The Red Knight

angry, and very intelligent. And more likely two than one.’

She winced.

‘Allow me a few minutes to think,’ she said.

He nodded, bowed, set his riding sword at his waist, and walked back into the courtyard.

His men stood like statues, their scarlet surcoats livid against their grey surroundings. The horses fretted – but only a little – and the men less.

‘Be easy,’ he said.

They all took breath together. Stretched arms tired from bearing armour, or hips bruised from mail and cuirass.

Michael was the boldest. ‘Are we in?’ he asked.

The captain didn’t meet his eye because he’d noticed an open window across the courtyard, and seen the face framed in it. ‘Not yet, my honey. We are not in yet.’ He blew a kiss at the window.

The face vanished.

Ser Milus, his primus pilus and standard bearer, grunted. ‘Bad for business,’ he said. And then, as an afterthought, ‘m’lord.’

The captain flicked him a glance and looked back to the dormitory windows.

‘There’s more virgins watching us right now,’ Michael opined, ‘Then have parted their legs for me in all my life.’

Jehannes, the senior marshal, nodded seriously. ‘Does that mean one, young Michael? Or two?’

Guillaume Longsword, the junior marshal, barked his odd laugh, like the seals of the northern bays. ‘The second one said she was a virgin,’ he mock-whined. ‘At least, that’s what she told me!’

Coming through the visor of his helmet, his voice took on an ethereal quality that hung in the air for a moment. Men do not look on horror and forget it. They merely put it away. Memories of the steading were still too close to the surface, and the junior marshal’s voice had summoned them, somehow.

No one laughed. Or rather, most of them laughed, and all of it was forced.

The captain shrugged. ‘I have chosen to give our prospective employer some time to consider her situation,’ he said.

Milus barked a laugh. ‘Stewing in her juice to raise the price, is that it?’ he asked. He nodded at the door of the chapel. ‘Yon has no liking for us.’

The priest continued to stand in his doorway.

‘Think he’s a dimwit? Or is he the pimp?’ Ser Milus asked. And stared at the priest. ‘Be my guest, cully. Stare all ye like.’

The soldiers chuckled, and the priest went into the chapel.

Michael flinched at the cruelty in the standard bearer’s tone, then stepped forward. ‘What is your will, m’lord?’

‘Oh,’ the captain said, ‘I’m off hunting.’ He stepped away quickly, with a wry smile, walked a few steps toward the smithy, concentrated . . . and vanished.

Michael looked confused. ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

Milus shrugged, shifting the weight of his hauberk. ‘How does he do that?’ he asked Jehannes.

Twenty paces away, the captain walked into the dormitory wing as if it was his right to do so. Michael leaned as if to call out but Jehannes put his gauntleted hand over Michael’s mouth.

‘There goes our contract,’ Hugo said. His dark eyes crossed with the standard bearer’s, and he shrugged, despite the weight of the maille on his shoulders. ‘I told you he was too young.’

Jehannes eased his hand off the squire’s face. ‘He has his little ways, the Bourc.’ He gave the other men a minute shake of his head. ‘Let him be. If he lands us this contract-’

Hugo snorted, and looked up at the window.

The captain reached into the palace in his head.

A vaulted room, twelve sided, with high, arched, stained glass windows, each one bearing a different image set at even intervals between columns of aged marble that supported a groined roof. Under each window was a sign of the zodiac, painted in brilliant blue on gold leaf, and then a band of beaten bronze as wide as a man’s arm, and finally, at eye level, a series of niches between the columns, each holding a statue; eleven statues of white marble, and one iron-bound door under the sign of Ares.

In the exact centre of the room stood a twelfth statue – Prudentia, his childhood tutor. Despite her solid white marble skin, she smiled warmly as he approached her.

‘Clementia, Pisces, Eustachios,’ he said in the palace of his memory, and his tutor’s veined white hands moved to point at one sign and then another.

And the room moved.

The windows rotated silently above the signs of the zodiac, and the statues below the band of bronze rotated in the opposite direction until his three chosen signs were aligned opposite to the iron-bound door. And he smiled at Prudentia, walked across the tiles of the twelve-sided room and unlatched the door.

He opened it on a verdant garden of rich summer green – the dream memory of the perfect summer day. It was not always thus, on the far side of the door. A rich breeze blew in. It was not always this strong, his green power, and he deflected some with the power of his will, batting it into a ball and shoving it like a handful of summer leaves into a hempen bag he imagined into being and hung from Prudentia’s outstretched arm. Against a rainy day. The insistent green breeze stirred through his hair and then reached the aligned signs on the opposite wall and-

He moved away from the horses without urgency, secure in the knowledge that Michael would be distracted as he moved – and so would the watcher in the window.

The captain’s favourite phantasms depended on misdirection more than aethereal force. He preferred to add to their efficacy with physical efficiency – he walked quietly, and didn’t allow his cloak to flap.

At the door to the dormitory he reached into his memory palace and

leaned into the vaulted room. ‘Same again, Pru,’ he said.

Again the sigils moved as the marble statue pointed to the signs, already aligned above the door. He opened it again, allowed the green breeze to power his working, and let the door close.

He walked into the dormitory building. There were a dozen nuns, all big, capable women, sitting in the good light of the clerestory windows, and most of them were sewing.

He walked past them without a swirl of his scarlet cloak, his whole will focused on his belief that his presence there was perfectly normal and started up the stairs. No heads turned, but one older nun stopped peering at her embroidery and glanced at the stairwell, raised an eyebrow, and then went back to her work. He heard a murmur from behind him.

Not entirely fooled then, he thought. Who are these women?

His sabatons made too much noise and he had to walk carefully, because power – at least, the sort of power he liked to wield – was of limited use. The stairs wound their way up and up, turning as tightly as they would in any other fortress, to foul his sword arm if he was an attacker.

Which I am, of a sort, he thought. The gallery was immediately above the hall. Even on a day this grey, it was full of light. Three grey-clad novices leaned on the casemates of the windows, watching the men in the yard. Giggling.

At the edge of his power, he was surprised to find traces of their power.

He stepped into the gallery, and his sabaton made a distinct metallic scratch against the wooden floor – a clarion sound in a world of barefoot women. He didn’t try to strain credulity by willing himself to seem normal, here.

The three heads snapped around. Two of the girls turned and ran. The third novice hesitated for a fatal moment – looking. Wondering.

He had her hand. ‘Amicia?’ he said into her eyes, and then put his mouth over hers. Put an armoured leg inside her thighs and trapped her – turned her over his thigh as easily as throwing a child in a wrestling match, and she was in his arms. He rested his back plate against the ledge of the cloister and held her. Gently. Firmly.

She wriggled, catching her falling sleeve against the flange that protected his elbow. But her eyes were locked