To my sister-in-law, Nancy Watt
Contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Chapter One
Sauce
Albinkirk – Ser John Crayford
The Captain of Albinkirk forced himself to stop staring out his narrow, glazed window and do some work.
He was jealous. Jealous of a boy a third of his age, commanding a pretty company of lances. Riding about. While he sat in a town so safe it was dull, growing old.
Don’t be a fool, he told himself. All those deeds of arms make wonderful stories, but the doing is cold, wet and terrifying. Remember?
He sighed. His hands remembered everything – the blows, the nights on the ground, the freezing cold, the gauntlets that didn’t quite fit. His hands pained him all the time, awake or asleep.
The Captain of Albinkirk, Ser John Crayford, had not started his life as a gentleman. It was a rank he’d achieved through pure talent.
For violence.
And as a reward, he sat in this rich town with a garrison a third the size that it was supposed to be on paper. A garrison of hirelings who bossed the weak, abused the women, and took money from the tradesmen. A garrison that had too much cash, because the posting came with the right to invest in fur caravans from the north. Albinkirk furs were the marvel of ten countries. All you had to do to get them was ride north or west into the Wild. And then come back alive.
The captain had a window that looked north-west.
He tore his eyes away from it. Again.
And put pen to paper. Carefully, laboriously, he wrote:
My Lord,
A Company of Adventure – well ordered, and bearing a pass signed by the constable – passed the bridge yesterday morning; near to forty lances, each lance composed of a knight, a squire, a valet and an archer. They were very well armed and armoured in the latest Eastern manner – steel everywhere. Their captain was polite but reserved; very young, refused to give his name; styled himself The Red Knight. His banner displayed three lacs d’amour in gold on a field sable. He declared that they were, for the most part, your Grace’s subjects, lately come from the wars in Galle. As his pass was good, I saw no reason to keep him.
Ser John snorted, remembering the scene. No one had thought to warn him that a small army was coming his way from the east. He’d been summoned to the gate early in the morning. Dressed in a stained cote of fustian and old hose, he’d tried to face down the cocky young pup in his glorious scarlet and gold, mounted on a war horse the size of a barn. He hadn’t enough real soldiers to arrest any of them. The damned boy had Great Noble written all over him, and the Captain of Albinkirk thanked God that the whelp had paid the toll with good grace and had good paper, as any incident between them would have gone badly. For him.
He realised he was looking at the mountains. He tore his eyes away. Again.
He also had a letter from the Abbess at Lissen Carak. She had sent to me last autumn for fifty good men, and I had to refuse her – your Grace knows I am short enough of men as it is. I suppose she has offered her contract to sell-swords in the absence of local men.
I am, as your Grace is aware, almost one hundred men under strength; I have but four proper men-at-arms, and many of my archers are not all they should be. I respectfully request that your Grace either replace me, or provide the necessary funds to increase the garrison to its proper place.
I am your Grace’s humblest and most respectful servant, John Crayford
The Master of the Guild of Furriers had invited him to dinner. Ser John leaned back and decided to call it a day, leaving the letter lying on his desk.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
‘Sweet Jesu,’ Michael called from the other side of the wall. It was as high as a man’s shoulder, created by generations of peasants hauling stones out of fields. Built against the wall was a two-storey stone house with outbuildings – a rich manor farm. Michael stood in the yard, peering through the house’s shattered main door. ‘Sweet Jesu,’ the squire said again. ‘They’re all dead, Captain.’
His war horse gave the captain the height to see over the wall to where his men were rolling the bodies over, stripping them of valuables as they sought for survivors. Their new employer would not approve, but the captain thought the looting might help her understand what she was choosing to employ. In his experience, it was usually best that the prospective employer understand what he – or she – was buying. From the first.
The captain’s squire vaulted over the stone wall that separated the walled garden from the road and took a rag from Toby, the captain’s page. Sticky mud, from the endless spring rain, covered his thigh-high buckled boots. He produced a rag from his purse to cover his agistation and began to clean his boots. Michael was fussy and dressed for fashion. His scarlet company surcoat was embroidered with gold stars; the heavy wool worth more than an archer’s armour. He was well born and could afford it, so it was his business.
It was the captain’s business that the lad’s hands were shaking.
‘When you feel ready to present yourself,’ the captain said lightly, but Michael froze at his words, then made himself finish his task with the rag before tossing it back to Toby.
‘Apologies, m’lord,’ he said with a quick glance over his shoulder. ‘It was something out of the Wild, lord. Stake my soul on it.’
‘Not much of a stake,’ the captain said, holding Michael’s eye. He winked, as much to amuse the onlookers of his household as to steady his squire, who was pale enough to write on. Then he looked around.
