The man suddenly swung again and, instinctively, Will threw the saxe up to parry the blow. But the swing was a feint and the man, with incredibly strong wrist work, twisted the ax back again and caught the saxe knife squarely in the middle of the blade. There was a ringing clang and the force of the blow tore the big knife from Will’s grip, sending it flying across the headland, the firelight flashing on its pinwheeling blade as it went. At the last moment, Will managed to avoid the follow-up stroke with another desperate leap.
He was farther than ever from the beacon now. He had no time to look and see how close the ship might be. This man was too good, too fast. Somehow, he had to neutralize that ax, with its enormous reach. For a moment, he thought of calling Tug. Then he stopped. The long-handled ax was designed as a weapon for foot soldiers to use against mounted warriors and, more specifically, their horses. Tug would come charging in to save him and the odds were he would be killed or maimed by a stroke from that ax.
An idea came. He slipped the longbow off his shoulder, holding it upright in his right hand, below the grip.
“Planning on shooting me, then, are you?” The man grinned at him. The minute Will reached for an arrow, the ax would split him from shoulder to waist, and they both knew it.
Will shuffled to his left, working his way back to the beacon. The man feinted several times and Will danced out of reach each time. But on each occasion, he managed to get closer to the beacon.
He slipped the satchel from his other shoulder, holding it by the strap, swinging back and forward, threatening the axeman with it. The man’s eyes narrowed warily as he watched.
Then Will flipped it overhand so that the strap caught on the edge of the iron firebox and the satchel swung into the fire. It was a totally unexpected move, and the man, expecting Will to swing the satchel at his head or face like a weapon, couldn’t stop his eyes from following it. He was distracted for no more than a fraction of a second, but it was enough. Will stepped in and slipped the end of the bow over the head of the ax, snagging the weapon in the narrow gap between the bow and the taut bowstring.
The bowstring was a string in name only. It was a stout cord designed to handle the eighty-pound draw weight of the longbow. Will heaved back on the bow, dragging the ax head down. His opponent tried to pull his weapon clear, and for a moment they struggled. Will had the bow in his right hand, which made it awkward to draw his throwing knife. He scrabbled in his pocket and found a striker, bringing it out and closing his left fist around its heavy brass shape.
The man was still jerking and tugging at the ax, twisting it in an attempt to break it free from the tenuous hold of the bow and the string. Will knew he had only seconds to act. Any moment now, the bow or the string would break.
WHOOOOFFFF!
An immense explosion erupted in the firebox. A blinding pillar of flame, vivid purple in color, shot seven meters into the air.
“What . . . ?” The axeman threw his disengaged left hand up in an instinctive movement to shield himself from the sudden explosion. As he turned toward the firebox in shock, his right jaw was exposed and Will swung the striker as hard as he could, an unsophisticated full round-arm swing that slammed his reinforced fist into the man’s jaw—at a point where nerve centers connected to the brain.
Will felt the grip on the ax suddenly loosen as it fell from the man’s hands to the grass, its weight dragging the bow tip down with it. A second later, his opponent hit the ground himself, his eyes rolled up in his head, his limbs slack and his body folding up like a rag doll.
Will staggered away from the flaring beacon. Fine grains of purple ash drifted down from the dark night sky and covered him. Shielding his eyes from the blaze, he looked out to sea. The ship had gone about and was clawing away from the beach, heading out to safe waters once more.
And now, for the first time, he became conscious of voices shouting on the beach and the ringing clash of weapons. He turned and looked. There was a large crowd of men visible in the light of the fires and lanterns—many more than the original number of moondarkers. They were fighting and struggling with each other, but as he watched, the fighting died down and it was obvious that one group had gained the upper hand in the struggle. The others were being compelled to sit down on the beach, their hands held behind their heads, under heavy guard. Will wasn’t surprised to see a familiar cloaked figure striding among the victorious group, pointing and issuing orders.
He moved over to the prone figure of the axeman, who was beginning to stir now. He rolled him onto his stomach and fastened his hands behind his back with a pair of leather thong thumb cuffs. Then he sank wearily onto the grass to wait for Halt.
As they rode home a few days later, Halt allowed himself one of his rare smiles. The majority of the moondarkers had been captured, with the aid of the Hambley town watch. Two of the wreckers had managed to escape in the confusion on the beach, but the other fourteen had been secured. Most important, the tall bearded man, their leader, was one of the prisoners.
Halt and Will had escorted them, secured together with chains and with their hands shackled, to the nearest garrison castle, where the local lord had been delighted to find room for them in his dungeon. They would be tried at the next District Assizes. With Will’s and Halt’s sworn testimony noted down by the castle lord’s secretary, there was no doubt that they would be convicted. All in all, it was a good result. Although Halt noticed that his young friend didn’t seem to share in his sense of satisfaction.
“Why the long face?” he asked.
Will turned to him moodily. “Don’t you start. I get enough of that from Tug.”
I tell it better than he does.
“Still,” said Halt, seemingly unaware of Tug’s interjection, “it’s been a good operation. We’ve shut down the moondarkers, captured their ringleader and saved a ship and its crew. You should be feeling happy.”
