They had almost thirty wagons, full of goods – many of them would be of no use, but he’d seen the armour in one, fine helmets, and weapons in another, and wine, oil, canvas cloth-
But it wasn’t rescuing the wagons that lifted his heart. Nor the capture of the wounded knight, a moment that he had yet to allow his mind to savour.
It was the men. Ten professional soldiers, three dozen guildsmen with bows – almost fifty stout men. If he could make it back to the fortress, he’d have hurt his adversary cruelly and
Half a league from the fortress, when it was plain that Lissen Carak was not afire, had not fallen to assault of black sorcery, he found himself whistling.
Sauce rode by his side. ‘A word?’ she asked.
‘Anything you like,’ he said.
‘Do you have to kill every single one of the monsters?’ she asked, and she spat like Bad Tom.
Looking carefully, he could see she was literally spitting mad.
‘I had that tusked thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t need you stealing my kills. If another man had done it, I’d gut him. Even Tom.’
The captain rode in silence for a few paces. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said.
‘Fuck you,’ she said.
‘I don’t mean that the way it sounds, Sauce,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it. If they see me, they come straight at me. It has been that way for as long as I’ve faced the Wild.’
Sauce didn’t wrinkle her lip – she wrinkled her whole face. ‘What?’ she asked, but her tone betrayed that she had noticed something of the sort.
He shrugged, but he was tired and wearing forty pounds of hauberk and armour, so it wasn’t all that evident a movement.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, lying.
She narrowed her eyes.
He didn’t offer any further information.
‘Who’s the knight?’ she asked.
The captain realised he was entering a whole field of cowpats with her questions. ‘Ask him when he wakes,’ the captain said.
‘He was going to kill you,’ she said. It was somewhere between a statement and a question.
‘Haven’t you ever been tempted yourself?’ Jacques asked from behind them.
Sauce’s clear, honest laugh rolled across the river and announced them to the Bridge Castle.
And the captain rode on, whistling.
In his head, he saw a beaten, angry adolescent, who said hot words – hot and true – to a man who was
Of course, the desperate, angry boy simply kept riding. He would ride his horse to death, and then he would walk, and then he would try to kill himself with a dagger, and he would find that he didn’t have the stomach for it, and he would fall asleep, weeping. And wake to try again, and fail, hating himself for what he was, and hating himself again for his cowardice.
The captain knew it. He’d been there. He still had the two sloppy knife scars.
‘Happily ever after,’ he said, with very little bitterness. He touched the white handkerchief at his shoulder and rode to the convent, still whistling.
Lissen Carak – Mag the Seamstress
Mag watched them return from her barrel by the main gate, where she sat with her back against the lead down pipe from the chapel gutters, sewing.
Like many of the farmers and folk in the fortress she had reason to fear the armoured men. But today, they were different. Today, they seemed less like a gang of thugs bent on violence and more like something from a song.
The young knight who led them was first through the gate, and he paused to call something back to the column – in fact, he shouted to them ‘Finish like you started!’ And she saw them all sat up in their saddles, even the ones with blood showing.
The only difference she could see was that most of them were smiling. But there was something else – a pride to them – that she hadn’t felt before.
The captain swung down from his charger and gave the reins to Toby, and the boy beamed at him, and the captain grinned and said something that made the servant boy grin even harder.
Defeated men wouldn’t look like that, the seamstress was sure.
Ser Thomas rode in with the female knight by his side, and the two barely fitted through the gate, but neither would give way to the other.
The courtyard was filling with nuns and farmers and their folk, taking horses, talking – in moments, it was clear that a great victory had been won, and an air of festival filled the fortress.
Mag finished her line of stitches quickly, gathering the heady aura of victory against long odds with every stitch and pulling it into the cap.
The old Abbess came to the steps from the hall, and the young captain, resplendent in his bright red surcote and gilt-edged armour, climbed up, knelt on one knee in salute, and spoke to her.
She nodded, gave him her hand, and then raised her hands for silence.
‘Good people!’ she called. ‘The captain informs me that our little army has won a great victory through the grace of God. But we are to expect an immediate attack, and every one of you is to get under cover now.’
The men-at-arms were already pushing people back into the nunnery, dormitory and the great hall. Mag saw the young knight turn, and catch the eye of the novice.
When the archers on the walls began to look at her pointedly, she gathered her basket and slipped into the dormitory herself.
But she’d just seen the priest do the oddest thing: he’d taken a dove from a cage and thrown it over the wall.
She might have said something, or reacted – but even as she watched, the Red Knight appeared and the priest departed. They didn’t see each other. The Red Knight spoke to someone who was with him up on the wall – a leg appeared over the dormitory balcony, and suddenly the armoured man held someone in his arms. Someone in the plain garb of a novice.
The intensity that bound them was blinding. Mag could see it, feel it, the way she could feel the well of power under the dungeons and the Abbess working her spells. It was a magnificent thing.
It was also private and she turned her head away. Some things, people are not meant to see.
Albinkirk Citadel – Ser John Crayford
The Captain of Albinkirk sat at his glazed window, and watched the distant woods.
