Freedom. Isabel. The words rang him like a bell and the carved Christ seemed to shift, though it was the light from wind-wafted candles. He remembered, as he did every day, the promise he and Isabel had made to each other never to be parted. You should be wary of swearing oaths to God, for the Devil is always listening.
Yet God was always watching, Hal thought, staring at the blank wooden eyes of Christ. You Yourself refused to be carried by the angels and wounded Your feet on the stones of the way. For this You came into the world in a stable on a winter’s night. You love my lost Isabel, too, and I hope You keep her safer than I did …
The blow on the back of his head blasted him back to the moment and he half fell, recovered and turned into the scowl of Frixco, who had cuffed him.
‘Hear me now?’ the man demanded and Hal nodded dumbly.
‘Time to go,’ Frixco growled, weary of it all. Seven years they had tended this one, waiting for some word from someone — anyone — as to his fate. None had come and even Frixco had almost forgotten what the lord of Herdmanston — wherever that was — had done.
Murder, Frixco recalled vaguely. And a Scots rebel. He would hang one day or the next and it could not come soon enough for Frixco de Fiennes, set the task of caring for him. Down below he heard shouts and bellows and scowled even more deeply — he was missing the best of the night’s feast.
Leckie heard the peculiar pink-pink sound, could not place it, cocked his head and strained. Silly wee sound, he thought. Like a wee moose dancin’ in clackety shoes. Or a faerie redcap, whetting his steel claws. He crept, following the noise past the brazier, away to the dark corner of the gatehouse battlements, where he caught the gleam of metal where none should be.
His heart skipped and he moved to it, saw the hooks and blinked, stunned, barely comprehending. A wee powrie’s steel-clawed fingers, right enough, he thought, hanging off my wall. He looked at the far side, to where Aggie crooned to her bairn, wanted to call out to her to get away, and then looked back at the steel talons, heard the pink-pink as they grated, shifting slightly from side to side.
Because something — someone — was climbing up the ladder they were attached to. The realization was a dash of ice down Leckie’s back. He should have made for the alarm iron. He should have bawled his lungs raw. Instead, he went forward and peered over the edge — and came face to face with a grey-haired man with an ugly grin.
‘Boo,’ said Sim, shot out a hand, grabbed Leckie by the front of his tunic and hauled him over and away before as much as a squeak had passed the man’s lips.
A little way below and climbing steadily, Jamie and the Dog Boy saw the blurring rush, heard the dull crunch. There was a muffled curse as the men waiting to climb dealt with the shock of a man cracking his brains and bones at their feet.
‘Christ betimes,’ Jamie hissed. ‘What was that?’
‘Sim at work,’ Dog Boy answered grimly and they climbed on.
Up on the battlements, Aggie had had enough of crooning and hoping. She turned to go, paused to wave farewell to Leckie, but saw only the vague shape in the far shadows, so she shrugged and turned away heading for the stairhead; the babe wailed a little as the rain hit his wee face.
‘Hush you, hush you,’ she sang, folding him into the safe warmth of a cloak corner. ‘The Black Douglas will no’ get ye the night, wee lamb.’
‘In truth, wee lamb,’ said a voice in her ear, even as a horned, calloused hand closed off her screams, ‘your ma is almost completely mistook in that regard.’
Frixco, following Hal to the top of the wind of stair that led to the hall, paused uncertainly. Screams had never been part of a Shrove feast before. Nor the clash of steel and shouts — perhaps a fight had broken out? Frixco was anxious not to miss it and turned to scowl and urge Hal on, saw the Prisoner’s face and whirled to look behind him.
Horror shrieked up the steps at him, one eye dangling from a bloody cord, his face a mass of gore and his mouth wide, every tooth outlined in red.
‘Back,’ his brother screamed. ‘Back. Up the stairs and bar the door. The Black is here …’
Frixco, stunned as a slaughter-ox, stood open-mouthed at the bloodied vision of his brother and the men spilling after him, turning fearfully to guard his back with drawn knives. William de Fiennes, his face a raw agony, half-blind and wholly afraid, slapped his brother’s gawp from him in a fury of panic.
Behind him, Hal saw Jamie Douglas, a flash as if scrawled against the dark by a bolt of lightning and as sure to him as if seven years had not passed at alclass="underline" wild black hair flying, a sword in one hand, a dirk in the other. And at his back, as strange as a two-headed calf, was another Jamie Douglas, standing fierce guard on a shivering girl with a swaddled wean in her arms.
It was only after, shoved and kicked into the chapel, with men piling up what little furniture there was against the door — all fourteen carved Stations included — that Hal realized that it had been Dog Boy he had seen.
Sim saw the men on the stairs, falling back with shields up to protect their lord; he was hurt bad was Sir William de Fiennes, for Sim had done it with a backlashed blow from a dirk and panted that out to Jamie Douglas as they crashed into the hall.
‘Poked oot his eye,’ he declared and Jamie nodded thoughtfully; both men agreed that such a wound might colour a man’s decision to resist.
They did not debate it long, for a sudden rush of new foes spilled on them and Sim crashed through a scatter of benches towards them, his breath harsh in his ears. There were men running away from him, to the back of the hall where there was no way out. On the table to his left, Red Rowan kicked through a slurry of sauce and meat and gruel, kicking trenchers like a boy jumping in puddles; he turned to grin at Sim and then seemed to be hauled backwards, though Sim knew fine well it was the force of the quarrel hitting him with a deep shunk of sound.
Sim leaped towards the man with the latchbow, who gave up feverishly attempting to span it, tried to swing it like a club, shrieking out his fear and anger. Sim’s sword blurred in the hazed candle-reek and cut into the man’s neck, so that his shouting was choked off in a gurgle; Sim kicked the body away with his boot, scooping up half a round of cheese on the way, so that it flew into the air.
‘Aaahh!’
Sim spun, blocking the snake-like blow with a frantic movement, though the stun of it almost lifted the sword out of his hand. The man who had rushed at him, yelling, was elderly, with a white beard and rheumy eyes; he jumped back and waved his weapon threateningly.
A fire iron, Sim saw. He is attacking me with a fire iron. A retired soldier, said the thought flickering through his mind as he chopped hard at the man’s knee. The man dodged; Sim felt his foot skid on a soggy trencher and then was on his arse, legs and arms flailing.
The old man screamed, wet-mouthed, and raised the fire iron high — but the point of a sword erupted out and upwards from his chest so hard and fierce that it went on into the underside of his jaw. He wailed, high and thin, falling away to reveal the grinning face of Jamie Douglas, staggering as the man’s weight dragged the sword down; he struggled to work his blade free.
‘Christ betimes, that was almost too good to waste: a brace of auld yins at it like Rolands. You will have little better entertainment at this feast.’
Sim’s mask of disgust was ignored and, grinning broadly, Jamie hauled him to his feet, put his boot against the old man’s dead neck, using the leverage to drag his sword free; the blood crept sluggishly out in a viscous tarn, lapping at the apples and plums, the buttered capons, the Shrove griddle cakes and bread spilled from the tables.