The Red Knight

Chapter Three

The Red Knight

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Amy’s Hob managed to get his nag to a gallop for long enough to reach the Captain in good time. The company was stretched out along the road in march order – no wagons, no baggage, no followers. Those were in camp with a dozen lances as guards.

‘Lord – Gelfred says he’s found its earth. Away in the forest. Trail and hole.’ Amy’s Hob was a little man with a nose that had been broken as often as he’d been outlawed.

The scout held up his hunting horn, and in it was a clod of excrement.

The fewmets, thought the captain, wrinkling his nose in distaste. Gelfred’s revenge for his impiety – sometimes close adherence to the laws of venery could constitute their own revenge. He gave the scout a sharp nod. ‘I’ll just take Gelfred’s word for it, shall I?’ he said. He stood in his stirrups and bellowed ‘Armour up, people!’

Word moved down the column faster than a galloping horse. Men and women laced their arming caps and donned their helmets – tall bassinets, practical kettle hats, or sturdy barbutes. Soldiers always rode out armed from head to foot – but only a novice or an overeager squire rode in his helmet or gauntlets. Most knights didn’t don their helmets until they were in the face of the enemy.

Michael brought the captain’s high-peaked helmet and held it high over his head to slide the mail aventail, the cape that protected the neck and depended from the lower rim of the helmet, over his shoulders. Then he seated the helmet firmly on the padded arming cap, visor pinned up.

The captain motioned for his squire to pause and reached up to pull the ends of his moustache clear of the mail. He was very proud of his moustache. It did a great deal to hide his age – or lack of it.

Then Michael adjusted the fall of the aventail over his breastplate, checked the buckles under his arms, and pushed the gauntlets on to his master’s hands, one at a time, while the captain watched the road to the north.

‘How far up the road?’ he asked Hob.

‘A little farther. We’ll cross the burn and then follow it west into the trees.’

He had the second gauntlet on, and Michael unbuckled the captain’s riding sword and took his long war sword from Toby, who was standing between them on foot, holding it out, a look of excitement on his plain face and a biscuit in his free hand.

Michael handed the shorter riding sword down to Toby, and girded him with the sword of war. Three and a half pounds of sharp steel, almost four feet long.

The weight always affected the captain – that weight at his side meant business.

He looked back, standing a little in his stirrups, feeling the increased weight of his armour.

The column had tightened up.

‘How far?’ he asked Hob.

‘A league. Less. Not an hour’s walk.’ Hob shrugged. His hands were shaking.

‘Standard front, then. At my word – Walk!’ called the captain. He turned to his squire. ‘Whistle. Not the trumpet.’

Michael understood. He had a silver whistle around his neck. Carlus, the giant trumpeter and company armourer, shrugged and fell back.

The column shifted forward, into a walk, the horses suddenly eager, ears pricked forward and heads up. The chargers quivered with excitement – the lighter ronceys ridden by the archers caught the bug from the bigger horses. Along the column, the less able riders struggled to control their mounts.

Up a long hill they went, and then back down – to a burn running fast with the water of two days’ rain. Hob led them west into the trees.

Now that they were at the edge of the Wild, the captain had time to note that the trees were still nearly bare. Buds showed here and there, but the north country was not yet in spring, and snow lay in the lee of the larger rocks.

He could see a long way in these woods.

And that meant other things could see him, especially when he was resplendent in mirror-white armour, scarlet and gilt.

He led them on for another third of a league, the column snaking along behind him, two abreast, easily negotiating the sparse undergrowth. The trees were enormous, their branches thick and long, but stretching out high above even Bad Tom’s head.

But when an inner sense said that he was courting disaster – imagine that taloned monster in among this column before we were off our horses and ready – he raised his right fist to signal a halt and then spread his arms – always good exercise, in armour – and waved them downwards, once. Dismount.

He dismounted carefully, to Grendel’s disgust. Grendel liked a fight. Liked to feel the hot squirt of blood in his mouth.

Not this time, the captain thought, and patted his destrier’s shoulder.

Toby came and took his head.

‘Don’t go wandering off, young Toby,’ the captain said cheerfully. ‘All officers.’

Michael, already off his horse and collected, blew a whistle blast. Then handed the captain a short spear with a blade as long as a grown man’s arm at one end and a sharp spike at the other.

Jehannes and Hugo and Milus walked up, their armour almost silent.

‘Gelfred has the beast under observation. Less than a league away. I want a spread line, heavy on the wings, light in the loins, and every man-at-arms with an archer tight to his back.’ The captain glanced about.

‘The usual, then,’ said Jehannes. His tone suggested that the captain should have said as much.

‘The usual. Fill the thing full of arrows and get this done.’ This was not the right moment to spar with Jehannes, who was his best officer, and disapproved of him nonetheless. He looked around for inspiration.

‘Thick woods,’ Jehannes said. ‘Not good for the archers.’

The captain raised his hand. ‘Don’t forget that Gelfred and two of our huntsmen are out there,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s shoot them full of arrows, too.’

The rear two-thirds of the column came forward in an orderly mob and rolled out to the north and south, forming a rough crescent two hundred ells long, in three rough ranks – knights in the front rank, squires in the middle, both men covering an archer to the rear. Some of the archers carried six-foot bows of a single stave, and some carried heavy crossbows, and a few carried eastern horn bows.

The captain looked at his skirmish line and nodded. His men really were good. He could see Sauce, off to the north, and Bad Tom beyond her. What else could they do? Be outlaws? He gave them purpose.

I like them, he thought. All of them. Even Shortnose and Wilful Murder.

He grinned, and wondered who he would be, if he had not found this.

‘Let’s get this done,’ he said aloud. Michael blew two sharp blasts, and they were moving.

He’d counted two hundred paces when Gelfred appeared off to his left. He waved both arms, and the captain lifted a fist, and the line shuffled to a halt. A single shaft, released by a nervous archer, rattled through the underbrush and missed the huntsman by an ell. Gelfred glared.

Milus spat. ‘Get his name,’ he growled. ‘Fucking new fuck.’

Gelfred ran to the captain. ‘It’s big,’ he said. ‘But not, I think, our quarry. It is – I don’t know how to describe it. It’s different. It’s bigger.’ He shrugged. ‘I may be wrong.’

The captain weighed this. Looked into the endless trees. Stands of evergreen and alder stood denser than the big, older oaks and ashes.

He could feel it. It knew they were there.

‘It’s going to charge us,’ the captain said. He spoke as flatly as he could, so as not to panic his men. ‘Stand ready,’ he called. To hell with silence.

Behind him, Michael’s breathing grew louder.

Gelfred spanned his crossbow. He wasn’t wearing armour. Once he had a bolt on the stock, he stepped into line behind Michael.

The captain reached up and lowered his visor, and it fell across his face with a loud snap.

And then his vision was narrowed to the two long slits in his faceplate, and the tiny breathing holes that also gave him his only warning of any motion coming from below. His own breath came back into his mouth, warmer than the air. The inside of the helmet was close, and he could taste his own fear.

Through the slits, the woods went on and on, although they seemed darker and stiller than before.

Even the breeze had died.

Silence.

No bird song.

No insect noise.

Michael’s breathing inside his dog-faced Thuruvian helmet sounded like the bellows in a forge running full-out at a fair. His first time, the captain thought to himself.

The line was shuffling a little. Men changed their stances – the veterans all had heavy spears, or pole-axes, and they shifted their weight uneasily. The crossbowmen tried to aim. The longbowmen waited for a target before they drew. No man could hold a hundred-pound weight bow for long at the full draw.

The captain could feel their fear. He was sweating into his armingcote. When he shifted, cold air came in under his arms and his groin, but the hot sweat ran down his back. His hands were cold.

And he could feel the tension from his adversary.

Does it have nerves too? Fear? Does it think?

No birds sang.

Nothing moved.

The captain wondered if anyone was breathing.

‘Wyvern!’ shouted Bad Tom.

It exploded from the trees in front of the captain – taller than a war horse, the long, narrow head full of back-curved teeth, scales so dark that they appeared black, so polished they seemed to be oiled.

It was fast. The damned things always were.

Its wave of terror was a palpable thing, expanding like a soap bubble around it – the full impact of it struck the captain and washed over him to freeze Michael where he stood.

Gelfred raised his crossbow and shot.

His bolt hit something and the creature opened its maw and screeched until the woods and their ears alike rang with its anger.

The captain had time to take his guard, spear high, hands crossed, weight back on his right hip. His hands were shaking, and the heavy spearhead seemed to vibrate like a living thing.

It was coming right for him.

They always do.

He had a long heartbeat to look into its golden-yellow eyes, flecked with brown – the slitted black pupil, the sense of its alienness.

Other archers loosed. Most missed – taking panicked shots at ranges far closer than they had expected. But not all did.

It ran forward over the last few yards, its two powerful, taloned legs throwing up clods of earth as it charged the thin line of men, head low and forward, snout pointed at the captain’s chest. Wings half open, beating the air for balance.

Gelfred was already spanning his crossbow, confident that his captain would keep him alive for another few heartbeats.

The captain shifted his weight and uncrossed his hands – launching the hardest, fastest swing in his repertoire. Cutting like an axe, the spearhead slammed into the wyvern’s neck, into the soft skin just under the jaw, the cut timed so that the point stopped against the creature’s jawbone . . . and its charge rammed it onto the point, pushing it deeper and then through the neck.

He had less than a heartbeat to savour the accuracy of his cut. Then the captain was knocked flat by a blow from its snout, his spear lodged deep in the thing’s throat. Blood sprayed, and the fanged head forced itself down the shaft of his spear – past the cross guard, ripping itself open – to reach him. Its hate was palpable – it grew in his vision, its blood lashed him like a rain of acid, and its eyes-

The captain was frozen, his hands still on the shaft, as the jaws came for him.

Afraid.

But his spearhead had wide lugs at the base, for just such moments as this and the wyvern’s head caught on them, just out of reach. He had a precious moment – recovered his wits, put his head down, breaking the gaze-

– as in one last gout of blood, it broke the shaft, jaws open and lunged-

The hardened steel of his helmet took the bite. He was surrounded by the smell of the thing – carrion, cold damp earth, hot sulphur, all at once. It thrashed, hampered by the broken spear in its gullet, trying to force its jaws wider and close on his head. He could hear its back-curved teeth scrape, ear-piercingly, over his helmet.

It gave a growl to make his helmet vibrate, tried to lift him and he could feel the muscles in his neck pull. He roared with pain and held hard to the projecting stump of the shaft as the only support he had. He could hear the battle cries – loud, or shrill, depending on the man. He could hear the meaty sounds of strikes – he could feel them – as men’s weapons rained on the wyvern.

But the creature still had him. It tried to twist his head to break his neck, but its bite couldn’t penetrate the helmet for a firmer grip. Its breath was all around him, suffocating him.

He got his feet beneath him and tried to control his panic as the wyvern lifted him clean from the ground. He got his right hand on his heavy rondel dagger – a spike of steel with a grip. With a scream of fear and rage, he slammed it blindly into the thing’s head.

It spat him free and he dropped like a stone to the frozen ground. His dagger spun away, but he rolled, and got to his feet.

