The Red Knight

Chapter Sixteen

Ser Jehannes

Lissen Carak – Michael

Michael watched the captain sleep. It was dawn, or near enough, and he cursed that he was awake. He rose, pissed in a pot, drank half a glass of stale wine and spat it out into the courtyard.

The place stank like a charnel house, and most of the soldiers had slept in rows in the tower. In their harness.

He walked to the table, opened his wallet, and took out a pair of wax tablets, withdrew his stylus, and wrote:

The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day Fifteen

Yesterday the enemy tried to storm Bridge Castle and, despite putting monsters inside, was repelled. We lost more than forty men, women, and children of the convoys, and three men-at-arms and two archers, as well as four men of the militia. These are our worst losses so far.

But the king is coming. Knights of the Holy Order of Saint Thomas came at nightfall on the thirteenth day to tell us we were saved. And yet we fought all day and the king did not come.

Where is the king?

Michael looked at the last line. He took the butt of the stylus to rub that line out. Then he shook his head, and went to wake the captain.

Near Lissen Carak – The King

The sun was an arc of fire in the east.

The king’s magnificent golden armour and brilliant red and blue heraldry caught the first rays of the sun so that he seemed to catch fire.

Behind him stood three hundred of the most heavily armoured knights Alba had ever seen, their heavy horses left in camp.

The golden helmet moved to the right and left, examining the dressing of the long line of chivalric warriors that vanished into the woods on either flank, each with his heavily armoured squire at his back.

His golden gauntlet was raised high, and fell, and the line of the vanguard advanced along the line of the old Bridge Road. The three hundred knights were each a man’s height apart, their line was a half-mile long, and the men at either end had hunter’s horns – noted horns, which they played back and forth like huntsmen.

The figure of the king seemed to dance forward joyfully.

He pressed through the woods, and the woods parted before him. There is nothing in the woods that can impede a man in full harness – no branch, no trailing vine, no bank of thickset canes, no matter how thorny, will stop a man in armour. Or slow him.

The line ground forward at a walking pace.

Half a mile.

A mile.

He raised his hand and his own horn bearer played a long note and the line stopped.

Men-at-arms raised their visors and drank water, but the morning was still early and it was cool in the dark woods.

Men pulled the branches out of their knee-armour, out of their elbow cops, out of the joints in their faulds.

And then, with the sounding of two horn calls, the line swept forward again, like a great boar hunt.

A mile behind them, the rest of the army lurched into motion.

The van pressed forward into the woods. Led by the king, in person.

Bill Redmede – Jack of the Jacks – saw the armoured figures coming on foot, armoured cap a pied, and the bitterness in his heart was enough to melt steel.

So much for Thorn and his contempt for men.

Jack turned to his lieutenant – Nat Tyler, the Jack of the Albin Plain. ‘Bastard aristos have a spy, brother.’

Tyler watched the inexorable approach of the armoured men. ‘And we’re in deep brush.’

‘Thorn said they’d be mounted on the road,’ Jack said. ‘Fuck!’

‘Let’s loose and get gone,’ Tyler said.

‘This is our day!’ Jack argued. ‘Today we kill the king!’

Seventy yards away, the king stood virtually alone. He stood in a shaft of light in the deep forest, and he raised his arms – he had a four-foot sword in one hand and a sparkling buckler in the other.

Redmede drew his great bow and, suiting thought to deed, loosed.

Beside him, Nat Tyler’s bow twanged deep, the harp of death.

All along the line, Jacks rose from ambush and loosed at the king.

The king’s figure twinkled as he pivoted on his back heel and spun, his buckler sweeping over his head, his sword scything through the first fall of arrows.

All around him, men-at-arms broke into a dead run, charging the line of archers.

The king stood his ground – stepped and swung, stepped, cut, and then ran forward.

‘Good Christ,’ Jack muttered. Not a single arrow had gone home. ‘Too far – too damned far!’

But the Jacks were robbers and partisans, not battlefield men, and they turned and ran.

A hundred paces to the rear, the line of Jacks steadied. Nat Tyler got them into a line at the edge of a meadow of flowers a third of a mile long and two hundred yards deep – an ancient beaver meadow, crisscrossed by a stream. Bill led them over the stream, emerging wet to the waist, and they formed a new line on the far side.

‘Better,’ Nat Tyler said with a grim smile.

The men-at-arms must have paused to drink water and rest. The sun was much higher when they came – and they came all together. Forward in a line. This time the captain yelled at them to pick their targets and leave the king to the master archers, and the shafts flew thick and heavy over open ground.

He could no longer cut every arrow in the air, and heavy shafts rang off his buckler, his helmet – he was leaning forward like a man walking into a storm, but his heart was singing, because this was a great deed of arms. He laughed, and ran faster.

The stream opened under his feet and he fell – straight down the banks and into a thigh deep pool.

Two peasants stepped to the edge of the pool and loosed arrows at him from a few feet away.

Gaston saw the charge falter and blew his horn. Men were falling into something – a line of pits, a hidden trench-

An arrow rang from his breastplate, denting it deeply, and then he had an armoured fist on the king, and he pulled him straight out of the muddy pool in one long pull. By his side his squire, angered, threw his short spear across the stream and it struck – more by luck than skill – in the torso of a peasant, who folded over it and screamed. And the king got his feet under him and ran straight at the beaver dam – the only clear bridge over the stream.

Gaston followed him, and every man-at-arms nearby followed, too. The dam was half in and half out the water – far from solid, just an animal’s hasty assemblage of downed branches and rotten wood. But the king seemed to skim across it, even as Gaston’s right leg went into water as cold as ice – and he lost his balance, flailed, almost lost his sword and an arrow slammed into his helmet.

The king ran on, across the uneven top of the dam. The first half ran to a rocky island, and then the dam was even worse, the centre of its span under water, and yet the king ran across it, his feet kicking up spray in a brilliant display of balance – straight across the dam into the archers pouring shafts at him, and one got past his buckler to bury itself in his shoulder by the pauldron, and another rang off his helmet, and then he was among them, and his sword moved faster than a dragonfly on a summer’s evening. Gaston was struggling to catch him, breathing like a horse at the end of a long run, soaked, his left leg trapped in mud for a moment and then Gaston was with the king, through the line of archers, and the horns were playing the avaunt and the mort.

He followed the king up the rise to the ridge that dominated the meadow, and more and more men-at-arms crossed behind them – and far off to the left, more men-at-arms had crossed the narrow footbridge on the road, and now the whole line of peasant archers was compromised, and they ran again.

But even as they turned to run, the wyverns struck.

Gaston saw the first one – saw the flicker of its shadow, and looked up in stunned unbelief, even as the wave of its terror struck him and the Alban knights with him. The Albans flowed through the palpable fear – and he refused to let himself pause, although for a moment it was so intense he couldn’t breathe – they surged forward even as the carthorse-sized monster killed a dozen of their number in a single flurry of talons and beak.

There were three of the things.

That was all Gaston could comprehend – that, and that the king was like a fiend, leaping forward at the first wyvern, and his sword sliced a wing through at the root and his back cut flayed a sword’s length of scales from the thing’s neck, and it whirled to face him but he was gone, under the flailing neck and his blade went up into its belly – ripped the thing open from anus to breastbone, and was gone again as its intestines fell free.

Gaston followed him to the second one, where it crushed the Bishop of Lorica to the ground with one blow and ripped his squire’s head from his trunk with its beaked head. Gaston got his spear up, and spiked the head – lost his balance on the uneven ground, broken with the spiked branches the beavers had left – stumbled, and lost his spear, whirled and drew his sword as the head, trailing his spear, went for him.

He cut into its snout with every muscle in his body.

Its head knocked him flat.

The head reared above him, with his spear and his sword stuck in it, and the king straddled him. Blood leaked from the arrow in his left shoulder, and the man cut one handed at the monster’s neck and severed its head.

The surviving knights roared their approval and Gaston got slowly to his feet, drenched by the hot blood of the thing, and dug in its jaw for his sword – he had to kick it off his blade.

The third wyvern was already airborne, leaving a trail of broken knights behind it, but after leaping into the air, he pivoted and collapsed on the king, bearing him to the ground.

Every knight still alive in the meadow fell on the wyvern, and blows rained on it like a steel hail – pieces of meat flew free like dust rises from the first fall of rain.

The wyvern hunched and tried to rise again into the air, but Gaston slammed his spearhead into its neck, and a few feet away, Ser Alcaeus hit the thing with a maul and staggered it. The king struggled from beneath it, staggered to his feet, and rammed his sword to the hilt in its guts before falling to his knees.

The wyvern screamed.

The king fell to the ground, his golden armour all besmirched with the blood of three mighty foes.

Ser Alcaeus swung his maul up over his head, screamed his defiance, and slammed the lead head into the wyvern’s skull, and the beast crumpled atop the king.

A dozen gauntleted hands scrambled to pull the dead thing off the king, even as trumpets sounded behind them and the mounted chivalry emerged from the tree line.

Gaston ran to the king. He got the king’s head on his knee and opened his faceplate.

His mad cousin’s eyes met his.

‘Am I not the greatest knight in the world!’ he roared. ‘And no craven, to basely let my liege be slain!’

His eyes flickered. ‘Get the arrow out of my chest and bandage me tight,’ he said. ‘This is my battle!’ And then the light went out of his eyes.

Gaston held his cousin tight while a pair of squires tried to staunch the flow of blood, stripping his breastplate and his haubergeon. The remnants of the vanguard pressed on.

‘He demanded it, this morning,’ said a voice behind Gaston, and suddenly the squires were bowing.

The King of Alba stood there, in Jean de Vrailly’s cote armour.

‘He said he knew of a plot to kill me, in an ambush – and he wished the honour of taking my place.’ The king shook his head. ‘He is truly a great knight.’

Gaston swallowed his thoughts, and wondered what his mad cousin had done. And why. But the mad eyes were closed forever.

Near Lissen Carak – Thurkan

Thurkan watched the king fall. His eyesight was tremendous and from two ridges away he and his clan watched the abnethog fling themselves on the knights.

Of course, he had told them that he would support their attack.

He’d told the Jacks much the same.

But Thorn was doomed, and Thurkan had no intention of letting his people suffer any more.

He turned to his sister. ‘If the men begin fighting among themselves, well and good – we will feast.’

‘I see nothing of the sort,’ Mogan said.

‘Nor I,’ Korghan said.

Behind them stood forty of their kind – enough Qwethnethog to turn the battle. ‘Go tell the Sossag and the Abenacki that the battle is lost,’ Thurkan said to his sister.

‘It isn’t lost unless we flee,’ his sister insisted. ‘By rock and flowing water – is that your will?’

Thurkan frowned, deep creases appearing in his jaw. ‘Thorn must die – now, while he is weak. Otherwise he will hunt us down.’

Mogan poked her snout close to her brother’s. ‘Do not let me believe that this is all the rivalry of two Powers,’ she spat. ‘I have lost kin – you have lost kin. We were promised a feast, and-’

‘We had a feast at Albinkirk and another on the road.’ Thurkan shook his head. ‘I do not do what I do lightly. Thorn must go. We are being-’ he flexed the talons on his forefoot, moving each digit in an intricate arc, ‘-manipulated. By something. I can feel it.’

Mogan snorted. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I obey. Under protest.’ And ran off into the trees, as fleet as a deer.

‘West,’ Thurkan told his brother.

‘I can help you,’ his brother insisted.

‘Perhaps. But Mogan cannot lead our clan or fertilize new eggs. And you can.’ The great head turned. ‘Obey, brother.’

Korghan flicked his tongue in anger. ‘Very well, brother.’

The two clan companies started west, even as the Royal Household Knights began to climb the ridge towards them.

Bill Redmede ran, loosed an arrow from his dwindling store, and ran again. His bodkin points were all but gone, and he had only hunting arrows.

The God-damned aristocrats had more plate armour than he’d ever seen. And the monsters – he’d been a fool to ever trust them and no doubt imperiled his soul, as well. He was bitter – tired, angry, and defeated.

But he’d seen the king fall. It was some consolation, but it didn’t seem to slow the rest of the aristos any, and like all his kind, he faced an ugly death if he was caught, so he waited a heartbeat, stepped from behind his tree and put a shaft under the arm of somebody’s fucking lord and turned, and ran again.

He made it up the second ridge, where they had started the morning, where the big daemon lord had issued its orders.

All the daemons were gone. Sod them, too. Oligarchs. Bad allies for free men.

The river was close now.

There were knights in red surcotes at the base of the ridge, and he could see them coming up the hill – most of them had dismounted, and a flurry of arrows told him that his boys were still fighting back. Fighting the Royal Guard.

He was damned if he was going to lose any more Jacks.

He turned and ran diagonally across the face of the ridge.

He came up behind Nat Tyler as the man loosed his last arrow. ‘Come on, Nat – the boats!’

Tyler turned like a wild thing – but he got a hold of his wits, paused, and winded his horn and whistles sounded in response.

‘Follow me!’ Bill called, and ran back up the hill – legs labouring, lungs searching for breath.

Behind him, the Jacks loosed a last arrow and ran – the sauve qui peut had been blown.

Bill ran, and the Jacks ran behind him. He paused when he saw three of his own trying to face a knight with drawn swords and bucklers, and he put a shaft to his bow – another knight burst from the trees and crossed the crest of the ridge – raised his visor-

Too good a shot to miss.

