The Red Knight

Chapter Eight

Master Random

North of Albinkirk – Peter

Peter the cook’s first thought was I am still a free man.

He had walked for two days along the road east, and he hadn’t seen another man. Yesterday noon he’d smelt smoke, and seen the fortress rising to the south – a fortress he had to assume was the town of Albinkirk, although his appreciation of the landscape of western Alba was virtually non-existent and he had only the comments of his captors and the mercenaries to go by.

The two traders must have travelled some way to the east, then. And he was virtually back where he’d begun.

Or he was walking in circles.

But the sight of Albinkirk, five leagues or so distant, oppressed him. It was, after all, the place they’d been taking him to be sold. So he turned up the first decent path leading north, into the mountains, and he followed it even though setting his feet to it required an act of courage and marked his first decision.

He was not going back.

He’d rid himself of his yoke. It was easier than he’d expected – given time and some large rocks, he’d simply bashed it to flinders.

Like all slaves, and many other men, he had heard that there were people who lived at peace with the Wild. Even at home, there were those who did more-

Best not to think of those people. Those who sold their souls.

He didn’t want to think about it. But he went north, the axe over his shoulder, and he walked until darkness fell, passing a dozen abandoned farmsteads and stealing enough food that he couldn’t easily carry more. He found a good bow, although it had no arrows and no quiver. It was odd, going into the abandoned cabins along the trail – in some, the steaders had carefully folded everything away; chests full of blankets, plate rails full of green glazed plates from over the eastern mountains, Morean plates and cups and a little pewter. He didn’t bother to steal any of these, except a good horn cup he found on a chimney mantel.

In other houses, there was still food on the table, the meat rotting, the bread stale. The first time he found a meal on the table he ate it, and later he burped and burped until he threw it up.

By the twelfth cabin, he’d stopped being careful.

He went into the barn, and there was a sow. She’d been left because she was heavy, gravid, and the farmer was too soft hearted – or just too pragmatic – to try and drive her to Albinkirk in her condition.

He was wondering if he was hard-hearted enough to butcher her when he heard the barn’s main door give a squeak.

He saw the Wild creature enter. It was naked, bright red, its parody of hair a shocking tongue of flame. It had an arrow on its bow, the iron tip winked with steel malevolence, and it was pointed at Peter’s chest.

Peter nodded. His throat had closed. He fought down his gorge, and the shaking of his arms, and managed to say, ‘Hello.’

The red thing wrinkled its lips as if he smelled something bad and Peter’s perspective shifted. It was actually a man in red paint, with his hair full of some sort of red mud.

Peter turned slightly to face the man. He held up his empty hands. ‘I will not be a slave,’ he said.

The red man raised his head and literally looked down his nose at Peter, who shivered. The arrow, at full draw, didn’t waver.

‘Ti natack onah!’ the red man said in a tone full of authority. A human voice.

‘I don’t understand,’ Peter said. His voice trembled. The red man was obviously a war-leader of some sort, which meant that there were others around. Whatever kind of men they were, they were not what Peter had expected. They raised his hopes, and dashed them.

‘Ti natack onah!’ the man said again, with increasing insistence. ‘TI NATACK ONAH.’

Peter put his hands up in the air. ‘I surrender!’ he said.

The red man loosed his arrow.

It passed Peter, missing him by the width of his arm, and Peter felt his bowels flip over. He crouched, his knees going out from under him, and he put his arms around himself, cursing his own weakness. And so quickly I am a slave again.

Behind him there was a scream.

The red man had put an arrow into the sow’s head, and she twitched a few times and was dead.

Suddenly the barn was full of painted men – red, red and black, black with white handprints, black with a skull face. They were terrifying and they moved with a liquid, muscular grace that was worse than all his imaginings of the creatures of the Wild. As he watched, they butchered the sow and her unborn piglets, and he was pulled from the barn – roughly, but without malice – and the red man lit a torch from a very ordinary looking fire-kit and set fire to the shingles of the barn.

It lit off like an alchemical display, despite weeks of rain.

More of the warriors came, and then more – perhaps fifty arrived within the hour. They passed through the cabin, and when the roof fell into the raging inferno of the barn, they gathered half-burned boards into a smaller fire, and then another and another, until they had a fire that ran the length of the small cabin, and then staked the unborn piglets on green alder and some iron stakes they found in the cabin and roasted them. Other men found the underground storage cellar, and pushed dried corn into the coals, and apples – hundred of apples.

By now there were a hundred painted men and women, and darkness was falling. Most had a bow and arrows; a few had a long knife, or a sword, or even, in one case, a pair of swords. A few had long falls of hair in brilliant colours, but most had a single stripe of hair atop their heads, and another across their genitals. They looked odd to him, but it was only after his brain began to grow accustomed to them that he realised that they had no fat on their frames.

No fat.

Like slaves.

No one was watching him. He was no threat, but he was also no use. He had a dozen opportunities to run, and he went as far as the edge of the clearing, where the farmer had been hacking down trees older than his own grandfather to make room for his crops. Then he stopped, lay on the low branch of an apple tree, and watched.

Before the ruddy sun was gone from the sky, he stripped off his hose and his braes – cheap, dirty, torn cloth – and walked back among them in his shirt. A few of them had shirts of deerskin or linen, and he hoped that he was making a statement.

He still had the wallet hanging over his shoulder, and the axe.

And the bow.

He came and stood near the barn-fire, feeling the warmth, and his stomach did somersaults as he smelled the burning pig-flesh.

One of the painted people had set fire to the cabin, and there was laughter. Another painted man had burned himself stealing pinches of pigs flesh from the sow’s carcass, and all the warriors around him were laughing like daemons.

If there was a signal he didn’t hear it. But suddenly, they all fell on the piglets as if a dining bell had sounded, and ate. It was like watching animals eat. There were few sounds besides those of chewing, ripping flesh from bone, punctuated by the spitting out of burned bits and cartilage and the continuing sound of laughter.

If it hadn’t been for the laughter, it might have been nightmarish. But the laughter was warm and human, and Peter found he had stepped closer and closer to the fires, drawn by the smell of food and the sound of laughter.

The red man was close to him. Suddenly, their eyes met, and the red man gave him the flash of a grin – almost a grimace – and waved a rib at him.

‘Dodeck?’ he asked. ‘Gaerleon?’

The other warriors close by turned and looked at Peter.

One man – taller than most, painted an oily black, with oily black hair and a single slash of red across his face – turned and grinned. ‘You want to eat?’ he said. ‘Skadai asks you.’

Peter took another step forward. He was intensely conscious of his legs and neck and face, naked and very different from theirs.

The red man – Skadai – waved to him. ‘Eat!’ he said.

Another warrior laughed and said something in the alien tongue, and Skadai laughed. And the black warrior laughed too.

‘Was it your pig?’ the black warrior asked.

Peter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was just passing through.’

The black warrior appeared to translate this to his friends, and handed him a portion of pig.

He ate it. He ate too fast, burning his hands on the skin and his tongue on the meat and fat.

The black warrior handed him a gourd that proved to be full of wine. Peter drank, sputtered and then handed it back. The burns on his hands suddenly hurt.

They were all watching him.

‘I was a slave,’ he said suddenly. As if they could understand. ‘I won’t be a slave again. I’d rather be dead. I won’t be a slave for you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But short of slavery, I’d like to join you.’

The black warrior nodded. ‘I was a slave, too,’ he said. He smiled wryly. ‘Well – of sorts.’

In the morning, they were up with the first tendrils of dawn, moving down the narrow road that Peter had climbed the day before. They moved in complete silence, their only communication via whistles and birdcalls. Peter attached himself to the black warrior, who called himself Ota Qwan. Ota Qwan followed Skadai, who seemed, as far as Peter could tell, to be the captain. Not that he issued any orders.

No one spoke to Peter, but then, no one spoke much anyway, so he focused on trying to move the way they did. He was not a noisy man in the woods, and no one cautioned him – he followed Ota Qwan as best he could, across an alder swamp, up a low ridge dotted with stands of birch, and then west along a deer trail through beech highlands, with a lake stretching away to the right of the long ridge and the great river stretched out to the left.

They moved across the face of the wilderness, sometimes following trails and sometimes following the flow of the terrain, and their paths gradually made sense to Peter – they were following a relatively straight course west, and avoiding the river. He had no sense of how many of them there were, even when they made camp, because that night, they simply stopped and lay down, all nestled tightly in a tangle of bodies and limbs. No one had a blanket, few had shirts, and the night was cold. Peter found he despised the touch of another against him, front and back, but his revulsion was quickly forgotten in sleep.

In the rainy grey of not-quite-morning, he offered some very stale bread from his sack to Ota Qwan, who accepted it with gratitude, took a small bite, and handed the crust on. Men watched it eagerly, but no one protested when the bread ran out before the mouths did. Peter hadn’t even had a bite. He had expected it to be handed back. But he shrugged.

On his second night with the painted people he couldn’t sleep at all. It rained softly, and the sensation of wet flesh – paint, grit, and a man’s naked thigh against his own – made him get up shiver alone. Eventually he crept back into the pile of bodies, disgusted but almost frozen.

The next day was agony. The whole group moved faster, running the length of a grass meadow curiously criss-crossed by an arterial profusion of canals the width of a man’s outstretched arm. The painted people leaped them with ease, but Peter fell into several, and always received a hand out and a belly laugh for his troubles.

The painted people wore supple, thin leather shoes, often the same colour as their paint so that he hadn’t noticed them at first. His cheap slave shoes were falling to pieces, and the great meadow was littered with sharp sticks pointing up from the ground. He hurt his feet a dozen times, and again, he was helped along and laughed at.

He was limping badly, exhausted, utterly unaware of his surroundings, so when Ota Qwan stopped Peter all but walked over him.

Just the length of a horse in front of them stood a creature straight from nightmare – a beautiful monster as tall as a plough horse, and as heavy, with a crested head like a helmeted angel, a raptor’s beak and blank eyes grey, the colour of new-wrought iron. It had wings – small, but heart-breakingly beautiful.

Peter couldn’t even look at it, because for the third time in as many days he was terrified beyond his ability to think.

Ota Qwan put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

Skadai raised a hand. ‘Lambo!’ he said.

The monster grunted, and raised a taloned claw-hand.

Peter had time to note that its left claw was wrapped in linen, the way an injured man’s hand would be wrapped in bandages.

Then the monster grunted again – if it spoke, the tones were too deep for Peter to understand – and then it was gone into the underbrush. Skadai turned and raised his bow. ‘Gots onah!’ he shouted.

There was an answering roar from all around them, and Peter was staggered to discover that there were dozens – perhaps hundreds – of painted warriors around him.

He grabbed at Ota Qwan. ‘What – what was that?’ he asked.

Ota Qwan gave him a wry smile. ‘That was what men call an adversarius,’ he said. ‘A warden of the Wild.’ He eyed Peter for a moment. ‘A daemon, little man. Still want to be one of us?’

Peter took a breath but it was hard. His throat was closed again.

Ota Qwan put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Tonight we’ll be in a regular camp. Maybe we can talk. You must have questions. I know a little.’ He shrugged. ‘I love living with the Sossag. I am one. I would never go back, not even to be a belted earl.’ The black painted man shrugged. ‘But it ain’t for everyone. And the Sossag are Free People. If you don’t want to continue with them, well, just walk away. The Wild might kill you, but the Sossag won’t.’

‘Free People?’ Peter asked. He’d heard it said before.

‘You have a lot to learn.’ Ota Qwan smacked his shoulder. ‘Move now. Talk later.’

Dormling – Hector Lachlan

Hector Lachlan walked into the courtyard of the great inn at Dormling like a prince coming into his kingdom, and men came out to stare, even applaud. The Keeper came in person, and shook his hand.

‘How many head?’ he asked.

Lachlan grinned. ‘Two thousand, six hundred and eleven,’ he said. ‘Mind you, master, that includes the goats, and I’m not so very fond of goats.’

The Keeper of Dormling – a title as noble and powerful as any in the south, for all it belonged to a big bald man in an apron – clapped Lachlan on the back. ‘We’ve expected you a ten-day. Your cousin’s here to join you. He says it’s bad to the south.’ He added, ‘We were afraid you might be broke, or dead.’

Lachlan accepted the cup of wine that the Keeper’s own daughter pressed into his hand. He raised it to her. ‘I drink to you, lass,’ he said.

She blushed.

Hector turned back to the Keeper. ‘The Hills are empty,’ he said, ‘which trouble in the south explains. How far south? Is it the king?’

The Keeper shook his head.

‘Your cousin told me that Albinkirk was afire,’ he said. ‘But come in and sit, and bring your men. The pens are ready, even for twenty-six hundred and eleven beasts. And I’m eager to buy – if I serve you a steak tonight, Hector Lachlan, you’ll have to sell me the cow first. I’m that short.’

The staff of the Dormling Inn descended on the drovers like an avenging army, carrying trays of leather tankards of strong ale and mountains of soft bread and sharp cheese. By the time the youngest, dustiest drover far in the rear had been served his welcome cup and his bread, their lord was clean of the mud of the trail, sitting in a room as fine as most lord’s halls, looking at a new tapestry from the East and smiling at the back of a local woman – a grown woman with a mind of her own, as he’d just discovered. He rubbed his bicep where she’d pinched him hard as a land crab and laughed.

‘Cawnor tried to levy a toll on me,’ he went on.

The Keeper and the rest of the audience shook their heads.