Drew his sword.

Cut. All before the wave of pain could strike him – he cut low to high off the draw, left to right across his body and into the joint behind the beast’s leg.

It whirled and before he could react, the tusked snout punched him off his feet. Too fast to dodge. Then threw back its head and screamed.

Bad Tom buried his pole-axe in its other shoulder.

It reared away. A mistake. With two wounded limbs, it stumbled.

The captain got his feet under him, ignored the fire in his neck and back, and stood, powering straight forward, coming at it from the side this time. It turned to flatten Bad Tom, and Jehannes, suddenly in front of it, hit it on the breastbone with a war hammer. Its face was feathered with barbs and arrows. There were more in the sinuous neck. Even as it turned and took another wound, in the moment that the head was motionless it lost an eye to a long shaft, and its body thrashed – a squire was crushed by a flick of the wyvern’s tail, his back breaking and armour folding under the weight of the blow.

Hugo crushed its ribs with a mighty, two-handed overhead blow. George Brewes stabbed it with a spear in the side and left the weapon there while he drew his sword. Lyliard cut overhand into the back of its other leg; Foliack hammered it with repeated strokes.

But it remained focused on the captain. It swatted at him with a leg, lost its balance, roared, and turned on Hugo who had just hit it again. It closed its jaws on the marshal’s head, and his helmet didn’t hold, The bite crushed his skull, killing him instantly. Sauce stepped over his headless corpse and planted her spear in its jaw, but it flung her away with a flick of the neck.

The captain leaped forward again and his sword licked out. This time, his cut took one of the thing’s wings clean off its body, as easy as a practice cut on a sapling. As the head turned and struck at him the captain stood his ground, ready to thrust for the remaining eye – but the head collapsed to the earth a yard from him, almost like a giant dog laying his head down at his master’s feet, and the baleful eye tracked him.

He thrust.

It whipped its head up, away from the point of the sword, reared, remaining wing spread wide and thrashing the men under it, a ragged banner of the Wild-

– and died, a dozen bolts and arrows catching it all together.

It fell across Hugo’s corpse.

The men-at-arms didn’t stop hacking at it for a long time. Jehannes severed the head, Bad Tom took one leg off at the haunch, and two squires got the other leg at the knee. Sauce rammed her long rondel into every joint, over and over. Archers continued to loose bolts and arrows into the prone mound of its corpse.

They were all covered in blood – thick, brown-green blood like the slime from the entrails of a butchered animal, hot to the touch, so corrosive that it could damage good armour if not cleaned off immediately.

‘Michael?’ the captain said. His head felt as if it had been pulled from his body.

The young man struggled to get his maille aventail over his head, failed, and threw up inside his helmet. But there was wyvern blood on his spear, and more on his sword.

Gelfred spanned his crossbow one more time, eyes fixed on the dead creature. Men were hugging, laughing, weeping, vomiting, or falling to their knees to pray, others merely gazed blank-eyed at the creature. The wyvern.

Already, it looked smaller.

The captain stumbled away from it, caught himself, mentally and physically. His arming cote was soaked. He went instantly from fight-hot to cold. When he stooped to retrieve his dagger, he had a moment’s vertigo, and the pain from his neck muscles was so intense he wondered if he would black out.

Jehannes came up. He looked – old. ‘Six dead. Sweet William has his back broken and asks for you.’

The captain walked the few feet to where Sweet William, an older squire in a battered harness, lay crumpled where the tail and hindquarters had smashed him flat and crushed his breastplate. Somehow, he was alive.

‘We got it, aye?’ he said thickly. ‘Was bra’ly done? Aye?’

The captain knelt in the mire by the dying man’s head. ‘Bravely done, William.’

‘God be praised,’ Sweet William said. ‘It all hurts. Get it done, eh? Captain?’

The captain bent down to kiss his forehead, and put the blade of his rondel into an eye as he did, and held the man’s head until the last spasm passed, before laying his head slowly in the mire.

He was slow getting back to his feet.

Jehannes was looking to where Hugo’s corpse lay under the beast’s head. He shook his head. Looked up, and met the captain’s eye. ‘But we got it.’

Gelfred was intoning plainchant over the severed head. There was a brief flare of light. And then he turned, disgust written plain on his face. He spat. ‘Wrong one,’ he said.

Jehannes spat. ‘Jesu shits,’ he said. ‘There’s another one?’

North of Harndon – Ranald Lachlan

Ranald rode north with three horses – a heavy horse not much smaller than a destrier and two hackneys, the smallest not much better than a pony. He needed to make good time.

Because he needed to make good time he went hard all day and slept wherever he ended. He passed the pleasant magnificence of Lorica and her three big inns with regret, but it was just after midday and he had sun left in the sky.

He didn’t have to camp, exactly. As the last rays of the sun slanted across the fields and the river to the west, he turned down a lane and rode over damp manured fields to a small stand of trees on a ridge overlooking the road. As he approached in the last light, he smelled smoke, and then he saw the fire.

He pulled up his horses well clear of the small camp, and called out, ‘Hullo!’

He hadn’t seen anyone by the fire, and it was dark under the trees. But as soon as he called a man stepped from the shadows, almost by his horse’s head. Ranald put his hand on his sword hilt.

‘Be easy, stranger,’ said a man. An old man.

Ranald relaxed, and his horse calmed.

‘I’d share my food with a man who’d share his fire,’ Ranald said.

The man grunted. ‘I’ve plenty of food. And I came up here to get away from men, not spend the night prattling.’ The old fellow laughed. ‘But bad cess on it – come and share my fire.’

Ranald dismounted. ‘Ranald Lachlan,’ he said.

The old man grinned, his teeth white and surprisingly even in the last light. ‘Harold,’ he said. ‘Folk around here call me Harold the Forester, though its years since I was the forester.’ He slipped into the trees, leading Ranald’s packhorse.

They ate rabbit – the old man had three of them, and Ranald wasn’t so rude as to ask what warren they’d been born to. Ranald still had wine – good red wine from Galle, and the old man drank a full cup.

‘Here’s to you, my good ser,’ he said in a fair mockery of a gentleman’s accent. ‘I had many a bellyful of this red stuff when I was younger.’

Ranald lay back on his cloak. The world suddenly seemed very good to him, but he remained troubled that there were leaves piled up for two men to sleep, and that there were two blanket rolls on the edge of the fire circle, for one man. ‘You were a soldier, I suspect,’ he said.

‘Chevin year, we was all soldiers, young hillman,’ Harold said. He shrugged. ‘But aye. I was an archer, and then a master archer. And then forester, and now – just old.’ He sat back against a tree. ‘It’s cold for old bones. If you gave me your flask, I’d add my cider and heat it.’

Ranald handed over his flask without demur.

The man had a small copper pot. Like many older veterans Ranald had known, his equipment was beautifully kept, and he found it without effort, even in the dark – each thing was where it belonged. He stirred his fire, a small thing now the rabbit was cooked, made from pine cones and twigs, and yet he had the drink hot in no time.

Ranald had one hand on his knife. He took the horn cup that was offered him, and while he could see the man’s hands, he said ‘There was another man here.’

Harold didn’t flinch. ‘Aye,’ he said.

‘On the run?’ Ranald asked.

‘Mayhap,’ said Harold. ‘Or just a serf who oughtn’t to be out in the greenwood. And you with your Royal Guardsman’s badge.’

Ranald was ready to move. ‘I want no trouble. And I offer none,’ he said.

Harold relaxed visibly. ‘Well, he won’t come back. But I’ll see to it that the feeling is mutual. Have some more.’

Ranald lay under his cloak without taking off his boots and laid his dirk by his side. Whatever he thought about the old man, there were plenty of men who would cut another’s throat for three good horses. And he went to sleep.

Harndon – Edward

Thaddeus Pyel finished mixing the powder – saltpeter and charcoal and a little sulphur. Three to two to one, according to the alchemist who made the mixture for the king.

His apprentices were all around him, bringing him tools as he demanded them – a bronze pestle for grinding charcoal fine, spoons of various sizes to measure with.

He mixed the three together, carried the mixture outside into the yard, and touched a burning wick to them.

The mixture sputtered and burned, with a sulphurous smoke.

‘Like Satan cutting a fart,’ muttered his son Diccon.

Master Pyel went back into his shop and mixed more. He varied the quantities carefully, but the result was always the same – a sputtering flame.

The boys were used to the master’s little ways. He had his notions, and sometimes they worked, and other times they didn’t. So they muttered in disappointment but not in surprise. It was a beautiful evening, and they went up on the workshop roof and drank small beer. Young Edward, the shop boy and an apprentice coming up on his journeyman qualification, stared at the rising moon and tried to imagine exactly what the burning powder did.

In all his imagings it was something to do with a weapon, because at the sign of the broken circle, that’s what they did. They made weapons.

Albinkirk – Ser John Crayford

Ser John was taking exercise. Age and weight had not prevented him from swinging his sword at his pell – or at the other four men-at-arms who were still willing enough to join him.

Since the young sprig had ridden through with his beautifully armed company, the Captain of Albinkirk had been at the pell three times. His back hurt. His wrists hurt. His hands burned.

Master Clarkson, his youngest and best man-at-arms, backed out of range and raised his sword. ‘Well cut, Ser John,’ he said.

Ser John grinned, but only inside his visor where it wouldn’t show. Just in that moment, all younger men were the enemy.

‘Ser John, there’s a pair of farmers to see you.’ It was the duty sergeant. Tom Lickspittle, Ser John called him, if only inside his visor. The man couldn’t seem to do anything well except curry favour.

‘I’ll see them when I’m done here, Sergeant.’ Ser John was trying to control his breathing.

‘I think you’ll want to – to see them now.’ That was new. Lickspittle Tom never questioned orders. The man gulped. ‘My lord.’

That makes this some sort of emergency.

Ser John walked over to his latest squire, young Harold, and got his visor lifted and his helmet removed. He was suddenly ashamed of his armour – brown on many surfaces, or at least the mail was. His cote armour was covered in what had once been good velvet. How long ago had that been?

‘Clean that mail,’ he said to Harold. The boy winced, which suited Ser John’s mood well. ‘Clean the helmet, and find me an armourer. I want this recovered in new cloth.’

‘Yes, Ser John.’ The boy didn’t meet his eye. Lugging armour around the Lower Town would be no easy task.

Ser John got his gauntlets off and walked across the courtyard to the guard room. There were two men – prosperous men; wool cotes, proper hose; one in all the greys of local wool, one in a dark red cote.

‘Gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘Pardon my armour.’

The man in the dark red cote stood forward. ‘Ser John? I’m Will Flodden and this is my cousin John. We have farms on the Lissen Carak road.’

Ser John relaxed. This was not a complaint about one of his garrison soldiers.

‘Go on,’ he said, cheerfully.

‘I kilt an irk, m’lord,’ said the one called John. His voice shook when he said it.

Ser John had been a number of places. He knew men, and he knew the Wild. ‘Really?’ he said. He doubted it, instinctively.

