The Red Knight

‘Ser knight?’ asked the boy with the crossbow.

He looked at the boy, and the boy flinched. Gawin sighed.

‘Ye weren’t moving,’ the boy said.

Gawin pressed his spurs to his horse’s side, and shifted his weight, and his destrier moved off. His once- handsome dark leather bridle was stained with the death of fifty thousand flowers, because Archangel ate every flower he could reach as soon as he’d figured out that the once fierce hands on the reins weren’t likely to stop him eating. That’s what his misery meant to his war horse – more flowers to eat.

I am a coward and a bad knight. Gawin looked back at a life of malfeasance and tried to see where he’d gone wrong, and again and again he came back to a single moment – torturing his older brother. The five of them ganging up on Gabriel. Beating him. The pleasure of it – his screams-

Is that where it started? he asked himself.

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked again.

The horse’s head was down, and they’d stopped again.

‘Coming,’ Gawin muttered. Behind him, the convoy he was not guarding rolled north, and Gawin could see the Great Bend ahead, where the road turned to head west.

West towards the enemy. West, where his father’s castle waited full of his mother’s hate and his brother’s fear.

Why am I going west?

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked. This time, there was fear in his voice. ‘What’s that?’

Gawin shook himself out of his waking dream. The goldsmith’s boy – Adrian? Allan? Henry? – was backing away from a clump of trees just to his left.

‘There’s something there,’ the boy said.

Gawin sighed. The Wild was not here. His horse stood among wildflowers, and last year this field had been ploughed.

Then he saw the sickly-pale arm, light brown, shiny like a cockroach, holding a stone-tipped javelin. He saw it and it saw him in the same moment, and he leaned to the left with the habit of hard training and ripped his long sword from its scabbard.

The boglin threw its weapon.

Gawin cut the shaft out of the air.

The boglin gave a thin scream of anger, balked of its prey, and the goldsmith’s boy shot it. His crossbow loosed with a snap and the bolt went home into the creature with a slurpy thud and came straight out the other side in a spray of gore, leaving the small horror to flop bonelessly on the wildflowers for as long as a trout might take to die, making much the same gasping motions with its toothless mouth, and then its eyes filmed over and it was gone.

‘They always have gold,’ the goldsmith’s boy said, taking a step towards it.

‘Step back, young master, and load that latch again.’ Gawin was shocked at his voice – calm, commanding. Alive.

The boy obeyed.

Gawin backed Archangel slowly, watching the nearest woods.

‘Run for the wagons, boy. Sound the alarm.’

There was more movement, more javelin heads, a flash of that hideous cockroach brown, and the boy turned and ran.

Gawin slammed his visor down.

He wasn’t in full armour. Most of it was in a goldsmith’s wagon, wrapped in tallow and coarse sacking in two wicker baskets because he had no squires to keep it. And because wearing it might have meant something.

So he was wearing his stained jupon, his boots, his beautiful steel gauntlets and his bassinet, riding a horse worth more than three of the wagons full of fine wools he was protecting. He backed Archangel faster, sawing the reins back and forth as his destrier all but trotted backwards.

The first javelin came out of the woods, high. He had his sword in his right hand, all the way down by his left side, the position his father’s master at arms had taught him. He could hear the man saying ‘Cut up, mind! Not into your own horse, ye daft thing!’

He cut up, severing the weapon’s haft and breaking its flight.

Behind him, he heard the boy yelling ‘To arms! To arms!’

He risked a long glance back at the convoy. It was hard to focus through the piercing of his visor, hard to pick up distant movement, but he thought he could see Old Bob directing men in all directions.

He turned back to see the air full of javelins, and he cut – up, down, up again as fast as thought. A javelin haft caught him in the side of head and rang his helmet like a bell, even with his padded arming cap. He smelt his own blood.

Turned his horse’s head – because once they’d all thrown, he had a moment to get around, and get away.

Two of them were running for him. They were fast, moving like insects – so low to the ground that they were a danger to horses’ legs. Archangel reared, pivoted on his hind legs, and a powerful forefoot shot out like a boxer’s punch.

Gawin flicked his sword out along his fingers, lengthening his grip until he was holding only the disc-shaped pommel and, in the same motion, made a wrist cut down and back.

Archangel’s boglin popped like a ripe melon, its chest and neck caving in with a dull thud and a fine spray of ichor. Gawin’s screeched as the cold iron pierced its hide – iron was poison to its kind, and it screamed its hate as its tiny soul rose from its corpse like a minute thundercloud that dissipated on the first whiff of breeze.

All at once they were away, the big horse galloping easily over the wildflowers. Gawin had trouble breathing. His visor seemed to cut all the air from his lungs and his chest was tight.

As he rode, he could see there were other knots of the things – perhaps four or five groups of them spread across the flowers like shit stains on a pretty dress, and suddenly he was filled with a fey energy, a will to do a great deed and die in the accomplishment.

I am a knight, he thought fiercely.

Gawin sat up in the saddle, holding his long, sharp sword with new purpose, and he turned Archangel and raised it at the boglins. Something dead within him rekindled as the sun lit the blade like a torch.

He felt the touch of something divine, and he saluted as if riding in a tournament.

‘Blessed Saint George,’ he prayed, ‘let me die as I wish I had lived.’

He put his spurs to Archangel – gently, a nudge rather than a rake – and the great horse thundered forward.

The boglins scattered. Javelins flew past and then he was among them, through them, using his knees to turn Archangel in a long curve toward the next clump, who were already running for the trees.

Gawin had no plans to survive so he thundered after them, slaying any that stood or were merely too slow to escape, leaning far out from the saddle-

Something called from inside the wood – a wail that froze his blood.

It was out of the woods and at him in heartbeats.

Archangel was ready, pivoted his whole great bulk as Gawin’s weight shifted so that the war horse moved like his own feet in a fight, and the huge enemy – scent of burned hair and soap and old ashes – shot past. One taloned arm stretched out like an angry cat’s paw, reaching for Archangel’s neck, but the war horse was fast, and some steel-shod forefoot smashed the taloned hand with lethal precision.

The thing screamed, its left talon hanging limply, the bones broken. It rose on its hind feet, raised its right claw, and fire shot from its outstretched talons – a beam of fire that caught his body where the mail aventail of his helmet hung over his padded jupon. It had no pressure, no impact, and Gawin ducked his head, putting the peak of his helmet into the flame by instinct rather than training. His left eye flared with pain even as the first cold knife of agony pierced his left shoulder. His body, with no guidance from his mind, cut down blindly with the sword.

His blow was weak and badly directed – the edge of the blade didn’t even bite into the thing’s hide – but the sword’s weight fell on its brow ridge, and it stumbled.

Archangel shouldered it. Gawin almost lost his seat, his back and rump crashing into the high-backed saddle as his war horse made its own fighting decisions and leaped forward, bearing down the monster again with weight and momentum, so that the creature’s stumble was more off balance and the horse landed two more blows with its