The Red Knight

Chapter Seven

Ser John Wishart

South of Albinkirk – Master Random

‘Gates of Albinkirk are broken, ser,’ Guilbert reported. He shrugged. ‘There’s fires burning in the town and it looks like a fucking fist, beg your pardon, punched the cathedral. King’s banner still flies over the castle but none answered my hail.’

John Judson, worshipful draper, and St Paul Silver, a goldsmith, drew their horses closer to Random where he sat with Old Bob, Guilbert’s friend and the last man he’d hired, a bald, ruddy skinned drunkard whose voice and carriage suggested that the spurs on his heels were actually his.

Old Bob was the oldest man in the company, and had a much-broken nose, bumpy with knots of erupting flesh. His straggly salt and pepper hair erupted from a narrow zone around his ears and was always dirty, but the man’s eyes were deep and intelligent and a little disturbing, even to a man as experienced as Gerald Random.

He wore good armour, and he wore it all the time.

‘That’s what the peasants said yesterday,’ Old Bob noted calmly.

Random looked at the other merchant venturers. ‘Albinkirk in ruins?’ he asked. ‘I’ve fought up here, friends. The border is a hundred leagues farther north, and even then – the Wild is west and north of us, not here.’

‘Something did this, all the same,’ Judson said. The corners of his lips were white, the lips themselves drawn tight. ‘I say we go back.’

Paul Silver wore high boots like a gentleman. Goldsmiths were often better dressed than their customers. It was the way of the world. But Silver had also served the king and wore a heavy sword, an expensive weapon meticulously kept ready for battle. ‘We’d be fools to ignore that something is going on,’ he agreed. ‘But bad as this is I’m not sure it means a convoy of nearly fifty wagons should turn back.’

Albinkirk rose on a high hill at the next great bend in the river. Ships would make it this far north, later in the summer when the floods were done and all the ice was out of the mountains – when the run off wasn’t carrying whole pine trees, big enough to stove in a round ship, down mountainsides and out into the great river. Albinkirk was the northernmost town that could be reached by ship, and yet the southernmost at the edge of the Great Forest that covered the mountains. Once it had hosted the Great Fair, but poor management and rapacious tolls had forced it to move further east, to the convent at Lissen Carak.

Today Albinkirk was a corpse, red-tile roofs looking grey and old, or fire-blacked, in the distance, and the spire of the cathedral gone.

‘What’s happened to the cathedral?’ Random asked.

Old Bob made a face. ‘They was attacked by dragons.’ He shrugged. ‘Or Satan himself.’

Random took a deep breath. This was the sort of moment for which he lived. The great decision. The gamble.

‘We could leave the road. Turn east on this side of the river and use the bridge at Lissen Carak,’ he found himself saying. ‘Keep the river between us and Albinkirk.’

‘A river won’t stop wyverns,’ Old Bob said.

‘Not much choice anyway,’ Guilbert said. ‘The gates are shut, so we can’t exactly take the High Road.’

‘They should want us in that town,’ Random said.

Judson watched him, and his face held something Random didn’t recognise – horror? Fear? Curiosity?

But finally the man worked up his courage and spoke his mind. ‘I’ll be taking my wagons back south,’ he said carefully.

Random nodded. Judson had the second largest contingent – eight wagons, a sixth of the total.

‘I reckon I’ll take my share of the sell-swords, too,’ Judson said.

Random thought for a fraction of a heart beat and shook his head. ‘How do you reckon that, messire?’

Judson shrugged, but his eyes were angry. ‘I paid for eight wagons to join your convoy,’ he said. ‘I reckon that’s a quarter the cost of the sell-swords, so I’ll take four of them. Six would be better.’

Random nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘No, and you know it doesn’t work that way. You joined my convoy for a fee. If you leave it – that’s on you. You didn’t purchase a share, you purchased a place.’

‘You think the King’s Court will see it that way?’ Judson asked. Fear had made him bold. ‘I’ll be back in a few days, telling my story.’ He shrugged and looked away. ‘Give me my half-dozen swords, and I’ll say nothing.’ Judson looked at Paul, and then he leaned forward. ‘You want to be Lord Mayor, Random? Start playing the game.’

Random looked at him, and then shook his head. ‘No. I won’t quarrel with you, and I won’t give you a sword, much less six. Go your own way. It should be safe enough.’

‘You’d send me back without a single man?’ Judson demanded.

‘I’m not sending you back. You’re going. Your decision.’ Random looked at Guibert and Old Bob. ‘Unless one of you has cold feet too?’

Old Bob scratched something unspeakable on his nose. ‘Going on ain’t going to be good,’ he said. ‘But I don’t need to go back.’

Guilbert looked at the older man. ‘What’s not going to be good?’ he said. ‘What in hell’s name are you on about?’

‘Wyverns,’ said the old man. ‘Daemons, irks and boglins.’ He grinned, and he looked truly horrific. ‘The Wild lies ahead.’

Harndon Palace – Desiderata

The lists were pristine – the gravel carefully tended and unmarked, the barriers crisp and white with new lime, like a farmer’s dooryard fence except for the fancy red posts at either end, each topped with a brightly polished brass globe the size of a man’s fist.

The stands were virtually empty. The Queen sat in her seat, her ladies around her, and her young knights in the lower tiers of the seats, tossing early flowers to their favourite ladies.

There were professional spectators – a dozen men-at-arms, most from the castle garrison of archers. Word had spread quickly, and the rumour was that the king had been challenged by this foreign knight and meant to show him a thing or two.

Desiderata watched her husband sitting quietly by the little wooden shack where he had armed. He was drinking water. His hair was long and well kept, but even at this distance, she could see the grey in the dark brown.

At the other end of the lists, his opponent’s hair was an unmarked gold, the gold of sunset, of polished brass, of ripe wheat.

Ser Jean finished whatever preparations he was making and had a quiet word with his cousin, while his squire held the biggest war horse the Queen had ever seen – a beautiful creature, tall and elegant of carriage, its gleaming black hide unrelieved by marks of any kind, with a red saddle and blue furniture all pointed in red and gold. Ser Jean’s arms, a golden swan on a field of red and blue, decorated the peak of his helm, the tight, padded surcote over his coat armour, the heavy drapery over the rump of his horse, and the odd little shield, curved like the prow of a war-galley, that sat on his left shoulder.

It was a warm day. Perhaps the first truly warm day of spring, and the Queen bathed in the sun like a lioness and gave forth a glow of her own that bathed her ladies and even the knights on the seats below her.

Today the foreign knight glanced up at her quite frequently, as was her due.

She looked back at the king. By comparison, he looked small and just a little dingy. His squires were the best in the land, but he liked his old red arming cote and his many-times-repaired plate, fashioned in the mountains far across the ocean when hardened steel was a new thing and carefully repaired by his armourer ever since. He liked his old red saddle with the silver buckles, and if they left traces of black tarnish on the leather, it was still a fine saddle. Where the foreign knight was new and shone from top to toe, her king was older – worn.

His war horse was smaller too – Father Jerome, the king called him, and he was veteran of fifty great jousts and a dozen real fights. The king had other, younger, bigger horses, but when he went to fight for real he rode Father Jerome.

The herald and the master of the list called them to action. It was friendly play – the spears were bated. Desiderata saw Gaston, the foreign knight’s friend, say something to the king, pointing to his neck, with a bow.

The king smiled and turned away.

‘He’s not wearing his gorget under his aventail,’ Ser Driant said in her ear. ‘Young Gaston asks why, and requests that the king wear it.’ He nodded in approval. ‘Very proper. His man wishes to fight hard, and he doesn’t want to be accused of injuring the king. I’d feel the same way myself, if the king had challenged me.’

‘The king did not challenge him,’ Desiderata said.

Ser Driant gave her a queer look. ‘That’s not what I heard,’ he said. ‘Still, I suspect the king will tip him in the sand and that will be that.’

‘Men say that man is the best knight in the world,’ the Queen replied, a little coldly.

Ser Driant laughed. ‘Men say such things about any pretty knight,’ he said. He looked at Ser Jean, mounting with a vault and taking his lance. ‘Mind you, the man is the size of a giant.

The Queen felt a mounting unease, such as she had never experienced watching men fight. This was her place – her role. It was her duty to be impartial as the armoured figures crashed together, and to judge the best of them. To forget that one was her lover and king and the other an ambitious foreigner who had all but accused her of being barren.

She should judge only their worthiness.

But as the two men manoeuvred their horses on either side of the barrier, she felt a band tighten around her heart. He had forgotten to ask for her favour, and she almost lifted the scarf she held in her hand.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d watched men fight without bestowing her favour on one, or perhaps both.

Ser Jean wore a foreign type of helmet, a round-faced bascinet with a low, round brow and a heavy dog-faced visor with the Cross of Christ in brass and gold.

The king wore the high-peaked helmet more typical of Albans, with a pointy visor that men called pig-faced but which always reminded the Queen of a bird – a mighty falcon.

Even as she watched, he flicked the visor down and it closed with a click audible across the field.

There was a stir up in the castle yard – soldiers craning their necks, others moving to the walls, while still others jammed up at the gate beyond which were sounds of shouting and galloping horses.

The Queen did not often pray. But as she watched the king she put her right hand to the rosary around her neck and prayed to the Queen of Heaven, asking her for grace-

Two horses flashed past the gate, galloping along the cobbled road to the lists down by the moat yard, their riders shouting and horseshoes striking sparks that leapt even in the sunlight.

She could feel the gathering of powers in the tiltyard, exactly as she had been able to feel the first gathering of Harmodius’ not inconsiderable power, but this was power of another order – like bright white light on a dark day.

The foreign knight touched his spurs to his horse.

The king spurred Father Jerome, almost in the same instant. In another time, she would have applauded.

The two messengers were racing along the moat road, neck and neck, as king and knight charged each other-

– and Ser Jean’s horse shied beneath him as a great horse fly sunk its sting far into the black horse’s unprotected nose, where the soft lips emerged from beneath the chamfron.

The war horse balked, missed a stride, and half-reared, half-turned from the barrier. Ser Jean fought for his seat, tried to force his mount’s head back to the barrier, but he was hopelessly out of line and now too slow to strike with real force. He raised his lance and then cast it aside as his pained horse reared again.

The king came on at full tilt, back straight, Father Jerome perfectly collected under him, lance aimed like a swift arrow from some ancient god’s bow. A foot short of Jean de Vrailly’s prow-shaped shield his lance tip swept up, plucked the swan from his helmet, and then the king thundered by, his lance dropping again to strike the brass globe on the last post of the lists. He struck it squarely, so hard that it ripped from its post and flew through the air to bounce and roll past Ser Gaston, past the two messengers thundering up the rise to the lists, and into the moat.

