‘This is the King’s notion of a knight,’ Rohan said, as Random passed.
He stopped. Turned his head, and smiled agreeably at the King’s champion and his friend. ‘Do you mean that as an insult, Ser?’ he asked.
‘Take it as you will,’ Rohan tossed off.
Random hobbled forward and put his face in the younger man’s face, very close. ‘You mean, you are afraid to tell me what you really think?’
The Sieur de Rohan flushed. ‘I mean that it is not my way to converse with a lowborn of no consequence.’
Random reached up and none too gently pulled the man’s beard. ‘I think you are just afraid.’ He laughed. ‘Come and issue me a cartel, when I’m whole. Or shut up and go home.’ He smiled at the Captal. ‘I hope I’ve made myself clear.’
The Sieur reached for his dagger.
The Captal caught his wrist. ‘Ser Gerald lost a foot in a feat of arms that any of us would envy,’ he said. ‘You will restrain yourself.’
‘I’ll kill him!’ Rohan said.
Gaston d’Eu materialised out of a side room and placed himself between Rohan and Random, who was standing his ground. He bowed to Random. Random returned his bow and hobbled away.
‘We’re in for some hard times,’ he said to Master Pye.
Ten Leagues North of Albinkirk – Ser John Crayford
Ser John was not dressed in armour.
In fact, he lay on the bank of a small stream dressed in hose so old that the knees had layers of patches, and a cote he’d bought from a peasant farmer ten years before. It was a nameless colour a little lighter than the fur of a barn mouse, and very warm in the late summer sunlight.
Rain had fallen in the night, and there were drops of water caught in the streamside ferns. They caught fire in the rising sun, like tiny, magnificent jewels burning with hermetical fire against the early morning transparent black of the stream that rolled slowly by.
In his right hand he had a rod four paces long, and from it dangled a horsehair line half again as long, and at the end was a hook with a tuft of feathers. He moved cautiously, like a man hunting deer – or something more dangerous. His eyes remained on the wonder of the water-jewels caught in the ferns and he watched them, his heart overflowing, for as long as the effect lasted – a few dozen heartbeats.
And then they became mere drops of water again as the sun’s inexorable rise changed the angle of light, and he moved over the low ridge at the edge of the stream, saw the rock that marked his spot, and his wrist moved, as delicate as a sword cut and as skilled, and his fly sailed back, over his head – he felt the change in tension as his line loaded – and he flicked his rod forward. The line unrolled as if from a drum, and his fly settled on the still black water with the delicacy of a faery harvesting souls.
Even as he released the breath he hadn’t known he was holding, a leviathan exploded from the deeps in a deep green and rainbow-coloured explosion of power, seized its prey and fled for the depths-
Ser John stood straighter and lifted the tip of his rod, sinking his hook home.
The trout resisted the tug, fled, and then leaped clear of the water. Sir John turned the fish over, trying to keep it from putting its full weight on the braided horsehair. He felt the weight gather and stepped to the right, the way he would if facing a deadlier adversary, taking the fish off line and turning it slightly so that it couldn’t get a firm purchase on the water with its fins. It tipped onto its side – and he pulled.
In a moment he had the fish on the bank – in another he’d pinned it with his left foot, and then he drew his roundel dagger and slammed the flat disc of the pommel into the back of the fish’s head, killing it instantly.
Whistling, he extracted the precious fish hook – the work of a master smith – and checked his horsehair line for splits or frays before drawing another knife from the strap of his pouch. He slit the trout from anus to gills, stripped its guts out with his thumb, and tossed them into the stream.
Before they could sink, something with a large green beak snapped them down into the depths, and was gone.
Ser John’s hand went to his sword hilt. It was fewer than sixty days since he’d cleared the last irks from the fields south of Albinkirk, and the new settlers were only now starting to arrive. He was still jumpy.
Just a snapping turtle, he reassured himself.
But as the sun rose over the edge of the wild, it occurred to Ser John that the snapping turtle, the otter, the beaver – and the trout – were as much creatures of the Wild as the irk, the boggle, or the troll.
He laughed at himself, put his first fish of the day into his net bag and staked it in the stream – carefully, so that he’d know if a snapping turtle was intending to take the fish. He had a spear. If he had to, he could kill the turtle.
‘I love the Wild,’ he said aloud.
And cast again.
The Manor of Middlehill had never been a great one, and the whole was held for the service of a single knight, and had been for ninety years. Helewise Cuthbert stood by the ruins of her gatehouse and her tongue pushed against her teeth in her effort not to weep, while her young daughter stood closer than she had stood in many years.
The Knights of Saint Thomas said that it was safe to return to their homes in the north, and had paid them well in tools and seed to return. Helewise looked at her manor house, and it looked like the skull of a recently killed man – the stone black from fire, the once emerald-green yard strewn with refuse that had once been their tapestries and linens. The windows, purchased with glass from Harndon, a matter of great family pride, were smashed, and the great oak door was lying flat, with a small thorn growing through its little lattice window.
Behind her stood twenty more women. Every one of them was a widow. Their men had died defending Albinkirk – or failing to defend it, or the smaller towns to the south and west of Albinkirk – Hawkshead and Kentmere and Southford and the Sawreys.
They gave a collective sigh that was close to keening.
Helewise settled her face, and gathered her pack. She smiled at her daughter, who smiled back with all the solid cheerfulness of age nineteen.
‘No time like the present,’ Helewise said. ‘It’s the work you don’t start that never gets done.’
Phillippa, her daughter, gave the roll of her head that was the dread of many a mother. ‘As you say, Momma,’ she managed.
Her mother turned. ‘Would you rather give it up?’ she asked. ‘A year’s work, or two, and we’ll be back on our feet. Or we can go be poor relations to the Cuthberts in Lorica, and you’ll become someone’s spinster aunt.’
Phillippa looked at her feet. They were quite pretty, as feet go, and the laces on her shoes had neat bronze points that glittered when she walked. She smiled at her feet. ‘I don’t think I’d like that much,’ she said, thinking of some of the boys in Lorica. ‘And we’re here now. So let’s get to work.’
The next hours were almost as bad as the hours in which they’d fled, while old Ser Hubert rallied the men of the farm to fight the tide of boggles. Phillippa remembered him a sour old man who couldn’t even flirt, but he’d waded into the monsters with an axe and held the road. She remembered looking back and watching him as the axe rose and fell.
Her views on what might be useful in a man had undergone what her mother would call a ‘profound change’.
Jenny Rose, one of the few girls her own age, found the first bodies, and she didn’t scream. These women’s screams were about spent. But other women gathered around her and patted her hands, and old crone Gwyn gave her a cup of elderberry wine, and then they all began to pull the pile of bones and gristle apart. The boggles went onto a pile to burn. The others-
They were husbands and brothers and sons. And, in two cases, daughters. They’d all been eaten – flensed clean. In some ways, that made the task easier. Phillippa hated clearing dead mice out of traps – so squishy, still warm. This wasn’t as bad, even though they were the bones of people she’d known. At least one set of bones belonged to a boy she’d kissed, and a little more.