Harry’s mouth splits into an emotionless grin. ‘See, you overstepped there. I know you’re lying now. Because, because you don’t know him. You just think you do.’
‘And how often do you lie, Harry? To your priest? To the boy? To the de Morton girl, who thinks she has your love? What a pretty web of deceit you are spinning,’ Montagu smiles. His tone drops, growing serious. ‘Here’s the thing, Harry. I don’t lie. There’s no point in it. I just present the truth from the right angle. And now I’ll give it to you: to ally yourself with that boy is to put yourself on the wrong side of history. There is no power in Europe that can save him from his fate, and when he goes down, everyone he touches will go down with him. Think on that, Sir Harry, and good night.’
Montagu salutes him, and strides off into the darkness.
Harry trudges back to the tourney fields in devastated silence. Iain is already asleep, sprawled on his back over half of the pallet. Harry looks at him and thinks of the energy he has left, and what fights he must conserve it for. And he snuggles into Iain, his head on the man’s shoulder, his arm across Iain’s chest.
Iain mumbles sleepily and opens an eye.
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ Harry snuffles, pulling him closer.
Iain opens his other eye and tips Harry’s chin up with his fingers, examining his puffy, red eyes, the tracks of dried tears. ‘Mm,’ he says. ‘But you have to sleep on your back, or you’ll open that wound up again.’
‘As you wish,’ Harry says, as Iain’s arms come around him.
Harry meets Alys and her chaperone after breakfast the next morning, all of them mounted up on their palfreys. Alys is on a chestnut horse, while her chaperone, an elegant dark-skinned girl in a yellow dress, follows on a fine black mare.
‘This is the Lady Fatima,’ Alys says. ‘Her father is an Egyptian nobleman who is very interested in selling his cotton to the English, and Lord Arundel is keen to help. So he sent his youngest daughter to build ties with us barbarians.’
‘And how do you find us?’ Harry asks.
‘It’s too wet, too cold, you don’t bathe enough and your food is horribly bland,’ the woman smiles. ‘Yet I consider myself lucky. My older sister went to Moscow.’
‘The poor thing, I still think we should mount a rescue,’ Alys says. Then she winks at Harry. ‘Come along, I’ve picked out the perfect route.’
They ride in silence along winding, elm-lined cinder trails away from the tourney grounds and into swathes of flat farmland separated by the occasional copse of oak and ash. Fatima lags close enough behind to keep an eye on them, but far enough that she is plausibly out of earshot.
‘So,’ Alys says eventually, ‘I hear you have a sudden interest in international affairs. What’s brought that on?’
Harry rubs the rough leather of Libby’s reins with his thumbs. ‘I made rather an enemy of Rabbie Ufford this week. It made me realise that I can’t win, the way I’m going about this.’ He looks over at Alys, suddenly nervous. ‘Give me a broadsword and I have all the confidence in the world. But this sort of fighting … spies and influence and secrets … I’m at sea, Alys. Completely at sea.’ He shuts his eyes. ‘Rabbie wanted me to throw the tournament.’
‘But you didn’t,’ Alys says.
‘We didn’t,’ Harry corrects.
Alys arches one of her immaculate dark eyebrows. ‘We.’
Harry exhales. ‘I was … more injured than anyone knew when I fell during the joust. Crocker used a tipped lance, covered in plaster and painted to look legal. My squire … took matters into his own hands. That wasn’t me, in the final tilts. It was him.’
‘Hm,’ Alys says, her lips turning down in mild surprise. ‘He’s … an impressive specimen.’
‘He is,’ Harry says, a small, private smile threatening to overtake his carefully schooled expression. ‘I’m afraid for him.’
Alys snorts. ‘Rabbie Ufford is so stupid, you don’t need to defeat him, Harry. You just need to wait patiently for him to defeat himself.’
‘If Rabbie were our only problem, we would indeed be fortunate,’ Harry whispers.
‘I think we should ride this way,’ Alys says, turning down a side trail that winds, serpentine, to the top of a low ridge overlooking a lovely, small castle.
Harry follows. And as he watches Alys sway gently with the motion of her horse, he knows that his epiphany last night remains true in the harsh light of day. It wasn’t, as some tiny shred of him had hoped, a product of drink and exhaustion and fevered late-night desperation.
He adores Alys. She’s beautiful. She dresses immaculately. She’s witty, she rides as bold as a man, she’s smart, and she’s both confident and modest. She is everything he should want physically.
And yet … he does not.
If he takes his fantasy by the birch tree and tries to imagine it with Alys, it’s wrong somehow. There’s nothing but wet ash inside him, whereas with Iain, there is a wildfire.
He still wants to laugh with Alys at dinner, and climb trees with her, and dance, and watch her raise children, and she can take care of all the damn politics and he can manage the estate and fight …
… and love Iain.
‘Ready for your first lesson?’ Alys asks, shaking him out of his reverie as they approach a copse at the top of the ridge.
‘Of course, but I warn you, I’m a bad student,’ Harry says.
‘Oh, this one is easy,’ Alys replies, sphinx-like. ‘You already know all the answers.’ Then she stops her horse and points down at the tidy little castle below them. ‘Do you see the woman there, by