Hawthor Veney made it to the top of the ridge on pride alone. It was his first fight, and he was a King’s Guardsman. His red surcote shouted his allegiance, and the Jacks were his enemies, and he pursued them ruthlessly. He caught one and hewed him from behind, a clumsy stroke that buried his point in the man’s neck, but the man fell hard, blood burst from the wound, and he ran on, wrenching the sword from the man’s corpse.

The next one he caught fell to his knees and begged for mercy. He was perhaps fourteen years old.

Hawthor paused, and an older guardsman beheaded the boy. ‘Nits make lice,’ he said, as he swept by, and Hawthor hardened his heart and ran on. Running in armour was hard. Running up a ridge with soft footing and tangled spring undergrowth was worse. His lungs began to labour and, as the Jacks rallied and rallied again, whipping deadly shafts at the guardsmen, Hawthor had to fight the temptation to open his visor.

He began to pass men when he could see the light through the trees that meant the crest of the ridge was coming. There was shouting to the right – he turned to look, and he heard the sound of steel on steel. He looked back and forth – it was closer, and with his faceplate closed, he couldn’t see where. There was a flicker of motion to the front – he looked, ran a few steps, stopped, and looked again.

Heard the scrape of blades. A voice called ‘Sauve Qui Peut!’

He was breathing like a horse after a race. He was afraid – he was afraid they were behind him. He popped his visor, turned his head-

And died.

Near Lissen Carak – Bill Redmede

Bill got another shaft on his bow after putting one through the knight’s face – felt better for doing it – but two more of his men were down and he knew better than to join the hand to hand fight. He ran.

They crossed the ridge, and started down the far side towards their boats. A handful of knights from the vanguard tried to stop them, and the Jacks just ran around them – exhausted men without armour have an advantage over exhausted men in armour.

Bill saw the Count of the Borders, close enough to touch, and he cursed his fate, that he should be so close to a mortal foe and be able to do nothing.

But he ran past the man, down the steep berm, into a broad field – ploughed, until recently. Nat Tyler came out of the trees to his left, and dozens more – a handful, compared to their numbers three weeks ago. But enough to start again.

Up the last dyke, and there were the boats. Fifty light bark boats – it had taken them three careful trips to get everyone over, night before last, and now . . .

Now they’d all fit in one go.

He tossed his bow into the bottom of the light boat, pushed it into the water, and stepped in, running lightly down the length of the boat to kneel in the bow. Then he rocked the stern off the muddy beach, and held his position in the current with his paddle until a young blond man in dirty white tossed his own bow into the boat and stepped clumsily into the stern. He almost swamped the light boat, and they were away into the current.

Twenty other boats were putting off behind him – the better boatmen got the boats moving. The less competent men started to die, as the Royal Guard began to close on them.

A few last Jacks dived into the water, abandoning packs and bows, quivers of invaluable arrows, but a few men had had the presence of mind to drag the rest of the boats off the mud and tow them and, safe in the current, they got the swimmers into boats.

More than a hundred Jacks had been saved from the disaster.

They began to paddle out into the centre. It was obvious from here that Bridge Castle was still in the hands of the sell-swords – an arbalest bolt skipped across the water to put a hole in one boat.

Tyler waved, pointed downstream, waved again, and paddled frantically to turn his boat.

Jack looked into the rising sun and it’s brilliant reflection on the broad river – and saw flashes. Rhythmic flashes – banks of oars on heavy bateaux, rowing upstream. He counted twenty – counted a second twenty-

Disaster. Disaster after disaster.

He turned his head. ‘Less power and more finesse, comrade. We have to turn this boat and paddle upstream – all your power will serve us well, then.’

A pair of crossbow bolts, like swallows feeding on insects, skipped by, passing within an arm’s length of their boat before sinking out of sight.

The man in the stern shook his head. ‘I’m no boatsman, brother,’ he admitted.

‘Never mind, lad. Drag your paddle on the left – just there. And we’re around.’ Bill hadn’t risen to leadership for nothing; he was patient, even when everything was at stake.

Then they were around, and his young companion’s strong arms were pushing the boat forward like a leaping deer. It was a waste of the man’s energy to spend so much but Jack let him tire himself, steering from the bow. Another volley of crossbow bolts from the distant bateaux and he lost a trio of Jacks – they were broadside on to the enemy and all three of them caught bolts.

Bill Redmede was an old boatman. And a master archer. He stowed his paddle, took his bow from the bottom of the light boat, wiped the stave and the string – good wax, not too much moisture. He was glad he’d left it strung, and he rose to his feet, the boat tipping – leaped lightly onto the ash gunwales, one foot on each.

‘Good Christ!’ shouted his stern paddle in dismay.

He drew and loosed in one motion, tipping the boat from side to side, loosing high – a hunting point. Then he knelt as he watched the fall of his arrow.

He lost it in the sun-dazzle. But he felt better for the shot, and he took up his paddle and gave way with a will.

Near Albinkirk – Desiderata

Desiderata was in a borrowed chain shirt – worn with a man’s hose, a heavy wool kirtle laced as tightly as her maids could manage, and a man’s arming cap. The effect should have been ludicrous, but was instead both martial and quite attractive, to judge from the reactions of the guildsmen and the hillmen all around her on the foredeck of the lead row-galley.

Lady Almspend stood by her side, also in a shirt of mail, with a sallet on her head and a sword at her waist. She was more ridiculous, but beaming at Ranald Lachlan, whose attention was torn between his lady-love and the approach of combat. The herd was penned in camp, with twenty of his brother’s men as guards. He stood in hauberk and leg armour, his open-faced bascinet and leather cote almost barbaric in comparison to the crossbowmen of the guilds of Lorica, most of whom had fancy cotes of plates and visored helmets, the latest fashion from the Continent. His hands rested on the great axe he carried.

The Queen looked at him. He was quieter than she had known him in year’s past. According to her secretary, he had actually been dead. The Queen suspected this might be a sobering experience.

‘Boglins on the bank,’ Ranald said, pointing a gauntleted hand.

‘Got them,’ said one of the guild officers. ‘Boglins to starboard. Pick your targets. Loose!’

A dozen bolts flew.

‘The king must have been victorious,’ Lady Almspend said. ‘Those aren’t our men fleeing across the river in front of us.’

Ranald turned so fast the chain aventail at his neck slapped his helmet. ‘Good eyes, my lady.’ He flashed her a smile – pleased to have her company in his favourite pursuit. He looked under his gauntleted hand for a long time. ‘They’re men – they’re in a sort of uniform. Now they turned their boats away-’

The guild officer had scrambled up into the bows past the Queen. ‘Jacks, by God. Rebels! Traitors! Heretics!’ He raised his arbalest, took careful aim, and loosed a bolt.

The boglins on the north bank began to flick arrows at them.

The Queen started. The back of her throat was scratchy. For the first time, she was afraid.

‘We have come too far west,’ Ranald said. ‘There are enemies on both banks, and the king won’t yet know that we are here.’

The Queen had received a message from the king late in the afternoon, and she had ordered the boats to row all night. She’d picked up the messenger at midnight, and his information had been exact. Today was to be the day – she intended to see it.

She stood on the foredeck and shaded her eyes with her hand – to the front, and to the right, and to the left. To the left, she saw a flash of red, and then another – and then half a dozen Royal Guardsmen appeared on the bank. She waved, and her ladies cheered.

‘Anchor here,’ she ordered.

A half-dozen boglin arrows fell onto the lead galley – most were deflected by the leather curtains that protected the rowers, but one struck home, and the man’s oar fell from his hands as he screamed. The arrow was deep in his shoulder.

Boglins poisoned their arrows, and his screams froze her blood. He had laughed and joked with her maids when they lay on the banks of the Alba, eating sausage.

It was as much of a shock as the sight of a boglin.

An arrow plummeted from the heavens like a stooping hawk, struck her helm, ripped down her back and knocked her flat.

She lay on the deck – suddenly the day was darker, and her back was wet.

‘Ware the Queen!’ Ranald called.

She reached for the golden light of the sun – it was all about her, such a glorious day-

‘She’ll bleed out. It is in her back.’ Ranald was doing something.

‘Is it poisoned?’ Lady Almspend asked.

‘I don’t think so – give me your pen knife. Wicked bastard – a swallowtail point.’ Lachlan sounded afraid.

She was floating above them, able to see the hillman digging in the flesh of her back with a knife. He had the mail shirt hiked over her hips having cut the shaft of the arrow. She’d seldom seen herself look less elegant.

‘It’s in her kidneys,’ Lachlan said, and sat back on his haunches, suddenly defeated. ‘Sweet Jesu!’

The captain had slept in his harness like everyone else, his helmeted head in the corner of the curtain wall where the west wall met the north tower. Four assaults had failed to re-take the wall, but he was so tired-

‘Boats on the river, Captain.’ Jack Kaves, senior archer, stood over him. ‘I brought you a cup of beer. Young Michael tried to wake you and went off to find more wine.’

The captain took the beer, rinsed his mouth and spat onto the mound of dead boglins outside the wall, and then took a long pull. Half of the mound of boglin bodies was still moving, so that the whole pile seemed to writhe – and they made mewling sounds like a pile of kittens, somehow more horrible than the screams of men.

No more men were screaming. The wounded had been sent up the hill to the fortress during a lull between attacks – the Knights of Saint Thomas, like their sisters, were doctors as well as fighters, and they gave basic care and rigged stretchers between horses. And the enemy killed every wounded man they could.

He got slowly to his feet. The weight of his armour and his own fatigue combined to make the process of rising painful – his neck hurt like he had been kicked by a horse. ‘Michael?’ he asked, confused and looking around.

‘In the store rooms,’ Kaves said.

‘Jack, help me get my helmet off,’ the captain said. He unbuckled his chinstrap, and Jack lifted the helmet clear of his head. The aventail was clotted with gore, which dragged across his face. The visor was gone.

He unlaced his arming cap. It was one of Mag’s, and with the intense interest of total exhaustion, he noted that she had embroidered his lacs d’amour across the crown – lovely work.

The cap was full of power. He hadn’t seen it before – perhaps hadn’t been able to see it. He held it closer and saw that every stitch held a tiny rainbow of light – the whole, with the lines of embroidery, was not unlike a set of tiny fish scales.

Jack Kaves whistled.

The captain turned and looked at his helmet, which had a great gouge in it where some weapon had punched right through it. Indeed, with all too little effort, the captain could remember the boglin chief’s scythes, slicing at his unvisored face and never quite reaching it.

‘Well, well,’ he said. He leaned forward, and Jack upended a pot of river-water over his head.

The old archer handed him a rag and he dried his hair, face and beard. While he used the rag, he walked along the wall, feeling the damp spread down inside his breastplate. He could all but hear it rusting. Michael was going to be-

There were, indeed, boats on the river. Fifty row galleys – obviously crewed by men.

He stood and watched them for several long minutes.

Jack Kaves stood beside him, holding out a sausage. ‘What’s it mean, Cap’n?’ he asked.

The captain gave a wry smile. ‘It means we win,’ he said. ‘Unless we screw it up really badly, we win.’

Albinkirk – Desiderata

Lady Almspend shook her head. She was tying the points of her sleeves back. ‘Don’t be a ninny. That’s fat. You there – get my kit-bag up from the hold. The barbs – I have a tool for them.’

‘You do?’ Lachlan asked.

Almspend took the Queen’s hand. ‘I know you can hear me, my lady. Stay with us. Take power from the sun – take strength. I can get this out, with a little luck.’

Lachlan grunted.

An oarsman came up the foredeck ladder with her leather bag.

‘Dump it on the deck,’ she ordered. He did, breaking an ink bottle and putting black ink on every shift she owned.

She snatched the item she sought – a pair of matching halves, like a mould for an arrow.

‘Hold on, my lady,’ she said. ‘This will hurt.’

She pushed the mould over the arrow – in and in, along the path of the original wound, and the Queen moaned, and a long line of saliva mixed with blood came out of her mouth.

Lachlan spat. ‘She’ll-’

‘Shut up,’ said Lady Almspend. She gave her moulds a twist and they snapped over the arrowhead – covering the wicked barbs.

‘Pull it out,’ she said to Lachlan.

He tugged and looked at her.

‘Pull it out, or she dies,’ Lady Almspend insisted.

Lachlan set his shoulders, hesitated, and then pulled. The arrow – moulds and all – popped free with a horrible sucking noise.

Blood spurted after it.

Lissen Carak – Peter

Nita Qwan knew that the great battle had started. But he was cooking. He had built a small oven of river clay, fired it himself, and now he was making a pie.

A third of the Sossag warriors were watching him. Sometimes they clapped. It made him laugh.

The pair of boglins were back, too. If you didn’t look too closely at their bodies they looked like a pair of rough-hewn, slightly misshapen back-country men.

They lay full length in the grass, beyond the circle of men, so that their wing-cases were atop them like upturned boats. When they approved of his cooking, they rubbed their back legs together.

His pie was the size of a mill wheel.

His fire was even larger – a carefully dug pit that he had filled with coals from patient burning of hardwoods.

There was no reason that the project should work, but it kept him busy, and it entertained the other warriors.

Nita Qwan wondered what Ota Qwan intended. The man had touched up his paint, polished his bronze gorget, sharpened his sword and his spear and all his arrows, and now he lay watching Peter cook with the other warriors.

Waiting.

The problem with a pie was that you never really knew if it was done.

Battle seemed to have some of the same qualities.

Nita Qwan went and sat with the pie for a while, and then he went over and squatted on his heels by Ota Qwan.

The war chief raised his head off his arms. ‘Is it done yet?’ he asked.

Nita Qwan shrugged. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Or yes.’