‘Aye,’ said the farmer. He was defensive, and he looked at his cousin for support. ‘There was tre of ’em. Crossing my fields.’ He hugged himself. ‘An’ one loosed at me. I ran for ta’ house, an’ picked up me latchet and let fly. An’ tey ran.’

Ser John sat a little too suddenly. Age and armour were not a good mix.

Will Flodden sighed. ‘Just show it to him.’ He seemed impatient – a farmer who wanted to get back to his farm.

Before he even undid the string securing the sack, Ser John knew what he was going to see. But it all seemed to take a long time. The string unwinding, the upending of the sack. The thing in the sack had stuck to the coarse fabric.

For as long as it took, he could tell himself that the man was wrong. He’d killed an animal. A boar with an odd head, or some such.

But twenty years before Ser John had stood his ground with thousands of other men against a charge of ten thousand irks. He remembered it too damned well.

‘Jesus wept. Christe and the Virgin stand with us,’ he said.

It was an irk, its handsome head somehow smaller and made ghastly having been severed from its sinuous body.

‘Where, exactly?’ he demanded. And turning, he ignored Tom Lickspittle, who was a useless tit in a crisis. ‘Clarkson! Sound the alarm and get me the mayor.’

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Patience had never been the captain’s greatest virtue, and he paced the great hall of the convent, up and back, up and back, his anger ebbing and flowing as he gained and lost control of himself. He suspected that the Abbess was keeping him waiting on purpose; he understood her motives, he read her desire to humble him and keep him off guard; and despite knowing that he was angry, and thus off guard.

Gradually, frustration gave way to boredom.

He had time to note that the stained glass of the windows in the clerestory had missing panels – some replaced in clear glass, and some in horn, and one in weathered bronze. The bright sunlight outside, the first true sign of spring, made the rich reds and blues of the glass glow, but the missing panes were cast into sharp contrast – the horn was too dull, the clear glass too bright, the metal almost black and sinister.

He stared at the window depicting the convent’s patron saint, Thomas, and his martyrdom, for some time.

And then boredom and annoyance broke his meditation and he began to pace again.

His second bout of boredom was lightened by the arrival of two nuns in the grey habit of the order, but they had their kirtles on, open at the neck and with their sleeves rolled up. Both had heavy gloves on, tanned faces, and they bore an eagle on a perch between them.

An eagle.

Both of them bowed politely to the captain and left him with the bird.

The captain waited until they were clear of the hall and then walked over to the bird, a dark golden brown with the dusting of lighter colour that marked a fully mature bird.

‘Maybe a little too fully mature, eh, old boy?’ he said to the bird, who turned his hooded head to the sound of the voice, opened his beak, and said ‘Raawwk!’ in a voice loud enough to command armies.

The bird’s jesses were absolutely plain where the captain, who had been brought up with rich and valuable birds, would have expected to see embroidery and gold leaf. This was a Ferlander Eagle, a bird worth-

– worth the whole value of the captain’s white harness, which was worth quite a bit.

The eagle was the size of his entire upper body, larger than any bird his father – the captain sneered internally at the thought of the man – had ever owned.

‘Raaaawk!’ the bird screamed.

The captain crossed his arms. Only a fool released someone else’s bird – especially when that bird was big enough to eat the fool – but his fingers itched to handle it, to feel its weight on his fist. Could he even fly such a bird?

Is this another of her little games?

After another interval of waiting, he couldn’t stand it any more. He pulled on his chamois gloves and brushed the back of his hand against the talons of the bird’s feet. It stepped obligingly onto his wrist and it weighed as much as a pole-axe. More. His arm sank, and it was an effort to raise the bird back to eye level and place it back on its perch.

When it had one foot secure on the deerskin-padded perch, it turned its hooded head to him, as if seeing him clearly, and closed its left foot, sinking three talons into his left arm.

Even as he gasped, it stepped up onto its perch and turned to face him.

‘Rawwwwwwwk,’ it said with obvious satisfaction.

Blood dripped over his gauntlet cuff.

He looked at the bird. ‘Bastard,’ he said. And he went back to pacing, albeit he now cradled his left arm in his right for twenty trips up and down the hall.

His third bout of boredom was broken by the books. He’d given them only a cursory glance on his first visit, and had dismissed them. They displayed the usual remarkable craftsmanship, superb calligraphy, painted scenes, gilt work everywhere. Worse, both volumes were collections of the Lives of the Saints, a subject in which the captain had no interest whatsoever. But boredom drove him to look at them.

The leftmost work, beneath the window of Saint Maurice, was well-executed, the paintings of Saint Katherine vivid and rich. He chuckled to wonder what lovely model had stood in a monk’s mind, or perhaps a nun’s, as the artist lovingly re-created the contours of flesh. Saint Katherine’s face did not show torment, but a kind of rapture-

He laughed and passed to the second book, pondering the lives of the devout.

What struck him first was the poor quality of the Archaic. The art was beautiful – the title page had a capital where the artist was presented, sitting on a high stool, working away with a gilding brush. The work was so precise that the reader could see that the artist was working on the very title page, presented again in microcosm.

The captain breathed deeply in appreciation of the work, and the humour of it. And then he began to read.

He turned the page. He imagined what his beloved Prudentia would have said about the barbaric nature of the writer’s Archaic. He could all but see the old nun wagging her finger in his mother’s solar.

Shook his head.

The door to the Abbess’s private apartments opened and the priest, hurried past, hands clasped together and face set. He looked furious.

Behind him, the Abbess gave a low laugh, almost a snort. ‘I thought you’d find our book,’ she said. She looked at him fondly. ‘And my Parcival.’ She indicated the bird.

‘I can’t see how such a brutally bad transcription merited the quality of artist,’ he said, turning another page. ‘I thought as much f that’s your bird, you are braver than I thought.’

‘Am I?’ she asked. ‘I’ve had him for many years.’ She looked fondly at the bird, who bated on his perch. ‘Can you not see why the book is so well wrought?’ she asked with a smile that told him that there was a secret to it. ‘You do know that we have a library, Captain? I believe that our hospitality might extend as far as allowing you to use it. We have more than fifty volumes.’

He bowed. ‘Would I shock you if I said that the Lives of the Saints held little interest for me?’

She shrugged. ‘Posture away, little atheist. My gentle Jesu loves you all the same.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘I am sorry – I would love to spar with you all morning, but I have a crisis in my house. May we to business?’ She waved him to a stool. ‘Still in armour,’ she said.

‘We are still on the hunt,’ he said, crossing his legs.

‘But you killed the monster. Don’t think we are not grateful. In fact, I regret taking the tone I did, especially as you lost a man of great worth, and since you were so very effective.’ She shrugged. ‘And you have done your work before the new month – and before my fair opens.’

He made a sour face. ‘My lady, I would like to deserve your esteem, and few things would give me greater pleasure than to hear you apologise.’ He shrugged. ‘But I am not here to spar, either. Unworthily, I assumed you kept me cooling my heels to teach me humility.’

She looked at her hands. ‘You could use some, young man, but unfortunately, I have other issues before me this day or I would be happy to teach you some manners. Now, why do you say you do not deserve my regard?’

‘We have killed a monster,’ he acknowledged. ‘But not the one that killed Sister Hawisia.’

She jutted out her jaw – a tic he hadn’t seen before. ‘I must assume that you have ways to know this. You must pardon me if I am sceptical. We have two monsters? I remember your saying the enemy seldom hunts alone this far from the Wild – but surely, Captain, you know that we are not as far from the Wild as we once were.’

He wished for a chair with a back. He wished that Hugo were alive, and he hadn’t been saddled with internal issues of discipline that should have been Hugo’s. ‘May I have a glass of wine?’ he asked.

The Abbess had a stick, and she thumped it on the floor. Amicia entered, eyes downcast. The Abbess smiled at her. ‘Wine for the captain, dear. And do not raise your eyes, if you please. Good girl.’

Amicia slipped out the door again.

‘My huntsman is a Hermetic,’ he said. ‘With a licence from the Bishop of Lorica.’

She waved a hand. ‘The orthodoxy of Hermeticism is beyond my poor intellect. Do you know, when I was a girl, we were forbidden to use High Archaic for any learning beyond the Lives of the Saints. I was punished by my chaplain as a girl for reading some words on a tomb in my father’s castle.’ She sighed. ‘You read the Archaic, then,’ she said.

‘High and low,’ he answered.

‘I thought as much . . . and there cannot be so many knights in the Demesne who can read High Archaic.’ She made a motion with her head, as if shaking off fatigue. Amicia returned, brought the captain wine and backed away from him without ever raising her eyes – a very graceful performance.

She wore that curious expression again. The one he couldn’t read – it held both anger and amusement, patience and frustration, all in one corner of her mouth.

The Abbess had taken Parcival the eagle on her wrist, and she was stroking his plumage and cooing at him. While the arm of her throne-like chair helped support the great raptor, the captain was impressed by her strength. She must be sixty, he thought.

There was something about the Abbess – the Abbess and Amicia. It was not a similarity of breeding – two more different women could not be imagined, the older woman with an elfin beauty and slim bones, the younger taller, heavier boned, with strong hands and broad shoulders.

He was still staring at Amicia when the Abbess’s staff thumped the floor.

The word hermetic rolled around the captain’s busy brain, and curled itself in the corner of Amicia’s mouth. But the staff took his attention.

‘Assuming I believe you – what does your huntsman say?’ the Abbess demanded.

The captain sighed. ‘That we got the wrong one. My lady, no one but a great Magus or a mountebank can tell us why the enemy acts as they do. Perhaps one of them is calling to others for reinforcements. Perhaps you have a nest of them. But Gelfred assures me that the signs left by Sister Hawisia’s killer are not the same as those of the beast we slew and my men – all of them – are exhausted. It will take them a day to recover. They’ve lost a gallant leader, a man they all respected, so I am sorry, but we will not be very aggressive for a few days.’ He shrugged.

She looked at him for a long time, and finally crossed her hands on the top of her staff and laid her long chin on them. ‘You think I do not understand,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I do. I do not believe you seek to cheat me.’

He didn’t know what to make of that.

‘Let me tell you my immediate concerns,’ she said. ‘My fair opens in a week. The first week of the fair is merely local produce and prizes. Then the Harndon merchants come upriver in the second week to buy our surplus grain and our wool. But in the second and third weeks of the fair, the drovers come down from the moors. That is when the business is done, and that’s when I need my bridge and my people to be safe. You know why there is a fortress here?’ she asked.

He smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The fortress is merely to guarantee the bridge.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘And I have been lax in letting my garrison drop – but if you will pardon an old woman’s honesty, soldiers and nuns are not natural friends. Yet these attacks – I hold this land by knight service and garrison service, and I do not have enough men. The king will send a knight to dispense justice at the fair and I dread his discovering how my penny-pinching ways have put these lands at risk.’

‘You need me for more than just monster-hunting,’ he said.

‘I do. I would like to purchase your contract for the summer, and I wonder if you have a dozen men-at-arms – archers, even – who could stay when you go. Perhaps men you’d otherwise pension off, or men who’ve been wounded.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t even know how to find a new garrison. Albinkirk used to be a fine town – and a place where such men could be found – but not anymore.’ She took a deep breath.

