The Mongoliad: Book One

CHAPTER 3: THE GHOST OF RUS

It was good that she did not have time to make herself comfortable in the chapter house, or else going back out into the Great Khan’s empire would have been unendurable.

She rode now, since it was impossible to move stealthily in such a large group. Finn, when he spoke at all, favored a guttural lowland tongue she could barely understand and had poor Latin. Still, he seemed to know the ground better than she, or perhaps he just sensed things more acutely. So she and Finn scouted ahead and signaled Haakon and Raphael when it was safe to move forward, and in that manner, they made good time until twilight and for half of the following day. After that, the forest grew so dense that the horses became more trouble than they were worth. They left them in the care of a local woodcutter whom they found by following the sound of his ax.

The woodcutter claimed to know nothing of Mongols, and cared little more.

Raphael said it was a toss of the coin as to whether the horses would still be there when they got back, but this was better than simply letting them go. They camped in a ravine that night, risking a fire, as the smoke and firelight would be lost in the ever-present fog.

Before midday on the next day, they came in view of the village of Czeszow, and Cnán was then able to use it as a guide star by which to find the hovel where Illarion had been surviving for the last fortnight. Raphael and Haakon caught up with them, and Finn showed with a smile and a gesture that he thought her tracking skills were impressive.

The hovel lay on the edge of a leveled estate. Houses and huts had been burned, livestock slaughtered and butchered where they lay, fields torched. Bones and half-rotted corpses lay in heaps. None of the corpses had two ears.

“Local nobility,” Finn opined, pinching his nose. “Dead, not so noble.”

Haakon had clearly never seen such devastation. His throat bobbed, and his face turned sickly green. His eyes wandered as if he sought a place to throw up. Cnán wondered that the others put up with him at all—he was so poor in life experience.

“Get used to it. Such is the way of Mongols,” she said.

“Of men in general,” Raphael said. “In Jerusalem they—”

“These are worse,” Cnán said.

A sudden light breeze from the east carried an especially penetrating stench, one so strong that even Raphael gagged and drew up his scarf. He offered perfume to the others for their cloths, but Cnán, who wore none, noted that none other took it—not even Haakon, whose snot rag was a filthy wonder.

“The town?” Finn said softly, turning west, as if that might help.

Cnán nodded.

They pushed through the half-hanging door into the hovel. In the gloom, a man coughed and a knife blade tossed a dismal gleam.

“Who is it?” came a harsh, low voice.

“Friends, brought here by your messenger,” Finn said.

“The other girl,” the man husked. His skin was bright and slick with sweat. He tried to get up, but the effort was poor, and his legs failed him. Raphael went to his side…carefully. He was feverish and might strike at phantoms.

“We’re relieved you’re among the living,” Raphael said. “Feronantus cherishes you and sends greetings.”

“Feronantus,” the man said through another racking cough. “Master and monster, where was he, they bound her hands, they bound her feet, she cried and died…a hand’s breadth from my face. This far, no farther.” He twisted his hand, dark with old blood. Raphael gripped the hand and lowered it. Then he gently took hold of Illarion’s jaw and turned his head.

“Let me see that ear,” he murmured

“Gone,” Illarion said, his tongue heavy. He flinched in pain with each movement of his jaw, but the words forced themselves out. “I’m sure the bastard took it with him. Let’s all go to hell and find it, soak it in wine, sew it back on. Illarion of the purple ear. I’ll trade that Mongol lackey my ear for his guts. They smear my leggings even now.”

Raphael withdrew ointment and simples from his pouch. He looked up as a shadow darkened the single room.

A slight blonde girl in a frayed robe tied with a sash stood in the doorway. She did not flinch or cry out when she saw the big men. Hanging from her sash was a cloth bag filled with leaves. Green juice leaked from one corner of her lips. She had been chewing leaves when she came in the door—no doubt for a poultice.

“Brave lass,” Raphael said, rising from his knee. “Where be you from, and who protects you?”

The girl remained mute, eyes distant. She focused with an effort on Illarion and smiled. Her smile was simple, her face untouched by any other emotion.

Cnán was about to explain the arrangement—that the girl was hired to fetch herbs and tend Illarion, for food and jade—when another, an older boy, old as Haakon but as dark as she, appeared in the door and gently pushed the girl aside. He faced into the hut with dagger drawn, saw Cnán, and hesitated.

