The Red Knight

The Magus spread his hands. ‘I’m keep saying I’m no fool, lad. So your mother trained you all your life to be a magus, I’ll guess. Brilliant tutor, special powers. It all but drips off you – you know that?’

The captain laughed. It was a laugh full of anger, self-pity, brutal pain. A very young, horrible laugh he’d hoped he’d left behind him. ‘She-’ He paused. ‘Fuck it, I’m not in a revealing mood, old man.’

The old Magus sat still. Then he took the wine flagon, poured a cup, and drank it off. ‘The thing is,’ he began carefully, ‘the thing is, you are like a vault full of grain, or armour, or naphtha – waiting to be used in the defence of this fortress, and I’m not sure I can let you stay locked.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve discovered something. Something so very important that I’m afraid I’m not very interested in what men call morality right now. So I’m sorry for the hurt your bitch mother caused you – but your wallowing in self-pity is not going to save lives, especially mine.’

Their eyes locked.

‘A vault full of naphtha,’ the captain said, dreamily. ‘I have a vault full of naphtha.’

‘She taught you well, this tutor of yours,’ Harmodius said. ‘Now listen, Captain. The mind that opposes us is not some boglin chief from the hills – nor even an adversarius, nor even a draconis singularis. This is the shell of a man who was the greatest of our order, who has given himself to the Wild for power and mastery and as a result is, quite frankly, godlike. I don’t know why he wants this place – or rather, I can guess at some surface reasons, but I can’t guess what he really wants. Do you understand me, boy?’

The captain nodded. ‘I have a thought or two in my head, thanks. I have to help you, if we’re going to make it.’

‘Even in the moment of his treason, he was too smart for me,’ Harmodius said, ‘although, for my sins, I’ve only had to face my own failure in the last week.’ He shrugged and sat back. He seemed suddenly smaller.

The captain downed the soft cider in four long gulps.

‘I’d like to survive this, too,’ he said. He sighed. ‘I’m not against the use of power. I use it.’

Harmodius looked up. ‘Can you channel?’ he asked.

The captain frowned. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never done it. And besides, my strength is poor. Prudentia taught that we grow in strength by the ceaseless exertion of muscle, and that the exercise of power is no different.’

The Magus nodded. ‘True. Mostly true. You have a unique access to the power of the Wild.’ He shrugged.

‘Mother raised me to be the Antichrist,’ said the captain bitterly. ‘What do you expect?’

Harmodius shrugged. ‘You can wallow or you can grow. I doubt you can do both.’ He leaned forward. ‘So listen. So far, everything he has done is foreplay. He has thousands of fresh-minted boglins; he has all the spectrum of fearsome boogiemen of the northern Wild – trolls, wyverns, daemons; Outwallers; irks. He has the power to cast a cage on you – on you who can tap directly into the Power of the Wild. When he comes against us in full measure he will destroy us utterly.’

The captain shrugged and drank some wine. ‘Best surrender then,’ he said with a sneer.

‘Wake up, boy! This is serious!’ The old man slapped the table.

They glowered at each other.

‘I need your powers to be deployed for us,’ Harmodius said. ‘Can you take instruction?’

The captain looked away. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. He sat back and was suddenly serious. He raised his eyes. ‘Yes, Harmodius. I will take your instruction and stop rebelling against your obvious authority for no better reason than that you remind me of my not-father.’

Harmodius shrugged. ‘I don’t drink enough to remind you of your odious not-father,’ he said.

‘You left out the Jacks,’ the captain put in. ‘When you were listing his overwhelming strength. We caught some of them in camp, in our first sortie. Now he’s moved them elsewhere and I’ve lost them.’

‘Jacks?’ Harmodius asked. ‘Rebels?’

‘Like enough,’ the captain said. ‘More than rebels. Men who want change.’

‘You sound sympathetic,’ Harmodius said.

‘If I’d been born in a crofter’s hut, I’d be a Jack.’ The captain looked at his armour on its rack as if contemplating the social divide.

Harmodius shrugged. ‘How very Archaic of you.’ He chuckled.

‘Things are worse for the commons than they were in my boyhood,’ the captain asserted.

Harmodius stroked his beard and poured a cup of wine. ‘Lad, surely you have recognised that things are worse for everyone? Things are falling apart. The Wild is winning – not by great victories, but by simple entropy. We have fewer farms and fewer men. I saw it riding here. Alba is failing. And this fight – this little fight for an obscure castle that holds a river crossing vital to an agricultural fair – is turning into the fight of your generation. The odds are always long for us. We are never wise – when we are rich, we squander our riches fighting each other and building churches. When we are poor, we fight among ourselves for scraps – and always, the Wild is there to take the unploughed fields.’

‘I will not fail here,’ the captain said.

‘Because if you are victorious here, you will have finally turned your back on the fate that was appointed to you?’ said the Magus.

‘Everyone has to strive for something,’ the captain replied.

Albinkirk – Gaston

There was no battle at Albinkirk.

The royal army formed up for battle just south of the town, on the west bank of the great river, with the smaller Cohocton guarding their northern flank. Royal Huntsmen had been killing boglins for two days, and the squires and archers of the army were learning to take their guard duty seriously after something took almost a hundred war horses in the dark of the night. Six squires and a belted knight died in the dark, facing something fast and well armoured – bigger than a pony, faster than a cat. They drove it off eventually.

The army had risen four hours before dawn, formed their battles lines in the dark, and moved carefully forward towards the smoking town. But after all that work, the mouse still escaped the cat.

Or perhaps the lion escaped the mouse. Gaston couldn’t be sure which they were.

The king had almost three thousand knights and men-at-arms, and half again as many infantry, even without the levies who had been left to guard the camp. On the one hand, the force was the largest and best armed that Gaston had ever seen – the Albans had armour for every peasant, and while their mounted knights might seem a trifle antiquated, with too much boiled leather in garish colours over double maille, and not enough plate – the Alban king’s force was now larger than any Gallish lord’s and well mounted and well-served. His cousin had ceased commenting on them. This close to the enemy, the Royal Host had become slimmer, fitter, and altogether more competent, with well-conducted sentries and pickets. Young men no longer rode abroad without armour.

But his father King Hawthor had, by all reports, had at least five times as many men when he rode forth against the Wild, perhaps even ten times as many. And the signs were all around them – the lack of plate armour was not just a penchant for the old-fashioned. All along the road, he had seen abandoned farms and shops – once a whole town with the roofs falling in.

It gave him pause.

But on this day, as the sun rose behind them and gilded their lance tips and pennons, the enemy melted away before them, abandoning the siege – as if Albinkirk had never truly been under siege after the assault.

The army halted at the edge of the great river and the Royal Huntsmen finished off any boglins too slow to get down the great earth cliff to the beach below. Heralds counted the dead and debated whether to count the destruction of the small enemy force as a battle or not.

Gaston answered his cousin’s summons, and saluted, his visor open and his sword loose in the sheath. It seemed possible that there would be an immediate pursuit across the river, even though it seemed odd that the enemy would retreat to the east.

But Jean de Vrailly handed his great bassinet to his squire and shook his head. ‘A royal council,’ he snapped. He was angry. It seemed his mad cousin was always angry these days.

Followed only by a handful of retinue knights and a herald, they rode across the field, covered in summer