twice the size of the yard at her convent, and the barracks building had the new internal chimneys and a lead roof.

Now safe in the greatest fortress in the north, they sagged to the ground in relief. The knights got themselves off their horses, and their squires – including the squires of the dead men – took their horses and then the castle’s men-at-arms flooded the courtyard, and the Earl Muriens was there, barking orders and offering hot stew – from a great bronze cauldron which he and another knight had hauled into the yard with their own hands.

‘You – lass. Out of those wet clothes,’ he barked at her. Then bobbed his head in an insolent parody of a bow. ‘Oh – you’re a nun. Well – here, drink this and then get out of your wet clothes.’ He leered. ‘You are the fucking lovesomest nun I’ve seen for many a year. Are there more like you?’ he asked.

He was big, with iron-grey hair and an attitude she knew immediately. The Red Knight might despise his father, but he certainly carried himself with the same air of cocky dominance.

‘I’ll see to the convoy first,’ she said. ‘My lord Earl. That worthy knight is Ser John Crayford, and he brought this convoy here to succour the fur trade.’

Amicia watched the old knight being carried into the castle. The Earl walked beside his stretcher for a few paces and said something, and she heard a weak grunt for Ser John.

‘That’s a fine man-at-arms. He must be fifty! As old as me – a good knight.’ The Earl grinned. ‘You his?’

Amicia laughed.

The Earl had the grace to be abashed by her laugh. ‘Well – there’s no fool like an old fool. So you’re here for our furs?’

‘If we can do it, it will save Albinkirk. As a trade town.’ Amicia tried to follow his mercurial changes, and was reminded . . .

‘Might save our trade, too.’ Muriens laughed. ‘I’ll take all the money I can get, but we haven’t a tithe of the furs we usually have. The trade went east to the fucking beg-your-pardon Moreans as soon as folk heard about the attacks in the south.’

‘You have no furs?’ asked Messire Amato.

Muriens laughed. ‘Fucking Etruscans. Of course I have furs. Why don’t you all come out of the cold before we start dickering like a man with a whore on a cold night – beg your pardon, sister,’ he added with a smile. ‘Although, sweet Saviour, you can come and take my confession anytime.’

Amicia smiled right back at him. ‘That will be enough of that, Your Grace,’ she said.

His mouth moved in a way – a sort of self-aware wryness, an appreciation of his own failures – that she knew so well it almost melted her heart. Then his face cleared and he bowed. ‘My apologies, sister. It is just my wicked way!’

Amicia allowed herself to be steered inside, even as she felt the very edge of the zone that surrounded beings with great power. She cloaked herself as carefully as she could, using what she had learned from both the Red Knight and Harmodius during the siege, and she kept her eyes down and thought of mice.

This was a mistake, she thought.

A pair of servants led her into the Great Hall and then up a winding stair and along a corridor that went up and then down.

‘Ma soeur, do you have a maid?’ one servant asked.

‘No,’ she answered.

The woman nodded. ‘I’ll send you a woman to help. This is the portmanteau from your horse – is there more?’

Amicia looked at the narrow bed with something close to lust. The air of the castle was cold, but not like the open marshes of the Adnacrags. And there was a stack of wool blankets waiting to serve her.

‘No more, I thank you. That’s all I have.’ She smiled. ‘I was very much a last minute addition. Goodwife, I am spent. May I lie down?’

The other woman nodded. ‘I doubt that Lady Ghause will receive you until after evensong. It is Christmas Eve.’ Despite being a senior servant, or perhaps even a lady-in-waiting, the older woman took the time to help Amicia strip.

The moment her soaked undergown was off, she was warmer, despite the frigid air. A pair of servant girls came in, and brought her a wool flannel gown – floor-length, and a lovely blue.

The younger bobbed a curtsy. ‘Lady Ghause sends this with her compliments, and says that religious women are all too rare here. She hopes that it suits you.’

The wool was soft and very fine and held a healthy charge of potentia like musk.

Amicia pulled it over her naked body, and the older maid pulled the covers over her, and she was asleep.

She awoke flushed and breathing hard, after the most erotic dream of her life. A dream with a very particular focus. She lay in her bed, calming her breathing.

The old Abbess had taught her to make a virtue of necessity. To meditate when only meditation could help. She imagined her knight – still very fresh in her traitorous memory, so she clothed him and armed him and placed his image, kneeling, in a nativity scene – a guard for one of the three great kings who had come to visit the newborn babe.

The nativity played out – the kings gave their gifts, and retreated, and he went with them, his steel sabatons crunching through the snow, and she watched him mount his horse with his usual grace, his annoying, ever-present grace. And she looked back to see the Virgin take up her child from the manger.

She breathed, calm, and centred-

‘Time to wake, sister! Time for mass!’

She stretched, at peace with herself, and smelled – perceived – the musk in the real and the touch of ops in the aethereal. The gown had been ensorcelled.

Honi soit qui mal y pense, she thought and stripped the thing off. She handed it to the maid, who was more than a little shocked at her nudity – and her tattoos.

‘Have this washed,’ Amicia said. ‘It stinks.’

After mass, she followed the housekeeper – the older woman who had led her into the castle – into the Great Hall and up a short set of steps.

Amicia could feel Ghause from across the fortress, and so she was prepared when the housekeeper opened the door.

The woman who sat on the tall chair of dark wood had no embroidery in her lap, and she held her head as few women did – up, with a direct gaze.

‘Ah – the nun. My dear sister, it is all too rare to receive a religious vocation here. Are you permitted to speak?’

Amicia thought so this is his mother. She burns in the aethereal like – like-

‘I have no vow of silence,’ she said.

‘You are the most remarkably attractive nun I’ve seen in many a day,’ Ghause said. ‘Watch out for my husband. He doesn’t like to take no for an answer. And he likes to break things.’ She smiled. ‘And people.’

Amicia felt her face burn hot. ‘My lady,’ she said softly. What else could she say to such a remarkable introduction?

‘Are you a virgin, girl?’ Ghause asked.

Amicia realised – just in time – that she was in a contest as surely as if she were fighting in the snow. ‘That is a rude question, my lady.’

‘Oh, I’m a rude woman. You do not fool me, sister. You seek to hide your powers, and I can feel them – sweet Christ, girl, you lit the very moon with your sword of light. You are a witch – a very powerful witch. Why are you here?’

Amicia made a good straight-backed curtsy. ‘My lady, I am here to help Ser John escort his convoy. As you have apparently seen, I have some skill in working the hermetical.’

Ghause watched her.

Amicia resisted the invitation to talk further.

‘You are from Sophie’s convent? Eh?’ the older woman asked.

Amicia winced at her own foolishness. When she had volunteered to come, she had imagined herself secure. She had imagined that she might look at his father and mother and see the source of his revolt against God. Learn things to his good.

In her pious arrogance, she had assumed that she would be secure and powerful here.

Ghause Muriens wore the aethereal not like a cloak or a fog, but like a garment of regal splendour. It was part of her. She lived in potentia.

Amicia felt naked before it. ‘I serve the Order of Saint Thomas,’ she said.

Ghause licked her lips. ‘At Lissen Carrak?’ she said softly. She was beautiful. Amicia had never seen a woman as beautiful. And what she manipulated was not as simple as air or darkness or light or fire.

Amicia nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘So – you know my son, perhaps?’ Ghause asked again. She rested a hand on Amicia’s arm, and the nun warmed to the touch. She warmed to her navel, and to the tips of her fingers.

The ring on Amicia’s finger flared. Ghause spat – like an angry cat – and started back and Amicia recovered control of her own body and mind. And was only then aware that Ghause had been overwhelming her. Seducing her.

‘Bitch,’ Ghause said. ‘That was unnecessary.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘A mere mind your own business would have sufficed.’

Amicia’s mind reeled. The ring had saved her. She took a deep breath, and then another.

Ghause smiled. ‘You do know him!’ she said. ‘Ah – sometimes, I wonder if there is a God after all.’

Amicia had recovered her control. ‘Madam, I nursed two of your sons in my place as a novice. And both were fine knights and gentle men.’ Her voice was steady as rock, and she had her version of events prepared. She fixed it in her palace, and banished all the rest to the locked box where she kept the Red Knight.

‘I am a proud mother, and I was led by false rumour to fear that Gabriel was dead. What can you tell me of him?’ Ghause asked.

Amicia shook her head. ‘Madam, he was the Captain of a fortress under siege by the Wild, and I was a novice serving in the hospital. Twice when he was wounded, I used my powers to heal him, and I stood by your younger son – Ser Gavin – and saw him fight. Brilliantly.’

‘My housekeeper says you have tattoos. Why does a sister of the great order have tattoos?’ Ghause smiled like a cat with a bird.

‘Once, I lacked the power to stop others from imposing their will on me,’ Amicia said gently. ‘I no longer lack that power.’

‘It pleases you to think you can match me,’ Ghause said. ‘I know what you dreamed,’ she said, almost cooing. ‘I watched it.’

‘I know of no reason that I should have to match you,’ Amicia said. ‘If you know what I dreamed, then you also know what I did with it. I am not your foe, madam, but if you attempt to enter my head again, I might feel myself attacked.’

Ghause licked her lips. ‘You admired my son.’ She put a hand to her bosom. ‘This interests me profoundly, woman. Tell me!’

Amicia dropped another curtsy. ‘My lady, I am a sister of the Order of Saint Thomas and my only bridegroom is Christ. You may impose on me with your manipulations – I will only see them as torments. I admire your son as a good knight and a good man.’

‘By Lady Tar!’ Ghause hissed. ‘My son Gabriel is not a good man or a good knight. That horseshit is for the peasants. I made him to be like a god!’

I should never have come here.

The air was full of Ghause’s power, and the impulse to speak lay on Amicia like a shirt of heavy maille. But she resisted. God has the ultimate power. Christ be with me. Virgin, stand with me, now and in the hour of my death.

‘Who gave you that ring?’ Ghause asked suddenly.

Amicia opened her mouth to speak, her own will broken by the sudden question, but a voice behind her cut her off ruthlessly.

‘Stop bothering the girl. Christ on the cross, woman, you are at her as if she’s a maid who’s stolen a silver spoon. Never mind the old hag, sister, she likes tormenting pretty women, and look, you are one.’ The Earl leaned in the door of the solar.

Trapped between them, Amicia knew a moment of true fear. It was like being a fawn caught between two giants.

‘She’s no maid. She’s a sorceress of immense power, she has more secrets than Richard Plangere, and I think she’s lying to me. I wouldn’t have let her in my wards, but now that someone else has, I mean to know her.’ Ghause stood with her hands on her hips. ‘You’re no nun.’