She took advantage of that moment. “We mean you no harm,” she said in Tocharian.

The boy considered her words, and then indicated the others with a thrust of his chin. “Are they taking him?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Good. He’s mad and makes noises in the night. There are still gleaners and ghouls out there. They will find him eventually. They’ll find us all if we stay.”

“You shouldn’t stay, then,” Cnán said.

The boy shrugged. “God protects,” he said. “We’ve survived this long.”

The mute girl smiled again. Cnán’s heart thudded. She had seen that smile too often around Mongol camps, decking the faces of the mindless and the broken—those kept alive to be used for lust. Men, women, and children…a smile worse than any mad leer.

Had Cnán felt free to speak her mind, she’d have cried out in protest about an arrangement that moved heaven and earth to get Illarion to safety while leaving this girl in a place where the Mongols could get to her again. But matters being as they were, she said no more.

Raphael took a clean cloth from his kit and wrapped it around Illarion’s head. “The flesh is mortifying,” he said. “But the maggots have trimmed it for you. And the girl’s chewed you a good green willow-bark mash. You’re a lucky man.”

“No,” Illarion said. He shut his eyes and crossed his mouth with a fingered X. “Take me. Empty me. I want to die.”

The boy touched the girl on the shoulder, and they turned and departed. Cnán went to the door to watch them. The boy ran from the devastated grounds without a backward glance, but the girl lingered, stooping on one knee as if bowing to a lord and looking one last time at the hovel. Then she fled. Watching from beside the door, Cnán tried not to think about where they would go. God protects, she thought.

It was difficult to move Illarion over rough territory. The journey back would take almost three days, Cnán estimated, and Raphael agreed. But once they retrieved their horses—for the woodsman proved honest—they made better time. Illarion seemed to improve. He said little now, but what he said made more sense.

He was tall, not especially heavy in build, but strong enough, Cnán sensed, to swing a plank with some abandon. His blond hair contrasted with a darker mustache and beard. His current troubles seemed traceable to the loss of his ear, the stump of which had suppurated, inflaming the side of his head and making it difficult to eat and talk. Sensing that pain was as much a problem as fever, Raphael dosed him with a bitter resinous gum and infusions of more willow bark. This gave the man some comfort and enabled him to stay on a horse for a few hours at a time.

They had hoped to push west quickly and return to the chapter house in the dense woods. However, Cnán spotted steady streams of refugees now moving along that route, harried by Mongol troops, and at her urging, they swung south for some miles before turning west again.

This brought them far too close to the Mongols’ encampment. Raphael told Cnán and Illarion that he, Feronantus, and Finn had sallied forth from the woods to reconnoiter, days before, and had seen, from the west, these very mud walls, almost Roman in style, forming a great square. “Ordu built here during the siege,” Raphael explained. “When Onghwe showed up, Ordu must have refused him permission to quarter his men, so Onghwe pitched a temporary camp on the field of battle—a terrible place. No love lost between them. When Ordu moved out, Onghwe returned to organize the gleaners and tax collectors, no fit duty for a true Mongol warrior.”

The ramparts were patrolled by regulars in pointed helmets, the forward positions occupied by troops of horsemen. They could not see the tents of the soldiers over these ramparts, but a huge hump of a felted pavilion, orange and green and brown, rose high at the center.

Finn drew their attention to a field beyond the ramparts. The area had been cleared, and what he thought might be a castle was under construction—crude gray logs forming a circle, with walkways and tiers of planks visible through the unfinished west-facing side.

“That wasn’t here a few days ago,” Raphael observed, frowning.

“Mongols don’t build castles,” Cnán said.

Raphael agreed. “It puts me in mind of one of the great arenas that the Romans built for their gladiators,” he said. “That may be where they plan to hold the competitions.”

A tall rectangular tower at the south end supported a wide viewing stand overlooking the arena and below that dropped in a sheer face to the straw-littered ground, bare but for a great reddish-purple curtain hung on the lower third.

“Feronantus read us the invitation,” Haakon said. “It spoke of a Red Veil through which victors are invited to pass.” Cnán cricked her neck and looked back at the young man. His countenance had brightened at the thought of clean battle between champions of honor. Despite all he had seen on this journey, he clung to a vision of battle as a pinnacle to be climbed, with glory or swift death at the summit. Clearly this boy was being groomed to die.