Ota Qwan nodded seriously.

Skahas Gaho laughed.

‘Why are we not on the field?’ Nita Qwan asked.

‘Pie isn’t done yet,’ Ota Qwan said, and all the senior warriors laughed. There was a unanimity to their laughter that told Peter that Ota Qwan had passed some important test of leadership. He was the war leader, and they did not contest it. A subtle change but a real one.

Ota Qwan rolled over, carefully brushing bits of fern from the grease that carried his paint. ‘Thorn is going to fight the knights in the fields,’ he said. ‘Fields from which every scrap of cover has been burned.’

The older warriors nodded, like a chorus.

Ota Qwan shrugged. ‘We almost lost a lot of warriors last night,’ he said. ‘I won’t risk the people on such foolishness again. This time, we will go when it is right for us to go. Or not. And the pie is as good a sign as any.’

Off by the edge of the clearing, a woman – Ojig – sat up quickly, and her sister, Small Hands, stiffened like a dog at the scent of a wolf, and took up her bow, and suddenly all the people were moving – weaponed, alert-

‘Qwethnethog!’ shouted Small Hands.

Nita Qwan never heard an order given but in heartbeats, the clearing was empty, save only his fire, his pie, and the six eldest warriors standing around Ota Qwan.

The Qwethnethog emerged from the underbrush moving as fast as a racehorse, and she took several long strides to slow. She looked back and forth at the line of men, and at the fire.

‘Skadai,’ she said in her shrill voice.

‘Dead,’ said one of the aged warriors.

‘Ahh,’ she keened. Made an alien gesture with her taloned paws, and turned. ‘Who leads the Sossag people?’

Ota Qwan stood forth. ‘I lead them in war,’ he said.

The Qwethnethog looked at him, turning her head from side to side. Nita Qwan noted that her helmet crest was a deep scarlet, and the colour came well down her forehead. But the crest was smaller than on a male. It amused him – even through the terror she broadcast – that he’d become so well-versed in the ways of the Wild as to know male from female, clan from clan. She was of their own clan – the western Qwethnethog, who lived in the steep hills above the Sossag lakes.

‘My brother speaks for all the Qwethnethog of the Mountains,’ she said in her shrill voice. ‘We are leaving the field, and will fight no more for Thorn.’

Ota Qwan looked at the men to the right and left. ‘We thank you,’ he said. ‘Go in peace.’

The great monster turned and sniffed. ‘Smells delicious,’ she said, to no one in particular.

‘Stay and have a piece,’ Nita Qwan found himself saying.

She coughed – he assumed that was her simulation of laughter. ‘You are bold, little man,’ she said. ‘Come and cook for me another time.’ And with a flick of her talons, faster than a deer, she was gone into the woods again.

No sooner was she gone then a dozen women came out of the woods – matrons, every one. They spoke so rapidly in Sossag that Nita Qwan couldn’t understand even single words.

So instead, he went and opened his temporary oven.

It was burned all down one side, but the rest had steamed well and the crust was a nice colour – a rich golden brown, shot with darker brown. Perhaps the oven had cracked – he had no idea why part of the outer rim was so singed.

Nor did he care, for the people came forward like an avenging army and seized the pie as fast as he could cut slices off it. He had made enough, and it wasn’t the way of the people to complain.

Ota Qwan took a piece – a burned piece. ‘Well done. Now we are fed, and well-fed. We will run all night.’

He ate his piece in four bites and drank a cup of water. Nita Qwan emulated him, and noted that his wife had packed his baskets. He took one on his back. She smiled shyly at him.

He smiled back.

He shouldered his quiver and his sword, and then – with no further discussion – they were off into the trees.

Albinkirk – Desiderata

The row galley landed against the Bridge Fort’s dock; the garrison was alert and manned the walls. The captain was waiting on the dock.

The row galley was full of women, each one more beautiful than the last. It wasn’t what he’d expected.

One woman – short, blonde, and harried – stood on the foredeck. ‘I need a healer,’ she said. ‘A good one.’

The captain turned to Michael. ‘Get me a Knight of the Order,’ he said. Then he turned back. ‘They are superb healers.’ he said. Unfortunately, they had gone on a sortie to clear the trench at dawn, and they hadn’t returned.

‘I know,’ she spat. ‘How long?’

‘A few minutes,’ he said, hopefully.

‘She doesn’t have a few minutes,’ the woman said, her face cracking. She seemed to clamp down on a sob. ‘She’s lost a great deal of blood.’

‘Who has?’ he asked as he tried to get a leg over the gunwale. A dozen oarsmen reached to pull him into the boat.

‘The Queen,’ she said. ‘I’m Lady Almspend. Her secretary. This is Lady Mary, chief among her ladies.

The Queen.

The Red Knight ignored the people gathered around the figure on the deck. The woman lying on the deck was losing blood at a tremendous rate. He could feel it.

And he had very little strength, at least in terms of power. What he had he’d squandered, fighting boglins. And to heal her here, now, would give himself away – at least as a Hermeticist.

So much blood.

She was young – imbued with power, herself.

In that moment, he realised that if she died, he could take her. As he had taken the boglin chief. She was defenceless – wide open, trying to use her power to strengthen herself. She drank in the sun’s rays – the pure power of Helios. She was very potent.

He put a hand on her back.

‘Well?’ Lady Almspend asked, impatient. ‘Can you help?’

Vade Retro, Satanus, the captain thought. He took his arming cap off his head, and pushed it into the wound. Put one finger on the cap as it turned from dirty white to brilliant scarlet.

He almost grinned. He was linked to a legion of healers. It was easy to forget that.

The palace seemed empty without Prudentia. He knew the basic phantasms of healing now – he wondered if he could release the power of Mag’s bindings to power them. And keep the power – and funnel it through workings he knew mostly from long ago lessons.

‘Amicia?’ he asked.

She was there. ‘Hello!’ she said. She took his hand, smiled – and let his hand drop.

‘I need to heal someone.’ He wished-

‘Show me,’ Amicia said briskly.

He took a moment to kneel by the fallen statue, and brush a hand across Prudentia’s marble back. ‘I miss you, ‘he said. ‘Help me, if you can.’

Then he took Amicia’s hand and laid it on the Queen.

She pointed to workings he now knew – through her – in a mind-wrenching moment, he was on her bridge using her memory palace even as he stood on Prudentia’s pedestal and collected what was left of his power.

It wasn’t enough.

Amicia shook her head. ‘I have nothing to give,’ she said. He looked up at her, and even in the aethereal her exhaustion was obvious. ‘So many wounded,’ she said.

Sighing for the loss, he tested the binding of power on Mag’s cap. He cast, as Harmodius had taught him, guided by Amicia’s sure hand on his – three workings, each contingent on the other, like nested equations on the chalkboard. The loosing, the binding for power, the healing. He used what was left of the life force he had taken from the boglin chief.

‘Saint Barbara, Taurus, Thales. Demetrios, Pisces, Herakleitus. Ionnes the Baptist, Leo, Socrates!’ he invoked, pointed, pivoted, and the room moved – the gears of his imagined rooms turning at the speed of a man’s muscles, so that the room spun like a top.

It was the most complex conjuring he had ever attempted – and the power that flared from it astounded him, a backlash of released power that rose in the room around him.

The arming cap immolated itself in a paroxysm of power – a brief flare, and all that power vanished into her.

A red mist crossed her back from her spine to the top of one tanned leg and around to her hip, right across the kidney. A flake of grey-white ash fell away from it.

The captain fell back away from her.

The Queen gave a squeak, and then sighed, as if stroked by her lover. And then gave a low moan.

Lady Almspend clasped her hands together. ‘Oh, by the power of God, ser! That was brilliant!’

The captain shook his head. ‘That wasn’t me,’ he admitted. ‘Or not just me.’ His voice was a croak.

The wound began to bleed again. They bandaged it tightly, being careful of the wound which still seemed to be open.

The captain shook his head. ‘But I felt the power flow,’ he said in frustration.

‘I feel the pain less,’ the Queen said bravely. ‘It was well done, Ser Knight.’

A red-haired giant threw his cloak over the Queen. ‘We need to get her ashore.’

The captain shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t. That castle is the lynch pin of the battle, and I’ve been holding it all night. I wouldn’t risk the Queen of Alba in it.’

But other boats were pulling up against the pilings of the bridge, anchoring or tying up, their crossbowmen engaging the boglins on the north bank. The bolder boatmen were pulling under the bridge, through the narrows, to further outflank the enemy in the meadows north of the river.

‘I have twenty brave men to add to your garrison,’ Red Beard said.

‘I’d rather have all those nice crossbowmen,’ the captain said. He smiled to take any apparent sting from his remark. ‘Very well. Land the Queen. Don’t mind the boglin guts – we haven’t had time to tidy up.’

He rose from the deck, almost unable to walk. He clambered back over the side to the dock, and managed to give the required orders.

He collapsed onto a bollard. He was aware that Red Beard was standing with him, talking, but he hadn’t slept, hadn’t recovered any power, and he’d just cast – he was phantasm sick, something about which Prudentia had warned him, over and over.

He reached out into the wan sunlight. Pulled the gauntlets off his hands and raised them to the sun.

What would mother think of this? He wondered. Because as soon as the sun licked his hands, he felt a trickle of power through his arms. The headache receded. The depression-

Amicia?

Captain? she asked tartly.

The sun. Reach out and take power from the sun.

I cannot. It is not given to me.

Crap, my lady. To paraphrase Harmodius, power is just power. Take it.

Did I hear my name?

Show her what you showed me. Show her the way to the sun.

With pleasure, as soon as I have a moment in which I am not fighting for my life. Harmodius’s image in the Aethereal was looking tattered.

Use the well, then, countered the captain.

Without intending, he was on her bridge over her stream. The stream was a trickle, the rocks dry, the foliage wilted.

He took her hand and she sighed.

‘We’re going to win,’ he said. ‘It is close, but we are going to win.’ He wasn’t sure just how the well would manifest in her place of power. He conjured a well cover, and a hand pump, just at the end of her wooden bridge. ‘Hold out your hands,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘The sun is not for me, but I can use the well.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s just there. Power is power. Take what you need.’ He pumped the handle and a surge of power shot from the nozzle like water under pressure and soaked her through her green kirtle.

She laughed. Power sprayed around them – into the pool under the bridge, into the trees.

The light became richer, the stream began to sing.

‘Oh!’ she said, and reached out to the well-

The well-cover and the pump-handle vanished, and the stream beneath their feet roared to life.

‘Oh!’ she said. Her eyes were tightly closed. ‘Oh, my God!’

He sighed. It was not the denouement he had hoped for.

But outside the palaces of the Aethereal, men were calling his name.

He leaned over and kissed her, all the sweeter for being there.

‘I must go,’ he said.

‘Those are Royal Guardsmen,’ Red Beard shouted, pointing to the south across the river, and back east of the bridge. ‘I know them.’

‘Horses,’ the captain said to Michael. ‘War horse for you, another for me, a mount for the red giant. Ser Milus, you are in command until I return. Send to the fortress for a healer. Tell them that the Queen of Alba is dying.’ He was hard put to leave her. It wasn’t his way to turn his back on a project. He had a new reserve of power – but she needed a fine, trained hand. And he needed to have something left for the fight.

They carried her past him.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered to himself. He reached out and put a hand on her naked shoulder. He gave her all the power he had – everything that he had taken through Amicia at the well, and all he had taken from the sun.

He sagged away from her. Spat the taste of bile into the water, and fell to his knees.

She made a sound and her eyes rolled up.

Michael caught his shoulder, and put a canteen in his fist. He drank. There was wine in the canteen, mixed with the water, and he spat it out, then drank more.

‘Get me up,’ he said.

Red Beard got under his other shoulder. ‘You’re a warlock?’ he asked brusquely.

The captain had to laugh. ‘I’ll forgive you your imprecise terminology.’

The wine was good.

Michael handed him a chunk of honey cake. ‘Eat.’

He ate.

He let the sun fall on his face and hands, and he ate.

Fifteen feet away, Ser Milus was trying to find the bottom of a leather jack of water. He nodded, sputtered. ‘Is the fight over?’

The captain shrugged. ‘It ought to be,’ he muttered. He could hear them fetching horses – could hear the heavy clop-clop of the hooves on the cobblestones of the Bridge Castle’s yard, and the rattle-slap of the tack going on.

‘Jacques has him,’ Michael said.

‘I hate that horse,’ the captain said. He finished his honey cake, swallowed more wine and water, and made himself run up the ladders to the top of the Bridge Castle’s north tower.

Sixty feet above the flood plain many mysteries were explained.

He couldn’t see beyond the ridges south of the river, but the brilliant sparkle of armour told him that the men-at-arms pouring over the last ridge had to be the Royal Army.

To the west the trees were full of boglins, and north, almost a mile away, a trio of creatures – each larger than war horses – emerged from the woods with a long line of infantry on either hand.

The new trebuchet mounted in the ruins of the north tower of the fortress loosed – thump-crack - and the hail of stones fell short of the Wild creatures, but they shied away anyway.

But as far as he could see, along the woods’ edge, the undergrowth boiled with motion.

‘Why are you still here? Even if you win you won’t take the fortress. You’ve lost, you fool,’ the captain muttered. ‘Let it go. Live to fight another day.’ He shook his head.

For a mad moment, he thought of reaching out to Thorn. Because if Thorn stayed to fight, some of his men were going to die, and he’d come to love them. Even Sym.

I’m tired and maudlin.