Amicia’s breath caught. ‘My vocation is not for you to criticise,’ she snapped.

‘Look at those breasts!’ the Earl said, slapping his booted thigh. ‘Sweet Christ, breathe harder, sweet.’

Amicia stood straight-backed, as if she was the equal of an Earl and the King’s sister. ‘May I be excused?’ she asked. ‘If this is your courtesy, I’ll stay with the servants.’

She ducked under the Earl’s arm and got down the steps to the main hall without a voice being raised.

With help from servants, she made her way to Ser John’s room, where the old knight was lying in a closed bed with heavy curtains. His colour was good and he was awake, and his squire was reading to him from a book of chivalry. He rose, but Amicia waved to the young man to sit.

‘Do you know Muriens?’ she asked.

Ser John shook his head. ‘Met the Earl in forty-nine or fifty. We was on the same side after Chevin, and I played dice with him once or twice. That’s all.’ He raised his head. ‘You, my girl, are red as a beet.’

‘Lady Ghause has been interrogating me. The Earl would like to peel me and perhaps eat me as well.’ She threw herself into a chair. ‘I’m a terrible nun. I want to burn her to ash. I need to go to confession for fifty things.’

Ser John nodded. ‘Well – you’re safe enough in here, and I don’t think I could muster an assault on your chastity, even if I was moved that way. How about I’ll just tell you my confessions, and then you can give me a nice easy penance. Jehan, go fetch us some nice hot wine.’

‘Thanks, Ser John.’

‘Think nothing of it.’ He managed a smile. ‘You save me from monsters, and I’ll save you from the Earl.’

She read to him from the gospels – he had a travelling set, writ plain and with no illuminations. After a few minutes, Jehan returned with wine, and sat on the settle near the fire and sewed his master’s ruined arming cote. Later, she reinforced all her healing work on him.

The Earl, dressed in green velvet, came to the door. ‘There you are,’ he said. He pushed in. ‘How’s your patient?’

Ser John sat up. ‘Well enough to tell you to get your teeth out of the nun before I get out of this bed and come after you with a mace.’

The Earl laughed. ‘I’ve heard you are a hot one, Ser John. May I pay her my respectful admiration?’

Ser John looked at the nun and then shook his head. ‘I’m thinking the good sister wants no admiration of that sort at all. Having, as you understand, got a bellyful of it from a company of mercenaries during a siege.’

The Earl laughed. ‘Damme, Ser John, she must have had them baying like wolves. And full of witch-power, too?’ He grinned. ‘Sister, I’m not really the spawn of Satan. I’ll keep my hands to myself – although, if you ever change your mind-’

Getting no response, he shook his head. ‘You’re better,’ he said to Ser John. ‘I gather you went after a stone troll with a dagger and won.’

Ser John laughed. Then he grabbed his ribs and wheezed. ‘Sweet Christ, Your Grace, but you can tell it that way. And while the words are true, it’d be just as true to say the evil thing tripped over me!’

The Earl laughed. ‘Well – there’s a spot at my Christmas high table for both of you. And my wife will keep her place with you, sister.’ He grinned at her, and his gaze fell from her face to her breasts, which were, she thought, buried in two layers of wool gowns. But some men-

Supper was served to the three of them without comment. Sister Amicia went to the chapel and prayed with the priest, who seemed distant. She found a clean white wool bed gown on her bed, and she wore it, and the only dreams she had were of swimming in a clear lake under stars so big that they were like berries on mistletoe.

Christmas Day dawned at Ticondaga with a long spell of snow followed by brilliant sunshine. Amicia went to mass, and spent the morning on her knees. As the whole garrison, their wives and sweethearts, processed out of the chapel and through the halls, Amicia found Ghause had left her husband’s side and joined her. As Ser John was tottering along at her side, she felt secure from immediate assault. Master Amato was close by, and smiled at her.

‘Relax, girl.’ The older woman put a familiar hand on her arm – skin to skin – and Amicia flushed. ‘When you are old and powerful, you will not fancy having some young sprig burst into your refuge either, dripping with ops and smelling of power.’ She nodded and arched an eyebrow. ‘The more so when the girl is your son’s lover.’

Amicia met the woman’s eyes. ‘I don’t plan to have a refuge. I will use my powers for good, and make people happier and better.’ She nodded curtly. ‘No man is my lover.’

At that moment, there was a pulse in the aethereal. The ring gave a flash of heat, and she felt her own store of potentia – blessedly unneeded in the fortress of Ticondaga – suddenly expended at a prodigious rate. Someone cast a working of healing – she felt it.

Ghause stepped away from her, and put a hand to her jewelled throat. She smiled in triumph. ‘But surely that was my son! You two are linked !’

Amicia sighed. ‘Your Grace, I know your son, and I am fond of him, but he and I have made different choices. I will give my love to all people – not one person.’

‘People are generally harder to like than horses or cats,’ Ghause said. ‘Come – pax. Eat with us at our feast – we will have carols.’ She nodded to Ser John. ‘Bring your patient. My husband wants to know if he really attacked a troll with his dagger.’ The older woman’s mouth twitched in mockery. ‘Men. There are so many more interesting things to discuss than war. Don’t you think?’

Liviapolis – The Red Knight

The palace Ordinaries spent Christmas Eve shovelling the snow from the great square, and laying down sawdust, and then rolling mats of woven straw over the ground. Barriers were built, and a mock castle, and four sets of stands in the ancient hippodrome, and then sailors from the fleet assembled canvas awnings from the cellars beneath the stables. Some of the canvas had rotted, but most of it was fresh and white, and in the frozen silence of Christmas morn, they laid it out along the newly rebuilt yards and roofed the ancient hippodrome and its raised timber stands with a great oval of cloth. When the snow began to fall gently outside, the whole hippodrome was covered, and a dozen adepts from the Academy finished the work with a hermetical reinforcement and a layer of sparkling light.

Morgon Mortirmir was assigned to work directly with the master grammarian, which indicated something of the speed with which his studies were progressing. The grammarian watched the workmen assemble the canvas roof far above them.

‘You understand the principle?’ he asked.

Mortirmir pulled on the beard he was trying to grow and stared at the empty stands. Was this a trick question? With the grammarian, you never knew. He looked at the question from half a dozen panicked angles and managed to say,‘Yes?’

‘Yes? Or maybe yes? Honestly, Mortirmir.’ The grammarian buried his hands in his voluminous fur-lined robe. Mortirmir threw caution to the winds. ‘It is not just a single principle, is it?’

Lip curling in disdain, the grammarian raised an eyebrow. ‘Explain,’ he said.

‘The scutum or aspis spell is among the most basic workings – one that uses potentia in a form that is almost raw. But placing the working into the cloth requires a different principle – the principle of like calling to like. The canvas alone would resist the rain or snow for some time, making it a kind of sponge to absorb our working, because our protection has the same intention? And then yet a third principle, because the canvas is woven from flax fibre, and was once alive, and thus is that much more interested in – harmony.’ Morgan stopped, surprised by the last word. When the grammarian didn’t interrupt or blast him to pieces, he added, ‘Without the canvas, it would require an incredible effort of will to roof the entirety of the hippodrome and more to maintain it all day. But with the solidity of the canvas here in the real, it is far easier to place our work in the aethereal.’

The grammarian smiled. ‘Not bad. Here, have some hot wine. Not bad at all. How many workings have you mastered?’

Mortirmir winced. ‘Four,’ he said. ‘Fire – as an attack. Light. I have several variations on light-’ he went on, but shook his head. ‘All of the series of aspis or scutum manipulations.’

‘Hence your presence here,’ the grammarian said.

‘A lock-breaking conjuration,’ Mortirmir added.

‘Two of the most difficult manipulations, but not one of the most basic elemental manipulations except fire.’ The grammarian nodded. ‘Memory problems?’

Mortirmir stared miserably at the ground. ‘I practise and practise but things don’t stick.’

The grammarian nodded. ‘It is hard to come late to your powers. I didn’t really come to a full memory palace and an understanding of manipulation and illusion until I was in my fifties.’ He looked up at the sailors. ‘If one of them fell, could you catch him?’

Morgan ran through the sum total of his manipulations. ‘Er – yes. I think so.’

The grammarian sipped his bottle of hot wine. ‘Would you?’ he asked.

‘Of course!’ Mortirmir said.

The grammarian nodded. ‘My pater was a sailor. I hardly knew him. An old priest saw me working power – all green – and sent me here.’ He shrugged. ‘From then I never left. I like the hot wine. And lights that work. Why am I telling you this?’

Mortirmir managed a smile.

‘Can you work this on your own?’ the grammarian asked.

Mortirmir nodded. ‘I think so. I’m jousting later and I don’t want to be weak.’

The grammarian laughed. ‘Jousting? You mean that tomfoolery where you ride in a set of iron kettles until you slam into another man? Well, young scholar, your place is here, and if you run out of ops you can remember that you have used your powers in the service of the Emperor. Jousting indeed-’ The grammarian shook his head, and his brief moment of good will was snapped.

He put his hand on Mortirmir’s shoulder. ‘Open up,’ he said. ‘Let me see the prep work on your casting.’

Mortirmir disliked the invasion of his mind by any of the professors, but since the revelation of his powers they were more and more intrusive. And they left echoes of themselves behind – some very dark.

Nonetheless, it was merely part of a scholar’s life. He opened his memory palace and admitted the grammarian, who entered as a much younger man in scarlet and cloth of gold.

Mortirmir’s memory palace was four columns of the Temple of Athena, and a slightly hasty simulacrum of a blackboard with a piece of silver chalk hanging from a fancy silk cord. There were no seats, and around the four columns there was smooth white marble for a few paces, and then a featureless grey plain stretching to the limits of the aethereal.

‘Crucified Christ, boy, this is the whole of your memory?’ the grammarian looked about with disdain.

Mortirmir shrugged.

The grammarian smelled like heather, in the aethereal, a good smell. And his presence was very solid.

He walked over to the sand table that Mortirmir had built in his mind next to the blackboard, and examined Mortirmir’s notes. And his grammar.

‘Ahh,’ he said. ‘This is more like it. This – this is the surface area of the hippodrome?’

Mortirmir nodded eagerly. ‘I took it from a book of geometrika.’

The grammarian favoured him with a smile. ‘You have bettered me, then, young sir. I always meant to, but in the end I always guess.’ He ran his slim silver stick along the lines of the working itself, as yet unpowered. ‘I see two things that I would do differently,’ he said. ‘But I see nothing that is wrong, per se. So I will allow you to proceed.’

‘Me, sir?’ Mortirmir had prepared the casting as an exercise, and only because he’d been told to do so. He’d come to channel power for the master. That’s what students did.