The Queen applauded . . . and yet felt that the king – she tried to keep the thought in check – that he might have voided his lance and passed his opponent without taking his crest. It would have been a generous act, and such things were done, between friends, when a knight was obviously struggling with his horse.

De Vrailly rode back toward his own end, back straight, horse now firmly under control.

A dozen royal archers ran to get between the king and the two riders, who were bearing down on him with intent, shouting but their words indistinct. They both held scrolls, the colourful ribbons dangling.

The archers parted to let them through when the king opened his faceplate and beckoned to the messengers. He was grinning like a small boy in his victory.

The Queen wasn’t sure whether this was the outcome of her prayer or not, and so she prayed again as the messengers reached the king, dismounting to kneel at his feet even as his squires began to take his armour.

At the same end of the lists, only a few feet away, Jean de Vrailly dismounted. His cousin spoke sharply to him, and the tall knight ignored the smaller man, and drew his sword – almost too fast to follow.

His cousin slapped him – hard – on the elbow of his sword arm, and the foreign knight fumbled his sword – the only clumsy movement she’d ever seen him make. He turned on his cousin, who stood his ground.

The Queen knew unbridled rage when she saw it, and she held her breath, a little shocked to see the Galle so out of control – but even as she watched, the man mastered himself. She saw him incline his head very slightly to his cousin, as if acknowledging a hit in the lists.

He turned and spoke to one of his squires.

The man collected the mighty horse’s reins and began to strip its barding with the help of a pair of pages.

She lost the action for a moment while she tried to take in what she had seen.

Suddenly the king was by her side.

‘He’s very angry,’ the king said, while bowing over her hand. He sounded content with his opponent’s anger. ‘Listen, sweeting. The fortress at Lissen Carak is under attack by the Wild. Or so both these two messengers say.’

She sat up. ‘Tell me!’ she demanded.

Ser Gaston came up, approaching the king with the deference that his cousin never seemed to show even when kneeling.

‘Your Grace-’ he began.

The king raised a hand. ‘Not now. The joust is over for the day, my lord, and I thank your cousin for the sport. I will be riding north with all my knights as soon as I can gather them. One of my castles, and not the least of them, is under attack.’

Ser Gaston bowed. ‘My cousin requests that he might ride one course against you.’ He bowed. ‘And he wishes your Grace to know that he honours your Grace’s horsemanship – he sends you his war horse, in hopes your Grace might school him as well as your own is schooled.’

The king smiled like a boy who’s been well-praised by a parent. ‘Indeed, I love a horse,’ he said. ‘I do not claim the good knight’s horse and arms, you understand – but if he offers.’ The king licked his lips.

Ser Gaston nodded to where the squire was leading the now-unarmed horse. ‘He is yours, your Grace. And he asks that he be allowed to take another horse and have another course with your Grace.’

The king’s face closed like the visor of his helmet had clicked down. ‘He has ridden one,’ the king said. ‘If he wishes another chance to prove himself, he may gather his knights and ride with me to the north.’ The king seemed on the verge of saying more, and then he steadied himself. But he allowed himself a small, kingly smile and said, ‘And tell him that I’ll be happy to loan him a horse.’

But Gaston bowed. ‘We will ride with you, your Grace.’

But the king had already dismissed him, and turned to the Queen.

‘It’s bad,’ he said. ‘If the writer of this letter knows his business, it’s very bad. Jacks. Daemons. Wyverns. The might of the Wild has joined against us.’

At the names, all of her ladies crossed themselves.

The Queen rose to her feet. ‘Let us help these worthy gentlemen,’ she said to her ladies. She rose and kissed the king’s face. ‘You will need carts, provender, supplies, canteens and water casks. I have the lists to hand. You gather your knights, and I’ll have the rest ready to follow you before noon.’ In a moment, the winds of war – actual war, with all it implied about glory and honour and high deeds – blew away her fancy for the foreign knight.

And her lover was the king. Going to war with the Wild.

He looked into her eyes with adoration. ‘Bless you!’ he whispered. And her king turned, and shouted for his constable. And the Earl of Towbray, who was ready to hand.

Towbray had the grace to give the king a wry smile. ‘How convenient that I have all my armed strength to hand, your Grace. And that you have summoned your knights to a tournament.’

The king usually had no time for Towbray, but just for a moment they shared something. The king clapped the other man’s shoulder. ‘If only I had planned it,’ he said.

Towbray nodded. ‘My knights are at your service.’

The king shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Towbray. Just when I’ve found reason to despise you, there you are doing something to help. And unfortunately a year hence, you’ll do something to spoil it again.’

Towbray bowed. ‘I am what I am, your Grace. In this case, your Grace’s servant.’

He glanced at the Queen.

She didn’t see his look, already busy with a list of long-bodied wagons available in the town of Harndon.

But the king followed Towbray’s glance, and his lip curled.

Towbray had been watching the king, too. It was easy to dismiss him – he didn’t seem to have any finer feelings, or to have any purpose beyond the tilt-field and his wife’s bed.

And yet here was the Wild, launching an attack, and the king just happened to have already summoned his host. That kind of luck seemed to happen to the king all the time.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain woke in the Abbey infirmary, his head on a feather pillow, his hands – the left heavily wrapped in bandages – laid neatly on a white wool blanket atop a fine linen sheet. The sun shone through the narrow window well over his head and the shaft of light lit Bad Tom, snoring in the opposite bed. A young boy lay with his face to the wall in the next bed, and an older man with his whole head wrapped in linen opposite him.

He lay still for a moment, oddly happy, and then it all came back to him in a rush. He shook his head, cursed God, sat and got his feet on the floor.

His movement caused the duty sister to raise her head. He hadn’t noticed her. She smiled.

Amicia.

‘Aren’t you afraid to be alone with me?’ he asked.

Her composure was palpable, like armour. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I am not afraid of you, sweet. Should I be?’ She rose to her feet. ‘Besides, Tom is only just asleep and old Harold – who has leprosy – sleeps very lightly. I trust you not to disturb them.’

The captain winced at the word trust. He leaned towards her – she smelled of olive oil and incense and soap – and had to fight the urge to put his hands on her hips, her waist-

She cocked her head a little to one side. ‘Don’t even think it!’ she said, sharply, but without raising her voice.

His cheeks burned. ‘But you like me!’ he said. It seemed to him one of the stupidest things he’d ever said. He gathered himself, his dignity, his role as the captain. ‘Tell me why you always fend me off?’ he asked, his voice controlled, light hearted, and false. ‘You didn’t fend last night.’

She met his look, and hers was serious, even severe. ‘Tell me why you curse God on rising?’ she asked.

The silence between them lasted a long time, during which he even considered telling her.

She took his left hand and started to unwrap the bandage. That hurt. A little later, Tom opened one eye. The captain did not particularly enjoy watching him admire her hips and her breasts as she moved with her back and side to him.

He winked at the captain.

The captain did not wink back.

After she’d put a oregano poultice on his hand and wrapped it in linen, she nodded. ‘Try not to seize the sharp bits when fighting grim beasts in future, messire,’ she said.

He smiled, she smiled, their silence forgotten, and he left feeling as light as air. It lasted all the way down the steeply turning stairs, until he saw the twenty-three tight-wrapped white bundles under an awning in the otherwise empty courtyard.

In the aftermath of the battle, the Abbess had ordered all of her people to stay indoors. No one would sleep in the open air, no matter how balmy and spring-laden it was. Services were held in a side chapel – the main chapel was now sleeping quarters.

He passed under the arch to his Commandery, and found Michael, who was busy writing, with Ser Adrian, the company’s professional clerk. Michael rose stiffly and bowed. Adrian kept writing.

The captain couldn’t help but smile at his squire, who was obviously alive and not one of the bundles in the courtyard. His face asked the question.

‘Two broken ribs. Worse than when I tried to ride my father’s destrier,’ Michael said ruefully.

‘In a business where we take daring and courage for granted, yours was a brave act,’ the captain said, and Michael glowed. ‘Stupid,’ the captain continued, putting a hand on the young man’s shoulder, ‘and a little pointless. But brave.’

Michael continued to beam with happiness.

The captain sighed and went to his table, which was stacked high with scrolls and tubes. He found the updated roster. It was due the first of every month, and tomorrow was the first of May.

Why had he even considered telling her why he cursed God?

People were often stupid, but he wasn’t used to being one of them.

He read through the roster. Thirty-one lances – thirty, because Hugo was dead and that broke his lance. He needed a good man-at-arms – not that there seemed to be any to be found in this near wilderness. There must be local knights – younger sons eager for glory, or for a little cash, or with a pregnancy to avoid.

The whole stack of paperwork made him tired. But he still needed men, and then there was the Wild to consider as well.

‘I need to talk to Bad Tom when he’s well enough. And to the archers from last night. Who was most senior?’ he asked.

Michael took a deep breath. The captain knew he was testing the bounds of the pain against the inside of the bandage with that breath – knew this from having broken so many ribs himself.

‘Long Paw was the senior man. He’s awake – I saw him eating.’ Michael rose to his feet.

The captain held up a hand. ‘I’ll see him with Tom. If he can leave the infirmary.’ His hand was throbbing. He initialled the muster roll. ‘Get them, please.’

Michael paused, and the captain swallowed a sigh of irritation. ‘Yes?’

‘What – what happened last night?’ Michael shrugged. ‘I mean, all the men feel we won a great victory, but I don’t even know what we did. Beyond killing the wyverns,’ he said, with the casual dismissiveness of youth.

The captain felt like yelling, We killed two wyverns, you useless fop. But he understood the boy’s attitude, albeit unspoken.

The captain sat carefully in a low backed folding chair made of a series of arches linked at the base – it was a beautiful chair with a red velvet cushion which welcomed him, and he leaned back. ‘Are you the apprentice captain asking? Or my squire?’

Michael raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m the apprentice captain,’ he said.

The captain allowed the younger man a small smile. ‘Good. Tell me what you think we did.’

Michael snorted. ‘Saw that coming. Very well. All day we sent out patrols to gather in farmers. I didn’t realise it at the time, but more patrols went out than came back.’

The captain nodded. ‘Good. Yes. We’re being watched, all the time. But the creatures watching us aren’t very bright. Do you have any of the power?’

Michael shrugged. ‘I studied it but I can’t hold all the images in my mind. All the phantasms.’

