‘It is you!’ the squire booms out, striding forwards to clap Harry on the back. ‘Harry! You missed out on all the fun.’ Rabbie is a little shorter than Harry, with close-cropped dark curly hair, narrow, deep-set brown eyes and heavy cheekbones. He had always been an angular child, and as Rabbie grew up his sharp features hadn’t filled out so much as they’d hardened.
Harry gives Rabbie a thin smile. He doesn’t have much to say. ‘You made it through without issue?’ he manages at last.
Rabbie grins. ‘Made it through? I cut down five of those bastard Scots. C’mon,’ he says, slinging his arm across Harry’s shoulders, ‘there’s dinner in the hall. I’ll tell you all about it.’ Harry fidgets, petty and diminished. Rabbie has a way of making him feel like a child, though Harry is only two years younger, nineteen to Rabbie’s twenty-one.
Harry tags along silently as Rabbie brags about the battle on Halidon Hill, how the Scots turned tail under English arrows, how English knights cut the fleeing rebels down and sent them to Hell. He swallows down the bile that rises in his throat. This isn’t valour. It doesn’t sound like his daydreams, stabbing retreating knights in the back, even if they were Scottish. He can’t bring himself to say that to Rabbie who, like him, has a father to avenge. He knows little of Bannockburn; maybe the Scots hadn’t fought fair there. Maybe that’s why they’d won.
He picks up the thread of Rabbie’s story again, something about how the Scots are more like animals than people with their strange, grunting language, bare feet and long hair, and is about to comment when he realises where they’re going.
It’s a huge canvas tent; lords in bright, expensive clothes mill about its entrance. Above it flies the red-and-gold three lions pennant of England. Harry is in his drab travelling clothes, unwashed and dirty from the road, and Rabbie is taking him to eat in the King’s hall.
Harry freezes. He is going to see the King. For the first time.
Rabbie looks up at him, concern softening the usually harsh line of his mouth. ‘C’mon, Harry. You look like you’re about to fall over. Come and get some food.’
And Harry doesn’t want this, doesn’t want Rabbie’s pity, doesn’t want to be the poor country cousin constantly in need of everyone’s charity. He would wrench away but his stomach chooses that moment to let out a loud gurgle. So he allows himself to be towed into the hall and sat down on a bench with Baron Montagu’s cheerful, rambunctious crew, all casually loud in the way of people used to being looked at, to being admired.
Harry doesn’t see the King. For that he’s thankful. He tears into the chicken, and bread and cheese, and the small beer, and mutters polite if terse responses to the condolences he gets from Montagu’s crew.
He doesn’t see the King until there’s a hand on his shoulder.
And he looks up and it’s him, tall and blond and in rich scarlet, with a gold circlet in his hair. King Edward is young, Rabbie’s age, and slim, but the corners of his blue-grey eyes already crinkle with lines, from laughter or worry, Harry cannot guess. He has a small scar on the side of his chin, visible through the reddish hairs of his beard. While Harry knows that kings are human and of course they scar too, the small defect still surprises him. Harry realises he is staring. He stutters and blushes and mentally tries to work out the mechanics of extracting his too-large frame from the bench and bending to one knee.
The King smiles at him and pats his shoulder. ‘Harry Lyon? Sir Simon’s squire?’ The other men around the table nod at the King, easy and familiar in his presence. ‘We wanted to pass on our sympathies for your loss, for both your losses—’
God’s teeth, Harry thinks, now even the King pities him.
‘—and to ask you to come forwards to the front of the hall, with Rabbie.’
Harry blinks. What?
Then he notices Rabbie is already up front, in the no-man’s-land near the King’s own table, on one knee. Harry gulps, and nods, stumbling as he rises from the bench.
The King waits for him, like an indulgent older brother, and looks him up and down as he stands. Harry realises he’s as tall as the King, maybe even a little taller, so he hunches his big shoulders slightly. The King notices and laughs, a ringing, beautiful sound. He shakes his head as he turns. ‘You are the West Country personified, aren’t you? We’ve seen haystacks smaller than you. Good thing you have to kneel for what’s coming.’
It’s only then that Harry understands what the King is doing. Harry’s skin prickles with nerves as he takes his place next to Rabbie. He glances over, eyes wide and questioning, but the other boy won’t meet his gaze. Rabbie looks forwards, solemn, as the King draws a sword and taps Rabbie three times on the shoulders. ‘For your valour on Halidon Hill. Rise, Sir Robert Ufford.’ And then the sword is touching Harry’s shoulders, and Harry’s heart is beating so fast he can’t breathe, and through the ringing in his ears Harry can barely make out the King saying ‘Rise, Sir Harry Lyon’, and it’s the moment Harry has been looking forward to since he first picked up a practice sword, the moment he was sure he would remember for the rest of his life, but even as it’s happening it’s running out between his fingers like water.
And then he’s left standing there, next to Rabbie, as the King sheaths his sword and turns back to Queen Philippa. The moment is over. Rabbie claps him on the shoulder again, and Harry is dimly aware that the assembled knights are cheering and thumping their tables as they walk back