The drover shrugged. ‘So we opened the road. I doubt there’s enough of his men left alive to hold their fort, should someone decide to take it from them now.’ Drovers never sought to hold land. Drovers drove.

His cousin Ranald pushed through the crowd.

‘You’re taller!’ Hector said, and crushed him in an embrace. Then he sank back into his chair and took a long draught of ale. ‘Albinkirk afire? That’s ill news. What of the fair?’

Ranald shook his head. ‘I was moving fast. I kept moving. I was already on the east side when I reached Fifth Bridge, so I stayed there and rode cross country.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t see a thing.’

The Keeper shrugged. ‘If I’d thought you’d be here today, I’d have held the two bloody peddlers,’ he said. ‘They claimed they’d been part of a merchant convoy headed west from Theva. Lost all their goods and slaves.’

Hector nodded. ‘Like enough.’ This was the time of year for the great convoys.

‘A pair of Moreans. Said it was an ambush. Whole convoy destroyed.’ The Keeper shrugged. ‘My sons say there was a good sized Theva convoy a ten-day back as well, on the south road, so they didn’t pass by here.’ He shrugged again. ‘I have no faith in Moreans, but they had no reason to lie either.’

‘Ambushed by what?’ Hector asked.

‘They couldn’t agree,’ the landlord said.

‘They said the Wild,’ said a bold young farmer, a frequent customer, and a suitor for one of the Keeper’s daughters. ‘Or, leastways, the younger one said the Wild.’

The Keeper shrugged again. ‘That’s true. Some of them said it was the Wild.’

Hector nodded slowly. ‘I certainly didn’t see an animal bigger than a dog the whole trip here,’ he said. He shook his head in weary disgust. ‘The Wild is set against Albinkirk? Where’s the king? His people eat my cattle too.’

The Keeper sighed. ‘I don’t know, and that’s a fact,’ he said. ‘I’ve put two of my sons and a dozen men on fast horses out to get ye news. We’ll see what they have. Folk have spied Outwallers in the woods. Sassogs. I think that if they were really there, they’d have been seen and et alive – but then I’m a suspicious bastard.’

Hector took a deep breath. ‘So it’s war then.’

The Keeper looked away. ‘I hope not.’

Hector took another pull of ale. ‘Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one smells most. How long until you hear from your fast horsemen?’

‘Tomorrow,’ the Keeper said.

‘Assuming the Outwallers don’t eat them.’ Hector kicked his sword out in front of him to make room for his legs and sat back, tipping his chair against the wall. ‘By the five wounds of Christ, Keeper. This will be an adventure to remember then – taking the drove into an army of the Wild. Not even my da did the like.’

‘Waste of courage and arrows, though, if the fair ain’t happening,’ the Keeper said. ‘Lissen Carak may be so many burned cots and splintered stones when you get there.’

Hector thumped his chair back down. ‘Truth in what you say,’ he said. ‘And no use pondering it until I know more.’ He looked around at the dozen men in the room. ‘But I have a real harper and a dozen other players in my tail – and unless Dormling’s fallen on hard times, I wager a golden noble to a copper cat we can have us some fine music and dancing to rival the fairies tonight. So enough talk of war. Let’s have wine and music.’

In the far doorway, the tall serving woman tapped her foot and nodded approvingly.

The Keeper’s youngest daughter clapped her hands. ‘Now that’s why you’re the Prince of Drovers,’ she said approvingly. ‘To Hector, Prince of the Green Hills!’

Hector Lachlan frowned. ‘The Green Hills have no lord but the Wyrm of Erch,’ he said. ‘The dragon will have no rival, and can hear all that’s said by men, so let’s not be naming me to the lordship of any hills – eh, Keeper?’

The Keeper took a long pull of his own ale and put an arm around his daughter’s shoulders, and said ‘Honey, you know never to speak so. The Wyrm is no friend of man – but he’s no foe to us, as long as we stay clear of him and keep the sheepfolds where he commands. Eh?’

She burst into tears and fled the room with every eye on her, and then the moment passed and the woman in the doorway clapped her hands. ‘Bother the Wyrm!’ she said boldly. ‘I want the harper!’

Harndon Palace – Desiderata

Desiderata lay back on the daybed in her solar, wearing only a long shift of sheer linen and silk hose with red leather garters. Her nurse clucked disapprovingly at her mistress’s deshabille and began the herculean task of gathering up her shoes.

Desiderata had a scroll, a day book, and a lead pencil encased in silver with her, and she was writing furiously. ‘Why don’t they build all the cart wheels to the same size?’ she asked.

Diota made a face. ‘Because wheelwrights don’t share their measures, mistress.’

Desiderata sat up. ‘Really?’

Diota clucked, looking for a second damask slipper. She found it under the daybed. ‘Every wheelwright builds to their own set of sizes – usually given ’em by their father or grandfather. Some build cartbeds to the width of the narrowest bridge – I grew up in the mountain country, and the Bridge of Orchids was the narrowest lane in the baillie. No carter would build a cart wider that that, and no wheelwright-’

Desiderata made an impatient noise. ‘I take your point. But military carts-’ She shook her head. ‘There are no military carts. We have vassals who give cart service. They hold their cottages and farms in exchange for providing a cart and a driver. Can you imagine anything clumsier? And when their cart breaks down, it’s the king’s problem.’ She chewed on the silver pencil. ‘He needs a professional train. Carts built for war, with carters paid a wage.’ She scribbled furiously.

‘I imagine it costs too much, my lady,’ Diota said.

Desiderata shook her head. ‘You know what it costs to repair the wheels on one cart? War does not need to be this expensive.’

‘You make me laugh, my lady,’ Diota said. She had found both of the red calfskin slippers – a miracle in itself – and she was putting the whole collection all on shoe forms to keep them stretched.

Desiderata gave her nurse the sort of smile that squires at court fought to gain. ‘I make you laugh, my sweet?’

‘You are the Queen of Beauty, with your head full of romance and starshine, and now you’re organising his supply train.’ Diota shook her head.

‘Without forage and fodder, a knight and his horse are worthless,’ Desiderata said. ‘If we want them to win glory, they must be fed.’ She laughed. ‘You think my head is full of starshine, nurse – look inside a young man’s head. I wager that half of the young louts who try to look down my dress and fight to kiss my hand will ride off to do great deeds without even a nose bag for their chargers. Without an oiled rag to touch up their sword blades. Without a sharpening stone or a fire kit.’ She tossed her head to move her mane of hair. ‘I’ve watched knights my whole life. Half of them are good fighters – fewer than a tenth make even marginally competent soldiers.’

Diota made a face. ‘Men. What more need be said?’

Desiderata laughed. She picked up a second scroll. ‘I’m moving forward with the plans for the tournament. The king will have almost the full muster of knighthood together anyway, so I’ll move the date by a month – the fourth Sunday in Pentecost isn’t a bad time for a big show. The planting will be done and only the haying will be in.’

‘Fourth Sunday – Lorica Cattle Fair,’ said Diota.

Desiderata sighed. ‘Of course.’ She made a face. ‘Drat.’

‘Have your tournament at Lorica instead.’

‘Hmmm,’ Desiderata mused. ‘Very good for the town – good for our relations there, as they’ll rake in a profit. And I understand my husband had to make some concession there.’

‘Because your perfect knight burned the Two Lions,’ Diota spat. ‘Foreign fuck!’

‘Nurse!’ Desiderata swung a pillow with great accuracy, catching her nurse in the back of the head with a soft tassel.

‘He’s a lout in armour.’

‘He’s reputed to be the best knight in the world,’ breathed the Queen. ‘You cannot judge him by the standards-’

‘By the Good Christ,’ Diota said. ‘If he’s the best knight in the world, then he should embody the standards.’

They glared at each other. But Diota knew her duty. She smiled. ‘I’m sure he is a great knight, my lady.’

The Queen shook her head. ‘I confess he lacks something,’ she admitted.

Diota made a noise.

‘Thank you, nurse. That will be quite enough. Despite your ill-mannered grumbling, I take your point – no doubt the king does need something nice done for Lorica. Holding the tournament there – if the timing is right, if the army is returning that road, and if the town fathers are in favour – yes, it would do very nicely. And I would get my tournament.’ She rang a silver bell, and the door to the solar opened to admit her secretary, Lady Almspend, one of the few university-taught women in Alba.

‘Two letters, if you please, Becca.’

Lady Almspend curtsied, sat at the writing table, and produced a silver pen and ink from her purse.

‘To the Mayor and Sheriff of Lorica, the Queen of Alba sends greeting-’

She dictated quickly and fluently, pausing while her secretary filled in titles and appropriate courtesies with equal fluency. It was the habit of kings and queens to employ scholars of repute as secretaries, as most of the nobility couldn’t be bothered to learn the task and employed others to do any actual writing. But Rebecca Almspend managed to write fine poetry and research the works of the troubadours of the last two centuries, and still found time to do her job thoroughly.

‘To his Alban Majesty, from your devoted, loving wife-’

Lady Almspend gave her an arch look.

‘Oh, say what I mean, not what I say,’ Desiderata pouted.

‘You Grace will forgive me if I suggest that sometimes your performance as a wilful beauty overshadows your obvious intelligence,’ Lady Almspend said.

Desiderata let the nails of her right hand pass lightly down the back of her secretary’s arm. ‘Let my letter be coy, and let him gather how very brilliant I am by looking at the design of his new war carts,’ she said. ‘Telling him how very clever I am will only cause him distress. Men, my dear Becca, are like that, and you will never attract a lover, not even a bespectacled merchant prince who adores your head for long columns of figures, if you wear wimples that hide your face and seek to prove to every lover that you are the smarter of the pair.’ The Queen knew perfectly well that her intellectual secretary had attracted the devotion of the strongest and most virile of the King’s Guardsmen – it had been something of a wonder at the court. Even the Queen was curious how it had happened.

Lady Almspend was perfectly still, and the Queen knew she was biting back a hot remark.

The Queen kissed her. ‘Be at peace, Becca. In some ways, I am far more learned than you.’ She laughed. ‘And I am the Queen.’

Even the staid Lady Almspend had to laugh at the truth of this. ‘You are the Queen.’

Later, when giving justice, the Queen summoned two of the king’s squires, and sent them with the letters – one was delighted to go to the army, if only for a day or two, and the other, rather more dejected, riding to a merchant town to deliver a letter to a retired knight.

The Queen allowed them both to kiss her hand.

North of Harndon – Harmodius

Harmodius was on his second night without sleep. He tried not to think about how easily he’d done such things forty years before. Tonight, riding very slowly down the road on an exhausted horse, he could only hope to keep his hands on the saddle, hope that the horse didn’t stumble, throw a shoe, or simply collapse beneath him.

He’d drained every reserve of energy. He’d set wards, thrown bolts, and built phantasmal dissuasions with the abandon of a much younger man. All his carefully hoarded powers were gone.

In a way, it had been marvellous.

Young magi have energy and old ones have skill. Somewhere in the continuum between young and old lies a practitioner’s greatest moment. Harmodius had assumed his had been twenty years ago, and yet last night he’d thrown a curtain of fire five furlongs long – and swept it ahead of his galloping horse like a daemonic plough blade.

‘Heh,’ he said aloud.

An hour after he’d extinguished the fiery blade, he’d met a foreigner on an exhausted horse, who had watched him with wary eyes.

Harmodius had reined in. ‘What news?’ he asked.

‘Albinkirk,’ the man breathed. He had a Morean accent. ‘Only the castle holds. I must tell the king. The Wild has struck.’

Harmodius had stroked his beard. ‘Dismount a moment, and allow me to send the king a message as well?’ he said. ‘I’m the King’s Magus,’ he added.

‘Ser Alcaeus Comnena,’ the dark-visaged man replied. He swung his leg over the horse’s rump.

Harmodius had given him some sweet wine. He was pleased to see the foreign knight attend his horse – rubbing the gelding down, checking his legs.

‘How’s the road?’ asked the knight.

Harmodius permitted himself a moment of glowing satisfaction. ‘I think you’ll find it clear,’ he said. ‘Alcaeus? You’re the Emperor’s cousin.’

‘I am,’ said the man.

‘Strange meeting you here,’ Harmodius said. ‘I’ve read some of your letters.’

‘I’m blushing, and you can’t see it. You must be Lord Harmodius, and I’ve read everything you written about birds.’ He laughed, a little wildly. ‘You’re the only barba- only foreigner whose High Archaic is ever read aloud at court.’

Harmodius had a werelight going, and was writing furiously. ‘Yes?’ he asked absently.

‘Although you haven’t written a thing in five years, now? Ten?’ The younger knight had shaken his head. ‘I am sorry, my lord. I had thought you dead.’

‘You weren’t far wrong. Here – deliver this to the king. I’m going north. Tell me – did you see any Hermetics fighting against Albinkirk?’

Ser Alcaeus had nodded. ‘Something enormous came against the walls. It pulled the very stars from the sky, and threw them at the castle.’

They had clasped hands.

‘I long to meet you under more auspicious circumstances,’ Ser Alcaeus had said.

‘And I you, ser.’

And with that, each had ridden off – one north, and one south.

Who can pull stars from the sky and hurl them at castle walls? Harmodius asked himself, and worried that there was only one answer.

The last light of day had shown him smoke rising over Albinkirk, and if the town was gone then he was bereft of a plan.

His original impulse was all but gone. The evidence of the road, and Ser Alcaeus, was that a marauding army of the Wild had come down on the north of Alba, and he was afraid – to the core of his chilled and weary bones – that all the work of the old King Hawthor was undone. Worse, whatever had cast the ensorcellment on him was out there. With that army.

