The Scholae finished the last man standing when he fell to his knees begging for mercy.
The Red Knight put his gauntleted hand against the door. ‘He’s in there,’ he said. ‘Majesty!’ he called. ‘Open your door! It is your rescue!’
The men pouring out of the barracks had begun to form a line in the icy yard – unarmoured, but with a workmanlike collection of short swords and heavy falchions, sabres and horse bows. An officer shouted, and they raised their shields and gave a Thrakian war cry.
Count Zac led the mounted men through the now-open gates. Arrows flew like snow flurries and the yard, already muddy, turned red-brown. The garrison had nowhere to go, no armour, and no hope of fighting twenty mounted men.
The rest of the armoured men were pouring into the Great Hall to help Milus and Ser Gavin, who had the only serious fighting. Both of them took wounds, outnumbered, fighting alone for as long as it took the sun to rise one finger above the horizon.
Ser Michael had one more duty to perform – a self-imposed one. He collected his team and ran through the bloody yard – the ice was gone – to the kitchens under the eastern tower. The yard door was unlatched, a woman screamed and they were in.
‘Lie down!’ he shouted. ‘And you will not be killed.’
The Red Knight hadn’t ordered him to save the women and children, but Michael was newly married, and he had his own notions about war.
Before the last screams were done, the Red Knight came into the yard with Giorgios and two more Scholae carrying the Emperor. Every man in the yard fell to his knees – even the archers, with a little help.
The Emperor smiled. ‘Oh, my braves,’ he said. ‘Please spare the rebels.’
They got him into a horse litter rigged up on the spot.
Milus found the Red Knight with Ser Michael. ‘Do we spare them?’ he asked.
The Red Knight grinned. ‘Ser knight, you have a flap of skin the size of a flapjack hanging off your thigh.’ He knelt in the bloody snow and put pressure on a wound Ser Milus hadn’t even seen. ‘But yes – if the Emperor wants to be clement, I’m not going to countermand him.’
‘You said to kill them all,’ Ser Michael said accusingly.
‘I said that when we were desperate,’ the Red Knight said, as if talking to a fool. ‘Now we’re merely in a hurry.’ He glared at Wilful Murder, who was trying to pass unnoticed into the kitchen, and nodded to Michael. ‘Saving the kitchen staff? That was well done,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even think of it,’ he admitted.
Bent and two more archers were holding Ser Milus, and Long Paw was wrapping his thigh with clean white linen. ‘Missed your prick,’ the archer said comfortingly.
‘If we bind them, they’ll be dead in an hour from the cold,’ Ser Milus said.
‘That’s a chance I’m willing to take,’ the Red Knight said. ‘Sorry. I know you are all gentle, perfect knights on errantry, but I’d rather not see these gentlemen again today. And when Andronicus’s relief force reaches here, every one of our prisoners will turn into a blood-mad Thrakian.’
‘Emperor said not to kill them,’ Ser Michael said. ‘If we tie them, the women will just untie them.’ He set his hips. ‘I won’t let you kill the women.’
The Red Knight rolled his eyes. ‘I wasn’t proposing to kill them, my young idealist. I was hoping you’d come up with some noble, but efficient, way of protecting us – and them from your excellent friends, like Wilful Murder here, who merely want a bit of rape.’ He shrugged. ‘Very well. Lock them all in the basement of the eastern tower, and let the fates see our mercy.’ He leaned over. ‘Michael – we did it!’
Michael shook his head. ‘Of course we did,’ he said.
The Red Knight sighed. ‘Sometimes I think you all take me for granted,’ he said and went off to wash the blood off his hands.
Father Arnaud laughed so hard that he almost fell down.
Demetrius’s relief force arrived at the seaside castle of Ermione six hours later.
His scout officer knew they were too late as soon as he saw the place on the horizon, with no smoke rising from the chimneys, but he kept his mouth shut. Demetrius was in a murderous mood, and looking for scapegoats and victims after his latest savage row with his father, ten leagues behind them with the main army.
They rode into the silent yard and Dariusz busied himself climbing the tower – just in case the guards had followed orders and held the room against all comers. Or killed the Emperor, as they’d been ordered to.
All four guards were dead on the landing – purses empty, weapons gone. The door to the Emperor’s room stood open. Dariusz walked around the room where the Emperor had been a prisoner, looking at it with the eyes of a man who analysed things. He came down via the Great Hall, and then walked in – and out – of the gate tower.
By then, Demetrius’s Easterners were killing the rescued prisoners, one by one. Demetrius sat his milk-white horse, a beautiful man on a magnificent horse in the midst of a courtyard awash in mud and blood. The men who had been the garrison fell on their knees – some for the second time – in the bloody slush and begged for mercy. This time they found none, and the Easterners coldly shot them down.
Dariusz waited until the worst of it was over, and then picked his way across the yard. ‘Sixty men,’ he said. ‘They took it by coup de main, at dawn. I don’t think that they lost a man in the process.’
Demetrius spat. ‘Fucking fools,’ he said. ‘If we kill them all, we make a lesson for the future.’ He spat in the bloody snow. ‘We have to pursue them. We’ll lose everything if the Emperor escapes.’
Dariusz looked at Aeskepiles, who was unmoved by the massacre. ‘My lord, we have equal numbers and they are hours ahead. If they choose to set an ambush, we’ll fall into it. Or we will pursue them too slowly because of the possibility of ambush. Either way, there is no point.’ He didn’t add that if he’d been the enemy commander, there would be another force – a blocking force – somewhere close by ordered to destroy any pursuit. Or that Lord Andronicus had fielded his entire army in late February, and the enemy’s force was as yet undetected.
Dariusz felt something like admiration for the Red Knight. They clearly read the same books.
Demetrius growled.
There were screams. Women’s screams.
Dariusz put his heels to his mount so that its head touched the head of Demetrius’s horse. To get the lord’s attention. ‘Spare the women,’ he said.
Demetrius laughed. ‘Oh, they won’t die,’ he said.
Aeskepiles drew a deep breath, snapped his fingers and Demetrius’s horse tossed him over his head into the muck of the yard.
Dariusz found his hand locked behind his back.
Aeskepiles backed his horse. ‘I won’t be party to this,’ he said. ‘Spare the women and children, or by dark gods, I will kill both of you right here.’
Dariusz wondered why the magister assumed that he was in favour of the rape and murder, but he was helpless and unlike many other helpless men, when Dariusz was helpless he relaxed.
Demetrius bounced to his feet. ‘You might have just asked, man-witch. Instead, you humiliated me.’ He smiled. ‘We’ll see. For now, they may live, their virtue unsullied.’ He rubbed his hip. ‘The virtue of some army women, saved by a warlock’s honour,’ he said. ‘You’re fools.’ He turned to Dariusz. ‘I hear what you say, scout. I worry-’
Dariusz shrugged. Since the mid-winter raid in the west, his assumptions had received blow after blow. He no longer assumed that his side was the side of right, and he was quite sure they were the side that was going to be beaten. And the loss of the Emperor-
Demetrius narrowed his eyes. ‘I hate to lose,’ he said. ‘Stay with me, Captain. I’m not beaten yet.’
Twenty leagues south and west of the castle where Demetrius vented his ire on the survivors of the garrison, the Red Knight’s army made a camp. Around the commander’s tall red tent lay a snug encampment; six hundred tents, each hordled in local brush and wood so that they appeared to be a small forest. A late winter squall had dropped three fingers of snow over them, which insulated the tents, but the army’s thirst for firewood had driven every peasant in the village out into the winter, their houses stripped for wood or disassembled, their own crucial woodpiles destroyed as if by incendiary locusts.