He scrambled down the ladder and found Jacques holding his new charger. Michael was at the postern gate. Jack Kaves waved.

The captain got a leg over his saddle and groaned. The big stallion shied and tossed his head.

‘I hate this horse.’ He looked down at Jacques. ‘Go straight for Jehannes, now.’

‘Ser Jehannes is wounded,’ he said.

‘Tom, then.’

‘Tom’s the man, aye,’ Jacques said.

‘Get every man-at-arms of the company mounted, and by the foot of the ridge,’ he said. ‘All the farmers and all the guildsmen along the trench and to the fort, here.’

Jacques nodded. ‘Just for the sake of conversation,’ he said, ‘we could keep the fortress.’ His smile was transparently empty of guile, like a boy who has just thrown a rock at a hornets nest and remains unrepentant.

The captain nodded. ‘We could. Hold it for ransom. Sell it to the highest bidder.’ He sounded wistful. ‘We could be the baddest. The Knights of Ill-Repute. Rich. Feared.’ He shrugged. ‘Sometime in the last month we became paladins, Jacques.’

Jacques nodded. ‘’Bout time, my prince.’

‘Stow that, Jacques,’ the captain said. He turned his horse’s head, backed his charger a few steps, and saluted Smoke, the archer commanding the gate. ‘Open it,’ he called. ‘And the Bridge Gate.’ He turned back to Jacques. ‘Don’t forget to bring healers,’ he said.

Red Beard joined them, mounted on an old roncey that had seen better days.

‘Sorry about the horse,’ the captain said. ‘I’m the captain.’

‘That’s your name?’ asked the red giant. ‘I’m Ranald. Ranald Lachlan.’

‘You know the Royal Guard?’ the captain asked. The he paused. ‘Lachlan? Tom Lachlan’s brother?’

‘Cousin,’ the other man said. ‘You know Bad Tom?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ the captain said. ‘Let’s go find the king.’ His voice was a little shaky.

‘Amen,’ the hillman answered. ‘Do you know him? The king?’

‘What a very interesting question,’ the captain answered. ‘No. Not exactly.’

Michael followed them, and their horses’ hooves rang as they crossed the bridge. At the middle the captain reached into the purse on his sword belt and produced a key – intricate, beautiful and apparently solid gold. He leaned out – groaning at the pressure on the muscles of his back and neck – how long ago did I fight the God-damned wyvern in the woods? He fitted the key into the great gate, turned it, and the gate vanished.

‘Nice trick,’ muttered Ranald.

Near Lissen Carak – The King

The king was collecting his guardsmen and the knights of his vanguard – the vanguard had lost fifty men-at-arms and as many squires, the men were exhausted already, and the morning was young. Two of his leading noblemen were dead – both the Bishop of Lorica and the constable had both gone down in the first fighting. The Captal de Ruth had taken a mortal wound defending the king, and was dying.

But the valets were coming up with the horses and the machines of war were grinding along – surgeons were searching among the wounded for those who could be saved, and his huntsmen, who had swept east to guard the flank of the onslaught of the vanguard, were trickling in. They, too, had lost men fighting monsters in the woods by the river – nor had they been victorious, by all accounts. The Wild creatures had burst through them and run off east. They had lost sixty men. Good men. Trained men.

It was hardly the great victory he sought. He had been ambushed and his column had survived. That was all.

‘Messengers, Sire. From across the river,’ called a herald.

The king looked north-west, and saw them – three men crossing the bridge at a fast canter.

‘Sound the rally,’ the king said.

More and more of his Royal Huntsmen were merging from the west, moving warily.

The Count of the Borders rode up and saluted. ‘The flower of our chivalry is half an hour behind me with the main battle,’ he reported. The man slumped. ‘By Saint George, my lord, that was the hardest fighting I ever need to see.’

‘The guardsmen say there are boglins across the river,’ the king noted.

‘Boglins?’ The count shook his head. ‘I struck a blow at a wyvern this morning, sire. This is the Wild, my lord, fighting for its life.’

‘I thought the Wild was beaten,’ said the king.

The Count of the Borders shook his head. ‘Where is Murien? What has happened to the Wall Castles?’

The king’s master huntsman, Febus de Lorn, bowed respectfully. ‘This isn’t from north, my lords. This is from west. I see Gwyllch – boglins – across the river, and Bothere has huntsmen who claim to have faced trolls in the low ground west of the road. Dhag’s come from the west, my lords.’

The king looked back at the approaching messengers. They weren’t messengers – all three in were armour, two cap a pied on war horses, and the third-

‘Par Dieu, gentlemen – that’s Ranald Lachlan, or I’m a minstrel’s son.’ The king turned his horse and rode towards the approaching trio.

Lachlan waved. The king had eyes only for him, and they rode together and embraced.

‘By all the saints, Ranald – I never expected to greet you on a stricken field!’ The king laughed. ‘How fares your fortune?’

Ranald looked away. ‘Aweel,’ he said, and a shadow touched his face. ‘I’ll tell ye, when we’ve time, my lord. These gentlemen, now, they seek to parley with you. This is the captain of the company yonder, that holds Lissen Carack for the nuns. And his squire, Michael.’

The king extended a hand to the knight – a man of middling height with a black beard and blacker circles under his eyes – absurdly young to be any kind of commander, but wearing superb armour.

‘Messire?’ he said.

The man was staring at him. Then, as if remembering his manners, the man touched his hand and bowed in the saddle. ‘My lord,’ he said.

‘You hold the fortress?’ the king asked eagerly.

‘The fortress and the Bridge Castle,’ the captain replied.

The king thought there was something familiar about the young man’s face, but he couldn’t quite place it. Something-

‘My lord, if you would bring your forces across I believe we can relieve the fortress and evacuate the villagers – and leave the Enemy facing a newly victualled and garrisoned fortress they cannot hope to take, without the loss of another man.’ The captain was speaking quickly, and his eyes were on the far wood line. ‘The Enemy – your father’s magus, or so they say – has made a number of errors. Not the least of which has been his consistent underestimation of our side’s intelligence. I believe he intends one more all-out attack, to attempt to restore his fortunes through the heroic exertions of his allies.’ The young man smiled crookedly. ‘I built a trench line twenty days ago for just this moment, my lord. If you would place your archers in that trench, and gather your chivalry behind the Bridge Castle, I believe we can hand this arrogant Magus a heavy defeat.’

‘Might I have your name and style, messire?’ the king asked. The plan was solid – the lad had a head on his shoulders, and his pure Alban speech made him one of the king’s subjects, mercenary or no.

The dark-headed man drew himself up straight in his saddle. ‘Men call me the Red Knight,’ he said.

‘I thought you to be a Galle, and a good deal older,’ the king said. He turned to the Count of the Borders. ‘My lord – will you take the constable’s place? Command the Royal Guard? And where is the Count d’Eu? He must have the command of the vanguard now, eh?’

The Count of the Borders turned to the young knight. His banner bore a dozen lacs d’amour. ‘How many lances do you have, my lord?’

‘Twenty-six, my lord Count – and the Knights of Saint Thomas. And several hundred very able militiamen, in the form of a contingent of Harndonner merchants. And I have the pleasure of having the aid of the king’s own Magus – Harmodius.’ The young fellow bowed in his saddle again.

‘Harmodius is here?’ the king asked. Suddenly, his day looked considerably brighter.

The young man looked away. ‘He has been a pillar of our defence,’ he said. ‘With my lord’s leave, I must prepare to receive you.’

The king smiled – such an odd young man. ‘We’re right behind you. Go!’

The man bowed, as did his squire, and together they rode back across the bridge.

The king turned to the Count of the Borders. ‘He seems odd but able. Wouldn’t you say?’

The count shrugged. ‘He’s held this place for twenty days against Richard Plangere and his legions of Hell. Do you really care if he’s odd?’

‘He reminded me of someone,’ the king said. He glanced at Lachlan, who had stayed with the command group. ‘You have something to say about our young sell-sword?’

Lachlan shrugged. ‘No, my lord. About the Queen. She was struck – in the back – by an arrow. She is resting and doing well, in part thanks to the young fellow there. He used power. I saw it.’

‘The Queen? The Queen is hurt!?’ asked the king.

‘She’s now resting quietly – in the Bridge Castle. The young captain sent for healers.’

The king rose in his stirrups. ‘Attend me, guards. Let’s go!’

The Count of the Borders was left with the Royal Staff, sitting on their horses in the dust stirred by the king’s rapid departure.

He shook his head. ‘A great knight,’ he said, watching his king. He sighed. ‘Very well – messires, attend me. The Royal Guards will cross the river first, followed by the Huntsmen and the Household. In the second line of battle, the Chivalry-’

Near Lissen Carak – Gaston

Gaston, Count D’Eu, was as tired as he had ever been, and something was wrong with his left hip – it didn’t seem to move as freely as it ought – but he managed to get his leg over his destrier’s broad back and he rode forward under his own banner, with his cousin’s men arrayed behind them – two hundred knights and men-at-arms. Fully a hundred gentlemen lay dead or wounded in the woods and meadows along the road – an absurdly steep price for his cousin’s reckless desire to be the man who broke the ambush his angel had told him awaited the king’s army.

His cousin, who lay in the arms of death. Who only wanted to be the greatest knight in the world.

Gaston wanted to go home to Galle, sit in the chair of judgment of his castle, and pontificate on which wine was the best at harvest time. He thought back to the peasants under the bridge, his heart now full of understanding. He vowed – would God accept such a vow? – to go home and beg Constance for her hand in marriage.

At the top of the last ridge, the king’s friend, the Count of the Borders, was sitting with a number of other gentlemen under the flapping folds of the Royal Banner. The Count d’Eu rose in his stirrups – damn it, that left hip hurt – and looked down to the river where the red-surcoted Royal Guard were just marching for the great three span bridge. On the other side, two companies of men-at-arms were formed in neat wedges at the base of the great ridge on which the fortress sat – half a league north of the river. From the Fortress of Lissen Carack to the bridge ran a trench, black, as if it had been burned.

At the western edge of the meadows and burned-out farms that had marked the demesne of the Abbess, thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of creatures swarmed like ants from a recently kicked hive.

As he watched, the long arm of a trebuchet mounted high in the fortress swung. It appeared to swing slowly, but its payload – invisible at this distance – flew at the sudden whip-crack release of the counterweight. The count looked for the fall of the shot, but he couldn’t see it.

The Count of the Borders waved. ‘My lord,’ he said. ‘You command the vanguard?’

‘I do. My cousin is wounded,’ Gaston said. ‘I have fewer than two hundred lances, and many of my younger knights are spent.’

‘Despite which, the king begs that you will use every effort to get your men across the river – dismount and occupy the line of works prepared for you.’ The count pointed at the black slash that ran from the fortress’s ridge to the bridge.

‘I see it,’ Gaston said. ‘But I lack the force to occupy that length.’

‘You shall be with the Royal Guard and all our archers,’ the Count of the Borders added. ‘All dispatch, my lord!’

Gaston could see creatures from the swarm now venturing farther and farther into the fields beyond the wood’s edge.

‘A moi!’ he ordered. ‘En avant!’

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched the Royal Army begin to deploy across the river. His blow was ready – a single hammer strike to win Alba.

The Royal Army appeared singularly unharmed by a morning-long ambush. That was unexpected. The Qwethenethogs alone should have done great damage amongst their ranks.

He felt a ripple of power – identified it, and cursed again. Both the dark sun and his former apprentice had survived. He acknowledged his own hubris in imagining them dealt with. It was the very curse of his existence. Why did he constantly think things would go his way?

Because they should.

He felt another use of power – closer to him, and it smelled like Qwethnethog. Like Thurkan.

He nodded and drew power to himself. The Qwethenethogs’ presence on this side of the river was very revealing.

The great daemon was coming for a trial of power. Thorn rocked his stone head.

Idiot. Traitor. I undertook this for you.

Turquoise fire began to play along the edges of his stick-like tree limbs and his beard of grey-green moss oozed power, and the faeries flitting through the clearing, excited by the overflow of his vast resources, he now drained of power in a single sip, leaving their fragile bodies to flutter to the ground.

The magnificent daemon entered the clearing from the south. His hide was still wet from swimming the river, but green and brown lightning played along the sides of his head, down to his long, scythed arms and over his richly inlaid beak and armour.

Thorn let him come.

When they were a few horse lengths apart, Thorn raised one hoary arm. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘If you mean me harm, save it for the defeat of our enemies.’

Thurkan stopped but he shook his mighty head. ‘Greater Powers than you or I contend here today,’ he said. ‘You are a pawn in the plans of a greater Power.’

Those were not the words Thorn expected, and they stung – stung with the peculiar power of words that carry their own truth.

‘It cannot be,’ Thorn said.

‘Why else do the humans have every advantage when we have none? That thing you call fortune; we have none. Every turn we make favours the enemy. Let us withdraw from this field.’ Thurkan held up an axe. ‘Or we must be rid of you.’

Thorn needed time to test the hypothesis that he had been used. He was the one who used others – the enmity of the Outwallers for the Albans, the needs of the boglins for new ground to live, the hunting instincts of the wyverns and the trolls.

He was not, in turn, used.

‘We have been used!’ Thurkan insisted. ‘Order the retreat, and we will fight another day!’

Thorn considered it.

And he considered the great mass of his infantry – the wights in their magnificent armour, the five thousand irk archers, the squadrons of trolls ready to engage the enemy’s knights. The Outwallers and the wyverns and the other daemons.

‘Even if what you say is true,’ Thorn said, ‘we are about to win a great victory. We will scour the kingdom of Alba from the face of the continent. We will rule here.’