‘If you capture a beast and bend it to your will, you can look through its eyes – it’s a potent phantasm but it is wasteful. Because you must first overcome the will of another creature – a massive effort, there – and then direct that effort. And in this case you must do so over distance.’

Michael listened, utterly fascinated. Even Ser Adrian had stopped writing.

The captain glanced at him, and the clerk shook his head and started to get to his feet. ‘Sorry, ‘he mumbled. ‘No one ever talks about this stuff.’

The captain relented. ‘Stay. It is part of our lives and our way of war. We use scouts because we don’t have a magus to use birds. Even if we did I’d rather use scouts. They can observe and report, can make judgments as to numbers, can tell if they see the same three horses every day. A bird can’t make those judgments, and the magus’ perceptions of whatever the bird sees is filtered through – something.’ The captain sagged. ‘I don’t know what, but I imagine it as a pipe that’s too small for all the information to get through, as if everything is seen through water or fog.’

Michael nodded.

‘The Wild has no scouts, so I guessed that our enemy was using animals as spies. We have trapped a lot of birds, and then I misled him.’ The captain crossed his hands behind his head.

‘And with cook fires. You told me so.’ Michael leaned forward.

‘Gelfred isn’t down at the Bridge Castle, not much anyway. He’s out in the woods, watching their camps. He has been since we realised the bulk of the Wild army had gone around us. Want to talk about brave? I sent patrols out with a weapon – something the Moreans make. Olive oil, ground oil, whale oil will do – bitumen, if you can get it, plus sulphur and saltpeter. There’s dozens of mixtures and any artificer knows them. It makes sticky fire.’

Michael nodded. The clerk crossed himself.

‘Even the creatures of the Wild sleep. Even the adversarius is just a creature. And when they gather to attack men – well, it stands to reason that they must have a camp. Do they talk? Do they gather at campfires? Play cards? Fight amongst themselves?’ The captain looked out of the window. ‘Have you ever thought, Michael, that we are locked in a war without mercy against an enemy we don’t understand at all?’

‘So you’ve watched them, and attacked their camp,’ Michael said with satisfaction. ‘And we hit them hard.’ Now Michael was smiling.

‘Yes and no. Perhaps we didn’t touch them,’ the captain said. ‘Perhaps Bad Tom and Wilful Murder put some fire on some meaningless tents, and then they followed our boys back and hit us harder – killing twenty-three people for the loss of just two wyverns,’ the captain said.

Michael’s smile froze. ‘But-’

‘I want you to see that victory and defeat are a question of perception, unless you are dead. You know every man and woman in the company – in this fortress – feels we won a great victory. We fired the enemy’s camps, and then we killed a pair of his most fearsome monsters in ours.’ The captain got to his feet as Michael nodded.

‘And because of this perception, everyone will fight harder and longer, and be braver, despite my fucking mistake to allow civilians into the courtyard which cost us twenty-three lives. Despite that, we’re winning.’ The captain’s eyes locked on Michael’s. ‘Do you see?’

Michael shook his head. ‘It wasn’t your fault-’

‘It was my fault,’ the captain said. ‘It’s not my moral burden – I didn’t kill them. But I could have kept them alive if I hadn’t been distracted that evening. And keeping them alive is my duty.’ He stood up straight and picked up the baton of the command. ‘Best know this, if you want to be a captain. You have to be able to look reality in the eye. I fucked their lives away. I can’t go to pieces about it, but neither can I forget it. That’s my job. Understand?’

Michael nodded and gulped.

The captain made a face. ‘Excellent. Here endeth the lesson about victory. Now, if it is not too much trouble, I’d like Long Paw and Bad Tom, please.’

Michael stood and saluted. ‘Immediately!’

‘Harumf,’ said the captain.

Long Paw was fifty, his once red hair mostly grey and a mere tonsure around a bald pate, with an enormous moustache and long sideburns so that he had more hair on his face than on his head. His arms were unnaturally long and despite his status as an archer and not a man-at-arms, he was reputed the company’s best swordsman. The rumour was he had once been a monk.

He clasped hands with the captain and grinned. ‘That was a little too exciting.’

Bad Tom came in after him, a head taller than either the captain or the archer, his iron grey hair curiously at odds with his pointed black beard. His forehead had a weight of bone that made his head look like the prow of a ship, and no one would call him a handsome man. He looked scary, even in broad daylight, dressed in nothing but a shirt and an infirmary blanket. He clasped hands with the captain and the archer, grinned at Ser Adrian, and settled every inch of his gigantic frame into one of the arched chairs.

‘Good plan,’ he said to the captain. ‘I had fun.’

Michael slipped in. No one had invited him, but his face suggested that no one had told him he couldn’t come, either.

‘Get us all a cup of wine,’ the captain said, which indicated that he was welcome enough.

When five horn cups were on five chair arms, and when Ser Adrian had his lead poised to write, Tom tasted his wine, leaned back and said, ‘We hit ’em hard. Not much to say – worst part was getting there. The lads was fair skittish, and every shadow had a boglin or an irk in it, and I thought once I was going to have to cut Tippit in half to shut him the fuck up. So I leaned over him-’

Long Paw grinned. ‘Leaned over him with that giant dagger in his fist!’

‘And Tippit pissed himself,’ Bad Tom said with evident satisfaction. ‘Call him Pishit from now on.’

‘Tom,’ Long Paw cautioned.

Tom shrugged. ‘If he can’t cut it he should go weave blankets or cut purses. He’s a piss poor archer and one day he’s going to get a man killed. Anyway, we rode most of the way there, and we moved fast, ’cause you said-’ Bad Tom paused, obviously at a loss for the words.

‘Your only stealth will be speed.’ One of Hywel’s many aphorisms.

‘That’s what you said,’ Tom agreed. ‘So we didn’t sweat it too much, but went for them. If they had sentries, we never saw ’em, and then we were in among their fires. I slit a lot of sleeping cattle,’ he said, with a horrible smile. ‘Stupid fucks, asleep with a killer among them.’

Remorse was not in Tom’s lexicon. The captain winced. The big man looked at Long Paw. ‘I got busy. You tell it.’

Long Paw raised an eyebrow. ‘All the archers had an alchemical on our backs. I threw mine in a fire – to start the ball, so to speak.’ He nodded. ‘They were spectacular. If that’s the word.’ Long Paw was obviously proud of it.

Tom nodded. ‘Made us plenty of light,’ he said, and the words, combined with his look, were horrible enough that Long Paw looked away from him.

‘We didn’t see no tents. But there was men sleeping on the ground, critters too. And beasts – horses, cattle, sheep. And wagons, dozens of them. They’ve been hitting the fair convoys, or I’m a Galle.’

The captain nodded.

‘We burned it all, killed the animals, and then any critter we come across too.’

‘What critters? Boglins? Irks? Tell me.’ the captain asked, and the words just hung there, between them.

Tom made a face. ‘Little ones. Boglins and irks mostly. You know. Nightmares and daemons pursued us. Fucking daemons are fast. I fought a golden bear, sword to its axe and claws.’ He blew his nose into his hand and flicked the contents out the window. ‘But I didn’t get to fight a daemon,’ he said regretfully.

The captain wondered if, in the entire world, there was another man who could regret not having met a creature that projected terror.

Bad Tom was not like other men.

‘How many? Total? What are we still up against?’ the captain asked.

Long Paw shrugged. ‘Dark and fire, Cap’n. My word ain’t worth shit – but I say we killed maybe fifty men and more creatures.’ He shrugged. ‘And all we really did was kick the ant hill.’

Tom gave Long Paw a look of appreciation. ‘What he said,’ Tom admitted. ‘We kicked the ant hill. But we kicked it hard.’

Michael sputtered. ‘You two killed fifty Jacks?’ he asked.

Tom looked at him as if he’d discovered a bad smell. ‘We had help, younker. And it weren’t all Jacks. I killed I don’t know how many – five? Ten? – before I realised they was all yoked together. Poor fucks.’

Michael made a choking sound. ‘Captives?’ he managed.

Tom shrugged. ‘Got to think so.’

Michael’s outrage showed, and the captain raised a hand. Pointed at the door. ‘More wine,’ he said. ‘And take your time.’

Long Paw shook his head as the young man slammed out. ‘Not for me, Captain. It’ll send me to sleep.’

‘I’m done, anyway,’ the captain said. ‘Better result than I thought. Thanks.’

Long Paw clasped his hand again. ‘One for the books, Cap’n.’

The clerk looked at his pencil scrawl. ‘I’ll just copy this out for fair,’ he said, exchanging a parting look with Long Paw and heading for the door himself.

His departure left the captain alone with Bad Tom, who stretched his naked legs out beneath his blanket and took a long drink of his wine.

‘That Michael’s too soft for this life,’ Tom said. ‘He tries, and he ain’t worthless, but you should let him go.’

‘He doesn’t have anywhere to go,’ the captain said.

Tom nodded. ‘I’d wondered.’ He took another sip and grinned. ‘That girl – the nun?’

The captain looked blank.

Tom wasn’t fooled for a moment. ‘Don’t give me that. Asking you why you curse God. Listen, you want my advice-’

‘I don’t,’ the captain said.

‘Get a knee between her legs and keep it there ’til you’re inside her. You want her – she wants you. I’m not saying rape her.’ Tom said this with a professional authority that was more horrible than his admission of killing the captives. ‘I’m just saying that if you get it done, you can have a warm bed as long as you’re here.’ He shrugged. ‘A warm bed and a soft shoulder. Good things for a man in command. None of the lads will blame you.’ His unspoken thought came through, too. Some of the lads might see you in a better light for it.

Tom nodded at the captain, and the captain felt a black rage boil up inside him. He worked on it – trying to shape it, trying to plug it. But it was like the brew they’d sent against the enemy – oily black, and when it hit fire-

Bad Tom took a deep breath and stepped back. ‘Beg your pardon, Captain,’ he said. He said it with as much assurance as he’d suggested everything else. ‘Overstepped, I expect.’

The captain swallowed bile. ‘Are my eyes glowing?’ he asked.

‘Little bit,’ Tom said. ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Captain?’

The captain leaned on the table, the burst of rage dying away and leaving fatigue and a headache of Archaic proportions. ‘Many things.’

‘You’re a freak, just like me. You ain’t like them. Me – I take what I want and let the rest go. You want them to love you.’ Tom shook his head. ‘They don’t love the likes of us, Captain. Even when I kill their enemies, they don’t love me. Eh? You know what a sin-eater is?’

That came out of nowhere. ‘I’ve heard the name.’