He nodded. ‘I will consider it. I will not pretend, since we are being honest with each other, that my company does not need a steady contract. I would like to recruit, too. I need men.’ He thought a moment. ‘Would you want women?’

‘Women?’ asked the Abbess.

‘I have women – archers, men-at-arms.’ He smiled at her chagrin. ‘It’s not so uncommon as it once was. It is almost accepted over the sea, on the Continent.’

She shook her head. ‘I think not. What kind of women would they be? Slatterns and whores taught to fight? Scarcely fit companions for women of religion.’

‘You have a good point, my lady. I’m sure they are far less fit as companions then the sort of men who are attracted to a mercenary company.’ He leaned back, stretching his legs to ease the pressure on his lower back.

Their eyes met, sharp as two blades crossed.

She shrugged. ‘We are not adversaries. Rest if you must. Consider my offer. Do you need a service for the dead?’

For the first time, he allowed himself to feel warmth for the lady Abbess. ‘That would be greatly appreciated.’

‘Not all your men reject God as you do?’ she said.

‘Much the opposite.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Soldiers are as inclined to nostalgic irrationality as any other group – perhaps more so.’ He winced.

‘I’m sorry my lady, that was rude, in response to your very kind offer. We have no chaplain. Ser Hugo was a gentleman of good family who died in his faith, whatever you may think of me. A service for the dead would be very kind of you, and would probably do much to keep my people in order – ahem.’ He shook his head. ‘I appreciate your offer.’

‘You are really quite sweet in your well-mannered confusion,’ she said, also rising. ‘We will get along well enough, Ser Captain. And you will, I hope, forgive me if I counter your blatant lack of respect for my religion with an attempt to convert you to it. Whatever has been done to you, it was not Jesu who did it, but the hand of man.’

He bowed. ‘That’s just where you are wrong, my lady.’ He reached for her hand, which she offered, to kiss – but the imp in him could not be stopped, and so he turned it over and kissed her palm like a lover.

‘Such a little boy,’ she said, but she was clearly both pleased and amused. ‘A rather wicked boy. Service tonight, I think, in the chapel.’

‘You will allow my company into the fortress?’ he asked.

‘Since I intend to employ you as my garrison,’ she replied, ‘I will, in time, have to trust you inside the walls.’

‘This is a sharp change of direction, my lady Abbess,’ he said.

She nodded and swept towards the inner door to the convent. ‘Yes it is,’ she said. She gave him a very straight-backed courtesy. ‘I know things, now.’

He stopped her with his hand. ‘You said the Wild is closer now. I’ve been away. Closer how?’

She released a breath. ‘We have twenty farms which we have taken from the trees. There are more families here than when I was first a novice – more families. And yet. When I was young, nobles hunted the Wild in the mountains – expeditions into the Adacrags were a knight errant’s dream. The convent used to host them in our guest house.’ She glanced out the window. ‘The border with the Wild used to be fifty leagues or more to the north and the west of us, and while the forest was deep, trustworthy men lived there.’ She met his eyes. ‘Now, my fortress is the border, as it was in my grandfather’s time.’

He shook his head. ‘The wall is two hundred leagues north of here. And as far west.’

She shrugged. ‘The Wild is not. The king was going to push the Wild back to the wall,’ she said wearily. ‘But I gather his young wife takes all his time.’

He smiled. And changed the subject. ‘Tell me what the book is?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘You will enjoy puzzling it out for yourself,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to deny you that pleasure.’

‘You are a wicked old woman,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘You are beginning to know me, messire.’ She smiled, all flirtation, and then paused. ‘Captain, I have decided to tell you something,’ she said. She wasn’t hestitant. She was merely careful. ‘About Sister Hawisia.’

He didn’t move.

‘She told me that we had a traitor in our midst. And that she would unmask him. I was supposed to be at the farm that day. She insisted on going in my place.’ The Abbess looked away. ‘I’m afraid that monster was meant for me.’

‘Or your brave sister unmasked the traitor and he killed her for it. Or he already knew she intended to unmask him, and set a trap.’ The captain hadn’t shaved in days, and he scratched absently under his chin. ‘Who knows of your movements and decisions, my lady?’

She sat back. Her staff smacked against the floor in real agitation. Their eyes met.

‘I am on your side,’ he said.

She was fighting tears. ‘They are my people,’ she said. She bit her lip and gave her head a shake that moved the fine linen folds of her wimple. ‘Bah – I am not a schoolgirl. I will have to think, and perhaps look at my notes. Sister Miram is my vicar, and I trust her absolutely. Father Henry attends me at most hours. Sister Miram has access to everything in the fortress and knows most of my thoughts. John le Bailli is my factor in the villages and the king’s officer for the Senechally. I will arrange that you meet them all.’

‘And Amicia,’ the captain said quietly.

‘Yes. She attends me at most hours.’ The Abbess’s eyes locked with the captain’s. ‘She and Hawisia were not friends.’

‘Why not?’ asked the knight.

‘Hawisia was gently born, nobly born. She had great power.’ The Abbess looked out the window, and her bird bated slightly at her movement.

‘Put him back on his perch, please?’ she asked.

The knight collected the great bird on his fist and transferred his great weight to the perch. ‘Surely he is a royal bird?’

‘I had a royal friend, once,’ said the Abbess, with a curl of her lips.

‘And Amicia is not gently born?’ the Red Knight prodded.

The Abbess met his glance and rose. ‘I will leave you to make such enquiries yourself,’ she said. ‘I find that I am uninterested in gossiping about my people.’

‘I have angered you,’ said the knight.

‘Messire, creatures of the Wild are killing my people, one of them is a traitor and I have to hire sell-swords to protect me. Today everything angers me.’

She opened the door, and he had a glimpse of Amicia, and then the door closed behind her.

Given an unexpected moment of freedom, he walked to the book. It stood under a window of Saint John the Baptist so he began to turn the pages, looking for the saint’s story.

The Archaic was painful, stilted, ill-phrased, as if a schoolgirl had translated the Archaic to Gothic and then back, making grievous errors in both directions.

The calligraphy was inhuman in its perfection. In ten pages, he could not find a pen error. Who would labour so over such a bad book?

The secret of the book merged in his mind with the secret that hid in the corner of Alicia’s downturned mouth, and he began to look more carefully at the lavish illuminations.

Facing the tale of Saint Paternus was a complex illustration of the saint himself, in robes of red, white and gold. His robes were richly embellished, and in one hand he held a cross.

In the other hand he held an alembic instead of an orb, and inside the alembic were minute figures of a man and a woman . . .

The captain looked back to the Archaic, trying to find the trace of a reference – was it heresy?

He stood up, releasing the vellum cover. Heresy is none of my concern, he thought. Besides – whatever that smug old woman was, she was no secret heretic. He walked slowly across the hall, his sabatons clinking faintly as he walked, and his mind still on the problem of the book. She was right, damn her, he thought.

Heading North – A Golden Bear

The mother bear swam until she could no longer swim, and then she lay up all day, cold to the bone and weary from blood loss and despair. Her cub sniffed at her and demanded food, and she forced herself to move to find some. She killed a sheep in a field and they fed on it; then she found a line of bee-hives at the edge of another field and they ate their way through the whole colony, eight hives, until both bears were sticky and drunk on sugar. She licked raw honey into the wounds the sword had made. Men were born without talons, but the claws they forged for themselves were deadlier than anything the Wild might give them.

She sang for her daughter, and called her name.

And her cub mewed like a animal.

When Lily was stronger, they went north again. That night, she smelled the pus in her wounds. She licked it and it tasted bad.

She tried to think of happier days – of her mate, Russet, and her mother’s den in the distant mountains. But her slavery had gone on too long, and something was dimmed in her.

She wondered if her wound was mortal. If the warrior man had poisoned his claw.

They lay up another day and she caught fish, no kind she recognised, but something that tasted a little of salt. She knew that the great Ocean was salted, perhaps the river had a spring run of sea fish.

They were easy to catch, even for a wounded bear.

There were more hives at a field edge, whose outraged human guard lofted arrows at them from his stone croft. None of them struck home, and they slipped away.

She had no idea where she was, but her spirit said to go north. And the river flowed from her home, she could taste the icy spring run off. So she kept moving north.

The Great North Road – Gerald Random

Gerald Random, Merchant Adventurer of Harndon, looked back along the line of his wagons with the satisfaction of the captain for his company, or the Abbot for his monks. He’d mustered twenty-two wagons of his own, all in his livery colours, red and white, their man-high wheels carefully painted with red rims and white spokes; the sides of every wagon white with red trim, and scenes from the Passion of the Christ decorating every side panel, all the work of his very talented brother-in-law. It was good advertising, good religion, and it guaranteed that his carters would always form his convoy in order – every man, whether they could not read or figure or not, knew that the God Jesu was scourged by knights in their guard room, and then had to carry his own cross to Golgotha.

He had sixty good men, mostly drapers’ and weavers’ men, but a pair of journeymen goldsmiths and a dozen cutlers, and some bladesmiths and blacksmiths, a handful of mercers and grocers too, all armed and well armoured like the prosperous men they were. And he had ten professional soldiers he’d engaged himself, acting as his own captain – good men, every one of them with a King’s Warrant that he had borne arms in the king’s service.

Gerald Random had such a warrant himself. He’d served in the north, fighting the Wild. And now he was leading a rich convoy to the great market fair of Lissen Carak as the commander, the principle investor, and the owner of most of the wagons.

His should be the largest convoy on the road and the best display at the fair.

His wife Angela laid a long white hand on his arm. ‘You find your wagons more beautiful than you find me,’ she said. He wished that she might say it with more humour, but at least there was humour.

He kissed her. ‘I’ve yet time to prove otherwise, my lady,’ he said.

‘The future Lord Mayor does not take his wife for a ride in the bed-carriage while his great northern convoy awaits his pleasure!’ she said. She rubbed his arm through his heavy wool doublet. ‘Dinna’ fash yourself, husband. I’ll be well enough.’

Guilbert, the oldest and most reliable-looking of the hireling swordsmen, approached with a mixture of deference and swagger. He nodded – a compromise between a bow and a failure to recognise authority. Random took it to mean something like I have served great lords and the king, and while you are my commander, you are not one of them.

Random nodded.

‘Now that I see the whole convoy,’ Guilbert nodded at it. ‘I’d like six more men.’

Random looked back over the wagons – his own, and those of the goldsmiths, the cutlers, the two other drapers, and the foreign merchant, Master Haddan, with his tiny two wheel cart and his strange adult apprentice, Adle. Forty-four wagons in all.

‘Even with the cutlers’ men?’ he asked. He kept his wife there by taking her hand when she made to slip away.

Guilbert shrugged. ‘They’re fair men, no doubt,’ he said.

Wages for six more men – Warrant men – would cost him roughly the whole profit on one wagon. And the sad fact was that he couldn’t really pass any part of the cost on to the other merchants, who had already paid – and paid well – to be in his convoy.

Moreover, he had served in the north. He knew the risks. And they were high – higher every year, although no one seemed to want to discuss such stuff.

He looked at his wife, contemplating allowing the man two more soldiers.