She felt no pity, however. He was a tool, and tools had their uses. When they were gone, you found another one. Getting emotional over one was to develop an attachment to it, and that was not the Binder way. Emotions sapped energy.

Illarion raised his head. “Competitions?” he asked in a voice low and heavy. His ear had stopped bleeding, but his jaw had swollen to grotesque proportions, and his fever had clearly worsened. “You mean a contest of courage between champions, to save the Western lands.”

“Yes!” Haakon said.

“It is of this I must speak to Feronantus,” Illarion said. But he would not be drawn out, even by curious Raphael, who brought out more bark mash and stuffed it into the man’s thickened cheek to ease his pain.

Past the encampment, against both Raphael and Cnán’s better judgment, they turned north and west. Both knew this would take them past the ruins of Legnica, but daylight was fading and they needed to reach the woods before nightfall.

At first, blinded by haunted low mists and rain, the rescue party encountered only more burned farmhouses and piles of bones picked clean by dogs, crows, and vultures—or perhaps hungry villagers. Raphael spoke briefly of the habits of besieged populations, but Illarion glared, and the physician stopped.

The remains of the town proper surrounded a low hill on which had been erected a crude fortification of logs and partial stone walls, with square wooden towers capped with wide roofs. The interior buildings were made of stone ramparts, with higher walls of wattle and daub. The log enclosures had been knocked in and burned, the stones pulled down; the inner buildings still smoldered even in the drizzle. The village around the “castle” had also once been protected by several log walls, now breached in so many places they jutted up from the flat land like broken teeth. Few other structures survived.

Deep forest and sanctuary lay just a few miles from the ruins, but bands of Onghwe’s Mongols and gleaners roved the broad outlying farms and neighborhoods, having plundered the town over and over again.

Clouds parted and the rain slowed, then stopped. The rescue party was forced this time to merge along the roads with another general, coagulated flow of miserable and ruined people, scattered, stumbling, stalking, staring fixedly forward or heads hung low, wailing or silent—abandoned clumps of human detritus. Haakon stayed near Finn, casting dark looks about him—nothing in his experience had prepared him for such a place. Everywhere lay the bones and rotting bodies of men, women, children, horses. Cattle. The stench was almost unbearable. Dogs and vultures were few by now; they had been hunted, beaten down with sticks, eaten. The rats were more numerous, and some were defiant, fat, and sleek, eyes flashing as they dropped their shoulders and lifted their heads to squeal at the passing horsemen.

The gleaners hunted unarmed survivors for sport, but avoided any who showed resistance, for gleaners were, in fact, the worst of cowards, brave only around the dead and dying. Spying a gleaner stripping a half-dead woman of her upper garments, Finn rode out over the mud and burned straw and slew the wretch with a single downstroke of his sword. Then, swinging his horse about, with a sharp cry and another stroke, he dispatched the woman. Cursing, he returned to the group, his cheeks streaked with tears.

Raphael was about to chide him for this foolishness, but instead clamped his jaw tight and looked away. “Worse to come,” he warned.

Cnán knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.

The general flow of misery lurched westward. They were forsaking lands that would not be productive for generations, avoiding paths and farm roads patrolled by regular Mongol troops.

Mounted and armed, the rescue party was as kings and princes compared to this rabble and so felt no need to act furtive. Someone might be hungry and desperate enough to attack them, but Raphael felt that it was best to continue to boldly ride straight through and then, once in the woods, proceed directly to the chapter house.

The style of movement that Cnán preferred, which Raphael called “sneaking,” made her uneasy with this course. Surprisingly, Finn was also unhappy—unnerved by the monstrous depredation and this endless spectacle of cruelty.

Near the western limits of the town, part of a stone perimeter wall still stood, built to withstand invasions coming out of the setting sun. Moving into the lee of this wall, they slowed as their horses skittishly avoided a rag-ribboned, sinew-strung litter of bones and moldering heads. Even in this carnage, the pitiful remains did not look or feel proper. They were too small…skulls crushed by a single blow…their garb not the undergarments of warriors or townspeople, but light, like nightwear.

Haakon pulled on the reins of his horse, eyes wild, until he fastened his look on Finn, then on Raphael—then on Cnán, who wrinkled her features. “Don’t look,” she said, “if you can’t bear it.”

Adam’s apple bobbing, Haakon lifted his eyes to the gray, misting clouds. Illarion did the same, touching his huge cheek and missing ear, as if to listen to faraway music.