‘We have ’em up in the hills,. Usually some poor wee bastard with one eye or no hands or some other freak. When a man dies, or sometimes a woman, we put a piece of bread soaked in wine – they used to soak it in blood – on the corpse. Goes on the stomach and the heart. And the poor wee man comes and eats the bread, and takes all the dead’s sin on them. So the dead un goes off to heaven, and the poor wee man goes to hell.’ Tom was far away, in memory. The captain had never seen him that way before. It was odd, and a little scary, to be intimate with Bad Tom.

‘We’re sin-eaters, every one of us,’ Tom said. ‘You and me, sure – but Long Paw an’ Wilful Murder and Ser Hugo and Ser Milus and all the rest. Sauce too. Even that boy. We eat their sin. We kill their enemies, and then they send us away.’

The captain had a flash of the daemon eviscerating his horse. We eat their sin. Somehow, the words hit him like a thunderclap, and he sat back. When he was done with the thought – which cascaded away like a waterfall, taking his thoughts in every direction – he realised the shadows had changed. His wine was long gone, Bad Tom was gone, his legs were stiff, and his hand hurt.

Michael was standing in the doorway with a cup of wine in his hand.

The captain dredged a smile out of his reverie, shrugged and took the wine.

He drank.

‘Jacques went down to Bridge Castle with grain and came back with a message for you from Messire Gelfred,’ Michael said. ‘He says it’s urgent he speak to you.’

‘Then I’ll have to put my harness on,’ the captain said. He sounded whiney, even to himself. ‘Let’s get it done.’

The Albinkirk Road – Ser Gawin

He had lost track of time.

He wasn’t sure what he was any more.

Gawin rode through another spring day, surrounded by carpets of wildflowers that flowed like morning fog beneath his horse, rolling away in clumps and hummocks, a thousand perfect flowers in every glance, blue and purple, white and yellow. In the distance, all was a carpet of yellow green from the haze of sun on the mountainsides that were coming closer every day, their peaks woven like a tapestry in and out of the stands of trees that grew thicker and closer every mile.

He’d never had the least interest in flowers before.

‘Ser knight?’ asked the boy with the crossbow.

He looked at the boy, and the boy flinched. Gawin sighed.

‘Ye weren’t moving,’ the boy said.

Gawin pressed his spurs to his horse’s side, and shifted his weight, and his destrier moved off. His once-handsome dark leather bridle was stained with the death of fifty thousand flowers, because Archangel ate every flower he could reach as soon as he’d figured out that the once fierce hands on the reins weren’t likely to stop him eating. That’s what his misery meant to his war horse – more flowers to eat.

I am a coward and a bad knight. Gawin looked back at a life of malfeasance and tried to see where he’d gone wrong, and again and again he came back to a single moment – torturing his older brother. The five of them ganging up on Gabriel. Beating him. The pleasure of it – his screams-

Is that where it started? he asked himself.

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked again.

The horse’s head was down, and they’d stopped again.

‘Coming,’ Gawin muttered. Behind him, the convoy he was not guarding rolled north, and Gawin could see the Great Bend ahead, where the road turned to head west.

West towards the enemy. West, where his father’s castle waited full of his mother’s hate and his brother’s fear.

Why am I going west?

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked. This time, there was fear in his voice. ‘What’s that?’

Gawin shook himself out of his waking dream. The goldsmith’s boy – Adrian? Allan? Henry? – was backing away from a clump of trees just to his left.

‘There’s something there,’ the boy said.

Gawin sighed. The Wild was not here. His horse stood among wildflowers, and last year this field had been ploughed.

Then he saw the sickly-pale arm, light brown, shiny like a cockroach, holding a stone-tipped javelin. He saw it and it saw him in the same moment, and he leaned to the left with the habit of hard training and ripped his long sword from its scabbard.

The boglin threw its weapon.

Gawin cut the shaft out of the air.

The boglin gave a thin scream of anger, balked of its prey, and the goldsmith’s boy shot it. His crossbow loosed with a snap and the bolt went home into the creature with a slurpy thud and came straight out the other side in a spray of gore, leaving the small horror to flop bonelessly on the wildflowers for as long as a trout might take to die, making much the same gasping motions with its toothless mouth, and then its eyes filmed over and it was gone.

‘They always have gold,’ the goldsmith’s boy said, taking a step towards it.

‘Step back, young master, and load that latch again.’ Gawin was shocked at his voice – calm, commanding. Alive.

The boy obeyed.

Gawin backed Archangel slowly, watching the nearest woods.

‘Run for the wagons, boy. Sound the alarm.’

There was more movement, more javelin heads, a flash of that hideous cockroach brown, and the boy turned and ran.

Gawin slammed his visor down.

He wasn’t in full armour. Most of it was in a goldsmith’s wagon, wrapped in tallow and coarse sacking in two wicker baskets because he had no squires to keep it. And because wearing it might have meant something.

So he was wearing his stained jupon, his boots, his beautiful steel gauntlets and his bassinet, riding a horse worth more than three of the wagons full of fine wools he was protecting. He backed Archangel faster, sawing the reins back and forth as his destrier all but trotted backwards.

The first javelin came out of the woods, high. He had his sword in his right hand, all the way down by his left side, the position his father’s master at arms had taught him. He could hear the man saying ‘Cut up, mind! Not into your own horse, ye daft thing!’

He cut up, severing the weapon’s haft and breaking its flight.

Behind him, he heard the boy yelling ‘To arms! To arms!’

He risked a long glance back at the convoy. It was hard to focus through the piercing of his visor, hard to pick up distant movement, but he thought he could see Old Bob directing men in all directions.

He turned back to see the air full of javelins, and he cut – up, down, up again as fast as thought. A javelin haft caught him in the side of head and rang his helmet like a bell, even with his padded arming cap. He smelt his own blood.

Turned his horse’s head – because once they’d all thrown, he had a moment to get around, and get away.

Two of them were running for him. They were fast, moving like insects – so low to the ground that they were a danger to horses’ legs. Archangel reared, pivoted on his hind legs, and a powerful forefoot shot out like a boxer’s punch.

Gawin flicked his sword out along his fingers, lengthening his grip until he was holding only the disc-shaped pommel and, in the same motion, made a wrist cut down and back.

Archangel’s boglin popped like a ripe melon, its chest and neck caving in with a dull thud and a fine spray of ichor. Gawin’s screeched as the cold iron pierced its hide – iron was poison to its kind, and it screamed its hate as its tiny soul rose from its corpse like a minute thundercloud that dissipated on the first whiff of breeze.

All at once they were away, the big horse galloping easily over the wildflowers. Gawin had trouble breathing. His visor seemed to cut all the air from his lungs and his chest was tight.

As he rode, he could see there were other knots of the things – perhaps four or five groups of them spread across the flowers like shit stains on a pretty dress, and suddenly he was filled with a fey energy, a will to do a great deed and die in the accomplishment.

I am a knight, he thought fiercely.

Gawin sat up in the saddle, holding his long, sharp sword with new purpose, and he turned Archangel and raised it at the boglins. Something dead within him rekindled as the sun lit the blade like a torch.

He felt the touch of something divine, and he saluted as if riding in a tournament.

‘Blessed Saint George,’ he prayed, ‘let me die as I wish I had lived.’

He put his spurs to Archangel – gently, a nudge rather than a rake – and the great horse thundered forward.

The boglins scattered. Javelins flew past and then he was among them, through them, using his knees to turn Archangel in a long curve toward the next clump, who were already running for the trees.

Gawin had no plans to survive so he thundered after them, slaying any that stood or were merely too slow to escape, leaning far out from the saddle-

Something called from inside the wood – a wail that froze his blood.

It was out of the woods and at him in heartbeats.

Archangel was ready, pivoted his whole great bulk as Gawin’s weight shifted so that the war horse moved like his own feet in a fight, and the huge enemy – scent of burned hair and soap and old ashes – shot past. One taloned arm stretched out like an angry cat’s paw, reaching for Archangel’s neck, but the war horse was fast, and some steel-shod forefoot smashed the taloned hand with lethal precision.

The thing screamed, its left talon hanging limply, the bones broken. It rose on its hind feet, raised its right claw, and fire shot from its outstretched talons – a beam of fire that caught his body where the mail aventail of his helmet hung over his padded jupon. It had no pressure, no impact, and Gawin ducked his head, putting the peak of his helmet into the flame by instinct rather than training. His left eye flared with pain even as the first cold knife of agony pierced his left shoulder. His body, with no guidance from his mind, cut down blindly with the sword.

His blow was weak and badly directed – the edge of the blade didn’t even bite into the thing’s hide – but the sword’s weight fell on its brow ridge, and it stumbled.

Archangel shouldered it. Gawin almost lost his seat, his back and rump crashing into the high-backed saddle as his war horse made its own fighting decisions and leaped forward, bearing down the monster again with weight and momentum, so that the creature’s stumble was more off balance and the horse landed two more blows with its steel-shod forefeet, forcing the creature onto all fours. It roared with pain as it put weight on the broken limb.

And then the grass was full of boglins thrusting their stone-tipped spears at him, and some of them scoring hits. The deerskin of his padded jupon turned a few and the damp sheep’s wool stuffing turned others, but at least one punched straight through and into his skin. Unthinking, he touched his spurs to Archangel and the great horse responded with a mighty leap forward, and then they were running free.

Gawin turned him in a wide circle. He couldn’t see from his left eye, and the pain in his side was so great that he could scarcely feel it – or anything else.

I want that thing, he thought. Let them take that head back to Harndon and show it to the king, and I will be content.

He got Archangel around. The horse had at least two wounds – both from javelins. But like his rider he was trained to fight hurt, and went at his prey with all the spirit he could have asked.

But the monster was running – weight forward, low to the ground, only three legs working, a dozen boglins gathered tight around it in the strong sunlight, as they fled into the trees.

Gawin reined up – surprised at himself. Death lay waiting in those trees. But it was one thing to fight to the death out here under the sun, and another to follow the Wild into the waiting trees and die alone – and for nothing. He reined up, and looked at the litter of broken boglins, and his view of them suddenly narrowed – he tasted salt in his mouth, and copper, and-

Lorica – Ser Gaston

Lorica again.

Gaston spat the foreign name as he watched the grey stone walls approach. He flicked a look at his cousin, who was riding serenely at his side.

‘We are going to be arrested,’ Gaston said.

Jean made a face. ‘For what?’ he asked. He laughed, and at the silvery peel of his laughter, other men smiled all down the column. Their contingent was third; first the king’s household, then the Earl of Towbray’s, and then theirs. They had more knights than the king and the earl together.

