‘Sweet Jesu,’ Michael called from the other side of the wall. It was as high as a man’s shoulder, created by generations of peasants hauling stones out of fields. Built against the wall was a two-storey stone house with outbuildings – a rich manor farm. Michael stood in the yard, peering through the house’s shattered main door. ‘Sweet Jesu,’ the squire said again. ‘They’re all dead, Captain.’
His war horse gave the captain the height to see over the wall to where his men were rolling the bodies over, stripping them of valuables as they sought for survivors. Their new employer would not approve, but the captain thought the looting might help her understand what she was choosing to employ. In his experience, it was usually best that the prospective employer understand what he – or she – was buying. From the first.
The captain’s squire vaulted over the stone wall that separated the walled garden from the road and took a rag from Toby, the captain’s page. Sticky mud, from the endless spring rain, covered his thigh-high buckled boots. He produced a rag from his purse to cover his agistation and began to clean his boots. Michael was fussy and dressed for fashion. His scarlet company surcoat was embroidered with gold stars; the heavy wool worth more than an archer’s armour. He was well born and could afford it, so it was his business.
It was the captain’s business that the lad’s hands were shaking.
‘When you feel ready to present yourself,’ the captain said lightly, but Michael froze at his words, then made himself finish his task with the rag before tossing it back to Toby.
‘Apologies, m’lord,’ he said with a quick glance over his shoulder. ‘It was something out of the Wild, lord. Stake my soul on it.’
‘Not much of a stake,’ the captain said, holding Michael’s eye. He winked, as much to amuse the onlookers of his household as to steady his squire, who was pale enough to write on. Then he looked around.
The rain was light – just enough to weigh down the captain’s heavy scarlet cloak without soaking it through. Beyond the walled steading stretched fields of dark, newly planted earth, as shining and black in the rain as the captain’s horse. The upper fields toward the hills were rich with new greenery and dotted with sheep. Good earth and fertile soil promised rich crops, as far as the eye could see on both sides of the river. This land was tamed, covered in a neat geometric pattern of hedgerows and high stone walls separating tilled plots, or neatly scattered sheep and cattle, with the river to ship them down to the cities in the south. Crops and animals whose riches had paid for the fortress nunnery – Lissen Carak – that capped the high ridge to the south, visible from here as a crenelated line of pale stone. Grey, grey, grey from the sky to the ground. Pale grey, dark grey, black.
Beyond the sheep, to the north, rose the Adnacrags – two hundred leagues of dense mountains that lowered over the fields, their tops lost in the clouds.
The captain laughed at his own thoughts.
The dozen soldiers nearest him looked; every head turned, each wearing matching expressions of fear.
The captain rubbed the pointed beard at his chin, shaking off the water. ‘Jacques?’ he asked his valet.
The older man sat quietly on a war horse. He was better armed than most of the valets; wearing his scarlet surcote with long, hanging sleeves over an Eastern breastplate, and with a fine sword four feet long to the tip. He, too, combed the water out of his pointed beard while he thought.
‘M’lord?’ he asked.
‘How did the Wild make it here?’ The captain asked. Even with a gloved hand keeping the water from his eyes, he couldn’t
Here, wealth and power held the Wild at bay.
‘The usual way,’ Jacques said quietly. ‘Some fool must have invited them in.’
The captain chuckled. ‘Well,’ he said, giving his valet a crooked smile, ‘I don‘t suppose they’d call us if they didn’t have a problem. And we need the work.’
‘It ripped them apart,’ Michael said.
He was new to the trade and well-born, but the captain appreciated how quickly he had recovered his poise. At the same time, Michael needed to learn.
‘Apart,’ Michael repeated, licking his lips. His eyes were elsewhere. ‘It
He motioned to Toby, who was now sitting well to the side and away from the isolated steading-house and eating, which is what Toby tended to do whenever left to himself. The captain turned to face his standard bearer and his two marshals where they sat their own fidgeting horses in the rain, waiting for his commands.
‘I’ll leave Sauce and Bad Tom. They’ll stay on their guard until we send them a relief,’ he said. The discovery of the killings in the steading had interrupted their muddy trek to the fortress. They’d been riding since the second hour after midnight, after a cold camp and equally cold supper. No one looked happy.
‘Go and get me the master of the hunt,’ he added, turning back to his squire. When he was answered only with silence, he looked around. ‘Michael?’ he asked quietly.
‘M’lord?’ The young man was looking at the door to the steading. It was oak, bound in iron, and it had been broken in two places, the iron hinges inside the door had bent where they’d been forced off their pins. Trios of parallel grooves had ripped along the grain of the wood – in one spot, the talons had ripped through a decorative iron whorl, a clean cut.
‘Do you need a minute, lad?’ the captain asked. Jacques had seen to his own mount and was now standing at Grendel’s big head, eyeing the spike warily.
‘No – no, m’lord.’ His squire was still stunned, staring at the door and what lay beyond it.
‘Then don’t stand on ceremony, I beg.’ The captain dismounted, thinking that he had used the term lad quite naturally. Despite the fact that he and Michael were less than five years apart.
‘M’lord?’ Michael asked, unclear what he’d just been told to do.
‘Move your arse, boy. Get me the huntsman. Now.’ The captain handed his horse to the valet. Jacques was not really a valet. He was really the captain’s man and, as such, he had his own servant – Toby. A recent addition. A scrawny thing with large eyes and quick hands, completely enveloped in his red wool cote, which was many sizes too big.
Toby took the horse and gazed at his captain with hero-worship, a big winter apple forgotten in his hand.
The captain liked a little hero-worship. ‘He’s spooked. Don’t give him any free rein or there’ll be trouble,’ the captain said gruffly. He paused. ‘You might give him your apple core though,’ he said, and the boy smiled.
The captain went into the steading by the splintered door. Closer up, he could see that the darker brown was not a finish. It was blood.
Behind him, his destrier gave a snort that sounded remarkably like human derision – though whether it was for the page or his master was impossible to tell.
The woman just inside the threshold had been a nun before she was ripped open from neck to cervix. Her long, dark hair, unbound from the confines of her wimple, framed the horror of her missing face. She lay in a broad pool of her own blood that ran down into the gaps between the boards. There were tooth marks on her skull – the skin just forward of one ear had been shredded, as if something had gnawed at her face for some time, flensing it from the bone. One arm had been ripped clear of her body, the skin and muscle neatly eaten away so that only shreds remained, bones and tendons still hanging together . . . and then it had been replaced by the corpse. The white hand with the silver IHS ring and the cross was untouched.
The captain looked at her for a long time.
Just beyond the red ruin of the nun was a single clear footprint in the blood and ordure, which was already brown and sticky in the moist, cool air. Some of the blood had begun to leech into the pine floor boards, smooth from years of bare feet walking them. The leeched blood blurred the edge of the print, but the outline was clear – it was the size of a war horse’s hoof or bigger, with three toes.
The captain heard his huntsman come up and dismount outside. He didn’t turn, absorbed in the parallel exercises of withholding the need to vomit and committing the scene to memory. There was a second, smudged