And yet he hadn’t pointed his horse’s head back south. When he came to the road that turned west, into the woods, and saw fresh wagon ruts on it he turned his horse’s head that way and followed them.

Part of that was pragmatic. He’d fought three bands of the Wild to win through this much of the road to Albinkirk. He wasn’t ready to fight a fourth.

Two hours later, somewhere in the darkness, a horse gave a long snort and then a soft whicker, and his horse answered.

Harmodius sat up.

He let his horse stumble forward. The horses would find each other quicker than he could, and they rode on for long minutes. He stared with unaided eyes at the darkness that pressed in on the road like a living thing.

The other horse whinnied.

His horse gave a call, almost a mule’s bray, in return.

‘Halt! You on the road – halt and dismount, or you’ll have enough crossbow bolts in you to play a porcupine in a show.’ The voice was loud, shrill, and sounded very young, which made the speaker dangerous. Harmodius slid from his horse, knowing in his bones that he was unlikely to be able to remount. His knees hurt. His calves hurt. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

A bull’s-eye lantern opened its baleful eye in front of him, the powerful oil lamp all but blinding him.

‘Who are you, then?’ asked the annoying young voice.

‘I’m the fucking King of Alba,’ Harmodius snapped. ‘I’m an old man on a done horse and I’d love to share your fire, and if I was a horde of boglins you’d already be dead.’

There were chortles from the darkness.

‘There you are, Adrian. Put that weapon down, Henry. If he’s riding a horse, he ain’t a creature of the Wild. Eh? Did you think of that, boy? What’s your name, old man?’ The new voice was authoritative without being noble. The bland accent of court was completely absent.

‘I’m Harmodius Silva, the King’s Magus.’ He walked forward into the lantern light, and his horse followed him, as eager for rest and food as his rider. ‘And that’s not a tall tale,’ he added.

‘Sounds pretty tall,’ said the new voice. ‘Come to the fire and have a cup of wine. Adrian, back to your duty, boy. Young Henry, if you point that weapon at me again I’ll break your nose.’

The man was in armour and had a heavy axe across his arms, but he stripped off a chain mitten and clasped Harmodius’ hand. ‘They call me Old Bob,’ he said. ‘Man-at-arms to the great and near great,’ he laughed. ‘You really Lord Silva?’

‘I truly am,’ said Harmodius. ‘Do you really have a safe camp and wine? I’ll pay a silver leopard to have a boy see to my horse.’

The man-at-arms laughed. ‘Long night?’

‘Three long nights. By the blood of Christ and his resurrection – I’ve been fighting for three days.’

They emerged into the circle of light from a big fire, and over the fire towered a heavy trestle that held the chains of three heavy cauldrons – and a pair of lanterns hung from the cross bar. It was the strongest light he’d seen since sundown. By the candlelight he could see a dozen men crouched over something on the ground, and the tall wheel of a heavy wagon. And beyond that, another.

‘You’ve reached Master Random’s convoy,’ the man-at-arms said. ‘Fifty wagons, or near enough, all the guilds of Harndon represented.’

Harmodius nodded. He’d never heard of Master Random, but then, as had become increasingly clear over the last three days, he’d been lost to the world for ten years or more.

‘You’re safe enough here,’ Old Bob said. ‘Boglins ambushed us today,’ he said, and shrugged, clearly unhappy about it.

‘You took losses?’ Harmodius was anxious to ask about the numbers and strength of the opposition, but his desire for information was at war with his fatigue.

‘The young knight,’ Old Bob motioned with his great axe at the group of men gathered around something on the ground. ‘He was badly wounded fighting a daemon out of the Wild.’

Harmodius sighed. ‘Make way,’ he said.

They had a candle, and the horse leech was cleaning the man’s wounds with vinegar. The young knight had lost a great deal of blood and, stripped naked, he looked pale and vulnerable. The new spring flies were feasting on him.

Harmodius cast almost without thinking, putting a small banishment on the flies.

Fatigue, which had seemed like a coat of mail, suddenly clamped like a vice around his heart. But he knelt by the wounded man, and Old Bob held the lantern high.

Just for a moment the wounded knight looked like the king.

Harmodius bent closer, examining the wounds. Three punctures, some slashes – nothing so deadly as to kill a healthy man, until he saw the burns. In the ruddy candle light, the man’s eye looked like a pit of red.

‘Sweet Jesu,’ the Magus said.

The odd pieces of dirt he’d seen on the man’s shoulder was no dirt at all – his chain links had burned right into his shoulder. The burns weren’t even red, they were black.

‘He faced down an adversarius,’ a man said. ‘A daemon of hell. Even when it threw fire at him.’

Harmodius felt his eyes closing. He didn’t have the power to save this brave soul which was frustrating, especially as he only needed a little organic power to stabilise the burns. It took much skill, much shaping of the phantasm, but little power.

The concept that the power needed was organic gave him a thought, though.

He touched his own reserves – the items he’d carefully enchanted over the years – drenched in sun power, imbued, impregnated, imprinted with the rich golden light of the Sacred Sun. All were cold and empty. And so was his greatest reservoir – his own skin. Empty, cold, tired.

And yet, by the logic of the experiment in his tower-

‘Everyone stand away,’ he ordered. He lacked the energy to explain; either this was going to work, or it was not. ‘I’m exhausted,’ he said to the old soldier. ‘You know what that means?’

‘Means ye can’t heal. Eh?’ said Old Bob.

‘Just so. I’m going to try tapping a local source. If I fail, nothing will happen. If I succeed-’ Harmodius rubbed his eyes. ‘By Hermes and all the saints, if I succeed, I think something will happen.’

Old Bob snorted. ‘Are you always that clear?’ He held out a beaker. ‘Drink first. Good red wine.’

Harmodius waved it away. The other men backed away, or fled to the fire – no one fancied watching a wizard work except Old Bob, who looked on with a cat’s wary curiosity.

Harmodius reached out into the darkness until he found a pool of the green power that he knew had to be there. It wasn’t far away. He didn’t enquire what it was. He simply seized its power-

– and the night exploded with shrieking.

One does not work with the ultimate powers of the universe for many years without developing a concentration bordering on utter ruthlessness. Harmodius focused on the power, which was difficult to lay hold of, difficult to seize, and it tasted wrong, somehow. That wrongness would instantly have repelled him, had he not the scientific assurance of his earlier experiment that a creature of the Wild could interact with the Hermetic. The reverse had to be true.

The shrieking went on, and the men around him moved in a disciplined kind of panic – seizing weapons, calming horses. Harmodius was aware of them, but not enough to break the iron chain of his connection to the distant green source of power, which he took like an infant sucking greedily at a breast.

Ruthlessly.

And then it was in him, filling him with its odd, bitter, wintergreen tang, and there was far, far more than he needed for his small enchantment. But he worked with it, first a complex binding, then two simultaneous phantasms run by dividing himself into two working halves, as his master had taught him so long ago. And there was so much power that he could divide himself once again, to leave an awareness to watch the darkness. Taking the green energy, as he had, seemed to have kicked a beehive.

A village witch could funnel power independently through each hand. Harmodius could use each finger as a channel, and could use other foci on his body – rings and the like – as reserves, or clamps.

He used many of them now.

His first use of it was to look into the burns. They were worse than he’d thought by the firelight – the blackened skin was charred, and in some cases the damage ran all the way through the skin layer to the fat and muscle.

These were lethal burns.

Indeed, the man was slipping away even as Harmodius worked to block the pain and heal the greatest wounds.

Healing burns was the most difficult of all forms of healing and Harmodius, for all his power, was no healer. He juggled tendrils of power for a dozen heartbeats, attempting to rebuild charred tissue and in the process only charring more. The control required was incredible and in his frustration and fatigue, he let slip a greater packet of the green power than he intended. It was rolling through him in waves and he passed it straight into the young man’s shoulder.

Harmodius had heard of healing miracles, but he had never witnessed one before. Under his hand, a patch of skin the size of a bronze sequin healed. The angry marks that pulsed in Harmodius’ enhanced vision simply faded and were gone.

It was incredible.

Harmodius had no idea what he had done, but he was an empirical magus and so he reached for more power, drew it from its source like a man trying to haul in a great ocean fish with a light rod, and then pumped it through his hands into the swaths of burned flesh . . .

. . . and they healed.

A section of the knight’s neck the size of the palm of a hand closed over and healed.

He reached for more power, seized it, struggled with the source and overcame it by main force of will, and then hauled with all his trained might, ripping the green power into his soul and then passing it down his hands into the knight, whose eyes suddenly opened with a great cry.

Harmodius stumbled back.

The screams from the woodlands stopped.

‘Why did you kill me?’ the young knight asked plaintively. ‘I was so beautiful!’

He slumped and his eyes closed.

Harmodius reached out and touched him. He was asleep, and the skin on his neck, chest, back, and shoulders was flaking away, the blackness and scabs simply falling away from the new flesh underneath.

New, pale flesh.

With scales.

Harmodius flinched, trying to understand what he had done.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain woke still tired. He got up, called for Toby, and stumbled to his wash basin.

Toby came in, chewing on a biscuit, and began to lay out his clothes. He moved warily, and the captain assumed from his averted head that something was wrong. Whatever it was, the captain would have to work it out for himself.

‘What news, Toby?’ the captain asked.

‘Boglins in the fields,’ the boy said, and went back to chewing.

‘Where’s Michael?’ the captain asked, when no one came to help him point his hose.

Toby looked away. ‘At chapel, I reckon.’

‘Only if Jesu came and visited Michael in person in the night,’ the captain said. Mornings made him nasty. Toby wasn’t to blame, but the boy idolized the squire and he wasn’t going to rat him out.

The captain pointed his own hose, and took an old arming doublet and began to lace it up. He didn’t call for Michael until he was ready to lace the cuffs. When the young man still wasn’t there, he nodded to Toby. ‘I’m going to go find him,’ he said.

Toby looked terrified. ‘I’ll go, master!’

The captain felt annoyed. ‘We can go together,’ he said, and his long legs took him out of the solar and down the hall to the Commandery where Michael slept.

Toby tried to beat him to the door, but a combination of shorter legs and deference kept him a stride behind.

The captain flung the heavy oak door open.

Michael leaped from his bedroll, a long dagger in his right fist. He was naked. So was the beautiful young girl he put behind him.

‘Michael?’ the captain said to the dagger.

Michael blushed. The blush started just above his groin, ran in splotches over his chest and up his neck to his face. ‘Oh my God – my lord, I’m so sorry-’

The captain looked at the girl. Her blush was even brighter.

‘That’s my laundry maid, I believe,’ he said. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps maid is the wrong word, given the circumstances.’

She hid her head.

‘Get dressed. Michael. It’s full light, and when that poor young woman walks down the steps to the courtyard, every person in the fortress will know where she’s been; either with you, with me, or with Toby. Perhaps with all three. Toby at least has the virtue of being her own age.’

Michael was trying to put his dagger away.

‘I love her!’ he said hotly.

‘Wonderful. That love is about to bring down a mountain of consequences that may end in your no longer being in my employ.’ The captain was angry.

‘At least she’s not a nun!’ Michael said.

That stopped the captain. And filled him with black rage; in a moment, he went from a distant, weary amusement to the flat desire to kill. He was struggling not to draw a weapon. Or use his fists. Or his power.

Michael took a step back and Toby placed himself between the captain and the squire.

Heavy, strong arms suddenly encircled the captain from behind. He thrashed, angry beyond sense, but he couldn’t break the grip. He tried to plant his feet and headbutt his adversary, but the man lifted him straight off the floor.

‘Whoa!’ said Bad Tom. ‘Whoa there!’

‘His eyes are glowing!’ Michael said, and his voice was trembling, Kaitlin Lanthorn cowering in the corner.

Tom spun the captain and slapped him clear across the face.

There was a pause. The captain’s power hung in the air – palpable even to non-talents. Kaitlin Lanthorn saw it as a cloud of golden green around his head.

‘Let go of me, Tom,’ said the captain.

Tom put his feet on the ground. ‘What was that about?’

‘My idiot squire deflowered a local virgin, for sport.’ The captain took a deep breath.

‘I love her!’ Michael shouted. Fear made his voice high and whiney.

‘Like enough,’ Tom said. ‘I love all the women I fuck, too.’ He grinned. ‘She’s just one of the Lanthorn sluts. No damage done.’

Kaitlin burst into tears.

The captain shook his head. ‘The Abbess-’ he began.

Tom nodded. ‘Aye. She won’t take it well.’ He looked at Michael. ‘I won’t ask you what you were thinkin’, ’cause I can guess it well enough.’

‘Get him out of my sight,’ the captain said. ‘Toby, get the girl dressed and get her . . . I don’t know. Can you get her out of here without everyone seeing?’

Toby nodded soberly. ‘Aye,’ he said, eager to help. Toby didn’t like it when his heroes were angry, especially not with each other.

The captain had a splitting headache, and he wasn’t even into the day yet.

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ he asked Tom.

‘Sauce has a patrol out and there’s the remnants of a convoy in the Bridge Castle,’ Tom said. ‘Bad news.’

Sauce reported an hour later, handing a child down off the saddlebow of her war horse and saluting her captain crisply.

‘Twenty-three wagons. All burned. Sixty corpses found, not yet ripe, and not much of a fight.’ She shrugged. ‘Slightly chewed.’ She lowered her voice, as there were dozens of people in earshot, all looking for news. ‘Many eaten down to sinew and bone, Captain.’