‘You. There’s the Nautarchon waving at us. Let’s see it, young man.’

They stood in the real, on the finely groomed sand floor, looking up.

Mortirmir closed his eyes, and summoned his workplace. The four broken columns stood like a reminder of his hermetical impotence, but he didn’t follow that image. Instead, he summoned power – the best of his skills, now – and, flooded with it, began to fuel the first set of his diplomatika.

At his side, the grammarian murmured, ‘Ahh.’

‘Look at that!’ called a sailor.

Morgan refused the distraction, and ran his fingers over the second part of his working, then dripped his power carefully – the canvas was delicate, and he could burn it.

The canvas took the hermetical power like dye – the golden light of the sun crept across it from the centre to the edges, and each panel flapped slightly as it filled – a line of sparks on the leading edge of the teenaged boy’s effort.

‘I love this part,’ called the sailor. His mate, on the next mast, laughed, and his laughter echoed hollowly.

Mortirmir’s first working had actually run lines of power up the masts and across the yards, and now his hermetical dye reached them in a flare of sparks, and the whole glowed a ruddy gold, as if the canvas was afire.

‘ASPIDES,’ Morgan said aloud.

All nine of the enormous canvas panels froze – the ruddy light flared and vanished. A careful observer could still note a line of light edging each panel, as fine as a thread.

The master grammarian nodded. ‘Lovely, Master Mortirmir. Multiple shields, not just one.’

‘If one fails, the others will keep people dry,’ Mortirmir said.

‘And each panel is its own unity,’ the grammarian went on. ‘Do you see a problem with that?’

Mortirmir shook his head. ‘No, Maestro.’

‘You’ve never built a roof, have you?’ The master grammarian was smiling, so Morgan began to experience real triumph. The sailors were applauding.

‘No, Maestro.’ Mortirmir looked up.

The maestro lifted his staff and said, ‘Scutum.’

With no flare at all, something changed. Mortirmir ran his tongue over the edges of his working – in his mind. All solid.

‘Between the panels, my young scholar. You made every panel whole. But you didn’t unify them. Snow would come in between them. Not much, and to be frank, I doubt anyone would notice. Your work is well done. You understood all of the principles involved, and your grammatical expression was excellent.’ The man bowed slightly. ‘Mind you, you have good teachers.’ He smiled. ‘But a roof is always a unity.

Mortirmir sighed. ‘I feel like a fool,’ he admitted.

The master grammarian nodded. ‘Good. That’s the feeling we all get when we learn something. I try to experience it once a day. Now go joust. I may even come back and watch.’ He paused. ‘You really must work on your memory, my boy.’

‘Yes, Maestro.’ Mortirmir bowed, and the master grammarian returned his bow.

He walked off the sand, and several sailors came and shook his hand. Their praise delighted him.

The Nautarchon bowed to him. ‘If you ever pass as a weatherworker, Master, I’d be delighted to have you on my ship.’ He pointed above them. ‘You treated the canvas – well, I saw it. Lovely. In a storm, a good mage can hold the sails like that – with ops. A well-found ship can stand a winter storm with a mage holding the rigging.’

Mortirmir hadn’t expected so much praise. He flushed, looked at the ground, and muttered something that he wasn’t sure of himself.

And his feet tangled around the blade of his sword as he walked away. Which hadn’t happened to him in weeks. He stumbled, looked around, and saw a dozen Academicians standing at the great entrance, in their robes. They were clapping.

Antonio Baldesce was laughing.

Mortirmir didn’t blame him. And he summoned up a smile as he crossed the sand, mindful that resentment at the needling he was about to receive would only make the whole thing worse.

Tancreda put a hand on his arm as he walked up. ‘He smiled! Gracious Mother of God, Plague! You made the master grammarian smile!’

Mortirmir shook his head.

Baldesce grinned. ‘And old Donatedello. He seemed to like you.’

Mortirmir’s arm tingled where Tancreda had touched it. He blushed.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the others.

‘I’m – I’m in the Christmas tournament.’

Baldesce laughed again. ‘I hope you remember the little people like us who helped you on your way,’ he said.

Kronmir read the message written in wax on the blade of a scythe and winced. The code was old and the message was baldly done, the wax visible to anyone, and the messenger – a girl no more than seven years old – had waited in the snow by his inn, thus making it possible for an enemy to take her and her message – and him. It hadn’t happened, but he shook his head, patted the girl, and gave her a gold piece.

‘Do you have a mother, girl?’ he said.

She shook her head. In that head-shake, she revealed the whole of her future – a future Kronmir wouldn’t wish on an enemy. Especially not at Christmas.

He added a second gold byzant, a valuable coin. And the thirty copper coins he had in a bag.

‘Listen, child,’ he said. ‘Men will kill you for the gold I’ve given you. Can you leave the city?’

She nodded.

‘Will you go to Lonika, if I send you?’ he asked.

She nodded again.

He took a piece of Eastern paper and folded it in a particular way, and wrote on it in lemon juice. ‘Take this to the same blacksmith who sent the scythe blade, child.’ He put a hand on her head, which was very warm – almost hot. It gave him great pleasure to do such a good deed at Christmas.

However much she might bridle at a life spent in a convent, it would be better than what awaited her in the city, without parents.

When she was gone, he rubbed the wax twice to make sure the message said what he thought it said, and then he tossed the scythe blade in the fire until the wax was utterly gone.

Then he set out across the city to find himself an assassin.

He went to a certain door, and knocked six times, and then walked away. That was all that was required to order the death of the Megas Ducas.

He went back to gather the strands of his extrication network, because in a day or so, a great many of his people were going to need to flee the city.

The assassin watched a mime come along the street, dressed all in red and green, with a wreath of berries in her hair. He had been expecting her – she came each day at the same time, and did the same dance. But today she did a different act, and he felt the spirit of action flood him as she stooped, as part of her dance, and made a snowball of the filthy mush in the street. She threw it with neat accuracy at his shutters. Then she did a cartwheel, heedless of the freezing slush.

She stopped under his window and did a handstand, and then pulled from her bag a puppet dressed all in red, and dropped it in the snow.

And stepped on it.

She left the scarlet thing behind her as she danced away.

He rose from the narrow bed in his garret and pulled on a plain, much-mended dirty-white hood, and then put a tinker’s basket over his shoulder.

An hour after first light, the princess processed from the Inner Court to the Outer Court, where she was met by her new Master of the Palace and the Megas Ducas. In the Outer Court the entirety of the Guard stood, shivering and magnificent, in their finest uniforms, a sea of scarlet and purple and gold and shining steel like a mosaic in which each man was a single tessera.

Her Ordinaries and the Nordikans marched to the centre of the Outer court and the Guard marched out by files from the right and left, and the Imperial chariot – empty, but for a driver – proceeded to the princess.

‘I thought that you had betrayed me,’ the princess whispered. She was like an icon brought to life – her face as white as milk, her body adorned in stiff cloth of gold encrusted with jewels and edged and accented in pearls.

‘Majesty,’ the Duke said, very softly.

The procession rolled across the square – a square nigh on packed with the people of the city who followed the princess and her Guard into the great cathedral where the Patriarch said mass.

The Megas Ducas accepted communion and did not burst into flames. Wilful Murder lost a small amount of money over it.

After mass the whole army, with most of the palace staff and the whole of the Academy, instructors, students, and servants in the Academy’s black livery, as well as the greater part of the population of Liviapolis, processed around the city carrying the relics of forty saints.

The aura of potentia so permeated the city that when the Megas Ducas was given wine, he could taste the raw power.

After the procession and a snatched meal, eaten cold from golden plates, the Megas Ducas took most of his knights, as well as some Scholae and a dozen knights of the Latinikon to the hippodrome, where heated pavilions had been set.

The crowd was already in the hippodrome – most had gone there straight from mass and the solemn procession. The crowd was so dense that they had raised the temperature inside. The knights were greeted with cheers as they appeared, and then they went into their tents – Ser Michael, as the master of the tourney, had divided them somewhat artificially into two teams.

The Megas Ducas was meant to be last to arrive, and he waited outside the gates of the hippodrome with his retinue of squires and pages; Toby and Nell and Nicholas Ganfroy, his trumpeter, with Ser Jehan leading and his banner carried by Ser Milus, who was a marshal for the day and not jousting. He was dressed from head to toe in scarlet wool and deerskin, with a hat of scarlet leather lined in fox fur and sporting three enormous red plumes. His knight’s belt was around his hips, and he wore a small white scrap of cloth pinned to his shoulder with a brooch of rubies and emeralds. At his side was a sword that all but breathed of potential and had a perfection of form that showed even through its red scabbard. The hilt was gilded steel, the grip wired in gold over scarlet deerskin, the pommel enamelled.

There was a great press of people around the gate – at least a thousand men and women, shouting his name. He leaned down from his great horse and kissed a baby – the first time he’d ever done such a thing, and he was rewarded with a warm wet feeling on his hands and a smell, and the mother beamed at him.

Toby handed him a towel and he wiped his hands and grinned at the mother, and then she was lost in the crowd.

The gates began to open, and the wall of sound hit him like a fist. If he had thought that a thousand people packed into the alley by the gate was a huge crowd, what waited for him at the end of the tunnel was twenty times as big, and he reeled as if an enemy had struck him with a lance.

But he got the smile back on his face. At his feet, Long Paw was gently but firmly pushing the crowd back, away from the tunnel into the hippodrome. A few young men and a trickle of older ones squeezed past into the tunnel ahead of the company archers and they flattened themselves against the walls of the tunnel and shouted his style, their cries ringing metallically in the confines of the half-bowshot-long tunnel.

He waved to the crowd trapped outside and made his horse rear a little, and they applauded and he rode into the tunnel. A young man ran alongside his horse, waving, until he tripped on something in the tunnel, and he fell with a shout.

The Red Knight looked down to see what had happened to him. There was a blinding flare of light, something struck him in the chest, and everything went dark.

The Megas Ducas entered the hippodrome last, and he rode in through the Imperial tunnel by the Great Gate very slowly, with great sheets of sound belting across the arena as the city crowd roared for him. But something was wrong – he was very stiff in the saddle, and Nell, the Duke’s page, could be seen to turn her horse in the gate and gallop for the palace.

Ser Michael was summoned. He watched a tight knot of the Duke’s household push into the Duke’s private pavilion, which wasn’t what should have happened. He made a sign to Ser Gavin, the captain of the ‘Outlander’ team, and ran for the Duke’s tent.

Inside, he found Toby kneeling by three stools all placed together. Wilful Murder was white as parchment, and Ser Jehan and Nicholas Ganfroy leaning over-

‘What’s happened?’ Ser Michael asked.

