The Red Knight

admission to the citadel. I had no choice but to let them in – they had no food. Among them were two guildsmen from Harndon, members of the Crossbowmen of the Order of Drapers. They say that a great battle was fought yesterday, south of the Fords, and that the Red Knight prevailed, albeit with a small force, crushing a great ambush of the Wild, for which praise to God. But another pair of refugees from the east informed me that Sossag raiders have burned every town east of the Fords all the way to Otter Creek, and that the hills are crammed with refugees.

All of this may be rumour. If I can spare the men, I will send a scout west to cooperate with the Abbess and the Red Knight.

My lord, we face here the very worst of the enemy. I beg you for immediate aid.

Your servant,

John Crayford, Captain of Albinkirk

Chapter Eleven

Michael the Squire

East of Albinkirk – Thorn

Thorn sat cross-legged beneath the tree that bore his name and watched the world.

He couldn’t pretend that he liked what he saw.

He had suffered a crushing defeat the day before – the little army that the sisterhood had hired, led by the dark sun that could extinguish itself – had combined with the last convoy coming upriver to crush his best mobile force.

Even now, he couldn’t reach any of his chieftains among the irks. Boglins were coming back across the river. But the losses had been staggering.

And he could feel the waves of sheer power that still rolled across the sea of trees from the fight. Someone almost as great as him had loosed powers that were better left unloosed. That power sang through the Wild like a clarion call. And Thorn knew the taste of that power.

I should have been there, he thought. His stone mouth creased in a near smile. My great apprentice, free from his tower and loose on the world at last. He flexed the reins of his spell of ensorcellment, but the reins hung slack, severed at the far end, and he reeled them in. I wonder how the boy worked it out? He thought. But he didn’t waste much thought on it. His apprentice had tricked him once and would never, ever best him again.

But his rebellious apprenctice wasn’t the only problem. Someone had killed three of the dhags which men called trolls, the great cave giants armoured in stone of the high mountains. He had only bound a dozen to serve him, and now three were slain.

And perhaps the worst blow of all was the Sossag’s defection. Their chiefs had deserted him, and gone east to fight their own battle. Had they been present with his force, none of this would ever have happened.

Thorn wheeled his starlings and doves in the sky, and looked down from their eyes, and knew that he had been misled by the powers in the old fortress. The assault of the birds of prey had pushed his little helpers away. And he had been blind. For one scant hour.

But in his hand was a precious jewel. His friend had, at last, sent him word. Detailed word.

Despite the defeat, he now had the true measure of his enemy, and his enemy was not as strong as Thorn had feared. He didn’t like the taste of their power, but he didn’t need to fear their soldiers. They were too few.

Thorn had not risen to power by ignoring the causes of defeat. He didn’t accept false pride. He acknowledged that he had been fooled, and beaten, and immediately altered his plans.

First, the Sossag had won a victory that would serve his ends – and they were badly hurt and their leaders looked fools. This was the time to force them back to their allegiance to him. He needed them, and their ruthless human cleverness – so very different, and so much more cunning than the irks and bogglins.

He needed to consult with his allies among the Qwethnethog daemons, and he needed to convince them, with a show of force, that he was still the master of these woods. Lest they slip away too.

He savoured the irony. He was attacking the Rock for them, and yet they threatened to defect.

He sighed, because all these petty inter-plays of emotion and interest resembled the very politics that had driven him away from other men, when he was a man. The Wild had been his escape and now proved the same.

It was foolish that he needed a victory to convince the unwilling when he could take the lives of most of his allies merely by reaching into the essence of their Wildness and pulling-

He remembered one of his students admonishing him that you could not convince men by killing them, and he smiled at the memory. The boy had been both right and wrong. Thorn had never been very interested in convincing anyone.

But reminiscence would solve nothing. He withdrew his attention from the doves and the lynx and the fox, the hares were all dead, taken by dogs, and he moved his thinly distributed consciousness back to the body he had made for it.

A dozen irks stood guard over him, and he acknowledged them. ‘Summon my captains,’ he said in the harsh croak he now had as a voice, and they flinched and obeyed.

West of Albinkirk – Gaston

The army that now trailed north on the last stretch to Albinkirk, was many times larger than the elite force that had left Harndon a week before. And much, much slower.

Gaston sat his horse in the midst of a road blockage bigger than some towns in his home province and shook his head. He was watching four men who sat hunched under a bridge, eating a side of bacon.

‘It’s like the rout of a beaten army,’ he said in low Archaic. ‘Except that it is still headed towards the enemy.’

The king was virtually unapproachable, now, as the entire knight-service of the country had reported in, and all of his great lords surrounded him. No longer could Jean de Vrailly pretend to threaten the king with his three hundred knights – his convoy was no longer the largest. The Count of the Borders, Gareth Montroy, came in with five hundred knights, hard men in lighter armour than the Galles but just as tall, and five hundred archers as well. The Lord of Bain’s banner led another two hundred knights, with the popinjay Edward Despansay, Lord Bain, at their head. They were the great lords, with uniformed retinues of professional warriors who trained together, but there also were hundreds of individual knights from the counties under the King’s Lieutenant’s banner, and almost a hundred of the king’s own Royal Knights, his elite bodyguard that also canvassed the countryside as justices and monster hunters under the king’s trusted bastard brother, Ser Richard Fitzroy. There were another hundred knights of the military orders, priests and brothers and lay brothers of Saint George and Saint Maurice and Saint Thomas whose discipline was as good or better than any company Gaston had ever seen, riding silently in their black-robed armour under the Prior of Pynwrithe and his marshal.

All together the king had more than two thousand knights and as many again men-at-arms, plus three thousand infantry who varied in quality from the superb – the green clad Royal Huntsmen rode ahead of the column and covered its flanks, dashing silently through the increasingly dense brush on specially trained horses, although they fought on foot as archers – to the ridiculous: county levies with spears and no armour who served for twenty days or until their side of bacon was eaten.

The men at his feet were eating as quickly as they could.

His beautiful cousin was riding at the head of his convoy. He wore his full harness – all the Galles did – and rode a war horse. But the last few days, the Alban knights had begun to do the same – not all at once, but in fits and starts. And in the evenings, they had begun to practise with their lances and with their swords, with their