The Red Knight (41 page)

He clasped hands with the captain and grinned. ‘That was a little too exciting.’

Bad Tom came in after him, a head taller than either the captain or the archer, his iron grey hair curiously at odds with his pointed black beard. His forehead had a weight of bone that made his
head look like the prow of a ship, and no one would call him a handsome man. He looked scary, even in broad daylight, dressed in nothing but a shirt and an infirmary blanket. He clasped hands with
the captain and the archer, grinned at Ser Adrian, and settled every inch of his gigantic frame into one of the arched chairs.

‘Good plan,’ he said to the captain. ‘I had fun.’

Michael slipped in. No one had invited him, but his face suggested that no one had told him he couldn’t come, either.

‘Get us all a cup of wine,’ the captain said, which indicated that he was welcome enough.

When five horn cups were on five chair arms, and when Ser Adrian had his lead poised to write, Tom tasted his wine, leaned back and said, ‘We hit ’em hard. Not much to say –
worst part was getting there. The lads was fair skittish, and every shadow had a boglin or an irk in it, and I thought once I was going to have to cut Tippit in half to shut him the fuck up. So I
leaned over him—’

Long Paw grinned. ‘Leaned over him with that giant dagger in his fist!’

‘And Tippit pissed himself,’ Bad Tom said with evident satisfaction. ‘Call him Pishit from now on.’

‘Tom,’ Long Paw cautioned.

Tom shrugged. ‘If he can’t cut it he should go weave blankets or cut purses. He’s a piss poor archer and one day he’s going to get a man killed. Anyway, we rode most of
the way there, and we moved fast, ’cause you said—’ Bad Tom paused, obviously at a loss for the words.

‘Your only stealth will be speed.’
One of Hywel’s many aphorisms.

‘That’s what you said,’ Tom agreed. ‘So we didn’t sweat it too much, but went for them. If they had sentries, we never saw ’em, and then we were in among
their fires. I slit a lot of sleeping cattle,’ he said, with a horrible smile. ‘Stupid fucks, asleep with a killer among them.’

Remorse was not in Tom’s lexicon. The captain winced. The big man looked at Long Paw. ‘I got busy. You tell it.’

Long Paw raised an eyebrow. ‘All the archers had an alchemical on our backs. I threw mine in a fire – to start the ball, so to speak.’ He nodded. ‘They were
spectacular
. If that’s the word.’ Long Paw was obviously proud of it.

Tom nodded. ‘Made us plenty of light,’ he said, and the words, combined with his look, were horrible enough that Long Paw looked away from him.

‘We didn’t see no tents. But there was men sleeping on the ground, critters too. And beasts – horses, cattle, sheep. And wagons, dozens of them. They’ve been hitting the
fair convoys, or I’m a Galle.’

The captain nodded.

‘We burned it all, killed the animals, and then any critter we come across too.’

‘What critters? Boglins? Irks? Tell me.’ the captain asked, and the words just hung there, between them.

Tom made a face. ‘Little ones. Boglins and irks mostly. You know. Nightmares and daemons pursued us. Fucking daemons are fast. I fought a golden bear, sword to its axe and claws.’ He
blew his nose into his hand and flicked the contents out the window. ‘But I didn’t get to fight a daemon,’ he said regretfully.

The captain wondered if, in the entire world, there was another man who could regret not having met a creature that projected terror.

Bad Tom was not like other men.

‘How many? Total? What are we still up against?’ the captain asked.

Long Paw shrugged. ‘Dark and fire, Cap’n. My word ain’t worth shit – but I say we killed maybe fifty men and more creatures.’ He shrugged. ‘And all we really
did was kick the ant hill.’

Tom gave Long Paw a look of appreciation. ‘What he said,’ Tom admitted. ‘We kicked the ant hill. But we kicked it hard.’

Michael sputtered. ‘You two killed fifty
Jacks
?’ he asked.

Tom looked at him as if he’d discovered a bad smell. ‘We had help, younker. And it weren’t all
Jacks.
I killed I don’t know how many – five? Ten? –
before I realised they was all yoked together. Poor fucks.’

Michael made a choking sound. ‘Captives?’ he managed.

Tom shrugged. ‘Got to think so.’

Michael’s outrage showed, and the captain raised a hand. Pointed at the door. ‘More wine,’ he said. ‘And take your time.’

Long Paw shook his head as the young man slammed out. ‘Not for me, Captain. It’ll send me to sleep.’

‘I’m done, anyway,’ the captain said. ‘Better result than I thought. Thanks.’

Long Paw clasped his hand again. ‘One for the books, Cap’n.’

The clerk looked at his pencil scrawl. ‘I’ll just copy this out for fair,’ he said, exchanging a parting look with Long Paw and heading for the door himself.

His departure left the captain alone with Bad Tom, who stretched his naked legs out beneath his blanket and took a long drink of his wine.

‘That Michael’s too soft for this life,’ Tom said. ‘He tries, and he ain’t worthless, but you should let him go.’

‘He doesn’t have anywhere
to
go,’ the captain said.

Tom nodded. ‘I’d wondered.’ He took another sip and grinned. ‘That girl – the nun?’

The captain looked blank.

Tom wasn’t fooled for a moment. ‘Don’t give me that. Asking you why you curse God. Listen, you want my advice—’

‘I don’t,’ the captain said.

‘Get a knee between her legs and keep it there ’til you’re inside her. You want her – she wants you. I’m not saying rape her.’ Tom said this with a
professional authority that was more horrible than his admission of killing the captives. ‘I’m just saying that if you get it done, you can have a warm bed as long as you’re
here.’ He shrugged. ‘A warm bed and a soft shoulder. Good things for a man in command. None of the lads will blame you.’ His unspoken thought came through, too.
Some of the
lads might see you in a better light for it.

Tom nodded at the captain, and the captain felt a black rage boil up inside him. He worked on it – trying to shape it, trying to plug it. But it was like the brew they’d sent against
the enemy – oily black, and when it hit fire—

Bad Tom took a deep breath and stepped back. ‘Beg your pardon, Captain,’ he said. He said it with as much assurance as he’d suggested everything else. ‘Overstepped, I
expect.’

The captain swallowed bile. ‘Are my eyes glowing?’ he asked.

‘Little bit,’ Tom said. ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Captain?’

The captain leaned on the table, the burst of rage dying away and leaving fatigue and a headache of Archaic proportions. ‘Many things.’

‘You’re a freak, just like me. You ain’t like them. Me – I take what I want and let the rest go. You want them to love you.’ Tom shook his head. ‘They
don’t love the likes of us, Captain. Even when I kill their enemies, they don’t love me. Eh? You know what a sin-eater is?’

That came out of nowhere. ‘I’ve heard the name.’

‘We have ’em up in the hills,. Usually some poor wee bastard with one eye or no hands or some other freak. When a man dies, or sometimes a woman, we put a piece of bread soaked in
wine – they used to soak it in blood – on the corpse. Goes on the stomach and the heart. And the poor wee man comes and eats the bread, and takes all the dead’s sin on them. So
the dead un goes off to heaven, and the poor wee man goes to hell.’ Tom was far away, in memory. The captain had never seen him that way before. It was odd, and a little scary, to be intimate
with Bad Tom.

‘We’re sin-eaters, every one of us,’ Tom said. ‘You and me, sure – but Long Paw an’ Wilful Murder and Ser Hugo and Ser Milus and all the rest. Sauce too. Even
that boy. We eat their sin. We kill their enemies, and then they send us away.’

The captain had a flash of the daemon eviscerating his horse.
We eat their sin.
Somehow, the words hit him like a thunderclap, and he sat back. When he was done with the thought –
which cascaded away like a waterfall, taking his thoughts in every direction – he realised the shadows had changed. His wine was long gone, Bad Tom was gone, his legs were stiff, and his hand
hurt.

Michael was standing in the doorway with a cup of wine in his hand.

The captain dredged a smile out of his reverie, shrugged and took the wine.

He drank.

‘Jacques went down to Bridge Castle with grain and came back with a message for you from Messire Gelfred,’ Michael said. ‘He says it’s urgent he speak to you.’

‘Then I’ll have to put my harness on,’ the captain said. He sounded whiney, even to himself. ‘Let’s get it done.’

The Albinkirk Road – Ser Gawin

He had lost track of time.

He wasn’t sure what he was any more.

Gawin rode through another spring day, surrounded by carpets of wildflowers that flowed like morning fog beneath his horse, rolling away in clumps and hummocks, a thousand perfect flowers in
every glance, blue and purple, white and yellow. In the distance, all was a carpet of yellow green from the haze of sun on the mountainsides that were coming closer every day, their peaks woven
like a tapestry in and out of the stands of trees that grew thicker and closer every mile.

He’d never had the least interest in flowers before.

‘Ser knight?’ asked the boy with the crossbow.

He looked at the boy, and the boy flinched. Gawin sighed.

‘Ye weren’t moving,’ the boy said.

Gawin pressed his spurs to his horse’s side, and shifted his weight, and his destrier moved off. His once-handsome dark leather bridle was stained with the death of fifty thousand flowers,
because Archangel ate every flower he could reach as soon as he’d figured out that the once fierce hands on the reins weren’t likely to stop him eating. That’s what his misery
meant to his war horse – more flowers to eat.

I am a coward and a bad knight.
Gawin looked back at a life of malfeasance and tried to see where he’d gone wrong, and again and again he came back to a single moment –
torturing his older brother. The five of them ganging up on Gabriel. Beating him. The pleasure of it – his screams—

Is that where it started?
he asked himself.

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked again.

The horse’s head was down, and they’d stopped again.

‘Coming,’ Gawin muttered. Behind him, the convoy he was not guarding rolled north, and Gawin could see the Great Bend ahead, where the road turned to head west.

West towards the enemy. West, where his father’s castle waited full of his mother’s hate and his brother’s fear.

Why am I going west?

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked. This time, there was fear in his voice. ‘What’s that?’

Gawin shook himself out of his waking dream. The goldsmith’s boy – Adrian? Allan? Henry? – was backing away from a clump of trees just to his left.

‘There’s something there,’ the boy said.

Gawin sighed. The Wild was
not
here. His horse stood among wildflowers, and last year this field had been ploughed.

Then he saw the sickly-pale arm, light brown, shiny like a cockroach, holding a stone-tipped javelin. He saw it and it saw him in the same moment, and he leaned to the left with the habit of
hard training and ripped his long sword from its scabbard.

The boglin threw its weapon.

Gawin cut the shaft out of the air.

The boglin gave a thin scream of anger, balked of its prey, and the goldsmith’s boy shot it. His crossbow loosed with a snap and the bolt went home into the creature with a slurpy thud and
came straight out the other side in a spray of gore, leaving the small horror to flop bonelessly on the wildflowers for as long as a trout might take to die, making much the same gasping motions
with its toothless mouth, and then its eyes filmed over and it was gone.

‘They always have gold,’ the goldsmith’s boy said, taking a step towards it.

‘Step back, young master, and load that latch again.’ Gawin was shocked at his voice – calm, commanding. Alive.

The boy obeyed.

Gawin backed Archangel slowly, watching the nearest woods.

‘Run for the wagons, boy. Sound the alarm.’

There was more movement, more javelin heads, a flash of that hideous cockroach brown, and the boy turned and ran.

Gawin slammed his visor down.

He wasn’t in full armour. Most of it was in a goldsmith’s wagon, wrapped in tallow and coarse sacking in two wicker baskets because he had no squires to keep it. And because wearing
it might have meant something.

So he was wearing his stained jupon, his boots, his beautiful steel gauntlets and his bassinet, riding a horse worth more than three of the wagons full of fine wools he was protecting. He backed
Archangel faster, sawing the reins back and forth as his destrier all but trotted backwards.

The first javelin came out of the woods, high. He had his sword in his right hand, all the way down by his left side, the position his father’s master at arms had taught him. He could hear
the man saying ‘Cut up, mind! Not into your own horse, ye daft thing!’

He cut up, severing the weapon’s haft and breaking its flight.

Behind him, he heard the boy yelling ‘To arms! To arms!’

He risked a long glance back at the convoy. It was hard to focus through the piercing of his visor, hard to pick up distant movement, but he thought he could see Old Bob directing men in all
directions.

He turned back to see the air full of javelins, and he cut – up, down, up again as fast as thought. A javelin haft caught him in the side of head and rang his helmet like a bell, even with
his padded arming cap. He smelt his own blood.

Turned his horse’s head – because once they’d all thrown, he had a moment to get around, and get away.

Two of them were running for him. They were fast, moving like insects – so low to the ground that they were a danger to horses’ legs. Archangel reared, pivoted on his hind legs, and
a powerful forefoot shot out like a boxer’s punch.

Gawin flicked his sword out along his fingers, lengthening his grip until he was holding only the disc-shaped pommel and, in the same motion, made a wrist cut down and back.