The Duke lay across the stools. He had a lot of blood coming out of him. He was talking, but the voice didn’t sound like his own. There was blood everywhere, and Father Arnaud seemed to be covered in the stuff. He was mumbling – probably in prayer – and his face looked grey.

‘Summon a magister,’ the Duke barked. He didn’t sound himself. ‘A tough one. No – get me that boy. Mortirmir. If he’s here.’

Ser Michael knew a crisis when he saw one. He didn’t ask. He turned and ran for the defenders’ pavilion.

‘Messire Mortirmir!’ Ser Michael called as he barged in. Twenty men were being armed by forty squires and pages in a cacophony of steel plates and a bewilderment of lost lace-points. Wicker hampers lay open on the sand, and only a few lucky men – and Ser Alison – had stools on which to sit.

Morgan Mortirmir had his leg harnesses on. And he had no squire.

He came willingly enough. ‘What’s this about?’ he asked, and then he paled. ‘Shit – it’s not the roof?’ he asked.

Ser Michael towed him by the elbow out onto the sands, where they received a smattering of applause – Mortirmir was the first armoured man to emerge. The crowd wanted to see some fighting.

Ser Michael was still trying to parse what he’d seen and heard. It seemed to him that the voice that had barked orders hadn’t been the Duke’s. He’d sounded very much like Harmodius.

Mortirmir was pushed through the knot of men to the foot of the bed made of stools. The Megas Ducas lay on it, covered in blood – his face was crusted in it and his linen shirt was scarlet.

‘Jesu Christi!’ Mortirmir muttered. ‘I’m no healer.’

Shut up and let me in.

Mortirmir might have reacted differently if not for the week he’d just had. He opened his palace and in strode a tall man in dark blue velvet.

All the time in the world, now, lad. Is this all you have for memory?

Who the fuck are you? asked Mortirmir, now terrified. He’d let a stranger into his palace. He was, in effect, naked.

Yes, that was foolish of you. Sorry, lad. I’m going to wear you like a shirt for a few hours. You will be supremely tired at the end and – bah. Stop wriggling. Your panic is understandable but a waste of my effort.

Sweet Jesu, you are young. And supple. What a pleasure – there.

Even as Mortirmir attempted to fight the intruder – with no effect whatsoever – the man was using his body. He could feel himself kneel by the Duke’s corpse. He could see his arms move.

Most horrible of all, he watched as his memory palace dissolved.

Really, most young people try and build something that is dashing and romantic and far too fucking complicated. The man in blue velvet sketched rapidly with a wand of gold. The gold – its gleam, and its aethereal presence – calmed Mortirmir. The legions of evil didn’t wield gold.

You play chess, eh, boy? the old man asked. The floor under their feet suddenly became black and white parquetry – eight squares by eight.

Mortirmir fought the urge to vomit. Nothing so utterly disconcerting had ever happened to him. Even his mind was not his own. His inner vision – in the aethereal – was in the control of this horrible old-

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Harmodius.

You’re dead!

Hmm. Not exactly. STOP WRIGGLING. There.

Mortirmir’s memory palace was suddenly entirely rebuilt as a garden with a giant marble chess floor in the middle. Every leaf on every wild rose bush was more vivid than anything had been in his former palace.

I’ve never been there – sir – I can’t-

Harmodius laughed. No one has ever been here. I made it up. I’m a little busy, lad. Shut up, please?

Chess pieces began to move.

The white queen’s head rotated and a line of pure green light shot out of it, touched the golden knob atop the king’s head, and turned into a rainbow of colours so vivid they were like a fever dream and Mortirmir wanted to give them new names. The colours focused on a crystal in Harmodius’s hand – an artificiality that Mortirmir could never have contrived. The old man nodded.

You are full of power, aren’t you, boy? I’m not sure I’ve ever had access to this much of the raw stuff. He flashed a smile of pure greed. You really are lucky I have other plans, because this body would suit my needs very well. And how your professors would love to have me as a student! He laughed nastily. Worry not. In fact, I suspect I’ll prove to be your benefactor.

He tossed the jewel he’d just created in the air, and Mortirmir saw his left hand strip the glove off his right. Saw his own right hand hover above the Duke’s side. There was a crossbow bolt protruding just above the heart on the left.

Assassin, the old man said. Very, very close. Another finger’s width to the left, and we’d both be gone. As it is we’re in trouble, and Mortirmir’s finger touched the Duke’s side. Power flared as if a small sun had been released. Poison, alchemy, and magick altogether. Someone wanted my young friend to be very, very dead. The sun intensified, and Mortirmir felt all his potential flowing out of him like water from a broken bottle.

It was the most terrifying sensation.

Worst of all, it became obvious to both of them – together, intertwined – that there was not enough potentia between the three – Harmodius, Mortirmir, and the stricken Megas Dukas – to save him. The power ran in as if into a bottomless pit, and nothing changed.

Mortirmir felt Harmodius sag in defeat.

His last aethereal pouch of of carefully hoarded ops vanished-

There was an explosion of pale, golden green light that seemed to come from the mortally wounded man’s hand.

Mortirmir’s left hand reached in, took the bolt, and withdrew it from the wound with a gentle tug and a horrible wet sucking noise. As the steel head slid free, the skin underneath closed. Perfectly.

Harmodius, deep in Mortirmir’s memory garden, stumbled against a stone pillar – the only remnant of the former palace – and shook his head. By Saint George, young magister. May you never see that again.

What happened? Mortirmir breathed.

Harmodius stood breathing, like a man who had run a long race. Then he shook his head. Not my secret to share, young man. He needs to sleep now. How’s your jousting?

Every knight ran three courses. The jousts were arranged carefully – every man knew the order of his opponents, and there were four sets of lists, and squires and pages ran from one to another as Ser Michael directed the whole entertainment.

Ser Alison unhorsed Ser George Brewes, to the crowd’s enormous satisfaction. Ser Francis Atcourt unhorsed the Red Knight, who fought with a singular lack of grace, and the princess put her hand to her chest when he struck the ground. But he rose with some of his usual bounce, and improved in his next exchange, plucking the crest neatly off the helmet of Ser Bescanon, whose lance tip scratched across the Red Knight’s shield and failed even to break.

Ser Gavin dominated the afternoon. His lance was sure, and it was clearly his day – he dropped Ser Francis Atcourt hard enough to make people in the crowd wince, and he broke a lance on each of three opponents from the Latinikon and then managed a spectacular feat against Ser Jehan, striking his helmet below the crest so that the whole helmet failed along its forge-weld lines and burst asunder. The older man was unhurt, but helmetless, as he rode down the list, and he wheeled his horse and bowed to his opponent as the crowd applauded.

Ser Alcaeus was the crowd’s darling, as captain of the defenders, and he dropped three opponents in a row. But the Podesta of the Etruscans, Ser Antonio, knocked him back in his saddle without unhorsing him and was judged the better lance on points. He rode off to stony silence from the crowd, and to the wild celebrations of the Etruscan merchants near the gate.

As the sun began to set, Ser Gavin faced the Megas Ducas, who was riding stiffly. For the first time all afternoon, the Duke was mounted on his new warhorse. Despite his stiff seat, he was technically perfect – as was his brother. They rode the first course, and broke lances on each other. As they walked their horses back to their starting positions Gavin raised his hand and they halted their horses in the centre of the lists, separated by the barrier that kept horses from colliding – and kept them on course.

Ser Gavin leaned over the barrier. ‘Is that you?’ he asked.

The Red Knight’s eyes flashed. ‘It is now,’ he said.

‘Why don’t I get to fight someone incompetent wearing your armour?’ Gavin asked. He flipped a salute and rode on. ‘You’re too bloody good.’

On their second course they broke lances on each other. The crowd roared. The small white handkerchief fluttered on the Red Knight’s aventail. The knights who were already out pointed and laughed.

Ser Bescanon said to Ser Jehan, ‘That was as pretty a pass as I’ve ever seen. We need an Alban crowd – this is art wasted on swine.’

Ser Jehan handed him a cup of wine. ‘He’s a brilliant lance,’ he admitted. ‘Better than I ever was.’

On their third pass, Ser Gavin’s lance skidded off the Red Knight’s shield and slammed into his left pauldron and ripped it off his body.

The Red Knight kept his seat as if made of iron, but the circular pauldron rolled across the sand like an accusation. The Red Knight paused at his own pavilion to have his visor removed, and then cantered back down the list and embraced his brother, and the two men pounded each other on the back.

‘Sweet Jesu, brother!’ Ser Gavin said. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘So I am. But that was spectacular,’ his brother said, and they rode together down the lists, saluted the princess, and rode to one of the heated pavilions.

‘Melee by torchlight?’ Ser George Brewes said, after exchanging a steel hug with his Captain. ‘People will die out there.’

Toby got the Red Knight’s maille off over his head and they could all see the bandages.

‘What the fuck!’ shouted Francis Atcourt.

‘Crossbow,’ the Red Knight said. ‘It’s out and healed. And now I’ll get it worked again. Relax.’ He waved to Morgon Mortirmir, who was in full armour. The young man looked as if his eyes had been glazed by a potter, but he was adept enough with his healing. ‘Poisoned and magicked. Somebody thought it would be a one-shot kill.’

‘We didn’t get the shooter,’ Ser Michael said.

The other knights in the pavilion looked shocked.

The Red Knight took a deep breath as a pair of Academy Scholae lifted his shirt. Blue fire played across his left shoulder. Mortirmir ran his hand over the wound and nodded.

Tancreda Comnena smiled at her Plague. ‘When did you learn to heal so neatly?’ she asked.

‘At the siege of Lissen Carrak,’ Mortirmir’s mouth said. ‘Damn – despoina, please forget I said that.’

She blinked once, slowly.

‘You are very beautiful, and I think I’m in love with you,’ Mortirmir said.

She flushed.

He knelt with the sort of grace usually acquired by older men. ‘My lady, if you would vouchsafe me a token, I would be proud to defend your beauty against all others, taking you and you alone as my lady fair.’

She put a hand on his head. ‘What a pretty speech,’ she said. ‘Does that work on girls in Alba?’

She had left her hand on his shoulder, and he took it, turned the hand over and kissed her palm. And then her wrist.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Now that would work on the girls of Alba, I’m sure.’ She leaned down. ‘Suddenly you are very sure of yourself.’ She leaned closer and brushed her lips against his – the lightest of butterfly pressures.

There you go, boy. That’s all there is to it. Really, you are lucky I’m giving you back this palace of meat and lust and power. I do this so much better than you do.