The captain fingered his beard, looked at the desperate people surrounding his horse, and knew that any morale won by his raids on the enemy camp was now dissipated in a fresh wave of terror.

‘Back to your work,’ the captain called.

‘We ain’t got no work!’ a man shouted, and the crowd in the courtyard rumbled angrily.

The captain had mounted in anticipation of taking out a patrol. He was restless and depressed himself, and craved action – anything to distract him.

But he was the captain. He nodded to Gelfred. ‘Go north, and move fast. You know what we want.’

He swung one spurred foot over Grendel’s back and slid from the saddle. ‘Wilful Murder, Sauce, on me. The rest of you – well done. Get some rest.’

He led them inside. Michael dismounted too, looking as furious as the captain felt having lost an opportunity to substitute honest fear for nagging terror. He clearly knew that he now had no opportunity to expiate his sin. But he took his own destrier and the captain’s and headed for the stable without untoward comment.

Sister Miram – the heaviest and thus most easily identified of the sisters – was passing through the courtyard with a basket of sweet bread for the children. The captain caught her eye, and waved.

‘The Abbess will want to hear this,’ he said to her. She put a biscuit in his hand with a look that might have curdled milk – a look of blanket disapproval.

There was a slip of vellum underneath it.

Meet me tonight

A bolt of lightning shot through him.

The Abbess arrived while he was still standing in his solar. He’d just stripped off his gauntlets and placed them on the sideboard, his helmet was still on his head. Sauce took it from him, and he turned to find the Abbess, hands clasped loosely in front of her, wimple starched and perfect, eyes bright.

The captain had to smile, but she did not return it.

He sighed. ‘We’ve lost another convoy coming to the fair – six leagues to the west, on the Albinkirk road. More than sixty dead. The survivors are panicking your people, and they aren’t helping mine much.’ He sighed. ‘In among them are refugees from Albinkirk, which, I am sorry to report, has fallen to the Wild.’

To Sauce, he said, ‘In future, no matter how badly off they are, take new refugees to Ser Milus. Let him keep their ravings contained.’

Sauce nodded. ‘I should have thought-’ she said wearily.

The captain cut her off. ‘No, I should have thought of it, Sauce.’

Wilful Murder shook his head. ‘It’s worse than you think, Captain. You’re not from around here, eh?’

The captain gave the archer a long look, and Wilful quailed.

‘Sorry, ser,’ he said.

‘It happens that I know the mountains to the north well enough,’ the captain said quietly.

Wilful was not so easily put down though. He produced something from his purse and put it on the table.

The Abbess turned as white as parchment when she saw it.

The captain raised an eyebrow.

‘Abenacki,’ he said.

‘Or Quost, or most likely Sassog.’ Wilful nodded respectfully. ‘So you are from around here.’

‘How many?’ the captain asked.

Wilful shook his head. ‘At least one. What kind of question is that?’ The feather he had placed on the table – a heron feather – was decorated with elaborate quillwork from a porcupine, the quills dyed bright red and carefully woven up the stem of the feather.

Wilful looked around, and then, like a conjuror, produced a second item, very like the first in look – a small pouch, decorated with complex leather braids. When his audience looked blank, he grinned his broken-toothed grin. ‘Irks. Five feet of muscle and all of it mean. They make amazing stuff. Fey folk, my mother used to call them.’ He looked at the Abbess. ‘They like to eat women.’

‘That’s enough, Wilful.’

‘Just saying. And there was tracks.’ He shrugged.

‘Nicely done, Wilful. Now give me some quiet.’ The captain pushed his chin towards the door.

Wilful might have been surly, but he found a silver leopard pushed across the table to him, too. He bit it, grinned and left.

The captain glanced at the Abbess as soon as they were alone. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked in his pleasant but professional voice. ‘This isn’t the random violence of the Wild, an isolated incident, a murder, a couple of creatures come over the wall on a rampage. This is a war. Daemons, wyverns, irks and now the Outwallers. All we seem to lack is a few boglins, a goblin or two, and then maybe the Dragon will enter the field too. Abbess, if you know anything, I think this is the time to tell me.’

She met his gaze. ‘I can make some educated guesses,’ she said. Her lips curled down. ‘I gather that the youngest Lanthorn girl spent the night here?’ she said archly.

‘Yes she did. I raped her repeatedly and threw her naked into the courtyard in the morning,’ the captain said. His annoyance showed. ‘Damn it, this matters.’

‘And Kaitlin Lanthorn doesn’t? My Jesu says she matters as much as you do, ser knight. As much as I do. Perhaps more. And spare me your posturing, boy. I know why you’re so touchy. She spent the night with your squire. I know. I have just spent a few minutes with the girl. We spoke about this.’ She looked at him. ‘Will he marry her?’

‘You can’t be serious,’ the captain said. ‘He’s the son of a great lord. He may be on the outs with his family just now, but they’ll forgive him soon enough. His kind doesn’t marry farm sluts.’

‘She was a virgin a few days ago,’ the Abbess said. ‘Calling her a whore doesn’t make her one. Nor does it make you stand any better in my sight.’

‘Fine,’ said the captain. ‘She’s a fine upstanding lass with impeccable morals and my nasty squire got her to bed. I’ll see to it that he pays for it – both morally and financially. Now can we please talk about the true threat here?’

‘Maybe we already are. So far, no creature of the Wild has done so much harm as your men have done,’ the Abbess said.

‘Untrue, my lady. I swear on my word: I will see to it justice is done for this young woman. I confess that she looked quite unsluttish this morning, and very young. I am embarrassed my squire has acted in such a way.’

‘Like master, like man,’ the Abbess said.

The captain clenched his fists. He mastered himself, unclenched them, and steepled his hands instead.

‘I think you are avoiding the topic. Sister Hawisia was murdered. Her murder was planned. Perhaps she was the target – perhaps you were. The daemon that did the killing had inside help. The men who helped the daemon then fell out among themselves and one killed the other, burying his body on the west road. Shortly after, we arrived. We found a wyvern and killed it. Gelfred and I found a pair of daemons; one died and the other escaped. We scouted and found an army forming under a powerful sorcerer. As of this morning, the woods around us are full of enemies and the road to Albinkirk is cut. Albinkirk has fallen to the Wild, and I put it to you, my lady, that you know more than you are telling me. What is really going on here?’

She turned her head away. ‘I know nothing,’ she said, in a tone that merely showed that she was a poor liar.

‘You cut down the sacred grove? Your farmers are raping dryads? By all you hold holy, my lady Abbess, if you do not help me understand this, we’re all going to die here. This is a full invasion, the first that has been seen since your youth. Where have they come from? Has the north fallen? Why has the Wild come here in such strength? I grew up with the Wall. I’ve been to Outwaller villages, eaten their food. There are far more than we admit – tens of thousands. If they have come to support the Wild directly, we will be swept away in the sea of foes. So what exactly is happening here?’

The Abbess took a breath as if to steady herself, succeeded, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Really, Captain, I have no more idea than you. The actions of the savages are beyond me. And the Wild is just a name we give to an amalgam of evil, is it not? Is it not sufficient that we are holy, and seek to preserve ourselves, our God, and our way of life? And they seek to take that from us?’

The captain met her gaze and shook his head. ‘You know more than that. The Wild is not so simple.’

‘It hates us,’ the Abbess said.

‘That’s no reason to mass against you now,’ replied the captain.

‘There’s burned trees and new fields out east toward Albinkirk,’ Sauce said.

The Abbess turned, as if to reprimand the woman, but shrugged. ‘We have to expand as our people expand. More peasants to feed required more fields.’

The captain looked at Sauce. ‘How many burned trees? I don’t remember them.’

‘They’re not right along the road. I don’t know – ask Gelfred.’

‘They go all the way to Albinkirk,’ the Abbess admitted. ‘We agreed to burn the forest between us and bring in more farmers. What of it? It was the old king’s policy, and we need that land.’

The captain nodded. ‘It was the old king’s policy, and it led to the Battle of Chevin.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘I hope that one of my messengers made it to the king, because right now we’re in a whole heap of shit.’

Michael came in with cups of wine. He flushed very red when he saw the Abbess.

The captain glanced at him. ‘All officers, Michael. Get Ser Milus from the Bridge Castle too.’

Michael sighed, served the wine, and left again.

The Abbess pursed her lips. ‘You wouldn’t abandon us,’ she said, but it was more a question than a statement.

The captain was looking through his window to the west. ‘No, my lady, I wouldn’t. But you must have known there would be a response.’

She shook her head, anger warring with frustration. ‘By Saint Thomas and Saint Maurice, Captain, you task me too heavily! I did no more than was my right, even my duty. The Wild was beaten – or so I’m told by both the sheriff and the king. Why should I not expand my holdings at the cost of some old trees? And when the killing started – Captain, understand that I had no idea that the killings were connected, not until-’

The captain leaned forward. ‘Let me tell you what I think,’ he said. ‘Hawisia unmasked a traitor, and died for it.’

The Abbess nodded. ‘It is possible. She asked to go to the outholdings when, ordinarily, I would have gone.’

‘She was your chancellor? The post Sister Miram holds now?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘No. She had more power then the other sisters, but she was too young to hold an office.’

‘And she was widely disliked,’ Sauce said.

The Abbess flinched, but she didn’t deny it.

The captain had his head in his hands. ‘Never mind. We’re here now and so are they. It’s my guess that the Jacks, or the daemons, or both, were going to kill you and seize the Abbey in a coup de main; Hawisia ruined it all somehow, either by confronting the traitor or by taking your place. We may never know.’ He shook his head.

The Abbess looked at her hands. ‘I loved her,’ she said.

The Red Knight knelt by her and put his hands on hers. ‘I swear I will do my best to hold this fortress and save you. But, my lady, I still feel you know something more. There is something personal about all this, and you still have a traitor within your walls.’ When she didn’t answer him, he got up from his knee. She kissed his cheek, and he smiled. He handed her a cup of wine.

‘Not your usual contract, ser knight,’ she said.

‘Damn it, my lady, this is my usual contract: it’s a war between rival barons, except that this time the rival baron can’t be negotiated with or turned from his path or simply murdered, and they are all good ways of avoiding a knock-down fight. But in every other respect you and the Wild are feuding border lords. You’ve taken a piece of his land, and in turn he’s raiding you and threatening your home.’

As the captain spoke, his officers trickled in – Bad Tom, Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, Wilful Murder, and Bent. The others were either asleep or on patrol.

The Abbess was brought a chair.

‘Park wherever you can,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll try and make this brief. I’d say we’re almost surrounded, and our enemy hasn’t bothered to build trench lines and trebuchets. Yet. But he’s got enough force to close the woods and every road around us. He’s got Outwallers – who are those men and women who live in the Wild, for you godless foreigners.’ The captain gave Ser Jehannes a mirthless smile. ‘I’m guessing he has a hundred or more Outwallers, a thousand irks, and perhaps fifty to a hundred other creatures of the types we’ve already seen – wyverns, daemons and the like.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m guessing our enemy is a potent magus.’

Bad Tom whistled. ‘Lucky we didn’t get ourselves killed trying for their camp then.’

The captain nodded. ‘When you move fast and plan well, you deserve a little luck,’ he said. ‘But yes, I’d say that getting away with that raid seized our luck with both hands.’

‘So now what?’ Sauce asked.

‘First, Jehannes, you are now the constable. Ser Milus, you are now marshal. Tom, you are now first lance. Sauce, you are now a corporal. In one sweep, I’m short three knights. Milus, are there any likely lads in your refugees? The merchants?’

Milus scratched under his chin. ‘Archers? Hell, yes. Men-at-arms? Not a one. But I’ll tell you what there is down in my little kingdom – there’s two wagon loads of armour in barrels, and some nice swords, and a dozen heavy arbalests. All for sale at the fair, of course.’

‘Better than what we have?’ the captain asked.

‘White plate – the new hardened breastplates.’ Ser Milus licked his lips. ‘The swords are good, the spearheads better. The arbalests as heavy as anything we have.’

The Abbess smiled. ‘Those were for me, anyway.’

The captain nodded. ‘Take it all. Tell the owners we’ll give them chits for it and settle up at the end if we’re still alive. How heavy are these arbalests?’

‘Bolts a forearm in length and thick as a child’s wrist,’ Ser Milus said.

‘Put them on frames. Two for you and the rest up here for me.’ The captain looked at the Abbess. ‘I want to build an outwork.’

‘Anything you like,’ she said.

‘I want to put all your farmers and all the refugees to work and I want your help seeing that I get no insolence from them. I need them to work quickly and be quiet.’ The captain took out a scroll of parchment and unrolled it.

‘My squire is a gifted young man, and he drew this,’ he said. Michael flushed uncontrollably. ‘We want a deep V-shape of walls on both sides and ditches outside the walls; built three hundred paces from Bridge Castle, where the road from the Lower Town starts up the hill. It will allow us to send soldiers and supplies freely back and forth from the Lower Town to Bridge Castle. Put boards all along the bottom so men can walk quickly, without being seen, and put three bridges over it, so our sorties can move easily about the fields. See this cutaway? A nice hollow space under the boards. Good place for a little surprise.’ He grinned and most of the soldiers grinned back.

‘We’ll also put a wall along the Gate Road, running all the way to the top. We should have done it in the first place, anyway. Towers here and here, on earth bastions.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘First, we put in covered positions for these new frame crossbows – here and here – so that if they attack while we’re building, it’s all a trap and they lose a couple of their own for nothing. Last, we improve the path from the postern gate to the Lower Town.’

