The Dread Wyrm

Chapter Eight

The Company

At Second Bridge they went east again-much the same route they’d used in the morning. It was possible that someone very quick might have sent a force by the west road on the other side of First Bridge and cut them off and, healing or no, Gabriel didn’t fancy another combat.

But as they climbed the low hills of the southern Albin, so that they could see all the way along the main ridges back to Harndon, Gabriel was sure he saw a column on the main road and another moving on the far bank-there were dust clouds there.

“We should have killed ’em all while we had the chance,” Ser Michael said. “I wish I knew where Da was.”

“I am not even sure you’re wrong,” Gabriel said.

But Gavin came to his rescue. “No,” he said. “We did what we set out to do. It’s all the plan we could make. If we’d had two hundred men-at-arms…”

“Anyway,” Tom said. “That stream’s gone past, eh? It was na’ a bad fight, as such things go. We didn’t lose a man.”

“Or a woman,” said Blanche, who was riding with the Queen. She was doing well.

At the Freeford crossroads, where the Harndon Road and the Eastern Road crossed the Meylan Stream, Gabriel gave them an hour. Toby led the squires off in search of food and came back with a laden mule and links of sausages flung casually over his shoulder. They all ate, even the Queen. In fact, she was ravenous, and Blanche accosted the captain again.

“She needs to eat. She’s not one of your mercenaries.” Blanche put her hands on her hips. “You can’t make her ride all night.”

Most of the casa looked away in various directions. But Ser Michael bowed and said, “The captain is doing his best-”

“I’m helping him make the right choice,” Blanche said.

Tom was looking back under his hand. “I think there’s men on the road,” he said.

It was early evening, and darkness was not so far.

“Get over the ford,” Gabriel ordered. “Now.”

Ser Michael reached down, plucked Blanche off the ground, and rode across the ford with her. The casa was mounted in moments, and Ser Francis and Chris Foliak got the Queen across-still eating.

Gabriel and his brother sat and chewed sausage.

“Local men,” Gavin said after a time. There were fifty or sixty men coming-a handful mounted.

The two of them were still in all of their tournament finery. Gavin tossed the last knot of his sausage into the river behind him and missed the swirl and snap as a pike took it. He and Gabriel rode forward, side by side, their right hands in the air.

One of the mounted men pressed forward to meet them. He took off his right gauntlet and held it up, too. “Ser Stephan Griswald,” he said. He was over fifty, and running to fat, and his coat of plates didn’t fit well-but the sword at his side spoke of some use.

“Ser Gabriel Muriens,” Gabriel said.

“That’s they!” shouted a spearman.

In fact, there were three or four dozen spearmen-with gambesons and good helmets, most of them with a chain aventail.

Ser Stephan nodded heavily. “Those your men?” he asked, pointing at the knights across the stream.

“Yes,” Gabriel said. In fact, his men were readying lances. “Are you the sheriff?”

“I am, my lord. And it is my duty to arrest you, in the name of the King.” The sheriff reached out with his truncheon, like a mace.

Gabriel backed his horse. “The King is dead,” he said. “And has been since this morning.”

That brought the sheriff up short. “My writ has just come from the King,” he said

“It is no legal writ, but a forgery by the archbishop,” Gabriel said. “Did he order out the militia?” he asked.

The sheriff shook his head. “Every county. By the saints, my lord-the King is dead? What mischief is this?”

“He took an arrow in the chest.” Gabriel nodded. “But you see the woman sitting under yon tree? That’s the Queen. The Galles want her, my lord sheriff. And I will not give her up. So you and your brave lads will have to fight us.”

Tom Lachlan was recrossing the ford with all the men-at-arms at his back. He and Ser Michael looked like the left and right hands of God in the setting sun.

“I think you’d need a legion of angels to arrest this lot,” said another old man in armour. “Leave it go, Stephan.”

The newcomer rode forward. Under the trees that lined the road it was almost night. He emerged-a straight-backed old man in fitted steel.

“Lord Corcy,” Gavin said.

“Ah-Hard Hands himself. And that’s young Michael, Towbray’s scapegrace older son.” He smiled and offered his hand. “Would you gentlemen send my duty to the Queen? And will you give your word not to attack us? You have more men and are far better armed-but we are”-he didn’t chuckle, but he sounded amused-“the arm of the law.”

Corcy was an old man, one of the old King’s military barons.

Gabriel took his hand. “I give you my word. Just let us go, and that’s the end.” Then he dared. “Unless you’d hide us?”

Lord Corcy thought for a moment, and his face became hard. “No,” he said.

Bad Tom came up on his bridle hand side. “If we kill them, they can’t tell aught where we went,” he said.

Lord Corcy’s hand went to his sword hilt.

“Damn it, Tom!” Gabriel spat. “Lord Corcy, we will offer you no violence unless you attack us.”

Corcy backed his horse. “My sons are at court,” he said.

Ser Gavin nodded. “We understand.”

Corcy’s eyes were lost in the darkness under the visor of his light bascinet, but he shook his head. “I’ll keep the news from court as long as I can. Who killed the King?” he asked suddenly.

“Honestly? I have no idea,” Gabriel said. “If I had to guess, I’d say the Jacks killed him. Or the Galles.” He shook his head. He was tired-too damned tired. He couldn’t see the shape of the plots. He’d lost the threads.

Lord Corcy spoke out of the darkness of his helmet. “It will be war. Civil war. With wolves on every border.”

Gabriel took his own hand off his sword hilt. “Not if I can help it,” he said.

Corcy leaned forward, and just for a moment, his eyes glittered. “Think the Queen’s brat is the King’s?” he asked.

Gabriel was too tired for this. But it occurred to him, in that moment, that he had the Queen. In his possession.

Possibilities unrolled like carpets. No-like a spider rapidly spinning out silk, the plots unwound. Structure after structure, faster than speech. It was, in every way, the opposite of the feeling of entanglement.

The civil war starts right here, he thought. I’m a side. And Corcy could be won over.

Is the baby in her womb the King’s?

Does it matter? As plots and plans and counter plans exploded in all directions in his head, he realized that it was not whether the Queen’s baby was legitimate that mattered.

It was what he decided.

This is Mater’s doing. But the sense of power was heady-like the moment in which he’d first really worked in the aethereal, and made fire.

If her child’s a bastard.

Stillborn.

Dead.

Then I’m the King. Or at least, it’s mine for the taking.

If the child is the King’s…

… and I have the Queen-

He allowed himself a brief smile, and all the realities and futures rattled around the hermetical multiverse for the time it took for a pretty girl to flash her eyes.

“My lord, I believe the Queen’s child is the rightful King of this realm,” the captain said.

He heard Gavin’s intake of breath. Tom wouldn’t know, yet, what that pronouncement meant. Michael would.

Amicia would.

Sometimes, the “right” thing is the Right thing. It’s beautiful when it works that way.

Ah, Mater. You are about to be cruelly disappointed.

I think.

Michael had it immediately. “My Lord Corcy, Ser Gabriel today upheld the Queen’s right in the lists against the King’s Champion, and slew him.”

“Christ, boy, you killed de Vrailly?” Corcy asked.

“Only the Sieur de Rohan, I fear,” Gabriel said.

The sheriff, silent until then, spoke up. “Trial by combat is barbaric,” he said. “And not recognized by law.”

Gabriel had to laugh, and did. “I agree,” he said, and slapped his thigh a little too hard, so that he yelped in pain as his left hand reminded him that it was not healed.

But he had Corcy’s eye.

“I would bend my knee to the Queen,” Corcy said. “And though I am loath to offer you poor hospitality, I have a barn-a storage barn. It would hide you all.” He let his horse take another step forward, so that he and the captain were shoulder to shoulder-inside each other’s guards. “I will cover you for one night. God help me.”

Gabriel’s smile was genuine. He reached out, right hand to right. “I’ll take you to the Queen. Immediately. How far to your barn?”

“Less than a league.” Corcy looked at the sheriff.

The sheriff reached out his hand. “I’m for the Queen,” he said impulsively.

Gabriel backed his horse in the near darkness. “How about it, gentles?” he called to the spearmen. “Who among you will bow to the Queen like loyal Albans?”

He turned to Corcy. “Which way?”

“This side of the river-up the Morea Road.” Corcy nodded. “I’ll ride with you and be my own guide-and hostage.”

Michael knew the game. His father had played it all his life. “I’ll just fetch the Queen back across, shall I?” he asked. “Gabriel? This is it? We’re now…?” He shook his head.

Gabriel twitched his reins, and his eyes went from Bad Tom to Michael to Gavin. “For good or ill, we’re about to become the Queen’s men.”

