The Red Knight

trees.’

She smiled. ‘Yes. I can feel it, although it is no friend to me.’

‘Really?’ he asked, cursing himself for a fool. Why had he not asked the Queen earlier? A safer experiment sprang to his mind. But what was done was done. ‘You can feel the power of the Wild?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Stronger and weaker – even in those poor dead things that decorate the hall.’

He shook his head at his own foolishness – his hubris.

‘Do you sense any power of the Wild in this room?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘The green lamp is an artefact of the Wild, is it not? A faery lamp?’

He nodded. ‘Can you take any of the power it pours forth and use it, your Grace?’

She shuddered. ‘Why would you even ask such a thing? Now I think you dull, Magus.’

Hah, he thought. Not so hubristic as all that.

‘And yet I conjured a powerful demon of the abyss – did I not?’ he asked her.

She smiled. ‘Not one of the greatest, perhaps. But yes.’

‘Allied to the Wild – would you say?’ he asked.

‘God is the sun and the power of the sun – and Satan dwells in the power of the Wild.’ She sang the lines like a schoolgirl. ‘Daemons must use the power of the Wild. When Satan broke with God and led his legions to hell, then was magic broken into two powers, the green and the gold. Gold for the servants of God. Green for the servants of Satan.’

He nodded. Sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But of course, it is more complicated than that.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, showing that glacial self-assurance again. ‘I think men often seek to overcomplicate things. The nuns taught me this. Are you saying that they lied?’

‘I just fed a demon with the power of the sun. I conjured him with the power of the sun.’ Harmodius laughed.

‘But – no, you banished him!’ Her silver laugh rang out. ‘You tease me, Magus!’

He shook his head. ‘I banished him after feeding him enough power to make him grow,’ the Magus said. ‘Pure Helios, which I drew myself using my instruments – lacking your Grace’s special abilities.’ Whatever they may be.

She gazed at him, eyes level, devoid of artifice or flirtation, mockery or subtle magnetism or even her usual humour.

‘And this means?’ she asked, her voice a whisper.

‘Ask me again, your Grace, after I conjure him back a week hence. Tell me you will stand at my side that day – I’m beholden to you, but with you-’

‘What do you seek, Magus? Is this within the circlet of what the church will countenance?’ She spoke slowly, carefully.

He drew a breath. Released it. Sod the church, he thought. And aloud he said, ‘Yes, your Grace.’ No, your Grace. Perhaps not. But they’re not scientists. They’re interested in preserving the status quo.

The Queen gave him a beautiful smile. ‘I am just a young girl,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t we ask a bishop?’

Harmodius narrowed his eyes. ‘Of course, your Majesty,’ he said.

The North Road – Gerald Random

Random’s convoy moved fast, by the standards of convoys – six to ten leagues a day, stopping each night at the edge of a town and camping in pre-arranged fields, with fodder delivered to their camp along with hot bread and new-butchered meat. Men were happy to work for him because he was a meticulous planner and the food was good.

But they had a hundred leagues to go, just to make Albinkirk, and another forty leagues east after that, to the fair, and he was later than he wanted to be. Albinfleurs – little yellow balls of sweet-scented, fuzzy petals that grew only on the cliff edges of the great river – were blooming in the hayfields that lined the roads; and when they were on his favourite sections of road – the cliff-edge road along the very edge of the Albin which ran sixty feet or more below them in the vale – the Albinfleurs were like stripes of yellow below him and layers of yellow on the cliffs nearly a mile distant on the other side. It was years since he’d left late enough to see the Albinfleurs. They didn’t grow in the north.

But after three glorious days of solid travel, they came to Lorica, and the Two Lions. His usual stop and supplier of bread and forage was a smoking hulk. It took him a day to establish a new supplier and get the material he needed, and the story of how the inn had been burned and the sheriff beaten by foreigners angered him. But the innkeeper had sent to the king, and stood in his yard with a bandaged head watching workmen with a crane lift the charred rooftrees off the main building.

He used one of his precious mercenaries to send a message about the killings back to the Guild Master in Harndon. Harndoners didn’t usually concern themselves with the doings of the lesser towns. But this was business, friendship, and basic patriotism all in one package.

The following day not one but two of his wagons broke spokes on their wheels – one so badly that the wooden wheel split and the iron tyre popped off the wheel. That meant finding a smith and wheelwright and forced him to go back to Lorica, where he had to stay in an inferior inn while his convoy crept north without him. He had to do it himself – the men in Lorica knew him but none of his hirelings, not Judson the draper, nor any of the other investors.

In the morning, the two wagons were ready to move, and he grudgingly paid the agreed fee for making two apprentice wheelwrights and a journeyman work by rush light through the night. Plus an extra silver leopard to the blacksmith for getting the tyre on before matins.

He finished his small beer and mounted his horse, and the smaller train was on the road as soon as he’d taken the Eucharist from a friar who said Mass at a roadside shrine. That roadside Mass was full of broken men and women – wastrels, a pair of vagabonds, and a troop of travelling players. Random had never been troubled by the poor. He gave them alms.

But the broken men worried him, for both his convoy and his purse. There were four of them, although they didn’t seem to be together. Random had never been robbed by men he’d just attended Mass with, but he didn’t take any chances, either. He mounted, exchanged meaningful glances with his drovers, and the carts moved on.

One of the broken men followed them on the road. He had a good horse and armour in a wicker basket, and he seemed listless. Random looked back at him from time to time.

Eventually, the man caught them up. But he hadn’t put on his armour and he didn’t even seem to know they were there. He rode up, slowly catching and then overtaking them.

Harndoners traditionally called the men they’d attended Mass with that day Brother or Sister, and so Random nodded to the stranger.

‘The Peace of God to you, Brother,’ he said, a little pointedly.

The man looked startled to be addressed.

In that moment, Random realised he wasn’t a broken man at all but a dirty gentleman. The differences were clear in his quality – the man had a superb leather-covered jupon worth a good twenty leopards, even covered in dirt. Hip boots with gold spurs. Even if they were silver gilt, they were worth a hundred leopards by weight.

The man sighed. ‘And to you, messire.’

He rode on.

Random hadn’t come to relative riches in the cut-throat world of Harndon’s shippers and guilds without having some willingness to grab at Fortuna’s hairs. ‘You’re a knight,’ he said.

The man didn’t rein in, but he turned his head and, feeling the weight shift, his horse stopped.

The man turned to look at him, and the silence was painful.

What have we here? Random wondered.

Finally, the young man – under his despair, the man was younger than Random by a generation – nodded.

‘I am a knight,’ the young man said, as if confessing a sin.

‘I need men,’ Random said. ‘I have a convoy on the road and if you wear spurs of gold, I’d be honoured to have you. My convoy is fifty good wagons headed north to the fair, and there’s no dishonour in it. I fear only bandits and