The Red Knight

The big man-at-arms stood on her stoop. He nodded. ‘The Bailli said you’d be ready to move first,’ he said. ‘I’m Thomas.’ His bow was sketchy, but it was there.

He looked like trouble from head to foot.

She grinned at him, because her husband had looked like trouble, too. ‘I’d be more ready if I knew how to pack a donkey,’ she said.

He scratched under his beard. ‘Would a valet help? I want people moving in an hour. And the Bailli said that if people saw you packed, they’d move faster.’ He shrugged.

Off to the right, a woman screamed.

Thomas spat. ‘Fucking archers,’ he snarled, and started back out the door.

‘Send me a valet!’ she shouted after him.

She got a produce basket down from the shed and began to fill it with perishable food, and then preserves. She had sausage, pickles, jam, that was itself valuable -

‘Good wife?’ asked a polite voice from the doorway. The man was middle-aged, and looked as hard as rock and as sound as an old apple. Behind him was a skinny boy of twelve.

‘I’m Jaques, the captain’s valet. This is my squire, Toby. He can pack a mule – I reckon donkeys ain’t much different.’ The man took his hat off and bowed.

Mag curtsied back. ‘The sele of the day to you, ser.’

Jacques raised an eyebrow. ‘The thing of it is, ma’am – we’re also to take all your food.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve been trying to pack it-’ Then his meaning sunk in. ‘You mean to take my food for the garrison.’

He nodded. ‘For everyone. Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d rather you made it easy. But we will take it.’

Johne came to the door. He had a breast and back plate on and nodded to Jacques. To Mag, he said, ‘Give them everything. They are from the Abbess, we have to assume she will repay us.’ He shrugged. ‘Do you still have Ben’s crossbow? His arming jack?’

‘And his sword and dagger,’ Mag said. She opened her cupboard, where she kept her most valuable things – her pewter plates, her silver cup, her mother’s gold ring, and her husband’s dagger and sword.

Toby looked around shyly, and said to Jacques, ‘This is a rich place, eh, master?’

Jacques smiled grimly and gave the boy a kick. ‘Sorry, ma’am. We has some bad habits from the Continent, but we won’t take your things.’

But you would under other circumstances, and anything else you fancied, she thought.

Johne took her by her shoulders. It was a familiar, comfortable thing, and yet a little too possessive for her taste, even in a crisis.

‘I have a locking box,’ he said. ‘There’s room in it for your cup and ring. And any silver you have.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘Mag, we may never come back. This is war – war with the Wild. When it’s done, we may not have homes to return to.’

‘Gentle Jesu!’ she let slip. Took a shuddering breath, and nodded. ‘Very well.’ She scooped up the cup and ring, tipped over a brick in her fireplace and took out all her silver – forty-one pennies – and handed it all to the bailli. She saved out one penny, and she gave it to Jacques.

‘This much again if my donkeys make it to the fortress,’ she said primly.

He looked at it for a moment. Bit it. And flipped it to the boy. ‘You heard the lady,’ he said. He nodded to her. ‘I’m the captain’s valet, ma’am. A piece of gold is more my price. But Tom told me to see to you, and you are seen to.’ He gave her a quick salute and was out her door, headed for Simon Carter’s house.

She looked at the boy. He didn’t seem very different from any other boy she knew. ‘You can load a donkey?’ she asked.

He nodded very seriously. ‘Do you-’ he looked around. He was as skinny as a scarecrow and gawky the way only growing boys can be. ‘Do you have any food?’ he asked.

She laughed. ‘You’ll be taking it all anyways, won’t you, my dear?’ she asked. ‘Have some mince pie.’

Toby ate the mince pie with a determination that made her smile. While she watched him, still packing her hampers, he ate the piece he was given and then filched a second as he headed for her donkey.

A pair of archers appeared next. They lacked something that Ser Thomas and Jacques the valet had both possessed. They looked dangerous.

‘What have we here?’ asked the first one through the door. ‘Where’s the husband, then, my beauty?’ His voice was flat, and so were his eyes.

The second man had no teeth and too much smile. His haubergeon was not well kept, and he seemed like a half-wit.

‘Mind your own business,’ she said, her voice as sharp as steel.

Dead-eyes didn’t even pause. He reached out, grabbed her arm, and when she fought him he swept her legs out from under her and shoved her to the floor. His face didn’t change expression.

‘House’s protected,’ said the skinny boy said from the kitchen. ‘Best mind yourself, Wilful.’

The dead-eyed archer spat. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘I want to go back to the Continent. If I wanted to be a nurse- maid-’

Mag was so stunned she couldn’t react.

The archer leaned down and stuck his hand in the front of her cotehardie. Gave her breast a squeeze. ‘Later,’ he said.

She shrieked. and punched him in the crotch.

He stumbled back, and the other one grabbed her hair, as if this was a practised routine-

There was a sharp crack and she fell backwards, because the archer had released her. He was kneeling on the floor with blood pouring out of his face. Thomas was standing over him, a stick in his hand.

‘I tol’ em that this house was protected!’ the thin boy shouted.

‘Did you?’ The big man said. He eyed the two archers.

‘We was gentle as lambs!’ said the one with dead eyes.

‘Fucking archers. Piss off and get on with it,’ the big man said, and offered her a hand up.

The two archers got to their feet and went out the back to collect her chickens and her sheep and all the grain from her shed, all the roots in her cellar. They were methodical, and when she followed them into the shed, the dead-eyed one gave her a look that struck fear into her. He meant her harm.

But soon enough the boy had her donkeys rigged and loaded, and she put her husband’s pack on her back, her two baskets in her arms, and went out into the square.

From where she stood, her house looked perfectly normal.

She tried to imagine it burned. An empty basement yawning at the sun. She could see the place where she rested her back when she sewed, rubbed shiny with use, and she wondered if she would ever find such a well-lit spot.

The Carters were next to be ready – they were, after all, a family of carters with two heavy carts of their own and draught animals, and six boys and men to do the lifting. The bailli’s housekeeper was next, with his rugs – Mag had lain on one of those rugs, and she blushed at the thought. She was still mulling over her instinctive use of his name – his Christian name-

The Lanthorns were the last, their four sluttish daughters sullen, and Goodwife Lanthorn, in her usual despair, wandered the village’s column of animals, begging for space for her bag and a basket of linen. Lis the laundress was surrounded by soldiers, who competed to carry her goods. But she knew many of them by name, having washed their linens, and she was both safely middle-aged and comely, an ideal combination in the soldiers’ eyes.

At last the Lanthorns were packed – all four daughters eyeing the soldiers – and the column began to move.

Three hours after the men-at-arms rode into Abbington, the town was empty.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Ser John gave him a company of crossbowmen – members of the town’s guilds, all of them a little too shiny in