towards them, stopped uncertainly, then knelt by the fallen Badenoch, unable to do much than flap a free hand while watching Hal and Dog Boy slither backwards out of the chapel.
Whatever happened now, Hal thought wildly, red war has returned to the Kingdom.
An hour later
The smoke was pall-black, thick as egret feathers and the English justiciars sat under it, miserable with surrender; Sir Richard Giraud wisely flung open the doors of the castle and Bruce men spilled into it, led by Edward, his great slab of a face grim as black rock. The English hovered uncertainly, fearful of what might be done to them and not even sure what had happened.
They were not alone in their confusion. In the hall of the fortress, the brothers Bruce and a few chosen straightened up overturned benches and sat, the Bruce himself a silent, floor-staring effigy.
‘Has he spoke?’ Edward demanded suddenly, rounding on Kirkpatrick, who pointed to the head-hung Bruce and didn’t have to say anything more. Edward tore off his maille coif and scrubbed his head with frustration; he had learned that there had been a ‘tulzie’, that Badenoch and his uncle were down, probably dead and the perpetrator of it sat shivering and muttering about the ‘curse of Malachy’.
Edward fought his own rising panic about that Bruce plague. He had sent riders to inform their supporters to gather their forces and had managed to take Dumfries from the quailing English by bluster and threat of burning. The Comyn, though, were still around and no doubt sending out for their own forces — the whole affair was as messy as dog vomit and his brother, the head of the family, was a gibbering uselessness.
‘Innocent blood.’
The voice turned him round, into the anxious, raised face. Edward looked at his brother and thought he looked as he had when he was six and in trouble; it was not a look he cared to find on the Earl of Carrick and Annandale, the man who would be king.
‘What happened, brother?’ he demanded, for the umpteenth time. He had heard from Hal and Seton and the dark youth they called Dog Boy, but had not learned much about what his brother had actually done to Red John Comyn. Stabbed him, he had heard — but there was a pinking poke and there was a paunch-ripping thrust and Edward did not know which his brother had done.
Bruce’s grip was sudden on Edward’s wrist, a talon that pulled him close, into the anguish.
‘God forgive me, Edward, for I have sinned. In a house of God, no less — the curse of Malachy…’
‘In the name of Christ,’ Edward thundered, snatching his hand back so vehemently that his brother was almost jerked from the bench, ‘what did ye do to him?’
‘No doubt I have killed him.’
The answer was low and hoarse and filled with pain and fear. Hal almost went to the man to lay the comfort of a hand on his shoulder, but that was a step too far and he hovered on the brink of it.
‘Ye doubt ye have killed him?’
The question was sharp and harsh, bringing all heads round to where Kirkpatrick, eyes feral and narrowed as a hunting cat, looked from the stricken Bruce to the brothers, one by one.
‘By God, no,’ Alexander said suddenly, seeing the way of it, while Niall and Thomas blinked and shuffled uncertainly. Without Robert, Hal realized suddenly, they are lost.
‘You have a good heart, brother,’ Edward said to Alexander, his French thick and hoarse, ‘but one unacquainted with such work as this. Use your vaunted head, all the same — you are clever enough to see how this must be played out.’
There was silence for a heartbeat while this sank in; the timing was rotten as wormed oak, but the sense of it was clear — there was no going back from an attack on the Lord of Badenoch. The Bruce faction was now at war with both Comyn and English and, if they were to have a chance of winning, the head of it must be declared king of Scots. The eyes turned to the figure on the bench, still shaking and now gnawing his nails.
‘No point to any of it,’ Kirkpatrick growled, ‘if Red John still lives.’
The truth of it hung over them, heavy as the smoke pall outside.
‘Red John was the impediment to matters,’ Kirkpatrick went on and would have said more, but Edward interrupted him.
‘See to it,’ he ordered. ‘Then we must be away from here…’
‘God in Heaven,’ whispered Bruce. ‘The curse of Malachy…’
Edward rounded savagely on him, almost unmanned himself by the summoning of that old Bruce plague.
‘Enough, brother — get yer wit back. What’s done is done and the path we ride now needs clear heads.’
‘Will ye come?’
Hal stared at the grim-eyed Kirkpatrick, knowing with sickening surety what was intended and that Kirkpatrick could not carry it out on his own.
‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick added. Hal nodded.
They came out into the twilight streets, where the stone houses of the rich were the colour of old blood and the shutters barred. No-one walked abroad save themselves, prowling like a pack of wolves, all ruffed and snarling; Ill-Made and Mouse and Sore Davey followed Dog Boy and Kirkpatrick and Hal, turning this way and that, flexing anxious knuckles on drawn weapons, for there was little need of propriety now.
Somewhere lurked the Comyn and their supporters, who had been surprised and scattered, though it would not be long before they recovered themselves — at which point, it would be best to be elsewhere, Hal thought.
James Lyndsay of Donrod agreed, wiping his dry mouth with the back of one hand and shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He had been set to watch the front of Greyfriars with a parcel of his own men, equally hackled.
‘Aye, he is in there yet,’ he answered when Kirkpatrick asked about Red John. ‘They have brought nobody out, though many have gone in — monks and the like, with clean linen and scurrying like squirrels. I have set men at the back and have had no word back o’ any leaving by there.’
‘So some of them live yet,’ Sore Davey muttered, picking a scab.
‘Not Sir Robert,’ Hal replied, remembering the half-severed head of Red John’s uncle, lolling in a spreading pool of thick blood.
‘So,’ Kirkpatrick said grimly. ‘Red John it is who is alive yet.’
‘Are ye for going after him, then, Kirkpatrick?’ Lyndsay demanded and then eyed the chapel uncertainly. ‘There are a wheen of men inside.’
‘Then bring yerself an’ yer mesnie,’ Kirkpatrick declared, then looked round them all, his eyes lingering longest on Hal.
‘Be set on it,’ he warned hoarsely. ‘There is one matter only here and that is the death of Red John. Everything else is thrall to it.’
He raked them all with one last glance, while the shadows dipped; somewhere a lonely dog barked, then howled.
‘Are ye set?’
Not nearly, Hal thought to himself. Not nearly at all for dire murder in a chapel. But he nodded into the chorus of grim grunts of assent.
They hit the chapel door at a rush and stumbled in, falling over each other in a fury of desperate fear, fired to roaring anger at what they were having to do. A priest squealed and dropped a ewer of bloody water; a man with sword up and shield ready was swamped and bundled backwards by Ill-Made and Mouse, while Sore Davey cut the legs from underneath him.
There was a confused whirl of echoing screams and bell-clanging metal, which Hal plunged into blindly, Kirkpatrick at his heels. A figure loomed up, all leather jerkin and unfocused eyes — but the blade in his fist was sharper than his sight, so that Hal ducked, half-turned and scythed; there was a piercing shriek, almost high enough for only hounds to hear.
Kirkpatrick knelt by the prone figure, swathed in bloody linen, the budded mouth slack and the face pale as milk, so that even the neat little beard seemed to have faded to wheat-straw. He was aware of Hal above him, bull-breathing and dripping pats of slow blood from his blade; someone was screaming.
Hal stared in appalled disbelief at the foot he had severed, still in the raggles of a boot, which leaked blood in front of him. Strange, Hal thought with that detached madness that came on in the middle of carnage, to be lying there looking at your own foot where it should not be.