The Queen came back across the stream at a trot, and her pretty palfrey threw spray high into the red sunset air. She had knights all around her, and Amicia and Blanche attended her. Despite nine months of pregnancy and ten days of hell, her carriage was upright, her face was both beautiful and dignified, and her horsemanship, as always, was perfect.

Every knight on the road dismounted.

Gabriel joined them.

All the spearmen pushed to be in front.

Chris Foliak held the Queen’s horse and she dismounted.

Then all the company knights were dismounting, and the squires and pages. By happenstance, she dismounted in front of a pair of wild rose bushes that bowed in early fulfilment of their blossom. Nell took the reins of her horse and knelt behind her.

“Ah,” she said. Her voice held unconcealed delight.

“Your grace.” Gabriel spoke loudly. “Your grace, these loyal gentlemen seek only to bend their knees to you and offer their loyal service to you-and to your house.”

She walked among them, putting her right hand on their heads-on the sheriff, and on Lord Corcy, and on Bob Twill the ploughman. Her smile was like the last light of the sun.

“I honour every one of you for your daring and your loyalty,” she said. “I swear to you by my honour and by the Virgin and my immortal soul that the child in my womb-seeking to get out!-is my husband’s child and the rightful heir of Alba.” She walked back to her horse.

“Lord Corcy has offered us lodging for the night,” Gabriel whispered.

She dazzled him with her smile. “I accept,” she said.

And then she folded in half and gave a great cry.

“Birth pangs,” Blanche said. She caught the Queen and wrapped her in her arms, supporting her.

The Queen caught herself and straightened. She looked at Ser Gabriel. “I’m sorry, my lord,” she said. “It is now.”

Ghause had spent too much of her day watching her ancient crystal for news of the south. It was very difficult to hold the thing on one place for any length of time-the effort of will drained her, not of ops, but of the strength to manipulate it.

But she had to know, and so she went back like a child picking a scab, even when her enemy’s infernal legions stormed the Saint George bastion’s gatehouse and she had to strengthen her barriers and throw fire on them until her bold husband could rally his knights and drive them out.

Ser Henri died retaking the Saint George bastion. So did a dozen of her husband’s best knights, and the earl, who had gone unwounded in twenty fights, took a blow that robbed him forever of his left eye. But they drove the Gallish knights and their Outwaller allies back off the walls.

And then Ghause had to heal the survivors. Another time, she would mourn Henri-the best chivalric lover any woman would ever want-brave, clever, handsome and hard and utterly silent.

The earl woke under her healing and that of the other talents attending-the four witches, men called them. His good right eye opened.

“One of the fuckers is wearing the Orley arms,” he spat. “I almost had him-I-” He closed his eye. “Oh, sweet. I lost Henri.”

Suddenly, and for all too many reasons, Ghause felt her eyes fill with tears. Not just for Henri. But for him. For all of them. She motioned the other witches away.

“We can hold this castle forever,” Ghause said.

Her husband clasped her hand. “Just get me up and fighting,” he said. “Their Black Knight is-something.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t get past him.”

“He’s thirty years younger than you, you old lecher.” Ghause hid her feeling behind her usual asperity.

“I’ve killed a lot of men younger than me,” he said, a hint of anger in his good eye. “Christ, you’re hurting me.”

She was trying to work on the eye, but its structures were too damned complicated, and she had to settle for killing infection and stopping any further damage. “I can’t save your eye,” she admitted.

He sighed. “I can still see what you look like naked,” he said. “I may just be slower to catch you.”

She smiled. “I’m no faster than you are, you old goat. It’s the maids that will breathe a sigh of relief.”

She gave his hand a squeeze and then went and found Aneas. He was unmarked, although he had fought almost without pause for two days. He had arrived with a dozen lances from Albinkirk just before the siege began and he’d become a pillar of defense-subtle, magical, and deadly.

“I need you to prepare the sortie. Your father’s down for a day or two.” Ghause spoke with absolute command. She didn’t need the men trying to take control now. Even as she spoke, Thorn-or his dark master-tried her defences.

And what was happening at Harndon?

Aneas-ever the dutiful son-gave a tired salute. “Mother-”

“Yes, my plum?” she asked.

“Is anyone coming to rescue us? Where are Gavin and Gabriel?” He met her eye. “Mother-we can have the best hermetical defences in the known world and the highest walls, but we’re already running out of men.”

“You’re not spreading this poison, my plum?” she asked lightly.

Aneas gave her a lopsided grin-a grin that his brothers also had. “I am the soul of cheerful confidence,” he said. “Is anyone coming?”

She nodded. “Ser John Crayford is bringing the northern army,” she said.

Aneas paused a moment. Then he collected his gauntlets. “You’re lying, Mother,” he said quietly.

He had never contradicted her before.

She shrugged. “We’ll hold,” she said.

Aneas pursed his lips and nodded. “Have you given thought to escape?” he asked. “The man who claims to be Kevin Orley has promised us all some spectacular tortures and humiliations.”

“The Orleys were never worth a tinker’s curse,” she said, snapping her fingers. “And if I leave this rock, it will fall. You know that.”

He frowned. “We have a bolt hole,” he reminded her.

“I won’t be captured,” she said. “But I’m not going anywhere. Hold the walls, my last son. I’ll hold the sorcerer.”

And when Aneas was gone back to his men, she all but flew up the steps to her solar. She gazed into the ball-

Waved her hand, moving the scene this way and that, her whole intent concentrated on the crystal artifact.

“Mary Magdelene,” Ghause swore. “He’s dead!”

For too long-time she could not spare-she watched the catastrophe play out in the south. She had no idea how the tournament had played out, but the King-her brother-was dead, his corpse wrapped in linen. She was bonded with her brother in a very special way, and she found him easily, even in death. She watched the corpse, and the Galles and the Albans gather around it like the flies.

The new archbishop was giving a speech. Over her brother’s corpse.

She bit her lip.

“Henri and you, in one day?” she asked the crystal. “Goodbye, brother.”

Then she moved her hand and sent the scene spinning northward. After an agonized minute of scrolling she faced her fears. She unlaced the side of her kirtle with hurried fingers, and pulled both it and her shift over her head.

Naked, she summoned her power, and cast.

Thorn was in the midst of a complex summoning to support the siege-the parsing of two energies to augment a trebuchet. Covered by a nasty, rainy spring night, Ser Hartmut was moving his machines forward.

But an alarm went off, and he dropped all the summoned power, so suddenly a trebuchet arm suddenly whipped back, killing two sailors.

Thorn cared not, and in the twinkling of an insect’s multifaceted eye, he was gone.

Instantly, Ghause had Gabriel in the stone. The summoning did her bidding. It was dangerous, given Thorn’s proximity, but she had to know.

He was alive. Wounded-and tired.

There was his little nun. Such a useless lover, that boy-he still hadn’t straddled the little twig, although she pined for it and Ghause had tried to put a geas on her.

And the nun and a tall blonde woman were supporting…

The so-called Queen.

Ghause spat.

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” she said to God and anyone else listening. “But-an eye for an eye.”

In the fastness of her palace, she looked at the great working she’d designed and built for months.

Desiderata was one of the best defended entities that Ghause had ever worked against. She’d watched the Queen struggle directly with Thorn’s dark master. She knew the woman’s calibre now.

She knew a moment’s pity. If she knew how to kill the babe without killing the mother, she’d have done it. She honoured any woman as strong as Desiderata. And she knew Desiderata to be a true daughter of Tar.

As Ghause was herself.

Just for the space of a few heartbeats, Ghause considered relinquishing her revenge. Her brother was dead.

But when she killed the babe, her son by her brother would be King. She didn’t pause to consider the obstacles, because she herself had never let obstacles like bastardy and incest stop her from anything.

And besides-a small, ignoble portion of her just wanted to see if her great working was capable. Capable of breaching all that the dark master himself had failed to breach.

She stared into the crystal, reached through-

The moon had not risen a finger’s breadth before they rode into the yard of the great stone barn that towered like a cathedral of farming-wood and stone sixty feet high and a hundred feet long.

Lord Corcy dismounted. Two young men ran out of the barn with spears-and halted, as the whole casa drew weapons.

“They’re mine,” he said. “Haver-put that spear down and tell your brother to do the same before these gentlemen mistrust us all.” He turned to Gabriel. “My barn watch. Let me show you around.”

Blanche pressed up close on her horse-his horse, in fact. “We need linen and hot water,” she said. “Please,” she added.

Lord Corcy nodded. “There’s an office with a bed. And a fireplace.” He pointed. To the two young men, he said, “Torches and lights. These folk need to be put up inside.” He turned back to Gabriel. “Sometimes we have militia musters here-I’ve bedding for fifty.”