‘We killed the two squires. I locked the sheriff in a shed. You burned the inn.’ Gaston winced as he said the last. Ten days in Alba and he was beginning to appreciate just how poor their behaviour had been.

Jean shrugged. ‘No one of worth was involved except the knight,’ he said. His voice rode the edge of a sneer. ‘And he has chosen not to take exception. He has shown especial wisdom in this, I think.’

‘Nonetheless, the king will learn exactly what happened in the next hour or so,’ Gaston said.

Jean de Vrailly gave his cousin a sad smile. ‘My friend, you have much to learn of the workings of the world. If we were in the least danger, my angel would have told me. And it seems to me that our knights make up the best part of this column – bigger, better men in superb armour on fine horses. We can always fight. And if we fight, we will win.’ De Vrailly shrugged again. ‘You see? Simple.’

Gaston considered taking his own men and riding away.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain rode through the postern gate of the Bridge Castle with no one but Michael, also mailed and armed. They’d ridden out of the upper postern of the fortress with a minimum of fuss – two men-at-arms on detail. But the captain rode fast and hard down the ridge because the sky was full of crows to the west. He noted there wasn’t a bird to be seen over the fortress or the castle.

He dismounted in the Bridge Castle courtyard, where big merchant wagons were parked hub-to-hub leaving just room for a sortie to form up. As the captain looked around he realised that all the wagons were occupied. The merchants were living in them. No wonder Ser Milus said he had room. Over by the main tower, dogs whined and barked – four brace of good hounds. He stopped and let them smell him. Dogs made him smile with their enthusiastic approval. All dogs liked him.

Cleg, Ser Milus’ valet, came and led him into the main tower, where the garrison had their quarters on the ground floor – plenty of paliasses of new straw, with six local women and another half-dozen company trulls sitting on the floor and sewing. They were making mattresses – there were twenty ells of striped sacking already measured and cut, as the captain had seen done in a dozen countries. Clean sacks made good mattresses while dirty linen spread disease – any soldier knew it.

The women rose to their feet and curtsied.

The captain bowed. ‘Don’t let me disturb you, ladies.’

Ser Milus took his hand and a pair of archers – older, steady men, Jack Kaves and Smoke, pushed the merchants away. Three of them were waving scrolls.

‘I protest!’ the taller man called. ‘My dogs-’

‘I’ll take you to law for this!’ called a stout man.

The captain ignored them and went up a set of tight steps to the uppermost floor, where tents had been used to partition the tower into sleeping quarters for officers.

Ser Jehannes nodded curtly to the captain. He nodded back.

‘Ready to move back up the hill?’ the captain said.

Jehannes nodded. ‘Do I owe an apology?’

The captain lowered his voice. ‘I pissed you off, and you sulked about it. I need you. I need you at the fortress, giving orders, kicking arses and taking names.’

Jehannes nodded. ‘I’ll go back up with you.’ He looked over to Gelfred, and indicated the huntsman with a nod. ‘It’s bad.’

‘No one ever summons me for good news.’ The captain was relieved that he hadn’t lost his most senior man forever, and clapped the man on the back hoping it was the right gesture. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Jehannes paused. ‘I am also sorry,’ he said. ‘I am differently made to you, and I lack your certainty.’ He shrugged. ‘How is Bent doing?’

‘Very well indeed.’ Bent was the archer in Ser Jehannes’ lance – and also the most senior archer in the fortress.

‘I’ll send you Ser Brutus,’ the captain said to Milus, who grinned.

‘You mean you’re trading me the best knight in the company for a kid with an archer he can’t control?’ He laughed. ‘Never mind – Jehannes outranked me and never did any work anyway.’

The captain thought – not for the first time – how sensitive his mercenaries were. Jehannes had chosen to go to the castle garrison as a mere man-at-arms rather than go to the fortress with the captain, because he was angry. And everyone knew it, because there was no privacy, in a camp or in a garrison. And now that he and the captain had made it up everyone was very gentle about it., The teasing would start later. The captain thought it remarkable that such men had so much tact, but they did.

Gelfred was waiting, and from his expression, he was about to explode.

The captain went into his ‘room’ and sat at the low camp table on a leather stool. Gelfred beckoned to the other two officers, and both came in. Jehannes paused in the doorway and spoke to someone just outside the tent flap wall. ‘Clear this floor,’ he said.

They heard men grumbling, and then Marcus, Jehannes’ squire, said in his guttural accent, ‘All clear, sers.’

Gelfred looked around. ‘Not sure where to start.’

‘How about the beginning? And with a cup of wine?’ The captain tried to be light hearted, but the others looked too serious.

‘The merchants came in – two of them had animals.’ Gelfred shrugged. ‘I’m telling this badly. Two of them had a dozen good falcons and some dogs. I took the liberty of securing them. Aye?’

A dozen good falcons and some hunting dogs would be worth a fortune. No wonder the merchants were so incensed.

‘Go on,’ the captain said.

‘Today is the first morning I’ve been here.’ Gelfred cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been in the woods.’

‘You did a beautiful job,’ the captain said. ‘Tom hit their camp just right – didn’t even see a guard.’

Gelfred smiled at the praise. ‘Thanks. Anyway. Starting this morning, I-’ he looked at Ser Milus. ‘I started flying the hawks against the birds – those that watch the castle.’ He shrugged. ‘I know this sounds lame-’

‘Not at all,’ said the captain.

Gelfred breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I was afraid you’d think me mad. Will you trust that I can see – I can see – that some of the animals are servants of the Enemy?’ He whispered the last part.

The captain nodded. ‘Yes. I believe it. Go on.’

Jehannes shook his head. ‘It sounds blasphemous to me,’ he said.

Gelfred put his hands on his hips in exasperation. ‘I have a licence from the Bishop,’ he said.

The captain shrugged. ‘Get on with it, Gelfred.’

Gelfred brought out a game bag. It was stiff with blood, but then game bags generally were.

He extracted a dove – a very large specimen indeed – laid it on the camp table, and stretched out its wings.

‘The gyrfalcon took it down about two hours ago,’ he said. ‘No other bird we have is big enough.’

The captain was staring at the message tube on the bird’s leg.

Gelfred nodded. ‘It came out of the abbey, Captain,’ he said.

Milus handed him a tiny scroll no larger than his smallest finger. ‘Low Archaic,’ he said. ‘Has to limit the suspects.’

The captain ran his eyes over the writing. Neat, precise, and utterly damning – a list of knights, men-at-arms and archers; numbers, stores and defences. But no description. Nothing with which to catch a spy.

‘Limit the suspects in a convent?’ the captain said bitterly. ‘A hundred women, every one of whom can read and write low Archaic.’ And use power.

One of whom he knew was an Outwaller.

Gelfred nodded. ‘We have a traitor,’ he said, and the captain’s heart sank.

The captain leaned his head on his hand. ‘This is why you needed to meet me here,’ he said.

Gelfred nodded. ‘The traitor isn’t here,’ he said. ‘The traitor is in the fortress.’

The catain nodded for a while, the way a man will when he’s just heard bad news and can’t really take it all in. ‘Someone killed the Jack in the woods,’ he said. His eyes met Gelfred’s. ‘Someone stabbed Sister Hawisia in the back.’

Gelfred nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. Those are my thoughts, as well.’

‘Someone co-operated with a daemon to murder a nun.’ The captain scratched under his beard. ‘Even by my standards, that’s pretty bad.’

No one smiled.

The captain go tto his feet. ‘I’d like to have you hunt our traitor down, but I need you out in the woods,’ he said. ‘And it is going to get worse and worse out there.’

Gelfred smiled. ‘I like it.’ He looked around. ‘Better than in here, anyway.’

Lorica – Ser Gaston

Outside the town, a deputation of ten wagons full of forage, four local knights, and the town’s sheriff waited under the Royal Oak. The king rode up and embraced the sheriff, and the king’s constable accepted the four young knights and swore them to their duty. The quartermaster took charge of the wagons.

The sheriff was midway through telling the king of the burning of the Two Lions when he turned white, then red.

‘But that is the man!’ he said. ‘Your Grace! That is the man who ordered the inn burned!’ He pointed at de Vrailly.

De Vrailly shrugged. ‘Do I know you, ser?’ he asked, and rode to the king, the sheriff, and the other member’s of the Royal Household gathered under the great tree.

The sheriff sputtered. ‘You- Your Grace, this is the miscreant who ordered the inn burned! Who allowed the innkeeper to be beaten, a loyal man and a good-’

De Vrailly shook his head mildly. ‘You call me a miscreant?’

The king put his hand on de Vrailly’s bridle. ‘Hold hard, my lord. I must his this accusation.’ The king glared at his sheriff. ‘However baseless it is.’

‘Baseless?’ the sheriff shouted.

De Vrailly smiled. ‘Your Grace it is true. My squires kicked the worthless paysant and burned his inn as a lesson for his insolence.’ He raised his left eyebrow just a hair – his beautiful nostrils flared, and his lips thinned.

The king took a deep breath. Gaston watched him very carefully. He had already loosened the sword at his hip in its sheath. Not even de Vrailly would get away this time. The king’s justice could not be seen as weak in front of his own people, his vassals and his officers.

De Vrailly is insane, Gaston thought to himself.

‘Ser knight, you must explain yourself,’ the king said.

De Vrailly raised both eyebrows. ‘I am a lord, and I have the High Justice, the Middle Justice, and the Low Justice right here in my scabbard. I need no man’s leave to take a life. I have burned more peasants’ cots than a boy has pulled the wings off flies.’ De Vrailly shook his head. ‘Take my word, your Grace: the man received due payment for his foolishness. Let us hear no more about it.’

The sheriff put his hands on the pommel of his saddle as if to steady himself. ‘I have never heard the like of this. Listen, your Grace – this pompous foreigner, this so-called knight, also killed two squires of Ser Gawin Murien, and then, when I approached him, had me beaten. I was thrown into a shed, tied and bound. When I was rescued, I found the inn burned.’

Gaston pushed his horse into the angry group. ‘Your words in no way prove my lord’s guilt,’ he insisted. ‘You did not witness any of these things, yet now pronounce them truth.’

‘You were the one who hit me!’ the sheriff said.

Gaston had to restrain himself from shrugging. You are an ineffective, useless man and a shame on your king – and you were in my way. But he smiled, glanced at the king, and offered his hand. ‘For that I apologise. My cousin and I were newly landed, and failed to understand the laws of these parts.’

