Sir Roderick gestures inside the keep, where Harry sees a flurry of movement on the second floor. ‘He went after a woman,’ the reedy East Anglian knight says.
‘Shit,’ Harry says under his breath. Then he yells, ‘Billy! Get out here now, or we’re leaving you!’
A nervous minute or two passes. Something’s wrong. Harry can feel it in his guts. ‘That’s it,’ he says, hauling Nomad around. ‘We’re leaving. Now.’
‘No,’ says Sir Roderick, preparing to dismount. ‘We have to get Billy—’
The rest of his sentence is cut off by a high, piercing whistle from the keep. There’s the clatter of doors being opened in the vassal houses dotted around it, hovels they’d ignored as too poor to be worth plundering. And the long hiss of swords leaving scabbards.
‘Billy’s dead,’ growls Harry, and sets his heels into Nomad.
He rides out of the keep at a gallop, not even checking to see who follows. They follow or they die. It’s that simple. The boy, Sir Nicholas, is on his left quarter, barely in control of his steed. Horse and boy have wide, terrified whale eyes. The other young knights are behind, and Sir Roderick – wrong-footed when Harry took off – brings up the rear.
Harry allows himself a moment to get his own heart under control when they pass a copse, and a shadow detaches itself from the darker shadows of the oaks to ride down and intercept them. ‘Keep riding straight back to our lines,’ hisses Harry, slowing Nomad so the boys gallop past him. ‘Don’t try to fight him. You’re not good enough.’
‘How would you know, Lyon?’ asks Sir Roderick, loosening his sword in its scabbard.
Because I think I taught him, Harry says to himself.
The Black Knight’s horse is fast, and much fresher than their own mounts, who have been under saddle all day. He pulls ahead of them, galloping along the edge of a wheat field, then angles his horse over the low earthen bank to the road, turning to charge them as soon as the destrier’s hooves hit its hard-packed dirt. He does not slow. Sword out, shield up, he gallops straight at them.
Harry prays the young knights scatter, and they do. One tries to get his sword up, get in a blow at the infamous Chevalier de la Mort, and receives a savage cut on his forearm for his trouble. The boy drops his own sword and howls, gibbering at the white flash of bone amidst the blood pouring from his arm.
And then the Black Knight is upon them. He barges Harry aside, sword high, their shields cracking against each other, and then he swings low, leaning out of his saddle and flicking his blade under Sir Roderick’s shield. Harry gasps as he sees the strike, a nasty cross-body thrust that has all the power of the knight’s shoulders and torso in it. The blade’s point slips through the mail as if it were butter, burying itself about six inches in Sir Roderick’s stomach. It doesn’t seem like much, but then a man is barely ten inches deep.
The knight pulls his sword out as he gallops past, the suction of the blade worsening the cut and forcing Sir Roderick to twist around. The knight flicks the blood off the point of his sword and sheaths it, galloping back towards the keep. He doesn’t look back. Harry knows, because he watches him until he’s out of sight.
Sir Roderick takes three days to die in screaming agony, the gut wound infecting his entire body.
And thus is the Galloway Dozen reduced to a quartet.
The morning after they return, Harry wakes with an erection. He can’t remember the last time he’d woken up with the normal morning arousal, and he looks down in confusion at his body and its traitorous moods.
He touches himself, of course. His mind fills with old images of Iain, fading now, blurry and indistinct. But as he writhes and arches off his pallet, he also sees the Black Knight, imagines the man riding him down in the woods where Harry first saw him, pulling him off his horse and taking him right there on the forest floor, not removing a single piece of his black armour, a gauntleted hand on the back of his neck and another hooked round the flesh of his hip under his hauberk, the heavy weight of a muscled, armoured body thrusting into him.
He comes so hard he almost passes out.
From then on he’s hard every morning, like he used to be. It’s as if his libido has just strolled back into his life after a long holiday and taken up residence again. As if nothing had changed in all the intervening years.
Harry takes to riding out alone again. He dawdles in copses and behind hedgerows, looking for shadows within shadows. He never finds them. It’s after one such trip in mid October, a couple of weeks into the English army’s residence in France, that Sir Hugh finds him at his campfire. The older knight carries a jug of something strong, bought or stolen from a nearby French village. Harry doesn’t bother to ask which.
Sir Hugh sits down and passes him the jug. Harry uncorks it and takes a long swig. Whatever it is burns like a stripe of fire down his throat, and leaves an aftertaste of apples.
They sit in silence for a while, watching the sputter of green wood burn in Harry’s fire. Watching the sun set. ‘You’re cracking up,’ Sir Hugh says at last. ‘You should go home.’
‘I’m fine,’ Harry says, passing the jug back.
Harry can see the flash of white in Sir Hugh’s eyes as the older knight glares at him. Sir