Thurkan shook his great head. ‘You delude yourself,’ he said. ‘There is no number of boglins who can match this number of armoured men in combat. And Thorn – I call you by name – I call you three times to attend my words. A battle, says my grandsire, is the result of a situation wherein both sides imagine they can win a conclusive fight with one throw of the knucklebones. And only one side is right. Today, the King of Alba believes he can defeat us. You believe that you can defeat him, despite everything. I say we will lose on this field. Withdraw and I am your loyal ally. Order this attack and I will fall on you with fire and talon.’

Thorn chewed on Thurkan’s words for many heartbeats, and not a breeze stirred the torpid late spring heat in the woods. Insect noises stopped. Not a gwyllch chattered, as if all of nature waited on Thorn’s decisions.

‘Not for nothing do men call you The Orator, Thurkan,’ Thorn allowed. ‘You speak brilliantly. But I doubt your motives. You want this army for your own. The only good you know is the good of the Qwethnethog.’ He took a breath and let it out slowly, to still his rage. And then he threw a single phantasm, a long prepared blow, like a single punch.

The daemon reacted instantly, raising all of its not-inconsiderable power in a wall of walls to stop the blow.

Quick as a mountain lion Thorn cast again.

The single gout of green lightning blasted through his walls like a siege ram through the walls of the wattle and daub house, and the tall daemon crumpled to the ground without a sound. He lay still but for the thumping of his left leg under the command of his hindbrain, still battering the ground in rage and frustration at his own death.

‘Attack,’ Thorn ordered his other captains. To the corpse, he said, ‘One of us was wrong, Thurkan.’ He reached out and subsumed the daemon’s power. And rose from it more powerful than he had ever been.

I should have done that a year ago, he thought, and smiled. And walked out onto the field at the head of his armies.

Near Lissen Carak – de Vrailly

Jean de Vrailly lay dying, content in knowing that he had performed a marvellous feat of arms – one of which men would speak for hundreds of years. His cousin had left him; a correct action, as the battle continued and the king’s standard was advancing, and he lay pillowed on the legs of his squire, Jehan, who had also taken a terrible wound.

The pain was so great that de Vrailly could barely register thoughts – and yet, he was in an ecstasy of relief to be atoning for sin with every waning beat of his heart. The massive damage to his side – the great puncture wounds that sucked air and spat blood and bile with every breath – were living penance, the very stuff of chivalric legend. He would go pure to his Saviour.

His only regret was that there was so much more he might have done – and in his darker moments of dying, he reviewed how he might have swayed his hips a little farther, evaded the wyvern’s blow, and carried on unhurt. So very close.

The archangel’s manifestation took him by surprise – first, because he had refused the angel’s orders, and second, because the archangel had always insisted on coming to him in private.

Now he appeared, glorious in armour, cap a pied in dazzling white plate, with the red cross emblazoned on a white surcote so utterly devoid of shadow as to seem to repel death.

All over the beaver meadow wounded men stopped screaming. Servants fell on their faces. Men rose on an elbow, despite the pain, or rolled themselves over despite trailing intestines or deep gouges – because this was the heaven come to life.

‘You fool,’ the archangel said softly – and with considerable affection. ‘Proud, vain, arrogant fool.’

Jean de Vrailly looked into that flawless face in the knowledge that his own had deep grooves of pain carved into it. And that he was going to his death. But he raised his head. ‘Yes!’ he said.

‘You were quite, perfectly brilliant.’ The archangel bent and touched his brow. ‘You were worthy,’ he said.

Just for a moment, Jean de Vrailly wondered if the archangel were a man. The touch was so tender.

The words cheered him. ‘Too proud to betray the King of Alba,’ he said.

‘There is a subtle philosophical difference between killing and letting die,’ the archangel said softly. ‘And thanks to you, all my plan is in ashes, and I must build a new edifice to make certain things come to pass.’ He smiled tenderly at the dying knight. ‘You will regret this. My way was better.’

Jean de Vrailly managed a smile. ‘Bah!’ he said. ‘I was a great knight, and I die in great pain. God will take me to his own.’

The archangel shook his head. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But I think you should live a while longer, and perhaps learn to listen to me next time.’ He bent low, and stripped the bright steel gauntlet off his hand – a slim, ungendered hand – and ran it along the knight’s body. That touch struck de Vrailly like the shock of taking his first wound – and lo, he was healed.

He took a deep and shuddering breath, and found no pain at the bottom of it.

‘You cannot just heal me,’ de Vrailly snapped. ‘It would be unchivalrous of me to walk away healed when my brave people lie at the edge of cruel death.’

The archangel turned his head, brushed the long hair back from his forehead, and he stood. ‘You are the most demanding mortal I have ever met,’ he said.

De Vrailly shrugged. ‘I will beg and pray, if that’s what you require, Taxiarch.’

The angel smiled. ‘I grant you their healing – those who have not already passed around the curve of life into death. And I grant to you great glory this day – for why would an angel of the Lord visit you except to bring you great power in battle? Go and conquer, arrogant little mortal. But I tell you that if you ever choose to match yourself against the greatest Power that the Wild has ever bred, he will defeat you. This is not my will, but Fate’s. Do you hear me?’

‘Craven fate would never keep me from a fight,’ de Vrailly said.

‘Ah,’ said the angel. ‘How I love you!’ The angel waved his spear over the beaver meadow.

A hundred knights and as many squires, men-at-arms, servants and valets were cured, their pain washed away, their bodies made whole. In many cases they were better than they had begun the battle. A peasant-born man-at-arms, a Galle, had the permanent injury to his lower left leg healed and made straight – a valet missing one eye had his sight returned.

All in the wave of a spear.

Several dozen wounded Jacks were cured, as well.

‘Go and save the king,’ the archangel said. ‘If that is your will.’

Every man in the meadow knelt and prayed until, in a puff of incense-laden displaced air, the armoured angel vanished.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Desiderata lay in a patch of bright sunlight. Her power was dimmed – she herself felt like a candle under a shade. Flickering.

So unjust! That single arrow, plummeting from heaven, and she was done. She had desired to be her husband’s support, perhaps to win herself a share of glory. And instead – this.

The strange young man had put the pain at a distance. That was a blessing. She could feel his worthiness like a bright flame. A knight and a healer – what a superb combination – and she longed to know him better.

Around her, her ladies were silent.

‘Someone sing,’ she said.

Lady Mary started, and the others slowly joined her.

Desiderata lay back on the cloaks of a dozen soldiers.

And then old Harmodius came. He came unannounced, walked into the castle courtyard and knelt beside her.

She was pleased to see the look in his eye. Even mortally wounded, he found her pleasing. ‘There you are, you old fool,’ she said happily.

‘Fool enough to leave the battle and save you, my dear,’ he said.

Carefully, painfully, with Lady Almspend and Lady Mary, he rolled her over and stripped the linen from her back. ‘It’s really quite a nice back,’ he said conversationally.

She breathed in and out, content at last.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain could see the king riding for the bridge at the head of his household, and he could see the king’s battles – each with more men-at-arms than he had ever commanded – coming down the ridge.

He rode along the trench – a trench currently occupied by two hundred archers and valets of his own company, and all the farmers from all the out-villages.

His sanguine surety that the Enemy had made a tactical error was gone, blown away on the wind, and now he watched an endless line of boglins crossing the open ground toward the trench with something akin to panic. It was hard to breathe.

The Prior was sitting on his destrier with Bad Tom, in the non-shade of a burned oak tree.

The captain rode his horse over to them, and then wasted his strength controlling his young war horse as the stallion sought to make trouble with the Prior’s stallion. Finally, he curbed the big horse mercilessly.

‘I miss Grendel,’ he said to Tom.

‘Bet Jacques doesn’t,’ Tom said. He looked back over the sunlit fields. ‘They’re coming.’

The captain nodded. Overhead, the trebuchet disgorged another load of small stones. Cast from a height, it smashed into the oncoming tide and ripped a hole in the enemy line.

The hole closed almost at once.

‘It’s so stupid, the captain said petulantly. ‘When he burned the farms, he did all the damage he needed to do.’ He turned his head to where the king’s Royal Guard was pouring into the trench, led by two hundred purple- and yellow-clad crossbowman from Lorica. ‘And his attack – whether it carries this trench or not – won’t take the fortress.’

The endless wave of boglins, and larger, worse things, swept across the burned plain towards the black line of his trench.

The reinforcements were not going to make the near end of the trench in time.

The farmers and the guildsmen were spread too thin, and they knew it. And the inexperienced purple and gold Loricans were halting, only a third of the way along the trench, and loosing bolts. Like militia.

Of course, they were militia.

‘The farmers will hold,’ Tom said. He was chewing on the stem of a flower. It was an oddly disconcerting sight. ‘The guildsmen will break. They’ve broken before.’

The captain looked at the Prior. ‘Messire, you are so much my senior – in years, in experience, and in this place – guide me. Or command me.’

The Prior let his horse put his head down to munch grass around the heavy bit. ‘Oh, no, you don’t. You have led this force to this point – you think I’m going to change commanders now?’

The captain shrugged. ‘I wish you would,’ he said.

Tom was watching the oncoming line. ‘You know we have to charge that line,’ he said. ‘If we charge the line, we should buy – hmm – ten minutes or so.’ He was wearing a grin that made him look like a small boy. ‘A hundred knights – ten thousand boglins – and trolls, and daemons, irks . . .’ He looked at his captain. ‘You know we have to.’

The Prior looked at Tom, and then back at the captain. ‘Is he always like this?’ he asked.

‘Pretty much,’ the captain said to the older man. ‘Will you come? I’m not at all sure any of us will come back.’

The Prior shrugged. ‘You are lucky,’ he said. ‘And luck is better than any amount of skill or genius. I can feel the power in you, young man. And I think your presence here is God’s will, and God is telling me to go where you go.’

The captain rolled his eyes. ‘You’re making this up,’ he said.

‘Did you speak so to the Abbess?’ the Prior said.

For once abashed, the captain looked away.

‘We will follow you,’ the Prior continued. ‘If this fortress falls our order will have lost everything.’

The captain nodded. ‘Have it your way, then. Tom; we’ll file across the trench on the two bridges and form line on the far side in open order.’ He looked around – to see Sauce, Michael, Francis Atcourt, Lyliard all looking pale with exhaustion.

‘Kill whatever comes under your sword,’ the captain said with an edge of sarcasm. ‘Follow me.’

The king entered the Bridge Castle’s courtyard to find his Magus, Harmodius, kneeling by the Queen. He was examining a wound in her back, and Lady Almspend put a hand on the king’s shoulder and kept him from approaching any closer.

‘Give him a moment, my lord,’ she breathed quietly.

‘Here they come!’ called a voice on the walls.

Crossbows began to release in a series of flat snaps.

The king didn’t know what to do. ‘I must see her!’ he said to Lady Almspend.

Lady Mary came up. ‘Please, my lord. A moment!’

‘The battle is about to be won or lost,’ the king moaned.

‘Fast as you can, lads! The captain is depending on us!’ called the voice on the walls.

‘My love?’ Desiderata called.

Harmodius stepped back, face pale, and the king came forwards.

Desiderata reached out and took his hand. ‘You must go and win this battle,’ she said.

‘I love you. You make me a better king – a better man. A better knight. I can’t lose you,’ the king said.

She smiled. ‘I know. Now go and win this battle for me.’

He bent and kissed her, mindless of the thread of blood that ran from the corner of her lip.

As he pulled himself away, Harmodius followed him.

‘I might ask you what you are doing here, but we’re in haste,’ the king said.

Harmodius narrowed his eye. ‘This battle is a closer run thing than I would ever have imagined, and even now, our enemy has increased his power to a degree I could never match,’ he said. ‘If I work to heal her he will know me, and he will assail me here. And I will be destroyed. This is as much a fact as the rising of the sun.’

The king paused. ‘What can we do?’ he asked.

Harmodius shook his head. ‘There are protections in the fortress – especially in the chapel.’ He shrugged. ‘But even if I could get her there, my saving her would deprive the army of my protection, and when he starts to kill, he will devastate us.’

The king frowned. ‘Save her,’ he commanded. ‘Save her. I will form up my knights and guard her to the fortress on a litter, and you can take her to the chapel, though all the enemies in the world stand between us and them.’

Harmodius considered his king, who was willing to sacrifice the army for the love of his queen.

But his feelings were very much engaged as well. ‘Very well,’ he said.

Lissen Carak – Father Henry

He didn’t like what he had to do. He didn’t like that they all hated him, now, and he wanted to argue with them. To show them what they were going to become.

Like her. Like the witches.

Gnawing the ropes was easy. But the archers had hurt him, and his back was flayed raw. It took time, and pain. He paused and rested. Paused and slept.

Awoke when he heard voices coming into the cellars. From below.

He gnawd his bonds again, mad with fury like a trapped animal. When he exhausted his muscles, he made himself pray. He overcame the pain.

He was good at pain.

After hours and more hours, he had the ropes off. And then he got through the scuttle – a trap door to the next cellar room. He moved carefully, and he only passed out once and woke again minutes or hours later.

He made it to the base of the main cellar ramp – where he could hear a pair of archers on duty.

He prayed . . . and God showed him the way. Whoever had come up into the cellar had left a door open. He dragged himself to the portal, and looked down.

Scrambled and found a lantern with a candle and a tinderbox. It was God’s will.

He dragged himself down the steps into the dark.