The king was firmly in the cleft stick of conflicting emotions, goals and needs – his indecision showed clearly on his face. He needed Jean de Vrailly’s three hundred knights and he needed to be seen to give justice. Gaston willed the sheriff to take his hand and clasp it. He willed it, and so did the king.

‘Messire, my cousin and I have joined the king to ride against the Wild.’ Gaston’s voice was low, urgent and yet soothing. ‘I beg your forgiveness before we go into battle.’

Gaston prayed that the king wasn’t looking at his cousin, whose expression at the word beg would have curdled milk.

The sheriff sniffed.

The king’s shoulders began to relax.

Almost as if against his will, the sheriff of Lorica took Gaston’s hand and clasped it. He left his glove on, which was rude enough, and he didn’t meet Gaston’s eye.

But the king seized the moment. ‘You will pay reparations to the town and to the innkeeper,’ he said. ‘The sum to be the full value of the inn and all of its goods and chattels. The sheriff will investigate the value and send a writ.’ The king turned in his saddle to address the Captal de Ruth. ‘You, who have announced your willingness to serve me, will first serve my sentence on this: your wages and those of all of your knights will be paid, in lieu of fine, to the innkeeper and to the town until the value set by the sheriff has been discharged.’

Jean de Vrailly sat on his horse, his beautiful face still and peaceful. Only Gaston knew he was considering killing the king.

‘We-’ he began, and the king turned in his saddle, showing some of the flexibility he had showed jousting.

‘Let the captal speak for himself,’ the king said. ‘You are glib in your cousin’s defence, my lord. But I must hear him speak his acceptance for himself.’

Gaston thought, He is very good at this. He has understood my cousin better than most men, and he has found a way to punish him while keeping him close and using his prowess against his enemies. Jean and his angel will not dominate this king in an afternoon. Outwardly, he bowed.

And glared at Jean.

Jean bowed as well. ‘I came to fight your enemies, your Grace,’ he said in his charming accent. ‘At my own expense. This ordinance makes little difference to me.’

Gaston winced.

The king looked around him, gathering eyes, gathering the opinions men cast with their body language, in subtle facial expressions, in the fretting of their horses. He pushed his tongue against his teeth – which Gaston had already come to read as a tic of frustration.

‘That is not sufficient,’ the king said.

De Vrailly shrugged. ‘You wish me to say that I accept your law and your writ?’ he said, and contempt dripped from every word.

Here we go, Gaston thought.

The Earl of Towbray pushed his horse between the king and the captal. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is my fault.’

Both the king and de Vrailly looked at him as if he’d come between them in the lists.

‘I invited the Captal to Alba to serve me, and I failed – even after a youth spent fighting on the Continent – to understand how he would see us.’ The earl shrugged. ‘I will bear the cost, for my mistake.’

De Vrailly had the good grace to appear surprised. ‘But – no!’ he said suddenly. ‘But I insist! I must bear it.’

The king was looking at the Earl of Towbray the way a man might look at a rare flower suddenly discovered on a dung hill.

Gaston remembered to breathe.

And in moments men were chattering with relief, the convoy was forming up, and Gaston could ride to his cousin’s side.

‘This is not what the angel told me would happen,’ he said.

Gaston raised an eyebrow.

De Vrailly shrugged. ‘But it will suffice. It irks me, cousin, to hear you crawl to a creature like that sheriff. You must avoid such things, lest they form a habit.’

Gaston sat still for a moment, and then leaned forward. ‘It irks me, cousin, to hear you put on airs before the King of Alba. But I assume you cannot help yourself.’ He turned, and rode back to his own retinue, and left Jean to ride by himself.

West of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn was dimly conscious of his body while he sat beneath the giant holm-oak and reached out over the sea of trees. He was aware of himself at the centre; of the fear and anger from the Jacks; the restive arrogance of the qwethnethogs; the mourning of the winged abnethogs; the distant presence that heralded the arrival of the Sossag people from the north, across the wall. He was aware of every tree past its tenth season; of the large patches of iris flowers; of the wild asparagus growing by the river where a man had built a cottage a century before; of the cattle that his raiders had taken to feed the Jacks; of the tuft-eared lynx that was both terrified and angered to have his army camped in its territory, and of the thousand other presences rolling away to the limits of his kenning.

He sympathised with the lynx. Unknowable, powerful creatures with filthy thoughts and polluted bodies, dirty with fear and hate, had come to his woods and fired his camp, terrifying his allies, destroying his trees and making him seem weak. The greater qwethnethogs would question whether he was worthy of service – the very strongest might even waste themselves and their energy on a challenge for mastery.

It was difficult for a Power of the Wild to have trusted lieutenants. But he would continue to attempt such relationships, for the good of the Wild and their cause.

He rose from beneath his tree and walked into camp, scattering lesser creatures and frightening the Jacks. He walked west, to the handful of golden bears who had allied themselves with him and had made huts of brush and leaves. He nodded to Blueberry, a huge bear with blue eyes.

The bear rose on his haunches. ‘Thorn,’ he said. The bears were afraid of nothing, not even him.

‘Blueberry,’ Thorn said. ‘I wish to recruit more of your people. Let me have the child and I will take it to the ice caves.’

Blueberry thought for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Better food, and females. Well thought.’ Sunset, the largest of the bears, brought the cub. She was small enough for Thorn to carry easily and mewed at him when he took her. He stroked her fur, and she bit at him, tasted his odd flesh, and sneezed.

He left the bears without another word and started north. When he stretched his legs, he moved faster than a galloping horse, and he could travel that fast for as long as he wished. He cradled the little bear and moved faster still.

Before the sun had dipped a finger’s breadth, he was too far from his camp to hear the thoughts of his allies, or to smell the fires of the men who had chosen to serve him. He crossed a series of beaver meadows, enjoying their health, feeling the trout in the streams and the otters in the banks, and he crossed a big stream flowing south from the Adnacrags. There he turned and followed the banks north, into the mountains. Leagues flew by. Thorn drew power from the hills, valleys, water, and the trees. He drew more than power.

He drew inspiration.

War was not his choice. It had been an accident. But if he had to make war now, he needed to remind himself why. He would make war for this. For the wilderness. To keep it clean.

And, of course, for himself. He was growing more powerful with every creature which chose to come and follow him.

The stream began to climb, faster and faster – up a great ridge, and then down, and then up again. He was in the foothills now, and his passage was like a strong wind in the trees. Deer looked up startled. Afraid.

Birds fled.

He knew the valley he wanted – the valley of the creek that the Sossag called the Black, that flowed from the ice caves under the mountains. It was a special place, almost as imbued with power as the Rock.

The bears ruled it.

He climbed a steep path, almost a road, from the stream to the top of the ridge, and waited. He was fifty leagues from his army. He set the bear on the ground and waited.

The sun began to set behind him and he let his mind wander, wondered if the enemy would try to raid his camp again. It occurred to him, now that he was far from the problem, that the enemy captain must have someone watching his camp. Of course. How else would he have known where to attack. He must be using animals as spies.

It was suprising how much clarity he could achieve when he was not bombarded with the chaos of other creatures.

‘Thorn.’

The speaker was old, a bear who had lived more then a century. He was called Flint, and he was acknowledged as a Power. He stood almost as tall as Thorn, and while he had white at his ears and muzzle, his body was strong and firm as a new apple in fall.

‘Flint.’

The old bear reached out and the little bear ran to him.

‘Her mother was enslaved and tortured by men,’ Thorn said. ‘To be fair, she was then rescued by other men, and brought to Blueberry at my camp.’

‘Men,’ said Flint. Thorn could feel the old bear’s anger, and his power.

‘I have burned Albinkirk,’ Thorn said, and realised what a pointless boast it was. Flint would know.

‘With stars from the sky,’ Flint said. His deep voice was like the sound of a rasp cutting into hardwood.

‘I have come to ask-’ Faced with Flint, it was suddenly difficult to explain. Bears were well known for their complete contempt for organisation. For government. Rules. War. Bears would kill when roused. But war repelled them.

‘Do not ask,’ Flint said.

‘What I do-’ Thorn began.

‘Has nothing to do with bears,’ Flint said. He nodded. ‘This is the cub of Sunbeam, of the Clan of the Long Dam. Sunbeam’s brother will no doubt come and avenge her.’ The old bear said this with obvious sadness. ‘As will his friends.’ Flint picked up the cub. ‘They are young, and understand nothing. I am old. I see you, Thorn. I know you.’ He turned his back and walked away.

All at once Thorn wanted to chase down the old bear and sit at his feet. Learn. Or protest his – not his innocence, but his intentions.

But another part of him wanted to turn the old bear to ash.

It was a long walk back to camp.

Lissen Carak – Sister Miram

Sister Miram was missing her favourite linen cap, and she took the moments between study of High Archaic and Nones to visit the laundry. She raced down the steps of the north tower – for a large woman, she was very fast – but then a flash of intuition made her pause at the door to the laundry. Six sisters laboured away, their hands and faces red, stripped to their shifts in the heat of the room. A dozen local girls worked with them.

Lis Wainwright was also stripped to her shift. Forty years had not ruined her figure. Miram might have smiled, but she didn’t. Beyond Lis were younger girls. Miram knew them all – had taught them. The Carters and the Lanthorns. The Lanthorn girls were simpering. There wasn’t usually a lot of simpering in the laundry.

A hundred nuns and novices generated a great deal of laundry. The addition of four hundred farmers, their families, and two hundred professional soldiers, forced the laundry to boil linen day and night. The drying lines were stretched at every hour, and even senior sisters like Sister Miram received their linens slightly damp and badly ironed. Or left them missing things like caps.

She looked around for Sister Mary, whose week it was to run the laundry, and heard a man’s voice. It was a cultured voice, singing.

She listened intently. Singing a Gallish romance.

She couldn’t see him, but she could see the four Lanthorn girls in their shifts, giggling, preening and showing a great deal of leg and shoulder.

Miram’s eyes narrowed. The Lanthorn girls were what they were, but they didn’t need some smooth-talking gentleman to encourage them on their road to hell. Miram strode across the damp floor and there he was, leaning in the laundry door. He had a lute, and he was not alone.

‘Your name, messire?’ she asked. She had pounced so swiftly that he was locked in indecision – keep playing, or flee?

‘Lyliard, ma soeur,’ he said sweetly.

‘You are a knight, messire?’ she asked.

He bowed.

‘None of these four unmarried maidens is of noble birth, messire. And while it may suit you to bed them, their pregnancies and their unwed lives will weigh heavily on my convent, my sisters, and your soul.’ She smiled. ‘I hope we understand each other.’

