The Lion Rampant

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Berwick

Octave of the Visitation, July 1314

He was in there, the King of England. Jamie said it twice so that Hal would hear, though he was not sure if it had worked, for the man gave no sign. Just kept staring across the mirk of a sodden day at the faint grey streaks and worms of pallid light that marked Berwick.

‘Are we going for him then?’ demanded Yabbing Andra, and Horse Pyntle snotted rain and worse from his nose, which was expressive enough.

‘We are bliddy not,’ Sweetmilk replied vehemently, and turned uncertainly to the Black Sir James Douglas. ‘That’s the right of it, is it not, yer honour?’

‘That’s the right of it,’ agreed Jamie Douglas, clapping Sweetmilk on his rain-sodden shoulder, hard enough to spurt water. ‘We are not here for the glory of snatching the son of Longshanks at all.’

He paused for effect and lowered his voice to a mockingly husked whisper.

‘We are here, lads, for … love.’

We should not be here at all, Kirkpatrick told himself, on a mad-headed fool’s errand like this. But he kept it to himself, for there was no way of avoiding it and he owed the Herdmanston lord this much and more.

He eyed the man who stared unflinchingly into the grey mirk; if the Devil was here to give him it, Kirkpatrick thought, Hal Sientcler of Herdmanston would sell his immortal soul for the power to drag Isabel MacDuff out of her cage and to his side with his eyes alone.

He crossed himself for the thought and waited, sitting with the others in the dubious shelter of a copse of trees while the twilight drained the land of colour and the rain filled it with misery.

It had been raining since the evening of the battle, Kirkpatrick thought, a downpour that drowned what was left of the fields and ruined the last chance of a harvest. Livestock plootered in mud, promising hoof rot and murrains — famine was coming with the winter and it would be hard.

He muttered as much aloud, so that Jamie Douglas turned to him. Expecting the uncaring rasp of the Black’s hatred of all things English, Kirkpatrick was surprised.

‘Sair,’ agreed James Douglas. ‘The price of bread will be crippling. The poor always suffer worst.’

Hal, face pebbled and eyes burning, turned at last from trying to see her through the miles and mist. Kirkpatrick nodded and smiled, aware — as he had been since he had hauled Hal to his feet beside the body of Badenoch — that he had been responsible for the Lothian knight’s crazed pursuit of that lord.

He had it that I was killed and that it had been his fault, Kirkpatrick thought. I was not and cannot — will never — reveal that I had just given up and lay there, waiting for Badenoch to kill me like a done-up heifer. Now I have the guilt of having driven Sir Hal to slaughter Badenoch, the man he stopped me killing once before — Christ’s Blood, here’s a tangle of sin and redemption that even God would have trouble unravelling.

It had been the last act of a bloody day, the stunning glory of it numbing yet. Such a victory, such a tumbling of great English lords to dust and ruin — aye, and death. The tallymen had been busy as fiddlers’ elbows noting the names: the Earl of Gloucester, slain. Sir Robert Clifford, slain. Sir William Marshal, slain. Sir Giles d’Argentan, slain. Tiptoft, Vescy, Deyncourt, Beauchamp, Comyn — great names whose holders were all slain, brothers and cousins and nephews all.

Fifty of the great and good of England were no more than a nick in a hazel stick now, a notch the thickness of a palm for an earl, the breadth of a finger for a banneret, the width of a swollen barleycorn for a lesser knight.

Hundreds of hazel sticks — and not one sliver for any of the great slather of corpses, blanching in the wet, stripped naked so that their wounds showed red and puckered as hag’s holes on the blue-white of their marbled skin. Thousands of them, Scots and English, Gascon, Hainaulter, Welsh, all left unrecorded so that, on the Scots side, folk could exult that only three had died: Sir William Airth, Sir William Vipond and, like justice from God, Sir Walter Ross, third son of the Earl of Ross.

Others had been more fortunate and survived to be ransomed, the greatest of them being Robert d’Umfraville, the Earl of Angus, and Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, taken prisoner at Bothwell just when they thought themselves safe.

The de Bohuns particularly, Kirkpatrick knew, had been so dragged in the dust of Bruce’s glory that you had to wonder how that family had so angered God: the Earl’s nephew, Henry, killed like a battle sacrifice by Bruce himself; the Earl and his kinsman, Gilbert, taken prisoner to be used as a ransom bargain for the return of all the imprisoned Bruce women — sister, wife and daughter.

And Isabel MacDuff.

All we have to do is wait, Kirkpatrick thought, in the safe and the dry while wee advocates arrange the business of it. By year’s end, Isabel could be back at Hal’s side and no risk in it at all. He had dared to argue that when he and Sir James and the King had considered the matter, with Hal waiting to be told whether he would be assisted to such a daring rescue.

Hal had not said a word — but the look Kirkpatrick had from the King would have stripped the gilt from a stone saint, so that he had given in with a wave of the hand.

‘Sir Hal has waited long enough,’ the King had declared.

‘Isabel has waited long enough,’ Hal corrected tersely. Which was a truth Kirkpatrick had not considered at all, so that it fell on him like a dropped brick; seven years, he had realized, in a cage on a wall, waiting for rescue. Aye — overdue indeed.

In the end, of course, Bruce had officially forbidden it. No one, especially Sir James Douglas, was to set as much as a toe on a Berwick wall. Truces had been arranged. There was his own sister and wife, the Queen, waiting to be released; matters were delicate and not to be plootered across with heavy feet.

Kirkpatrick had agreed while shooting Hal warning glances to stay quiet; he knew the Lothian lord would go anyway. He was sure Bruce knew that, too.

So, while Edward Bruce and Randolph stumbled down the muddy roads to Wark and out to Carlisle as the mailled fist, the King returned the bodies of Gloucester and Clifford — and the boiled bones of Humphrey de Bohun — with all due care and mercy, as the lambskin gauntlet. And turned a blind eye to Sir James Douglas, Kirkpatrick and Sir Hal of Herdmanston, riding off on their own towards Berwick with a knot of hard-eyed men.

The day dripped on, and then a rider flogged a sodden garron through the grey and skidded to a halt in a shower of clots.

‘He is left,’ Dog Boy declared, wiping his streaming face while the steam came off him like haze. ‘Headed out to Bamburgh and then York with a great escort against capture.’

Jamie’s face brightened with the possibilities at once, but caught sight of Hal’s own and shrugged, shamefaced, abandoning the glory that might have been.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Love it is then, though you can scarce blame me for thinking of scooping up such a prize as Edward of England.’

‘Less risk in that,’ Kirkpatrick growled morosely, but Dog Boy, shaking water from him, grinned into his damp-smoke mood.

‘Would ye not risk the same for your own wummin, then?’ he demanded. ‘For love?’

Kirkpatrick gave him a jaundiced eye. He had a woman he would marry before too long and the bounty of that and the lands she brought was a glow in the core of him. He would risk much for that — but love? He had never considered love in the matter of getting wed and said so.

Dog Boy, bright with the joy of Bet’s Meggy, little Bet and Hob, laughed at how the nobiles arranged such matters. Yet he had to agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the risk: he had watched the cavalcade quit Berwick, the hunched and smouldering King Edward in the centre of it, so there was a better chance of sneaking up the walls than if he had been there. A slight shift in risk, but welcome all the same and he said as much, to give heart to everyone.

‘King Edward has been given the advice the Holy Father gave to the beggar,’ Parcy Dodd answered and folk shifted expectantly, for a story was as warming as the fire they dared not light.