The mercenaries, efficient as always, had left arrows painted on the rock. He began to follow them.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched his great assault sally forth from the edge of the woods, and knew fear.

He had lost many, many creatures in the weeks of siege and now he feared he lacked the resources to survive.

His fear hadn’t started there, though.

As his assault began, something whose level of manifested power was to Thorn as Thorn was to a boglin shaman, had appeared on the other side of the river. It had cast a single phantasm of such complexity and power that it beggared the very strongest sending Thorn had ever cast. And then it had vanished.

A Power. A great Power of the Wild.

Thorn stood at the edge of the burned fields, watching his massive assault leap towards the hated enemy; seeing the fruition of his revenge on the king and his useless nobles, watching as his boglins finally seized the empty Lower Town and boiled through its streets.

And all he could think was – Damn the daemon. He was right. I’ve been had.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain led his men in single file across the boards laid across the burned, vitrified trench. As he crossed, two farm boys with halberds waved. They gave a cheer.

Why not? They weren’t riding into a horde of boglins.

He laughed. Turned to find Jacques behind him, Carlus the armourer with his trumpet on his hip, and Michael carrying his banner.

‘Form your front,’ he called.

The line of boglins was about six hundred paces distant.

He looked back at Bridge Castle, hoping to see the king.

He looked across the river, but the main battle was just straggling down the ridge. Two thousand knights.

The king was just a little late.

He could see a handful of knights crossing the bridge. The banner was from Galle, and not one he knew.

Move! he thought.

He looked back.

His men-at-arms, with the addition of all the military orders knights, formed in two ranks, and took up two hundred yards of front – leaving as much again on either flank.

Empty air.

He was the centre man in the line.

The boglin line was four hundred paces away, give or take.

‘Advance! Walk!’ he called, and Carlus repeated it by trumpet.

‘Remember this, boys!’ Bad Tom called from his place in the ranks.

The big horses made the earth shake, even at a walk. Their tack rattled and clinked, and the sound of their riders’ armour added to it. The sound of a company of knights.

Two hundred and fifty paces.

‘Trot!’

Even a hundred and fifty armoured men on destriers make the ground rumble like an earthquake.

One last time, the enemy had underestimated them. They had more than a dozen of the great trolls, belling and ranting several hundred paces to the rear of the infantry line. They were coming on now – coming quickly. But like the king, they were going to be much too late for the moment of impact.

The captain had a feeling, though, that the trolls were not at their best in the open, and that they wouldn’t be particularly manoeuvrable. Or was that his own hubris?

But that was all passing away. Strategy and tactics were over, now.

He turned his head at the cost of some pain, and saw the Gallish knights pushing along the trench. The Lorican crossbowmen were moving too – Ser Milus was visible, roaring orders at them.

There would be no gap in their line when the Enemy struck.

The two lines were approaching each other at the combined speed of a galloping horse. The boglins were not going to flinch but they were spread out over the ground, all cohesion lost, like a swarm of insects pouring over the ground.

‘Charge,’ he shouted. Carlus and Jacques might not have heard him over the drumming hooves, but he swept his lance down to point at his first target – locked it into the hook-shaped rest under his arm, and Jacques sounded the charge.

The captain leaned forward into his lance.

For a few glorious heartbeats, it was the way he had imagined, when he was a small boy dreaming of glory.

He was the wind, and the roar of the hooves, and the tip of the spear.

The slight bodies of the boglins were like straw dolls set in a field, and the lances ripped through them so smoothly that creatures died without dragging the lances down, and the stronger men were able to engage three, four even five of the creatures before their lances broke, or their points touched the ground, dug in and shattered or had to be dropped.

The horses were spread widely enough to allow horse and rider to thread the enemy line, to take advantage of spaces between boglins, to weave their path.

For a few deadly heartbeats, the knights destroyed the boglins, and there was nothing the boglins could do to retaliate.

But like mud clogging a harrow, the very density and sheer numbers of the boglins began to slow the knights’ charge and even their heavy horses had to shy – or simply could no longer trust their hooves to ground that was so thickly littered with boglins. The charge slowed, and slowed.

And then the boglins began to fight back.

Lissen Carak – Father Henry

Father Henry paused at the base of the steps to gather his courage. His hate. He was deep underground, and his candle was guttering, and he had no idea how far it was to the outside. And he hurt.

He prayed, and then he walked. Walked and prayed.

And, of course, it wasn’t much farther than walking down the castle road, outside.

He finally found a pair of double doors, as high as two men, and as wide as a church. He expected them to be locked with all the power of Hell. But the sigils lay cold and empty. He reached for the two great handles. There was a key between them.

Lissen Carak – The King

The king had his queen on a litter between four horses, and he and his household knights got out the main Bridge Castle gate even as the garrison shot bolt after bolt over their heads into the oncoming line of creatures.

Even as he watched he saw the Prior and the sell-sword knight lead their men-at-arms over a pair of narrow wooden bridges and onto the plain.

He looked to the right and left, trying to imagine why they were charging the enemy.

But it was glorious to see.

The knights took their time, formed up neatly, and the endless horde of enemies ran at them silently – perhaps the most horrible aspect of the boglin was its silence. He could hear the mercenary captain calling orders, and his trumpeter repeated them.

‘Ready,’ Ser Alan said.

The king gestured across the front of the trench. ‘Since our friends have been kind enough to clear us a path,’ he said, and touched his spurs to his mount.

As he rode, he watched the charge go home.

It was superb, and he was annoyed that he wasn’t a part of it. He leaned back to Ser Alan. ‘As soon as we have the Queen to the fortress, we will join them,’ he said, pointing to charge which was cutting through the enemy like an irresistible scythe.

Ser Ricar shook his head. ‘My lord,’ he protested. ‘We have only sixty knights.’

The king watched the charge even as his household trotted across the front of the trench. ‘He hasn’t much more than that.’

‘But you are the king!’ Ser Alan protested.

The king began to feel the onset of the indecision that infected him on every battlefield. A lifetime of training in arms as a knight demanded that he lead his knights in that wonderful charge – a charge that even now was beginning to lose its impetus, three hundred paces from the trench at his feet.

He was also aware – as a man is aware of a distant call – that it was not his duty as king to perform feats of arms.

But Desiderata had said-

The fighting was so close.

And his queen didn’t need him. She had a clear path all the way to the gate of the fortress.

‘Knights!’ roared the king. ‘On me!’

Lissen Carak – Father Henry

The priest had the secret doors open, and he stood back and watched the boglins flood through the great opening, squirming in a very inhuman way, to vanish onto the steps which ran up and up into the ridge. He watched for a moment, and then something slammed into his head.

He started to fall. Out of the corner of his eye he could see some sort of spike.

In a moment of vertigo, he realised it had to be through his head.

He tried to move, and couldn’t.

Something hurt more than his back.

Slowly, like a tree falling, he went to the ground. He tried to pray, but he could not, because they pressed all around him and he screamed, trying-

Trying to die before they began to eat him.

Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin

Ser Gawin had risen with the dawn and managed to get himself to the chapel to pray. He remained on his knees for a long time in the morning light, unaware of anything except the pain in his side and the crushing sense of his own failure.

But, eventually, he roused himself when he heard the soldiers bellowing for every man-at-arms to get mounted. He rose and crossed himself, and then walked as steadily as he could manage out the door of the chapel, and hauled himself in front of Ser Jehannes.

‘I can ride,’ he said.

Jehannes shook his head. ‘He didn’t say the wounded,’ Jehannes said. ‘I’m not riding, myself, lad. Stay here.’

Gawin was minded to disobey. The longer he was on his feet, the better he felt. ‘I can ride,’ he said again.

‘Ride tomorrow, then,’ Jehannes said. ‘Tom’s got all the men-at-arms already. If you want to be a help, arm yourself as much as you can and walk around looking confident. It’s bad out there.’ Ser Jehannes pointed into the courtyard of the fortress, where the farmwomen and the nuns stood in knots, silent. Most of them were watching the plains below. ‘We’ve perhaps forty men to hold the fortress, and yon ladies feel they’ve been abandoned.’

‘Sweet and gentle Jesu,’ Gawin swore. ‘Forty men?’

‘Captain’s trying to win the day,’ Jehannes said. ‘Stupid bastard. All we had to do was sit tight in the fortress and let the king do as he would. But the little bourc always has to be the fucking hero.’

Gawin gave the older man a lopsided smile. ‘Family affliction,’ he said, and went to do his share.

It took him long minutes to find his armour, left unpolished in a heap and not in the hospital but in a closet off the apothecary.

But he couldn’t seem to get into it.

He managed, in the end, to get into his arming cote, and to get his breast and back closed by lying full length on the floor and closing it around him like a clamshell. But then the pain in his side kept him from buckling it.

‘I’ll do your buckles, if you’ll let me,’ said a voice.

It was the novice. The one whose appearance made his brother squirm. The one who had used power to heal him.

‘You are-’

‘Amicia,’ she said. She nodded at an archer, who stood quietly across the room. He looked tired and unhappy. ‘He was left to guard me, but he’s bored, and I haven’t turned into a boglin or a dragon yet. Stop moving.’

Her hands were curiously confident. And strong.

‘You are using power,’ he said.

‘I’m giving you some strength,’ she said. ‘Something evil is coming – I can feel it. Something of the Wild. We’re going to go and stop it.’ She sounded fey, terrified, and overly bright. Brittle.

Gawin took her assertion at face value. He looked at the archer. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

The boy wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Sym, my lord,’ he said sullenly.

‘Sym, can you fight?’ Gawin asked.

‘Anything,’ Sym said assertively. Looked away. ‘Only thing I’m any good at, and look at me – left to guard the captain’s nun.’

The fingers on Gawin’s shoulder harness stiffened.

Sym looked at the two of them from under his eyebrows. ‘Sorry. Know you ain’t. But I’d rather be with my mates.’ He shrugged. ‘This is the big fight. I never been in one. All the oldsters talk big about this fight and that fight, but this is the biggest the company was ever in, and I want my part of it by fucking God.’ He looked away. ‘Want to be a hero.’

Gawin laughed. He surprised himself with the purity, the unforcedness, of his laugh. ‘Me, too,’ he said. He slapped his shoulders. He couldn’t bear the weight of his arm harness, but he had a breast and back, and she put the gauntlets on his hands, and then, with Sym’s help, they put his bascinet on his head, slipping the aventail over his hair.

He considered saying something flirtatious – Best looking squire I’ve ever had. But at the thought of squire he choked.

While Sym pulled his aventail down over his back plate, she did something – something that started as a word, and rose in pale yellow fire, and ended like the pop of a soap bubble.

‘Mater Mary,’ she said, and crossed herself. ‘They are here. Right here. In the fortress. Follow me!’ she called and ran for the door.

Sym followed her, leaving Gawin to find his long sword resting in a corner, pick up Sym’s buckler, and follow.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Whatever his other failings, the captain’s borrowed young destrier had a great heart, and he loved to fight.

The horse swung back and forth – pivoted on his forefeet and kicked with his iron-shod back hooves, half-reared and pivoted on his back feet, punching with his front, keeping the captain in the centre of a carefully cleared circle devoid of standing foes. Boglins who tried to get under the horse to hamstring him or worse were trampled to sticky ruin or simply kicked clear.

The captain had long since lost track of how many of the creatures he’d killed. His arm was tired – but then, he’d started the action almost too tired to lift his weapon.

But, as they had practised, the companions were drawing together – horse to horse, man to man.

The captain swung from the shoulder, nipped both arms off an enemy on the foreswing like a farmer pruning vines, leaned well forward using his stirrups for balance, and cut back into another creature’s head, clearing his front, and George – somewhere in the combat, the captain had named his horse George – backed a few paces.

And tucked in behind Bad Tom, who was like a millwheel of destruction.

He let Tom do it. Thumbed his visor, and raised his face plate, and drank in great gouts of fresh air.

George wanted to be back at it.

The captain stood in his stirrups and looked over the battle line. His people had formed up well and althought there were gaps, there were not many.

His people going to get buried.

He had no sense of time – no one did, in a hand-to-hand fight. But at his back, the purple and yellow tabards had flowed all the way down the trench to Master Random’s guildsmen, and a sturdy line of scarlet was filling in behind them. And beyond them, just crossing the bridge, was solid green. Archers of the Royal Hunt.

‘Jacques!’ he roared.

His valet was two horse lengths away, fighting for his life.

‘Carlus!’ he roared.

The trumpeter didn’t even look around.

‘Damn,’ the captain said. It was a game of seconds and hard-fought inches, and he was losing time. They needed to ride clear.

He gave George his head and sent the war horse crashing into one of Jacques’ adversaries. A ton of war horse versus a hundred pounds of irk was no contest at all.

His sword took another, and then Jacques went down as his horse fell – killed by one of the dozen creatures under its hooves. That quickly, Jacques was gone. The captain turned, cut at the irk under George’s feet and watched a spear catch Carlus under the jaw, killing him instantly. Down he went, with his trumpet, and with it, their chance to cut their way free. The captain cut down, his sword beheading a boglin even as the hideous thing bit into Jacques’ throat – and he roared and looked for help, but there was none.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Guarded by Ser Driant and five knights, the Queen’s litter started up the long and twisting road to the great gate of the fortress.

The king had ordered his knights to form a compact company behind him.

‘Once more, my lord,’ Ser Alan said, ‘I’d like to remind the king that if Lord Glendower were alive, he would never allow this.’

At the word allow all sense left the king’s head. ‘I’m the king,’ he said. ‘Follow me!’