He loved his wife. And the worry on her face was worth spending more than the value of a cart to alleviate. And what would the profit be, should his convoy be taken or scattered?

‘Do you have a friend? Someone you can engage at short notice?’ he asked.

Guilbert grinned. It was the first time that the merchant had seen the mercenary smile, and it was a surprisingly human, pleasant smile.

‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘Down on his luck. I’d esteem it a favour. And he’s a good man – my word on it.’

‘Let’s have all six. Eight, if we can get them. I have a worry, so let’s be safe. Money is not all there is,’ he said, looking into his wife’s eyes, and she breathed out pure relief. Some dark omen had been averted.

He hugged her for a long time while apprentices and journeymen kept their distance, and when Guilbert said he needed an hour by the clock to get his new men into armour – meaning they’d pawned theirs and needed to redeem it – Random took his wife by the hand and took her upstairs. Because there were so many things that were more important than money.

But the sun was still in the middle of the spring sky when forty-five wagons, two hundred and ten men, eighteen soldiers, and one merchant captain started north for the fair. He knew that he was the ninth convoy on the great road north – the longest to assemble, and consequently, the last that would reach Lissen Carak’s great supply of grain. But he had the goods and the wagons to buy so much grain that he didn’t think he’d be the loser, and he had a secret – a trade secret – that might make him the greatest profit in the history of the city.

It was a risk. But surprisingly for a man of money, as the lords called his kind, Gerald Random loved risk as other men loved money, or swords, or women, and he set his sword at his hip, his dagger on the other, with a round steel buckler that would not have disgraced a nobleman, and smiled. Win or lose, this was the moment he loved. Starting out. The dice cast, the adventure beginning.

He raised his arm, and he heard the sounds of men responding. He sent a pair of the mercenaries forward, and then he let his arm fall. ‘Let’s go!’ he called.

Whips cracked, and animals leaned into their loads, and men waved goodbye to sweethearts and wives and children and brats and angry creditors, and the great convoy rolled away with creaking wheels and jingling harness and the smell of new paint.

And Angela Random knelt before her icon of the Virgin and wept, the tears as hot as her passion of an hour before.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Seven men had died fighting the wyvern. The corpses were wrapped in plain white shrouds because that was the rule of the Order of Saint Thomas, and they gave off a sickly sweet smell – corruption and zealous use of sweet herbs, and bitter myrrh burned in the censors that hung in the front of the chapel.

The whole fighting strength of his company stood in the nave, shifting uneasily as if facing an unexpected enemy. They wore no armour, bore no weapons, and some were very ill-dressed; not a few wore their arming cotes with mail voiders because they had no other jacket, and at least one man was bare-legged and ashamed. The captain was plainly dressed in black hose and a short black jupon that fitted so tightly that he couldn’t bend over – his last decent garment from the Continent. His only nod to his status was the heavy belt of linked gold and bronze plaques around his hips.

Their apparent penury contrasted with the opulence of the chapel – even with the shrines and crosses swathed in purple for Lent, or perhaps the more so because the purple of Lent was so rich. Except that nearer to hand, the captain could see the edge of a reliquary peaking out from beneath its silken shroud, the gilt old and crazed, the wood broken. Tallow, not wax, burned in every sconce except the altar candelabra, and the smell of burning fat was sharp against the sweet and the bitter.

The captain noted that Sauce wore a kirtle and a gown. He hadn’t seen her dressed as a woman since her first days with the company. The gown was fine, a foreign velvet of ruddy amber, somewhat faded except for one diamond shaped patch on her right breast.

Where her whore’s badge was sewn, he thought. He glared at the crucified figure over the altar, his pleasant, detached mood destroyed. If there is a god, how can he allow so much fucking misery and deserve my thanks for it? The captain snorted.

Around him the company sank to their knees as the chaplain, Father Henry, raised the consecrated host. The captain kept his eyes on the priest, and watched him throughout the ritual that elevated the bread to the sacred body of Christ – even surrounded by his mourning company, the captain had to sneer at the foolishness of it. He wondered if the stick-thin priest believed a word of what he was saying – wondered idly if the man was driven insane by the loneliness of living in a world of women, or if he was consumed by lust instead. Many of the sisters were quite comely, and as a soldier, the captain knew that comeliness was in the eye of the beholder and directly proportionate to the length of time since one’s last leman. Speaking of which-

He happened to catch Amicia’s eye just then. He wasn’t looking at her – he was very consciously not looking at her, not wanting to appear weak, smitten, foolish, domineering, vain . . .

He had a long list of things he was trying not to appear.

Her sharp glance said, Don’t be so rude – Kneel, so clearly he almost felt he had heard the words said aloud.

He knelt. She had a point – good manners had more value than pious mouthing. If that was her point. If she had, indeed, even looked at him.

Michael stirred next to him, risked a glance at him. The captain could see that his squire was smiling.

Beyond him, Ser Milus was trying to hide a smile as well.

They want me to believe. Because my disbelief threatens their belief, and they need solace.

The service rolled on as the sun flared its last, nearly horizontal beams throwing brilliant coloured light from the stained glass across the white linen shrouds of the dead.

Dies ir?! dies illa

Solvet s?clum in favilla:

Teste David cum Sibylla!

The coloured light grew – and every soldier gasped as the blaze of glory swept across the bodies.

Tuba, mirum spargens sonum

Per sepulchra regionum,

Coget omnes ante thronum.

It’s a trick of the light, you superstitious fools! He wanted to shout it aloud. And at the same time, he felt the awe just as they did – felt the increase in his pulse. They hold the service at this hour to take advantage of the sun and those windows, he thought. Although it would be very difficult to time the whole service to arrange it, he admitted to himself. And the sun cannot be at the right angle very often.

Even the priest had stumbled in the service.

Michael was weeping. He was scarcely alone. Sauce was weeping and so was Bad Tom. He was saying ‘Deo gratias’ over and over again through his tears, his rough voice a counterpoint to Sauce’s.

When it was all done, the knights of the company bore the corpses on litters made from spears, out of the chapel and back down the hill to bury them in the consecrated ground by the shrine at the bridge.

Ser Milus came and put his hand on the captain’s shoulder – a rare familiarity – and nodded. His eyes were red.

‘I know that cost you,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

Jehannes grunted. Nodded. Wiped his eyes on the back of his heavy firze cote sleeve. Spat. Finally met his eye too. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

The captain just shook his head. ‘We still have to bury them,’ he said. ‘They remain dead.’

The procession left by the chapel’s main door, led by the priest, but the Abbess was the focal point, now in severe and expensive black with a glittering crucifix of black onyx and white gold. She nodded to him and he gave her a courtly bow in return. The perfection of the Abbess’s black habit with its eight-pointed cross contrasted with the brown-black of the priest’s voluminous cassock over his cadaver-thin body. And the captain could smell the tang of the man’s sweat as he passed. He was none too clean, and his smell was spectacular when compared with the women.

The nuns came out behind their Abbess. Virtually all of the cloister had come to the service, and there were more than sixty nuns, uniform in their slate grey habits with the eight pointed cross of their order. Behind them came the novices – another sixty women in paler grey, some of a more worldly cut, showing their figures, and others less.

They wore grey and it was twilight, but the captain had no difficulty picking out Amicia. He turned his head away in time to see an archer known as Low Sym make a gesture and give a whistle.

The captain suddenly felt his sense of the world restored. He smiled.

‘Take that man’s name,’ he said to Jehannes . . . ‘Ten lashes, disrespect.’

‘Aye, milord.’ Marshal Jehannes had his hand on the man’s collar before the captain had taken another breath. Low Sym – nineteen, and no woman’s friend – didn’t even thrash. He knew a fair cop when he felt one.

‘Which I was-’ he began, and saw the captain’s face. ‘Aye, Captain.’

But the captain’s eyes rested on Amicia. And his thoughts went elsewhere.

The night passed in relaxation, and to soldiers, relaxation meant wine.

Amy’s Hob was still abed, and Daud the Red was fletching new arrows for the company and admitted to being ‘poorly’, company slang for a hangover so bad it threatened combat effectiveness. Such a hangover would be punishable most days – the day after they buried seven men was not one of them.

The camp had its own portable tavern run by the Grand Sutler, a merchant who paid the company a hefty fee to ride along with his wagons and skim their profits when they had some to share. He, in turn, bought wine and ale from the fortress’ stores, and from the town at the foot of Lissen Carak – four streets of neat stone cottages and shop fronts nestled inside the lower walls and called ‘The Lower Town’. But the Lower Town was open to the company as well, and its tavern, hereabouts known as the Sunne in Splendour, was serving both in its great common room and out in the yard. The inn was doing a brisk business, selling a year’s worth of ale in a few hours. Craftsmen were locking up their children.

That was not the captain’s problem. The captain’s problem was that Gelfred was planning to venture back to the tree line alone, while the captain had no intention of risking his most valuable asset without protection. And no protection was available.

Gelfred stood in the light rain outside his tent, swathed in a three-quarter length cloak, thigh high boots and a heavy wool cap. He tapped his stick impatiently against his boot.

‘If this rain keeps up, we’ll never find the thing again,’ he said.

‘Give me a quarter hour to find us some guards,’ the captain snapped.

‘A quarter hour we may not have,’ Gelfred said.

The captain wandered through the camp, unarmoured and already feeling ill-at-ease with his decision to dress for comfort. But he, too, had drunk too much and too late the night before. His head hurt, and when he looked into the eyes of his soldiers, he knew that he was in better shape than most. Most were still drinking.

He’d paid them. It improved his popularity and his authority, but it gave them the wherewithal to be drunk.

So they were.

Jehannes was sitting in the door of his pavilion.

‘Hung over?’ the captain asked.

Jehannes shook his head. ‘Still drunk,’ he answered. Raised a horn cup. ‘Want some?’

The captain mimed a shudder. ‘No. I need four sober soldiers – preferably men-at-arms.’

Jehannes shook his head again.

The captain felt the warmth go from his heart to his cheeks. ‘If they are drunk on guard, I’ll have their heads,’ he growled.

Jehannes stood up. ‘Best you don’t go check, then.’

The captain met his eye. ‘Really? That bad?’ he said it mildly enough, but his anger came through.

‘You don’t want them to think you don’t give a shit, do you, Captain?’ Jehannes had no trouble holding his eye, although the marshal’s were bloodshot and red. ‘This is not the moment to play at discipline, eh?’

The captain sat on an offered stool. ‘If something comes out of the Wild right now, we’re all dead.’

Jehannes shrugged. ‘So?’ he asked.

‘We’re better than this,’ the captain said.

‘Like fuck we are,’ Jehannes said, and took a deep drink. ‘What are you playing at? Ser?’ He laughed grimly. ‘You’ve taken a company of broken men and made something of them – and now you want them to act like the Legion of Angels?’

The captain sighed. ‘I’d settle for the Infernal Legion. I’m not particular.’ He got to his feet. ‘But I will have discipline.’

Jehannes made a rude noise. ‘Have some discipline tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask for it today. Show some humanity, lad. Let them be sad. Let them fucking mourn.’

