Trey raised his head, his emerald eyes glaring feral. “I can still remember the boom as his twenty stone came crashing down the dais. He wasn’t wearing his helm, I remember that too, and each of the three bloody thuds that it took to lop off that bastard’s head!”
“Trey…” Jael whispered, retreating to the edge of the pool.
The captain laughed, “God, what a bloody mess that was. My hands were shaking, and the blade kept twisting. I just couldn’t line my cut with the edge.” He said it with a smile, then the mirth sunk into the lines on his face—drawn tight across the corners of his mouth and on his forehead. From outside the changing room came the clamor of boots—from within the antechamber—now from behind the door. “I don’t doubt that you’re ready, Jael, but you should know what you’re ready for.”
The door burst open. Half a dozen clerics poured inside, all of them seniors from the council meeting, Elder Frampt at their head, gasping. “There you are, Gildmane! You’re a hard bugger to track, you know that? You—” He cut himself off, eyes locked onto the naked maiden hiding in the crystalline waters a few feet afar. His upper lip twitched in anger, but his tone betrayed a man abashed, confused at what to do with what he was looking at. He averted his gaze toward Trey and railed, “What in Hell do you think you’re doing, you son-of-a-bitch. Desecrating this place with your—”
“With my what? My bathing?”
“Stick it up your ass, Gildmane. Fornicating—disgraceful! You’re supposed to be chaste knights.”
The captain sneered. “Is that how you do it in the west? Up the ass? I’m afraid that’s considered sodomy in the capital.”
“Make japes all you like,” Frampt spat, “it won’t save you if we report to the commander.”
“If,” Jael noticed the weakness of his wording—like a gap between plates. The cleric was bluffing. He wanted something from them. What, she wondered, were they after in the first place?
Trey noticed it as well, and with a smile he replied, “Report to Pyke if you want, but what are you going to tell him? That I was fucking my squire from across the water with a ten-foot cock?” He rose to his full height in the pool, the water splashing hot about his thighs as he spoke to the clerics at the elder’s back, “What do you say, lads? ”Think I could peg her from here?”
A few of the seniors laughed, and even Leonhardt chuckled, blushed as she was. Frampt, however, could not find the humor in himself. He ground his teeth and began to turn his back, then thought better of it. “If you’ve had enough games, Captain, perhaps you’d like to save some lives. There has been another attack. Freshwater Heath, a hamlet to the northwest. The survivors arrived here less than an hour ago.”
“Then they’re safe, and we’ll commence our raid on the morrow.”
“No,” the elder rasped, “we’re commencing it right now. Lloyd and his guilt be damned. I’m not sparing a single one of those butchers. Let God be their judge and us his hand of justice.”
It came together for Jael all at once. “But you’re afraid,” she started, “that’s why your here, asking us for help. You can’t do it on your own.”
“Watch your tongue, lass,” he said. “We’re going whether you come or not.” Then he asked the captain, “So are you with us? We need to be quick about this, before the commander notices we’re gone.”
Trey looked to his squire and answered, “We’re with you. We wouldn’t want to miss out on all the fun.”
Back in the barracks, arming and armouring, Leonhardt doubted any of what they were about to do would prove amusing. That was, until she and her fellow members of the Cross came out into the yard, into the black and raw with fresh horses waiting. They mounted alongside a square of forty clerics, the five seniors and Frampt included, each face a stoic mask despite the danger of their disobedience. Their frost-white breath and scarlet tunics—bright in the shadow of night—put a thrill in Jael’s heart and a chill in her spine. Together, Cross and cleric donned the iron skullcaps of the Watcher’s Eye. They brandished their arms: steel shafted mauls with heads of bronze and plush red velvet—for it was sinful in the eyes of Berthold that a man of God should draw blood—and Troy, Brandon, and Jael each had their swords—the captain with his axe. Then it occurred to Leonhardt the reason for his choice. “Three bloody thuds…I just couldn’t line my cut with the edge.”
Before the hour was done, their formation had hit the high road, galloping slowly as not to overtake their prey. They wanted them home, in their village hovels with their vigils watching eastward for the men of the Eye. If this raid was like passed attacks, and if they resisted initiating prematurely, Frampt believed they could still flank the pagans between the clerics and the Cross as was discussed in the meeting. It was sound tactics to Jael, though as they ambled on the moorland road with black woods to the south and the moon hidden in midnight clouds, she could think only of the owl’s scream and the brackdragon’s jaws and the elder’s account—fog like
