The King's assassin

into a sea of mud that had once been fields full of turnips. The Hawks formed up into their battle lines, shields locked together, spears held at the ready, and waited. Meridian was coming.

‘Hold fast, lad,’ muttered Tarn. Men pressed either side of Berren and behind him too, a battle line three ranks deep and more than a hundred wide. ‘Keep your shield up. Keep your eyes open and watch your feet!’ Meridian’s line would be longer, Tarn had already said that, and now Tarn was standing right next to him and Berren’s eyes were wide and ready to fight. ‘If they come at us with horse, get down on your knees. Hold your spear steady and let the crossbows behind you do their work.’ Not that he hadn’t told them the same thing a hundred times, not that they hadn’t practised it with the lancers. ‘When it comes to the push and shove, watch your feet. You slip over and go down — and men will in this mud — you’ll never get up. When they come at you, you stab them in the face with your spear or you stab them in the foot, because that’s all you’ll be able to reach. Your spear gets stuck, drop it and use your sword. Your life belongs to the men either side of you and theirs to you. Remember that.’

Berren’s heart started to beat faster. He thought about how he’d always wanted to learn to fight, how he’d spent every day of his life in Deephaven yearning for it. But this would be no scattered chaos like the battle on the beach where every man had fought for himself; no, here was a real battle, the real thing, where men were crushed together, where it started with a rain of arrows or a charge of horse and all came down to who broke first, and learning swords had nothing to do with it.

Somewhere off through the rain he heard distant shouting. Talon rode along the battle line. Two hundred men lifted their shields and locked them together. The fear started to rise in Berren’s throat. He had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. What use were quick feet and a flashing sword when there were men pressed in all around him?

And then Talon stopped in front of him. ‘You!’ He pointed at Berren. ‘Out of the line! Now!’

Berren couldn’t bring himself to look at the faces of the men around him as he stepped out. A lot of them were going to die. He was no better than them and they knew it — he knew it. He ought to be with them, facing what they faced, fighting with them, fighting for them, dying perhaps, and yet he was shaking with relief. Talon stopped again a moment later as he rode along the line, and then again, each time picking a man to come with him. The shorter men, Berren realised. The small ones. The ones who might be quick and fast but might not be as strong as the rest. The weak links! He almost gasped. That was him! For all his skill with a sword, in this battle line where everything would come down to strength and grunts, he was weak!

‘Put your shields down,’ Talon said quietly, voice half lost in the wind. ‘You won’t be needing those.’ He handed each of them a crossbow and pointed through the rain. ‘There’s a farm half a mile that way. That’s where Meridian will be. The lancers will come around the right flank towards it and draw out his reserve. You will circle around to the left. Do whatever damage you can. Good luck.’ He saluted. The other men saluted back but Berren just stared. Then Talon rode along the front of the Hawks’ battle line, shouting rousing cries while the soldiers shouted back. In the lashing rain, men banged their spears and swords against their shields. The others Talon had chosen ran off into the sodden haze. Some, perhaps, were simply running away. Was that why Talon had chosen them? Did he know they were the ones who would break? Berren stayed where he was. He watched, creeping forward, keeping pace with the edge of the line. He couldn’t simply leave, could he? Leave the men he’d fought with on the beach, the men he’d lived with through the summer?

Meridian’s army emerged out of the rain like a wall of ghosts, banging their own spears and shields. Shouts went up from both sides: The Hawks! The Panther! The Black Swords! For Talon! For Meridian! Talon had three ranks to Meridian’s five. Somewhere in the haze Berren thought he heard galloping hooves, or perhaps he felt them through the earth, for he certainly didn’t see any horsemen.

The Hawks checked their advance — the front rank dropped to a crouch with their spears at the ready, revealing both ranks behind with crossbows. The strings were wet and sloppy, but the range was short, and four hundred bolts slammed into Meridian’s wall of shields. Men fell. In the mud, soldiers tripped and slipped over the bodies of the fallen, but the wall of shields came on, and now they returned a barrage of their own. The Hawks rose to their feet. Another shout tore through the rain. Meridian’s men began to run — not a flat-out charge, but a steady trot, keeping their wall intact. As Berren watched, the back ranks of the Hawks threw their crossbows away, high and over their shoulders. They readied their spears.

