There was worse to come, at least for Hal, as the morning crept closer – the Auld Templar shifted out of the shadows like a wraith and, with a pause for a single deep breath, like a man ducking underwater, said:

‘I need to call on your aid.’

Hal felt the chill of it right there.

‘I am, as ever, fealtied to Roslin,’ he replied carefully and saw the old man’s head jerk at that. Aha – so I am right, he thought. He summons me as a liege lord.

‘Before my son came of age,’ the Auld Templar said slowly, ‘I was lord of Roslin. I taught the young Bruce how to fight.’

Hal said nothing, though that fact explained much about the Templar’s presence with the Earl of Carrick.

‘When my son was able, I handed him Roslin and gave my soul and arm to God,’ the Templar went on. ‘I have never regretted it – until now.’

He stared at Hal, pouch eyes flickered with torchlight.

‘I cannot be seen to fight for one side or the other,’ he went on. ‘But Roslin must jump.’

‘To the Bruce,’ Hal said bleakly and had back a nod.

‘The Sientcler Way,’ Hal added, hearing the desperation in his own voice. The Sientcler Way was always to have a branch of the family on either side of a conflict. That way, triumph or loss, the Sientclers always survived.

The Auld Templar shook his head.

‘This conflict is too large and the Sientclers are too thinned. This time, we must jump one way and pray to God.’

‘You wish me to serve the Bruce, in your stead,’ Hal declared flatly; the Templar nodded.

It was hardly a surprise. Roslin owed fealty to the Earl of March, Patrick of Dunbar – and so, therefore, did Herdmanston – but Earl Patrick was lockstepped with Longshanks and, with a son and grandson held by the English, the Auld Templar was inclined to those who opposed them.

‘My father,’ Hal began and the Auld Templar broke in.

‘Is at home,’ he said. ‘He sent word that the Earl of March refuses to help return my boys to me. Just punishment for rebellion, he says. The Earl of Carrick has promised help with ransoms.’

Well, there it was – sold for the price for two men from Roslin. Hal felt his mouth dry up. Herdmanston was put at risk and his father with it – yet he knew the Auld Templar had weighed that in the pan and still found the price acceptable.

‘Then we are bound – where?’ Hal asked, sealing it as surely as fisting a ring into wax. For a moment the Auld Templar looked broken and Hal realised the weight crushing those bony shoulders, wanted to offer some reassurance. The lie choked him – and the Auld Templar’s next words would have made mockery of it in any case.

‘Irvine,’ he said and forced a grin to split his snowy beard. ‘The Bruce is off to treat with rebels.’

Hal stared at the space where the Auld Templar had been long after the dark had swallowed the man – until Sim found him and, frowning, asked him why he was boring holes in the dark. Hal told him and Sim blew out his cheeks.

‘Rebels are we then?’ he declared and shrugged. ‘Bigod -that puts us at odds with the chiel who has also just asked for our aid. I would not mention it.’

The Earl of Buchan was in the undercroft, coldest hole in Douglas and the resting place of the mysterious body. In the soft, filtered light of early morning, you could see why the body had drained the blood from Bruce’s face when he’d had it torn from the mulch almost into his face.

Kirkpatrick, too, had looked stricken – but, then, no-one was chirruping songs to May at the sight of the half- eaten, rotted affair, undeniably human and undeniably a man of quality from the remains of his clothing and the rings still on his half-skeletal fingers.

Not robbed then, for a thief would have had his rings and searched under armpits and bollocks, the place sensible men kept most of their heavy coin. The dead man had a purse with some little coin in it still snugged up in a scrip with what looked to be spare braies, but no weapon. No-one, at first, wanted to go near the corpse save Kirkpatrick and, when he left it, he closeted himself with Bruce.

Grimacing with distaste, Buchan had assumed the mantle of responsibility for it and now beckoned Hal and Sim Craw to where the reeking remains lay on the slabbed floor. He spoke in slow, perfect English so that Sim Craw, whose French was poor, could understand.

‘White Tam has had a look but the most he can tell is that it is a year dead at least,’ Buchan had declared. ‘He says he is just a huntsman, but that yourself and Sim Craw are the very men for looking over bodies killed by violence. I am inclined to agree.’

Hal did not care for this unwelcomed skill handed to him by White Tam, nor did he want to be closeted with Buchan following the events of the hunt and the Auld Templar, but it appeared the earl was not put out at having his plans foiled by a wee lord from Lothian and a pair of splendid dogs. Hal had to admire the blithe dismissal of what would have been red murder if he had been allowed to succeed – but he did not want to be cheek by jowl with this man, who held a writ from the distant thunder that was King Edward to hunt out rebels in the north.

He thought to refuse the earl, using the excuse of not wanting to go near the festering remains, but he had seen Kirkpatrick’s face in the instant the effigy had been torn up by Bruce’s reins and in the long ride back. Now such a refusal was a blatant lie his curiosity undermined. Swallowing, driven by the desire of knowing, Hal had looked at Sim Craw, who had shrugged his padded shoulders in return.

‘A wise man wavers, a fool is fixed,’ he growled meaningfully, then sighed when he saw it made no difference, following Hal to the side of the thing, trying to breathe through his mouth to keep the stink out of his nose.

‘Christ be praised,’ Buchan said, putting a hand over his lower face.

‘For ever and ever,’ the other two intoned.

Then Sim poked his gauntleted hand in the ruin of it, peeled back something which could have been cloth or rotted flesh and pointed to a small mark on a patch of mottled blue-black.

‘Stabbed,’ he declared. ‘Upward. Thin-bladed dagger – look at the edges here. A wee fluted affair by the look. Straight to his heart and killit him dead.’

Hal and Sim looked at each other. It was an expert stroke from a particular weapon and only a man who killed with it regularly would keep a dagger like that about him. Wildly, Hal almost asked Buchan if he and Bruce had hunted in these woods before and had lost a henchman. He thought of the two deerhounds, slathered with balm and praises, and the dead alaun t, bitterly buried by the Berner.

‘So,’ Sim declared. ‘A particular slaying – what make ye of this, Hal? When the slayer was throwin’ him down, d’ye think?’

It was a cloth scrap, a few threads and patch no bigger than a fingernail, caught in the buckle of the dead man’s scrip baldric. It could have been from the man’s own cloak, or another part of his clothing for all the cloth was rotted and colour-drained, but Hal did not think so and said as much.

Sim thought and stroked the grizzle of his chin, disturbed a louse and chased it until he caught it in two fingers and flicked it casually away. He turned to Hal and Buchan, who was wishing he could leave the festering place but was determined, on his honour and duty as an earl of the realm, to stay as long as the others.

‘This is the way of it, I am thinking,’ Sim said. ‘A man yon poor soul knows comes to him, so getting near enough to strike. They are in the dark, ken, and neb to neb, which is secretive to me. Then the chiel with the dagger strikes…’

He mimicked the blow, then grabbed Hal by the front of his clothes and heaved him, as if throwing him over on to the ground. He was strong and Hal was taken by surprise, stumbled and was held up by Sim, who smiled triumphantly and nodded down to where the pair of them were locked, buckle to buckle, Sim’s leg between Hal’s two.

Hal staggered upright as Sim let go, then explained what had just happened to the bewildered Buchan, who had understood one in six words of Sim’s explanation in Lowland Lothian. Like wood popping in a fire, the earl thought.

‘Aye,’ Hal said at the end of it, ‘that would do it, right enough – well worked, Sim Craw.’

‘Which does not explain,’ Buchan said, ‘who this man is. He is no peasant with these clothes – Kirkpatrick said as much when he was here.’

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