Harry feels completely lost. Everything around him is this cavalcade of cruelty, and no matter what he does he can’t seem to stop it. He tries to act with chivalry and honour and it doesn’t matter a damn bit.
Ralf carries Iain up to his pallet. Harry turns to leave.
‘Where are you going?’ says Annie, picking up wet cloths stained pink with blood and tossing them into a bucket.
‘To the chapel,’ Harry says. ‘I need to pray. I need guidance.’
Annie puts her hands on her hips. ‘God can wait, or you can talk to Him from right here. You need to be with your friend.’
‘Iain’s not my friend,’ sighs Harry. ‘He’s made that abundantly clear.’
Annie looks up at the heavens beseechingly as she exhales in frustration. ‘He’s in tremendous pain, Harry, much as the little bastard’s too mean to show it. You’re the closest thing to a friend he has. Don’t leave him alone right now.’
Harry nods and goes up to the solar. Ralf is arranging Iain on the pallet, trying to make him comfortable. Iain’s eyes are wet with unshed tears and he’s shaking, slipping into shock from pain and exhaustion.
‘He should sleep in my bed,’ Harry says to Ralf. ‘It’s more comfortable.’
‘No, Harry,’ Ralf says. ‘This is not the time to confuse the boy with something new. We’ll stick with what he’s used to. But if we could put some of your pillows under his leg … ?’
Harry lurches to the bed and grabs as many pillows as he can carry, and he and Ralf tuck them under and around the splinted leg.
Harry goes to bed but sleep doesn’t come, just the nightmare sound of snapping bone echoing again and again in his memory as he combs over everything he could have done differently, every way that if he’d tried a little bit harder, they wouldn’t have arrived at this point.
Iain cries out in the night, whimpers of terror rising to a full scream of pain as he moves his leg. Harry catapults out of bed and fumbles for a candle. He crawls over to Iain’s pallet and touches the boy. ‘Are you well?’ he whispers.
He feels more than sees Iain shaking his head.
‘Here,’ he says, lying onto his side and moving backwards so his back touches Iain’s shoulder. ‘I’m here. I won’t let anything else bad happen to you, Iain. Not tonight.’
The night crawls by slowly for both of them. Harry’s brain is still stuck in a morass of self-blame and regret, and Iain still flinches in terror every hour or two. But he doesn’t scream again, and Harry finally drifts off into an exhausted sleep shortly before dawn.
They don’t talk about it in the morning, and they don’t repeat it the next night.
Iain is catatonic. He barely eats. He won’t speak. He doesn’t want to move from his pallet. Harry goes about his days in a kind of sleepwalk himself, off balance, his thoughts spiralling over how many of his retainers could be earning an extra penny from Rabbie, and how little Harry can do about it. It’s a secondary concern, though, compared to the dark-haired boy huddled in the corner.
Not a boy, Harry corrects himself. Not for long. Iain’s only two years younger than Harry. In March, he’ll be eighteen.
Harry is used to Iain’s silences, but before they’d always burned with quiet fury, or a fierce, calculating intelligence. Now, it’s as if something has died within Iain. He’s just … blank. Staring into space out the window, all day and night.
After four days of fasting, Iain at least begins to eat, mechanically, what Annie puts in front of him. But he still won’t speak.
Harry can’t stand this oppressive misery. Can’t stand to think that Iain’s ferocious spirit has finally been broken. He never wanted that. All he wanted was less stabbing, and no more running away.
So Harry starts filling the silences, each night.
He reads aloud from Sir Simon’s books. He asks if Iain wants to take a turn. He wilfully mispronounces some of the Latin, which before would have got at least a groan from the boy, and now provokes no reaction at all.
When that fails, Harry moves on to telling stories of his squireship in Wiltshire with Sir Simon de Attwood. He lies on his bed in the dark and talks of his life growing up in Dartington. Of his mother, who raised him, and ran the entire manor herself. The time he fell out of a tree. The time he learned to swim, by falling out of a boat. All the times he fell off horses. And he hopes maybe there’ll be a quiet, rough, sarcastic voice whispering back through the night, teasing him for falling off so many things.
But there’s just more silence.
Then it begins to rain. They have three nights of it, and the patter of the downpour on the thatch is better than silence. Downstairs at dinner they sing. Iain shows no reaction when Harry asks if he wants to be carried down for it, just as he shows no reaction to Annie changing his bandages.
Harry is babbling away to the ceiling on the third night, some idiotic story about his first tournament as Attwood’s squire that isn’t interesting at all, about how he’d cried behind a tent because he was homesick, because he missed his mother so much. He’s just saying words to fill the void Iain has left inside him, and—
Iain says something. It’s drowned in the rain.
Harry just about falls off the bed. ‘What did you say, Iain?’
‘Her name was Marguerite,’ Iain whispers, his voice raspy and faint.
‘Your mother?’ Harry says, scooting onto the floor and sitting near him.
Iain nods, tears rolling down his face, as ugly sobs emerge from his mouth. Harry realises it’s