When Mortirmir rode out for his last exchange of blows, he wore a magnificent red and purple sleeve on his shoulder. And Despoina Comnena pulled her cloak tight against her and refused to let her cousin look to see if she had given the sleeve.

In the last courses – mostly retakes from earlier bouts where a run had been missed or a horse or man had been injured – Mortirmir broke a lance against Ser Antonio and rocked the Podesta in his saddle, to the delight of the crowd and young Mortirmir himself, who pumped his fist in the air in self-satisfied glee. But he mastered himself, and the two were seen to embrace. Ser Alcaeus hit Ser Alison hard but didn’t unhorse her, and the crowd roared. It was the last pass, between two favourites, and when it was over the two knights met in the middle of the barrier. Ser Alison said something and Ser Alcaeus put his hand on his heart and shook his head, and then the two embraced.

They all rode around the lists in procession, and the princess awarded the prize of honour to Ser Gavin – very much against her will, the crowd could see, and they roared for the Red Knight nonetheless.

And then they trooped back to their pavilions.

‘I am so sorry,’ Ser Gavin said.

‘I’m not – that was magical,’ the Red Knight said. ‘I think you may be the best jouster I’ve ever faced.’

Francis Atcourt shook his head. ‘Someone stuck you with a crossbow bolt, and you are still jousting?’

The Red Knight winced. One of the two Scholae – young Mortirmir – raised a hand, and a third Academician stepped forward and a line of power connected them – the junior student passing raw ops to his classmate.

‘I hoped he might be stupid enough to try again,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Any luck, Morgan?’

The Alban student shrugged. ‘We’re seeking the weapon, but whoever did this knows enough to break the connection between bow and arrow,’ he said, his voice deeper and strangely confident for an adolescent.

Toby, head down and clearly ashamed, said, ‘I’m too used to having Ser Thomas. And Ser Ranald. I was lax.’

The Red Knight reached out and tweaked his squire’s cheek. ‘Horse shit, Toby, we’re all a little stretched right now. And this bastard is good. He chose his moment well. We covered it.’

‘Why do you have to go back out there?’ Ser Michael asked.

The Duke’s eyes rested on his – sardonic and dark and a little too glittery. And glinting red in their depths. ‘Michael – if I go down all hell will break loose. I promise you. If they don’t even see me hesitate-’ he smiled, ‘-then they’re going to have some fractures of their own.’

‘Who is this they?’ Ser George asked.

Ser Gavin pushed forward. ‘Fuck that!’ he said angrily. ‘This place can burn for all of me.’

The Red Knight shook his head. ‘Gentles all, we may have a busy Christmas night. We knew it was coming – Gelfred got a messenger, but there must have been a duplicate.’ He sat up. He was very pale. ‘However, if I survive the public dancing, we should be fine. If I don’t, let me take this moment to tell you all what a pleasure it has been to be your Captain.’

Atcourt turned to Ser Michael. ‘He’s insane. Make him go to bed. And shouldn’t we warn the princess?’

The Red Knight’s face closed.

‘Warn her?’ Ser Michael spat. He turned and looked at Ser Alcaeus, who stood with his arms folded.

The Morean knight shook his head, looking ten years older, but said nothing.

It was Ser Alison who took up the gauntlet. She laughed, and her raucous laugh rang out like a challenge to fate. ‘Warn the princess? She’s probably paying the fucking assassin.’

Harndon – The Queen

The Queen had tidied her apartments with Diota, and she’d busied herself, first meeting with Master Pye, who’d brought her gift for the King, and then wrapping it. Then she’d dressed carefully in brown velvet with bronze and gold beads and emeralds the size of nail-heads. Her belly showed, but Diota had worked a miracle of her own, recutting the brown velvet to match her latest expansion.

‘Where is Rebecca? And Emota? And my other ladies?’ she asked, as the winter darkness began to roll over the snow. She watched the shadows lengthen – the towers appearing to creep across the dirty snow in the main yard – and thought with a shudder of the other darkness in the corridors under the Old Palace.

‘Sweet, they’re late. Everyone’s late,’ Diota said, with her usual practicality. ‘Because it is Christmas, sweeting, and that’s what happens at Christmas.’

‘I’m fat,’ the Queen said. She glanced at her nurse. ‘Emota worries me. She looks ill.’

Diota rolled her eyes. ‘You are having a baby, Your Grace.’ She grinned. ‘It’s been known to add a few pounds.’ She looked thoughtfully at the mirror. ‘Emota – I’m a coarse old woman. I’d say she chose the wrong door at the stable.’

‘Emota? She is no light of love,’ the Queen said.

Her nurse shrugged. ‘Men are pigs. And they behave accordingly.’

‘What do you know?’ the Queen asked.

‘Know? Nothing. But I think that one of the Galles has turned her head, and the little bitch has been spying on us for them.’ Diota seized a hairbrush and yanked too hard at her mistress’s hair. ‘I heard one o’ they calling her a slut and a whore.’

The Queen shook her head. ‘Why are they so stupid? Blessed Virgin – my own husband thinks I was unfaithful,’ Desiderata said. Suddenly she sobbed. She hadn’t said the words aloud before.

‘He’s a fool,’ Diota said. ‘But he’s a man, and that’s the way of men.’

‘How can he even think it?’ the Queen shouted. She hadn’t meant to shout. The anger appeared, almost out of the air.

The privy door opened, and Lady Rebecca entered. She curtsied, her face as pale as new milk.

‘Oh, Becca, what’s wrong?’ the Queen asked.

Almspend shook her head, pursed her lips and said nothing.

‘I command you,’ the Queen said.

‘It is Christmas, and like everyone else, I am late,’ her secretary said. ‘Men in the halls are saying endless foul things.’

‘You have been attacked by one of the Galles!’ Diota cried.

Almspend smiled. ‘Unlikely,’ she said quietly. ‘Or rather, unlikely to happen more than once.’

The Queen sighed. ‘If only Mary – bah. She’ll come back after Epiphany.’ She looked out the window. ‘I would give much to leave the poison of this court. To go to a nunnery and have some peace until my baby is delivered.’ The thought of her baby clearly cheered her. She allowed a small smile to penetrate her anger.

Almspend made an effort, drew herself together and picked up a brush and began to work on the Queen’s hair.

Diota looked at her. The two exchanged glances.

‘Where is Emota?’ asked the Queen.

Almspend shrugged. ‘Busy, I expect, Your Grace.’ She was careful, but the Queen’s head turned.

‘Lying down for her Gallish lover,’ Diota spat.

Almspend glared at her. ‘That’s not how I’ve heard it,’ she said.

‘Nurse, do not be crude. Emota is the youngest of my ladies and perhaps not the brightest.’ The Queen smiled. ‘But she has my love all the same.’

‘You should keep it,’ Lady Emota said from the doorway. ‘I am not bright. I am dull, and stupid, and foolish. And pregnant. Can we share that, Your Grace? Like you, I will bear a bastard child.’

The Queen turned so fast that Almspend’s brush tangled in her hair and stayed there. ‘Emota!’ she said.

Emota pointed a finger at the Queen. ‘I am ruined because you are a slut. I believed you. I believed all that instruction about protecting the protectors and guarding the guardians and all I will have for my idles is a swollen belly and the reputation of being a whore just like my Queen.’ She burst into tears and threw herself on the carpet.

‘What has happened?’ the Queen asked. She looked at the other women.

Almspend got hold of the hairbrush and began to work it loose from the Queen’s hair.

Diota rolled the prostrate girl over and slapped her – none too gently – on the cheek. ‘Get up, you silly woman,’ she said.

‘He is the best knight!’ Emota said. ‘And he treated me like – like-’

‘Are you leman to Jean de Vrailly?’ the Queen asked.

‘Among others,’ Diota spat. ‘She’s ridden a prize number of warhorses.’

‘Aaaghh!’ wept Emota. It was as if she’d taken a wound, she cried so hard.

‘The Galles will use her against you,’ Almspend said, brushing on. ‘Her lechery will make you look a wanton, Your Grace.’

The Queen knelt by her lady. ‘Emota – I need to know what has happened. But I will not desert you.’

Almspend’s eyes met Diota’s in agreement for once. ‘Your Grace, it would be better if you did desert her.’

The Queen gathered the sobbing girl in her arms. ‘Why – because she loved the wrong man? What does it matter?’ she asked. ‘It is all male vanity and foolishness. All of it.’

Almspend’s eyes met her Queen’s. ‘That’s not the argument to use to a court full of men at Christmas,’ she said. ‘The Galles have us under siege, my Queen. And they have put a sap in through poor Emota.’

‘More like a battering ram,’ Diota said.

‘Be kind. Both of you. What has this girl done that is so bad?’ She turned to Almspend. ‘I understand your argument, my dear. I am upset too.’ She pressed her hand against Almspend’s cheek. ‘You are angry.’

‘More afraid than angry,’ Almspend said cautiously.

‘What do you know?’ the Queen asked, gazing into her secretary’s eyes. Almspend’s eyes were pale blue and shone like ice on a clear winter day. The Queen’s were deep and dark, green and brown and gold, and they seemed to hold secrets – all the secrets of an ancient world.

‘What have you learned?’ the Queen asked.

Almspend pursed her lips and frowned, and her eyes darted away. ‘Not today – please, Your Grace.’ She looked at the young woman sobbing on the floor. ‘Your Grace – I apologise. Emota is guiltless of anything but having her head turned. I’m sure of it. But the vitriol we will reap-’

‘When you call me Your Grace this often, I know that something is very wrong.’ The Queen smiled. She looked down and put her hand on the girl. ‘But no girl who has been raped is guilty of anything, and we will not make her more a victim.’ She ran her hand down the girl’s back and golden light seemed to fill the room.

‘Ahh!’ sighed Emota.

The air seemed clear and clean.

Diota breathed in and out noisily, and then sighed. ‘Ah, poppet. You have deep places in you, and no mistake.’

The Queen shook her head. ‘I will make them pay. I will make them pay for Emota and for Mary and for every harsh word they have said. I swear it.’

The lights flickered.

Almspend shuddered. ‘That – was heard.’

‘I care not. They would toy with me and harm those I love? I will rip their manhoods from them and blind their eyes with my talons.’ The Queen stood up like a statue of bronze, and she shone.

Almspend stepped back.

The Queen put a hand to her forehead. ‘Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death. Holy Mary, what did I say?’

Almspend shook her head.

The Queen took a little holy water from a vial and crossed herself. Then she took a deep breath. ‘I was in touch with something,’ she said. ‘Becca, you are troubled and you were before Emota came in.’

‘Humour me,’ Almspend asked without raising her eyes. ‘Your Grace.’

‘Is it something bad?’ the Queen asked.

Almspend raised her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, how I wish I could lie.’