“I ruined my bow in the fight,” Will said. “The upper limb is hopelessly twisted. It’ll never shoot straight again.”
Halt shrugged. “You can always replace a bow,” he said. “Can’t say the same for your head.”
“It was my favorite bow,” Will said.
Halt raised an eyebrow. “Well, that makes it much more valuable than your head, I suppose.”
Will sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “I can always make another bow. But there was something else . . .”
He paused and Halt turned toward him, frowning, wondering what was on his mind. He’d noticed that his usually exuberant young friend had been somewhat withdrawn since his struggle with the axeman on the headland. Will had said little about the encounter and Halt wondered if, in fact, it had been a closer call than he was letting on. Perhaps that fight had shaken his confidence, he thought.
“Something else?” he prompted. If Will was having a reaction to the struggle with the moondarker, it would be better for him to get it out in the open and not bottle it up inside.
“I forgot . . . ,” Will said miserably. “When I threw my satchel in the fire, I forgot that my speech was in there.”
Halt took a few seconds to recognize the full import of the tragedy. Then he spoke very deliberately.
“You threw your speech in the fire?” he said.
Will gave a very dejected nod. “Yes.”
“And . . . would I be right in assuming that this was your only copy of the speech?”
“Yes.”
A long pause. Then: “You didn’t make any notes, did you?”
“Well, yes. I did. Quite a lot of them, in fact.”
“Ah. I see.”
“But . . . they were in the satchel too.” Will shook his head and turned to Halt. “Halt, it was such a great speech! I’d been working on it for weeks, you know.”
“I know,” Halt said. He was working very hard to keep his voice noncommittal.
They rode on in silence for several minutes. Then, tentatively, Halt opened the subject once more.
“Can you by any chance
remember any of it?” he asked.
Will shook his head. “Not a word. I’ve been trying ever since. But I can’t think of a single word.”
“You know, Will, a great speech is usually a pretty memorable one,” Halt said carefully. He was treading on delicate ground here. The previous time he’d discussed the speech with Will, Pauline had berated him for his lack of sensitivity.
“I suppose so,” Will agreed.
“So, doesn’t the fact that you can’t remember a single word of that speech tell you anything?”
Will frowned. That thought hadn’t occurred to him and he didn’t know if he cared to consider it.
“Are you saying that maybe it wasn’t such a great speech?”
“No. You’re saying that. Let me put it another way. Who is this speech for?” It wasn’t grammatical, but Halt had a habit of ignoring good grammar for the sake of brevity and clarity.
“Who? Well, it’s for—”
But before he could answer, Halt interrupted.“Is it for the King, or the Baron, or the hundreds of guests who will undoubtedly be present?”
“No.”
“Is it for some future historian, leafing through the records and finding an account of the wedding?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
Will shifted in his saddle uncomfortably. He could see where Halt was going. “I suppose it’s for Horace and Evanlyn.”
“You suppose?”
“I know. It’s for Horace and Evanlyn.” There was a note of certainty in his voice now.
Halt nodded several times. “And what do you want to say to them?”
“I don’t know . . . I suppose I want to say that . . . I love them both. They’re two of my very dearest, very oldest friends. That I can’t imagine a more perfect match than the two of them.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re both brave and loyal and totally honest. They’re just perfectly suited to each other. She’s bright and vivacious and funny. He’s steadfast and utterly dependable. And just as funny in his own quiet way. I would trust my life to either one of them without hesitation. I have done so in the past.”
He paused, thinking, hearing his own words and his true thoughts for the first time, devoid of any false embellishments and overblown phrasing.
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know . . . Yes. One more thing. I want them to know that if they ever need me, if they ever need to call on me, I will be there, no matter what.”
“That’s what you want to say?” Halt asked.
Will paused, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. There was a definite sense of purpose about him now. Halt was pleased to see it.
“And do you think that’s what they want to hear?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Halt reined in and Will checked Tug to stop beside him. They half turned in the saddle, facing each other, and Halt spread his hands and raised his eyebrows.
“Well then, Will, that’s all you need to say.”
Slowly, a rueful smile spread over Will’s face. “That speech I wrote,” he said. “It was pretty awful, wasn’t it?”
“It was appalling,” Halt said, then couldn’t resist adding, “and I say that with the greatest fulsomeness of my heart.”
Will winced as the memory of that phrase came back to him.
“Did I really write that?” he said.
Halt nodded. “Oh yes. You really wrote that.”
“Just as well I threw it in the fire, then,” Will said. He clicked his tongue and Tug started trotting down the highway again. Halt urged Abelard to follow them. He caught up and they rode side by side for several hundred meters in silence once more.
Then Halt said quizzically, “I didn’t realize your speech was in the satchel. Mind you, it does explain one thing I’ve been wondering about . . .” He let the sentence hang, unfinished, so that Will had to ask the question.
“What was that?”
“Why the flames turned purple. It wasn’t the dye. It was the speech.”
“And I suppose you’ll tell everyone about that, won’t you?” Will asked.
Halt turned a beatific smile upon him.
“Of course I will,” he said.