The rain was light – just enough to weigh down the captain’s heavy scarlet cloak without soaking it through. Beyond the walled steading stretched fields of dark, newly planted earth, as shining and black in the rain as the captain’s horse. The upper fields toward the hills were rich with new greenery and dotted with sheep. Good earth and fertile soil promised rich crops, as far as the eye could see on both sides of the river. This land was tamed, covered in a neat geometric pattern of hedgerows and high stone walls separating tilled plots, or neatly scattered sheep and cattle, with the river to ship them down to the cities in the south. Crops and animals whose riches had paid for the fortress nunnery – Lissen Carak – that capped the high ridge to the south, visible from here as a crenelated line of pale stone. Grey, grey, grey from the sky to the ground. Pale grey, dark grey, black.
Beyond the sheep, to the north, rose the Adnacrags – two hundred leagues of dense mountains that lowered over the fields, their tops lost in the clouds.
The captain laughed at his own thoughts.
The dozen soldiers nearest him looked; every head turned, each wearing matching expressions of fear.
The captain rubbed the pointed beard at his chin, shaking off the water. ‘Jacques?’ he asked his valet.
The older man sat quietly on a war horse. He was better armed than most of the valets; wearing his scarlet surcote with long, hanging sleeves over an Eastern breastplate, and with a fine sword four feet long to the tip. He, too, combed the water out of his pointed beard while he thought.
‘M’lord?’ he asked.
; ‘How did the Wild make it here?’ The captain asked. Even with a gloved hand keeping the water from his eyes, he couldn’t see the edge of the Wild – there wasn’t a stand of trees large enough to hide a deer within a mile. Two miles. Far off to the north, many leagues beyond the rainy horizon and the mountains, was the Wall. Past the Wall was the Wild. True, the Wall was breached in many places and the Wild ran right down into the country. The Adnacrags had never been cleared. But here—
Here, wealth and power held the Wild at bay. Should have held the Wild at bay.
‘The usual way,’ Jacques said quietly. ‘Some fool must have invited them in.’
The captain chuckled. ‘Well,’ he said, giving his valet a crooked smile, ‘I don‘t suppose they’d call us if they didn’t have a problem. And we need the work.’
‘It ripped them apart,’ Michael said.
He was new to the trade and well-born, but the captain appreciated how quickly he had recovered his poise. At the same time, Michael needed to learn.
‘Apart,’ Michael repeated, licking his lips. His eyes were elsewhere. ‘It ate her. Them.’
Mostly recovered, the captain thought to himself. He nodded to his squire and gave his destrier, Grendel, a little rein so he backed a few steps and turned. The big horse could smell blood and something else he didn’t like. He didn’t like most things, even at the best of times, but this was spooking him and the captain could feel his mount’s tension. Given that Grendel wore a chamfron over his face with a spike a foot long, the horse’s annoyance could qucikly translate into mayhem.
He motioned to Toby, who was now sitting well to the side and away from the isolated steading-house and eating, which is what Toby tended to do whenever left to himself. The captain turned to face his standard bearer and his two marshals where they sat their own fidgeting horses in the rain, waiting for his commands.
‘I’ll leave Sauce and Bad Tom. They’ll stay on their guard until we send them a relief,’ he said. The discovery of the killings in the steading had interrupted their muddy trek to the fortress. They’d been riding since the second hour after midnight, after a cold camp and equally cold supper. No one looked happy.
‘Go and get me the master of the hunt,’ he added, turning back to his squire. When he was answered only with silence, he looked around. ‘Michael?’ he asked quietly.
‘M’lord?’ The young man was looking at the door to the steading. It was oak, bound in iron, and it had been broken in two places, the iron hinges inside the door had bent where they’d been forced off their pins. Trios of parallel grooves had ripped along the grain of the wood – in one spot, the talons had ripped through a decorative iron whorl, a clean cut.
‘Do you need a minute, lad?’ the captain asked. Jacques had seen to his own mount and was now standing at Grendel’s big head, eyeing the spike warily.
‘No – no, m’lord.’ His squire was still stunned, staring at the door and what lay beyond it.
‘Then don’t stand on ceremony, I beg.’ The captain dismounted, thinking that he had used the term lad quite naturally. Despite the fact that he and Michael were less than five years apart.
‘M’lord?’ Michael asked, unclear what he’d just been told to do.
‘Move your arse, boy. Get me the huntsman. Now.’ The captain handed his horse to the valet. Jacques was not really a valet. He was really the captain’s man and, as such, he had his own servant – Toby. A recent addition. A scrawny thing with large eyes and quick hands, completely enveloped in his red wool cote, which was many sizes too big.
Toby took the horse and gazed at his captain with hero-worship, a big winter apple forgotten in his hand.
The captain liked a little hero-worship. ‘He’s spooked. Don’t give him any free rein or there’ll be trouble,’ the captain said gruffly. He paused. ‘You might give him your apple core though,’ he said, and the boy smiled.
The captain went into the steading by the splintered door. Closer up, he could see that the darker brown was not a finish. It was blood.
Behind him, his destrier gave a snort that sounded remarkably like human derision – though whether it was for the page or his master was impossible to tell.