All the soldiers nodded.

Except Tom. Tom spat. ‘We don’t have the fucking men to hold all that wall,’ he said. ‘Much less in both directions.’

‘No we don’t. But building it will keep the peasants quiet and busy, and when our enemy attacks we’re going to make him pay for it, and then let him have it.’

Tom grinned. ‘Of course we are.’

The captain turned to the others. ‘I’m assuming that our enemy doesn’t have a lot of experience in fighting men,’ he said. ‘But even if he does, we won’t have lost much with these distractions.’

The Abbess looked pained. Her eyes had a hunted look, and she turned away. ‘He is a man. Or he was, once.’

The captain winced. ‘We face a man?’

The Abbess nodded. ‘I have felt the brush of his thought. He has some small reason to – to fear me.’

The captain looked at her, gazing as intently as a lover into her flecked brown and blue eyes, and she held his gaze as easily as he held hers.

‘It is none of your affair,’ she said primly.

‘You are not telling us things that would be of value to us,’ the captain said.

‘You, on the other hand, are the very soul of openness,’ she replied.

‘Get a room,’ Tom muttered under his breath.

The captain looked at Ser Milus. ‘We cut the patrols down to two a day, and we launch them at my whim. Our sole remaining interest is getting any more convoys in here safely, or in turning them away. Albinkirk is gone. Sauce – how far did you go today?’

She shrugged. ‘Eight leagues?’

The captain nodded. ‘Tomorrow – no, tomorrow we won’t send anything. Not a man. Tomorrow we dig. The day after, we send four patrols, in all directions except west. The day after that, I’ll take half the company west along the road, as fast as we can go. We’ll aim for twenty leagues, pick up merchants or convoys we can, and get a look at Albinkirk. Then back here, all with enough force to kill whatever opposes us.’

Tom nodded. ‘Aye, but against a hundred Outwallers, in an ambush, we’ll just be dead. And that’s without a couple of daemons and maybe a pair of wyverns and a hundred irks to eat our bodies afterwards. Eh?’

The captain wrinkled his lips. ‘If we surrender the initiative and hunker down here we’re all dead too,’ he said. ‘Unless the king comes with his army to relieve us.’

The Abbess agreed.

‘For all I know the Wall fortresses have already fallen,’ the captain said. His eyes narrowed, as if the subject had particular interest to him. ‘Whatever the case, we cannot count on any help from the outside, nor can we hope that this is an isolated incident. We have to behave as if we have an unending supply of men and materiel, and we have to try to keep the road east open. We need to lure our enemy into some battles of our choosing.’ He looked around at his officers. ‘Everyone understand?’ He looked at the Abbess. ‘We have to be ready to destroy the bridge.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a phantasm to do it. I have it. It is regularly maintained: when a certain key is turned in the gate lock, the bridge will fall into the river.’

The officers nodded their approval.

The captain stood. ‘Very well. Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, you are in charge of my construction project. Tom, Sauce, you will lead the patrols. Bent, get the arbalest frames up, and placed in those four covered positions,’ he smiled, ‘where Michael marked them. Bent, take charge of running the rotations inside the fortress too. Don’t worry about who is a man-at-arms, who’s a valet, who’s an archer. Just get the numbers right.’

They all nodded.

‘You planning to take a nap?’ Bad Tom asked.

The captain smiled at the Abbess. ‘My lady and I are going to raise a nice fog,’ he said. ‘She is a very potent magus.’

He had the pleasure of watching her eyes widen in surprise.

Jehannes paused. ‘And you? Captain?’

‘I am a modestly talented magus.’ He nodded to his new constable. ‘Ah, Michael. Please don’t go anywhere.’

The other officers rattled out, Michael stood uncomfortably by the door, and after a moment it was just the three of them.

‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ the Abbess asked.

Michael writhed. ‘I love her,’ he said.

She smiled, to his shock.

‘That is the best answer you could have given, under the circumstances. Will you wed her?’ she asked.

The captain made a noise.

Michael stood straight. ‘Yes.’

‘What a dashing young fool you are, to be sure,’ said the Abbess. ‘Who’s son are you?’

Michael’s lips tightened, so the Abbess beckoned to him, and he came to her side. She leaned forward, touched his forehead, and there was a magnificent burst of colour and sparkling shards, as if a sunlit mirror had shattered.

‘Towbray’s son,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I knew your father. You have twice the looks and twice the grace he ever did. Is he still a weak man who changes sides with every twist of the wind?’

Michael stood his ground. ‘Yes, he is,’ he said.

The Abbess nodded. ‘Captain, I will take no action until our war is resolved. But what I say now, I say as a woman who has lived at court with the great. And as an astrologer. This boy could do much worse than Kaitlin Lanthorn.’

Michael looked at his captain, whom he feared more than ten abbesses. ‘I love her, my lord,’ he said.

The captain thought of the note in his gauntlet, and of what the Abbess had just said – he’d felt the power of her words, which had bordered on prophecy.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘All the best romances bloom in the midst of a good siege. Michael, you are not so much forgiven as pardoned for this. Your pardon does not include further tumblings of said girl in my solar. Understood?’

The Abbess looked long and hard at the squire. ‘Will you marry her?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said the squire, defiantly, bowed and left the room.

The captain looked at the Abbess and grinned. ‘And the sisters will go with her? They’ll liven up castle life, I have no doubt.’

She shrugged. ‘He should marry her. I can feel it.’

The captain sighed. And sighed again when he realised that there was no one to help him disarm.

‘Shall we go and make fog?’ he asked.

She extended her hand. ‘Nothing would please me more.’

Lissen Carak – Bad Tom

Bad Tom stared at the captain’s steel-clad back, slim as a blade, as he squired the Abbess down the corridor to the steps. Jehannes made as if to pass him, and Tom put his arm up and blocked him.

They glared at each other, but if they had had fangs they’d have been showing.

‘Give it a rest,’ Tom said.

‘I don’t like taking orders from a boy,’ Jehannes said. ‘He’s a boy. An inexperienced boy. He’s hardly older than his squire. That gifted young man.’ He spat.

‘Give it a rest, I said.’ Tom spoke with the kind of finality that starts fights, or sometimes ends them. ‘You were never going to be captain. You haven’t the brains, you haven’t the hard currency, and most of all, you haven’t the birth for it. He has all three.’

‘I hear the boy almost lost the castle because he can’t keep his hands off some nun. He was off billing and cooing while you were out with the sortie. That’s what I hear.’ Jehannes leaned back and crossed his arms.

‘You know what makes me piss myself laughing when I watch you?’ Tom leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the older man’s nose. ‘When he issues his orders, you just fucking obey like the trained dog you are. And that’s why you hate him. Because he’s born to it. He’s not new at this, he’s the bastard of some great man, he grew up in one of the big houses, with the best tutors, the best weapons masters, the best books, and five hundred servants. He gives orders better than I do, because it’s never occurred to him that anyone would disobey. And you don’t. You just obey. And later, you hate him for it.’

‘He’s not one of us. When he has what he wants, he’ll go.’ Jehannes looked around.

Tom leaned back, shifted until his shoulders fitted neatly along a line of stone. ‘That’s where you are wrong, Jehan. He is one of us. He is a broken man, a lost soul, whatever crap you want to call us. He has everything to prove, and he values us. He-’ Tom spat. ‘I like him,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘He’s a loon. He’ll fight anyone, anytime.’

Jehannes rubbed his chin. ‘I hear you.’

‘All I ask,’ said Tom. He didn’t do anything obvious, but a subtle shift of his hips cleared the corridor. Jehannes stood straight, and then, quick as thought, his rondel dagger was in his hand – poised at shoulder height.

‘Not planning to use it,’ he said. ‘But don’t threaten me, Tom Lachlan. Save it for the archers.’

The knight turned and walked away, sheathing his dagger easily.

Tom watched him go with a slight smile on his lips.

‘Catch all that, young Michael?’ he said, levering his giant form upright.

Michael blushed.

‘Not for his ears – hear me? Men talk. Sometimes with their bodies, sometimes like old fishwives. Not his business.’ He looked at Michael, who was not quite cowering in the doorframe.

But Michael was afraid, yes, but also determined. ‘I’m his squire.’

Tom rubbed his chin. ‘So you get to decide some things. If you hear two archers talking about stealing from a third, would you peach?’

Michael managed to meet his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. And talking about raping a nun?’ he asked.

Michael held his eye. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. And talking about how much they hate him?’

Michael paused. ‘I see what you mean.’

‘He’s not their friend, he’s their captain. He’s pretty good at it, and he’s better every day. But what he don’t know won’t hurt him. Get me?’ Tom leaned in close.

‘Yes.’ Michael didn’t back away. He tried to stand tall.

Tom nodded. ‘You’ve guts, young Michael. Try not to get dead. We might make a man-at-arms out of you yet.’ He grinned. ‘Nice, that little chit of yours. Best act quickly if you want to keep her for yourself.’

Out in the yard, a dozen archers and a pair of squires were gathered around a girl, and they were all furiously peeling carrots.

Lissen Carak – Father Henry

The priest watched the sell-swords come out of their leader’s room. The captain, the source of infection. She came out first, and the Bastard was holding her hand like they were lovers. Perhaps they were – if he was an imp of Satan then pleasuring an old whore would be just his mark. Aristocrats. Birds of a feather.

Bile flooded his throat, and his hands shook a little to think that he had – he had-

He ducked his head to avoid looking at them, and went back to his sermon. But it was a long time before his hands were steady enough to scrape the old parchment as clean and thin as he needed it to be.

And when the biggest of the sell-swords came down the steps, he caught the priest’s eye and smiled.

Henry felt fear go through him like a wave of cold and dirty water. What did the man know?

He got up from his work-table as soon as the giant walked off, and he slunk across the chapel to the prie-dieu in the chapel. Reached under the altar cloth to make sure it was still there. His war-bow. His arrows.

He sagged with relief, and hurried back to his work table, imagining one of his shafts in the giant’s groin. Listening to him scream.

Dormling – Hector Lachlan

The fast horsemen hadn’t learned enough to change Hector’s mind. He looked at the rough sketch of the country and shook his head. ‘If I go east, I’d as well take my beasts over the mountains to Theva,’ he said. ‘And I don’t intend to do that. I have customers in Harndon and Harnford waiting for their cattle. West of the mountains, there’s no way to pass a few thousand head except the road.’

The Keeper had spent the night dancing and drinking his own ale as well as some nasty foreign spirits and his head was pounding. ‘So wait here and send a message to the king,’ he said.

Lachlan shook his head. ‘Sod that. I’ll be away in the first light. What can you give me, Keeper? How many men?’

The Keeper grimaced. ‘Perhaps twenty helmets.’

‘Twenty? You have a hundred swords here, wasting your money and standing about idle.’

The Keeper shook his head in turn. ‘The Wild’s coming,’ he said. ‘I can’t just drift away like some. I have to hold this place.’

‘You can hold this place with thirty men. Give me the rest.’

‘Maybe thirty like you – thirty heroes. Normal men? I need sixty.’

‘So now you’ll give me forty? That’s better. Forty brings me near a century strong – enough to watch both ends of the herd and still leave a sting in my tail.’ Lachlan looked over his sketch. ‘When we come down out of the hills, it’ll be worse – I’ll want horses. So I’ll take fifty of your swords and two hundred head of horses.’

The Keeper laughed. ‘Will you now?’ he asked.

‘Yes. For a third of my total profit.’ Lachlan asked.

The Keeper’s eyes widened. ‘A third?’

‘Of the profit. In silver, payable when I’m standing on your doorstep on my road home.’ Lachlan was smiling as if he knew the punch line to a secret joke.

‘And nothing if you’re dead,’ said the Keeper.

‘I confess, paying my debts won’t matter so much to me if I’m dead,’ Lachlan answered.

The Keeper pondered a while. The tall serving woman came in, and the Keeper was surprised to see that nothing but the blandest of smiles passed between them. He’d been sure the dark-haired woman was the drover’s type.

‘I need your trade, and you’re a well-known man,’ the Keeper said. ‘But you’re trying to take all my horses and half my fighting strength on a wild-haired adventure with little profit and a great deal of death.’ He rubbed his head. ‘Tell me why I should help you?’

Lachlan kicked his sword blade around his chair and sat back. ‘If I told you I was going to make the greatest profit in my family’s history by getting this herd through to the south-’ he said.

The Keeper nodded. ‘Sure, but-’ The drover’s cheerful arrogance annoyed him.

‘If I said that success would leave the king in my debt, and open new markets for my beef,’ Lachlan said.

‘Perhaps,’ the Keeper said.

‘If I said I lay with your youngest in the night, and she carries my son in her womb, and that I’ll do this for her bride price and be your family?’ Lachlan said.

The Keeper sat up, rage crossing his face.

‘Don’t you lose your temper with me, Will Tollins. She came to me free, and I’ll wed her and be happy on it.’ But Lachlan put his hand on the hilt of his sword just in case.

The Keeper held his eye. And they sat there, diamond cut diamond, for a long time.

And then the Keeper smiled. ‘Welcome to my family.’

Lachlan held out a great hand, and the other man took it.

‘Forty-five swords, and all the horses I can raise by tomorrow, and I get half your profits – a quarter for my own and quarter for Sarah’s bride price. And you wed her today.’ He had the drover’s rough hand in his own, and he felt no falsehood in it.

Hector Lachlan, the Prince of the Drovers, withdrew his hand, spat and held it out, and Will Tollins, the Keeper of Dormling, took it, and the Inn of Dormling rang to a second night of revelry.