‘We mourned yesterday. We went to church, for god’s sake. Murderers and rapists, crying for Jesus. If I hadn’t seen it, I’d have laughed to hear about it.’ Just for a moment, the captain looked very young indeed – and confused, annoyed. ‘We’re in a battle. We can’t take a break to mourn.’

Jehannes drank more wine. ‘Can you fight every day?’ he asked.

The captain considered. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You ought to be locked up, then. We can’t. Give it a rest, Captain.’

The captain got to his feet. ‘You are now the constable. I’ll need another marshal to replace Hugo. Shall I promote Milus?’

Jehannes narrowed his eyes. ‘Ask me that tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If you ask me again today, I swear by Saint Maurice I’ll beat you to a fucking pulp. Is that clear enough?’

The captain turned on his heel and walked away, before he did something he’d regret. He went to Jacques – as he always did, when he’d reached bottom.

But his old valet – the last of his family retainers – was drunk. Even the boy Toby was curled up on the floor of the captain’s pavilion, with a piece of rug pulled over him and a leg of chicken in one hand.

He looked at them for a long time, thought about having a tempertantrum, and decided that no one was sober enough to bother. He tried to arm himself and found that he couldn’t get beyond his chain hauberk. He put a padded cote over it, and took his gauntlets.

Gelfred had the horses.

And that is how the captain came to be riding with his huntsman, alone, on the road that ran along the river, sore back, pulled neck muscles, and all.

North of Harndon – Ranald Lachlan

Ranald was up with the dawn. The old man was gone, but had left him a deer’s liver fried in winter onions – a veritable feast. He said a prayer for the old man and another when he found the man had thrown a blanket over his riding horse. He cleared the camp and had mounted up before the sun was above the eastern mountains.

It was a ride he’d done with the king a hundred times. Following the highway north along the Albin, except that where the great river wound like an endless snake, the highway ran as straight as the terrain would allow, deviating only for big hills and rich manors, and crossing the Albin seven times via the seven great stone bridges between Harndon and Albinkirk. Lorica was the first bridge. Cheylas was the second – a pretty town with red-tile roofs and round chimney-stacks and fine brick houses. He ate a big meal at the sign of the Irk’s Head, and was out the door before the ale could tempt him to stay the night. He changed to his big hackney and rode north again, crossing Cheylas Bridge while the sun was high in the sky and making for Third Bridge as fast as his horse would go.

He crossed Third Bridge as darkness was falling. The Bridge Keeper didn’t take guests – a matter of law – but directed him politely to a manor farm on the west bank. ‘Less than a league,’ the retired soldier said.

Ranald was pleased to find the man’s directions were spot on, because the night was dark and cold, for spring. In the North, the Aurora played in the sky, and there was a feel to it that Ranald didn’t like.

Bampton Manor was rich beyond a hillman’s ideas of rich – but Ranald was used to how rich the southland was. They gave him a bed and a slice of game pie, and a cup of good red wine, and in the morning, the gentleman who owned the farms smiled at his offer of repayment.

‘You are a King’s Guardsman?’ the young man asked. ‘I am – I would like to be a man-at-arms. I have my own harness.’ He blushed.

Ranald didn’t laugh. ‘You’d like to serve the king?’ he asked.

The young man nodded. ‘Hawthor Veney,’ he said holding out his hand.

His housekeeper bustled up with a bag. ‘Which I packed you a lunch,’ she said. ‘Good for a ploughman, good for a knight, I says.’

Ranald bowed to her. ‘Your servant, ma’am. I’m no knight – just a servant of the king, going home to see my family.’

‘Hillman?’ she said, and sniffed. It was a good sniff – it suggested that hillmen themselves were not always good people, but that she’d already decided in his favour on the matter.

He bowed again. To young Hawthor, he said, ‘Do you practise arms, messire?’

Hawthor beamed, and the older housekeeper cackled. ‘It’s all he does. Doesn’t plough, doesn’t reap, won’t even attend the haying. Doesn’t chase servant girls, doesn’t drink.’ She shook her head.

‘Goodwife Evans!’ Hawthor said with the annoyance of a master for an unservile servant.

She sniffed again – another sniff entirely.

Ranald nodded. ‘Would you care to measure your sword against mine, young ser?’

In a matter of minutes they were armed and padded in jupons and gauntlets and helmets, standing in the farmhouse yard with a dozen labourers for an audience.

Ranald liked to fight with an axe, but service in the King’s Guard required knowledge of the courtly sword. Four feet of steel. The boy – Ranald didn’t think of himself as old, but found that Hawthor made him feel old with every comment he made – had a pair of training weapons, not too well balanced, probably made by a local man, a little heavy. But they were perfectly serviceable.

Ranald waited patiently in a garde. Mostly, he was interested in seeing how the boy came at him – a man’s character was visible in his swordsmanship.

The boy stood his ground. He put his sword on his shoulder, and came forward in a position that fencing masters called ‘The Garde of the Woman’. His stance was too open and he didn’t seem to understand that he needed to cock the sword back as far as he could. The sort of little error you would spot up when arms are your profession, thought Ranald. But he liked how patient the boy was.

The boy closed with assurance, and launched his attack without a false preamble – no bobbing or weaving or wasting effort.

Ranald cut into the boy’s attack and knocked his blade to the ground.

The boy didn’t wait for the whole move, but back-stepped.

Ranald’s sword licked out and caught him in the side of the head despite his retreat.

‘Oh!’ Hawthor said. ‘Well struck.’

The rest was much the same. Hawthor was a competent lad, for a young man without a master-at-arms to teach him. He knew lots of wrestling and very few subtleties, but he was bold and careful, a superb combination for a man so young.

Ranald paused to get out of his heavy jupon and to write the boy a note. ‘Take this to Lord Glendower with my compliments. You may be asked to serve a year with the pages. Where are your parents?’

Hawthor shrugged. ‘Dead, messire.’

‘Well, if the goodwife can spare you,’ he said. And he was still smiling as he headed for the Fourth Bridge, at Kingstown.

North of Harndon – Harold Redmede

Harold Redmede looked down at the sleeping hillman with a smile. He packed his gear silently, left the hillman the better part of a venison liver, picked up his brother’s gear as well, and humped it all to the stream.

He found his brother asleep under a hollow log with his threadbare cloak all about him. Sat and whittled, listening to the Wild, until his brother woke on his own.

‘He was harmless,’ Harold said.

‘He was a king’s man, and thus a threat to every free man,’ said Bill.

Harold shrugged. ‘I’ve been a king’s man,’ he said. It was an old argument, and not one likely to be resolved. ‘Here, have some venison and the cider I saved for you. I brought you fish hooks, twenty good heads for arrows and sixty shafts. Don’t shoot any of my friends.’

‘An aristo is an aristo,’ Bill said.

Harold shook his head. ‘Bollocks to you, Bill Redmede,’ he said. ‘There’s right bastards in the nobles and right bastards in the commons, too.’

‘Difference is that a right bastard commoner, you can break his head with your staff.’ Bill took a piece of his brother’s bread as it was sliced off with a sharp knife.

‘Cheese?’ Harold asked.

‘Only cheese I’ll see this year.’ Bill sat back against a tree trunk. ‘I’ve a mind to go put a knife in your guest.’

Harold shook his head. ‘No you won’t. First, I drank with him, and that’s that. Second, he’s wearing mail and sleeping with a dirk in his fist, and I don’t think you’re going to off a hillman in his sleep, brother o’ mine.’

‘Fair enough. Sometimes I have to remember that we must be fair in our actions, while the enemy is foul.’

‘I could still find you a place here,’ Harold said.

Bill shook his head. ‘I know you mean well, brother. But I am what I am. I’m a Jack. I’m down here recruiting new blood. It’s going to be a big year for us.’ He winked. ‘I’ll say no more. But the day is coming.’

‘You and your day,’ Harold muttered. ‘Listen, William. You think I don’t know you have five young boys hid in the beeches north of here? I even know whose boys they are. Recruits? They’re fifteen or sixteen winters! And you have an irk for a guide.’

Bill shrugged. ‘Needs must when the de’il drives,’ he said.

Harold sat back. ‘I know irks is folks,’ he said, waving a hand. ‘I’ve met ’em in the woods. Listened to ’em play their harps. Traded to ’em.’ He leaned forward. ‘But I’m a forester. They kill other folks. Bill. If you’re on their side you’re with the Wild, not with men.’

‘If the Wild makes me free, mayhap I’m with the Wild.’ Bill ate more bread. ‘We have allies again, Harold. Come with me. We can change the world.’ He grimaced to himself. ‘I’d love to have a good man at my back, brother. We’ve some right hard cases, I’ll admit to you.’ He leaned forward. ‘One’s a priest, and he’s the worst of the lot. You think I’m hard?’

Harold laughed. ‘I’m too fucking old, brother. I’m fifteen winters older than you. And if it comes to that-’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll be with my lord.’

Bill shook his head. ‘How can you be so blind? They oppress us! They take our land, take our animals, grind us-’

‘Save it for the boys, Bill. I have six foot of yew and a true shaft for any as tried to grind me. But that won’t make me betray my lord. Who, I may add, fed this village himself when other villages starved.’

‘Farmers are often good to their cattle, aye,’ Bill said.

They looked at each other. And then both grinned at the same time.

‘That’s it for this year, then?’ Harold asked.

Bill laughed. ‘That’s it. Here, give me your hand. I’m off with my little boys for the greenwood and the Wild. Mayhap you’ll hear of us.’ He got up, and his long cloak shone for a moment, a dirty white.

Harold embraced him. ‘I saw bear prints by the river; a big female and a cub.’ He shrugged. ‘Rare down here. Watch out for her.’

Bill looked thoughtful.

‘Stay safe, you fool,’ he said, and swatted him. ‘Don’t end up eaten by irks and bears.’

‘Next year,’ Bill said, and was gone.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Gelfred led them west along the river for miles, on a road that became increasingly narrow and ill-defined, until they had passed the point where they fought the wyvern and the road disappeared entirely. There were no longer any fields; the last peasant’s cot was miles behind them, and the captain could not even smell smoke on the cool spring breeze, which instead carried an icy hint of old snow. The Abbess had not been exaggerating. Man had lost this land to the Wild.

From time to time Gelfred dismounted in patches of sunlight and drew his short, silver-tipped wand from his belt. He would take his rosary from his belt and say his beads, one prayer at a time, eyes flicking nervously to his captain, who sat impassively on his horse. Each time, he would lay the shrivelled, thorned stick of Witch Bane on the ground at his feet, and each time it pointed, straining like a dog on a leash.

Each time, they rode on.

‘You use the power of grammerie to track the beasts?’ the captain said, breaking the frosty silence. They were riding single file along a well-defined track, the old leaves deeply trodden. It was easy enough to follow, but the road was gone. And by almost any measure, they were in the Wild.

‘With God’s aid,’ Gelfred said, and looked at him, waiting for the retort. ‘But my grammerie found us the wrong beast. So now I’m looking for the man. Or men.’

The captain made a face, but refused to rise to the comment about God. ‘Do you sense their power directly?’ he asked. ‘Or are you following the same spore a dog would follow?’

