The Red Knight (31 page)

The mayor shook his fist. ‘The
convoys
are coming. If we close the gates, this town will
die
!’ He paused. ‘For the love of God! There’s
money
involved.’

Ser John shrugged. ‘I hope the money helps when the boglins come,’ he said.

As if on cue, an alarm bell sounded.

After the mayor pounded out of the castle, Alcaeus went out on the wall and saw two farms burning. Ser John joined him. ‘I told him to bring the people in last night,’ he muttered.
‘Fucking idiot. Thanks for trying.’

Alcaeus watched the plumes of smoke rise and his stomach did flips. Suddenly, again, he was seeing those the irks under his horse. He had once, single-handed, fought off four assassins who were
going for his mother. Irks were much, much worse. He tasted bile.

He thought of lying down.

Instead, he drank wine. After a cup, he felt strong enough to visit his page, who was recovering from terror in the resilient way teenagers so. He left his page to cuddle with a servant girl and
walked wearily back to the guard room, where there was an open cask of wine.

He was on his fourth when Ser John’s fist closed around his cup. ‘I take it you are a belted knight,’ Ser John said. ‘I saw your sword, and you’ve used it.
Eh?’

Ser Alcaeus got up from his chair. ‘You dared draw my sword?’ he asked. At the Emperor’s court touching a man’s sword was an offence.

The old man grinned mirthlessly. ‘Listen, messire. This town is about to be attacked. I never thought to see it in my lifetime. I gather you had a bad day yesterday. Fine. Now I need you
to stop draining my stock of wine and get your armour on. They’ll go for the walls in about an hour, unless I miss my guess.’ He looked around the empty garrison room. ‘If we
fight like fucking heroes and every man does everything he can, we might just make it – I’m still trying to get that fool to send the women into the castle. This is the Wild, Ser
Knight. I gather you’ve tasted their mettle. Well – here they come again.’

Ser Alcaeus thought that this was a far, far cry from being a useful functionary at his uncle’s court. And he wondered if his true duty, given the message he had in his wallet, was to
gather his page and ride south before the roads closed.

But there was something about the old man. And besides, the day before he’d run like a coward, even if he’d had the blood of three of the things on his sword first.

‘I’ll arm,’ he said.

‘Good,’ Ser John said. ‘I’ll help, and then I’ll give you a wall to command.’

Abbington-on-the-Carak – Mag the Seamstress

Old Mag the seamstress sat in the good, warm sunshine on her doorstep, her back braced against the oak of her door frame, as she had sat for almost forty years of such mornings.
She sat and sewed.

Mag wasn’t a proud woman, but she had a certain place, and she knew it. Women came to her for advice on childbirth and savings, on drunken husbands, on whether or not to let a certain man
visit on a certain night. Mag knew things.

Most of all, she knew how to sew.

She liked to work early, when the first full light of the sun struck her work. The best time was immediately after Matins. If she managed to get straight to her work – and in forty years
of being a lay sister, helping with the altar service in her village church, of tending to her husband and two children she had missed the good early morning work hours all too often.

But when she got to it – when cooking, altar service, sick infants, aches and pains, and the will of the Almighty all let her be – why, she could do a day’s work by the time
the bells rang for Nones in the fortress convent two leagues to the west.

And this morning was one of those wonderful mornings. She’d been the lay server at church, which always left her with a special feeling, and she had laid flowers on her husband’s
grave, kissed her daughter in her own door yard and was now home in the first warm light, her basket by her side.

She was making a cap, a fine linen coif of the sort that a gentleman wore to keep his hair neat. It wasn’t a difficult object and would take her only a day or two to make, but there were
knights up at the fortress who used such caps at a great rate, as she had reason to know. A well-worked cap that fit just so was worth half a silver penny. And silver pennies were not to be sneered
at, for a fifty-three-year-old widow.

Mag had good eyes, and she pricked the fine linen – her daughter’s linen, no less – with precision, her fine stitches as straight as a sword blade, sixteen to the inch, as good
or better as any Harndon tailor’s work.

She put the needle into the fine cloth and pulled the thread carefully through, feeling the fine wax on the thread, feeling the tension of the fine cloth, and aware that she pulled more than the
thread with each stitch – every one gathered a little sun. Before long, her line of stitches
sparkled
, if she looked at it just so.

Good work made her happy. Mag liked to examine the fine clothes that came through to Lis the laundress. The knights in the fortress had some beautiful things – usually ill-kept but well
made. And many less well-made clothes, too. Mag had plans to sell them clothes, repairs, darning—

Mag smiled at the world as she stitched. The sisters were, in the main, good landlords, and much better than most feudal lords. But the knights and their men brought a little colour to life. Mag
didn’t mind hearing a man say fuck, as long as he brought a little of the outside world to Abbington-on-the-Carak.

She heard the horses, and her eyes flicked up from her work. She saw dust rising well off to the west. At this hour, it could never bode well.

She snorted and put her work in her basket, carefully sheathing her best needle – Harndon work, there was no local man who could make such – in a horn needle case. No crisis was so
great that Mag needed to lose a needle. They were harder and harder to get.

More dust. Mag knew the road. She guessed there were ten horses or more.

‘Johne! Our Johne!’ she called. The Bailli was her gossip, and occasionally more. He was also an early riser, and Mag could see him pruning his apple trees.

She stood and pointed west. After a long moment, he raised an arm and jumped down from the tree.

He dusted his hands and spoke to a boy, and heartbeats later that boy was racing for the church. Johne jumped the low stone wall that separated his property from Mag’s and bowed.

‘You have good eyes, m’ame.’ He didn’t smirk or make any obvious gesture, which she appreciated. Widowhood brought all sorts of unwelcome offers – and some welcome
ones. He was clean, neat, and polite, which had become her minimum conditions for accepting even the most tenuous of male approaches.

She enjoyed watching a man of her own age who could still jump a stone wall.

‘You seem unconcerned,’ she murmured.

‘To the contrary,’ he said quietly. ‘If I were a widowed seamstress I would pack all my best things and be prepared to move into the fortress.’ He gave her half a smile,
another bow, and sprang back over the wall. ‘There’s been trouble,’ he added.

Mag didn’t ask foolish questions. Before the horses rode into their little town square, shaded by an ancient oak, she had two baskets packed, one of work and one of items for sale. She
filled her husband’s travelling pack with spare shifts and clothes, and took her heaviest cloak and a lighter cloak – for wearing and sleeping, too. She stripped her bed, took the
bolster and rolled the blankets and linens tightly around it to make a bundle.

‘Listen up!’ called a loud voice – a
very
loud voice – from the village square.

Like all her neighbours she opened the upper half of her front door and leaned through it.

There were half a dozen men-at-arms in the square, all mounted on big horses and wearing well-polished armour and scarlet surcotes. With them were as many archers, all in less armour with bows
strapped across their backs, and as many valets.

‘The lady Abbess has ordered that the good people of Abbington be mustered and removed into the fortress immediately!’ the man bellowed. He was tall – huge, really, with arms
the size of most men’s legs, mounted on a horse the size of a small house.

Johne the Bailli, walked across the square to the big man-at-arms, who leaned down to him, and the two spoke – both of them gesturing rapidly. Mag went back to her packing. Out the back
she scattered feed for her chickens. If she wasn’t here for a week, they’d manage, longer, and they’d all be taken by something. She had no cow – Johne gave her milk –
but she had her husband’s donkeys.

My donkeys,
she reminded herself.

She’d never packed a donkey before.

Someone was banging at her open door. She shook her head at the donkeys, who looked back at her with weary resignation.

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.