The Red Knight

now.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’ She drank her wine and, quite spontaneously, she took his hand. ‘I’m fifty,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never withstood a siege, myself.’ She let his hand go and bit her lip. ‘Are you afraid?’

He took her hand again and kissed it. ‘Always. Of everything. My mother made me a coward. She taught me, very carefully, to fear everything. Starting with her. See? You are become my confessor.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘I am the world’s expert at overcoming fear. Cowardice is the best school for courage, I find.’

She had to smile. ‘Such a wit. Vade retro!’

He nodded. ‘I’m too tired to get out of the chair.’

Their laughter and light conversation lasted through the rest of her wine, and his. Finally she said, after looking out the window, ‘And what do you fear most?’

‘I fear failure,’ he said. He laughed at his own words. ‘But alone of the people in this fortress, I have no fear of the Wild whatsoever.’

‘Are you posturing?’ she asked.

He stared into her fire for a little. ‘No,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I need to go look at the watch. I have tried something reckless tonight. I need to make sure my people are ready for it. You know that your enemy is using animals to watch us – yes?’

‘Yes,’ she said, very quietly.

‘Do you know anything else, my lady? Anything that would help your very young captain save your walls?’ He leaned toward her.

She looked away. ‘No,’ she said.

He put his wine cup on the oak sideboard with a click. ‘I told you the truth.’

‘Let us have a few moments to marshal our forces,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘Go see to your watch. My few tawdry secrets are not in any way germane to our siege.’

He bowed, and she waved him away, so he went out into the stairwell. It was dark.

Her door closed, and he began to feel his way down the stone steps when a hand closed on his.

He knew her in a moment, and pulled the hand to his lips – faster than she could take it away. He heard her sigh.

That moment he considered crushing her against the stone wall. But it occurred to him that she must be there by the Abbess’ commission, and it would be rude, to say the least, to attack the novice outside the Abbess’ door. Or something like that went through his head – before her lips came down on his and her hands pushed against his shoulders.

His heart pounded. His mind went blank.

He could feel her power, now. As their bodies moved together – her tongue probing his – they were generating power.

She broke their kiss and stepped away – a sudden absence of warmth in the dark – and said ‘Now we are even.’ She took his hand. ‘Come.’

She led him down the dark stone steps. Across the hall – the bonfires in the courtyard made the stained glass figures flicker and wriggle as if they were animated, and fitful rainbows played across the hall floor. After the complete darkness of the Abbess’ solar stairwell, the hall seemed well enough lit.

She was taking him to the books. Halfway across the hall they kissed again. No one could have said which of them initiated it. But when his hand moved across her bodice, she stepped away.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to show you this, and I am not your whore.’

But she kept his hand. Led him to the book. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you understand?’ she asked, flipping the pages.

‘No,’ he admitted. There is nothing a young man enjoys less than telling the object of his affection how little he knows.

Her not-quite-a-smile played somewhere in the corner of her mouth. ‘You are one of us, are you not? I can feel you.’

His eyes were on hers, but when she looked at the book he looked too. Looked at the alembic in St Pancreas’s hand. And followed the saint’s pointing finger to a diagram, lower on the page – a tree.

He flipped to another page, where another saint pointed – this time to a cloud.

‘Is this a test?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘Yes.

‘Then I guess the book is a code. The shapes that the saints point to indicate the shape of a template that, when covering the text, will indicate what the reader should read.’ He ran his finger over the text across from St Eustachios. ‘It is a grimoire.’

‘A fantastically detailed, internally coded, referential grimoire,’ she said, and then bit her tongue which he found, just at that moment, intensely erotic. He reached to kiss her, but she made the dismissive motion women make when boys are tiresome. ‘Come,’ she said.

He followed her across the hall. He was conscious, at a remove, that he had a watch to oversee; a siege to command. But her hand in his held such promise. It was smooth, but rough. The hand of a woman who worked hard. But still smooth; like the surface of good armour.

She dropped his hand the moment she opened the courtyard door, and they were in the light again.

He wanted to say something to her – but he had no idea what he wanted to say.

She turned and looked back at him. ‘I have one more thing to show you,’ she said.

Even as she spoke, she pulled a cowl of not-seeing around herself.

He was being tested in another way.

He reached into the palace of his memory and did the same. He was there for long enough to see Prudentia looking at him with ferocious disapproval, and that the green spring outside his iron door was building up into a storm of epic proportions.

And then they slipped across the courtyard. They were scarcely invisible – one of the Lanthorn girls, spinning in a reel with a young archer, saw the captain clearly because she was dancing and she deftly avoided him as she whirled.

But he was not interrupted as he passed.

She stopped at the iron-bound dormitory door and he manipulated his phantasm so that it linked to hers. It was a very intimate thing to do – something he had never done with anyone but Prudentia, and which the sight of her had reminded him of.

She used to say that the mind was a temple, an inn, a garden, and an outhouse, and that casting with another magus partook of worship, intimate conversation, sex, and defecation.

But as his power reached to hers, hers accepted it, and they were linked.

He winced.

She winced as well.

And then they were in the dormitory, standing in a small hall where, on his former visit, older nuns had sat to read or to do needlework. There was light here. Most of the nuns were out in the yard, but two still sat quietly.

‘Look at them,’ Amicia said. ‘Look.’

He didn’t have to look too hard. Tendrils of power played about them.

‘All of you have the power?’ he asked.

‘Every one of us,’ she said. ‘Come.’

‘When will I see you again?’ he managed, as she led him along the northern curtain behind the stable block. An apple tree grew there, in a stone box set into the wall. There was a bench around it.

Amicia settled onto the bench.

He was too befuddled to seek to kiss her, so he simply sat.

‘All of you are witches?’ he asked.

‘That’s an ugly word for you to use, man-witch,’ she said. ‘Sorcerer. Warlock.’ She looked out over the wall.