These were the bones of children, from infants to toddlers to adolescents, and they stretched all along the wall, mounding near the base. Scores of children. An entire town’s future, crushed, broken, rotting in the mud.

Cnán knew what had happened here. She had heard stories out of the Far East, at the limits of her ranging. With the hilltop fort broken and the other walls breached, the citizens had brought the infants and youth of Legnica to this final and strongest wall, in the last days. Near the end, as the Mongols swept in from behind and then all around, torturing and killing all in their path, the soldiers and the last of the parents had sacrificed the young that they might not suffer a worse fate. Their crowns had been bashed by hammers or hilts, then their throats cut clean like so many shoats, ten or twenty at a time, the bodies then heaved from the rampart.

Possibly the townspeople had harbored a faint hope of arousing pity within the Mongols or their lackeys, but that was impossible, Cnán knew. The tiger would pity the fawn, the wolf would weep over its lamb before Mongol would cringe at the corpse of a child.

Haakon made small sounds deep in his throat. Surely hell itself lay not far below this stinking ossuary, bubbling up toward the world’s incomprehensible evil. None of the rescue party wanted to tarry among these dead. The vengeance of their young, unshaped ghosts might be worse than that of any Mongol.

They rode away from the wall and the bones as quickly as they could—corrupt mud spattering from the hooves of the horses and flecking their faces and armor—to reach the shelter of the thick woods before nightfall.

Cnán wiped a dollop of ooze from her cheek. It was tinted red with blood.

Dusk and more mist stole over them as they crossed the glacis of cleared land. The refugees had flowed south, and the old field of battle seemed deserted of all but the scattered bones of Legnica’s defenders. Their path was clear.

Cnán was about to release the breath in her tight chest when, directly ahead of her, pale and vivid in the twilight, Finn’s hand flew up like a falcon ready to swoop down on prey. She had learned to respect that gesture; it meant that his ears had picked up a trace of something so faint that he risked losing it by shushing them.

The party drew to a halt to let him listen.

Finn’s hand descended and made the prancing gesture that meant horses. Then, thumb pinching quick against two raised fingers: small. He was hearing ponies. A great many ponies.

Cnán dismounted. She knew better than to try to outride what was coming. Haakon drew his greatsword.

Finn’s hands now told them by darts and swoops that the ponies were not in one place, but all around. Cnán could finally hear their hooves, then the low voices of the men who had been quietly riding to surround their party. She bent her knees, dropping to a squat, and then to all fours, pulling her dark cape around her. They had drawn the attention of a scouting party. Perhaps a sentry had sighted them or some scavenger had ratted them out, hoping to purloin some small item of value once the Mongols were finished. Or perhaps someone had reported Finn’s attack on the gleaner.

No matter. Cnán could see it clearly. Her companions would end up like hedgehogs, bristling with arrows, but she would hide among their corpses, then scurry to the woods before the sentinels caught her.

Raphael nudged his mount forward and laid his hand on Haakon’s forearm. The boy’s drawn sword, shining like an icicle in the twilight, would make him the first target of the archers. Haakon lowered the blade, nodding.

A little squadron of Mongols filed into position between the rescue party and the trees. Cnán reckoned she might still be able to steal past them during the confusion of the fight, but some troubled part of her soul was telling her to stay with her comrades.

“The second one, in the armor that looks like fish scales,” she said in low tones. “He is rich. Their leader.”

“We charge him, then,” Haakon proposed.

“And die in a cloud of arrows before we get halfway,” Raphael said.

“On me,” Illarion suddenly commanded, surprising them all. He spurred his horse forward. Unsettled by the corpses and by the tension in the voices, the mount startled, but then, at a soothing word from his gaunt rider, dropped into a slow walk. “Follow. Single file. Slow. Like a funeral procession. Vaetha, walk your horse. All of you, hood yourselves.”

They did as Illarion instructed. The Ruthenian rode stiffly, steadily, at a plodding pace, his great hollow eyes staring straight ahead.

A single armored Mongol rode ahead of the band, grinning, striped bow held out in one hand, as if signaling peace, friendship. A chief, no doubt. Cnán counted their opponents. Fifteen horse-mounted bowmen.

Less than a hundred paces now separated the groups.

To bar the Ruthenian’s path, the chief crabbed his pony sideways.

Illarion continued straight on, his horse snorting and tossing his head.