On the next morning, Lachlan led his tail and all his herds out onto the road into the watery sunlight. Every man had a shirt of shining rings, every ring riveted closed on a forge, every hauberk fitted to its wearer over a heavy cote of elk hide quilted full of sheep’s wool, and every man had a heavy bow or a crossbow, a sword at least four feet high to the cross, and some had axes as tall as they themselves were, over their shoulders. Every man had a tall helmet with a brim that kept the rain off your face and a sharp point at the top, and a cloak of furze, and long leather boots like leather hose that went to the hip. The Keeper’s men wore hoods of scarlet with black lines woven in, so that they made a check of red and black, and Lachlan’s men had a more complex weave of red and blue and grey that made a colour that seemed to change with the trees and the rain. And Sarah Lachlan stood in her father’s door-yard with a wreath of spring jasmine in her hair, kissing her man again and again while the flame of her hair lit the morning like a second sun. Her former suitor, the farmer, stood in the watery sun with a great axe on his shoulder, determined to go and die rather than face life without her.

Lachlan put an arm around him. ‘There’s other girls, lad,’ he said.

Hector Lachlan took his great green ivory horn and put it to his lips and blew, and the deep note sounded up the vale and down it to the Cohocton, over leagues of ground. Deer raised their heads to listen, and bears paused in their orgy of spring eating, and beavers, surveying the dams broken by the spring rains, looked up from calculations. And other things – scaled and taloned, chiton brown or green – raised their heads and wondered. The horn call rang from hillside to cliff edge.

‘I am Hector Lachlan, Drover of the Green Hills, and today I set forth to drive my herd to Harndon!’ Hector shouted. ‘Death to any who oppose me, and long life to those who aid me.’ He sounded the horn again, and kissed his new wife, and took a charm from around his neck and gave it to her.

‘Wish me luck, love,’ he said.

She kissed him, and gave him not one tear. But she looked at her father defiantly and was shocked to find him smiling back.

Then Hector crushed her to his burnie, and then he was walking out the gate. ‘Let’s go!’ he shouted, and the drive lumbered into motion.

West of Albinkirk – Gerald Random

Gerald Random scratched his head for the tenth time that morning under his linen coif and wished that he could stop his convoy for long enough to wash his hair.

The Magus rode by his side, all but asleep in the saddle. Random couldn’t help looking at him with the same proprietary air a man might look at a beautiful woman who’s suddenly consented to sleep with him. Having the Magus by his side was incredible luck, like a tale of errantry come to life.

The convoy was down a wagon this morning – the farrier’s cart had been parked badly, had sunk in the rain and both oxen’s throats had to be slit. The farrier himself was dry eyed, as his tools had been distributed among forty other carts and he’d been promised a place on the return. Altogether it was a small loss, but the whole column was exhausted, and Random was, for the first time, seriously considering turning around and going back south. The total loss of the convoy was a risk he could not really afford – his financial losses if the convoy failed but the stock survived would merely set him back ten years. But if it was destroyed, he’d be ruined.

And dead, you fool, he thought to himself. Dead men never become lord mayor, nor sheriff.

Set against that, he’d brought them through an ambush and one straight-up fight and last night most of them had snatched a little sleep. He was reasonably sure that, with the Magus at his side, they could cut their way to the fair at Lissen Carack.

But what if they arrived to find no fair? The farther north-west they went, the less likely it seemed that there was a fair at Lissen Carack. Or even a convent.

On the other hand, going back seemed both craven and dangerous. And the old Magus had been very clear: he was going to Lissen Carack, not back down the river to the king.

He scratched his itching head again.

He was seven leagues west of Albinkirk, if his notions of the road were accurate. About two days travel to the fords of the Cohocton, and another full day at oxen speed up the north side to the Convent.

The sun rose fully and the sky was truly blue for the first time in three days. Men’s clothes dried, they warmed up, and the chatter of a well-ordered company began to spread. Men ate stale bread and drank a little wine, or small beer if they had it fresh, or hard cider if not, and the column rolled briskly along.

The soldiers were twitchy – Old Bob had a dozen mounted men spread a hundred horse-lengths wide in the trees ahead of the wagons, and the rest covered the rear in a tight knot ready to charge in any direction under Guilbert.

They didn’t stop to eat a noonday meal, but rolled on.

When the sun was well down in the sky, Old Bob rode back to report that they were coming to one of the turn fields, the cleared fields maintained specifically for the fair convoys to camp.

‘Looks like hell,’ he said. ‘But it has fresh water and it’s clear enough.

In fact, raspberry prickers had grown up over most of the field, and while one small convoy seemed to have made camp there a few days before, they had stayed to the edge by the road and cut no brush.

Guilbert sent his men out into the raspberry canes in armour, to cut armloads of the stuff with their swords, and he had the archers lash them in bundles on the sturdy Xs of a pair of fascine horses, cradles made of heavy logs where armloads of brush and prickers could be wrapped tight. In the last three hours of daylight, while the boys cooked and brought in water and the older men saw to the animals and circled the wagons, the soldiers build a rampart of raspberry cane bundles.

And then, the evening being dry, they set fire to the rest of the field. The canes went up like dried wood, burning into the edge of the trees in a few minutes.

The Magus came awake to watch the sparks rise into the clear night air.

‘That was extremely foolish,’ he said.

Random was eating a garlic sausage. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Clear field for archery. No cover for the little boglins and spider irks.’

‘Fire calls strong as naming,’ the old Magus said. ‘Fire is the Wild’s bane.’ He glared at the merchant, and his glare held weight.

Random had been glared at all his life. ‘Convoy’s safer with a clear field around,’ he said, like an angry boy.

‘Not if six wyverns come, you idiot. Not if a dozen golden bears decide you’ve intruded – not if even a pair of daemon wardens decide youy’ve broken the Forest Law. Then your clear field will not save you.’ But he looked resigned. ‘And irks have nothing to do with spiders. Irks are Fae. Now – where’s my patient?’

‘The young knight? Sound asleep. He wakes up, talks to himself, and goes back to sleep.’

‘Best thing for him,’ Harmodius said. He walked around the circle of wagons, found his man, and looked him over.

Harmodius put the blanket back after a long look, and then the younger man’s eyes opened.

‘You might have just let me live,’ he said. He looked pained. ‘Sweet Jesu – I mean you might have let me die.’

‘No one ever thanks me,’ the Magus agreed.

‘I’m Gawin Murien,’ he said. Groaned. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I know who you are,’ the Magus said. ‘Now they can call you Hard Neck.’

Neither man laughed.

‘I don’t really know what I did to you. I’ll work it out over the next few days. Don’t worry about it.’

‘You mean, don’t worry that I’m gradually turning into some loathsome God-cursed enemy of man who will try to slay and eat all my friends?’ Gawin asked. His voice strove for calm, but there was panic in it.

‘You have a vivid imagination,’ Harmodius said.

‘So I’ve always been told.’ Gawin looked at his own upper left arm and recoiled in horror. ‘Good Christ, I have scales. It wasn’t a dream!’ His voice rose suddenly, and his eyes narrowed. ‘By Saint George – my lord, must I ask you to kill me?’ His eyes went far away. ‘I was so beautiful,’ he said, in another voice.

Harmodius made a face. ‘So very dramatic. I seized the power to heal you from something of the Wild.’ He shrugged. ‘I wasn’t really fully in control of the power, but never mind that. Without it, you’d have died. And whatever you may feel about it right now, death is not better!’

The young knight rolled away, closing his eyes. ‘Like you would know. Go away and let me sleep. Oh, Blessed Virgin, am I doomed to be a monster?’

‘I very much doubt it,’ Harmodius said, but he knew that his own slight doubt was not very reassuring.

‘Please leave me alone,’ the knight said.

‘Very well. But I’ll be back to check on you.’ Harmodius reached out with a tendril of power and it was his turn to recoil at what he saw. Gawin saw his reaction.

‘What’s happening to me?’

Harmodius shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he lied.

An hour after full dark, the enemy struck. There was a whistle of arrows from the darkness, and two of the guildsmen on guard fell – one silently, the other with the panicked screams of a man in pain.

Guilbert had the wagons manned and alert in a hundred heartbeats. Which was as well, because a wave of boglins, announced by a sinister rustling, exploded into the north face of the wagon-fort.

But Guilbert was an old campaigner, and his dozen archers shot fire-arrows into the piles of cane and brush left around the old clearing, and most of them caught. And then, by the flickering light of spring bonfires, the guildsmen and the soldiers killed. Having negotiated the raspberry cane walls, the boglins were almost incapable of climbing the tall wagons after, and they died in dozens trying.

But the red arrows arching like vicious dragonflies over the fires began to annoy the defenders. The arrows lacked the potency to penetrate good mail, and their flint heads shattered easily, but they sunk deep in exposed flesh, and men who took them, even as a scratch on the hand, became fevered in an hour.

Harmodius went from man to man, pulling the poison by grammerie. He’d had a day to gather power and rest, and he was full of sunlight, his aids charged and ready except for the two wands, whose charging required greater time, attention, and investment.

When the fires burned down, he cast a powerful phantasm of light on a tree way out at the edge of the raspberry thicket. He repeated the spell six times, all the way around the wagon-fort, to back-light their attackers and blind their archers. But the Hermetic cost was immense, and he was shouting his power to the world.

As his sixth light casting began to fade, and the deadly, wasp-like arrows began to come in again, Harmodius felt the presence of an enemy. A practitioner.

Another magus.

There was a moment’s warning – possibly as the other one raised a defensive ward.

Harmodius raised his own. And then, like a man fighting with a sword and buckler, he pushed his ward across the open space between himself and the other source of power. If his ward was held close to his body, it could only cover him. Held close to the other magus, the ward could cover the whole convoy.

A simple exercise in mathematica that most practitioners never learned.

It cost a fraction more energy to maintain the ward over there than here. Energy exploded against his ward and was deflected. Irks and boglins died under the onslaught of phantasms which should have been supporting them.

Harmodius smiled wickedly. Evidently whoever was out there had a great deal of raw power and very, very little training.

In his youth, Harmodius had been an accomplished swordsman. And the practice of hermetical combat had many close analogues in swordsmanship. Harmodius had always meant to write a treatise on the subject.

As his adversary prepared another attack, Harmodius dashed through the labyrinthine palace of his memory, stacking wards and gardes in a sequence he’d practised but never used.

His opponent’s next attack came with more force – a titanic, angry upwelling of power that came as a lurid green stripe across the night.

His first ward was voided. The enemy had moved off line, realising the strength of his forward defence.

His second ward, however, caught the attack and subtly displaced it – and the third ward reflected it down yet another line – right back into the caster, who was struck squarely by his own phantasm.

His wards flared a deep blue-green – and Harmodius struck. In the tempo of the opponent’s own attacks, he launched a line of bright, angelic white – a line like a lance that connected his index finger and the enemy’s wards. It cost Harmodius almost no power, but the enemy, having over-committed to warding in the wrong place, now used his reserve ward to block . . .

. . . nothing. The light beam was just that. Light. There was no force behind it.

Like a fencing master going for an elegant, killing thrust, Harmodius drew power for his attack, and launched it, all in a tenth of a beat of a panicked guildsman’s heart. And as the blow went in – over one ward, under a second, and through the weakened energies of the third – he felt his enemy collapse. Felt him experience the despair of defeat.

And without intending to, he reached out and seized something – just as he had taken power to save the young knight. But this time, he took the essence of the enemy sorcerer much faster and more thoroughly.

His opponent’s power was extinguished like a candle.

Harmodius took a deep breath, and realised that he was now more powerful than he had been when he started the night.

He cast a seventh light without any opposition.

The irks faded into the brush, and the rest of the night passed as slowly as he’d ever known, but with no further attacks.

West of Albinkirk – Gerald Random

A horse length from the Magus, Random stood with Old Bob. The last exchange of phantasm happened incredibly quickly. Random had watched it.

In the distance, something screamed.

A cruel smile spread across Harmodius’s lips.

Random glanced at Old Bob, who was looking at him. ‘That was-’

Old Bob shook his head. ‘Legendary,’ he said.

In the morning, the convoy confronted the truth – the broken bodies of a hundred boglins lay among the wagons. No man could deny what they had fought. Several vomited. Every man crossed himself and prayed.

Random approached the Magus who sat, cross-legged in the open, greeting the rising sun with his arms across his lap.

‘May I interrupt?’ he asked.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ grumbled the Magus.

‘My apologies,’ Random said. ‘But I need some information.’

The Magus snapped his eyes open. ‘If you do not let me do this, I will have fewer arrows to my bow when they come again,’ he said.

Random bowed. ‘I think we should turn and go back.’

The Magus frowned. ‘Do as you must, merchant. Leave me be!’

Random shook his head. ‘Why shouldn’t I turn back?’

Harmodius’ voice was savage. ‘How do I know, you money-grubbing louse? Do as you like! Just leave me alone!’

Old Bob was already mounted and Guilbert stood by his horse with a short, oddly curved bow across his saddle. Today was his turn to ride point.

Old Bob gestured tp Messire Random. ‘Well?’ he asked.

‘We press on for Lissen Carak,’ Random said.

Old Bob rolled his eyes. ‘What the fuck for?’

Random looked back at the Magus. And shrugged. ‘He made me angry,’ Random said, with simple honesty.

Old Bob looked at the pile of dead boglins. ‘You fought ’em before?’ he asked.

Random nodded.