The woman just inside the threshold had been a nun before she was ripped open from neck to cervix. Her long, dark hair, unbound from the confines of her wimple, framed the horror of her missing face. She lay in a broad pool of her own blood that ran down into the gaps between the boards. There were tooth marks on her skull – the skin just forward of one ear had been shredded, as if something had gnawed at her face for some time, flensing it from the bone. One arm had been ripped clear of her body, the skin and muscle neatly eaten away so that only shreds remained, bones and tendons still hanging together . . . and then it had been replaced by the corpse. The white hand with the silver IHS ring and the cross was untouched.
The captain looked at her for a long time.
Just beyond the red ruin of the nun was a single clear footprint in the blood and ordure, which was already brown and sticky in the moist, cool air. Some of the blood had begun to leech into the pine floor boards, smooth from years of bare feet walking them. The leeched blood blurred the edge of the print, but the outline was clear – it was the size of a war horse’s hoof or bigger, with three toes.
The captain heard his huntsman come up and dismount outside. He didn’t turn, absorbed in the parallel exercises of withholding the need to vomit and committing the scene to memory. There was a second, smudged print further into the room, where the creature had pivoted its weight to pass under the low arch to the main room beyond. It had dug a furrow in the pine with its talons. And a matching furrow in the base board that ran up into the wattle and plaster. A dew claw.
‘Why’d this one die here when the rest died in the garden?’ he asked.
Gelfred stepped carefully past the body. Like most gentlemen, he carried a short staff – really just a stick shod in silver, like a mountebank’s wand. Or a wizard’s. He used it first to point and then to pry something shiny out of the floorboards.
‘Very good,’ said the captain.
‘She died for them,’ Gelfred said. A silver cross set with pearls dangled from his stick. ‘She tried to stop it. She gave the others time to escape.’
‘If only it had worked,’ said the captain. He pointed at the prints.
Gelfred crouched by the nearer print, laid his stick along it, and made a clucking sound with his tongue.
‘Well, well,’ he said. His nonchalance was a little too studied. And his face was pale.
The captain couldn’t blame the man. In a brief lifetime replete with dead bodies, the captain had seldom seen one so horrible. Part of his conscious mind wandered off a little, wondering if her femininity, the beauty of her hair, contributed to the utter horror of her destruction. Was it like desecration? A deliberate sacrilege?
And another, harder part of his mind walked a different path. The monster had placed that arm just so. The tooth marks that framed the bloody sockets that had been her eyes. He could imagine, far too well.
It had been done to leave terror. It was almost artistic.
He tasted salt in his mouth and turned away. ‘Don’t act tough on my account, Gelfred,’ he said. He spat on the floor, trying to get rid of the taste before he made a spectacle of himself.
‘Never seen worse, and that’s a fact,’ Gelfred said. He took a long, slow breath. ‘God shouldn’t allow this!’ he said bitterly.
‘Gelfred,’ the captain said, with a bitter smile. ‘God doesn’t give a fuck.’
Their eyes met. Gelfred looked away. ‘I will know what there is to know,’ he said, looking grim. He didn’t like the captain’s blasphemy – his face said as much. Especially not when he was about to work with God’s power.
Gelfred touched his stick to the middle of the print, and there was a moment of change, as if their eyes had adjusted to a new light source, or stronger sunlight.
‘Pater noster qui es in caelus,’ Gelfred in
toned in plainchant.
The captain left him to it.
In the garden, Ser Thomas’ squire and half a dozen archers had stripped the bodies of valuables – and collected all the body parts strewn across the enclosure, reassembled as far as possible, and laid them out, wrapped in cloaks. The two men were almost green, and the smell of vomit almost covered the smell of blood and ordure. A third archer was wiping his hands on a linen shirt.
Ser Thomas – Bad Tom to every man in the company – was six foot six inches of dark hair, heavy brow and bad attitude. He had a temper and was always the wrong man to cross. He was watching his men attentively, an amulet out and in his hand. He turned at the rattle of the captain’s hardened steel sabatons on the stone path and gave him a sketchy salute. ‘Reckon the young ‘uns earned their pay today, Captain.’
Since they weren’t paid unless they had a contract, it wasn’t saying much.
The captain merely grunted. There were six corpses in the garden.
Bad Tom raised an eyebrow and passed something to him.
The captain looked at it, and pursed his lips. Tucked the chain into the purse at his waist, and slapped Bad Tom on his paulder-clad shoulder. ‘Stay here and stay awake,’ he said. ‘You can have Sauce and Gelding, too.’
Bad Tom shrugged. He licked his lips. ‘Me an’ Sauce don’t always see eye to eye.’
The captain smiled inwardly to see this giant of a man – feared throughout the company – admit that he and a woman didn’t ‘see eye to eye’.
She came over the wall to join them.
Sauce had won her name as a whore, giving too much lip to customers. She was tall, and in the rain her red hair was toned to dark brown. Freckles gave her an innocence that was a lie. She had made herself a name. That said all that needed to be said.
‘Tom fucked it up already?’ she asked.
Tom glared.
The captain took a breath. ‘Play nicely, children. I need my best on guard here, frosty and awake.’