Endless Knight (A Knights Through Time Romance #23)

Prologue

Thomas Ashcombe knew the day was lost when the sky turned red.

Not with sunset. The sun still hung high above the field, a hard white coin behind the smoke, giving no mercy to the men dying beneath it.

The red came from banners trampled into mud, from torn surcoats and open flesh, from the slick shine on sword blades and the churned ground beneath the horses’ hooves.

It came from everywhere at once, until the whole world seemed made of blood and iron, and the screams of men who had risen that morning believing courage might be enough.

Courage, Thomas had learned, did not stop a mounted charge.

Nor did loyalty or prayer.

“Hold!” he bellowed, though his voice had gone raw an hour ago and the word tore at his throat like a hook. “Hold the line, damn you!”

The line did not hold. It bent, shuddered, and broke beneath the king’s men like rotten wood under a boot.

Shields split. Spears snapped. A horse went down screaming, its rider trapped beneath it, clawing at the mud with both hands while men surged over him.

Somewhere to Thomas’s left, a boy from Ashcombe, Will Miller’s second son, cried for his mother in a voice too young for such a field.

Thomas tried to reach him.

A mailed shoulder slammed into him. He staggered, caught his footing, and brought his sword up in time to turn aside a blow meant for his head.

The force of it jarred his arm to the elbow.

He struck back before thought could slow him, his blade finding the gap beneath the other man’s helm.

The soldier dropped, and Thomas shoved past him, already searching for the boy.

He could no longer see him, there were too many bodies. Saints, there were too many bodies.

“Thomas!”

Hob’s voice cut through the din, rough as a millstone.

Thomas turned and saw him twenty paces away, blood running down one side of his face from a split scalp, still swinging an axe with grim, ugly purpose.

Hob had been with him since Wales, since before Ashcombe had ever been Thomas’s burden, and the sight of him upright in that sea of ruin struck Thomas with a relief so sharp it was almost pain.

“Back!” Hob shouted. “My lord, we must fall back!”

Thomas heard him, understood the words. Yet the part of him that had led these men here, that had taken their oaths and eaten beside them and listened to them boast of the ale they would drink when Montfort won the day, could not make his feet move.

Fall back from whom? From Wexford, who had kept the rolls in that cramped little hand and complained all the way from Ashcombe about the mud ruining his boots?

From Osbern’s brother, who had kissed the little wooden cross around his neck before the first charge and said his wife would have his hide if he lost it?

From Martin, who was wed three months and still blushed when men teased him about his bride?

From Will Miller’s boy, who had called for his mother?

Thomas turned back toward the crush.

Hob reached him before he could take three steps. The man was built broad as a church door and twice as stubborn. He caught Thomas by the back of his hauberk and hauled.

“My lord!”

“Let go.”

“Nay.”

Thomas rounded on him, fury blazing hot enough to burn through fear and grief alike. “I said let go.”

“And I said no, which proves I’ve more wit than you this day.” Hob’s face was grey beneath the blood, his eyes bright and terrible. “They are gone.”

Thomas looked past him. The field had become a thing from hell.

Simon de Montfort’s men were being cut apart.

Not beaten. Cut apart. The king’s banners snapped above the press, bright and pitiless, while the losing side folded inward beneath the weight of horses, steel, and the dreadful certainty of defeat.

The air stank of sweat, blood, churned grass, and the hot copper reek of bodies.

Smoke drifted from somewhere beyond the ridge.

A crow already circled overhead, black wings patient as a priest.

“They are not all gone,” Thomas said.

Hob’s grip tightened. “They will be if you stay to die beside them.”

A rider came at them then, one of the royalists, his horse flecked white with foam and red at the chest. Thomas shoved Hob aside and took the impact on his shield. The blow drove him back three steps. Thomas ducked beneath the next slash, came up hard, and opened the man’s thigh from knee to hip.

The rider screamed and toppled.

Another man rushed in, then another. For a while there was only the work.

Step, turn, cut, breathe if there was time.

Thomas had always understood battle best in pieces.

A wrist exposed. A foot placed badly. The twitch before a man struck high.

The half breath between one killing and the next.

He had won his reputation in those pieces, built it on mud and discipline and the stubborn refusal to die when better men had managed it.

But today the pieces would not fit together.

There were too many enemies. Too few of his own left standing. The shouts that had guided him were gone, swallowed by the roar. His arm grew heavy. The mail at his side had split. Blood slid warm beneath his tunic, though whether it was his own or someone else’s he could not tell.