‘Take every man to the pile and make him look at them. Careful like. In daylight. Make every man touch one. Make every man see where they’re weak.’ He shrugged. ‘It helps.’

Random hadn’t thought of any of those things. So he ordered it done, and stood there while Old Bob hauled a corpse off the pile.

The guildsmen flinched as he slammed the body down.

‘Don’t be afraid, lads,’ Old Bob said. ‘It’s dead.’

‘Fucking bug,’ said one of the cutlers.

‘Not bugs. More like-’ Old Bob shrugged. ‘Get the Magus to tell you what they’re like. But look. They have hard parts and soft parts. Hard on the chest. Soft as cheese here under the arms.’ To demonstrate, he took his arming dagger and thrust it into the muddy brown skin, which extended like membrane from the soft-hard chitinous armour of the torso, under the arm with no effort at all. Green-black ichor covered his blade, but none leaked out.

‘A thrust is always deadly,’ Old Bob said. He struck, and his heavy dagger blade punched through the thing’s tough shell, and a putrid odour filled the air. One of the salters vomited.

Old Bob walked over and kicked him. ‘Do that when you’re fighting and you’re fucking dead. Hear me? Look at it. Look at it!’ He looked around at the startled apprentices. ‘Everyone touch it. Take one off the pile for yourself, and try it with your sword. Do it.’

As Guilbert rode to the head of the column, he muttered to Harold Redlegs – loud enough to be heard – ‘Because the old Magus made him mad? That makes all sorts of sense.’

It didn’t make any sense to Random, either.

But an hour down the road, Harmodius rode up next to the merchant and bowed in the saddle.

‘My pardon if I was brusque,’ he said. ‘Sunrise is a very important moment.’

Random laughed. ‘Brusque, is it?’ he asked. But then he laughed. It was a beautiful day, the woods were green, and he was commanding the biggest convoy of his life.

Riding to war beside a living legend.

He laughed again, and the old Magus laughed, too.

Thirty wagons behind, Old Bob heard their laughter and rolled his eyes.

North of Albinkirk – Peter

The Sossag People had gathered almost their full fighting strength and brought it south across the wall. Ota Qwan said so, ten times a day, and the second full day in camp, he saw the whole fighting strength of the Sossag gathered in one place, the great clearing a mile south of camp. He stopped counting men when he reached several hundred, but there had to be a thousand painted warriors and another few hundred unpainted men and women. He’d learned that to be painted was to declare a willingness to die. Unpainted men might fight – or not, if they had other immediate interests, like a new wife or new children.

Peter had also learned that the Sossag had little interest in cooking. He had tried to win a place through efforts with a copper pot and a skillet, but his beef stew with stolen wine was eaten noisily and quickly by the band with which he travelled, the Six River Sossag who also called themselves the ‘Assegatossag’ or ‘Those who follow where the Squash Rots’ as Ota Qwan explained.

They ate it, and went about their business. No one thanked him or told him what a fine meal it had been.

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘It’s food!’ he said. ‘The Sossag don’t eat that well, and we all know what it is like to grow hungry. Your meal was excellent in that there was enough for everyone.’

Peter shook his head.

Ota Qwan nodded. ‘Before I was Ota Qwan, I understood what it was like to cook, to eat well, to dine.’ He laughed. ‘Now, I understand many things, and none of them involve fine wines or crunchy bread.’

Peter hung his head a little and Ota Qwan slapped his back.

‘You will earn a place. Everyone says you work hard. That is all the People expect of a newcomer.’

Peter nodded.

But that night he made a number of new friends. Dinner had been a simple soup with some seasonings and deer meat that Ota Qwan had contributed, and one of the reptilian monsters had come, sniffed the carcass of the deer, and made its strange crying noises until Skadai came at a run.

Peter had been afraid, but it had left them in peace, the deer meat had gone into the soup, and all was well.

When the soup was served, two of the boglins came out of the woods. They were slim without being tall – when they stood erect, they were only the height of a tall child, and their heads were more like insects then men, with the skin stretched tight over light bones perched on bodies with a bulbous armoured torso and four very mammalian appendages. Their legs were thin and heavily muscled, the arms whipcord-tight. They were hideous, and just watching one move was the stuff of nightmare. They didn’t mix much with Sossag, although Peter had seen Skadai speak to a group of them.

They also seemed to come in three types – the commonest were red-brown and moved very quickly; the second type were clearly warriors, with a more heavily armoured carapace and paler, almost silver, skin. The warriors were almost as tall as a man, and every appendage had a spike. The Sossag used the Albin name for those ones – wights.

And finally, there was what seemed to be a leader class – long and thin, like great mantis creatures. The Sossag called them priests.

These two creatures were both lowly workers, each carrying a bow and a spear, naked except for a quiver and a canteen. Peter tried not to watch the liquid sliding of plate on plate in their lower abdomens. It was disturbing.

They stopped by his fire. Both rotated their heads in unison, their strange lobe-shaped eyes seeing the fire and the man together.

‘Guk fud?’ said the nearer of the two. His voice was scratchy, almost a screech.

Peter tried to get past his fear. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘U guk fud?’ said the other one. ‘Gud fud?’

The first one shook its head and abdomen – an alien display, but Peter understood it was showing impatience. ‘Me try fud,’ he screeched.

Peter still didn’t understand their shrieks, but the pointing claw-hands seemed to indicate his stew pot.

None of the Sossag were rising to help him. As usual, they had eaten to satiety and now lay on the ground, virtually unmoving, although every one of them was watching him. Ota Qwan was smiling – a hard, cruel smile.

Peter bent, turning his back on the creatures, and poured stew into a bowl. He added a little wild oregano and handed it to the nearer of the two monsters.

He took it, and Peter watched him sniff the bowl. He wished he hadn’t. Watching the thing’s not-entirely-inhuman nose split open to reveal a cavernous hole in the face with spiky hairs-

The thing made a loud scratching noise with two of its arms and poured the whole bowl straight into the hole in its face.

Threw back its head at an unnatural angle and screamed.

Then it held out the bowl for more.

Peter scooped two more bowls, put oregano on both, and handed one to each boglin.

The entire process was repeated.

The smaller of the two boglins opened and closed its beak-mouth three or four times, emitting a chemical reek that caught at the back of Peter’s throat.

‘Fud gud!’ it chirped.

Long, agile tongues of a shocking pink-purple emerged from their mouths, and they licked the bowls clean.

They emitted a long scratching noise together, and raced off, running lightly on the ground, bent half over.

Peter stood by his fire with two empty food bowls. He was shaking a little.

Skadai came. ‘You have been honoured,’ he said. ‘They seldom notice us.’ He looked like a man with more to say, but then he pursed his lips, patted Peter on the shoulder, smiled and loped off, as he always did.

Peter was still trying to decide what to make of the incident when the woman came and put a hand on the small of his back.

That hand on his back was a palpable thing – another means of communication, a thing he hadn’t expected, and it conveyed a wealth of information to him – so much, in fact, that an hour later he was between her legs . . . and moments after that another man kicked him in the head.

Such a blow might have killed, but the painted man was barefoot and Peter had a little warning. And despite being a former slave and a cook, Peter had been bred to war, so as the kick turned his head, as he ripped himself free of the dark-haired woman’s embrace, he was already moving, calculating, reaching for the knife he wore around his neck.

The painted man expected him to be easy prey. He screamed, in rage or feigned rage, and attacked again. Peter had rolled on his back with the force of the kick, and he had the knife in his hand, and when the painted man – his red and black and white mixed in blotchy patches that looked like a skin sickness – jumped at him, Peter killed him as easily as such a thing could ever happen. He rammed his blade deep into the man’s belly and then rolled him over as he screamed in shock and desperation, his wild eyes suddenly wide with the despair of agony leading inevitably to death.

Peter ripped the knife up his abdomen, spilling his guts and covering himself in the man’s gore.

Then, full of his own terror, he plunged the knife into the man’s eyes, one and two.

By then, the blotchy man was dead.

Peter lay there for a moment. Every one of the last hundred heartbeats was open to him like a long book, carefully read, and the remnants of his erection reminded him that he had passed from one extreme of life to the other in that time.

He tried to get to his feet but his knees were shaking and there were men all around him.

All Sossag men.

Skadai held out a hand and hauled him to his feet with a firmness that seemed threatening. But was not.

Then Ota Qwan was there, with a steadying hand.

‘Open your mouth,’ he said.

Peter opened it, and Skadai stuck a bloody finger into his mouth and began to chant. Ota Qwan grabbed his arm tightly. ‘This is important,’ he said. ‘Listen: Skadai says, “Take your foe, Gruntag, into your body.” ’ Ota Qwan squeezed again. ‘Skadai says, “Now you and Gruntag are one. What you were, he is. What he was, you are.” ’

Peter wanted to retch at the taste of coppery, warm blood inside his mouth.

‘I say, don’t make a habit of killing Sossag,’ Ota Qwan said.

‘He attacked me!’ Peter squeaked.

‘You were fucking his woman, who was only using you to be rid of an inferior man. She avoided the shame of sending him from her blankets by arranging for you to kill him. Understand?’ Ota Qwan turned to a group of painted men and said something, and they all laughed.

Peter spat. ‘What’s so funny?’

Ota Qwan shook his head. ‘Our humour. Yours later, but not now, I think.’

‘Tell me,’ Peter said.

‘They asked how you were. I said you weren’t sure whether the dick or the knife went in more smoothly.’ Ota Qwan’s eyes were a bright blue, and the man was amused. ‘You are now a man, and a Sossag. Killing your own should not be a habit, but you must know by now what the Wild is.’

Peter spat again. ‘It’s every hand raised against every other hand,’ he said. He had trained to kill all his young life, and his first failure to kill another man had made him a slave. But this sudden success felt more like rape than victory. He was covered in blood and worse, and yet these men were congratulating him. ‘There is no law.’

Ota Qwan shook his head. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ he said. ‘There are many laws. But the greatest of them is that the strongest is the strongest. And every creature, weak or strong, makes a good meal.’ He laughed. ‘It’s no different at the king’s court. But here, it’s fair and honest, at least in that no one lies. Skadai is faster and deadlier than I will ever be. I will never challenge him. But another man might – or a woman – and the matrons would name a form of challenge, and the challenger would face Skadai. Or perhaps simply attack him – but that sort of victory does not always result in the killer gaining the power and prestige he seeks. Am I making sense?’

‘Too much sense,’ Peter said. ‘I want to wash.’ Peter wanted free of this alien man and his paint and his aura of violence.

‘I tell you this because now other warriors see you as a man and you may be challenged. Or simply killed. Up until now, I have protected you.’ Ota Qwan shrugged.

‘Why kill me?’ Peter asked.

Ota Qwan shrugged. ‘To raise the number of men they’ve killed? Or to claim Senegral, your woman?’ He laughed. ‘Grundag died easily because he thought you were a slave. He wasn’t much of a man, but he was a fighter, and his very stupidity made men afraid of him. They are not afraid of you – although the way you opened him and cut out his eyes may make some men afraid. But many men want Senegral, and she doesn’t like to say no.’

Peter had made it to the stream, and despite the cold and the sharp rocks, he threw himself into the low pool where the men washed their cups, heedless of the layer of water-swollen grains where a hundred wooden bowls had been washed after dinner. Heedless of leeches. Wanting only to get the sticky blood and intestinal matter off his hands and his belly and his groin.

From the water, he said, ‘Perhaps I should just kill her.’

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘An elegant solution, except that her brothers and sisters would then surely kill you.’

The water woke his brain and froze his skin. He put his head under the water and come up floundering, feet aching from trying to balance on sharp rocks. ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

‘Paint!’ Ota Qwan said. ‘As a warrior on a mission, you are exempt from such treatment. Unless you provoke it, of course. But men are not as swift as other animals, as deadly in a fight, as well-taloned, or as long limbed. Eh? But in a pack, we are the deadliest animals in the Wild, and when we paint, we are a pack. Do you understand?’

Peter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I will paint. And that commits me to make war against people I do not know to gain a little peace at home.’ He laughed. His laughter was strange and wild and a little crazed. ‘But they enslaved me, so they can take the consequences.’

Ota Qwan nodded. ‘I knew you would make one of us from the moment I met you,’ he said. ‘Don’t disdain us. We do as other people do, we just don’t call it by pretty names. We make war now to support Thorn, but also so that all the other killers and all the other predators will see our strength and leave us in peace. Will fear us. So we can go home and grow squash. It is not all war and knives in the dark.’

Peter sighed. ‘I hope not.’

Ota Qwan made a noise. ‘You need to paint soon, I think. And have a name. But I will let someone else name you.’

He gave Peter a hand out of the stream, and then took him to a fire, where he removed the horde of leeches stuck to the former cook. On another day, the leeches would have appalled him, but Peter bore their removal with hardly a glance, earning a respectful grunt from an older man.

Then Ota Qwan spoke, and all the men and several women stiffened, paid close attention, and went to their blanket rolls, returning with pretty round boxes of pottery and wood – some covered in remarkable designs made with coloured hair or quills, and some made of gold or silver.

Every little vessel held paint – red, black, white, yellow, or blue.

‘May I paint you?’ Ota Qwan asked.

Peter smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said. He was exhausted and almost asleep.

Three men and a painted woman did the actual painting, under Ota Qwan’s direction. It took an hour, but when they were done Peter was black on one side of his body and red on the other.

But on his face they had painted something more intricate. He had felt the woman’s fingers on his face, around his eyes, her own rapt expression and slightly open mouth oddly transfigured by the fish she wore painted across her eyes.