The Queen smiled. ‘Let us kneel, and pray to our Lady for succour. And to Christ Jesus.’

Almspend sighed. They all knelt, and prayed.

There was noise in the courtyard, and Diota leaned out to watch. A dozen squires – most of them Galles, but several Albans – trooped by with torches. They stopped in the middle of the courtyard and began to sing a bawdy carol. They were dancing – Diota leaned out further.

Her breath sucked in, and she turned inside.

‘They have figures. Made like Your Grace, and Lady Mary, and Lady Emota. In whore’s clothes. They are dancing with them.’

The Queen’s face darkened. ‘Send for my knights.’

‘Your Grace, most of your knights were sent north by the King.’ Almspend shook her head. ‘There’s Diccon Crawford and Ser Malden. They can hardly fight all the Galles.’

The Queen’s face darkened further.

‘And the King has just stepped onto his gallery,’ Diota reported.

‘He will act,’ the Queen asserted.

‘I’m sure of it,’ Diota said. She came back to Almspend’s side, and took up a brush.

After some hooting from the courtyard rose to assail them, the Queen sobbed. The harsh laughter of young men rose to assail them.

And the King did nothing.

‘How did it come to this?’ the Queen asked.

N’gara – Yule Court

The hall was set with a thousand stars and ten thousand tapers – slight lights of beeswax that nonetheless seemed to burn for ever, while a hundred small faeries flitted from light to light like bees with flowers. The silver sound of their laughter was polyphonic and, against it, Tapio’s harper played an ancient lament, the ‘Song of the Battle of Tears’, which was only played at Yule.

Tamsin sat in state and Bill Redmede, who loved his own lady to distraction, nonetheless found her the fairest being he’d ever seen. Today her heart-shaped face was framed with her snow-white hair and her gown of white wool was embroidered with golden leaves and red berries intertwined with real holly and real ivy, and she wore an ivy crown.

She sat in the centre of the dais with Mogon, the Duchess of the Westmores, as her title was translated, on her right, and a tall golden bear on her left. At her feet was a table full of men – Redmede himself, and Bess and young Fitzwilliam and Bill Alan, and Cat, and the Grey Man. And on the other side sat Outwallers – a very young shaman, an elderly hunter who’d been healed by Tamsin herself, and a handsome man with the strangest skin Redmede had ever seen, blue-black like charcoal, with lively brown eyes and curly hair.

He caught Redmede staring at him, and instead of glaring he smiled. Redmede responded with his own smile.

‘Nita Qwan,’ the man said, extending his forearm in the Outwaller way, and Redmede bowed his head as Jacks did and then embraced the man. ‘Bill,’ he shouted over the music. The irks tended to listen for a bit and then wander off into conversation, and the hall was loud, although the plaintive notes of the lament were easy to hear, if you listened. ‘Or you may call me Peter!’

‘Your Alban is easy on the ears,’ Redmede said. He introduced the black Outwaller to Bess, who grinned, and to Bill Alan, who looked at the man’s hand for a moment as if it was a precious artefact.

‘Was it an accident? Or some monster did this?’ Alan asked.

Nita Qwan laughed. ‘Where I come from, all men look like me.’

‘O’ course they do, mate!’ Bill Alan said. ‘Don’t mind me – too much mead.’ He raised his cup. ‘An’ very fine it looks on ye, too!’

‘You must be the Sossags,’ Bess said.

Nita Qwan grinned and swallowed some mead of his own. ‘We must, lady,’ he said.

The music changed, and couples – mostly irks – began to rise from the benches. There were enough Western Kenecka Outwallers – with their red-brown skin and high cheekbones – to provide a solid contingent of men and women, and the Jacks and Outwallers were game to dance.

Tamsin came down the dais, and Tapio forward from the tapestries at the back of the hall to bow deeply over her hand. She smiled, as radiant as the brightest mid-winter sun, and the mistletoe in her hair seemed to glitter with life and barely suppressed magic, and Tapio gathered her in his arms and kissed her. And as they kissed, many others kissed throughout the hall, and Redmede found himself lost in Bess’s eyes.

And then the Faery Knight took a great cup of beaten gold from one of his knights and walked to the centre of the hall.

‘Be free of my hall, all you guests. But be warned that this night we celebrate the triumph of the light over the darkness – whether you choose to call that Yal’da or you celebrate the coming of a blessed babe or you merely yell for the crushing of the long night. If you serve the dark, begone!’

He raised the cup, and light flowed out like spilled wine, and the irks raised a great shout, and all the Outwallers too, and the high-pitched war cry ripped out into the night.

‘Now drink and dance!’ Tapio said. ‘Those are my only commands.’

The wreckage of the hall was fitting tribute to the finest revel Bill Redmede had ever witnessed, or joined, and he himself was almost too drunk to care what happened under the table, behind the tapestries, or on the dais at the head of the hall.

Bess reached out to a beauty – a fair irk woman with a slim figure and a halo of golden hair – and the woman caught her hands and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Child of man.’ She laughed. ‘You taste better than I’d imagined. A bright Yule to you and your mate.’

Bess curtsied. ‘You are all so beautiful!’ she breathed. ‘Where are the hideous irks? The ugly faces and the fangs?’

The irk maid passed her silver fan over her face and there she was, a glowering hag with a nose six inches long and warts with hair. ‘Would you go to war dressed for a party?’ she asked. ‘Or to a party, dressed for war?’ she asked, and her face returned to its elfin beauty. ‘I have as many faces to wear as a child of man has dresses. Fair is fair,’ she added, and kissed Redmede until his head spun. The irk maid spun away on light feet. ‘Your mouths are rich, children of men. Be love!’

And later still, when only a hardy few eaters were picking the bones of a deer carcass on the centre table, and a hundred faeries flitted high in the cavernous ceiling, leaving streamers of pale fire as they moved, and half the hall was dancing and the other half was singing or playing instruments – hautboys, sackbuts, and corinettos and oboes and recorders and whistles and lutes and harps and a hundred stringed instruments that Bill Redmede had never seen before – some very small, or possessing just two or three strings, so that the vast cavern that was the Faery Knight’s hall seemed to move with the dance – then Mogon came and squatted on her haunches by him.

‘The time is now,’ she said. ‘This is a magic time. The aethereal is wide open to the real. Thorn will be blind as a bat, and without high-pitched sounds to help him, and all his little helpers will be deaf until morning.’

Nita Qwan, the Sossag, was resting under the table on the trestle. He emerged with a flagon of Yule ale. Redmede worried briefly what the Outwaller had seen – he and Bess had been a little busy.

‘May I see Lord Tapio now?’ he asked Mogon.

Mogon nodded. ‘You’ll see him, as he invites you.’

Nita Qwan and Redmede bowed to their companions – those still upright – and followed the Duchess through the hall. The great warden danced among the dancers, passing light-footed through the intricate whorls and turns of a hundred couples and two different figures.

At the back of the hall hung a tapestry of a unicorn, done in white spider’s web on a tissue of spider silk by a thousand faeries. It was so light that it fluttered in the breeze and so vivid that Redmede expected the unicorn to move.

They passed behind it, and the tapestry blocked all sounds – and light. The reverse showed the same unicorn, but with the image turned.

They walked through a broad cavern lit with torches, and into another, and then came to a heavy oak door with decorations wrought in bronze – half moons and stars and comets. Mogon rapped it smartly, and it opened.

Inside was a room that might have been at home in any lord’s castle – the whole panelled in old oak, with oak table and chairs and great bronze candlesticks. A fire roared in a huge fireplace that filled one wall – a sorcerous fire, white and blue, and the walls were hung with armour and weapons. And heads. Two Wyverns, a dozen great beasts, an unidentifiable monster – and rows of human heads.

Bill Redmede was arrested by the heads.

‘Welcome, fair guessstsss.’ Tapio put a hand under Redmede’s elbow and seated him at the great table. And then he went around. ‘Lord Geraaargkh of the Blueberry Moeity, who comes as the Steward of the Adnacrag Bears. Mogon, Duchess of the Western Lakes, and Lady of the Wardens of the Wild. Tekksimark, Marquis of Mound Five and representative of one hive of the Western Boglins. Nita Qwan, for the Sossag – and perhaps for other Outwaller men, as well. Bill Redmede for the Jacks, and perhaps for other men in Alba and the east.’

There was a sudden, polite babble of complaint – Bill Redmede didn’t feel he held any remit to speak for men, nor did Nita Qwan, and Tekkismark chittered animatedly that his hive was one of the smallest.

Tapio swept out an arm in a magnificent gesture. ‘I agree that none of us can actually speak for a race. Nonetheless, it is time to act, and when they make songs of us, we will stand for our peoples.’ He frowned. ‘If any songs are made in the days to come.’

Mogon showed her long pink tongue and a smell of burning soap filled the air. ‘You are too dramatic, my friend,’ she said. ‘No matter who wins, there is always someone to make songs.’

Tapio’s frown turned to a smile. ‘Tamsin and I will have to stand for the irks, although no two Eld folks agree on anything from the best wine to the best way to kiss a mortal.’ He sat, his deerskin shirt glowing from the odd fire. ‘I agree that while an irk lives, someone will be making songs.’ He crossed his legs – his legs which were longer than any mortal’s. His hose were of deer-skin. ‘But we are not here to talk about the vagaries of art, are we? Some of you are already engaged in war, or near war, with Thorn. Others of you are as yet undecided – indeed, one of you is only just discovering the purpose for which we have gathered.’

‘What is that purpose?’ demanded Tekkismark.

‘We are here to bring about the defeat of the entity known as Asssh, currently posssesssing the sssorcerer Thorn.’

The bear growled, then sat back – a very human gesture as it tucked its big arms behind its head. ‘What is possessing, in this context?’ he asked with a rumble like a cat’s purr.

Mogon leaned forward. ‘Possession is against the Law.’

Tapio shrugged. ‘Isss it? ’ he hissed. ‘And when doesss Asssh ressspect the Law? ’

Bill Redmede leaned forward, looked at Nita Qwan and met the same incomprehension in his blank stare, and turned to Tapio. ‘Lord – who is Ash? What does he have to do with Thorn? What is he to me?’

Nita Qwan nodded his agreement. ‘And of what law do you speak?’ he asked.

Tapio exchanged a long look with Mogon. Geraaargkh took his clawed paws from behind his head and turned his glistening black eyes on the two men. ‘Trust two men not to know the Law.’

Mogon shook her great head. ‘Why? We take care that they do not learn too much of the Law of the Wild, even when they have lived among us for fifty generations, like the Sossag.’ She paused, and the spines on her head raised, the whole crest coming erect with a snap. ‘The Law prevents us from destroying each other in times of drought and famine. It was formulated long ago when the first human sorcerers began to manipulate the elements in a way that we had not foreseen.’