“No more servants,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry, my lord, but I can’t let you send to your castle.”

“There won’t be much for linens here,” Corcy said.

Gabriel snapped his fingers and pointed and Toby appeared. “Clean linen. Get every clean shirt in the casa if you must.”

Toby bowed and vanished like a conjuror’s trick.

“You are well served, my lord,” Corcy said.

“We’ve been through a fair amount.” Gabriel bowed and followed Blanche. He got an arm under the Queen’s shoulder and together with the strong blonde woman they got the Queen up the ramp of the barn and onto the threshing floor, and then through a big door to the right. There was a small panelled room.

Lord Corcy displaced Blanche and helped carry the Queen, whose legs suddenly stopped working altogether.

“Bed,” Corcy said. He pointed with his chin. Up against the end stalls, where two very curious donkeys enjoyed the warmth of the barn’s one warm room, there was a bed.

Blanche got the Queen’s feet. Amicia had one of her hands and was singing a prayer.

Blanche’s eyes met Gabriel’s for a moment. “A stable?” she asked.

“There wasn’t any room at the inn,” Gabriel snapped.

Amicia’s eye met his in intense disapproval, but Blanche laughed.

“You’re a card,” she said. “My lord.”

Ghause felt the birth pangs as if they were her own.

If the babe was born, her spell was lost. In the aethereal, mother and child were one bond until birth. The aethereal cared nothing for nature and everything for association. Separate was separate. Together was the bond.

Outside, thunder rolled. The heavens protested her decision-lightning flashed, and she regretted nothing.

“Brother,” she called. “I will make it as if you had never been.”

Thorn materialized hard by Ser Hartmut. They were so close to Ticondaga’s walls that the run-off of the rain falling on the castle’s roofs hundreds of feet above them fell on their heads.

Hartmut was leading his own mining team. He never seemed to tire, or relent.

He started-the only sign of surprise Thorn had ever seen-and half drew the hermetical artifact he called a sword. Thorn had learned by his arts that it was much more than a sword. It was more like a gate.

“You would do well not to surprise me,” Ser Hartmut growled.

Kevin Orley flipped his visor open.

Thorn ignored him. “It is now. Prepare the assault.”

Hartmut glared. “Now? In darkness, in the rain?” He was not afraid of Thorn, and he shrugged. “Eight days of your empty promises and our blood-”

“Rain will not stop us,” Thorn said.

“Soldiers like to be warm and to eat,” Hartmut said. “Mastery of this simple concept has won many battles, and forgetting it lost more.”

Thorn simply turned. “Now,” he said.

Ser Hartmut growled. Then he turned and, loaded with armour as he was, began to run back from the exposed post to which he’d crawled, towards his camp, where despite the rain, fires flickered.

Gabriel watched Amicia comfort the Queen. Most of her grave dignity was gone with the birth pangs-her face was furrowed in pain.

Blanche smiled at him. “Best be gone, my lord. Men have no stomach for this sort o’ thing, being the weaker sex, as it were.”

Gabriel had to return her smile-mostly because she had humour, and that was what he needed, just then.

“You might find out where yer squire has got to with all the linens,” she added.

Lord Corcy himself was heating water in the fireplace. But before Gabriel could even pretend to be useful, Toby entered with an armload of linen sheets, shifts, and shirts. Nell came in behind him with a pair of pretty satin pillows, a woman’s gown in brown velvet, and a nested set of copper kettles.

“Which,” Nell said, with a curtsey to all present, “Ser Christopher says as he happens to have this gown and these pillows-”

“Only Foliak goes on campaign with a dress to put on his conquests,” Gavin said from the huge doorway.

Blanche put her hands on her hips. “Men-out.”

Ser Michael came in with more linen. “Sorry, lass. That’s not some friend of your ma’s having a baby. That’s the rightful Queen of Alba. If I could, I’d pack every peer of the realm into the room.”

Gabriel nodded at Michael. “I’d forgotten that,” he said.

“Somewhere, Kaitlin isn’t far from giving birth,” Michael said. “Mayhap I’ve just given it all more thought.”

“Christ and all the saints,” swore Blanche. “The poor Queen!”

Amicia turned-with more venom than Gabriel had ever seen. Amicia looked old. She had lines on her face that she’d never had, and even the torchlight was unkind. Gabriel, who had two bad cuts on his head, a blinding headache and a left hand so sore as to penetrate all that, assumed he looked as bad.

He turned to Toby. “Get my harness off,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be attacked while the Queen gives birth. And I’m about to drop.”

As if on cue, Bad Tom appeared at the far door, by the donkeys. He had a long sword in his hand.

“Barn’s all ours,” he said. He nodded to Lord Corcy.

Corcy had been replaced at the water kettle by Nell, and he stood with a hand to the small of his back. “Weren’t you for killing us all, an hour back?”

Tom Lachlan laughed. “Nothing personal,” he said. “Better this way.”

Corcy nodded.

It was a big room, a third of the barn, and the squires and pages moved in among the knights, disarming them. The metal falling on the stone floor made a racket.

“Quiet!” demanded Amicia. “Can you so-called gentlemen not manage to let this poor woman have a little peace?”

The squires began to move about more quietly. Somehow, the scrape of metal on the floor seemed even louder.

The Queen screamed.

Ghause stood in her citadel, amidst the dark trees and the bright cascade of flowers.

The whole vastness of her working was all one brilliant plant with deep roots and a carefully cultivated single yellow rose that was as big and lush a blossom as the real had ever seen. It was perhaps more perfect for never having known real weather or real bees.

Ghause did not pray, as she did not think it fitting to pray when she was about to kill. But she did reach out to her lady.

“You promised me revenge,” she reminded her patron.

And she thought-I hope Thorn is watching. Perhaps he’ll slink home.

One slim hand reached out, and plucked the rose.

The world screamed.

Thorn could not smile in triumph, but the triumph was there. “I knew she would have to do it,” he said to the rain and the darkness.

But Ash was elsewhere.

Thorn raised his own net of cobweb and deceit and false guidance-camouflage and deception such as nature practised on herself-as long prepared as her working. Into her magnificent black cathedral of a curse he launched his own working so that it nested inside, like the resident mice and bats and moths in a castle.

“Goodbye, Ghause,” he said.

At the Queen’s scream, Amicia stood.

Gabriel suddenly understood that this was not a matter of the birth.

Blanche caught the Queen’s hand.

Gabriel stepped straight into his palace. There, Prudentia stood on her plinth. She frowned.

“It’s your mother,” she said. “Oh, Gabriel-”

Gabriel pushed open the door to the aethereal. He loosed workings that he kept ready, a careful barrage-his own shield first, as he had learned from bitter experience, and then his glittering tapestry working.

He spat names at his statues and his signs as his room whirled about him.

In the real, his heart had beaten once.

Then, having done what he could, he stepped to the door.

Prudentia moved to stop him. “Master,” she cried. “This is death, come for the Queen, from your mother.”

Gabriel nodded. “I’ve made all my decisions,” he said.

“I’m no fan of your mother, boy. She killed me. But this-you would give your life to baulk her?”

Gabriel set his jaw in a way that those who knew him often dreaded. “Yes.”

Prudentia stepped out of the way. “Goodbye.”

“I’ll be back, Pru,” he said. Then he stepped out of his palace.

In the real, Toby saw the captain pause, and his face did-that thing.

Toby had the spear to hand-he’d just put it by the fire, having oiled the shaft. Nell saw him, and without more thought he snatched it and threw it to her, and she pressed it into the captain’s unmoving hands.

In the aethereal, the curse was like a thick black curtain of felt-if an entire quadrant of the sky could be made of black felt that extended for an infinite distance.

Gabriel found himself on the infinite plain of the true aethereal. He was not alone. He and Amicia stood side by side, and Desiderata stood a pace behind them.

The curse was so remarkable that Gabriel wasted a non-breath in awe.

“I will not surrender,” Desiderata said. Gabriel watched it rush at them.

There was something in it-something riding it. He had the senses-thanks mostly to Harmodius-to see the fine details in the aethereal.

He had the time to curse his bad fortune. And his mother.

And the delightful irony that if he could reach her to tell her that he was about to offer his life to defend her target, she would relinquish the working. That and other ironies. It was all-absurd.

He had nothing to lose, and the aethereal offered the illusion of time.

“What did you promise God for my life?” he asked Amicia.

Amicia didn’t look at him. “Everything, of course,” she said.

“All I did was cast a little love charm,” he said.

She turned. Desiderata laughed aloud, for all that her existence was about to be blotted out. “She is not charmed,” Desiderata said. “By my powers I tell you.”