She thought she understood Illarion’s strategy: by moving so, he projected dogged purpose, hopefully slowing the Mongols from making a pincered feint to scatter their smaller party. If the Ruthenian turned or rode too quickly, the Mongols would instinctively rush in and give chase like dogs coursing a hind.

The chief twitched his bow left, right, then up. He dropped back. The Mongol squadron finally split to the right and left, then began to draw in like a slow snare or a purse string against their flanks and rear, fifty paces, thirty paces… close enough that their first arrows would be certain to strike home, yet not close enough to bring them within range of Haakon’s bright sword.

The chief deftly spun his pony, as if daring them to chase after and catch him, him personally, with his back turned and everything. Grinning all the while.

Cnán did not understand what Illarion proposed to do when he reached the chief. Perhaps swing on him and die, giving the others some chance of reaching the woods?

Less than five paces now separated Illarion and the chief.

With a sweep of his arm, Illarion drew back the cloak that had swathed him for much of the last two days and hurled it aside, where it spun and flew for an uncanny number of yards, like a bat, then fell—to precisely drape the picked skeleton and conical helm of a Polish knight.

A knight who had almost made it to the forest before taking three arrows in the back.

All heads turned, mesmerized by this.

Bones rattled. The round hump of the skull shifted under the cloak, as if finding new life.

Illarion reined his horse just to the left of the Mongol chief and canted his head with a careless jerk, exposing the swollen, earless right side of his face. Not once did his eyes meet the man’s.

Now understanding the Mongol’s reaction, Cnán watched him further, seeing first curiosity, then a twist of lip and brow—signaling alarm and confusion. The chief’s features went pale and his mouth opened as if to scream. Frantic, heels kicking the pony’s flanks, he spun about and dog-yelped to his comrades. His pony bucked and turned but did not know which way to go.

Illarion rode steadily on. His missing ear dripped black blood. His hollow eyes knew death as an intimate comrade; nothing living could stop him…or would wish to.

Leaning over his pony’s neck, reining it in, the chief jerked its head left and spurred it even harder, leaving a gap through which Illarion rode without pause and without betraying the slightest awareness that the Mongols were even there. The Ruthenian did not need to act to appear to ride from beyond humanity, beyond life.

The chief gawped in terror. His pony stumbled in the muck.

On the left and right and behind, the Mongols turned and drew back, muttering and shouting.

Behind Illarion, Raphael leaned to one side and cupped his hand to his ear, imitating the gaunt Ruthenian—but with a grim and toothy smile. He swiveled in his saddle to leer at the Mongols.

The entire squadron broke and scattered into the mist.

The rescue party rode on at the same pace. At Finn’s gesture, Cnán remounted. She could see that Haakon’s shoulders were drawn in, flexing and flinching just like her own.

The trees came up none too soon, and the horses parted to accommodate them. Cold, clean night air swirled from the west, bringing more rain and mist, and water dripped in pattering, rhythmic showers from the leaves and branches, as if to cleanse them of all they had seen.

“You speak Mongol, don’t you?” Haakon asked Cnán when they had counted a hundred paces deep into the woods.

“Tartaric, Turkic, some Tungus,” she said.

“What did the leader say?”

“You should know,” Cnán said, “even if you ken not a word.”

Haakon frowned. “You think I’m an oaf.”

Cnán grimaced and dropped her chin.

Haakon flicked his damp hair back. “Tell me,” he persisted. “I want to hear it anyway.”

Cnán touched her right ear. “We are unclean spirits of the fallen,” she said, “returning to the forests of the West from which we came.”

“Ghosts,” Finn said.

“Ghosts,” she confirmed.

Once in the woods, two hours of picking their way along leaf-littered paths in broken moonlight brought them back to the clearing and the old monastery. By then they had shaken off the clammy dread that had overtaken them during their journey and had begun to converse about topics other than death and how to avoid it. They were received warmly by the Skjaldbræður, whose numbers, during their absence, had increased to something like a score. Illarion, of course, was embraced and even wept over. Cnán had expected this. But she was surprised by the hospitality that some of the knights were now showing toward her. In a courtly style that struck her as ridiculous, Feronantus asked whether she would consider gracing their camp with her presence for a while and directed her attention toward a tent that had been pitched, somewhat aloof from the others, and made ready for her. This at first struck Cnán as amusing, since there was no shortage of buildings in the compound, though most lacked roofs.

