He felt an armoured back against his, and turned to find the Captain of the King’s Guard – Sir Richard Fitzroy. The man managed a smile.
‘I will build a church,’ Michael chanted. ‘I will burn a thousand candles to the Virgin,’ he went on.
‘Get the crap off your blade,’ Tom said. He had a scrap of linen out of his wallet, and he was suiting action to words.
Sauce didn’t grin. She took a handkerchief from her breastplate and wiped her face. Then she took in what her captain was doing and handed him a wooden canteen of water, pulling it over her shoulder on a strap.
He knelt and gave water to the King of Alba.
Who smiled.
The knight who reined in above him provided some shade. His giant war horse had a hard time standing securely on the shifting pile of dead boglins, and his rider curbed him savagely and swore in Gallish. He looked around, as if expecting something.
The king grunted something, and the captain bent over further, his shoulder screaming at the effort, the helmet and the aventail on his head and neck feeling like the weight of a lifetime of penance.
The king had a horny talon between the plates of his fauld, buried deep in his thigh, and his blood soaked the ground.
‘I have saved you,’ said the knight who towered over them. ‘You may take your ease – you are saved.’ Indeed, as far as the eye could see, a wave of knights were dispatching the last creatures too foolish or too bound by Thorn’s will to flee. ‘We have won a mighty victory today. Where is the king, please?’
The captain was able for the first time in hours – it felt like hours, and later it would prove to be only a few minutes – to look around.
His company-
His men-at-arms were gone. They lay in a ring, their white steel armour, even matted with gore, brilliant when surrounded by the green, grey, white and brown of their adversaries.
But their red tabards were very like those worn by the king’s knights.
The king’s household knights were intermixed with them, and the Knights of Saint Thomas in their black. Many of the latter were still standing – more than a dozen.
‘The king is right here,’ Fitzroy said.
‘Dead?’ the foreign knight asked.
The captain shook his head. He could easily come to dislike this foreigner. Galles were superb knights but very difficult people.
His mind was wandering.
The captain stiffened in shock.
‘Give him to me,’ said the foreign knight. ‘I will see he is well guarded.’
‘He’s well-guarded right here,’ said Sir Richard.
Bad Tom leaned forward. ‘Sod off, son.’
The captain reached out a hand to steady Tom.
‘You need manners,’ said the mounted knight. ‘But for my charge, you would all be dead.’
Tom laughed. ‘All you did was to lower my body count, pipkin,’ he said.
They glared at each other.
The Prior waded over to them. ‘Ser Jean? Captal?’
De Vrailly backed his horse. ‘Messire.’
‘A litter for the king.’ He waved.
Other knights rode forward – there was the banner of the Earl of Towbray, and there was the Count of the Borders. They came in a rush, now that the king had been discovered. Towbray found the king’s squires and the Royal Standard, and raised it, covered in ichor.
There was a low cheer.
A long line of infantrymen came over the field of the dead. They had to pick their footing, and they weren’t quick about it. As they came, the captain and Michael got the king’s breast and back off, and got his hauberk up. Bad luck had slit a dozen rings – worse luck to receive a second blow that bent the fauld and penetrated the leg. There really was a lot of blood.
The captain smiled, knelt, placed his hand on the king’s bare thigh when Michael peeled back his braes and his hose, and with no conscious effort he released Amicia’s power.
Harmodius did the actual casting.
It made the captain feel a little sick, as if he was three people.
And then the footmen of the Royal Guard were there – everywhere around them – and the king was lifted high, placed on a cloak across two spears . . . and he held onto the captain’s hand. So they walked, hand in hand, across the stricken field. It was the longest walk the captain had ever taken – the sun was beating down like a new foe, the insects descended like a plague, and the footing was impossible.
But eventually, they were free of the corpses and were climbing the long road to the fortress.
Soldiers stopped and bowed, or knelt. Men in the field had begun to sing the Te Deum, and its strains rose like the casting of a mighty phantasm from the fields below. The captain felt the king’s hot hand in his own, and tried not to think too much about it.
The Queen lay in the chapel – on the altar. She raised her head, and smiled.
The king released a sigh, as if he had been holding his breath.
The captain saw Amicia. She stood in the light of the window behind the altar. She appeared inhuman, a goddess of light and colour, and she was, to his sight, sparkling with power.
The captain ignored the dead man.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her anyway.
She was healing each injured person brought to her. The power went into her as easily as breathing – she was drinking the unspent green from Thorn’s hammer blow, and from the sun streaming through the broken chapel window, and the well – taking all three streams of power and releasing it in a cloud of rainbow light so that soldier after soldier approached her, knelt, and arose healed. Most stumbled away and went to sleep in the arms of their comrades.
She passed her hands over the king as if he were any other soldier, any of the women wounded in the desperate defence of the courtyard, any of the children injured in the collapse of the West Tower – and he was healed.
And then she turned, and her eyes looked into his.
He couldn’t breathe.
He had the foolish impulse to kiss her.
She touched him. ‘You must open your powers, or I cannot heal you,’ she said. She gave him a smile. ‘You were not this powerful, a few days ago.’
He sighed. ‘Nor were you,’ he said.