Most of the mercenary knights and their retainers had formed in a thick knot, almost dead centre in the field. The king aimed his horse’s spiked head at the banner with the lacs d’amour. ‘Follow me!’

Lissen Carak – Harmodius

Harmodius spat with rage, turned his horse, and followed the king, who was throwing himself into the arms of his enemy when almost any other action would have saved him.

The Queen would die. And he, Harmodius, loved her in a way the king never could – she was the perfect child of Hermeticism. An angel, come to earth.

But like an artist with a favourite painting, Harmodius could not bear to see the king die either. Not here – not so close to triumph, or at least to survival.

We are all making the wrong decisions, Harmodius thought. And he realised that if he died here, his new-found knowledge would die with him.

It was like some ancient tragedy, in which man is granted knowledge only to be destroyed.

But he didn’t have to waste much more time on such thoughts.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched, almost unbelieving, as the target of his campaign threw himself forward, unprotected. He couldn’t have manipulated the king into such a foolish move.

The king.

He had made a dash for the fortress and Thorn had suddenly seen his defeat – for in the fortress the king would be unassailable.

But no.

The fool was now leading his knights forward into the very maw of Thorn’s monsters.

And his boglins were in the fortress.

Just for a moment, he was balanced on an exquisite knife-blade of doubt as to whether to kill the king himself, by means of power, or to send his choicest creatures to do his work.

But in that moment, he decided that, regardless of the campaign, if he killed the king, he had won. No matter which power was using him, killing the King of Alba would place him in the front rank. It would cause civil war. Would weaken the human hold on Alba.

He gathered power to him.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The company was dying around him.

The anonymity of armour kept him from knowing who – he could never spare more than a glance – but as the boglins surrounded them and hemmed them tighter and tighter, armoured figures went down – either hamstrung horses, spear thrusts, or lucky arrows.

Tom continued to be like a hammer at his side, Sauce was like an avenging angel, and the military order knights fought like the legions of Heaven.

Even as he raised and lowered his sword yet again, he would have chuckled at the pointlessness of it all, if he had not been occupied. They had bought the time, and the battle should now be safely won. And the bitterness – had Carlus not gone down with the trumpet, had Jacques lived fifty more heartbeats-

He slew two more boglins before he saw the troll.

It reared, its blank stone face smooth and black, and it belled, it’s shrill trumpet ringing out above the ring of weapons and the silent intensity of the boglins.

Not just one of them.

Six of them.

And the wave front of their fear made the boglins beneath his horse’s hooves quail and void their attacks. George rose, kicked out, and then plunged forward.

The wave of terror passed over them.

The captain got his sword in a good two-handed grip, and George leaped for the nearest troll as he brought it up high above his head on the left. You are supposed to use a lance on these things, he thought.

The troll saw him, turned, and put its antlered head down, low, so its antlers covered its neck, and charged, seeking to get its antlers under the Red Knight’s sword and unhorse him.

George turned mid-stride.

Faster than human thought, the animals struck.

Like a cat, George pivoted his weight and one hoof licked out and caught the monster a staggering blow in the centre of the forehead, so hard that cracked its stone face.

The troll screamed, turned its head, whipping its antlers through a spray of motion and leaped, turning, caught the armoured horse in the right rear haunch. George got his back feet off the ground with a caper and the blow slewed the horse around on his forefeet-

The line of attack opened like a curtain as the two creatures turned into each other. The captain felt as if he had all the time in the world – as if this moment had been predicted since the dawn of the world. The troll’s turn – his destrier’s turn – the open line at the back of the monster’s neck . . .

His sword struck, two handed, like the fall of the shooting star to earth, and cut along the line where two great plates of hardened flesh met; sliced through the troll’s spine, and in, down, out and free in a gout of ichor-

George leapt free, stumbled, and the captain was thrown from the saddle.

He got a shoulder down, landed on something squishy and rolled, the plates of his shoulder harness clanking like a tinker’s wagon and the muscles in his neck, injured and re-injured since early spring, wrenched again.

But he ended his shoulder roll on his knees, and pushed immediately to his feet.

Off to the right, Tom and Sauce were pouring blows into another troll, but behind them the thick knot of companions had begun to dissolve as the remaining trolls ripped into their horses. Armour crumpled; men died.

Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin

Gawin followed Sym as the archer followed the novice – down the stairs, across the courtyard to the entrance to the cellars where the stores were kept.

There were two archers guarding the heavy oak door to the cellars.

‘The Wild is coming up the escape!’ Amicia yelled, fear and frustration powering her words.

Every farm wife and nun in the courtyard heard her.

The two archers looked at each other.

Sym came up next to her. ‘Captain’s orders!’ he yelled, his thin voice shrill and not very heroic.

The bigger of the two archers fumbled with his keys.

Gawin ran across the yard to join them.

The women were frozen, and he had a moment to consider the looks on their faces – panic, determination, and a sullen kind of anger that it should come to this when they had already lost so much.

Yes, he understood those looks of loss. Of failure.

‘Arm yourselves!’ he called to them.

The bigger archer opened the iron-bound oak door and Sym ran down the steps into the darkness.

Gawin pushed past the novice.

The first cellar was gloomy but well-enough lit. A stack of spears leaned against one of the company’s great wagons. Gawin caught one up as he went by.

There was another door, ahead, which was just opening.

Sym was too late to stop it, so he spitted the creature that opened it – ripped his sword out of the boglin’s armoured thorax and kicked it so hard that it folded backwards-

Gawin caught a glimpse of steps going down and a seething knot of the creatures filling the stairwell.

‘Hold the door!’ Gawin called. He thrust with his spear, and felt the steel head crunch through the soft hide around the boglin’s neck and head – just like digging a knife into a lobster. Something popped, it fell off his spear, and he pushed.

Sym cut, and cut again, and again, desperation and terror lending wings to his sword arm.

The stairwell was crawling with them.

He killed another one.

And another one.

And the novice turned, raised her hands, and spoke a single word in Archaic, and golden-green light filled the cellar.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Desiderata could scarcely breathe for the immanence of power. And the pain, which was returning. But she could feel the enemy – the centre of the power of the Wild, its emerald intensity shot full of black – gathering force. She could feel it as surely as she could feel the power of the sun on her arms.

‘What’s happening here?’ Ser Alan asked. He bent to carefully place her litter on the doorsill of the chapel.

The woman was older – dressed plainly, like a servant or a farmwife. She had a spear in her hands. ‘If it please you, Ser Knight – there’s boglins got into the cellars, and all the garrison is trying to hold the doors.’

‘Good Christ!’ Ser Alan cursed. The other knights of the escort drew their swords.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn watched as the king and his knights obligingly fought their way into the centre of his range.

Sometimes plans did work out.

His trolls – the magnificent dhags – were cutting the knights to pieces. They were also dying, but he had more. Or he could obtain more. The Wild was fecund beyond human imagining.

He let the king fight on – on and on – until his reckless charge broke through the ring of bone and hide around the mercenaries. Around the dark sun.

The king and the dark sun together.

He took his gathered power, summoning every tendril that he could muster – the might that had been Thurkan, the souls of the fair folk, the convoluted essence of the Sossag shamans-

He savoured it, for a moment.

There was nothing to interrupt him, no distractions as he placed his power almost lovingly on a spot just between his two foes.

The edifice of his memory was no palace but a twisted yarn of ropes and webs, and he braided them in his mind with the mastery of an aeon.

Laid his hand to the completed cord, and cast.

Harmodius felt it, saw it, and cast his counter: a mirror. Even his counter had tails and vestiges – traps within traps. As he had learned.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain felt the moment the great phantasms were loosed as a single instant. It was as if fire or lightning had flashed through every inch of the air between the two casters.

He was Harmodius. As, for a moment, he had been Amicia.

There was no time.

He had so little left – but he gave it, straight into Harmodius’s arms. He reached and took from Amicia, who was herself fighting for her life – from Miram and her choir. And from the very sunlight around him.

And it wasn’t going to be enough.

The captain reached out to the great iron-bound door, and threw it open, and green light flooded into him.

He threw it through Harmodius to strengthen the counter work.

There was a thunderclap – a gout of white-green fire that shot into the heavens. A ripple in the curtain of reality so that, just for a moment, the veil of the world was wrenched aside. The captain saw black night pierced with white stars, and the dawn of chaos, and the rising plume of power that was the coming of the world.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Desiderata felt Harmodius’s power rise to meet the emerald giant – and she saw the deep subtlety of his mind in his casting.

But the emerald’s might was twenty times greater than that of the court Magus, and the tide of green rolled over him – dissipated, mirrored, channelled – but overpowering, like a rising river facing a plain full of channels and damns, yet eventually overcoming all of them to spill in one unstoppable flood-

But vast quantities of the emerald power hung in the air, cast aside by Harmodius’s counter spell. Or part of it.

The ripple of power passed the king, who watched, horrified, as Ser Alan was burned at his side, his armour straps charring, his face a livid red as he screamed – and man and horse collapsed. Beyond him, Harmodius frowned – his hand withered and blew away to ash and then, in a few hearttbeats, the Magus was subsumed. He turned to ash, crumpled and was borne away on the wind.

Thorn was struck by the mirror in the very moment of completion of his phantasm, and some of his own carefully hoarded power struck right back down the channel of his casting, burning him.

He screamed. Flinched. But far across the battlefield, Harmodius’s essence flickered and went out.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain struck, the sword descending more from the force of gravity than from any power of his shoulders.

In the Aether he had Harmodius by the hand.

Take me, boy.

In one moment, the captain had to understand, and to act. He opened his way into his palace, seized the spirit of the dead Magus with one Aethereal hand and cast his own phantasm with the other. The air outside was heavy with discarded power, green and ripe for plucking, and he took it, aided by the meticulous ordering of last night’s foe, aided by the thaumaturgical knowledge of his tutor – of Amicia’s Wild casting-

And there he was. Standing on the plinth, where she had always stood.

‘Better the slave of a bad master,’ the Magus muttered.

Suddenly the captain was unsure whether he should have allowed this – entity – refuge to his palace.

‘Any port in a storm, lad,’ the dead Magus said. ‘Go fight monsters, or you’ll be as dead as I am.’

And he lifted his sword again. The air was still redolent with power.

George was behind him, and on his feet.

Amplify my voice, he told the dead Magus.

‘Wedge! On me! Michael – the banner to me!’ His voice rang out like some antique god’s.

In a moment out of time, the captain wondered if this was exactly how the antique gods came about.

No time like the present.

Kneel! He commanded the creatures of the Wild.

Hermes Thrice-sainted, boy! You are challenging his control! Stop!

A third of the creatures around him stopped fighting, fell back or stood, stunned.

Lissen Carak – de Vrailly

Ser Jean de Vrailly led the main battle of the king’s host down the last ridge, and their hooves clattered like a fall of hail as they crossed the bridge. He had more than a thousand belted knights, and no one – not even the Count of the Borders – questioned him. An archangel had given him great glory, and every man in the main battle knew it.

Jean could see the Royal Standard trapped, far out in a sea of foes, with another standard he didn’t know – lacs d’amour in gold on a field of black. A foppish banner.

But he laughed to see the battle, and led the first files to cross the bridge off to the left, west towards the setting sun.

The soldiers in the long trench were rising from it, either in loyal determination to save the king, or in eagerness to join his attack.

Good for them. For once, there was to be enough glory for all.

He continued to ride west, and the long file of knights followed him – gradually enveloping the southern flank of the enemy.

Behind him, the Count d’Eu rose to his feet, and pointed his cut-down lance at the knot around the Royal Standard. ‘A moi!’ he roared.

Daniel Favor, former wagoner, climbed over the edge of the trench, to stand on the grass in the wind. Around him, farmers from the villages around Lissen Carack looked at him, and knew they could not let him be a better man.

Adrian Pargeter climbed out of the safe trench, and put his crossbow on the ground to draw his sword. Older guildsmen looked at each other. A draper with a grey beard asked his lifelong business rival – we really doing this? - and then they were up the vitrified earth too, drawing their swords.

Ranald Lachlan leaped up the side of the trench, waved his axe at his comrades, and pointed it at the enemy. ‘Come on, then!’ he said.

The trench emptied in moments, and they came.

Lachlan threw his axe in the air, and it spun in a great wheel of light over his head and fell back into his hand.

And the thin line of men charged.

Lissen Carak – Ser Gawin

Gawin saw Sym stumble, and a pair of the armoured things took him – dragged him down. Sym’s dagger licked out, gutted another boglin which fell atop him . . . and then the archer was gone, and Gawin was alone in the doorway.

A bright green light flashed, and Gawin was able to see far too much in the illumination. The crawling things beneath him on the stairs turned brown, their eyes burned away and dozens of them sank to the ground, all vitality leaching away as their bodies crumbled.

Gawin heaved a breath.

There were a dozen of the things left – all in a clump, a crawling, rolling mass of legs – he cut and cut at them like a madman, and then forced the door with sheer weight and determination, and he stumbled back . . .

A swarm of armoured men fell on the knot of boglins, hacking with axes, stabbing with spears – six knights he knew all too well. Ser Driant – the King’s Companion – other men of the household.

Gawin found himself pulled to the floor. He’d lost a moment’s attention and two of the things had him-

But he was Hard Hands, and he closed his left hand and slammed it into a lobe-shaped eye, keyed his hand around his adversary’s arm, and ripped it off the boglin with a tearing like ripping old leather, and then he swung the taloned arm like a club beating the bleeding thing to the ground. Ripped his rondel from its place at his hip, drove his knee into the soft place at the centre of the second boglin’s breast, and as its arms closed on him, slammed the dagger home, breaking its back. Spears slammed into the thing from all sides.