Gelfred gave his captain a long look. ‘I’d like your permission to buy some dogs,’ he said. ‘Good dogs. Alhaunts and bloodhounds and a courser or two. I’m your Master of the Hunt. If that is true then I would like to have money, dogs, and some servants who are not scouts and soldiers.’ He spoke quietly, and his eyes didn’t rest on the captain. They were always roaming the Wild.

So were the captain’s.

‘How much are we talking about?’ the captain asked. ‘I love dogs. Let’s have dogs!’ He smiled. ‘I’d like a falcon.’

Gelfred’s head snapped around, and his horse gave a start. ‘You would?’

The captain laughed aloud. It was a sound of genuine amusement, and it rang like a trumpet through the woods.

‘You think you are fighting for Satan, don’t you, Gelfred?’ He shook his head.

But when he turned to look at his huntsman, the man was down off his horse, pointing off into the woods.

‘Holy Saint Eustace! All praise for this sign!’ he said.

The captain peered off through the bare branches and caught the flash of white. He turned his horse – no easy feat on the narrow track between old trees – and he gasped.

The old stag was not as white as snow – that much was obvious, because he had a patch of snow at his feet. He was the colour of good wool, a warm white, and there were signs of a long winter on his hide – but he was white, and his rack of antlers made him a hart; a noble beast of sixteen tines, almost as tall at the shoulder as a horse. Old and noble and, to Gelfred, a sign from God.

The stag eyed them warily.

To the captain he was, palpably, a creature of the Wild. His noble head was redolent with power – thick ropes of power that seemed, in the unreal realm of phantasm, to bind the great animal to the ground, the trees, the world in a spider web of power.

The captain blinked.

The animal turned and walked away, his hooves ringing on the frozen ground. He turned and looked back, pawed the old snow, and then sprang over a downed evergreen and was gone.

Gelfred was on his knees.

The captain rode carefully through the trees, watching the branches overhead and the ground, trying to summon his ability to see in the phantasm and struggling with it as he always did when his heart was beating fast.

It had left tracks. The captain found that reassuring. He found the spot where the beast had stood, and he followed the prints to the place where it had turned and pawed the snow.

His riding horse shied, and the captain patted her neck and crooned at her. ‘You don’t like that beast, do you, my honey?’ he said.

Gelfred came up, leading his horse. ‘What did you see?’ he asked. He sounded almost angry.

‘A white hart. With a cross on his head. I saw what you saw.’ The captain shrugged.

Gelfred shook his head. ‘But why did you see it?

The captain laughed. ‘Ah, Gelfred – are you so very holy? Shall I pass word of your vow of chastity on to the maids of Lonny? I seem to remember one young lass with black hair-’

‘Why must you mock holy things?’ Gelfred asked.

‘I’m mocking you. Not holy things.’ He pointed a gloved hand at the place where the stag had pawed the snow. ‘Run your wand over that.’

Gelfred looked up at him. ‘I beg your pardon. I am a sinful man. I should not give myself airs. Perhaps my sins are so black that there is nothing between us.’

The captain’s trumpet laugh rang out again. ‘Perhaps I’m not nearly as bad as you think, Gelfred. Personally, I don’t think God gives a fuck either way – but I do sometimes wonder if She has a wicked sense of humour and I should lighten up.’

Gelfred writhed.

The captain shook his head. ‘Gelfred, I’m still mocking you. I have problems with God. But you are a good man doing his best and I apologise for my needling. Now – be a good fellow and pass your wand over the snow.’

Gelfred knelt in the snow.

The captain winced at how cold his knees must be, even through his thigh high boots.

Gelfred spoke four prayers aloud – three Pater Nosters and an Ave Maria. Then he put his beads back in his belt. He raised his face to the captain. ‘I accept your apology,’ he said. He took the wand from his belt, raised it, and it snapped upright as if it had been struck by a sword.

Gelfred dug with his gloved hands. He didn’t need to dig far.

There was a man’s corpse. He had died slowly, from an arrow in the thigh that had severed an artery – that much they could reasoned from the blood that soaked his braes and hose into a frozen scarlet mass.

All of his garments were undyed wool, off white, well made. He wore a quiver that was full of good arrows with hardened steel heads – the captain drew them one by one and tested the heads against his vambrace.

Gelfred shook his head. The arrows alone were worth a small fortune.

The dead man’s belt pouch had a hundred leopards or more in gold and silver, a fine dagger with a bronze and bone hilt and a set of eating tools set into the scabbard, and his hood and cloak were matching undyed wool.

Gelfred opened his cloak and took out a chain with an enamelled leaf.

‘Good Christ,’ he said, and sat back.

The captain was searching the snow using his sword as a rake, combing up old branches under the scant snow cover.

He found the bow after a minute. If was a fine war bow, heavy, sleek, and powerful – not yet ruined by the exposure to the snow.

Gelfred found the arrow that had killed him after assiduous casting, using his power profligately, casting it wider and wider. He had the body, had the blood, had the quiver. The connections were strong enough that it was only a matter of time, unless the arrow was a very long way away.

In fact, the arrow was near the road where they had left it, almost on their trail, buried in six inches of snow. Blood was still frozen to the ground where the arrow had been torn from the wound.

The arrow was virtually identical to the fifteen in the quiver.

‘Mmm,’ said the captain.

They took turns watching the woods while the other stripped the corpse of clothes, chain, boots, belt, knife – of everything.

‘Why didn’t something eat him?’ Gelfred asked.

‘Enough power here to frighten any animal,’ the captain said. ‘Why didn’t the man who killed him strip his corpse and take the arrows? And the knife?’ He shook his head. ‘I confess, Gelfred – this is-’ he snorted.

Gelfred didn’t raise his eyes. ‘There’s plenty of folk live in the Wild.’

‘I know that.’ The captain raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m from the north, Gelfred. I used to see Outwallers every day, across the river. There’s whole villages of them.’ He shook his head. ‘We raided them, sometimes. And other times, we traded with them.’

Gelfred shrugged. ‘He isn’t an Outwaller.’ He looked at the captain as if he expected trouble. ‘He’s one of those men and women who want to bring down the lords. They say we’ll – that is, that they’ll be free.’ His voice was detached and curiously non-committal.

The captain made a face. ‘He’s a Jack, isn’t he? The bow? The leaf brooch? I’ve heard the songs.’ He shook his head at his huntsman. ‘I know there’s folk who want to burn the castles. If I were born a serf, I’d be out there with my pitchfork, right now. But Jacks? Men dedicated to fighting for the Wild? Who would fund them? How do they recruit? It makes no sense.’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I’d always assumed the Jacks were made up by the lords to justify their own atrocities. Shows what a little youthful cynicism will get you.’

Gelfred shrugged. ‘There are always rumours.’ His eyes slipped away from the captain’s.

‘You’re not some sort of secret rebel, Gelfred?’ The captain forced the other man to meet his eyes.

Gelfred shrugged. ‘Does it brand me a traitor to say that sometimes the whole sick wheel of the world makes me want to kill?’ He dropped his eyes, and the anger went out of him. ‘I don’t. But I understand the outlaws and the outwallers.’

The captain smiled. ‘There. At last, you and I have something in common.’ He rolled the frozen corpse and used the dead man’s sharp knife to slit his hose up the back. He cut the waistband of the man’s linen braes, stiff with frozen blood, and took them as well. He got a sack from his heavy leather male that sat behind his saddle, and filled it with the dead man’s belongings.

He tossed the purse to Gelfred. ‘Get us some dogs,’ he said.

Naked, the dead man didn’t look like a soldier in the army of evil. The thought made the captain purse his lips. He leaned over the corpse – as white as the snow around it – and rolled it over again.

The death wound went in under the arm, straight to the heart, and had been delivered with a slim bladed knife. The captain took his time, looking at it.

‘His killer came and finished him. And was so panicked, they didn’t know their man was already dead.’

‘Already dead?’ Gelfred asked.

‘Not much blood. Look at his cote. There’s the entry – there’s the blood. But not much.’ The captain crouched on his heels. ‘This is a puzzle. What do you see, Gelfred?’

‘His kit is better than ours,’ Gelfred said.

‘Satan pays well,’ the captain shrugged. ‘Or perhaps he merely pays on time.’ He looked around. ‘This is not what we came for. Let’s go back to the trail and look for the monster.’ He paused. ‘Gelfred, how can you conjure with Witch’s Bane?’

Gelfred walked a few paces. ‘I’ve heard it can’t be done,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But it can. It’s like mucking out a stall – you just try not to get the shit on you.’

The captain looked at his huntsman with a whole new appreciation. Sparring about religion had defined their relationship in the weeks since the captain had engaged him.

‘You are potent,’ the captain said.

Gelfred shook his head eyes on the trees. ‘I feel that we’ve disturbed a balance,’ he said, ignoring the compliment.

The captain led his horse to a downed tree. He could vault into the saddle, but he felt sore in every limb, and his neck hurt where the wyvern had tried to snap it, and he was still more than a little hung over, and he used the downed tree to mount.

‘All the more reason to keep moving,’ he said. ‘We’re not in the Jack-hunting business, Gelfred. We kill monsters.’

Gelfred shrugged. ‘My lord-’ he began. He looked away. ‘You have power of your own. Yes?’

The captain felt a little frisson run down his back. Run? Hide? Lie?

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A little.’

‘Hmm,’ Gelfred said, noncommittally. ‘So. Now that I have eliminated the . . . the Jack from my casting, I can concentrate on the other creature.’ He paused. ‘They were bound together. At least,’ he looked scared. ‘At least, that’s how it seemed to me.’

The captain looked at his huntsman. ‘Why do you think someone killed the Jack, Gelfred?’

Gelfred shook his head.

‘A Jack helps a monster kill a nun. Then, another man kills him.’ The captain shivered. The chainmail under his arming cote did a wonderful job of conducting the cold straight to his chest.

Gelfred didn’t meet his eye.

‘Not money. Not weapons.’ The captain began to look around. ‘I think we’re being watched.’

Gelfred nodded.

‘How long had the Jack been dead?’ the captain asked.

‘Two days.’ Gelfred was sure, as only the righteous can be sure.

The captain stroked his beard. ‘Makes no sense,’ he said.

They rode back to the track, and Gelfred hesitated before facing west. And then they began to ride.

‘The stag was a sign from God,’ Gelfred said. ‘And that means the Jacks are but tools of Satan.’

The captain looked at his huntsman with the kind of look fathers usually have for young children.

Which, the captain thought, was odd, since Gelfred was ten years his senior.

‘The stag was a creature of the Wild, every bit as much as the wyvern, and it chose to manifest itself as it did because it opposes whomever aids the Jacks.’ The captain shrugged. ‘Or so I suspect.’ He met his huntsman’s eye. ‘We need to ask ourselves why a creature of the Wild helped us find the body.’

‘So you are an Atheist!’ Gelfred asked. Or rather, accused.

The captain was watching the woods. ‘Not at all, Gelfred. Not at all.’

The trail narrowed abruptly, killing their conversation. Gelfred took the lead. He looked back at the captain, as if encouraging him to go on, but the captain pointed over his shoulder and they rode on in silence.