‘How long ago?’ Nita Qwan asked.

Tapio rubbed his bare chin. ‘Nine thousand years, as men count time.’ He looked at Mogon, who shrugged.

‘There was no time, before men came,’ Mogon said. ‘It is pointless to count the time since, merely to satisfy the ignorance of men.’

‘There was a great war, that covered all the earth,’ Tapio said very quietly.

‘Men against the Wild?’ Redmede heard himself ask. He put a hand over his own mouth.

‘No,’ Mogon said. She stared into the fire. ‘Not at all.’

Tapio poured himself more wine. ‘When the war was over, the survivors determined that never again would people of power do certain things.’

Mogon kept looking into the fire. ‘All the things the winners had done to win the war were outlawed, of course,’ she said. ‘Possession. Necromancy. The fire from the sky.’

Tapio added. ‘Ash was there. Ash is the greatest of the dragons – and the one most inimical to any rivals.’

Mogon laughed. ‘Ash has no rivals, but he perceives all of us – every sentient being – as an enemy because he understands the potential in every thinking thing to rise to power. Ash desires to be a god. Or perhaps to be God.’ Her laugh was bitter. ‘I am accounted old at half a thousand years, and I have seen enough to know that the showdown with Ash has been long and long in the making. My father believed-’ She looked at Tapio.

Geraaargkh shook himself and hunkered over. ‘We were promised!’ he said. ‘Promised a king. A leader.’

Tapio’s smile grew cynical. ‘A messiah – isn’t that what we were expecting? ’

‘Half the Wild thinks it is you,’ Geraaargkh said.

‘It is said,’ Tekkismark spat. ‘You are the one. The one who will free us from the wheel and make the gears turn any way they will.’ He clashed his forearms together, and they made the same sound, Redmede thought, that a peasant made as he sharpened a scythe.

Tapio looked disgusted. ‘I am not your messiah. We need to come down from the clouds and solve this ourselves.’

Mogon sat back heavily and her big oak chair gave a momentous creak, almost a groan. ‘We were promised. By the Lady Tar.’

Nita Qwan nodded. ‘Tar is a name I know, even among my people in Ifraqu’ya. But we call her Tara. The Great She-Wolf.’

Mogon’s crest was almost a bristle brush – every spine seemed to strain for the beamed ceiling. ‘Tar is no wolf, man-who-cooks. Tar is another of the great serpents. A dragon.’

Geraaargkh said, ‘Bears call her “The First”.’

Tapio sipped his wine and sang a lilting song in an irk language. The pace was slow and steady, and the tuning was alien to human ears, but had a stately dignity that transcended melody.

‘First who slipped through dappled glades

First who danced among the blades.’

Nita Qwan cleared his throat in the momentary silence that followed the irk’s song. ‘So – Tar is good? And Ash is evil?’

Tapio grinned so that all his fangs showed. ‘Out in the hall many folk are dancing in the Yule, proclaiming the light against the dark. And despite my love’s passion for cleaning, there are small creatures that live in the hall – mice, rats, even some beetles. When the flashing heels of a dancer slay one such, was the dancer good, or evil? While proclaiming the triumph of light, they may slay a dozen mice and a hundred beetles.’

Mogon extended a long, taloned arm. ‘And if the mice and the beetles were to band together and form an army against the dancers would they understand what they were fighting? Would the dancers?’

Redmede felt thick and stupid. He stood up. ‘What are we to do, then?’ he asked.

Tapio laughed. ‘Oh, we’ll fight, alongside the mice and the beetles,’ he said. ‘Just don’t imagine we’re the heroes. For all I know, Ash is locked in a valiant struggle with the very soul of evil, and we will provide the tiny distraction that leads to the ultimate triumph of darkness.’

Redmede grabbed the table. ‘Really?’

Tapio shook his head. ‘Nay, brother. I am in a foul mood. Listen: west of the Inner Sea everything is moving. Hordes are coming – greater than armies. This is just one tiny part of whatever is going on. We – the mice and the beetles – can only go by what we see. Some dancers avoid us on the floor – some even pick us up and move us tenderly to the wall. Others stomp on us whenever they can.’ He sighed, raised an eyebrow, and looked at Redmede from under it. ‘But aren’t you Jacks suspicious any time someone tells you that they represent the side of good and right? ’

Redmede nodded. ‘That’d be the Church.’

Mogon shook her head. ‘No – that’s everyone. Once the dispute turns to war, every side claims the others are demons.’ She turned to Tapio. ‘Can we not approach this Thorn and offer a deal? Or simply make an alliance and use it as a shield?’ She nodded. ‘And I agree about the west. Someone has kicked all the anthills there.’

‘We can piss on that fire when the flames lick us. As for Thorn.’ Tapio shrugged. ‘It is probably worth a try.’

Geraaargkh said, ‘Too late for us. He attacked us. Even now, the cubs of my people are hunted in the woods.’

Mogon was watching Tapio. ‘You want this,’ she said.

He gave her a wry smile, full of humour and sorrow with a spice of self-knowledge. ‘I’m no messiah,’ he said. ‘But I’m a pretty fair general. Go to war with Ash? No one will ever forget us! ’

Geraaargkh growled. ‘You and your songs will not save the life of one cub, or provide winter food for a starving bear.’

Tekkismark made the scythe sound again. ‘Always, my kind are the fodder in the wars of the powers. It would be different to fight on a side we had chosen ourselves.’

Tapio seemed fascinated by his moccasins. ‘I’m sure your kind always imagine that they choose their sides.’

Tekkismark’s mouth opened – sideways – and his purple-ichor tonguebeak shot out for a moment. ‘No!’ he scratched out. ‘That delusion is for men. We are slaves to our message breeze, and nothing else.’ He snapped the chitinous claws on one delicate hand. ‘Coming here, I was against war with Thorn. Meeting you, I war will make. When the spring turns and the hard water softens, then my people will come.’

Geraaargkh snarled. ‘My people are at war, although many do not yet know it. But we will have lost the Adnacrags by spring. Where will we make a stand? And how? Thorn’s power increases every day, and he gathers men and creatures from many lands.’

Tapio scratched under his chin, a gesture curiously at odds with his languorous elfin dignity. ‘Thorn – what a pleasure to say his name aloud – Thorn will have to make war on men to seize the Adnacrags, and men, as we all know, can be brilliant at making war.’

‘The only thing at which they have skill,’ Tekkismark said drily.

‘They build snug dens,’ Geraaargkh said.

‘At any rate, he will have to fight several great battles to take your mountains. We need not hurry. It will take him a long time to reach us,’ Tapio said. He wobbled his head from side to side – not a human gesture. ‘A year for him, or perhaps two. And three – at least – before the rising tide out of the West crests and overruns us.’

Mogon shook her crested head. ‘Every victory will make him stronger,’ she insisted. ‘Even now, Ash has sent him something abominable. When it grows to maturity, it will be mighty indeed.’ She paused. ‘Is Ash behind the rise of the West?’

‘It flatters me, Duchess, that you ask me about Ash as if he and I were peers. I have no idea what Ash intends. Nor what has happened in the West, where there are powers with whom I, thanks be to Tara, have never contended.’ Tapio nodded thoughtfully. ‘But what you say of men and war is fully true, my friends, and perhaps it would suit us to fight like men. And like the Wild, too. Will you have me as your High Constable? ’

Mogon smiled. ‘If only my brother had lived. But yes.’

One by one, the others nodded. Tekkismark made an odd sound, and a scent like almonds washed over them.

‘He makes the breeze of agreement,’ Mogon said.

‘Well,’ Tapio said slowly. ‘If Thorn insists on tying himself to an army of men – we can always use the mountains against him.’

‘We could ally ourselves with the men he fights,’ Nita Qwan said.

Every head turned.

Mogon’s head bobbed up and down, and there was a sound like a strong pair of men using a two-man saw. The Duchess was laughing.

‘We could go to war, and ally with men,’ she said softly. ‘We, the last free peoples in the West, could ally with our oppressors to fight off one of our own.’

Tapio met her eye. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we could.’ He laid a hand on Mogon. ‘Victory in war is usually the result of compromising what you want and behaving like those you despise.’

Later, Bill Redmede couldn’t remember a vote, or a show of hands, or even further discussion. Merely that Tamsin came to the door and seemed to bring a scent of peppermint and cinnamon with her, and then they were all in the hall, dancing – men, and irks, and bears, and Wardens and one boglin wight.

All the females formed a circle in the middle, and began to dance widdershins, turning first outward to the males and then inwards to each other, with many a gesture and a twist, while the males circled them like hungry wolves dancing the other way around, clapping and turning as the music rose. Redmede found himself with Bess again, and she grinned at him and he loved her – reached out and took her hand, and she pressed his tight and then swept past as the music swept higher and faster – left to Mogon, nimble on her feet, and right to Lady Tamsin and her entrancing smile.

The males left the great circle, and they formed smaller circles of their own, so that the central figure of women was surrounded by a dozen small circles of men. Redmede found himself behind a short, dark-haired man he didn’t know, who was speaking to Tapio, who was next in the progression. The circles dissolved into a promenade, and Redmede caught Bess’s hands again as Tamsin laughed behind him.

‘It is like the old days,’ she said. ‘All the barriers are down, and anyone can dance.’

She laughed, and the man with her – the short man – laughed as well, and a trace of smoke came out his nostrils.

Harndon – The Queen

Sometimes, things can be saved by nothing more than custom. The King’s indifference – she couldn’t call it more than that – might have ripened into something worse, except that it was Christmas and he was a great knight, a good king, and a good husband. The habit of being a good husband at Christmas stopped him from taking any terrible action and so the day itself came.

The Queen had sent a dozen notes to her allies. As the war between her servants and those of the Galles at court was nigh on open, she took precautions learned in her father’s court to the south, and her training stood up to the test. It began with mass and she attended with Lady Almspend, Lady Emota and ten more of her ladies, all in dark red velvet and ermine as warm as the spirit of fire.

Mass was held in the great cathedral of Harndon, built by six generations of wool merchants, goldsmiths, knights and kings. Its spire towered over even the royal palace; the central window of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas was accounted one of the fairest in Christendom, and with the first light of a winter day shining through the east wall’s magnificent depiction of Christ’s birth, men might be forgiven for thinking that they were watching the selfsame event as it happened.

A dozen Gallish squires and twenty more Albans who aped their style were waiting in the square outside the cathedral door with buckets of slush and truncheons. They loitered around the Queen’s cross, built by the King’s grandmother to celebrate the birth of his father.