He got to his feet with his dagger clenched like a mantis’s claw. But the only figures standing in the green-lit cellar were armoured men.

Gawin sagged.

Ser Driant reached out an ichor-spattered hand. ‘Ser Gawin?’ he said.

Gawin was looking for the novice.

She was slumped against the wall. At her feet were the remnants of Sym the archer – the skin of his face flensed away where they’d swarmed atop him. She was pouring her power into him.

‘You cannot help him,’ Gawin said. ‘However great your talent, you cannot help him.’

She ignored him.

Ser Driant seized his shoulder. ‘Is she a healer?’ he asked.

Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt the challenge as a blow in his gut.

The dark sun.

The young Power glowed with fresh vitality. He had taken new prey, and he was stronger for it.

Thorn gathered his wits.

I am hurt. He is not. And I have been duped.

What if he can best me?

The air between them was thick with the misspent green power of his last phantasm, only partially expended. He had only to reach forth and take that power . . .

But if he was caught while doing it, it would be the end of him.

What if this was a Power’s plan all along? To lead me to over-extend, so that I might be destroyed?

Oh, Thurkan, it may be I owe you an apology.

Carefully, he began to wrap sigils of concealment about himself, even as he roared with false defiance.

Attack! he commanded his creatures.

High above him, in the fortress of his enemies, someone seized the power of the Wild – raw – and shaped a mighty phantasm with it.

So!

He wasn’t waiting for the trap to close. He fled.

Lissen Carak – de Vrailly

Jean de Vrailly judged his moment well. He had led the chivalry of Alba off to the west almost a league along the river. A handful of boglins had tried to oppose him, his sword was wet with their hellish ichor, and it was as easy as taking the heads off fennel plants in his mother’s garden.

And now-

Oh, the glory.

He raised his arm, closing his fist – turned his horse. ‘Halt!’ he ordered. ‘Now turn to face the enemy!’ Not a military command, but he had never led so many knights, and he didn’t know their commands in their language. So he turned out of the line, and cantered along the column. ‘Face me!’ he called. ‘Come! Turn your horses!’

As soon as half a dozen knights understood him, they all understood. And the great column, a thousand horses long, turned into a line a thousand horses wide as he cantered down the front, his lance held above his head, the royal arms of Alba sparkling on his chest.

I will be king.

He didn’t know where the thought came from, but suddenly it was there – he grinned and turned his horse to face the enemy. He was in the centre of this mighty line. To his right front, his own dismounted knights, led by his cousin, and the men of the King’s Guard had just slammed into the enemy fighting line. They were outnumbered badly.

But it didn’t matter.

Because he lay across the enemy’s line, like the crossing of a T, and the enemy had committed all of his reserves. And there was no force on earth, in the Wild or out of it, that could stop a thousand of his kind charging in a line.

He raised his lance high, feeling the astonishing, angelic vitality that filled him. ‘For God and honour!’ he roared.

‘Deus veult!’ cried the knights. Men closed their faceplates.

And then the line started forward.

The battle was over long before the first lance struck home. The enemy’s whole right wing had begun to melt back into the forest as soon as the knights emerged over the bridge – and now, as their charge rumbled forward, the wyverns, the trolls, and the handful of daemons edged back too. Some simply turned and ran for the woods. They didn’t have the bad judgment of men. Like any animal in the Wild faced with a larger predator, they turned and fled. Wyverns leapt into the air; the remaining trolls ran with stone-footed grace, and the daemons ran at the speed of racehorses – untouchable.

Only the boglins and irks stood and fought.

And in the centre, held by Thorn’s will, a dozen mighty creatures and a horde of boglins continued to try to kill the king and the dark sun.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain could no longer raise his sword to cut. He had the weapon in both hands – his left gauntlet held the blade halfway down, and he used it as a short spear, slamming the point into faces and armoured chests.

Moments of terror blended together – a scythe talon that came inside his visor, luck or skill directing the razor-sharp claw to curve up into his scalp and hair, leaving him alive instead of blind or dead.

A trio of irk warriors dragged him down with their sheer weight, their thin, strong limbs racketing against the steel of his armour in a killing frenzy. As slowly as honey poured on snow, or so it seemed, his right hand burrowed past the hideous strength of their limbs to the rondel dagger at his hip, and then he was on one knee, and they were gone, and his dagger dripped gore.

The comfort of steel armour rasping against his own – back to back. He didn’t know who it was, he was just thankful for steel not chitin.

And then, a daemon.

This lord of the Wild was taller than a war horse. The captain hadn’t remarked on their absence from the battlefield, but now that he faced one some part of his brain registered that he hadn’t faced one before.

The crest on its head was a livid blue – utterly different from the one he’d faced in the woods to the west, or in the dark.

It watched him intently, but it didn’t attack.

He watched it and wished he had his spear – currently leaning against his armour rack inside the fortress – and a horse, and a ballista, and twenty fresh friends.

The thing had a pole-axe the size of a wagon’s axle-tree. The head was flint. It was crusted with blood.

It turned its head.

Had he been fresh he’d have sprung forward with a mighty attack while it was distracted, but instead he merely breathed again.

It looked back at him.

‘You are the dark sun,’ it said at last. ‘I can take you, but if you hurt me, I will die here. So instead-’ It saluted him with a flourish of the great pole-axe. ‘Live long, enemy of my enemy.’

It turned and ran.

The captain watched it go, throwing boglins from its path, with no idea who or what it was. Or why it had left him alive.

But he was trembling.

He fought more boglins. He cut some sort of tentacled thing from the Prior, who flicked him a salute and went back to work. Later, he saw the king go down, and he managed to get a foot on either side of the king’s head, and then all the monsters in the Wild came for him.

Some time passed, and he was standing between Sauce and Bad Tom, and the King of Alba’s body lay between his feet. The last rush of the monsters had been so ferocious as to rob the word of all meaning – an endless rain of blows, which only fine armour could repel, because sheer fatigue had robbed muscles of the ability to parry.

Tom was still killing.

Sauce was still killing.

Michael was still standing . . .

. . . so the captain kept standing too, because that’s what he did.

They came for him, and he survived them.

There finally came a point when the blows stopped. When there was nothing to push against, no fresh foe to withstand.

Before he could think about it, the captain slapped his visor open and drank in the air. And then bent down to check the king.

The man was still alive.

The captain had had a leather bottle, just an hour ago. He started to search his person for it with the slow incompetence of the utterly exhausted.

Not there.

He felt an armoured back against his, and turned to find the Captain of the King’s Guard – Sir Richard Fitzroy. The man managed a smile.

‘I will build a church,’ Michael chanted. ‘I will burn a thousand candles to the Virgin,’ he went on.

‘Get the crap off your blade,’ Tom said. He had a scrap of linen out of his wallet, and he was suiting action to words.

Sauce didn’t grin. She took a handkerchief from her breastplate and wiped her face. Then she took in what her captain was doing and handed him a wooden canteen of water, pulling it over her shoulder on a strap.

He knelt and gave water to the King of Alba.

Who smiled.

The knight who reined in above him provided some shade. His giant war horse had a hard time standing securely on the shifting pile of dead boglins, and his rider curbed him savagely and swore in Gallish. He looked around, as if expecting something.

The king grunted something, and the captain bent over further, his shoulder screaming at the effort, the helmet and the aventail on his head and neck feeling like the weight of a lifetime of penance.

The king had a horny talon between the plates of his fauld, buried deep in his thigh, and his blood soaked the ground.

‘I have saved you,’ said the knight who towered over them. ‘You may take your ease – you are saved.’ Indeed, as far as the eye could see, a wave of knights were dispatching the last creatures too foolish or too bound by Thorn’s will to flee. ‘We have won a mighty victory today. Where is the king, please?’

The captain was able for the first time in hours – it felt like hours, and later it would prove to be only a few minutes – to look around.

His company-

His men-at-arms were gone. They lay in a ring, their white steel armour, even matted with gore, brilliant when surrounded by the green, grey, white and brown of their adversaries.

But their red tabards were very like those worn by the king’s knights.

The king’s household knights were intermixed with them, and the Knights of Saint Thomas in their black. Many of the latter were still standing – more than a dozen.

‘The king is right here,’ Fitzroy said.

‘Dead?’ the foreign knight asked.

The captain shook his head. He could easily come to dislike this foreigner. Galles were superb knights but very difficult people.

His mind was wandering.

Don’t give him the king, said Harmodius.

The captain stiffened in shock. How did you do that? Prudentia never spoke to me outside the memory palace.

Do I look like Prudentia? Harmodius muttered. Do not give this man the king. Take him to the fortress, yourself. Take him to Amicia, with your own hands.

‘Give him to me,’ said the foreign knight. ‘I will see he is well guarded.’

‘He’s well-guarded right here,’ said Sir Richard.

Bad Tom leaned forward. ‘Sod off, son.’

The captain reached out a hand to steady Tom.

‘You need manners,’ said the mounted knight. ‘But for my charge, you would all be dead.’

Tom laughed. ‘All you did was to lower my body count, pipkin,’ he said.

They glared at each other.

The Prior waded over to them. ‘Ser Jean? Captal?’

De Vrailly backed his horse. ‘Messire.’

‘A litter for the king.’ He waved.

Other knights rode forward – there was the banner of the Earl of Towbray, and there was the Count of the Borders. They came in a rush, now that the king had been discovered. Towbray found the king’s squires and the Royal Standard, and raised it, covered in ichor.

There was a low cheer.

A long line of infantrymen came over the field of the dead. They had to pick their footing, and they weren’t quick about it. As they came, the captain and Michael got the king’s breast and back off, and got his hauberk up. Bad luck had slit a dozen rings – worse luck to receive a second blow that bent the fauld and penetrated the leg. There really was a lot of blood.

Do I have anything left?

You can stop the blood flow. But I’ve been squandering your power, keeping you alive, for a long time now. Amicia?

I’m right here.

The captain smiled, knelt, placed his hand on the king’s bare thigh when Michael peeled back his braes and his hose, and with no conscious effort he released Amicia’s power.

Harmodius did the actual casting.

It made the captain feel a little sick, as if he was three people.

You feel sick? The dead Magus laughed in his head.

And then the footmen of the Royal Guard were there – everywhere around them – and the king was lifted high, placed on a cloak across two spears . . . and he held onto the captain’s hand. So they walked, hand in hand, across the stricken field. It was the longest walk the captain had ever taken – the sun was beating down like a new foe, the insects descended like a plague, and the footing was impossible.

But eventually, they were free of the corpses and were climbing the long road to the fortress.

Soldiers stopped and bowed, or knelt. Men in the field had begun to sing the Te Deum, and its strains rose like the casting of a mighty phantasm from the fields below. The captain felt the king’s hot hand in his own, and tried not to think too much about it.

The Queen lay in the chapel – on the altar. She raised her head, and smiled.

The king released a sigh, as if he had been holding his breath.

The captain saw Amicia. She stood in the light of the window behind the altar. She appeared inhuman, a goddess of light and colour, and she was, to his sight, sparkling with power.

Christ. Look at her, boy.

The captain ignored the dead man.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her anyway.

She was healing each injured person brought to her. The power went into her as easily as breathing – she was drinking the unspent green from Thorn’s hammer blow, and from the sun streaming through the broken chapel window, and the well – taking all three streams of power and releasing it in a cloud of rainbow light so that soldier after soldier approached her, knelt, and arose healed. Most stumbled away and went to sleep in the arms of their comrades.

She passed her hands over the king as if he were any other soldier, any of the women wounded in the desperate defence of the courtyard, any of the children injured in the collapse of the West Tower – and he was healed.

And then she turned, and her eyes looked into his.

He couldn’t breathe.

He had the foolish impulse to kiss her.

She touched him. ‘You must open your powers, or I cannot heal you,’ she said. She gave him a smile. ‘You were not this powerful, a few days ago.’

He sighed. ‘Nor were you,’ he said.

The room was the same. He was almost afraid to enter it, but it looked better. The moss was gone from the floor, and Prudentia’s statue was repaired, and now occupied a niche that hadn’t existed before.

The Magus stood on the plinth in the centre of the room.

The captain by-passed him, and walked to the door.

‘Think on what you do, boy,’ said the dead Magus. ‘She is a Power, neither more nor less than you.’

The captain ignored him, and opened the iron-bound door.

And she was there.

And he was healed.

She looked at the plinth and her eyes widened in horror. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘What have you done?’

And she was gone.

North of Lissen Carak – Peter

They stopped in a clearing in the woods. The ground had been rising steadily to the north, and they were running almost due north, and that was all Nita Qwan knew except that, as usual, he had never been so tired in all his life.

They all lay down in a muddle and slept.

In the morning, Ota Qwan stood up first, and they ran again. The sun was high in the sky before they straggled over a ridge, and young warriors were sent back without their baskets to fetch the matrons and mothers of newborns who had lagged behind.

And when the last of the women was over the ridge, fires were lit carefully and the people made food, and ate.

And when Nita Qwan felt as if life might be worth living, Ota Qwan came to the centre of the ring of fires with a spear. And Little Hands, the senior woman, came and faced him.

He handed her the spear. ‘Our war is over,’ he said. ‘I give you the spear of war.’

Little Hands took it. ‘The matrons have it, ready for any enemy. Our thanks, Ota Qwan. You have surprised us, and done well.’

No one said anything more – there was neither applause nor censure.

An hour later, they were running north again.