‘I am half afraid to enquire,’ Jamie Douglas said laconically and Parcy grinned his wide grin, the rain pearling on his nose.

‘The Pope is visiting town,’ he began, ‘and all the people are turned out and dressed up in their best cloots, all lining the way from the gate, hoping for a personal blessing from the Holy Father. One stout burgher, a man of stature and local note, has put on his best fur-trimmed cloak and gold chain for the moment, for he is sure that sight will pause the Pope and that the Holy Father will bless him.’

‘A bad plan,’ Horse Pyntle grunted, ‘for your clerical is a magpie for the shine and yon burgher will not, I suspect, own it long if he flaunts it at such a high heidyin.’

‘Ah,’ Parcy declared, as if he had been expecting that very point, ‘but he is standing next to a beggar, a man with more stain and rag than cote and who smells like a privy on a hot day. The stout burgher thinks to impress His Holiness by handing such a man a coin at the crucial moment. Certes, as the Holy Father comes walking by, the burgher ostentatiously offers the coin, the beggar takes it, bites it with the one black tooth he has left and vanishes it into his rags. The Pope leans out of his litter then — and speaks softly to the beggar. The burgher is stunned; the Holy Father ignores him and passes on, having spoken only to the beggar.’

‘Aye, well,’ muttered Yabbing Andra, uneasy at Parcy’s constant blasphemies, ‘the Holy Father is more interested in the poor and feeble ones.’

‘Just what the burgher thinks,’ Parcy declared cheerfully, ‘so he thrusts the rest of his bag of coin at the beggar and trades cloots with him. Then he sprints down the street — for certes, the crowd parts before a man who smells so badly — and flings himself almost into the path of the Pope’s processing litter. Sure enough, the litter stops, the ringed hand beckons and the burgher proudly walks up to get the blessing he has worked and paid so dearly for.’

Parcy paused and grinned.

‘Then he hears, hissed in his now flea-bitten ear: “I thought I told you to get yourself to Hell away from my path, you beggarly misbegotten pile of shite.”’

There were a few loud barks of laughter, a lot of headshaking and admiration for Parcy risking his soul with such a tale. But they were cheered by it, all the same, Jamie saw — and they would need such heart for what they intended.

‘When it is darker, then,’ Hal declared, capping the laughter like a candle snuffing flame.

They went back to sitting, dripping in the rain, and the Dog Boy thought of what he had learned: Berwick had been put in the charge of Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. The knight with stripes and little red birds, Dog Boy recalled, whom I almost tumbled off his fancy horse.

He is like snot on your fingers, de Valence said to himself. You think you have got rid of it and then, the Lord alone knows how, it appears again, on the other hand. He looked at the Dominican and wished him as gone as the Italian abbot and the King, both ridden off to the safety of the south.

Leaving me, he added bitterly to himself, with the ruin of it.

And it was a ruin. What was left of the army straggled south by a dozen different routes, too fearful of what snarled at their heels even to find time for loot and rape, too sodden to burn anything. The lords who were left would be of no help in bringing them to order; those who were mounted had long since vanished and those unhorsed were either already dead or taken.

The vellum rolls lay like white mourning candles on the table in front of him, a litany of lost lives and shattered hopes painstakingly scraped out by the clericals. Even now they were not complete; new revelations of the fate of the barons who had fought at Stirling were still being discovered.

One at least was accounted for and de Valence was soured to his belly at what he would have to tell his sister, Joan. Your son, the young lord of Badenoch, is not coming home — slain by the same God-damned Scotch rebels who murdered your husband.

Faced with that, the canting cadaver that was Jean de Beaune, piously name-changed to Brother Jacobus, was a misery de Valence could have done without, but the matter the Dominican had thrown at him would not be lightly dismissed. Yet de Valence vowed he would scourge the Cathar-hunting little prelate back to Carcassonne if he had to wield the whip himself.

‘The lady Isabel,’ he persisted, ‘is within the King’s Peace.’

More so now than ever, he said to himself, for she could easily become a counter in the game of ransom.

‘She has been accused,’ Jacobus growled. ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live.’

‘The accuser is more of a Devil’s spawn than the lady in question,’ de Valence spat back. ‘Malise Bellejambe has been the creature of the Comyn for as long as I can remember, God forgive my kin for it. I know him well enough for he came to me only recently, hoping to slither his way into my patronage, and I sent him away as I would the serpent in Eden.’

‘God be praised,’ Brother Jacobus intoned at this last, crossing himself piously.

‘For ever and ever,’ de Valence answered by rote. ‘Now this Malise seeks your patronage — is there not a reward for exposing a witch? Apart from the love of Christ and Mother Church?’

‘You stand in the path of the Inquisition,’ the Dominican persisted.

‘I obey my king,’ de Valence replied savagely, weary of the whole business. He saw his clerks hovering, arms full of rolls that almost certainly continued the litany of ruin for his king’s cause.

‘She is a heretic.’

‘You have proof? Other than the word of a disenfranchised, dismayed worm like Bellejambe?’

‘I … that is …’

‘You mean no,’ de Valence interrupted roughly, and waved a hand so that the candles guttered in the wind of its passage. ‘Get you gone, Brother.’

‘I will investigate further …’

De Valence glared at the Dominican.

‘You will not go against the King’s Peace. Three miles, three furlongs and three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine palms and three barleycorns — within that, Brother, Lady Isabel MacDuff is inviolate until the King himself decides her fate.’

‘Or God,’ Brother Jacobus persisted. ‘You may find that the good folk of this town consider the Lord’s Will takes precedence over suffering a witch to live in the King’s Peace.’

De Valence’s ravaged hawk of a face made Jacobus recoil a little.

‘Should the good folk of this town voice this opinion,’ de Valence said, soft as a blade slice on skin, ‘I will know where to look for the cause. Fomenting discord and riot in a town under my command is treason, Dominican, and I have been given the writ of Law here.’

He leaned forward a little, the candlelight turning his face to a twisted mask of shadows.

‘Break it, Brother, and you will discover that, for all there is no torture permitted in England, your Inquisition is a squalling baby compared with what I can inflict on those who thwart the King’s writ. Pleading a knowledge of Latin will not help you.’

For a moment, they were locked in stares, and then Brother Jacobus turned on his heel and swung away. De Valence waited until he was almost at the door, the trailing wind of his fury making the sconces dance madly, before calling out.

‘Jacobus.’

The Dominican whirled, his face a scowl.

‘You forget your station.’

The prelate’s face flushed so that the veins stood out, proud as corded rope. Then he bowed.

‘My lord earl.’

‘You may leave.’

The Dominican’s face was a beautiful thing and de Valence took some vicious comfort from it before he turned from the closed door into the bustle of the clerks. For all that, he knew that Isabel MacDuff was in danger. If the game of kings being played out above their heads did not include her as a vital piece, then she would fall to the flames.

The clerks moved in with their blizzard of bad news in vellum and the room seemed suddenly stifling, every candle flame a sear. De Valence moved to the shuttered slit of window and pulled them open, so that the night breeze, sodden with damp, snaked in to shiver the sconces.

He stood for a moment, hearing the muffled noises of the castle settling for another night, saw the red eye of brazier coals flaring in the breeze and the figures moving past it, no more than shadows. A wall guard shifted into the lee of a merlon and left his dog to trot the walkway; de Valence felt a spasm of irritation at this slackness, just because the King had quit the place.

Then, however, he heard the dog bark and was reassured: a good dog more than made up for a bad guard.

Out in the cloaking dark, Jamie Douglas gave a muffled curse at the sound. No one needed reminding of the last time the Scots had attempted to stealth their way up the walls of Berwick’s fortress — foiled by a barking dog.

‘It will be the same one,’ Parcy Dodd muttered miserably. ‘Aulder by a bit and wiser than ever.’

‘Given Fair Days and petted,’ Dog Boy agreed softly, his grin white in the dark. ‘Fat with the finest for having saved an entire wee town.’

‘I dinna see any cheer in this revelation,’ muttered Sweetmilk.

‘Never fash,’ Dog Boy answered. ‘Just make sure you move gentle as spider silk and get Sim Craw’s marvel up under the wall without discovery. Leave the wee beastie to me — tonight I am more Dog Boy than Aleysandir.’

Hal heard the mention of Sim Craw and watched Sweetmilk scuttle into the dark, half-crouched and hunchbacked under the rolled-up ladder. As much as the arbalest, that ladder was Sim’s legacy, he thought to himself, as the ache of loss settled in him again, bone-deep. He thought of Sim then, turning slowly in the bladderwrack and weed, his face wrapped in the wisps of his own white hair …

The slap of a hand on his shoulder wrenched him from the sorrow into the face of Jamie Douglas, the expression on it a large, silent question. Hal shrugged it off and went ahead, following Kirkpatrick, Dog Boy and Sweetmilk; somewhere, Parcy Dodd and Horse Pyntle held the horses.

‘We were kine the last time we did this,’ Jamie muttered, ‘which let us get close to the walls.’

Not now, Hal thought. A cow this close to Berwick and still uneaten would excite more interest than not, while stumbling people, seeming starved and shut out from safety by couvre-feu and caution, were all too common in these times.

It took them a long time in the dark and wet, all the same, as they crept slowly to the foot of the mound, slipping into the wet ditch and up out the far side, shivering and cold. They carried no swords, only long dirks, and wore no armour other than jacks — though Jamie’s had metal plates sewn into the padding, rather than just straw stuffing.

The only ones burdened were Sweetmilk with the ladder and Dog Boy with the long pike-spear — though Kirkpatrick eyed Hal’s slung latchbow with a jaundiced stare. It had been Sim’s and he had brought it more for remembrance than use, Kirkpatrick thought. Unnecessary and risky, he added sourly to himself as he climbed painfully up the castle mound. Above them the White Wall loomed ghostly in the dark.

Sweetmilk, panting like a mating bull, scrambled up the mound almost on his hands and knees with the Dog Boy close behind and everyone else trying to avoid the twenty-foot spear he carried low to the ground.

At the foot of the wall, Sweetmilk shed his load as silently as he could and then leaned his back to the ashlar, his face gleaming sweatily in the dark. He cupped his hands and Dog Boy, the spear notched into the neat socket at the top of the rolled ladder, stepped into the stirrup of them, then up on to Sweetmilk’s shoulders. The man grunted and buckled a little, so that the others held their breath; then he straightened and braced, grinning.

Dog Boy, perched on Sweetmilk, raised the spear high, straining against the tipping weight of the ladder, until the padded prongs slid softly over the crenellation. Slowly he withdrew the spear and passed it back down to the hands of Hal, who disposed of it in the grass. Wiping his lips with the back of one hand, Dog Boy tugged gently on the length of cord, heard the soft click of release and then the ladder pattered down the wall like a cat after mice.

Almost before it had cascaded on to the muffled curses of Sweetmilk, Dog Boy had tugged a test on it and then was up it like a rat up a spital drain.

He was almost at the top when he heard the growl and froze. Now came the hardest task…

He reached into the dangle of his scrip, broke off a piece of what was there and tossed it up over the merlon to the walkway. The growl stopped; Dog Boy climbed until his head was up above the level and dog and man stared at each other in the dripping mirk. It growled.

Dog Boy threw more, mumuring gently. The dog snapped it up and whined uneasily; the tail flickered. Dog Boy climbed up to waist height and held out his hand, so that the animal had to creep close for the prize — which it did.

‘Swef, swef,’ Dog Boy soothed and the dog whined and let him come over to feed another delicious morsel. Dog Boy sat in the dark-shadowed lee of the merlon and fed the last to the dog, fondling its ears while it ate, tail wagging.

Is a dog bound by a blood pudding? It is, Dog Boy thought sadly, caressing the animal and drawing it close while it licked his fingers and whined, tail working furiously. Bound and tied by it, especially if it had tasted such before, when it was fêted.

But folk are fickle and forgetful, he thought, slowly, gently, drawing his knife. That was then and this is now and the wee beastie craves what once it enjoyed.

It does not deserve this, he added sorrowfully, feeling the blade of the knife cold as poor charity. The animal gave a choke, no more, as voice and life were cut from it, and before it could take its last wheeze of breath, Dog Boy had it by the scruff of the neck while its heart pumped thickly out of the gaping throat, trailing like ribbons as he threw it over the wall.

Below, the rush and thump of it falling made everyone jump and Sweetmilk, spattered with blood, had Jamie’s hand clamped on his mouth to muffle the curses.

‘Gardyloo,’ Jamie growled. ‘That will be our signal.’

‘Not yours,’ Hal replied flatly. ‘You are forbidden to set foot on the wall …’

‘Away with you,’ Jamie said, releasing Sweetmilk so suddenly that the man stumbled. ‘I did not come to this jig to stand at one side and admire you lassies.’

Hal looked from him to Kirkpatrick, but any help he sought from there was stillborn with the man’s weary shrug.

They started up the ladder.

Hal led the way, panting and sweated by the time he reached the top. Wet inside and out, he thought laconically as he heaved himself as quietly as he could over the crenellation. The misery of Dog Boy’s face brought him up short and he stared as the man looked bitterly at his bloody palms and then wiped them on his tunic.

‘I am ill named,’ he growled to Hal. ‘I am the curse of dogs. Every one I meet dies.’

Never mind the men — aye, and women, too — that have regretted bumping into you, Hal thought, but he held his tongue in his teeth and merely patted Dog Boy on his sodden shoulder, glancing up and down the length of gleaming, empty walkway as he did so.

A distant brazier glowed to his left; to the other side was the bulk of a tower, one of the nine Berwick’s fortress possessed and the one they wanted: the Hog Tower. Below, the bailey courtyard flickered in the dancing shadows from stray lights, pale as corpses in the sea-haar — forge, brewhouse, bakehouse, Hal recognized. The dark mass would be the stables, where no light was permitted. No one moved.

Jamie Douglas slithered to his side and grinned, before wiping his streaming face.

‘Bigod,’ he hissed. ‘I should have brought more men. We could capture it easy.’

‘We could not,’ Hal flung back at him. ‘We could try and capture it and it would be hard and bloody. It would also ruin any rescue. Mind that, Sir James, when your heid is bursting with glory.’

‘In and out,’ added a panting voice as Kirkpatrick came up alongside them, ‘quiet and quick.’

He beamed mirthlessly at Jamie Douglas.

‘Like you were taking the favour of someone else’s wife,’ he added.

‘You might have thought of another way to put that,’ Hal glowered back at him and Kirkpatrick acknowledged his lack of tact with an apologetic wave.

‘Aye, weel — the husband is long deid, Devil take him …’

‘Whisht, the lot of you.’

Dog Boy’s glare froze them all and they obeyed him, regardless of station and suddenly, shockingly, aware of where they were perched. Like eggs on a high ledge, Hal thought, and cackling like gannets.

‘Bide here,’ he declared to Jamie, who scowled and looked about to protest.

‘We need to protect the way out,’ Hal pointed out. Besides, he added to himself, you should not be here at all and your lust for glory and your bloody-handed temper will carry you away when we least need it.

Jamie, unused to taking orders from the likes of Hal, looked about to protest and Dog Boy thrust himself into the path of it.

‘I will also stay,’ he announced, ‘to guard our way to safety.’

Jamie, suddenly realizing that this was not his quest and given a suitable task of bravery and honour, nodded and grinned. With a brief look of raised-eyebrow relief, Kirkpatrick passed Hal and led the way towards the Hog Tower, skulking along the walkway, pressed to the crenellations.

There was a door and he imagined it would be shut and barred, which was the way if the castle was guarded, all perjink and proper. He tested it, heard the bar behind it clunk softly in the pins and did not know how they would get it open. He turned to say so to Hal, found that man’s face turned up and pebbling with moonlit rain.

Hal stared up at the cage, clamped like a barnacle to the outside of the tower. She was there, the thickness of a wall, a few long strides away …

Kirkpatrick saw it, too, and blinked the rainmist off his eyebrows.

‘A quick and strong young man’, he hissed, ‘could be up on that and inside in no time.’

It took a moment for Sweetmilk to realize Kirkpatrick was staring at him and he blenched when he did so.

‘Aye, right,’ he whispered back scornfully. ‘In through the door it does not have, for what would be the point of that on the outside of a cage hung a long drop from the ground?’

‘It has a wee slanty half-roof,’ Kirkpatrick pointed out, ‘to shed the rain. With wooden shingles, easily removed. The bars, too, are wooden — ye might snap yer way in.’

Sweetmilk eyed the half-roof, no more than a ledge to shoot rain into the courtyard below, and then the wrist-thick timber grill of the cage. He looked at Hal and saw the misery there, the rain like tears; he does not want to tell me to do something so foolish, Sweetmilk thought. But he wants his woman free.

All folk’s plans for the best seem to involve me putting myself in the hardest places, he thought, moving to the wet rock of the tower and looking for handholds. Well, I came through the bloody horror at Stirling, so I will come through this also. He fumbled the dirk into his belt, ignoring Kirkpatrick’s advice to take it in his teeth. An idiot would suggest that, he wanted to say, for all it does is make you look like a red murderer and put cuts on your tongue and lips.

He felt between the weathered mortar of the stones for crevices and nicks and little ledges. Christ’s Wounds, this would not be easy.

Hal watched him swing up and out; he held his breath, seeing that Sweetmilk had removed his shoes and tied them round his neck. Clever — slick-smooth leather soles were no help at all and Sweetmilk’s shoes were more status than necessity for a man with such horned and calloused bare feet.

As if to mock them, the rain started in earnest, a hissing curtain that shrouded everything to a few feet and sent rivulets and streams coursing down between the stones of the tower. Sweetmilk, arms and feet screaming in strained agony, reached up one wobbling hand and grasped the underside supports of the cage.

For a moment he swung free, dangling by one hand like a limp banner while everyone held their breath. Then he swung up the other hand and slapped it on to the timber. Slowly, laboriously, he drew himself up and then hung on the outside of the cage, a grey figure in the misting rain.

‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘he climbs like a babery ape.’

‘He will fall like a bliddy stone,’ Hal muttered.

Then the bar clunked out of the pins and and the door started to open outwards. Kirkpatrick, swift as shadow, moved into the swinging lee of it while Hal, caught like a thief in a larder, could only crouch and freeze, the rain dropping in his dry, open mouth, looking up into the shrouded, murderous stare of Sweetmilk, who clung to the outside of the cage, not daring to move.

A man shouldered through the open doorway, cloak shrouding his head and shoulders, unlacing his braies and hunched up against the rain so that he saw only the tops of his own shoes.

‘Dinna loit on anyone,’ a voice called out from behind him and the man, head down and drawn in, cursed and stood between the merlons, fumbling out his prick.

‘No sensible soul is abroad on a night like this,’ he growled back, and grunted as his stream joined the rain. There was a moment, a long moment, when he stood and emptied himself, enjoying the feel and wishing it would hurry — he would have gone into the Witch’s cell and used her pot if it had not been for the sleeper across her door. That and the fact that she was called the Witch, of course.

He shivered at the thought. Fine-looking woman, mark ye, for all her age … He turned sideways and stared into the face of a rainsoaked man, crouching like a hare on the walkway where he should not have been. The man grinned a sickly grin, his hair plastered wetly down his face in pewter daggers.

‘Who the f-’

He was cut off, mid-flow, from speech, piss and life as Kirkpatrick took a step from the shadows and shoved.

‘Gardyloo,’ he muttered as the man fell off the wall, his last curse trailing behind him as he whirled his arms and legs in a futile dance in the air. There was a distant thud.

Hal was already past them both, into the dark of the tower. Stairs, circling up and down; Hal went up, to where a light flickered.

‘Hurry up and close the door, else the candle will go out.’

The voice was booming loud in the enclosed space and Hal froze; then he edged up and round until he could peer over the last edge of the floor level above. The man sitting at the table, idly working at a leather strap, stared straight back at him, astonished.

They sprang for one another at the same time and Hal’s wet soles slipped, so that he fell on the last part of the stair. Should have hung my shoes round my neck, like Sweetmilk, he thought wildly, and had to fall back a few steps as the man came down at him, sword out.

Disadvantaged in every way, Hal thought, armed only with a knife, below a man with a longer weapon on a spiralling stair designed to suit him and not me. Sparks flew as the man struck and missed; Hal saw him glance wildly over his shoulder, saw the iron rod dangling from a hook, waiting to be struck like a ringing bell.

The man slashed once more and sprang back, heading for the alarm iron; Hal was after him, stumbling, stabbing wildly. He felt the blow up his arm, the grate of it on bone and the man gave a sharp cry and fell, slamming face-first on to the table even as he groped for a soothing grasp on his pinked heel. Hal leaped on him, heard the air drive out with a choking gasp and battered his own head on the table so that it whirled with bright light and stars.

Dazed, he rolled free, blood in his mouth, and felt the man scrabble up — and a dark shape moved past him like a wind from a grave; the man yelped as Kirkpatrick’s arm snaked round his neck and drew it back. The dagger gleamed in the guttering candle flame like a basilisk eye before the man’s throat smothered the wink of it.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick muttered and held the kicking man until the breath left him; there was blood everywhere, spattering in pats as the man struggled his last.

Hal rolled on to all fours, spitting, to see Kirkpatrick wiping his bloody hand on the man’s tunic, following it up with the dagger; his entire sleeve was sodden with gore.

‘Aye til the fore,’ he growled and Hal, blinking the last of his daze away, climbed wearily to his feet and started up the stairs, Kirkpatrick behind.

The shape was wraithed and black, hidden in the shadows and would have clattered the pair of them back down the stairs if a sharp warning voice had not called out.

‘Look out for her.’

Hal saw the black shroud of nun rush from the shadows and had time to stick out a fist so that the woman, already starting to shriek, ran her face on to the ram of it. Her scream choked off into a grunt, her legs flew out from under her and she clattered limply to the flags at the foot of the door.

That voice, Hal thought. It is her.

The door was barred from the outside and he lifted it easily and wrenched it open.

She saw the dark shape and felt her heart catch in her throat. There was so little light that he was all planes and shadows, might have been anyone — but she knew it was him. Hal. At last …

She was not ready for it, had always seen this moment in her mind as something much different, with her in barbette and sewn-sleeved gown, her face immaculate, her hair glowing like autumn bracken. Sitting in her little room with her hands in her lap, all composed beauty.

Not rousted from her bed, with straw in the greying raggle of her hair and barely dressed at all …

‘Lamb.’

The old term flung all that away like shredding mist and he took a step to where a shard of flitting moonlight sliced across his face. Lined, grey-bearded, even in a moonlight never kind to colour, but with the eyes she remembered, focused like flames on her.

‘Am I so changed?’ he asked and she heard the uncertainty, the tremble, and the inside of her melted with knowing that he felt exactly the same as she.

‘I would know my heart’s delight anywhere,’ she managed and then they clung, fierce as tigers. She tasted iron and salt on his lips — blood, she realized.

‘Estat ai en greu cossirier, per un cavallier q’ai agut,’ he said, husky and muffled into the top of her head and she smiled. ‘I was plunged into deep distress, by a knight who wooed me’ … the words, in langue d’oc, belonged to the famed troubairitz the Countess of Dia and Hal and Isabel had played this game of line and line about before, when they and the world were younger and each moment almost as precious as this.

‘Eu l’autrei mon cor e m’amor, mon sen, mos huoills e ma vida,’ she replied and looked up at him, a smile blurred by tears. ‘To him I give my heart and love, my reason, eyes and life.’

‘Bigod, be done with sucking kisses aff her and find a way to get me in …’

Isabel whirled, startled at a voice where none should be and saw the black shape clinging to the outside of her cage, outlined in rain.

‘Sweetmilk,’ Hal growled, and called out to the man, his voice hoarse and low: ‘Break the roof tiles, man, and keep yer voice down.’

Cursing, Sweetmilk clung with one hand and worried the slick, stiff wooden tiles with the other; one came free with a crack and he forced it between the grilled bars of the cage, not wanting to clatter it like an alarm iron into the bailey. Then he stopped, craned his head to see and then back to where Hal and Isabel held each other.

‘Jamie and Dog Boy are discovered.’

He came along the walkway through the rainmist, making kissing sounds and cursing between wheedles, wrenched from the comfort and warmth of his distantly glowing brazier and makeshift shelter. Dog Boy knew it was the owner of the hound he had throat-cut, wondering where his wee guard pet had got to. He shook his head, more at the bad cess of the dog’s revenge than to get the water out of his eyes.

Beside him, Jamie crouched, balanced on the balls of his feet; in three more steps they would be seen.

Jamie darted forward, lunging out of the shrouding water in the hope that surprise would conquer all — but the guard was a good man and trained well enough that the spear he was holding in one fist came down and level before he had even registered who or what was coming at him.

Jamie, armed only with a long dirk, skidded to a halt, fell backwards and scrabbled upright; for a long moment they stared at each other, the guard with water dripping off the rim of his iron hat, studded jack soaked black, the spear pearling water from shaft and tip.

Then Dog Boy came up and the man blinked out of the numbing shock, opened his dry mouth and bellowed.

‘Ware afore. Ware afore.’

‘Christ and His bliddy saints …’ Jamie hissed and threw the dirk. It whirled, struck the man in the face haft first and sent him staggering. Dog Boy, with a grim grunt, hurled forward and rammed the man to the wet walkway; the spear flew free, rolled off the edge and clattered noisily on to the cobbles below.

The guard struggled and spat and cursed, but Jamie was on him now too and helped pin one arm and a leg, leaving Dog Boy, fighting the mad, fluttering panic of the man, to free up his dagger hand and drive the weapon into the man’s ear, the most vulnerable spot.

For a moment he was years back, leaping on the back of a man fighting the Bruce — and winning — in a dark corridor of a leper house. He had knifed into an ear then, too, felt the same gush of blood over his hand, so hot he was amazed it did not scald him …

Panting, slick with blood and rain, the three of them wrestled and grunted and gasped until, at last, one kicked frantically and then was still. Jamie, dashing rain from his eyes, grinned and got to his hands and knees, was about to say how Dame Fortune was smiling when the bitch betrayed them with the iron clang of an alarm.

Dog Boy looked at the cage, where Sweetmilk clung like a barnacle, then to where men were spilling out of butter-yellow doorways below and up the stone stairs, more coming along the ramparts so that they would pass through the Hog Tower and along to where the ladder snaked to safety. There was no way he or Jamie could stop them.

‘Away,’ Jamie declared, clapping Dog Boy on the shoulder and half dragging him to his feet. ‘Or we are taken.’

‘We cannot leave them,’ Dog Boy spat and Jamie whirled him until they were face to face.

‘Too late, Aleysandir. All we can do is give them the best chance of escaping on their own.’

Dog Boy did not see it. If the guards already spilling up to the Hog Tower passed through it they would send some up one level, to check on the prisoner. When they did, all would be lost for the trapped Hal and Isabel, Kirkpatrick and Sweetmilk.

Jamie saw all that in the Dog Boy’s face. He grinned and sprang along the walkway towards the guards, spreading his arms wide and bawling like a rutting stag.

‘A Douglas. A Douglas. The Black is here. Come ahead if you think yourselves warriors.’

Even as he sprinted for the ladder, two steps behind Jamie, Dog Boy knew that the guards were elbowing each other to get through the door of the Hog Tower, desperate to close with the legendary Black Douglas, to capture or kill him, for ransom or reward. All of them, Dog Boy thought with a savage moment of exultation as he slid down the ladder, his palms and fingers scorching.

Hal and Isabel clung to each other, breath pinched off. Kirkpatrick, half-crouched and with his knife out, looked from their gleaming faces to the dark shape of Sweetmilk, hanging on to the outside bars of the cage. It was so quiet Kirkpatrick could hear the hiss of the rain — and the loud shouts of ‘A Douglas’.

Clever Sir Jamie, he thought as the thunderous clatter of men below spilled through from one walkway to the next, too eager to think; the throat-cut body of the guard below only spurred them on to more vengeance.

There were loud shouts — but no one came up. Everyone clattered on through, bawling loudly about the castle in danger from the Black Douglas. They would be balked at pursuit, all the same, for the White Wall had a postern gate at the foot of a set of steps known as the Breakneck Stairs, with good reason. The only other way was to follow the Black down his own ladder in the dark.

‘We must go,’ he hissed and Hal looked, agonized, at Sweetmilk. He is doomed, Kirkpatrick wanted to say, but the nun groaned and focused all attention on her.

‘Strip her.’

Isabel moved swiftly on her own advice, while the others gawped for a moment, before helping her. It took hardly a moment to pull off the nun’s outer habit and scapular, then Isabel had Hal and Kirkpatrick drag the woman into the cell. She came round as Isabel’s face came out of the scapular and they looked at each other, the nun round-eyed with astonishment; her mouth opened as if to scream.

‘I would not do that, Sister Alise,’ Isabel said and looked to where Kirkpatrick stood with the dagger in his fist. The nun’s eyes went huge and round with fear, and then Isabel spoke to Kirkpatrick.

‘I would not like to hear that she had died,’ she said coldly. ‘A wad in her mouth, tied with a bit of her habit cord, will suffice. Her wrists and ankles too, I think.’

Kirkpatrick obeyed her and Alise was trussed and staring, snoring through her damaged nose.

‘How the world turns, Sister,’ Isabel said, her gentle voice no less of a scathe than a hot iron. ‘If you had not contrived to have Constance kept from me, out of spite, it would be her across my door and not you. Malise will not be pleased — his power may have been removed, but his hate is not and he will visit it on you. It seems that you may burn in Hell before I do.’

‘Time we were away,’ Kirkpatrick interrupted and Hal stared miserably out at Sweetmilk, who pressed his face close to the bars and grinned a wet, wan farewell.

‘On yer way, lords. I will scrauchle free of this, dinna fret.’

‘Down to the bailey and out the gate,’ Isabel declared, shoving Hal out of the tower cell. ‘A nun and her braw escorts, headed back to her convent and away from all this Godless trouble.’

‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘you can strop your wits when you walk with your ladyship and no mistake.’

They slithered like dancing shadows down to the level where the guard lay, down the spiral of stairs further still; somewhere beyond they heard men cursing and picking their way carefully down the worn-smooth, steeply pitched Breakneck Stairs.

At the foot of the tower, Hal led the way out into the bailey, walking smartly, but more casually than his thundering heart; behind came Isabel, hands folded piously in the sleeves, scapular hood drawn up against the rain and to hide her face. Kirkpatrick, at the tail end, saw the great gates of the castle start to close, and Isabel called out sharply to let her and her escort through. The gate commander, a long-time garrison resident, looked at the black-shadowed Bride of Christ and shook his head.

‘Sorry, Sister, while the alarum is up, the yett is shut and the bridge raised as well in a meenit. You mun wait.’

The tile clattered at his feet and made them all leap away from it, looking round wildly. Above, Sweetmilk swung and capered and launched another so that the guards scattered. Someone yelled to fetch a latchbow and the gate commander, squinting up through the rain with a face like bad whey, crossed himself. It was an imp of Satan, for sure — Christ’s Wounds, this was a night when Hell had unlatched its door …

A man ran up with a crossbow spanned, slid in a leather-fletched bolt, aimed and shot. Just as he did so, the gate commander remembered the nun and turned to warn her to get to safety — but she was gone.

Then the body fell, a whirl of arms and legs crashing to the cobbles with a sickening wet thud; the gate commander was disappointed to see that it was no imp at all, just a man with his face twisted in agony and his head leaking into the gutter like a broken egg.

Hal knew Sweetmilk was dead and the sour sick of it dogged his heels as he wraithed through the last crack of the gate and across the bridge, which trembled and creaked under the raising windlass even as they scurried.

‘He saw we were shut in and contrived to help,’ he muttered. ‘God forgive us, he could never have survived the fall.’

Kirkpatrick, feral eyes flicking this way and that as they moved along the lee of buildings, growled back that the bolt would have killed him before that; it was meant as a soothe but did not balm the loss much. Isabel snapped the glare between them.

‘Best we do not stand here like a set mill, for I am resolved never to go back in that cage.’

Hal blinked the rain from his face, felt it scamper, erratic as running mice, down through his collar and back. She never would, he vowed, for he would die before he let it happen and, when he said it, had back the glow of a smile and a kiss on his wet cheek.

The streets were dark — they had called couvre-feu hours before — but not empty; the place was stuffed with the debris of war, the sour wash of those flung out of their old lives and forced to run for the dubious shelter of Berwick, with nothing more than hope to cling to.

Huddled in doorways and up covered wynds, soaked and starving, they made a mockery of the orders that were supposed to keep folk indoors, by law of the Governor. Too miserable even for the oblivion of sleep, they stretched pale hands out of the shadows: ‘Alms, for the love of Christ.’

‘Here is aid for us,’ Kirkpatrick voiced. ‘A nun, delivering succour to the poor, with two braw lads to keep her from harm …’

‘Until the cry is raised and Alise found like a goose trussed for a Yule table,’ Isabel answered. ‘Then two men and a nun will be all they look for.’ She looked pointedly at Hal and added: ‘One with a bloody great crossbow slung on his back.’

‘It was Sim Craw’s,’ he answered and she heard the bleak in his voice, knew it for what it was and brought one hand to her mouth as if to choke the misery that wanted to spill from it. Sim. Gone. There was no time for the tale of it, but she knew the truth and simply nodded silence on the matter of the crossbow.

They moved as swiftly as they dared, away from the brooding bulk of the castle, pausing now and then like mice on a dark larder floor when they saw the lambent sputter of torches that marked the Watch on their rounds.

‘Dog Boy did this,’ Isabel said suddenly, sinking into the lee of a rough wall. ‘I saw him when he came here and heard the alarm raised later — yet he escaped.’

‘Well minded,’ Hal said admiringly. ‘He did and was raised in station for his daring. The way he told the tale involved rooftops and running.’

He was half our ages, Kirkpatrick wanted to add but did not.

‘How did he get out?’ Isabel persisted patiently and Hal, nodding, frowned and thought.

‘The Briggate.’

The distant clanging of the alarm iron brought their heads up, like stags hearing a baying. There was shouting.

‘Shut fast now,’ Kirkpatrick mourned bitterly.

They went on all the same, walked round a corner and into four men of the Watch. They knew nothing yet and Isabel was on the point of saying so when Kirkpatrick, panicked, gave a sharp yelp like a dog. Hal saw the hackles of the Watch come up, already bristled by the alarm.

‘Run,’ he said.

They ran, she gathering up her wet habit and looping it through her belt as she went, making a pair of fat breeches to the knee so her legs moved more freely. They went down streets and up alleys like gimlets through butter, half stumbling over the cursing sleepers seeking the shelter of the narrowest of places, where the houses almost came together like an arch against the rain.

Up steps, over courts, and Kirkpatrick, turning to tumble a water-sodden butt in the path of their pursuers, was stunned to hear her laugh and Hal’s answering wild cry of ‘gardyloo’. Like bliddy weans, he thought bitterly, with no idea of the dangers here.

Panting, drenched, they paused to gasp in air and Hal clung to Isabel, who grinned back at him from her pearled face. The warp has found the weft, he thought, the song the throat. No matter what happens now I am as happy as when the sun first found shiny water and I know it is the same for her.

They moved on, at a gentler trot now, burst into a wynd and shrank back from fresh rush lights, mounted on a cart. Behind, the Watch flames bobbed — one less, Hal noted with grim satisfaction — and circled in confusion.

There was a smell here, a stink they all knew well, and Isabel covered her nose, while Hal and Kirkpatrick fell into the old trick of it, breathing through their open mouth.

The dead were here.

There were a heap of them. Brought and dumped, they were the ones too weak from hunger or disease to stay in this world any longer. Two men in rough sack overtunics worked with grunts under the poor light of damp torches to load them on the cart.

Kirkpatrick looked at Hal.

‘They will not be taking them to anywhere inside Berwick,’ he said pointedly and Hal, after a pause, nodded and drew out his dagger. Isabel laid a hand on his arm and strolled forward, folding her hands into her nun’s tunic, hearing Hal and Kirkpatrick slide sideways into the dark.

The two men paused and looked up, saw what it was and waited deferentially. One even hauled his rough hood from his head.

‘Sister,’ the taller of the pair said. ‘Ye are ower late to bring succour to these.’

There was bitterness there, but whether at convent charity or his own condition at having to manhandle the nuns’ failure was a mystery; his comrade nudged him sharply for his cheek.

‘I am sorry for it,’ Isabel said piously. ‘Right sorry for this and everything else that will happen.’

The first man shuffled, made ashamed by the vehemence of her words.

‘Ye cannot tak’ the weight of God’s judgement all on yerself, Sister,’ he said.

‘I am glad you feel so,’ Isabel answered. ‘And so doubly sorry for this.’

They were puzzled as long as it took for the tall man to feel the savage wrench that took his head back, baring his throat for Hal’s dagger. The other, bewildered, half turned and took Kirkpatrick’s thin, fluted dagger through the eye.

There was silence for a moment or two, broken only by ragged breathing, the whisper of rain and the choke of dying men; blood washed down the cobbles into the open gurgling trench of the drain. Isabel looked at the two men and tried to feel some pity for innocents, but failed. The world was full of innocents, all as dead as these, she thought. A wheen of them are scattered nearby — and more are on the cart. They, at least, would serve the living one last time.

Then, in a flurry of movement, they stripped the rough tunics from the men and put them on. Isabel flung off the nun’s habit and stood soaking in her undershift while Kirkpatrick tried not to stare at the cling of it. She shot him a warning glance as she climbed up on the cart and silenced Hal with another, so that he saw the inevitability of it.

‘If you make a single comment on what has been exposed here, Black Roger of Closeburn, I will blind you, so I will.’

Kirkpatrick, with a wan grin, held up his hands in mock surrender and watched, admiringly, as Isabel laid herself down amid the loaded corpses, as if settling for the night in a feather bed.

‘Roll on your side, lady,’ Hal advised, ‘lest the rain get in your eyes and make you blink.The right side, mind.’

So you do not have to look into the blue-tinged wither of an old woman with her own marbled stare, Hal thought. Christ’s Wounds, I have missed the courage of this woman among all else.

They each took a shaft and heaved; the cart ground reluctantly away, the torches bobbing and trailing sparks into the night.

Malise hurried through the slick streets, wrapped in a dark cloak and a hot fury. He might be a great lord, he ranted to himself, but de Valence had no right to speak to him the way he did. Jacob the Jew, indeed.

He wished he’d had the courage to spit Gaveston’s old nickname for de Valence right in the Earl’s face when Pembroke had looked down his long, hooked nose at him. It had been hard enough getting entry to the castle at all and his anger and fury at that had been fuelled by the fact that he had been sent from it in the first place by the same Earl.

But the guard knew him and let him in — eventually — growling that the ‘enemy was at the gate’. Malise suspected differently, saw the Earl himself in the bailey, naked sword in hand but unarmoured and sending men right and left with barely concealed irritation.

He had elbowed through them and demanded to know what had happened to Isabel MacDuff. Then he had had the Look.

‘Gone, though the matter is nothing to do with you,’ the Earl had spat coldly and rounded on a luckless passing serjeant.

‘You — Hobman, is it? Yes. Go to the gate, find out who let this man in and arrest him. Then take the gate yourself and let no one in. You hear? No one. We are under attack here.’

He turned back to Malise.

‘You will go with him and leave. If I see you again I will make you suffer for the irritation in my eye.’

‘There is no attack. They came to free her,’ blustered Malise. ‘You must send men to the town gates or she will escape …’

A look brought Hobman’s hand on his shoulder and his firm voice in Malise’s ear.

‘Come along now, there is a good sir.’

The soaking rain trickled down Malise’s neck and brought him back to the moment, the night and the wet. He recoiled away from the dark mouths of alleys, fearing the feral eyes and worse that he imagined lurking there, and tried to work out what the bitch would do.

Not alone, he thought and the savage exultation of it drove into him like a spike: the Lothian lord, Hal of Herdmanston. It had to be him, silly old fool, come to rescue his light o’ love as if he was Sir Gawain plucking the Grail from a high tower.

There was no way for her to escape, he thought. But if it were me, I would head for the gate nearest the Tweed where the old bridge, destroyed so often that Berwick had given up rebuilding it, was no more than a staggering line of black stumps like rotting old teeth.

Now folk had to ford the Tweed instead, but the postern that led to it kept its old name.

The Briggate.

He came down through the surging streets, worried at first by the knots of flame-lit men with grim faces and iron hats but realizing they were stumbling burghers, called out to the half-done walls and trembling at the idea of the Scots breaking in. Even if many of them were Scots themselves, Malise thought as he hurried through the trail of their torch embers, they had families and livelihoods here that Bruce’s army would not treat kindly.

At the Briggate, he paused uncertainly; the area around the gate was thick with armed men now, at least twenty and perhaps more, all bristling with spears and crossbows, rain dripping from the rims of their helmets and soaking padded jacks.

Malise spotted the serjeant in charge by his maille and his attitude, bawling orders left and right, his bucket helm under one arm and his surcote dark with rain and bright with the badge of de Valence.

‘Have some men and a woman gone out the gate?’

The serjeant turned at the sound of the voice, saw the dark, dripping figure and thought at once of a wet weasel in a dark wood.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded, only half interested. The men he had were all call-outs, barely of use even when placed behind merlons. God help us if the Scotch come at us out of the dark, he thought …

‘Sir Malise Bellejambe.’

That snapped the serjeant’s head round and he stared more closely at the wet weasel. It was possible this man was a nobile. Just possible enough to allow caution in dealing with him.

‘Well,’ the serjeant said and added, with a hint of scathe, ‘my lord. Nothing has gone through this gate. Nor will it, coming or going.’

‘The deid kert.’

They both turned to the voice and the owner of it blinked from under his soaking hood, looking from one to the other uncertainly and wishing now that he had never spoken.

‘The what?’

Gib heard the tone of the serjeant and wished even more fervently that he had kept his lips snecked on the matter. But it was out now, so he stammered out the truth of it: the dead cart had been manhandled out through the open gate just before everyone had arrived.

‘You opened the gate?’ the serjeant demanded and now Gib heard the growling thunder, so that he started to sweat, despite the rain.

‘Aye, for a brace of auld chiels. I telt them the gate could not be opened, for the alarm was sounded. So they said they would leave the bliddy thing, for they were not inclined to roll it back the way they had come.’

He looked imploringly at the serjeant, willing him to see the shock of it.

‘I didnae want a pile o’ corpses blocking up the way and stinking my door all night.’

‘Ye opened the gate,’ the serjeant replied in a disbelieving knell of a voice.

‘I said they would not be allowed back,’ whined Gib, ‘but they laughed and answered that it was a fine excuse for their wives and they would spend the night at the Forge.’

Malise knew the Forge, a smithy just across the ford set to capture the passing trade. It provided a howf for travellers too late to gain entry to the town and was a notorious stew, providing drink and food and whores, even in times like these. More so, he added to himself, for folk trapped beyond Berwick’s walls needed to lose their fears in drink and lust. Even the women.

‘They were rebels,’ he explained to the frowning serjeant, ‘who have freed a prisoner from the castle and are now headed for escape. If you provide some men, we can overtake them …’

‘Open the gate?’ thundered the serjeant. ‘Again?’

‘In pursuit …’ Malise began and the serjeant closed one eye and scowled.

‘Aye, you would like that, I am sure, if you were a rebel spy. Get me to open the gate and spill in a lot of your friends.’

‘I am Sir Malise Bellejambe …’

‘So you say.’

‘He is, though,’ Gib interrupted helpfully and withered under the glare. ‘The Witch-keeper.’

Now the serjeant knew who the man was: the jailor of the witch in the cage; an idea struck him.

‘Is she the one sprung, then?’

Malise, all nervous impatience, nodded furiously and the serjeant, wiping the rain from his face, thought with agonizing slowness and then nodded.

‘You can go alone,’ he said, ‘out the postern. If there are only two old men and a woman, you should have little trouble. Mind — you will not be allowed back in this night.’

No one will, he added to himself, watching Malise scuttle to the small door set in one of the large ones. He gave a nod and the man unlocked it with a huge key while Malise fretted at his slowness; it was barely open before he wraithed through it.

‘Fair riddance to you,’ the serjeant declared and spat, listening to the comfort of the lock clunking shut.

She rolled, stiff and shivering, off the cart and accepted the rough sodden sacking which Hal stripped off and gave to her.

‘Time we were not here,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, looking back towards the distant gate; Isabel nodded, and then looked dubiously at the huge steel-pronged arbalest Hal handed her.

‘It is spanned. All ye need do is slot a bolt in it,’ he said and handed her one with a look as sharp as its point; she nodded again, feeling the dragging weight.

‘Move yerselves,’ Kirkpatrick hissed and Isabel paused once more and signed the cross over the tipped-forward cart of lolling dead.

‘God be praised,’ she said.

‘For ever and ever,’ they muttered and turned into the river. It only came up to their shins, but had spated with the rain and the force of it was enough, with the stone-littered gravel bed, to stumble them. They moved like sleepwalkers towards the distant flickering lights of the Forge, Kirkpatrick in the rear and concentrating on his footing, cursing the dark and the wet and bad cess of the whole business.

Lucky to get away with it, he thought to himself, just as he heard the scatter of pebbles sliding under an unsteady foot. He turned, saw a dark shape and started to duck — and then the world exploded the side of his head into a bright light.

Hal and Isabel turned as Kirkpatrick reeled backwards and hit the water with a great spray; Isabel screamed and part of the rain-soaked dark seemed to tear itself away and lunge at Hal. He had time to see the winking flash that sliced the explosion of water, had time to realize that the wild, flailing hilt of that dagger had felled Kirkpatrick. Had time for the crazed eyes to sear a name into his head …

Malise.

Then the black shape was on him and all was mayhem.

Isabel saw the shadow and screamed again, knowing who it was even as Hal took the rush of it and Kirkpatrick toppled into the water like a felled tree. She saw him, arms out and loose, launched away on the shallow water and turning like a log, so that she knew he was unconscious and would drown unless she helped.

She floundered to him, underkirtle and sacking and the slung arbalest conspiring to suck her to a stop, levered him face up, hearing the splash and grunt of the two men fighting.

‘Wake,’ she roared at him, slapping his whey cheeks, aware of the great bloody bruise on one side of his face, but his head rolled back and forth and she shrieked her frustration at him, and then began hauling him to the nearby bank in a fury of panic that she would not get back to help Hal in time.

Hal thought Malise was the ugliest thing in creation, his greasy pewter hair plastered to his skull, his face a braided knot of hate, studded and pitted and marked down one side with nicks and glassy pocks and a nose bent sideways like a ruined spoon.

They held each other like fumbling bad lovers, Hal’s fist clamped on Malise’s wrist as he tried to bring the dagger down, Malise’s other arm flailing wildly and blocked, time and again, by Hal’s forearm. Hal felt the dull pain there and, in desperation, struck out between Malise’s blows, felt the man stagger; for a moment they lurched and lumbered in the fountaining water, before Malise recovered and they strained, almost still.

‘I will finish you, Lothian.’

His breath was fetid as a dragon’s; Hal remembered watching Bruce in a fight long ago and spat his own sourness into Malise’s face, which made the man roar and tug. Malise tried to bite and gouge.

A mistake, Hal thought, clinging on with a panicked sense of his failing strength, the sear of the old wound along his ribs, the trembling ache of his wrist — he has turned rabid …

Malise, in a maddened, careless fury, tried to butt Hal; then he swung round, tumbling them both into the water in a spray fine as diamonds. Spitting and growling like soaked dogs, they rolled apart and came up looking for one another.

Hal turned an eyeblink too late and took a blow meant for his throat on his wildly flung hand, so that Malise’s forearm smashed into the wrist Badenoch had damaged at the Pelstream fight. The shock and pain made him cry out; Malise gave a bellow of triumph and kicked, but the water hampered him enough to cushion the blow. Yet Hal, off balance, stumbled and fell, floundering.

Malise gave an exultant howl and started forward — only for something to drop round his neck and haul him up short, so that he almost fell backwards. Furious, puzzled, he twisted round in the grip of what felt like a noose — into the wet, grim face of Isabel, her hair a Medusa of wild wet snakes over her face and the arbalest held in both hands.

She had struck with it, but it was spanned and she had missed, dropping the loop of a prong and the taut braided cord over Malise’s shoulders like a noose; there was no quarrel in it, for she had dropped that. He saw the lack, looked at her and snarled. He started forward and she pushed back, keeping him away as he came hard up against the braided cord. He reached up his dagger-free hand and started to lever it over his head.

‘You will burn in Hell,’ he screeched and she heard the wild, strange cry, almost like a plea — and all that he had done to her, all the foul things he had poured on her body and in her ears, washed up like old sick. He saw it in her eyes.

‘Then I will meet you there,’ she said and pressed the sneck.

The arbalest bucked and thrummed. The string took Malise in the throat like a ram, crushing apple and pipe and forging such a searing pain that he shrieked away from it and tore free, ripping the weapon from her grasp. He fell in the water, floundering free of the tangle of the arbalest and rolling over.

She picked up Sim’s legacy, planning to club Malise with it, but instead she stood and watched him gasp. Like a fish, she thought. Drowning in air. Hal climbed to his feet, staggering a little, and she moved to him, supporting him, aware that riders were approaching.

So near to escape … She wondered if she could find Malise’s dagger in the spate and stones of the Tweed, for she would not go back to the cage. Not with breath in her …

The riders came up and a great grin split the face of the leader, the black hair plastered to the diamond-netted beard.

‘Bigod, ye made it then. Who is that chiel?’

The Black Douglas. Isabel sagged, so that now Hal had to hold her up.

‘Malise Bellejambe,’ he answered numbly and now he saw Dog Boy and Parcy and the others. He thought of Sweetmilk and felt the souring loss of him.

‘Is it, bigod?’ Jamie Douglas said, looking down at the man making gug-gug sounds as he tried to suck breath into a throat long past caring, floundering in the rush of river. ‘I thought he would be bigger.’

Kirkpatrick came up, half staggering and with blood all down his face.

‘Time,’ he began and could not finish it.

‘Past time,’ Jamie Douglas agreed, ‘for we have fired the Forge. Mount up and let him drown here.’

But Dog Boy was off his horse and wading to the side of the gasping Malise. He looked down at him, looked down into the desperate rat eyes of him and, when he had recognition, nodded slowly.

‘Aye,’ he said, strangely gentle. ‘Ye mind me, I can see. The wee boy from Douglas. You poisoned the dogs and red-murdered Tod’s Wattie.’

Those old sins washed back into the fevered brain of Malise and he tried to explain that he had not meant to kill the dogs nor Tod’s Wattie, which was a lie. But all that came out was a horrible rasping gurgle that appalled him — as did the blade appearing in the man’s hand. The lurch of harsh realization sucked the final strength from him and he knew he had no future to speak in.

He saw flames flare and the Witch, outlined stark and eldritch as she turned on the back of the horse, her wet hair blown by a rain wind into a halo of snakes. The sudden sharp fear that he had lost her, his only love, was swamped by a sharper, disbelieving sorrow that everything would go on as before, save that now he would not be part of it.

Dog Boy slit the ruined throat, one hand over the man’s eyes to still him, as you did with a dog that was too old or done up to live; the blood skeined away in the spate like an offering.

Then he rose up and went silently to his horse, swung up into the saddle and splashed back across the ford to safety without a backward glance.