When they were done one of the men brought a small round mirror in a horn case, and he looked at the mask over his face, the divisions of white and red and black like herring bones, and he nodded. It spoke to him, although he wasn’t sure what it meant.

He left them his shirt.

He walked though the firelit darkness, and the air was cool on his painted skin, and the fires burning at every camp were warm, even from a distance. Ota Qwan led him from fire to fire, and warriors murmured to him. He nodded and bowed his head.

‘What are they saying?’ he asked.

‘Mostly hello. A few comment on how much taller you are now. The old man tells you to keep your paint clean and sharp, and not muddy it as you used to do.’ Ota Qwan laughed. ‘Because, of course, you used to be Grundag. Understand?’

‘Christ,’ Peter said. And yet, the murmured welcomes straightened his spine. He had triumphed. He didn’t need to wallow in the killing.

He was alive, and tall, and strong, and he rather liked the paint.

At his own fire, Senegral had made all of Grundag’s belongings into a small display, and she gave him a cup of warm, spiced tea, and he drank it. Ota Qwan stood at the edge of the firelight and watched.

‘She says, look at the good bow you have. Some of your arrows are very poor. You should make better, or trade for them. And she says that she will try not to inflame other men, if you will only keep her the way she wishes to be kept.’

Peter went through the carefully laid out goods by the bark basket, holding each item up in the firelight. Two excellent knives and a good bow with no arrows to speak of; some furs, a pair of leggings and two pairs of unadorned moccasins. A horn container full of black paint, a glass jar with red paint. Two cups. A copper pot.

‘I thought women made their men shoes?’ Peter asked.

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘Woman who fancy their men make them magnificent moccasins,’ he said.

‘I see,’ Peter said. He packed everything back into the basket. The woman came and stood next to him, and he put a hand under her skirt and ran it up her leg to her thigh, and then around her thigh, and she made a sound, and soon enough, they were back where they had been when the dead man kicked him in the head.

At some point she moaned, and later he laughed aloud at the absurdity of it all. He wanted Ota Qwan to translate his thoughts to her, but of course, the man was gone.

Why is he helping me? Peter thought, and then he was asleep.

And in the morning, all the painted men rose, took only the equipment they needed for violence, and followed Skadai. Peter took the bow and the best knife, and his paint and a single red wool blanket and strode naked, after Ota Qwan. He found it surprisingly easy to ask no questions, simply follow.

Later, he asked Ota Qwan how to get arrows, and the man silently gave him a dozen.

‘Why?’ Peter asked. ‘Is it not every man against every other man?’

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘You know nothing,’ he said. ‘Do you not follow me? Will you do my bidding when the arrows fly and the steel fills the air?’

Peter thought about it. ‘I suppose I will.’

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘Come. Let’s go find your name.’

South of Albinkirk – de Vrailly

Jean de Vrailly clamped down on his impatience and it turned, as it always did, to anger. The blossoming of his rage always made him feel sinful, dirty, and less of a man and a knight, and so, while riding easily through the high ridges and spring flowers of Alba’s fertile heartland, he reined up his second charger and dismounted, to the confusion of his brothers in arms, and knelt in the dirt beside the road to pray.

The mild pain of kneeling for prolonged periods always steadied him.

Images floated to the surface of his thoughts as he imagined the crucifixion of the Christ; as he pictured himself as a knight riding to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, or inserted himself in meditation into the adoration of the Magi, a lowly caravan guard sitting on his charger behind the princes who adored the newborn lamb.

Contempt broke through his reverie. He despised the King of Alba, who stopped in each town to play to his peasants, win their sighs and their raucous laughter, still their fears and give them law. It was done with too much drama and it took too much time, and it was obvious – obvious to a child – that something was happening in the north that required the instant application of the kingdom’s mailed fist.

Disgust. The knights of Alba were slow, slothful, full of vice and barbarity. They drank, they ate too much, belched and farted at table, and never, ever exercised in arms. Jean de Vrailly and his retinue rode from town to town in full armour, cap a pied, with heavy quilted cotes under hauberks of ring mail surmounted by shining steel plate – three layers of protection, which every knight in the East wore every day of his life – to town, to church or to ride out with his lady.

The Wild had not made a major incursion in the East in a century, yet their knighthood stood ready to fight at every moment.

Here, where stands of unkempt trees stood on every ridge, and where an incursion of the Wild threatened a major city just over the horizon – the knights rode abroad in colourful tunics with fashionable, long trailing sleeves, pointed shoes and carefully wrapped hats like the turbans of the far East, with their armour stored in wicker baskets and oak barrels.

Right now, four days from Albinkirk, a party of the king’s younger knights and squires were hawking, riding their palfreys along the ridge tops to the west, and he wanted to punish them for their light-hearted foolishness. These effete barbarians needed to be taught what war was. They needed to learn to take off their chamois gloves and feel the cold weight of steel on their soft hands.

He prayed, and praying made him better. He was able to smile to the king, and nod to a young squire who ill-manneredly galloped down the column raising a cloud of dust, mounted on a hot-blooded Eastern mare worth a hundred leopards as a racehorse and worthless in a fight.

But when the army, which grew every day as contingents of knights, men-at-arms, and archers joined from each town, each county, each manor, settled for the night, de Vrailly ordered his squires to set his pavilion as far from the rest of the army as could be managed – out in the horse lines, surrounded by beasts. He dined simply on soldiers’ rations with his cousin, summoned his chaplain, Father Hugh, to hear Mass and confession of his sins of passion, and then, shriven and spiritually clean, he bathed in water from the Albin, the mighty river that rolled by the door of his tent, dismissed his squires and his slaves, and towelled himself dry, listening to the sound of three thousand horses cropping grass on a beautiful spring evening. The smell of the wildflowers overpowered even the smell of the horses.

Dry, he dressed in a white shirt and braes and a white jacket, a jupon of the very simplest style. He unrolled a small, precious carpet from far to the east, and opened a portable shrine – two paintings hinged face to face for travel – the Virgin and the Crucifixion. He knelt before their images and prayed, and when he felt empty and clean he opened himself.

And his archangel came.

Child of Light, I salute you.

As he did every time the angel came, de Vrailly burst into tears. Because he never quite believed a visitation was real, until the next one confirmed all of the past ones. His unbelief – his doubt – was its own punishment.

Through his tears, he bowed. ‘Bless me, Taxiarch, for I have failed you many times.’

He tried never to look directly into its shining face which seemed in memory to be made of beaten gold, but in fact looked more like mobile, sparkling pearl. Looking too closely might break the spell-

It is not your error that the King of Alba did not do as we wished. It is not through you that this kingdom has been untimely assailed by the forces of Evil. But we will overcome.

‘I succumb to rage, to contempt, to self-righteousness and anger.’

None of these will help you to be the best knight in the world. Remember how you are when you fight, and be that man at all times.

No priest had ever put it to him so well. When he fought, he dismissed all worldly concerns and was only the point of his spear. The archangel’s words rang through him like the meeting of blades between two strong men, like the clarion call of a stallion trumpeting.

‘Thank you, lord.’

Be of good cheer. A great test is coming. You must be ready.

‘I am always ready.’

The archangel placed a shining hand on his forehead, and just for a moment, de Vrailly looked up into the archangel’s shining face, his outstretched, perfect hand, his golden hair, so much brighter than de Vrailly’s own and yet somehow alike.

Bless and keep you, my child. When the standard falls, you will know what must be done. Do not hesitate.

De Vrailly frowned.

But the angel was gone.

He could smell the incense, and he felt at peace – his mind comforted, languorous, as he was after he had a woman, but without the sense of shame or dirt.

He smiled. Took a deep breath, and sang the opening notes of a Te Deum under his breath.

West of Albinkirk – Harmodious

Harmodius lay on a pack of furs, the pottery mug of warm wine balanced on his chest, and watched Random stir a hot poker into another beaker, adding honey and spices.

Behind the merchant, Gawin Murien sat quietly mending a shoe. He didn’t speak, but he was going about the tasks of soldiering, and Harmodius was content to keep a watch on him. His left shoulder was now heavily scaled from the nipple to the neck, and down to the base of his bicep. The scales no longer seemed to be spreading, but they were growing larger and harder. The young man seemed curiously heedless of them – since the first night, he hadn’t remarked on them at all.

Harmodius was old in guile, and had known many young men. This one was preparing for death, and so Harmodius watched him carefully. The second ring on his right hand held a phantasm that would drop the boy like a blow from a spiritual axe.

‘I like it sweet. But I have a sweet tooth,’ Random said. He grinned. ‘My wife says that all my efforts to win riches and fame are merely to ensure my supply of biscuits and and honey.’

Harmodius drank from his cup again. It was far sweeter than he liked it but on this evening, under the curtain of stars with a dreadful enemy as close as the edge of the firelight, the hippocras was all he could have asked.

Immanence.

It was a mild shock, like seeing a former lover walk into a tavern. Somewhere not so very far away, something powerful was manifesting. It might be something supremely powerful, a very long way away, or something merely awesome and terrifying, in the next field.

‘To arms!’ Harmodius said, jumping to his feet. He gathered himself for a moment and extended his enhanced senses.

Gawin Morion was already in his leather jupon, and his helmet was going on his head.

Random had a breast- and backplate on over his travel clothes, and he produced a crossbow from the same wagon bed which had held the makings of their wine.

Other men repeated the alarm, but most were fully dressed, armed and armoured, and Harmodius ignored them all, reaching out – past the orange glow of firelight, past the fields of bracken and fern that surrounded them.

Nothing. Not a single boglin.

Harmodius knew the laws of identity in the use of Power. There were two ways to locate another user. He could sit silently, his attuned senses waiting to see if there was another pulse of immanence. Or he could send out a pulse of his own power to ring across the night, which would identify him to every creature of the Wild with the slightest sensitivity to such things. Which was most of them.

He settled for the quieter, more passive option, even though it was not in his nature and although he was all but bursting with power. He hadn’t felt so capable in many years. He wanted to play with it, the way a man will swing a new sword about, cutting the heads off ferns and fennel stalks.

Harmodius bore down on his power. And his impatience.

Pushed his senses further.

Further.

Well to the north he found trolls – their large, misshapen forms as horrible in their lack of symmetry as they were in their black crystalline alienness. They were marching.

To the west, he found a user of much talent and little training. But he had no context for the discovery – a village witch, or a boglin shaman or one of the Wild’s living trees. He had no idea, and he dismissed the entity as far too weak to have displayed the power he had sensed.

Whatever it was, it seemed to have left the world – departed by whatever path it had chosen. It manufactured a new loci, or jumped to one that had previously existed.

The display of power remained like a beacon, and Harmodius was unhappy to find that it was behind them, to the south and the east by many leagues. But he swooped on it like a raptor falling on a rabbit – and fled just as quickly when he sensed the order of magnitude it represented.

When he was a small boy in a fishing village Harmodius, who’d had a different name then, had rowed out on the deep in a small boat with two friends to fish for sea trout and salmon with hand lines. Porpoises and small whales shared the sport, and sometimes they caught good fish only to have them snatched away by their aquatic rivals. But late in the day, while pulling in a heavy fish, Harmodius had seen a seal – an enormous seal as long as his boat – flash into a turn and reach for their magnificent fish . . .

. . . just as a leviathan, as much larger than the seal as the seal was larger than the salmon, turned under the boat to take the seal.

The size of the creature beneath the boat – fifty times its length – and its great eye as it rolled, the froth of blood that reached the surface without a sound as it took the seal, the gentle swell it made, and then, perhaps the most terrifying of all, its mighty fluke breaking the surface a hundred yards away and flinging spray all the way over them-

In all his life, Harmodius had never seen anything that moved him so deeply, or so impressed on him his own insignificance. It was more than fear. It was the discovery that some things are so great that they would not notice you even if they destroyed you.

He’d brought in the salmon, which died unaware of the role it had played in the death of the mighty seal, and the lesson was not lost on the boy.

And all of that came to him as he fled the immensity of whatever creature had briefly been in the Valley of the Albin, fifty leagues to the south.

He came back into his own skin.

Random was looking at him with concern. ‘You screamed!’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

‘We are safe,’ Harmodius said. But his voice was more of a a sob than it should have been. No one is safe. What was that?

East of Albinkirk – Hector Lachlan

East of Albinkirk, the sun rose on the western slopes of Parnassus, the westernmost of the mountains of the Morea where the streams rushed down, heavy with the last of the snow and the spring rains to flood the upper waters of the Albin.

Hector Lachlan was drinking tea and watching the East Branch. It was high – far too high – and he was trying to figure out how he might get his herds over it.

Behind him, the men in his tail were breaking camp, packing the wagon, donning their hauberks and their weapons, and the youngest, or the least lucky, were already out with the herds.

While he watched, his tanist, Donald Redmane, stripped naked at the water’s edge and plunged in, using the edge of a ruined beaver dam as a diving platform. He was high spirited and strong and only heartbeats later, he was pulled out by the rope around his waist, his shoulder and collarbone bruised against the rocks.

Lachlan winced.

That night, something killed a stallion in their herd, and Lachlan, who had never fought an irk in his life, had to assume that it was some such creature who was responsible – multiple punctures and slashes from something much smaller than the horse. But the why of it eluded him. He doubled his herd guards, aware of how futile such measures could be. In the Hills, he had stone fences and deep glens with natural fortifications to take herds and guard them, but here, on the road – he was in the country that the drovers held to be safe. And something was hunting him. He could feel it.