DINNER FOR FIVE
1
FOR WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN THE TENTH TIME IN AS MANY minutes, Jenny glanced around the interior of her restaurant. Everything seemed to be in order. The tables were neatly positioned, the chairs arranged around them in perfect symmetry. Each table was laid with a red-and-white-checked cloth, and the eating utensils glistened in their places. She walked quickly between the tables, checking that knives and forks were on the correct side of the settings. Her headwaiter, Rafe, hovered anxiously behind her.
Rafe was a good worker and a loyal employee. He was well intentioned, cheerful and honest. In fact, he was everything Jenny could hope for in a head waiter. Except for one failing. Rafe had an unfortunate tendency to confuse his left hand with his right. This meant that, from time to time, his cutlery settings became reversed, and for a perfectionist like Jenny, that was a source of extreme annoyance.
Some time back, Will had more or less solved the problem. He had pointed out to Rafe that a knife was like a small sword, and so it should be used in the right, or sword, hand. This simple mnemonic had been remarkably effective. For some weeks after, Rafe could be seen setting tables, from time to time making a mock sword stroke to establish which hand was which and which side the knives went on.
But occasionally, Jenny noticed, he became overconfident and placed the knives and forks where instinct told him they should go. When that happened, they mysteriously reversed their positions on the tables and Jenny’s temper, always close to boiling point, would explode.
Her friend Alyss, with a diplomat’s eye for compromise, had suggested that she could solve the problem by simply folding the knife and fork together in the napkin and placing the rolled bundle in the center of the setting. But Jenny was stubborn.
“Right is right and left is left,” she said. “Why can’t he learn that?”
She sensed Rafe behind her as she checked the restaurant. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that his right hand was describing small, jerking motions as he made incipient sword strokes to test the positioning of each setting. As she checked the last table, she turned to him and nodded.
“That’s all fine, Rafe. Good work.” She saw his shoulders sag in relief and a beaming smile break out across his open, honest face.
“Thank’ee, Mistress Jenny. I do try my best for ’ee.”
“I know, Rafe,” she said. She patted his hand and for a moment regretted the number of times she had cracked him across the head with a ladle when he had failed to live up to her high standards.
But only for a moment.
He followed her now to the kitchen, where her assistant chef was hard at work cutting and chopping in preparation for the evening meal. Scullery assistants hurried to and fro, bringing more food from the larder for the cook to prepare and polishing serving platters and cooking pans till they gleamed. At Jenny’s appearance, the pace in the kitchen increased noticeably.
Rafe could afford to be more sanguine about this part of the inspection. If something was wrong in the kitchen, he couldn’t be blamed for it. Jenny cast a professional eye around the room. Somewhat to Rafe’s disappointment, there seemed to be nothing wrong. He would have enjoyed seeing someone else suffer the cracking impact of Jenny’s ladle on the back of their head. She gestured to a row of ducks spitted on a long metal rod, their skins glistening with the spiced and flavored oil that had been rubbed over them.
“Those ducks will have to go over the fire no later than four o’clock,” she told the assistant chef.
The woman looked up, blew a stray strand of hair away from her eyes and nodded. “Aye, Mistress Jenny.”
“And make sure Norman turns them regularly. They must cook evenly.”
“Aye, mistress. Norman? You hear the mistress the
re?” she called to a young scullery assistant, who was currently bringing a basket of potatoes from the vegetable locker.
“Aye, Miss Ailsa. Aye, Mistress Jenny. I’ll turn them regular like. Never fear.”
Jenny nodded. The ducks would be placed on their spit over the large open fire in the dining room. They would be turned regularly so that the skin roasted evenly and crisped to a golden brown. The fat dripping onto the coals would sizzle and hiss and fill the room with its delicious odor, creating a truly mouthwatering atmosphere. Jenny had learned from Master Chubb, her mentor, that there was a certain amount of show business necessary in a good restaurant. There were only six ducks, but their effect on the atmosphere would far outweigh their relatively small number.
“Very well.” Jenny cast one more look around, trying to find something out of place, something that needed correction, and failed. Her staff watched her anxiously. This would be the first time in many months that Jenny had not overseen operations in the restaurant herself. She was something like a new mother leaving her baby in the care of others for the first time.
It would take a very special circumstance for Jenny to trust her restaurant to them in this way. Both Rafe and Ailsa knew that. And this was a special occasion. Tonight, she was cooking a romantic dinner for two in her cottage for a special guest.
A very special guest.
Tonight, the handsome, young Ranger Gilan was coming to dinner.
Resolutely, Jenny turned her back on the restaurant and strode up the high street of Wensley Village. It felt unnatural for her not to be in the kitchen at this time of day, preparing for the evening dinner service. But she had left Ailsa and Rafe in charge and she had to trust that she had trained them well.
“After all, I have to have some time off occasionally,” she muttered, resisting the almost overwhelming temptation to rush back and see what disasters had occurred in the two and a half minutes since she had left.
She entered the butcher’s stall, halfway down the high street. Edward, the butcher, looked up and smiled as he saw her. Jenny was an excellent customer, of course, buying large amounts of his product for her restaurant. And on top of that, she was extremely pretty. Just the sort of young lady that butchers the world over enjoyed flirting with.