‘We attack at midnight,’ Montagu says as they swallow down a supper of stale biscuit and hard cheese. ‘I need you to get as much rest as you can before then. Dress lightly. It will be close-quarters fighting.’
Harry is compelled to speak up. ‘What are we retrieving, my lord?’
Montagu smiles, that cruel hawk’s smile. ‘I’ll know when I see it,’ he replies. ‘You just make sure nobody gets through to me.’
Later, as they settle onto their cloaks in the forest floor to grab some sleep, Harry tugs at Rabbie’s sleeve. ‘Do you know?’ he says. ‘What we came here for?’
Rabbie smirks. ‘Not what. Who.’ Then he rolls over.
Harry stares up at the forest canopy, his mind restless. Montagu had been the man trusted to capture Lord Mortimer. Of course he’d be the one sent to capture a dangerous Scotsman. But who is it? What mighty lord wasn’t present at Halidon Hill, but could threaten English supremacy? He realises then how little he knows of the Scottish. Devon, so far southwest, barely concerns itself with activities north of the Avon, much less the Tweed. He’s only heard a handful of names: William Wallace; Robert the Bruce and his brother; Black Douglas. Is this man a relative of theirs?
Harry is seized with the realisation that this is it. He’s not an outsider any more. He is with the right people, at the right time, about to do something important.
‘Was it like this? At Nottingham Castle?’ Harry asks Rabbie, soft in the night so as not to wake the others. ‘When you took Mortimer?’
Rabbie mumbles sleepily, ‘Mmhmm. Just follow Montagu. He knows what he’s doing.’ Then Rabbie kicks him. ‘Go to bed, Harry. Work to do later.’
Finally, Harry thinks as sleep overtakes him, finally he’s going to be where the action is.
The action is horrible.
They slip on their chainmail hauberks and chausses in silence, then follow their guides over the crest of the hill down to the edge of a vast lake. Three boats wait for them at the shoreline. They cast off under the moon’s pale, reproachful gaze. The lake and the steep hills it nestles among are bathed in silver, silent and surreal. As they round a small headland, no sound but the clank and splish of oars, Harry startles. For, suddenly revealed, is their target: a small stone castle on an island, its foundations wrapped with evening mist like something out of legend. As if soon the boats would spirit them through some invisible barrier, into the land of the fae, to a hand coming out of the water with a sword.
Harry realises he is holding his breath as the boats’ prows scuff onto the pebbled shore of the island, fearful of breaking the spell. The landscape is alien, savage, and more beautiful than his heart can hold.
Then they kick down the rotting door of the castle and slay every living thing inside.
They didn’t need a dozen knights. Three could have done it. Harry stands agape, watching as Rabbie wields a torch in one hand and his mace in the other. Watches as he brains an old serving-woman who is trying to escape the massacre of half-asleep retainers in the hall. ‘You know our targets. No witnesses, no survivors,’ Montagu hisses as they rush up the bank, weapons drawn. Except Harry doesn’t know. Nobody has told him.
In the flickering light of their torches and the glow of the hearth’s embers, Harry has only impressions of the chaos in the hall, of women, their bodies thin and their clothes threadbare. A few very elderly men, their bones breaking like twigs under the boots and blades of the English.
Billy Shayler’s long sword cleaves straight through an old man’s spindly forearm, raised high against the blow, straight down to the skull beneath. Thomas Howland smashes his shield into the back of a thin redhead as she tries to flee past. She falls onto her face, cracking her head on the stone floor. Sir Thomas kicks her onto her back and sinks his sword into her heart.
And above it all, Lord Waldegrave is giggling.
Where are the men? Harry thinks, panicking. Where are their men? Nobody is armed. This isn’t fair.
He realises the men must be away at war, as are the men of his own hall, and his stomach twists as he thinks of knights kicking down Dartington Manor’s old door at night, wetting their swords with the blood of his dependants.
A beautiful woman of his mother’s age stumbles down the stairs, her fine dress a faded turquoise velvet, the neckline marked and frayed where once-heavy ornamentation had been removed. She screams at them. Her black hair is shot with white and then, inevitably, red. Montagu swears at the knight that kills the woman – Colin Crocker, Harry thinks it’s Crocker – back-handing him across the face.
Harry stands and holds his sword in trembling hands and prays they don’t notice he hasn’t killed anyone yet. The cries of the dying, their terror and the piss and shit that flows out of them, the stink of their intestines, it crashes against the hard stone walls of the castle’s hall and over Harry like a suffocating blanket of evil.
Montagu is glaring around, looking for something, when Rabbie screams. There’s a boy, and he’s jumped on Rabbie’s back and he’s got his teeth locked on Rabbie’s ear as he tries to shove a dull eating knife through Rabbie’s mail coat. Montagu grabs the boy and pulls him off, and half Rabbie’s right ear comes too and the boy spits it into Montagu’s face and nobody knows what to do and Montagu is yelling ‘Stay back! Stay back!’ and the boy is thin and small and maybe sixteen years old but he is fighting like a hellcat, screaming at them in Gaelic and trying to rip Montagu’s throat out with his bare hands and Montagu is punching him in the side of the head with