They thought themselves hidden by the press of the crowd, and for a little while, the mob shouted, ‘The Queen is a foreign whore!’ and other epithets.

The leader of the squires was disturbed to see a dozen men on black horses, in matching black surcoats, ride down the Cheapside. They filled the mouth of the Cheap from shop front to shop front, their massive horses breathing plumes of vapour like so many equine dragons.

He pointed them out to another squire.

‘Time to go!’ shouted the second man. ‘The bitch has friends!’

But the mouth of Saint Thomas Street was suddenly filled with apprentices, and every man and boy of them had a wooden club. They came right up to the edge of the mob and halted, very well disciplined.

The mob stopped shouting cries against the Queen.

The trained men came marching down Saint Mary Magdelene towards the square, and the rattle of their drums cleared the mob as fast as boiling water clears ice from a pump handle. There was only one way for them to go, past the King’s Arms tavern and along Dragon Street, and so they went. Or rather, some did, and others edged towards the knights of Saint Thomas and away from the noisy squires by the cross.

The square was empty when the Queen passed through. Two hundred shop boys and apprentices bowed deeply as she came, and when she turned and smiled at the trained men, Edmund thought he might die on the spot.

But the Queen herself knew full well that she had not won a victory, but merely set back the day of reckoning.

The King didn’t seem to think anything of it, although he did, at the end of mass, comment on the number of militia in the streets. ‘A nice demonstration of loyalty,’ he said.

The Queen couldn’t see whether the Captal was discomfited by it or not.

Later, at the palace, teams of minstrels and jongleurs arrived, and the Queen and her ladies changed hurriedly – although an outsider might have been forgiven for mistaking their speed for something other than hurry. And then, in a long procession led by the Queen, nearly every woman in the palace not actively involved in cooking or laying the Christmas table walked down into the yard with torches and were met there by the King and as many gentlemen, pages, servants and hangers-on, and the whole multitude went out into the streets by torchlight. There was a fair snow falling, and the air was brisk and cold, and the King kissed his wife a dozen times.

‘Will we dance?’ he asked.

The Queen smiled. ‘My lord, if it is your will, we may dance while we carol.’

The King’s eye was drawn to something at the edge of the torchlight. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, and his voice was far away, ‘adventures would come to us at Christmas – giants, and wild men, and once, the Fairy Knight himself, riding on a unicorn, challenging my father’s knights to a tournament on the frozen river.’

‘Oh!’ said the Queen, in delight. ‘What happened then?’

‘The showy bastard dropped a dozen of my father’s best on their arses and we all drank wine and felt like the lesser men. But he gave us the most beautiful gifts, and it was like living a chanson.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard – I’ve heard some evil things recently.’ His eyes met hers. ‘About you. I don’t think I believe them.’

‘My lord-’ she began, but it was time to sing.

They sang the ‘Three Ships’ and they sang a carol about the slaying of the innocents, and all the Queen could see in her head was a man-at-arms slaying her new-born babe. Then they sang the ‘Agnus Dei’ and a mighty hymn, and then the ‘Rising of the Sun’ and the circles formed to dance, the women as the deer, the men as the hunters.

They were in the great square below the castle, and they danced down the river steps and out onto the Albin, which was frozen six feet thick already and would freeze further before spring arrived. Palace servants came by on skates with warm wine, and then they sang again, this time ‘Jesu the Joy of the World’ before they were away again in six great circles in the torchlight.

The crowd mixed with the palace servants and the court itself, so that there were apprentices and their girls, knights and their ladies, merchants of the town – the Queen curtsied to Ailwin Darkwood and he turned her sedately and handed her to a tall journeyman wearing an iron badge and steel ring of the armourers’ guild.

‘What’s your name, young sir?’ she asked.

‘Tom, Your Grace.’ He bowed extravagantly to her and vanished down the chain.

As they closed in for the next figure, the King took possession of her and marched her along the shore. A pair of pages held torches so close to them that she feared for her hair, but she looked up into his face and smiled, and he smiled down at her.

‘What I was trying to say,’ he managed, ‘was that in my pater’s time, we were much closer to the Wild at Christmas. It was fun. And good for the knights.’

She leaned up, her fur-lined boots secure in the slippery, stamped-down snow, and kissed him on the lips, and hundreds of people close by let out a whoop and did the same.

‘The Wild is always close,’ she said. ‘We are the children of it, not its enemies. You can find the Wild under the floors of the New Palace, and Wild in the woods across First Bridge.’

‘What you say is close to blasphemy,’ he said.

‘Nay, my lord. Simple fact. Feel the air – smell the spruce? You could reach out and touch a tree in the Adnacrags tonight. The world shimmers on the solstice, my lord. The gates are all open, or so Master Harmodius used to say.’

The King stopped and looked up. Behind him, a thousand couples paused, sipping wine or kissing or wondering what the royal couple were about, but such pauses in the dance were not so rare.

‘God’s truth!’ the King swore. ‘I’ve never seen so many stars, that much is true.’ He picked her up and spun her. ‘By God, madam, why can I not believe you? I want nothing more than a son.’

She put his hand on her belly. ‘There is your son, my lord. Feel his heartbeat – feel it beating strongly for Alba.’

He leaned down in the torchlight. ‘I cannot believe that you would betray me.’ His hand was warm against her.

Then they were moving again, and the procession returned to a circle, and she lost the King in the turnings – in the great chain that some old Harndoners said marked the binding of all the people of Alba, one to another. In a very old way.

The Queen moved on, first turning with a circle of women – there was Emota, her expression strained, and there was Lady Silvia, a new girl from the north, and a trio of red-faced merchants’ daughters, giggling with panic at being in the Queen’s set, and then she was whirled away into the great chain again, and she touched hands with a young knight of Saint Thomas, who smiled at her with a beatific peace on a heavy, bluff face; on along the chain, a dark-visaged man with dirty hands who nonetheless beamed at her, and a handsome man in a magnificent fur-lined hood, the fabric some sort of Eastern silk worked in figures that flashed in the torchlight. She had a pair of torches by her all the time; despite her elation, she knew that both young men were royal squires, and both were armed. Young Galahad d’Acre alone could handle a dozen footpads or any number of men of ill intent. It wasn’t that she was afraid – merely that the last few days had made her uncharacteristically aware of her vulnerability. And her baby’s.

Another figure, and she was being turned in place by a man – one of the Galles. He passed her off – somewhat roughly, she felt, but she feared to imagine a slight – and she heard a shout from behind her right shoulder. She reached out a hand and it was taken, and there was the Captal himself. He turned her, his hand not quite resting on hers and his smile fixed in place. His eyes were on the commotion and she turned – it was time for the women to gather in their own circles-

Galahad was down. She knew that from the change in the light. He was struggling to get to his feet and someone hit him.

The snow had extinguished his torches.

She acted, humming deeply in her chest and reaching into the night – and to the stars – and taking what she needed.

The two torches burst into light – brilliant, screaming light.

Galahad caught his assailant a stout blow in the groin with a burning torch and the man burst into flame. He stumbled away into the crowd, and the crowd gave a shriek and parted cleanly before him.

Galahad got his feet under him and raised the torches, ruthlessly illuminating his attacker’s last moments. The man burned – his flesh and muscles and fat burned very fast, and his screams stopped, and the blackened sticks of his bones fell to the snow, hissed and went out.

A delicious smell of roast pork wafted over the crowd, and a woman threw up her dinner.

Galahad was weeping.

The Queen looked around her, seeing Lady Almspend close, and Lady Sylvia a little further back. But no Lady Emota.

One of the Galles – the Count d’Eu – took her. ‘Your Grace is, I think, in some danger,’ he said.

She retreated a step. The Galles were all around her.

‘With me, Galahad. Where is young Tancred?’ she asked, keeping her voice as steady and light as could be managed.

‘Here at your back, Your Grace,’ Tancred’s high, girlish voice was at odds with his heavy build and single brow.

‘Please allow me to escort you to the King,’ the Count said. He bowed, and the pressure of his hand on hers was normal. Kindly meant.

One of the Galles wearing d’Eu’s colours put a hand on the breast of another Galle and pushed, and the man went down.

The Count’s hand pinned hers like a blacksmith’s vice and he held her arm under his own as if they were wrestling. He dragged her along. She almost lost her feet and stifled a scream.

‘Your Grace is in great danger,’ he muttered to her. ‘My men are doing their best to foil it, but there is an attack on your person. I swear to you it is none of my cousin’s doing. I would know. Come.’ D’Eu swept her along the ice, and she was comforted that her two squires remained tight by her sides, both wearing short swords and maille under their fur-lined cotes. Galahad’s torches continued to burn more white than red, and the light they cast illuminated the darkness for a bowshot.

‘My ladies!’ she said suddenly.

The Count paused and turned. ‘Monsieur d’Herblay!’ he called. ‘The Queen’s ladies!’

At the edge of the light, a man dressed in clerical black gave a bow and turned. He went back into the darkness with a dozen men at his heels.

The crowd around them began to thicken like ice forming in a bucket. The Queen felt her right hand going numb, so fiercely did the Count pin her hand. She saw concerned faces flash by – the man in the beautiful hat bowed, and then followed her, and then she saw the tall boy, Tom, and he, too, followed.

She saw a dozen torches gathered together on the river, and she knew the King was there, and the relief she felt was so palpable that her knees trembled beneath her.

The King was laughing with the Count of the Borders and the Master of the Staple. He turned and handed her a cup of wine, even while a pretty young woman with red hair plucked at his hand.

‘Come, Majesty,’ she said.

The Queen took her cup, and the red-haired young woman dropped a curtsey and backed away into the crowd.

The King picked up the tension from her hand, and from the thin set of the Count d’Eu’s lips. ‘What is happening?’

The Count d’Eu bowed. ‘Your Grace, I have no firm idea, but men attacked your squire here, and I feared for the Queen.’

‘He was right to do so,’ the Queen said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

The King returned the Count’s bow. ‘Then you have my thanks, messire, as always. We must go back to the dance. People will talk.’

He ruffled young Galahad’s hair. ‘What happened to you? You look white as the snow.’

‘I – I struck a man.’ Galahad’s voice caught. ‘And he burned like a torch.’

The King paused, one foot already lifted to walk. ‘Did you?’ he asked. ‘There is a prophecy . . . never mind now.’ He set his face and leaned down to his Queen. ‘This is an odd night, and I’ll be the happier when we are done with it.’

Then they were back on the river, and she was dancing again. The air became heavy, and she had trouble breathing. There was something in the torches, she thought . . .

She turned with a stranger, a small man with a pointed black beard. He had a brilliant smile and jet-black eyes.

Behind him in the circle-