poison ivy caused an itchy numbness, a leaden pollution.
‘Interesting,’ the captain said.
Sauce was watching him.
Her smile forced him to smile in return. The squires and valets in the garden began to breathe again and the captain was sure they’d stay awake, now. Given that there was a murderer on the loose who had monster-allies in the Wild.
He got back to his horse. Jehannes, his marshal, came up on his bridle hand side and cleared his throat. ‘That woman’s trouble,’ he said.
‘Tom’s trouble too,’ the captain replied.
‘No other company would have had her.’ Jehannes spat.
The captain looked at his marshal. ‘Now Jehannes,’ he said. ‘Be serious. Who would have Tom? He’s killed more of his own comrades than Judas Iscariot.’
Jehannes looked away. ‘I don’t trust her,’ he said.
The captain nodded. ‘I know. Let’s get moving.’ He considered vaulting into the saddle and decided that he was too tired and the show would be wasted on Jehannes, anyway. ‘You dislike her because she’s a woman,’ he said, and put his left foot into the stirrup.
Grendel was tall enough that he had to bend his left knee as far as the articulation in his leg harness would allow. The horse snorted again. Toby held onto the reins.
He leaped up, his right leg powering him into the saddle, pushing his six feet of height and fifty pounds of mail and plate. Got his knee over the high ridge of the war-saddle and was in his seat.
‘Yes,’ Jehannes said, and backed his horse into his place in the column.
The captain saw Michael watching Jehannes go. The younger man turned and raised an eyebrow at the captain.
‘Something to say, young Michael?’ the captain asked.
‘What was the stick? M’lord?’ Michael was different from the rest – well born. Almost an apprentice, instead of a hireling. As the captain’s squire, he had special privileges. He could ask questions, and all the rest of the company would sit very still and listen to the answer.
The captain looked at him for a moment. Considering. He shrugged – no mean feat in plate armour.
‘Witch Bane,’ he said. ‘A Witch-Bane
‘A nun?’ Michael asked. ‘A nun who could work
‘All in a day’s work, lad. It’s all in a day’s work.’ His visual memory, too well trained, ran through the items like the rooms in his memory palace – the splintered door, the faceless corpse, the arm, the Witch-Bane arrow. He examined the path from the garden door to the front door.
‘Wait on me,’ he said.
He walked Grendel around the farmyard, following the stone wall to the garden. He stood in his stirrups to peer over the wall, and aligned the open garden door with the splintered front door. He looked over his shoulder several times.
‘Wilful!’ he called.
His archer appeared. ‘What now?’ he muttered.
The captain pointed at the two doors. ‘How far away could you stand and still put an arrow into someone at the
‘What, shooting through the house?’ asked Wilful Murder.
The captain nodded.
Wilful shook his head. ‘Not that far,’ he admitted. ‘Any loft at all and the shaft strikes the door jamb.’ He caught a louse on his collar and killed it between his nails. His eyes met the captain’s. ‘He’d have to be close.’
The captain nodded. ‘Gelfred?’ he called.
The huntsman was outside the front door, casting with his wand over a large reptilian print in the road. ‘M’lord?’
‘See if you and Wilful can find any tracks out the back. Wilful will show you where a bowman might have stood.’
‘It’s always fucking me – get Long Paw to do it,’ Wilful muttered.
The captain’s mild glance rested for a moment on his archer and the man cringed.
The captain turned his horse and sighed. ‘Catch us up as soon as you have the tracks,’ he said. He waved at Jehannes. ‘Let’s go to the fortress and meet the lady Abbess.’ He touched his spurs ever so lightly to Grendel’s sides, and the stallion snorted and deigned to move forward into the rain.
The rest of the ride along the banks of the Cohocton was uneventful, and the company halted by the fortified bridge overshadowed by the rock-girt ridge and the grey walls of the fortress convent atop it, high above them. Linen tents rose like dirty white flowers from the muddy field, and the officer’s pavilions came off the wagons. Teams of archers dug cook pits and latrines, and valets and the many camp followers – craftsmen and sutlers, runaway serfs, prostitutes, servants, and free men and women desperate to gain a place – assembled the heavy wooden hoardings that served the camp as temporary walls and towers. The drovers, an essential part of any company, filled the gaps with the heavy wagons. Horse lines were staked out. Guards were set.
The Abbess’ door ward had pointedly refused to allow the mercenaries through her gate. The mercenaries had expected nothing else, and even now hardened professionals were gauging the height of the walls and the likelihood of climbing them. Two veteran archers – Kanny, the barracks room lawyer of the company, and Scrant, who never stopped eating – stood by the camp’s newly-constructed wooden gate and speculated on the likelihood of getting some in the nun’s dormitory.
It made the captain smile as he rode by, collecting their salutes, on the steep gravel road that led up the ridge from the fortified town at the base, up along the switchbacks and finally up through the fortress gate-house into the courtyard beyond. Behind him, his banner bearer, marshals and six of his best lances dismounted to a quiet command and stood by their horses. His squire held his high-crested bassinet, and his valet bore his sword of war. It was an impressive show and it made good advertising – ideal, as he could see heads at every window and door that opened into the courtyard.
A tall nun in a slate-grey habit – the captain suppressed his reflexive flash on the corpse in the doorway of the steading – reached to take the reins of his horse. A second nun beckoned with her hand. Neither spoke.
The captain was pleased to see Michael dismount elegantly despite the rain, and take Grendel’s head, without physically pushing the nun out of the way.
He smiled at the nuns and followed them across the courtyard towards the most ornate door, heavy with scroll-worked iron hinges and elaborate wooden panels. To the north, a dormitory building rose beyond a trio of low sheds that probably served as workshops – smithy, dye house and carding house, or so his nose told him. To the south stood a chapel – far too fragile and beautiful for this martial setting – and next to it, by cosmic irony, a long, low, slate-roofed stable.
Between the chapel’s carved oak doors stood a man. He had a black habit with a silk rope around the waist, was tall and thin to the point of caricature, and his hands were covered in old scars.
The captain didn’t like his eyes, which were blue and flat. The man was nervous, and wouldn’t meet his eye – and he was clearly angry.
Flicking his eyes away from the priest, the captain reviewed the riches of the abbey with the eye of a money- lender sizing up a potential client. The abbey’s income was shown in the cobbled courtyard, the neat flint and granite of the stables with a decorative stripe of glazed brick, the copper on the roof and the lead gutters gushing water into a cistern. The courtyard was thirty paces across – as big as that of any castle he’d lived in as a boy. The walls rose sheer – the outer curtain at his back, the central monastery before him, with towers at each corner, all wet stone and wet lead, rain slicked cobbles; the priest’s faded black cassock, and the nun’s undyed surcoat.
