Harry giggles, a little hysterical.
He tilts the skin so water begins to trickle out. The boy slowly, so slowly, puts his head under the trickle of water, tilting his gagged mouth so the stream goes into it. He drinks almost the whole skin. A lot goes down his face but enough makes it into his mouth that Harry feels like the boy may not die of dehydration. He realises how dirty the boy is when the rivulets of water leave clean marks down his face.
When the skin is empty the boy backs away again. There’s no acknowledgement, no thanks, and at first Harry is put out by that. Until he remembers how he and his friends have just killed everyone the boy ever cared about.
So he holds up the bucket and offers to sluice down the cage floor. The boy glares at him, then nods once. He wriggles until he’s sitting down on the floor, still out of Harry’s reach, but close enough that the water will rinse his lower half too. Harry heaves the bucket of water through the bars; the cold stream-water splashes against the metal floor of the cage. The boy hisses as it washes over his thighs.
‘What are you doing?’ growls Rabbie, from behind Harry.
Harry turns away from the cage, leaving the canvas flap up for air circulation and hoping Rabbie doesn’t notice. ‘He stinks,’ he says, arranging his face into a look of disgust as he switches to English. ‘Don’t fancy riding behind a reeking cart full of piss and shit again tomorrow.’
Rabbie grins at him. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he winks. ‘I ride up front, with Montagu.’
Harry groans and bumps shoulders with Rabbie as they head back to the dying embers of the fire, back to their blankets. He thinks he’s managed to snowball Rabbie, until Rabbie leans in and whispers, ‘Don’t go soft, Harry. You saw what the little savage did to me. He’ll do it to you, and worse, with a smile on his face.’
And the thing is, Harry doesn’t doubt him at all.
They rise at dawn again and press on southwards. Dinner is hurried; they’re only about six hours from the border and everyone is keen to be back on English soil. Harry is bolder this time, just looks Montagu in the eye and says, ‘I’m going to give the prisoner some water.’ He’d even filled a skin from the stream the previous night, to have on hand.
Montagu just shakes his head slightly in resignation. But the Baron’s sharp grey eyes are on Harry as he flips up a corner of the canvas and beckons the boy over. He doesn’t speak to the boy. Something in him doesn’t want to let Montagu know that the boy speaks French.
It’s different in daylight, the boy drinking. Harry can see the blood in his matted hair, the dirt and filth ingrained into his pores. How visible his bones are under his fair skin. And the boy looks back, his eyes not on the trickle of water from the skin but on Harry, watching him, assessing him. ‘You must be hungry,’ Harry whispers to the boy. ‘I’ll try to get permission to feed you, tonight.’ The boy’s eyes narrow. They’re ringed in dark lashes, as long as a girl’s, and it only serves to make his eyes look paler, more unnatural.
When the skin is empty again, Harry throws the canvas flap back down and turns to Montagu. ‘When we cross into England, I’d like to get straw for the cage, and a bucket for him to piss in. They do as much for the bears,’ he says, referring to the cage’s original use.
Montagu raises an eyebrow, says, ‘Hmm,’ and mounts up on his horse. ‘Ride with me,’ he commands.
Harry mounts up and trots Star to Montagu’s side. He can’t resist a smirk at Rabbie. ‘Guess you’ll have to ride in the back for a bit, Sir Robert.’
Rabbie smirks back. ‘We only let you up here so you understand how far away it is from where you belong, Sir Harry.’ But then he peels his chestnut palfrey away and obediently takes a position in the rear.
Once Rabbie is gone, Baron Montagu smiles at Harry. There’s surprise and amusement in his face. ‘Making friends, are we?’
Harry blushes.
‘Who is he?’ Harry asks again. Because none of it adds up. A rural, poverty-stricken hall. A Scottish boy who looks like an urchin but speaks French as well as Gaelic. And who is so important to English politics that the great Baron Montagu himself crosses seventy miles of enemy territory to capture him.
Montagu looks forwards, his gaze growing distant, and begins to talk over Harry. ‘Did you know we lose about a third of our noble families every hundred years?’ the Baron says. ‘New ones replace them, of course, but do you ever think about how the failing houses just … slip away? Where they go? Most don’t fall very far, of course. But some do. Some fall very far indeed.’
Harry thinks of turquoise velvet and the frayed holes where embroidery used to be.
Montagu hums. ‘How is Dartington Manor? Heavily indebted, last I heard.’
‘We’re making do,’ Harry replies. ‘Harvest looks good this year.’
The lie rolls smoothly off his lips. Dartington needs more than a good harvest. It needs Harry to come back from war laden with glory, with gifts from the King of land and jewels. Except Harry missed the war, and his excursion with Montagu into Galloway has brought neither glory nor reward, just a hollow sense of shame.
This was the unspoken thing between his mother and Harry, the matter they never discussed. He wanted to make everything right, use steel and youth and muscle to pay off the carrion crows circling their home. And his mother, when she saw that determined look in his eye, would stroke