After a few minutes, Gelfred raised a hand, slipped from the saddle, and performed his ritual.

The stick in his hand snapped in two.

‘Holy Saint Eustace,’ he said. ‘Captain – it is right here with us.’ His voice trembled.

The captain backed his horse a few steps to get clear of the huntsman’s horse and then took a heavy spear from its bucket at his stirrup.

Gelfred had his crossbow to hand, and began to span it, his eyes wide.

The captain listened, and tried to see in the phantasm.

He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. And he knew, with sudden weariness, that it could feel him too.

He turned his horse slowly.

They were at the top of a bank – the ground sloped sharply to the west, down to a swollen stream. He could see where the track crossed the stream.

On the eastern slope, towards the fortress, the ground fell away more slowly and then rose dramatically up the ridge they had just descended, and the captain realised that the ridge was littered in boulders – rocks big enough to hide a wagon, some so large that trees grew from the top of them.

‘I think I may have been rash,’ the captain began.

He heard the sharp click as Gelfred’s string locked into the trigger mechanism on his bow.

He was looking at an enormous boulder the size of a wealthy farmer’s house. Steam rose over it, like smoke from a cottage fire.

‘It’s right there.’ He didn’t turn his head.

‘Bless us, Holy Virgin, now and in the hour of our deaths. Amen.’ Gelfred crossed himself.

The captain took a deep breath and released it softly, fighting his nerves. The ground between them and the rock was tangled with scrubby spruce, downed trees, and snow. Miserable terrain for his horse to cross in a fight. And he wasn’t on Grendel – he was on a riding horse that had never seen combat.

Not wearing armour.

I’m an idiot, he thought.

‘Gelfred,’ he said, without turning his head. ‘Is there more than one? What is downslope?’

Gelfred’s voice was calm, and the captain felt a spurt of affection for the huntsman. ‘I believe there is another.’ Gelfred spat. ‘This is my fault.’

‘Is this our killer?’ the captain asked. He was quite proud of his conversational tone. If he was going down, he would die like a gentleman. That pleased him.

Gelfred was also a brave man. ‘The one upslope is the killer,’ he said. ‘By the wounds of Christ, Captain – what are they?’

‘Stick close,’ the captain said. ‘You’re the huntsman, Gelfred. What are they?’

He began to ride forward, down the trail to the west. He passed Gelfred, who came in so tight behind him that the captain could feel the warmth of his horse. Down the steep slope to the stream, and he could no longer see the boulders, but he could hear movement – crashing movement.

Across the stream in a single leap of his horse. He could feel her terror.

He could feel his own.

He rode five yards, holding his mount down to a trot by sheer force of will and knee. She wanted to bolt. Ten yards. He heard Gelfred splash across the stream instead of leaping it and he turned his horse. She didn’t want to turn.

He put his spur into her right side.

She turned.

Gelfred’s eyes were as wide as his horse’s.

‘Behind me,’ the captain said.

He was facing their back trail. He backed his horse again, judging the distance.

‘I’m dismounting,’ Gelfred said.

‘Shut up.’ The captain fought for enough mental control to enter the room in his head. Closed his eyes – forced them closed against the crashing sound from the top of the ridge to the east.

Prudentia?

She stood in the centre of the room, her eyes wide, and he ran to her, took her outstretched hand and pointed it over his shoulder.

‘Katherine, Ares, Socrates!’ he called. He ran to the door, grasped the handle, and turned the key while the room spun around him.

The lock clicked open and the door crashed back against his leg, throwing him from his feet so that he fell heavily on the marble floor. The breeze was an icy green wind, and on the other side of the door-

It was caught on his shoulder where he had fallen, and the gale was sliding him along the floor as it forced the door open.

He wondered what would happen if the door crashed back against its hinges.

He wondered whether he could die in the small, round room.

Had to assume he could.

I rule here! he said aloud. He put a knee under himself, as he would if he was wrestling with a big man. Used the key for leverage. Pushed the door with his shoulder.

For a long set of heartbeats, it was like pushing a cart in mud. And then he felt the shift – minute – but the tiny victory lit his power like a mountebank’s flare and he slammed the door closed as his net of power wove itself like a giant spider’s web across the stream.

The horse was fighting him, and the thing was halfway down the hill, coming straight down the track, its bulk breaking branches on either side of the trail while its taloned feet gouged clods of earth out of the ground.

His mind shied away from looking at its head.

He couched his lance, timing his charge.

Horses are complex animals, delicate, fractious and sometimes very difficult. His fine riding horse was spirited and nervous on the best of days, and was now terrified, wanting only to flee.

Gelfred’s crossbow loosed with a flat crack and the bolt caught the thing under its long snout and it shrieked. It slowed.

Thirty yards. The length of the tiltyard in his father’s castle. Because this had to be just right.

The adversarius – the captain had never seen one, but had to assume that this was the fabled enemy of man – lengthened its loping stride to leap the brook.

A daemon.

The captain rammed his spurs into his mount. Sometimes, horses are simple. His riding horse exploded forward.

The adversarius leaped again at the edge of the stream, its hooked beak already reaching for his face, arms spread wide.

It seemed to slow as it crossed the water – vestigial wings a blur of angry motion, maned head with a helmet crest of bone curving above it, spraying spittle as the thing tried to snap at the fine web of Power he had cast over the near bank. It would only last a moment – already the daemon was blowing through the mild restraint the way a big child, angry and frightened, tears through spider web.

He tracked the thing’s right eye with his lance tip like it was an opponent’s crest; the brass ring; the upper left corner of the shield on the quintain. Held in place like an insect pinned to a page, it tried to rear back just as his spear point glanced off the ocular ridge and plunged into the soft tissue of the eye, the strong steel of the long spear head breaking the bone above and below the eye socket, driving the point deeper and deeper, the whole weight of the man and horse behind it.

His lance shaft snapped.

The creature’s legs spasmed and its talons tore into his horse’s forequarters, raking flesh and tendon from bone, flaying the poor animal while it screamed. The captain flew back over its rump on force of the impact, with no brace against his back from a tilting saddle. The horse reared and the talons eviscerated it, its guts spilling onto the road in a great gout.

The daemon got its feet on the ground and its forearms shredded the last of his web of power-

It turned from the ruin of his horse and he saw the damage he’d done, the angry orange of its remaining eye – no slit, no pupil. Nothing but fire. It saw him.

The terror of its presence pounded him like a hammer of spirit – for a moment, the terror was so pure in him that he had no self. He was only fear.

It came for him then, rising up fast on its haunches – and, like a puppet with the strings cut, it collapsed atop the corpse of his riding horse.

He gagged, clamped down on the vomit, failed, and heaved everything in his stomach down the front of his jupon. When he was done he was sobbing in the backwash of the terror.

As soon as he had any control over himself, he said ‘Ware! There’s another!’

Gelfred approached him slowly, holding a cup in one hand and a cocked and loaded crossbow balanced carefully on his arms.

‘It’s been a long time.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve prayed the whole rosary, waiting for you to recover.’ He was shaking. ‘I don’t think the other one is coming.’

The captain spat out the taste of vomit. ‘Good’ he said. He wanted to say something witty. Nothing came. ‘Good.’ He took the cup. ‘How – long did I kneel here?’

‘Too long,’ Gelfred said. ‘We need to ride.’

The captain’s hands shook so hard he spilled the wine.

Gelfred put his arms around him.

The captain stood in that unwanted embrace and shook. Then he washed in the creek. He felt violated. And different. He was suddenly afraid of everything. He didn’t feel at all like a man who had faced a daemon, the greatest adversary to the rule of man, in single combat, and the adoration in Gelfred’s eyes made him sick.

Tomorrow, I will no doubt be insufferable, he thought.

Gelfred cut the head from the daemon.

He threw up again, a stream of bile, and wondered if he could ever face a creature of the Wild again. His bones felt like jelly. There was something in the pit of his gut – something that had gone.

He knew exactly what this felt like: like being beaten by his brothers. Beaten and humiliated. He knew that feeling well. They’d been younger than him. They’d hated him. He’d made their lives a misery, when he learned that-

He spat.

Some things are best left unexamined. He held the line at that memory, and felt his fear recede a little, like the first sign the tide is in ebb.

It would pass, then.

Gelfred couldn’t get the horse to bear the head. The captain didn’t have enough concentration to conjure anything to help them with it. So they tied a rope to the head and dragged it.

It would be a long walk back to camp. And after an hour, something behind them began to howl, and the captain felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

Lissen Carak – Mogan

Mogan watched her cousin’s killer as he mounted slowly and rode up the road.

Mogan was a hunter, not a berserker. Her cousin’s death terrified her, and until she had understood it she was not going down to face the men on the road. Instead, she edged cautiously from rock to rock, keeping well out of their line of sight, and she watched them with her superb eyes, made for spotting the movement of prey a mile across the plains to the west.

When they were well clear of the scene of the fight, she trotted down the ridge.

Tunxis lay in a pitiful heap, his once mighty frame hunched and flattened by death, and there were already birds on the corpse.

They cut his head off.

It was horrendous. Mogan threw back her head and howled her rage and sorrow.

After her third howl, her brother came. He had four hunters with him, all armed with heavy war-axes or swords.

Thurkan looked at his nest-mate’s corpse and shook his great head. ‘Barbarians,’ he spat.

Mogan rubbed her shoulder against his. ‘One man killed him. I chose not to try him. He killed our cousin so easily.’

Thurkan nodded. ‘Some of their warriors are terrifying, little sister. And you had no weapon to open his armour.’

‘He had no armour,’ Mogan said. ‘But he had Power. Our Power.’

Thurkan paused, sniffing the air. Then he walked to the edge of the stream, and back, several times, while his nestmates stood perfectly still.

‘Powerful,’ Thurkan said. He paused and licked his shoulder where a mosquito had penetrated his armoured flesh. Insects. How he hated them. He batted helplessly with a taloned forefoot at the cloud that was gathering around his head. Then he bent over his cousin’s form, raised his talons, and turned his cousin’s corpse to ash in a flash of emerald light.

Later, as they ran through the forest, Thurkan mused to his sister. ‘This is not as Thorn thinks it to be,’ he said.

Mogan raised her talons to indicate her complete lack of interest in Thorn. ‘You seek to dominate him, and he seeks to dominate you, but as he is not of our kind your efforts are wasted,’ she said scathingly.

Thurkan took a hundred running steps before he answered. ‘I don’t think so, little sister. I think he is the rising power of the Wild, and we must cleave to him. For now. But in this matter he is blind. This fortress. The Rock. Here we are, masters of the woods from the mountains to the river – and he would have us leave our winnings to assault this one place. And now the Rock has a defender – one who is also a power of the Wild.’ Thurkan ran on. ‘I think Thorn is making an error.’

‘You seek his throat, and his power,’ Mogan said. ‘And it is we who wish to return to the Rock.’

‘Not if the cost is too high. I am not Tunxis.’ Thurkan leapt a log.

‘How can the Rock have a defender who is one of us? And we not know him?’ Mogan asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Thurkan admitted. ‘But I will find out.’