The Red Knight

print further into the room, where the creature had pivoted its weight to pass under the low arch to the main room beyond. It had dug a furrow in the pine with its talons. And a matching furrow in the base board that ran up into the wattle and plaster. A dew claw.

‘Why’d this one die here when the rest died in the garden?’ he asked.

Gelfred stepped carefully past the body. Like most gentlemen, he carried a short staff – really just a stick shod in silver, like a mountebank’s wand. Or a wizard’s. He used it first to point and then to pry something shiny out of the floorboards.

‘Very good,’ said the captain.

‘She died for them,’ Gelfred said. A silver cross set with pearls dangled from his stick. ‘She tried to stop it. She gave the others time to escape.’

‘If only it had worked,’ said the captain. He pointed at the prints.

Gelfred crouched by the nearer print, laid his stick along it, and made a clucking sound with his tongue.

‘Well, well,’ he said. His nonchalance was a little too studied. And his face was pale.

The captain couldn’t blame the man. In a brief lifetime replete with dead bodies, the captain had seldom seen one so horrible. Part of his conscious mind wandered off a little, wondering if her femininity, the beauty of her hair, contributed to the utter horror of her destruction. Was it like desecration? A deliberate sacrilege?

And another, harder part of his mind walked a different path. The monster had placed that arm just so. The tooth marks that framed the bloody sockets that had been her eyes. He could imagine, far too well.

It had been done to leave terror. It was almost artistic.

He tasted salt in his mouth and turned away. ‘Don’t act tough on my account, Gelfred,’ he said. He spat on the floor, trying to get rid of the taste before he made a spectacle of himself.

‘Never seen worse, and that’s a fact,’ Gelfred said. He took a long, slow breath. ‘God shouldn’t allow this!’ he said bitterly.

‘Gelfred,’ the captain said, with a bitter smile. ‘God doesn’t give a fuck.’

Their eyes met. Gelfred looked away. ‘I will know what there is to know,’ he said, looking grim. He didn’t like the captain’s blasphemy – his face said as much. Especially not when he was about to work with God’s power.

Gelfred touched his stick to the middle of the print, and there was a moment of change, as if their eyes had adjusted to a new light source, or stronger sunlight.

‘Pater noster qui es in caelus,’ Gelfred intoned in plainchant.

The captain left him to it.

In the garden, Ser Thomas’ squire and half a dozen archers had stripped the bodies of valuables – and collected all the body parts strewn across the enclosure, reassembled as far as possible, and laid them out, wrapped in cloaks. The two men were almost green, and the smell of vomit almost covered the smell of blood and ordure. A third archer was wiping his hands on a linen shirt.

Ser Thomas – Bad Tom to every man in the company – was six foot six inches of dark hair, heavy brow and bad attitude. He had a temper and was always the wrong man to cross. He was watching his men attentively, an amulet out and in his hand. He turned at the rattle of the captain’s hardened steel sabatons on the stone path and gave him a sketchy salute. ‘Reckon the young ‘uns earned their pay today, Captain.’

Since they weren’t paid unless they had a contract, it wasn’t saying much.

The captain merely grunted. There were six corpses in the garden.

Bad Tom raised an eyebrow and passed something to him.

The captain looked at it, and pursed his lips. Tucked the chain into the purse at his waist, and slapped Bad Tom on his paulder-clad shoulder. ‘Stay here and stay awake,’ he said. ‘You can have Sauce and Gelding, too.’

Bad Tom shrugged. He licked his lips. ‘Me an’ Sauce don’t always see eye to eye.’

The captain smiled inwardly to see this giant of a man – feared throughout the company – admit that he and a woman didn’t ‘see eye to eye’.

She came over the wall to join them.

Sauce had won her name as a whore, giving too much lip to customers. She was tall, and in the rain her red hair was toned to dark brown. Freckles gave her an innocence that was a lie. She had made herself a name. That said all that needed to be said.

‘Tom fucked it up already?’ she asked.

Tom glared.

The captain took a breath. ‘Play nicely, children. I need my best on guard here, frosty and awake.’

‘It won’t come back,’ she said.

The captain shook his head. ‘Stay awake anyway. Just for me.’

Bad Tom smiled and blew a kiss at Sauce. ‘Just for you,’ he said.

Her hand went to her riding sword and with a flick it was in her hand.

The captain cleared his throat.

‘He treats me like a whore. I am not.’ She held the sword steady at his face, and Bad Tom didn’t move.

‘Say you are sorry, Tom.’ The captain sounded as if it was all a jest.

‘Didn’t say one bad thing. Not one! Just a tease!’ Tom said. Spittle flew from his lips.

‘You meant to cause harm. She took it as harm. You know the rules, Tom.’ The captain’s voice had changed, now. He spoke so softly that Tom had to lean forward to hear him.

‘Sorry,’ Tom muttered like a schoolboy. ‘Bitch.’

Sauce smiled. The tip of her riding sword pressed into the man’s thick forehead just over an eye.

‘Fuck you!’ Tom growled.

The captain leaned forward. ‘Neither one of you wants this. It’s clear you are both posturing. Climb down or take the consequences. Tom, Sauce wants to be treated as your peer. Sauce, Tom is top beast and you put his back up at every opportunity. If you want to be part of this company then you have to accept your place in it.’

He raised his gloved hand. ‘On the count of three, you will both back away, Sauce will sheathe her weapon, Tom will bow to her and apologise, and Sauce will return his apology. Or you can both collect your kit, walk away and kill each other. But not as my people. Understand? Three. Two. One.’

Sauce stepped back, saluted with her blade and sheathed it. Without looking or fumbling.

Tom let a moment go by. Pure insolence. But then something happened in his face, and he bowed – a good bow, so that his right knee touched the mud. ‘Humbly crave your pardon,’ he said in a loud, clear voice.

Sauce smiled. It wasn’t a pretty smile, but it did transform her face, despite the missing teeth in the middle. ‘And I yours, ser knight,’ she replied. ‘I regret my . . . attitude.’

She obviously shocked Tom. In the big man’s world of dominance and submission, she was beyond him. The captain could read him like a book. And he thought Sauce deserves something for that. She’s a good man.

Gelfred appeared at his elbow. Had probably been waiting for the drama to end.

The captain felt the wrongness of it before he saw what his huntsman carried. Like a housewife returning from pilgrimage and smelling something dead under her floor – it was like that, only stronger and wronger.

‘I rolled her over. This was in her back,’ Gelfred said. He had the thing wrapped in his rosary.

The captain swallowed bile, again. I love this job, he reminded himself.

To the eye, it looked like a stick – two fingers thick at the butt, sharpened to a needlepoint now clotted with blood and dark. Thorns sprouted from the whole haft, but it was fletched. An arrow. Or rather, an obscene parody of an arrow, whittled from . . .

‘Witch Bane,’ Gelfred said.

The captain made himself take it without flinching. There were some secrets he would pay the price to preserve. He flashed on the last Witch-Bane arrow he’d seen – and pushed past it.

He held it a moment. ‘So?’ he said, with epic unconcern.

‘She was shot in the back – with the Witch Bane – while she was alive.’ Gelfred’s eyes narrowed. ‘And then the monster ripped her face off.’

The captain nodded and handed his huntsman the shaft. The moment it left his hand he felt lighter, and the places where the thorns had pricked his chamois gloves felt like rashes of poison ivy on his thumb and fingers – if