Lyliard looked as if he’d been hit by a wyvern. ‘Ma soeur!’

‘You look like a squire,’ Sister Miram said to the young man at Lyliard’s elbow. He also had a lute and while he lacked Lyliard’s dash and polish Miram’s opinion was he’d get there in time. And he was handsome, in a raffish, muscular way.

‘John of Reigate, sister.’ He was young enough to drop his eyes and look like a schoolboy caught out in a lark. Which he was. She had to remember that they killed for a living, but they were still people.

The third man was the handsomest. He had polish and good looks. And he blushed.

‘And you are the captain’s squire,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Unfair. My fame proceeds me.’

‘Don’t ape your master,’ Miram said. ‘The three of you, gently born, should be ashamed of yourselves. Now go.’

Lyliard looked abashed. ‘Listen, sister, we merely crave some female company. We are not bad men.’

She sniffed. ‘Do you mean you would pay for what you take?’ She looked at all three of them. ‘You seduce innocents instead of committing out and out rape? Is that supposed to impress me?’

The captain’s squire sniffed. His left hand patted the bandage around his waist. ‘You really have no idea who or what we are. What we face.’

Miram caught his eye and stepped very close, close as a lover. Almost nose to nose. His eyes were blue, and she had once been a woman to enjoy handsome men.

Hers were a deep, old green.

‘I know, young squire,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what you face.’ She didn’t blink and he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her. ‘Save your posturing for whores, boy. Now go and say twenty Pater Nosters, mean them, and think about what it might mean to be a knight.’

Michael would have liked to have stood his ground, but the moment her regard dropped away, he stumbled a step.

She smiled at the three of them, and they backed away from the door.

Sister Miram went back into the laundry, where the Lanthorn girls were huddling, terrified, and trying to cover their bare legs.

Sister Mary came in, carrying a huge basket. ‘Miram!’ she called out. ‘What’s amiss?’

‘The usual,’ Miram said. And started searching for her missing cap.

North of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt bitten by the old bear’s disdain. His walk back was full of thoughts about how the men in the Rock had, apparently, inflicted two defeats on him. He had to face the hard truth; to the irks and boglins and even to the daemons, these little fiery pinpricks were defeats.

He didn’t really think that either of his lieutenents would challenge him, and he reached out more and more to the east as he walked, until he could feel the intense wrongness of the invaders. They were not like the peasants, the nuns, and the shepherds in the fortress. They smelt of violence.

He had always hated their kind, even when he walked among them as a man.

Also in the fortress, surrounded by all that cold stone worked by man, the enchantments an aeon old and proof against all but his strongest enchantment, he could feel the Abbess, a sun of power, with her nuns a star field behind her.

He flinched away from her.

And the tendrils of his questing power saw another, darker sun – the beacon that the daemons had seen – that Thurkan, the sharpest of the daemons, had seen and avoided. The shielded one, who had resisted, however briefly, his workings on the battlefield.

The bears hadn’t refused him, precisely. But nor were they helping him with any force but a few angry warriors bent on revenge. He drew deep breath of clean air and turned north, back into the mountains, and lengthened his stride until he was all but running, his giant body now moving faster than the fastest horse. He could get where he wanted to with a phantasm, but he was suddenly wary of using too much power. Power attracted other power, and in the Wild, that could spell a quick end – all too often, something bigger than you arrived unexpectedly. And ate you.

Even as he ran the forest highways, Thorn contemplated eating Turkan.

Lissen Carak – Kaitlin

The four Lanthorn girls were quick to recover from Sister Miram, and the afternoon found them coring winter apples behind the kitchens. There were no sisters and no novices.

The eldest Lanthorn girl was Elissa. She was dark haired, as tall as a man, thin, with long legs and very little figure and a nose like a hawk. Despite this men found her irresistible, mostly because she smiled a great deal and was selective in her use of the family’s principle weapon: a sharp tongue.

Mary was the second daughter. She was the very opposite of her elder sister; short, but not squat, with a full figure, guinea gold hair, a narrow waist and a snub nose. She thought herself a great beauty and was always puzzled when boys preferred Elissa.

Fran was brown haired, full-lipped and full hipped. She had her mother’s looks, her father’s brains and sense of honesty, and she seldom cared whether boys noticed her or not.

And Kaitlin was the youngest: just fifteen. She was not as tall as Elissa, not as full-figured as Mary, nor yet as witty, or as cutting, as Fran. She had pale brown hair that framed a heart-shaped face, and she appeared to be the quietest and most respectable of the Lanthorns.

‘Bitch,’ Fran said, tossing a core aside. ‘She thinks we’re going to be good little girls with pig shit on our feet for the rest of our lives.’

Elissa looked around carefully. ‘We have to play this right,’ she said thoughtfully. She ate a slice of of apple, deftly taking a knife from beneath her kirtle, cutting a slice, wiping the knife on her apron and putting back in her sheath faster than most people could follow. She looked down her long nose at Fran. ‘I hearby convene a meeting of the “Marry a Noble” club.’

‘Silly kids’ nonsense,’ Mary scoffed. She was eighteen. ‘No one around here is going to marry any of us.’ She flicked her eyes around the circle. ‘Maybe Kaitlin,’ she admitted.

Fran tossed an apple core viciously into the sty behind them. ‘If some people would stop making the beast with two backs with every farm boy in every blessed hay stack-’

Elissa’s smile didn’t even thin. ‘Ahh, Fran, you’ll go a virgin to your wedding, won’t ya?’ She snorted.

Fran’s next apple core hit Elissa in the nose and she hissed.

Mary shrugged. ‘Scarcely matters if I bed ’em or don’t,’ she said, ‘seeing they say I did, and folks believe ’em.’

The others nodded.

Elissa shrugged. ‘Listen, the men-at-arms don’t talk to the farmers. They don’t know shit about our lives. And even the archers-’ She shrugged. ‘The archers have more money than any farm boy in this place. The men-at-arms-’

‘They ain’t all gents,’ Mary said. ‘I wouldn’t touch that Bad Tom if I had armour on.’

Fran shrugged. ‘I rather like him.’

‘You’re dumber than I thought then. Aren’t you supposed to be the smartest, fastest one? He gives me the creeps.’ Mary shivered.

Elissa raised a hand for silence. ‘That’s as may be. What I’m saying is that we-’ She looked around. ‘We have something. Of value.’ She smiled. The smile lit her face and turned her from a square jawed young harridan into a very attractive woman. Mary turned and saw that Elissa’s smile was for a middle-aged squire just walking past the kitchen with a pail of ash. Off to polish armour somewhere.

Elissa folded up her smile and put it away. ‘There’s sixty men-at-arms,’ she said. ‘Sixty chances one of them might marry one of us.’

Mary snorted.

But Fran leaned forward, the apple in her hand forgotten. ‘You might have something there,’ she said.

Elissa and Fran weren’t usually allies. But Elissa met her look and both smiled.

‘So we don’t,’ Elissa said. ‘We just don’t. That’s all you have to do, girls. Don’t. Let’s see what we’re offered.’

Mary wasn’t so sure. ‘So what. We don’t bed them? What else do we do? You’re planning to learn to shoot a bow? Go to Mag and take up fine sewing?’

Elissa shook her head.

‘Lis won’t stop opening her legs for any likely lad,’ Mary said.

‘Lis can do as she likes. She’s old and we’re not.’ Fran looked around. ‘Captain’s not bad looking.’

Elissa made a crude noise. ‘He’s doing one of the nuns.’

‘He ain’t!’ said Kaitlin. She’d been silent thus far, but some things couldn’t be allowed to pass.

‘Oh, you’re an expert, are ya?’ asked Mary.

‘I clean his room,’ Kaitlin said. She blushed. ‘Sometimes.’

Elissa looked at her. ‘You, young maiden, are a dark horse.’

‘I ain’t!’ Kaitlin said, prepared for their mockery.

‘You go right in his room?’ Elissa asked.

‘Almost every day.’ Kaitlin looked around. ‘What?’

Elissa shrugged. ‘One of us could be in his bed.’

Kaitlin put a hand to her mouth. Mary spat. Fran, frankly, looked as if she was considering it.

‘Too desperate,’ Fran pronounced. ‘He’s scary, too.’

‘Creepy,’ said Mary.

‘His squire’s pretty as a picture,’ Elissa said.

Kaitlin blushed. Luckily the rest weren’t watching.

North-west of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn needed to know more. He needed his friend in the Rock to be less coy. Thorn summoned birds from the air even as he ran through the woods in the failing light. Now he was climbing ridges. The descent on the north side was never as steep as the ascent had been, and he was going higher and higher into the mountains. The trees thinned, and he moved faster as the land opened up.

A pair of ravens descended to his fists as if they were hawks to a knight. He spoke to them, planted messages in their wise heads, and sent them to the fortress. No one ever suspected ravens. They rose above him and then soared away to the south-east, and he turned and saw how very high he had come.

He looked out over the wilderness. At his feet – far, far below – was the chain of beaver ponds like miniature lakes sparkling in the last of the sun. The stream that connected them was a thread of silver, visible here and there in the warp and weft of trees.

He turned and climbed higher. The trail was steeper now, and he was not so fast. He had to use his long, powerful arms to pull himself from tree to tree. The stream began to descend in a series of waterfalls at his side.

Finally, he pulled himself over a slick rock and raised himself by main force to the top, his arms spread wide, grunting with effort as they lifted the full weight of his giant body. At his feet was a pool, deep and black, and a waterfall dropped a hundred feet into it. The spray coated him in moments. He stooped and drank deep of the magic pool.

A head broke the surface, just an arm’s length away, and he started.

Who drinks in my pool?

The words appeared in his mind without a sound being spoken.

‘I am called Thorn,’ he said.

The creature rose from the pool, black water flowing from him. As he moved up the side of the pool he grew and grew. His skin was jet-black and shone like obsidian.

He moved fast yet appeared to be perfectly still; the transitions were difficult to catch, movement always seemed to happen at the corner of Thorn’s eye. And when the creature fully emerged, he was a quarter taller than the sorcerer.

A shining black stone golem, with no face, no eyes, no mouth.

I do not know you.

‘I know a little of you,’ Thorn said. ‘I know that I need allies. Your kind are said to be fearsome warriors.’

I can feel your power. It is considerable.

‘I can see your speed and strength. They, too, are considerable.’ Thorn nodded.

Enough talk. What do you WANT?

The mind shout almost brought Thorn to his knees. ‘I want a dozen of your kind as my guards. As soldiers.’