“Thomas!”

This time the voice was younger. Perkin? Nay, not Perkin. Perkin was safe at Ashcombe, still too green to carry anything sharper than a pitchfork. This was Hugh Tanner, seventeen and long-limbed, with straw in his hair more often than sense in his head.

He stood half a dozen paces away with a spear in both hands and terror written plain across his face.

“My lord, I cannot find my father.”

The words struck harder than any blade.

Thomas moved toward him. “Hugh, to me.”

The boy took one step before the arrow found him. It was a small sound he made. Not a scream. Almost surprise. He looked down at the shaft jutting from beneath his collarbone, then up at him as though Thomas might explain how such a thing had been allowed to happen.

Thomas caught him as he fell.

“I’ve got you,” he said, though he did not. He had never had him. He had brought the boy here under a banner and a cause, and fine words men used before fields became slaughterhouses.

Hugh’s hand clutched at his sleeve. His fingers were already cold.

“My father,” the boy whispered.

“I will find him.”

The boy’s grip loosened, his eyes fixed on something beyond Thomas’s shoulder, and the breath left him in a soft, wet sigh.

For a moment Thomas knelt in the mud with the dead boy in his arms and heard nothing.

Not the shouting nor the horses. Not Hob cursing behind him. Nothing but the strange hollow ringing that came after a blow to the head, though no blow had landed.

He laid Hugh down gently, as if gentleness mattered now.

The world came back all at once as he rose.

A mace glanced off his helm, sending white sparks through his vision. Another blow clipped his jaw, not clean enough to break bone but sharp enough to split flesh from ear to chin. Heat flashed. Blood filled his mouth. He spat it into the mud and drove his sword forward with both hands.

The man before him died with surprise on his face.

Thomas hoped the next one looked the same. He had taken two more steps into the press when Hob crashed into him from the side, nearly taking both of them down.

“Enough!” Hob snarled.

Thomas swung at him before he realized who it was. Hob ducked, grabbed him around the middle with his good arm, and dragged him backward with a strength born of rage and desperation.

“Cease, you witless dolt!”

“Leave me!”

“Nay. I’ve no wish to carry your corpse home, and I’ll not tell Edith I left you here because you were too thick-skulled to live.”

“Those are my men.”

“Aye,” Hob said, and there was no humor in him now. “And those still breathing need you more than the dead.”

Thomas struck him then.

Not with the sword. Some last frayed thread of sense kept him from that. But his fist caught Hob across the mouth, and the man reeled back, blood on his teeth.

For one heartbeat they stared at each other.

Then Hob laughed. It was a terrible sound. Broken and furious and half mad with pain.

“There he is,” Hob said. “There’s the lord of Ashcombe. Now use that temper to get the living out of here.”

The words cut through him.

The living.

Thomas turned, blinking sweat and blood from his eyes, and saw them.

Saints, not many left at all. A knot of Ashcombe men gathered near the broken remnants of a hedgerow, pressed hard by royalist foot soldiers.

One man limped. Another leaned on a spear as if it alone kept him upright.

Wexford was there, clutching a leather satchel to his chest with one arm while trying to hold a dagger with the other.

Near them, a horse without a rider dragged its reins through the mud.

Galahad.

Thomas’s grey warhorse tossed his head, white blaze bright beneath the filth, eyes rolling as men shouted around him. By some mercy, the beast was alive. By some greater mercy, he had not bolted.

Thomas whistled, sharp and piercing.

The great horse shoved through the chaos, ears flat, hooves striking too near the fallen. Thomas caught the reins and vaulted into the saddle with less grace than habit. His ribs protested. His jaw throbbed. The world tilted and righted itself.

From the height of the horse, he could see what he had not seen from the mud.

The battle was ended. Men were merely taking time to die. Montfort’s banner was down.

A cry went up somewhere beyond the smoke, fierce and triumphant. The king’s men had found their victory and meant to wring every drop from it.

Thomas looked toward the Ashcombe men and lifted his sword.

“To me!” he shouted. “Ashcombe, to me!”

Hob bellowed the same, louder than any wounded man had a right to be. The remaining men stumbled, limped, fought, and dragged one another toward the hedgerow, toward Thomas, toward anything that looked like command in a world that had lost all sense.

A royalist knight saw the movement and spurred toward them.