Gabriel wanted to grin like a boy with his first kiss. “Take power from me, Amicia. All you can. Spend, and save not.”

The three of them joined hands.

“No,” Desiderata said. “Let me.”

Amicia turned her head away from Gabriel, and began, “In nomine patri…”

She began to walk forward into the black, and they went with her, arms raised.

And then, in the way of the aethereal, he held the spear.

Too much time, and no time.

He thought that the idea of felt was itself interesting. Usually, the manifestation of the working had something to do with the caster-and everything to do with the context.

Gabriel thought-how do you defeat a mountain of felt?

And then it filled their aethereal horizon like a sudden summer storm.

Gabriel cut with the spear.

But at the moment that they met the curse, it overcame everything.

Thorn’s working was the flight of a butterfly passing a spider’s web.

But Ghause was an old, powerful spider, and in that moment her foolishness was revealed, and she saw her adversary’s working.

Discovered, but deep inside her defences, Thorn had no choice but to strike. He enveloped her power, the better to subsume her-to take every iota of her essence. Her soul. Her power.

Ghause laughed. “Richard Plangere-is that all you want of me?” she asked, and her voice dripped with the seductive contempt of an experienced woman.

She raised no shield in her instant to act. Instead, she cut him with an image-an erotic image, powered by her rich imagination and all her phantasms, full of the smells and tastes of sex.

Thorn roared. The sound shook the walls-soldiers hid their heads or trembled.

Cracks appeared in the stone of his skin, and moisture poured forth.

Damaged, he lashed back with hate.

Her laughter was extinguished as he killed her in one mighty blow, the working like a stone fist of ops carefully tended for the moment-

But not for this moment. Thorn stood in the fastness of his dark palace. His frustration was immeasurable. He collected his stored ops, the power he had saved to battle her, and cast it at the great gates of Ticondaga. The gates exploded in a hail of stone and concrete and lethal wood splinters. Heedless of his own Wild infantry or the Galles and Outwallers who thought him an ally, he began to call down the stars themselves from the heavens and hurl them at the fortress, and his aim had only grown more accurate since the taking of Albinkirk.

Like a fist of God, the first rock struck the high tower from which Ghause had cast, and blew it to atoms, leaving only a glow of incredible heat and glasslike slag where her corpse had been cooling in the high tower.

Aneas had enough talent to know the breath when his mother died-and to know what it meant.

He was in the inner yard, by the doors of the great hall, and he had a dozen veteran men-at-arms to hand.

“Follow me,” he said.

Muriens men-at-arms didn’t ask questions.

The Earl of Westwall had trouble with his eye-double vision, rather than no vision. But he armed as soon as his men told him of the size of the assault, and he was waiting in person when the gates were blown in by sorcery.

He was knocked from his feet. And as he struggled to rise to his knees, he knew she was dead. Nothing but her death would have allowed the spells on the gates to give way.

He would have cried. But there was no time. Stone trolls were coming up the ramp of rubble that had once been the gatehouse.

“You old bitch,” he said with enormous fondness. And went at the trolls, and his death, with a high heart.

Gabriel had never been in this kind of sorcerous duel before. Neither, he suspected, had Harmodius-no help was coming from that quarter.

The spear cut the curse the way a heavy, sharp knife would cut a tapestry-with immense difficulty. The curse seemed to rip more than cut. The felt analogy was shredded into tougher filaments that tried to bind the spear in place. Further, tendrils of the curse gathered to him-his aethereal legs were matted with the stuff.

He cut back on a new line, amazed that the feeling of powering the cut with his waist and shoulders was exactly like using the weapon in the real and then such thoughts were lost in the heart-breaking futility of the third, weakest cut.

The curse was clearly winning.

It didn’t seem to do him any harm.

So he stopped fighting, pointed the spear at the heart of it, and spoke one word in High Archaic.

“Fume.”

If Amicia preferred God’s power to his, he’d use it himself.

The curse burned. It burned best where he had cut it with the spear.

A tendril of the curse drifted across his eyes and another across his mouth even as he poured power into the fire. He tried to move the spear, but it was locked in place, a thousand black ribbons criss-crossing on the haft.

He brought his first casting-the shield-to his face, and the energy forced the tendrils away. He took a breath and cast, imagining his memory palace to find a piece of Mag’s superb ice bridge working and throw it into the curse.

Water, fire and ice.

It was one way to unmake felt.

Amicia felt Gabriel leave her, and then she was with Desiderata in a castle of golden bricks with walls as tall as ten men and lofty towers.

“Why didn’t he come with us?” Desiderata asked. “I could use his strong arms on my battlements.”

“He always has to do things himself,” Amicia said.

The wave of black water crashed against the stone palace. It was clever, the water-it went over the battlements and the towers, filling the courtyards and the spaces between.

But it could not enter the citadel, and it could not seem to undermine the walls.

Amicia raised a shield of brilliant gold, and another of sparkling green-no mean feat in the aethereal itself.

The magnificent golden outer wall collapsed.

“Oh, my God,” Desiderata said. “Oh, blessed Virgin-this is not the dark lord of the dungeon.”

The aethereal ground on which the golden walls rested began to erode away, disintegrating like the dream it was.

Amicia was beyond anything of her experience of the hermetical-or anything else. She could only bow her head and pray.

And continue to flood her shields with all the power that she possessed.

The citadel walls began to collapse from the bottom.

“My baby!” screamed Desiderata. She reached out, and put her hands on the walls of her palace and held them with her own will, commanding their obedience, and she began to build a flood of gold to link them.

The black water leached through the widening cracks and puddled on the new golden floor-and began to rise.

Outside was a gale of laughter.

Desiderata raised her head and her eyes met Amicia’s with no fear. Only pride.

“There he is, come to see my fall,” she said.

Between sleeping and waking…

Gabriel moved the spear easily, back and forth, and hunks of the curse like dead goat-hair fell away.

It was a waste of will, however, as the curse was suddenly dead, unpowered. Impotent.

Or complete.

Gabriel retreated like a beaten army-but one with its rearguard intact. Or that was his analogy, and analogies matter in the aethereal. He chose to retreat through the door of his palace, because he could see nothing but the tattered remnants of the curse around him-no Amicia, and no Queen.

The door was shut. He had a moment of panic before he realized that, almost by definition, he had the key. He opened it, and there was Pru.

He slammed the door shut, and leaned against it, spear in hand. “Told you I’d be back,” he said.

Prudentia, who always rose to his arrogance, said nothing. Only, when he’d breathed a few times, she said, “You should know. Your mother is dead.”

Of course she was dead.

The curse was unpowered.

A host of thoughts came into his head, and filled it.

The back of her hand struck him. “Are you an idiot?” she screamed.

Her hands folded across his back in a warm embrace.

Crouching over Prudentia’s body.

His hand on her latch, and her head next to Ser Henri’s on a pillow.

His first casting in her solar-a housefly subsumed, its tiny spirit in him.

Her voice in his ear the day-the day-

He mastered himself. It was what he did.

“And Amicia and the Queen?” he asked Prudentia.

“Ticondaga is falling even now,” Prudentia said. “Can you not feel it?”

He could. Oh, now that he let himself, he could feel it. The stones of the ancient castle were in his soul, and they were being pounded with fire and rock and hate. Only the struggle with the curse would have covered this much terror.

For the first time in his life, Gabriel fled the aethereal, because it was more terrible than the real.

Nell pushed the spear into the captain’s hands-and instantly he began to use it. She only just rolled free, and she had a scar on her right ankle for the rest of her life.

And in the next heartbeat or two, the Queen screamed again, and then said, quite clearly, “My baby!”

Tom pushed Toby out of the way and drew his sword. “By Tar,” he roared. “Let me at it, whatever it is!”

But denied access to the aethereal, he was only a spectator to the captain’s one-sided fight. The spear shone like a bolt of lightning, and blue-red fire crackled around the room.

All the candles went out, then the fire.

“Jesus Christ!” someone said.

Nell found herself by Lord Corcy. He was saying “pater noster” over and over again.

The darkness was absolute, and then sound went, too, and there was only the beat of her heart and the feel of the floor and the mantelpiece under her arm. The fear was itself like a heavy, wet piece of damp felt, and threatened to suffocate her-she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see or hear-

And then a baby cried.

Blanche, at the Queen’s side, had never quit her task, despite horror and terror and blindness. Her arms were between the Queen’s legs, and when she had the head, she did what her mother had said to her fifty times-ran a hand back, and pulled gently.

Pulled the puling thing clear, and gave it a slap.

In that moment, the curse shattered.

No light returned, because the candles and torches and fire were truly extinguished. But the quality of darkness changed, and sound returned.