The smooth monster threw back his head and laughed, and suddenly there was a mouth after all, with cruel teeth. The stone of his face – if it was stone – seemed to flow like water. We serve no one.

Thorn would have smiled if he still had the ability to. Instead, he simply cast his binding. Simultaneously, he shielded his mind from the shout that was sure to follow.

The troll stiffened. He screamed, and his teeth clashed like rocks in a flooded stream, and his smooth arms grew hands and talons that reached for Thorn.

The sorcerer didn’t stir. The net of his will settled in sparkling green strands over the creature and tightened, and that quickly it was over.

I will slay you and all your kind in ways too horrible for your mind to encompass.

Thorn turned. ‘No you will not,’ he said. ‘Now, obey. We have more of your kind to find, and a long night ahead of us.’

The troll thrashed in his binding like a wolf in a cage. He screamed, his bell-like voice ringing across the wilderness.

Thorn shook his head minutely. ‘Obey,’ he said again, and pushed a little more of his will into the binding.

The monster resisted, showing – or growing – wicked black in a black mouth. His whole body stretched for Thorn.

To Thorn, it was like arm wrestling with a child. A strong child – but a child nonetheless. He slammed his will down on the troll’s, and it crumbled.

That was the way of the Wild.

The other trolls weren’t hard to find, and the second was considerably easier to press than the first had been . . . but the seventh was much harder than the sixth, and by the time the sun had set he had a tail of mighty trolls and that sense a man gets when he has lifted so much weight that he can no longer lift his arms.

He sat in a narrow gully, and listened to the wind while his blank-faced trolls crouched all around him.

After some time, as the sun began to slip beneath the rim of the world and he felt better, he reached out a tendril of his power toward the dark sun in the distant fortress.

And he recoiled from what he found, because-

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain was leaning on the wall, the curtain wall that covered the outer gate. He’d walked here almost without volition, because the confines of the Commandery were suddenly too close and airless.

He’d written her a note. Because he was not fifteen he had written one, not ten of them, and he’d placed it in the crotch of the old apple tree. And then, after cursing himself for waiting and hoping she might appear by some sympathetic magic, he’d walked to the wall for some air.

The stars burned in the distant heavens, and there were fires in the Bridge Castle courtyard below him. The Lower Town at the foot of the ridge was empty – a skeleton guard held it and no more. And there was no light.

He looked out at the darkness – the Wild was as dark as the sea.

Something was looking for him. At first it was a prickle in his hair, and then a presentiment of doom, and then, suddenly, he’d never felt so vulnerable in all his life, and he crouched on the battlement fighting a particularly awful childhood memory.

When it didn’t relent, didn’t let up, he took a deep breath and forced himself to his feet. He turned and made himself walk, despite the crushing fear, up the steps set into the wall to the first tower. The second step was so hard he had to use his hands on the fourth and fifth – by the eighth he was crawling. He pushed, made a sword of his will, and pushed through. The feeling relaxed like the grip of an unwelcome suitor as soon as he entered the stone structure.

Bent leaped to his feet, a deck of painted cards in his hand. ‘Captain!’ he shouted, and a dozen archers leaped to their feet and snapped their salutes.

The captain glanced around. ‘At ease,’ he said. ‘Who’s on the walls?’

‘Acrobat,’ Bent answered. ‘Half-Arse on the main curtain, Ser Guillam Longsword and Snot commanding the towers with the engines. Watch changes in a glass.’

‘Double up,’ the captain ordered. He wanted to apologise – Sorry, boys, I have a creepy feeling, so I’m costing a lot of you a night’s sleep. But he’d learned not to apologise when he gave an unpopular order, much less over-explain it. And the successful raid had given him credit in the hard currency of leadership – no commander is ever much better than his last performance.

Bent grimaced, but he started lacing up his embroidered leather jack. Like many of the other veterans, Bent wore his fortune on his body – a subtle brag, a statement of his worth, a willingness to see that fortune taken by his killer. The dark-skinned man looked around, and like true soldiers his fellow gamblers avoided his eye.

‘Hetty, Crank, Larkin, with me. Hetty, if you don’t want the duty, don’t be so obvious about sneaking to the jakes.’ Bent glared at the youngest man in the tower room and then turned back to the captain. ‘That sufficient, m’lord?’

The captain didn’t know Bent very well – he was Ser Jehannes’ man – but he was impressed that his most senior archer would take the trick on the wall himself. ‘Carry on,’ he said coldly, and walked across the room surveying the piles of coins on the tables, and the dice and cards, as he did. He was pretty sure Ser Hugo would never have allowed such overt gambling. So he scratched his beard and beckoned to Bent.

The archer came up like a dog expecting a kick.

The captain pointed at the money on the main table. He didn’t say a thing.

Bent raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth.

‘Save it,’ the captain said. ‘Remind me of the company rule on gambling.’

Bent made a face. ‘Total value of the game not to exceed a day’s pay for the lowest man,’ he recited.

Two rose nobles gleamed up at the captain, with more than a dozen silver leopards and a pile of copper cats by them. The captain put his hand over the pile. ‘Must be mine then,’ he said, ‘I’m the only man in the company who makes this kind of money every day.’

Bent swallowed but his eyes narrowed in anger.

The captain lifted his hand, leaving the pile untouched. He locked eyes with the archer and smiled. ‘You get me, Bent?’

The archer all but sighed with relief. ‘Aye, Captain.’

The captain nodded. ‘Good night, Bent,’ he said, and touched the man’s shoulder, to say, And over is over, unless you dick up. He’d learned from experts, and he wanted to believe he was doing the captain thing well.

He walked out onto the wall, and there it was again – not the fear, but the feeling he was being watched. Scrutinized. He was ready for it this time, and he reached into the round room, and-

– there was Prudentia.

‘He is looking for you,’ she said. ‘His name is Thorn. A Power of the Wild. Do you remember how to avoid being found?’

He stopped to kiss her hand.

‘How do you know it is this Thorn?’ he asked.

‘He has a signature, and he has cast many times tonight, gathering allies. If you would pay attention to the Aethereal, instead of dabbling-’

He smiled. ‘I’m not interested. Too much like hard work.’

The door was open a crack. He often left it that way to give himself fast access to power, and tonight he could feel that searching presence through the crack in the door – more powerfully, if anything, than he had felt it on the wall.

Of course.

He continued past Prudentia and pushed the door firmly shut. The heavy iron latch fell into place with a comforting click.

North-west of Lissen Carak – Thorn

– the dark sun went out like a torch thrown into a pool.

He was disoriented, at first. The dark sun had dimmed and strengthened, dimmed and strengthened, and years of patient growth of power had taught him not to read too much into the fluctuations in power wrought by distance, weather, old phantasms that lingered like ghosts of their former powers, or animals who used power the way bats used sound. There were thousands of natural factors that occluded power the way other factors might affect sound.

In fact, he thought that the use of power and the movement of sound might usefully be studied together. The thought pleased him, and he spun off a part of himself to contemplate the movement of sound over distance as an allegory – or even as a direct expression – of power. Meanwhile, he sat and breathed in the night air and maintained, almost without effort, the chains of power that bound the trolls, and a third part of him looked for the dark sun with increasing frustration.

A fourth aspect considered his next move.

The conflict at the Rock had now forced a gathering of resources and allies that involved risks and challenges he had not anticipated. If he continued gathering, he would soon reach a level that would at least appear to challenge his peers – already the mighty Wyrm of the Green Hills was awake to him, raising, as it were, a scaled green eyebrow at his speedy accumulation of power and lesser creatures, men and resources. The old bear in the mountains did not love him either. And at some future point the trolls, scarcely people and more like cruel animals as they were – would come to resent his chains and find a way to throw them off.

So might one feudal lord be alarmed – or at least deeply curious – when a neighbour called in his vassals and raised an army.

The allegory occurred to the fourth self, because the fourth self had once been a man – a man capable of raising armies.

Before he’d learned the truth.

And at another level, the fortress was obviously not going to crumple at his command. Albinkirk’s outer wall had fallen so easily that he’d allowed himself to be seduced by the easy victory – but the citadel itself, full of terrified humans, was not yet under his claws and the easy conquests were over.

And whatever the dark sun was, it was powerful and dangerous, and the men of violence who surrounded it were deadly enemies who he would not underestimate again. Neither could he accept their pollution of his land, attack of his camp, or the preceeding endless cycle of challenge and counter challenge that had led him to grant a favour and confront the fortress more directly.

And where, exactly, was his professed friend in the Rock?

Enough.

He had made his choices, and they led to making war. Now he had to marshal his assets without affronting his peers, rip the fortress from the face of the world – a warning and a tale for all his foes – and grant the Rock to the Wild.

And all the while he contemplated this next move, that part of him which was enjoying the cool of night continued to avoid the golden light cast by the Abbess, as if the mere admission of her existence would be a defeat.

Twenty leagues to the south a hundred of his creatures stirred and rumbled and slept in the cold darkness, and two hundred men huddled close to their fires and posted too many sentries, and over the mountain to the north, hundreds of Sossag warriors woke and made their fires and prepared to come to his cause. And west, and north, creatures woke in their burrows, their caves, their holes and hides and homes – more irks, more boglins, and mightier creatures – a clan of daemons, a moiety of golden bears. And because power called to power, they were coming to him.

The trolls would counter the knights. The Sossag would give him more reliable scouts. The irks and boglins were his foot soldiers. By morning, he would have a force to deal with anything that humankind could offer. Then he would close his claws around the fortress.

Of course, there was irony in his trust of men, rather than creatures of the Wild, to fight other men.

With this decision his selves collapsed, one by one, back into the body under the tree, and that body stretched, sighed, and was almost like a man’s.

Almost.

Lissen Carak – Kaitlin Lanthorn

Kaitlin sighed, and half rolled against the figure beside her. She sighed again, and wondered why her sister had to take up so much of the bed . . . and then she suddenly knew where she was, and she made a noise in her throat. The man next to her turned and put a hand on her breast, and she smiled. And then moaned a little.

He licked her under her chin and kissed her, his tongue dabbing away at the corner of her mouth like a questing thing, and she laughed and threw her arms around him. She was not a slut like her sisters, and she’d never had a man in her bed before in her life, but she was not going to be bound by their sordid plans or their poor taste. She was in love.

Her lover ran his tongue across the base of her ear lobe while one lazy finger traced the line of her nipple. She laughed, and he laughed.

‘I love you,’ Kaitlin Lanthorn said into the darkness. She had never said the words before, not even when he’d first had her maidenhead.

‘And I love you, Kaitlin,’ Michael said, and put his mouth over hers.