But not all of them. Along Talon’s line tiny sparks of flaming light arced through the air towards the advancing soldiers. Even through the rain, light flashed bright enough to make Berren cringe. Fire blossomed along Meridian’s line; men screamed and burned. Their charge faltered. The wall of shields wavered, and now the Hawks launched their own charge. They crashed into Meridian’s line, its soldiers still reeling and screaming, the smell of singed flesh and hair mingling with the smell of rain and earth. The shield wall cracked and broke in a dozen places. Around the edge, soldiers broke away. Berren raced after them. He cut down one man who didn’t even try to fight, just ran and wasn’t quick enough, and then a second who tried to dart past him and slipped in the mud. The next one he let go. By then, everyone was so covered in filth it was almost impossible to tell who was who any more. And they were running — why kill a man who was already running?

He sighed, shook himself down and sheathed his sword. Somewhere out there was King Meridian. Perhaps Kuy too, both of them men Talon wanted him to kill. Quietly he applauded the Prince of War. Meridian had a cohort of men in heavy armour, two cohorts of longbow archers and around fifty cavalrymen. In this mud, in this rain, in this roiling mass of confusion, they were useless. It all came down to men in thick leather and old mail hacking and stabbing at each other with swords and short spears.

There were more of Meridian’s men around him now, lurching through the mud, back towards the general direction of Tethis. Berren slipped in among them, but he’d barely gone a dozen paces when someone was running at him out of the rain, and Berren had no idea whether this was a friend or an enemy or just some irate peasant, letting him know what he thought of what was happening to his turnip field. All he could see was a madman covered with black mud, with wild white eyes and a great big axe.

‘Cowards! Get back and fight or take what’s coming to you!’ The axe swung. Berren ducked and tried to jump away, but the wet earth took his feet out from under him. He landed flat on his back, spattering mud in all directions as the axe split the air where he’d been standing. The axeman almost lost his balance as well. ‘Vermin, all of you! Get back and fight! Afore I cut you all down like this one!’ Berren tried to scrabble to his feet but he kept slipping. The axeman steadied himself. Somewhere underneath the layers of black goo was a skirt of hardened leather strips. He had braided hair and a spindly beard, both caked in mud.

He’s from somewhere in the far south, then. The thought bubbled up from the storm of panic in his head. Berren pushed with his feet, trying in vain to find some sort of purchase. The mud was like a thick soup.

The man with the axe took a long hard look at him and braced himself. ‘Deserter,’ he hissed. ‘You know what that means.’

Desperate, Berren threw a handful of mud. It caught the axeman squarely in the face. He shuddered, pitched over backwards and didn’t move.

When at last Berren found his feet, the axeman was still lying there. Berren stood, waiting for his heart to stop racing, for his hands to stop shaking, for the urge to run away to fade. He dropped to his knees and threw up. Then he looked down at the axeman again, sprawled flat on his back in the slime. Already mud had started to ooze between the dead man’s fingers. His face was covered in dirt and the tail of a crossbow bolt stuck out of his chest, punched straight through his mail shirt. Berren looked back the way he’d come, but all he could see was a handful of ghostly shapes stumbling through the mud, covered in it and almost lost in the rain.

His sword lay on the ground. He picked it up and wiped it clean. He’d never know who’d saved his life. His crossbow was soaking wet and covered in filth — though at least the rain washed the worst of the mud away. Whether it would still work, he had no idea. Try not to get them wet, Talon had said, and they’d still been laughing about that as they’d locked their shields together in the pouring rain with Meridian’s soldiers rushing towards them.

He trudged on for a few minutes and then dropped to his haunches. He couldn’t see any more deserters now. The ground here was firmer, the soaked earth not yet trudged into slime by a thousand marching feet. The turnips hadn’t been crushed. Absently, he pulled a couple out of the ground and peeled them. They were sweet and ready for harvest. He peered through the grey sheeting rain for any sign of a building, a barn perhaps. That’s where Meridian would be. Somewhere with a roof over his head. Somewhere dry where he could see what was happening,