Nell struggled with her belt pouch to find her tinder kit.

Blanche clutched the baby, wiping all the birthing away with one of Bad Tom’s best ruffled shirts. She dared not assay the darkened room, so she sat, the baby crushed to her.

She heard the other woman-the living saint-say, “Fiat Lux.”

A candle popped into flame. The light seemed as bright as daylight.

“God be praised,” said the sheriff, on his knees. Then-a set look on his face-the man rose and approached the bed.

“Your grace,” he said. “It is said that a woman in the moment of birth cannot lie. Whose child is this?”

Desiderata groaned. But her eyes opened in her sweat-slick face. “The King my husband’s, and no other,” she said.

Then the sheriff went back to his knees, and as Nell lit more candles, the other men bent their knees.

Ser Gabriel was crying.

No one present could remember seeing him cry, and Sauce, who might have had something to say, was two hundred leagues away.

But he reached out with the spear.

It pointed straight at the babe.

Before Blanche could think to protest, the spear moved, and cut the cord.

“God save the King,” Ser Gabriel said. He knelt.

For a moment, that’s how they all were-the Queen on the bed, where Blanche put her babe in her arms and knelt in her turn, and Amicia standing at the Queen’s shoulder, her face seeming to emit light, and all the knights and pages and squires on their knees, bareheaded, in a barn on a late spring night.

There was Bad Tom, who had no notion of kneeling to any man, and there was Nell, whose eyes had filled with tears, and there was Ser Michael, who wore a grin as wide as a cheese, and Ser Gavin, who looked as if he’d been kicked, and there were two boys who watched the barn and Ser Bertran, silent as usual, and Ser Danved, silent for once, and Cully and Ricard Lantorn and Cat Evil-all on their knees, and Francis Atcourt and Chris Foliak and Lord Corcy and the sheriff and Toby and Jean and a dozen others in the candle-lit dark, all on their knees on the dirty stone flags.

“God save the King,” they said.

Then Amicia began to sing. She raised her voice in her Order’s Te Deum, softly at first. But Ricar Orcsbane knew it, and Lord Corcy, and Gabriel-they sang, and other voices took up the hymn until the barn was full of the sound.

And Gavin went to his brother.

“What?” he asked, before the amen had sounded. “What has happened?”

Gabriel held himself together long enough to stumble out into the night, his brother at his heels. He found a milking shed, turned, and took Gavin by the shoulders.

“What?” Gavin said. “You look like you lost your best friend.” He paused. “We won, didn’t we? We saved the baby.” He looked at Gabriel’s rare, open tears. “Christ, you’re scaring me. Why do I feel this way?” he demanded.

Gabriel simply collapsed like a marionette with cut strings, and began to shiver; he said, “Nooooooo,” for a while, and sobbed.

To Gavin, it was more terrifying than fighting a hasternoch or a wyvern. He was tempted to walk away into the comforting darkness, and he told himself that his brother would rather be alone.

But he also told himself that he had a lot of atoning left to do for being the cruel brother, and so finally he pushed himself into his brother’s personal space with the same kind of effort that he’d have used to close for a grapple in a fight to the death. It was-embarrassing.

Gabriel threw his arms around his brother. “They are all dead,” he said clearly. And then he let go of any attempt at self-control.

Eventually, embarrassed and more than a little angry, Gabriel pulled himself out of his brother’s arms. “I hate that,” he sputtered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“What, being human?” Gavin nodded. “Who’s all dead?”

“Mater. Pater. Ticondaga. They’re all dead.” He lost it again, moaning.

He wept.

Gavin, puzzled, looked at him. “I’m sorry even to ask this-but are you sure?”

“Unngh-I’m-sure.” He paused. “Ohhh. Ohh, God.” He had trouble speaking, and his mouth opened and closed, opened and closed.

Gavin fidgeted. He couldn’t take this seriously. His mother was literally a force of nature-not something that could even become dead.

“I killed them,” Gabriel said. “Fuck. Fuck. I… got it so wrong.”

Gavin began to fear that his brother couldn’t be lying. But he walled off the horror-father and mother and brothers all dead. He simply willed it away. “How in God’s name can you have killed them?” he asked.

Gabriel’s tear-filled eyes glittered like something malevolent in the dark. They had a faint red sheen to them. “I was deceived. Thorn is stronger-aagh. Stronger than Mater thought, and stronger than I thought.” He paused, caught his breath-lost it again, and sobbed anew.

Gavin cleared his throat. “And that’s your fault?” he asked. “Isn’t that a little selfish, even for you, brother?”

Gabriel raised his head. He didn’t chuckle, or smile, but something in his eyes said that Gavin’s shot had gone home.

“How can you know they’re lost?” Gavin said reasonably.

Gabriel coughed and cleared his throat and rubbed his nose on the wool sleeve of his pourpoint. He cleared his throat again. “Like it or not, I’ve always been able to tell where Mater was-to some degree. Unless she hid herself.” He choked a moment on some memory, and then sat suddenly on a bench. A milking bench.

“Oh, fuck, I have screwed this up,” he said, and put his head in his hands.

The reality of the death of his mother and father was just starting to strike Gavin. He cared for his brother, and he’d been more interested in supporting him-he, who seldom if ever needed support. But things began to seep in around the edges…

“Pater, too?” he asked.

Gabriel raised his head. His eyes were oddly swollen, and Gavin had a flash of the last time he’d seen Gabriel like this-when he and Aneas and Agrain had ambushed Gabriel and beaten him to a pulp. A long time ago.

Then, he’d spat defiance through his tears.

Now, he shook his head. “I don’t know.” He met Gavin’s eyes. “Damn it, Gavin, you have no sight in the aethereal. You have no idea. It’s like a dream. Nothing is clear unless you make it clear, and if you exert your will to make it clear, you may be changing it.”

He paused. “Oh, merde.” He was recovering-Gavin could see the wheels turning. He was just comprehending, himself. He loved his father-a tough, crafty man who-

As if he’d been punched, Gavin went down on one knee.

Gabriel put his arms around his brother. “Turn about is fair play,” he said into his brother’s hair. But then he was crying again.

“Damn you,” he muttered, struggling visibly for his self-control. But he failed.

Then they both cried together.

For no apparent reason, Nell found herself being a woman, not a military page. Well-there was a reason-there was a baby.

He had healthy lungs and a determined air of survival, and wanted everyone to know it. Big, tough men quailed at his cries.

Small, tough women did not. So Nell joined Petite Mouline, Ser Bertran’s page, and a handful of other women tending the baby, while some of the company’s best, and hardest-working men-Toby, for example, and Robin-cowered in corners and made extravagant excuses and furiously polished armour. Bad Tom busied himself setting a watch.

Blanche led the women. She clearly knew more about babies than the others, and they had no matrons or mothers to guide them.

Blanche had something of the captain’s gift. As the hours wore on, Nell began to suspect that Blanche knew little more about babies than she did herself, but she had solid notions of cleanliness and a determined, confident air.

When the bells of the parish church rang twelve, the baby went to sleep like the extinguishing of a candle.

Throughout the barn, men muttered, sighed, and fell instantly asleep themselves.

Just after the bell rang for one o’clock, Blanche finished tidying up the birthing room and smiled gratefully at Nell, who had stayed with her when all the others had gone to sleep. The nun-everyone said she was a nun, despite her clothes-sat by the Queen, but she did not speak or move-she was eerily like a statue of the Virgin, and Blanche knew, in some instinctive way, that she was guarding the Queen, or the baby, or both.

She was, however, useless for the normal work, and there was an unholy amount of blood, mucus, and a thick black sludge emitted by the baby that was more disgusting than anything she’d faced in five solid years as a palace laundress.

Blanche piled all the foul linen in one horrible pack, and wrapped it in burlap, and was saddened to note the state of her own kirtle-a grey, shapeless beggar’s garment to start with, it was now quite foul. Blanche, who always prided herself on her clean, neat prettiness, was a little surprised at her own state.

Nell, who seemed a sensible, smart lass even if she did dress like a man, was now falling asleep every time she stopped moving.

“Go sleep,” Blanche said in her laundry command voice. “You’ve been a hero.”

Nell grinned. “You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “I did some fighting today.”

Blanche hadn’t noticed that the other girl was wounded, but she had a nasty gash on her left forearm and another, already closed but black as pitch, on her ankle.

“The other bastard’s hilt,” Nell said.

Blanche sighed and tore the cleanest strip from her shift-one of her own shifts worn under the beggar’s kirtle. She regretted it, but Nell was the closest thing she had to a friend in the lunatic asylum into which she felt she’d fallen. And Nell-another competent, hard-working girl-had the big cauldron boiling, having fed it a succession of small branches brought by guilty-looking young men. Including one tall fellow who kept smiling at Nell even through the chaos of the evening.

Blanche scooped some boiling water and made a quick, hot poultice as her mother had taught her and started to clean the wound. “Saints, sweetie, that’s open. It’ll go red and sick.” Blanche took a deep breath to steady herself. “I should stitch it closed,” she said.

Nell looked at her. “You know how?” she asked.

Blanche frowned. “I’ve seen it done,” she said. “And I’m a fine sewer by trade-none better.”

“Boil the thread and fire the needle,” Nell said. “I seen that part in Morea.”

Three minutes later, it was done. Nell looked at the neat, even stitches with something like reverence.

Blanche also looked pleased. “Never sewn flesh afore,” she said. “Yech. What a day. That boy-your husband?” she asked.

Nell laughed. “Lover,” she said. “I want to be a knight, like Sauce, not a baby maker.”

Blanche gave a little cough. Her shock must have shown. Nell shrugged. “In the company, you do what you like as long as you don’t make waves. I never been treated like I am here. Almost like I was a man.”

Blanche grinned. “I don’t want to be treated like a man,” she said, and giggled despite her fatigue.

Nell managed a giggle, too. “Not like that, silly,” she said. Then shrugged, no doubt thinking of Oak Pew. “Unless that’s what suits you. All the captain cares about is work and fighting. There really ain’t no other rules.”

“Aren’t any other rules,” Blanche said. She smiled in apology. “Sorry, my ma was a daemon for words. Don’t you have any women-no offence-in this company?”

Nell shrugged. “There’s some. You meet Sukey?”

Blanche nodded. “Dark hair-brought all the sheets.”

“She couldn’t stay because she’s in charge of everyone’s billets. Like an officer. Her mother’s the head woman of the whole company. Course, her mother’s a sorceress, too. And a seamstress.” Nell sat back. “Mag does near everything. She knows all the songs, too.” She looked down at her arm, which Blanche was patting with a hot, wet rag.

Blanche took a strip of clean, dry linen, looked at it critically, and put it down to wash her hands.

“You have a boy?” Nell asked.

“No,” Blanche admitted.

“No boy?” Nell asked. It seemed terrible to her.

Blanche smiled. “I’m no better than I ought to be, as my mother would say with a sniff. I’ve had a few boys. But at the palace, it makes trouble if you do aught more than flirt with staff, and out in the streets-” She pursed her lips. “There’s a host of apprentices would like to have me. But I’m not ready to be caught.” She laughed.

She wrapped Nell’s arm quickly, and a little too tight.

“Where are you going to sleep?” Nell asked.

“Right here, on the floor,” Blanche said. She began putting the filthy linen into the nice clean boiling water, as if she was the lowest laundry girl back at the palace.

Nell shook her head. “We have straw pallets and blankets and all proper-”

Blanche laughed at the idea that a straw pallet and a blanket was proper.

“Come sleep wi’ my lance. I’ll see you right. In the morning, Sukey will assign you somewhere.”

Blanche nodded. “I’m the Queen’s laundress,” she said. “I don’t really need to be assigned.”

Nell looked as if she might say more, but Diccon chose that moment to poke his head in.

Blanche was appalled at how casually these people dealt with the Queen. But she saw her new friend’s face light up.

“Run along and have a chat wi’ your lad,” she said in her best grown-up voice. “I’ll finish this little pile of things and hang ’em. But come back and show me where to sleep, eh, my sweet?”

Nell nodded and gripped her hand like a man. “I’ll be back,” she said. “Diccon’s never long,” she said with a sly smile.

Diccon’s head vanished.

“You know how babies is made?” Blanche asked.

“Oh, aye. I even practise, from time to time. You?” Nell shot back.

Both girls laughed, and then Nell went off into the dark stone barn, and Blanche kept boiling her linens, though her eyes would scarcely stay open.

She did a haphazard job, by her own standards. Really, what she needed was more clean water, and she was, just for a moment, too tired to fetch it and a little defeated by not knowing where it had come from.

The inner door opened, and she turned, hoping for Nell.

Instead, it was the dark-haired lord. The Red Knight, except he’d worn green all day.

She was seated, and tired, but she managed to get to her feet.

He waved a hand and looked at the Queen and the babe asleep on her breast. The Queen’s eyes were open-Blanche had a moment of unease at what she might have heard, but she smiled.

“I’m alive,” she said, in her normal voice. “Is that Blanche?”

Blanche curtsied.

“What are you doing here, Blanche?” she asked. “Never mind, my dear. May I have a cup of water?”

“Oh, your grace, I’m out of water,” Blanche said. Both of them were whispering. The baby stayed asleep.

“I’ll fetch water,” the Red Knight said. He looked odd. Like he’d been crying. Blanche thought he was the handsomest man, but his eyes were red and puffy like a little boy caught stealing a cake.

“Just show me,” Blanche said.

“I can fetch water,” he insisted. He took the big bucket from where it sat by the fire. In the flickering light, it was easy to misjudge distance, and he bumped into her hard.

“A thousand apologies, Mistress,” he said.

He went out.

Blanche was considering following him, but then the Queen would be alone, except for Sister Amicia who was, somehow, not quite human. Not directly with them. Blanche lacked a vocabulary to describe her, but she shone softly golden in the darkness.

The Queen called out. “I’m sorry to be so helpless, Blanche, but I am so hungry…”

Blanche had no idea where to get food, and she didn’t want to interrupt Nell.

The Red Knight came back and managed to set the full bucket down by the fire without spilling a drop.

“My lord, can you-fetch some food for her grace?” Blanche hesitated. It was always dangerous, giving any kind of a demand to a lord. “I’m sorry, my lord, but it’s for the Queen.”

“Ser Gabriel will do,” he said. “We did share a saddle all day. Your grace,” he said, bowing in the Queen’s direction, “what do you fancy that I can find for you? I wouldn’t wake my worst enemy right now for service.”

The Queen stretched out a hand and took his. “You saved us,” she said.

Ser Gabriel knelt.

“Ghause…” the Queen said.

Gabriel cleared his throat. Blanche thought he might have sobbed. “She tried to kill you and the babe,” he said.

“And now?” the Queen asked.

“I fear she is dead-though not through our efforts.” Gabriel’s smile was shaky in the firelight, and Blanche turned away, unwilling to watch. “I hope it is not treason to want my mother not on my conscience.”

“Your mother is dead?” the Queen asked. “Oh, ser knight, I’m so sorry.”

“If you are so sorry immediately after she tried to kill you and your baby,” he said savagely, “then you are a saint.”

Desiderata smiled. “A hungry saint,” she said with a glance at Sister Amicia. “She is watching in the aethereal.”

Ser Gabriel put a hand on her forehead with great tenderness. “In the Wild-when a Power reaches a certain-level-”

Desiderata nodded. “I know. Apotheosis.”

Gabriel looked at Amicia. “I think she’s close.” He shrugged, trying to make light of it. “What happens to Christians? Sainthood?”

Desiderata smiled. “She will not leave us just yet, ser knight,” she said with serene confidence, as if…

… as if someone else were speaking through her. Blanche shivered. She knew the Queen intimately-and the Queen was somehow different.

But Ser Gabriel merely bowed. “Can I help you with a hale winter apple, some sausage and a nice hard cheese?” he asked.

Blanche busied herself with the water. She served the Queen two cups and put a third at her elbow. Then she put the rest on to heat in a big, often-patched copper cauldron that seemed to have more rivets than a porcupine had quills. It held water well enough, though.

She stirred her first laundry load and skimmed the foulest crud off the top.

Ser Gabriel came back with food. At the first scent of the sausage, Blanche realized that she, too, was famished.

He knelt by the Queen and fed her.

While she was chewing, he asked, “Can you ride tomorrow, your grace?”

Blanche put a hand to her throat, but the Queen managed a chuckle.

“I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?” she asked. “De Vrailly won’t give me a day to rest.”

Ser Gabriel was cutting sausage with his eating knife. “I fancy it is the archbishop at the root of this, and not poor de Vrailly.”

“Poor de Vrailly?” Desiderata asked, and the open malice in her voice was the Queen that Blanche knew. Human. And angry.

“He’s a pawn,” Ser Gabriel said. “We are all pawns.”

“Now you sound like de Rohan,” she said. “Yes, I can ride tomorrow. Or right now, if you let me have more cheese first. Promise me you’ll feed Blanche, too. She’s done nothing but ride and work all day.”

Ser Gabriel nodded. He put the last piece of cheese in her mouth as if she was an infant. “I can give you about eight more hours,” he said. “Unless the news is bad.”

“Worse than the death of your mother?” Desiderata asked. “I’m sorry, that was pert.”

Ser Gabriel managed a smile. “Yes. Many things could be worse. Mater and I seldom saw eye to eye.”

“You saved me,” Desiderata said again. “I will never forget it.”

Ser Gabriel chuckled. It was a dark sound with no pleasure in it. “Can I tell you something?” he asked. He was cutting the apple into slices.

Blanche suspected that they’d forgotten she was there, but as a servant to royals, she was used enough to the feeling. But the Red Knight’s manner scared her.

The knife paused on the apple.

“Yes, if you will,” Desiderata said.

“My mother wanted me to be King,” he said.

Desiderata’s breath was loud.

The small eating knife rested against the apple’s skin. And cut.

“It is the deepest irony,” the Red Knight said, “that on the very night of her death, I have you and your babe under my hand.”

He reached out, a piece of apple pressed to the knife blade by the pressure of his thumb. The knife blade passed within a fraction of an inch of the Queen’s mouth and all but rested on her cheek as he pressed the apple slice between her lips.

The Queen’s eyes were locked on his.

Sweet Christ, he seemed so nice.

Blanche was moving, but she was too far away.

“You never wanted to be King,” Desiderata said. If the knife troubled her, she didn’t give a sign. Blanche’s lunge was checked by the pail of water, over which she tripped.

Both heads turned. The Red Knight rose, cut the last piece of apple in half, gave the Queen one part and ate the other himself. He shook his head. “The world is an odd place, your grace,” he said. “Nothing is what it seems, and few things worth having are easy to have. I suppose there is a man who, finding the power of Alba under his horse’s hooves on the road, would abandon everything he’s ever done to make himself King.” He bowed, but somehow his glance collected Blanche. He gave her a hand and helped her up. “The Queen is in no danger from me, Lady Blanche. I am not my mother.”

Desiderata smiled-and it was like her old smile, full of a woman’s provocative wisdom. “But you wanted me to know,” she said.

The Red Knight shrugged. “I suppose. There’s no one else to share the jest save Blanche. Lady Blanche, I’ll fetch you some food.”

“I’m not a lady,” she hissed at his back. Her heart was beating very fast.

She had really thought he was about to kill the Queen.

When he was gone, the Queen’s face sagged. “Oh, blessed Virgin, give me strength,” she said. She managed a tired smile at Blanche. “Oh, he scared me, too, Blanche.” She looked around. “We need a Royal Standard, Blanche.”

Blanche laughed. “Your grace, I’m a fine hand with a needle, but even I couldn’t run up a gold dragon tonight.”

She held a cup of water for her mistress to drink, and used a cleanish spot on her kirtle to wipe the Queen’s lips. “Sleep, your grace. I don’t think he’d actually… but I’ll still attend you.”

“Nonsense, my dear. Go sleep. He’s not as dangerous as he-”

Ser Gabriel came in. He had a tray this time-a tray which proved to be an archer’s leather and steel buckler full of bread and cheese and apples.

He motioned to Blanche.

She looked at the Queen, but her eyes were already closed. Her babe lay on her breast with his eyes tightly shut and mouth slightly open.

Blanche glanced back at the Red Knight, who beckoned her. She shut the door to the Queen’s chamber behind her. There was a small stall-probably the abode of a favoured riding horse-just off the passage. He had a camp stool and an upturned barrel there and he set the food down.

“May I join you?” he asked.

“I’m not gentry,” she said. “You don’t have to waste your fine manners on me.”

“Alas, once started they’re very hard to turn off.” He sat on a leather trousseau rather suddenly, as if his knees had given way.

“Does all your chivalry extend to terrifying my mistress, then?” she asked.

He looked at her. His eyes were queer in the darkness-almost like a cat’s. He took out a knife-the same knife-and began to cut another apple into slices. He held one out to her and she took it without thinking and ate it. The apple was tart and hard despite a winter in a cold cellar, and she could not stop herself from seizing the next two slices he offered, greedily.

His mouth made a strange shape-neither smile nor frown. “Sometimes, things need to be said, between people of power,” he said. “Even between lovers, or parents. Things that show intent, or honesty. Or simply draw a line, for everyone’s peace.” He sat back, so his face was hidden, except his odd eyes.

It occurred to Blanche that he was giving her a real answer. It was like when her mother had first spoken to her as a woman. Heady stuff. She was alone with him. She suspected his motives. But he was interesting.

“You had to tell her that you could kill her and be King?” she asked. She was into the cheese.

So was he. “Do you think she’d rather go to sleep wondering what was on my mind?” he asked. “Or knowing?”

Blanche chewed. “Depends,” she said.

“Too true,” he said. “The bread’s stale.”

“I’ve had stale bread before,” she said, and took a slice. It was good bread, if a day or two old. “We lived in Cheapside.”

He poured wine into a somewhat crumpled silver cup. “We’ll have to share,” he said. “I tried to find Wilful’s cup, or Michael’s, but I couldn’t in the dark.”

She murmured a prayer and drank. The wine was dark red and had a lovely taste, almost as if it had cinnamon in it, with a little sweetness.

“Does your company always eat and drink this well?” she asked.

His teeth flashed. “Good food and good wine recruit more men-and women-than silver and gold,” he said. “When Jehan and Sauce and I started the company, we agreed we’d always have good food.” He said, “My father always fed his men…” And stopped, his face working. He put his face in his hands for a moment, and she wondered if he was laughing, but she thought perhaps-not.

She rose to her knees and handed him the wine cup. He took it carefully-so carefully that he didn’t touch her. Blanche was used to a more forward kind of boy and dismissed her earlier suspicions of his intentions.

She wondered what it would be like to be his mistress. Was he rich? He was likely to be the Queen’s captain for some time. He had nice manners-nicer than the court gallants she’d known.

She almost giggled aloud at such an absurd fantasy. Blanche, the laundry mistress, was more like her speed.

“You drank all the wine!” he said in mock annoyance. He had cried, then. Odd man. And now, like all men, sought to pretend he hadn’t.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“You tell that to all your boys,” he said.

She blushed, but it was dark. “I’m so sorry, my lord,” she said. “I should go look at the Queen. The wine was very good.”

“Your servant, Lady Blanche,” he said.

He rose-for a moment she thought he might…

Then he was past her, holding the door. “Since you tumbled the last bucket,” he said wryly, “I’ll draw another before I rest.”

He came back with the bucket, and with Nell, who had a straw palliasse over her arms and her boy in tow. The two of them made her a bed at the foot of the Queen’s. Nell looked well pleased-Blanche, in passing, plucked a straw out of her hair. Diccon, her young man, was diligent in avoiding his captain’s glance.

The Red Knight nodded, and went out the door.

Blanche fell onto her pallet and was asleep before she could think.

Gabriel fell into the straw next to his brother. Gavin muttered something. He’d been kind enough to leave room and two blankets. Gabriel refused to think about Ticondaga or all the errors he’d made-because if he stayed awake mourning, the morrow would be worse.

He closed his eyes. Smiled at a thought instead of weeping, and went into his palace of power. There-in the cold, clear world of the aethereal -he could work his own sleep.

“You need to sleep,” Pru said.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said.

He cast a simple working, using only two symbols and one statue. Pru’s hands moved, and he was asleep.

“Gabriel-they want you. Gabriel-get up!”

Gabriel surfaced slowly. His self-imposed working was strong enough to keep him down unless he made an effort of will. The effort of will broke the working, but it also brought him a flood of images.

“Ohh,” he said. He moaned. “Oh, noooooo.”

Mater, dead. Ticondaga-destroyed. Thorn, triumphant. The Queen. Amicia.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Sorry.” Gavin was shaking him. “It is Dan Favour, from Gelfred, and he says it has to be you.”

“Fuck,” he said again. He sat up. His eyes filled with tears and he banished them as best he could.

He rose from his blankets in shirt and hose and climbed over the rest of his lance and his casa sleeping in a small loft. Nell cursed him. Gavin had a taper lit and handed it to him.

“I’m going back to sleep,” he said.

Gabriel wished he had that power. Instead he went down a ladder and then out to the main area of the barn, where long lines of men and women lay in rows on straw bundles or pallets. The barn was a cacophony of snores and heavy breathing.

The outside air was sharp and cold. He saw Ser Danved in full harness, standing watch with his lance by the road. Cully was dressed. He was buckling his sword belt while he talked to young Favour, who was head to toe in a dark green that looked mostly black in the fitful torchlight.

Cully gave a sketchy salute. “Sorry, Cap’n,” he said. “But you ha’ to hear this your own sel’.”