But when she pulled back the tent’s flap and found the interior clean and tidy, with a floor of dry green grass and a raised cot with a fresh straw tick for her to lie on, she better understood the gesture. The buildings of the old monastery were ancient and tumbledown, infested by vermin, stinking in diverse ways.

Peering out the back flap, instinctively checking for an escape route, she saw moonlight reflecting from water about a stone’s throw away and knew that she was not far from the monks’ old fish pond—the only place around here she could get anything like a bath.

She accepted Feronantus’s invitation. The knights retreated to their chapter house, whence she heard the popping of bungs and pouring of ale. She stripped and made a direct line for the pond. Drawing closer to it, she moved faster, since an impressive number of bugs seemed to be landing on her exposed skin. By the time she reached the shore, she was at the core of a humming swarm of mosquitoes and biting flies and had to dive into the water, if only to save her life. But it was worth it to feel the dirt of the road being rinsed from her skin and her hair. She swam for a while, bobbing her head up out of the water just long enough to breathe in air and mosquitoes, then diving before the bugs could do more serious damage.

The way back to the tent was a headlong sprint through an almost tangible mass of aroused insects. Bats swooped as well, making her groan when they squeaked too close. Unable to really see where she was going, she plunged through a group of knights who were on their way to the chapter house. Being seen naked meant nothing to her, but some of the knights gasped and looked the other way, imagining that she’d be mortified. The tallest of the group—Cnán instantly recognized him as Percival—took stock of the situation, moved adroitly to the entrance of her tent, peeled back the flap, and then stood there as if carved in marble, modestly averting his gaze. She dove through the opening. He let the flap drop.

The knights, now feeling free to speak their minds, issued a few good-natured complaints about her ungenerously having drawn so many insects into their camp. “At least I am clean!” she shouted from her enclosed fastness, “which is more than I can say for any of you.” This silenced them. Not, she guessed, because her words had struck home, but because they simply had no conception of what she was talking about.

She spent a few moments rolling around on the grass, slicking the water and the bugs from her skin. It was actually not the worst bath she’d ever had. Then she dressed in a linen tunic and doeskin breeches from her kit—clothes she had been saving against the unlikely possibility that she might have to costume herself as something other than a scurrying wretch.

Some part of her was wondering how she would look in the eyes of Percival. He had, in general, paid her no attention whatsoever. And yet there had been more than simple consideration in his act of holding the tent open. There had been…nobility? Brotherhood? She flung her short wet hair briskly at that thought.

She wanted Percival to see her in some better condition than wet and naked and covered with bugs. But another part of her—speaking, curiously, in the voice of her mother—was reminding her just how dangerous it was to feel any such desire. Emotion led to attachment; attachment led to…

While she was dressing, the jovial chitchat in the chapter house ceased. Someone protested he was not ready—voice too drunk and muffled to identify. Moments later, she heard a man howl, then scream long and loud. The murmur of conversation was slow to resume after that. But the aroma of cooking meat drew her to the place anyway. As she approached the door, Raphael came out, shoulders square, flexing his fingers. The fingers were stained green at the tips. He had been crushing more herbs.

His posture spoke of satisfaction, a job well done.

“Was it Illarion who cried out?” she asked.

“Yes. His ear—what’s left of it—is fine.”

“Fine? One side of his face is twice the size of the other.”

“That actually had little to do with the ear,” he insisted. “Thank the maggots and that poor girl and her poultice. I finally took the trouble to look in his mouth. The man had an abscessed molar.”

The words were unfamiliar.

“A toothache,” Raphael said. He lifted a sheathed dagger and pulled from one pocket a metal tool with long pincers, still stained with blood. “I yanked it out. The man has a jawbone like that of an ass. He’s already feeling better.”

She gave him an incredulous look. He tried, but failed, to prevent a grin from splitting his face. “I didn’t say he felt grateful,” he pointed out, raising his hands in mock surrender. Then he used them to shoo her inside. “Get you in. There’s hot food and plenty.”

Cnán enjoyed the Syrian’s company but was happy to take his leave in this case. The pincers evoked a queasy reaction quite unlike her response to swords and daggers.

She entered the chapter house and felt something so unfamiliar that it took her a few moments to identify it: she felt safe.

She knew what it was to belong, surrounded by courage and kept from harm by the luck, skill, and daring of the knights of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae.