BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Bad Girls
Twisted Romance
Mayday
No Mercy
Semiautomagic
Grindhouse
Smoke/Ashes
Contents
By the Same Author
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Three
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Four
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Supporters
Copyright
One
July 1333: Battles Without Honour and Humanity
H arry slows his horse as he reaches the marshalling field. He has pushed the little bay palfrey to her utmost, riding hard for a fortnight across the long spine of England to catch up with the King’s forces. And now, at the edge of Edward’s camp at Berwick, he finds he has missed the battle against the Scots by a single day. The only question that remains is whether he’s missed the war.
It’s a victory, at least. Harry can tell by the way cheerful men-at-arms lurch through camp well into their cups even though the sun has barely reached its midday apex. A tipsy longbowman, flushed red from the July heat, points out the knights’ field to Harry and passes him a flask of something that smells like it could raise the dead.
Harry refuses. He doesn’t feel like drinking. He’s furious: at fate, at the summer crowds on the Great North Road, at having missed out on a chance to prove himself, again. And, much as he knows it’s a craven and terrible thing to feel, he’s angry at his mother for having died then. It was her illness that made Harry miss the marshalling of troops in Scotland. Instead of leaving with Sir Simon like a proper squire, he’d had to run home to Devon to attend to her last days. He knows it wasn’t his mother’s final act of protest against Harry following in his father’s footsteps – training for knighthood, fighting the Scots – but it feels like it.
Harry knees Star, his palfrey, towards the bright pavilions of the knights’ campground. He scans the sea of fluttering pennants, looking for a faded, frayed red flag with a white lion rampant, the Attwood coat of arms. Sir Simon will no doubt fill him in on what happened at Halidon Hill, and how he missed Edward of Windsor’s first great victory against the Scots.
As Harry navigates his horse through the muddy field, past the canvas palaces of noblemen towards the smaller, shabbier tents of country knights at the far edge of the field, he lets his frustrations boil within him. He grew up listening to the stories of King Arthur, Gawain and the other great knights of history, while the real England writhed through a long winter of treason and infighting with Edward of Carnarvon, his French queen Isabella and her lover, Lord Mortimer. Now, finally, the country is reaching a sort of springtime, under the hand of the young Edward of Windsor, and Harry is nineteen years old, the perfect age for a squire to prove himself in battle.
Except, the battle was yesterday.
Perhaps there will be more fights against the Scots, but even to Harry’s young eye, this doesn’t look like an army that is getting ready to march anywhere but home to harvest.
Perhaps there will be war with France, in a few years. Its four-hundred-year-old Capet dynasty is fighting for life after Philip the Fair’s three sons, sibling kings, have each died without a male heir. The French barons are discontented and mutinous, unhappy with the country cousin of Valois who has been placed on the throne. The other choice is Edward of Windsor himself, for his mother Isabella is a Capet princess, sister to kings. This has fired up a feeling in England of pride and hope, of daring glances across the Channel and a thought of one day. England has Gascony, sure, but once it had so much more. Once, and maybe again.
But first, King Edward has committed to restoring Balliol and the disinherited lords of Scotland to their rightful homes. On his long journey to Berwick, Harry had such daydreams about the feats of arms he would perform at Sir Simon’s side: saving Baron Montagu’s life. Saving the King’s life. Capturing Archibald Douglas, the Guardian of Scotland. Enough for a squire to dazzle a baron, or a king. Enough to earn his knight’s belt.
Harry reins up at Sir Simon’s tent, at the most unfashionable edge of the field, and calls out for him as he slides off his palfrey.
There’s no answer.
He looks around. One of Sir Simon’s men-at-arms, Edgar, hustles over from where he’s playing dice with a small group in front of another tent. Harry notices that Edgar looks shocked, but then Edgar isn’t the brightest and always looks a bit stunned, so he doesn’t think anything of it.
Until Edgar opens his mouth.
‘D’ye not know, Master Harry?’ Edgar says in English.
Harry swallows, his throat dry with road dust. No discussion ever ends well when it begins like that.
Edgar wipes his broad, spade-like hands down over his bony cheeks, pulling at the flesh there. ‘They got ’im, they did. I’m … I’m sorry, lad.’ He shifts his weight from foot to foot, as he stutters out the story: Simon de Attwood has been slain on Halidon Hill. His old coat of mail was no match for a Scottish spear.
Harry nods his thanks at Edgar, ties up Star and, under the guise of loosening her girth, leans his forehead against her saddle. He loses time, leaning against the good little bay mare and listening to passing tales of valour, in noblemen’s French, in commoners’ English. If the camp chatter is to be believed, yesterday’s battle was a massacre. A good third of the Scots’ men-at-arms slain by the English longbowmen arrayed by Henry of Beaumont. Douglas is dead, along with a dozen other Scottish lords. English casualties were light, and Harry knows he shouldn’t resent a drop of English blood against the tide of Scottish crimson spilt, but why Sir Simon? He hadn’t even wanted to fight.
A terrible, crushing sense of culpability settles over Harry’s shoulders. It’s his fault.
