The Red Knight

Nothing troubled them but the coming darkness, their exhaustion, and the cold. It was late in the day and increasingly clear that they would have to camp in the woods. The same woods which had produced a daemon and a wyvern.

‘Why didn’t it kill us?’ the captain asked. Two daemons.

Gelfred shook his head. ‘You killed that first one. Pretty. Damn. Fast.’ His eyes were always moving. They had reached the main road, and Gelfred pulled up on his horse’s reins. ‘We could ride double,’ he said.

‘You’ll lame that horse,’ the captain snapped.

‘You cast a spell.’ Gelfred wasn’t accusatory. He sounded more as if he was in pain.

‘Yes,’ the captain admitted. ‘I do, from time to time.’

Gelfred shook his head. He prayed aloud, and they rode on until a drizzle began and the light began to fade.

‘We’ll have to stand watches,’ the captain said. ‘We are very vulnerable.’ He could barely think. While Gelfred curried the poor beast, he gathered firewood and started a fire. He did everything wrong. He gathered bigger wood and had no axe to cut it; then he gathered kindling and broke it into ever smaller and better sorted piles. He knelt in his shallow fire-pit and used his flint and steel, shaving sparks onto charred cloth until he had an ember.

Then he realised that he hadn’t built a nest of tow and bark to catch the ember.

He had to start again.

We’re a pair of fools.

He could feel that the woods were full of enemies. Or allies. It was the curse of his youth.

What exactly have I stumbled into? he asked himself.

He made a little bird’s nest of dry tow and birchbark shreds, and made sparks again, his right hand holding the steel and moving precisely to strike the flint in his left hand. He got a spark, lit the char-

Dropped it into the tow and bark-

And blew.

The fire caught.

He dropped twigs on the blaze until it was steady, and then built a cabin of dry wood, carefully split with his hunting knife. He was very proud of his fire when he’d finished, and he thought that if the Wild took him here, at least he’d started the damned fire first.

Gelfred came and warmed his hands. Then he wound his crossbow. ‘Sleep, Captain,’ he said. ‘You first.’

The captain wanted to talk – he wanted to think, but his body was making its own demands.

But before he could go to sleep he heard Gelfred move, and he was out of his blankets with his sword in his fist.

Gelfred’s eyes were big in the firelight. ‘I just wanted to move the head,’ he said. ‘It – it’s hard to have it there. And the horse hates it.’

The captain helped to move the head. He stood there, in the dark, freezing cold.

There was something very close. Something powerful.

Perhaps building the fire had been a mistake, like coming out into the woods with just one other man.

Prudentia? Pru?

Dear boy.

Pru, can I pull the Cloak over this little camp? Or will I just make a disturbance in casting?

Cast quietly, as I have taught you.

He touched her marble hand, chose his wards and gardes, and opened the great iron door to his palace. Outside was a green darkness – thicker and greener than he liked.

But he took carefully from the green, and closed the door.

He staggered with the effort.

Suddenly he couldn’t stay upright. He fell to his knees by the daemon’s head.

The darkness was thick.

The head still had something of its aura of fear about it. He knelt by it – knees wet in the damp, cold leaves, and the cold helped to steady him.

‘M’lord?’ Gelfred asked, and he was obviously terrified. ‘M’lord!’

The captain worked on breathing for a moment.

‘What?’ he whispered.

‘The stars went out,’ Gelfred said.

‘I cast a little – concealment over us,’ the captain said. He shook his head. ‘Perhaps I mis-cast.’

Gelfred made a noise.

‘Let’s get away from this thing,’ the captain said, and he got to his feet, and together the two men stumbled over tree roots to their tiny fire.

The horse was showing the whites of its eyes.

‘I have to sleep,’ he said.

Gelfred made a motion in the dark. The captain took it for acceptance.

He slept from the moment his head went down, despite the fear, to the moment Gelfred woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

He heard the hooves.

Or talons.

Whatever it was, he couldn’t see the thing making the noise. Or anything else.

The fire was out and the night was too dark to see anything. But something very large was moving – just an arm’s length away. Maybe two.

Gelfred was right there, and the captain put a hand on his shoulder to steady them both.

Skerunch.

Snap.

Tick.

And then it was past them, moving down the hill to the road.

After an aeon, Gelfred said ‘It didn’t see us or smell us.’

The captain said Thanks, Pru.

‘My turn to watch,’ he said.

Gelfred was snoring in ten minutes, secure in his lord in a way the captain could not be in himself.

The captain stared into the darkness, and it became his friend more than his foe. He watched, and as he watched, he felt his heartbeat settle, felt his pains fade. He made an excursion into his palace of memory – reviewing sword cuts, castings, wards, lines of poetry.

Beyond the bubble of his will the night passed slowly. But it did pass.

Eventually, the faintest light coloured the eastern sky, and he woke Gelfred as gently as he could. He lowered his ward when they were both awake and armed, but there was nothing waiting for them, and they found the horse, and the head.

Just around the clearing where they’d slept, a pair of deep tracks – cloven, with talons and a dew claw – pierced the forest leaf mold.

Gelfred started. The captain watched as he followed the tracks-

‘Are we borrowing trouble, Gelfred?’ he asked, following a few paces behind.

Gelfred looked back and pointed at the ground in front of him. When the captain joined him, he saw multiple tracks – perhaps three sets, or even four.

‘What you fought yesterday. Four sets of prints. Here’s one moving more slowly. Here’s two moving fast – here they pause. Sniffing.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s what I see.’

Curiosity – the kind that gets cats killed – pulled the two of them forward. In ten more steps, there were eight or ten sets of tracks, and then, in another ten steps-

‘Sweet Son of Man and all the angels!’ Gelfred said.

The captain shook his head. ‘Amen,’ he added. ‘Amen.’

They stood on a bank over a gully wide enough for a pair of wagons and a little deeper than the height of a man