Favour knelt on one knee. “My lord,” he said. “Ser Gelfred ordered me to find you-he sent ten of us out. We have the main column formed as you ordered, south of Lorica.” He looked at Cully. “But there’s already an army on the roads-Galles and Albans and much of what’s left of the Royal Guard. More’n a thousand lances, my lord.”

Cully had the captain’s case, and he unrolled a map. It was not very accurate, because it had been designed merely to give a traveller distances from various towns to Harndon.

“At last light, de Vrailly was at Second Bridge,” Favour said.

“Get to the bad part,” Cully said.

Favour cleared his throat. “There’s banners with de Vrailly,” he said. “Towbray’s banners.”

Gabriel struggled to be awake. “Towbray? He’s in the dungeons-”

“Ser Gelfred picked up a couple of royal archers yester e’en,” Favour said, his eyes on Cully. “Looking for new employment, they said, as the Earl of Towbray had sworn fealty to de Vrailly.”

Gabriel nodded. “That could be,” he said. “Wake Ser Michael.” He frowned.

Lord Corcy appeared out of the darkness. “Towbray-that snake,” he said.

Gabriel would, in that moment, have preferred almost any other man awake rather than the old Alban lord, who was possibly an ally but not yet proven. But there was no crying over spilled milk. “Towbray has a passion for changing sides, I agree,” he said.

“His presence will cement the loyalty of many of the southern barons,” Corcy said.

Gabriel stared into the darkness, and then down at his map. He measured a distance-Second Bridge to Lorica.

“How long for you to reach Gelfred?” he asked.

Favour bowed. “Before daylight. I swear it.”

Ser Michael appeared from the barn. He looked the way Gabriel felt.

“Your pater’s with de Vrailly,” he said bluntly.

Michael froze.

Gabriel watched him carefully.

“Idiot,” Michael swore.

Gabriel found that he’d stopped breathing for a moment, and now he breathed again. He put his arms around Michael. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve gotten knocked around the last few hours-it’s as if the pillars of the earth have been knocked over.”

Michael spat. “I came here to rescue him,” he said.

“He refused to go with Ser Ranald, two days back,” Favour said. “I’m that sorry, Ser Michael, but we was-not best pleased. He was the only royal prisoner to turn us down.”

“That idiot,” Ser Michael said. He looked at his captain and shrugged. “So?”

“Officers,” the captain said.

Blanche was awakened to find Nell leaning over her.

“Wake up, girl!” Nell said. “Get the Queen up!”

The babe awoke and, finding the world changed, challenged it with a yell.

Outside, a brazen trumpet rang out a long call.

The barn seemed to explode into motion. Once, as a child, Blanche had seen her mother find a nest of mice in a chest in their garret. As soon as she touched it, mice ran in every direction, making her mother scream.

This was like that, except that the mice were unkempt men and women.

At the door, an archer stopped Nell.

“We attacked?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Nell spat, and pushed past him, looking for horses.

Nothing had been packed well in the exhausted darkness. The cursing from beyond the door was fluent and very descriptive. Blanche might have admired it, but she had all her damp laundry to pile into a basket thrown through the door by Nell’s boy.

The babe was louder than the trumpet.

Sister Amicia awoke-if she had been asleep. She picked the baby off her mother’s lap as soon as it finished feeding and began to bounce it. She grinned a very un-saintlike grin at Blanche.

Blanche got the Queen bathed-just a sponge and lukewarm water-and into a shift that hung on her like a sack. Then she put the Queen in the same gown she’d worn the day before-the white gown of a bride or a penitent sinner. The gown in which the Queen would have been burned.

“Don’t fuss,” Desiderata said, taking her baby back from Amicia. “Don’t fuss. If we’re moving now, there’s a reason. Be quick, Blanche. Leave anything you cannot carry.”

Blanche frowned, thinking that it wouldn’t be the Queen’s problem if Blanche had no clothes and no clean swaddling for the baby.

But again, Nell appeared to save her. She had Blanche’s palfrey of the day before in the small stall just outside the door, and she had a donkey. Cully, the master archer, stood by the donkey.

“Just gi’ me your baskets,” he said kindly. “I’ll see ’em onto the animal.”

Blanche favoured him with a smile. She knew she must look a fright, but there was nothing she could do-no bath, no clothes, no nothing.

The saddle on her palfrey was worth more than her whole wardrobe had ever been worth, and she wondered whose it had been.

Cully tightened a belt and set the tine of the buckle, and gave a tug at the laundry basket. It didn’t move.

“You ha’ any trouble with this animal, call me, my lady,” he said.

“I’m no lady,” Blanche said.

Cully grinned. But he said nothing, and then he was through the great double door of the barn.

“Archers-on me! Fall into the left with your horse to hand.” He took his bascinet-as fine as many a knight’s-off the pommel of his saddle and pulled the aventail over his head.

An archer brushed past her and his hands tried most of her body as he went past. The man leered back at her.

Blanche’s right hand caught him just above his eyebrow and slammed him against the doorpost.

Another archer laughed. “She’s a quick ’un, Cat!” he said. He grinned at Blanche, who glared.

Then the trumpet rang again, and armoured figures poured into the great barn’s yard. Pages scurried by with horses-chargers and riding horses, sometimes as many as three horses to a page. The men-at-arms began to mount.

She got the Queen up on another palfrey brought by a page she didn’t know. That page was also a woman, a pleasant, dark-haired woman old enough to be Nell’s mother.

“They call me Petite Mouline,” she said in an Alban deeply accented with Occitan. “The cap’n says that this ’orse is for the lady Queen, yes?”

Petite Mouline had a fine breastplate and her maille was dark and well oiled over a bright red arming coat. Her smile was warmer than the horse. “Oh, the petit bébé!”

The Queen emerged from her birthing room with the sister at her elbow, and she put a dainty foot into her stirrup and leaped into the saddle with a vitality that belied the last few hours.

Amicia mounted her own horse more carefully.

In the stone-flagged yard, Bad Tom’s voice-as loud as Archangel Gabriel’s trumpet-put the company-or rather, the fragment of the company with them-into order.

The Red Knight was in full harness. Outside, the moon was small and bright-bright enough to cast shadows on the ground and to light his shoulder armour in a dazzle of complex reflections.

He bowed to the Queen. “Your grace, I cry you pardon me. De Vrailly has moved faster than I expected.”

“We must run-I understand.”

He smiled. “Well, your grace, as to that-” He turned as Lord Corcy came up.

“I’m with you, my lord,” Corcy said. “I must get home, collect my harness and the men I can trust. I hope you’ll agree to let the sheriff and his men disperse.”

“I’m afraid I must ask you all to come with us for a few leagues,” the captain said.

Corcy nodded. “I was afraid you’d see it that way. I beg you to reconsider. These men won’t betray you until pressed. I will swear any oath you name.”

The Queen reached out and took Lord Corcy’s hand. “I accept your word, my lord. Go, and return.”

“We’ll just keep your son as our guest,” the captain said.

He and Corcy exchanged a long look, and Blanche thought there might be blood, but Corcy bowed. “Very well, my lord. Adam, remain here with these gentlemen. Where will I find you, sir?”

The Red Knight-in his proper colour, visible even in moonlight-nodded. “North of Lorica, and moving quickly,” he said. “We’ll have de Vrailly at our heels.”

“I’ll come as fast as I may,” Lord Corcy said.

The sheriff was more openly angry. “Christ on the cross, gentles! I swore my oath! Let me be!”

The spearmen who’d accompanied him the day before muttered angrily.

Bad Tom came out of the yard. “We don’t have horses for this lot,” he said. “They’ll only slow us down.”

Blanche put a hand to her throat, convinced she was about to see these poor men butchered.

A tight ring of pages and archers surrounded them, and suddenly they had swords in their hands.

The captain put his hands on his hips. His golden belt glowed in the moonlight.

He winked. It seemed improbable, but she was sure he had winked.

“We’ll be long gone to Lorica,” he said. “Let them go.”

The archers and pages sheathed their swords.

The sheriff and his men were even handed their weapons. They took no more damage than some taunts.

Most of them fled.

Blanche was interested to see that two men-both big, capable-looking peasants-remained. They had a brief conversation with Cully and were put up on wagons.

The Queen smiled at her. “Oh, it is good to be alive! The sun is coming. It is just across the rim of the world. There’s a fox in yon hedgerow looking for a meal, and a family of mice in the foundation just here-by the blessed Virgin, it is the world.” She looked at the worthy sister. “I did not expect to see this morn at all,” she said.

Amicia nodded. “The fox will eat the mice,” she said.

Desiderata’s clear, delighted laugh rang out. “Only some, Amicia. That is the way of the world, too.”

The column began to move.