Prologue #2
Thomas met him halfway.
The strike jarred his arm nearly numb. The knight was fresh, or fresh enough, his surcoat clean where Thomas’s was hacked and dark with blood. He hated him for it. Hated the smoothness of his sword arm, the polished edge of his shield, the plume on his helm that had not yet been torn away.
The man struck high. Thomas leaned low, let the blade glance over his shoulder, and drove his own sword beneath the shield.
The knight folded over the wound with a grunt.
Thomas wrenched the blade free and shoved him from the saddle.
“Move!” he roared.
They moved. Not bravely now. Bravery had burned away.
What remained was harder and uglier. Survival.
Hob took the rear. Thomas rode the edge, using Galahad’s bulk to break space where there was none, turning aside blows, cutting when he had to, shouting himself hoarse until the small remainder of Ashcombe’s men spilled through a gap in the hedge and down toward the old track.
Arrows hissed after them.
One struck the ground near Galahad’s hoof. Another hit Wexford in the back.
The bailiff gave a shocked little grunt and pitched forward. The leather satchel burst open when he fell, spilling rolls, loose notes, a broken tally, and God knew what else into the bloody mud.
Thomas wheeled the horse.
Hob swore. “Leave him!”
Thomas was already down. Wexford lay facedown, fingers twitching in the dirt. Thomas rolled him enough to see the man’s face. His eyes were wide, his mouth working as if he had discovered a final objection to the arrangement.
“My lord,” he rasped.
“Be still.”
“The rolls.” Wexford’s hand clawed weakly toward the scattered satchel. “The rents. Michaelmas.”
“Damn the rolls.”
Wexford made a sound that might have been laughter if there had been any breath in it. “Can’t. Someone must…account.”
Thomas looked at the papers darkening in the mud.
Rents, yields, obligations, all the small scratchings by which a manor lived or failed.
He knew too little of them. He had always known too little, because there had been older brothers once, older men, stewards, bailiffs, people who understood barns and leases and why a goose owed at Martinmas mattered while he soldiered.
He understood swords. A sword would not save Ashcombe from Michaelmas.
Wexford caught his sleeve. His grip was feeble, but his eyes had sharpened with fear. “They will come for the lands.”
Thomas leaned closer. “Who?”
“The king’s men. Neighbors. Those who smiled when you rode out.”
Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth.
“If Ashcombe looks weak, they will take her apart stone by stone.”
Thomas looked back toward the field, where weakness was being punished with merciless efficiency.
“When you return—” Wexford whispered. His fingers spasmed once, digging into Thomas’s sleeve.
Then he was gone. Thomas stared at him for a breath too long.
“My lord!” Hob shouted.
Thomas gathered what he could from the mud. A roll. Two broken tallies. The satchel, slick and torn. He slung it over his shoulder, caught Galahad’s reins, and mounted. An arrow nicked his boot as he turned the horse.
They rode. Not far. Not truly. Only far enough to leave the worst of the field behind, to reach the hollow where the old track dipped between hawthorn and ash. There, the surviving men collapsed as if cut loose from strings.
Thomas counted them, then counted again.
Seven. Out of twenty-three men who had ridden with him beneath Ashcombe’s banner, seven remained breathing.
Hob leaned against a tree and slid slowly down it, his injured arm cradled against his chest. “I’ll live,” he said before Thomas could ask.
“I did not ask.”
“You were about to. I spared us both the tenderness.”
Thomas almost laughed. It came out wrong, a sound scraped raw.
He moved among the men. Bound a wound with a strip torn from his own surcoat.
Gave water to Osbern’s cousin, who shook so badly he spilled half of it down his chest. Took a dagger from a man who kept trying to stand, though his leg was opened from thigh to knee and he had no clear notion of where he was.
Beyond the trees, Blackmere Field roared on. Or mayhap it only lived now inside Thomas’s head.
A sound came from the ditch beside the track.
Not a soldier’s sound. Smaller.
Thomas turned to see two children crouched beneath the hedge.
The boy had a knife in his fist, the blade little more than a kitchen thing with a nicked edge and a handle wrapped in dirty cord.
He held it before him as though he meant to fend off the whole victorious army with it.
His face was pinched and white under a smear of soot, and one eye was swollen nearly shut.
Behind him, a girl no more than six clutched his tunic with both hands, her pale brown hair tangled with leaves.
Thomas took one step toward them as the boy lifted the knife higher.
“Stay back.”
The voice was thin, but the courage in it was not.
Thomas stopped.
Hob, from beneath the tree, muttered, “Saints.”
Thomas crouched slowly, though every part of him ached. “What are your names?”
The boy’s chin trembled. He locked it hard. “Wat.”
“And hers?”
“My sister, Alyson.”
The little girl pressed her face into Wat’s back.
Thomas looked toward the smoke rising beyond the track. Not battlefield smoke. House smoke. Barn smoke. The king’s men had come through more than the field that day.
“Where are your mother and father?”
Wat’s mouth flattened. There was answer enough in that small, fierce silence.
Thomas held out his empty hand, palm up. “You are from Ashcombe?”
The boy hesitated. “From Lowmere.”
Close enough. Under Ashcombe’s shadow. Under Thomas’s protection, though he had done a poor job of proving it.
“You’ll come with me.”
Wat shook his head once. “No.”
Thomas would have admired the boy under other circumstances. At present, he was too tired to argue with a child armed with a cheese knife.
He unfastened his cloak and held it out. It had been fine wool once. Now it was torn, wet, and stained beyond saving. “Your sister is cold.”
Wat looked at the cloak. Then at Thomas. Then at Alyson, whose small teeth were chattering.
At last, slowly, he lowered the knife.
Thomas wrapped the cloak around both children, careful not to move too quickly. Alyson made a tiny sound when the warmth closed around her, and something in Thomas’s chest cracked in a place no physician could set.
He looked at Wat. “Keep the knife if it comforts you.”
The boy stared. “Truly?”
“Aye. But if you stick Hob with it, he’ll be cross.”
Hob grunted from the tree. “I will be more than cross.”
Alyson peered out from the cloak with round eyes.
For the first time since dawn, Thomas felt something almost like breath move through him. Not relief. Never that. But a thread. A thin one. Enough to pull on.
He lifted Alyson into Galahad’s saddle first, then Wat behind her. The boy clung to his sister with one arm and to the horse’s mane with the other, the knife still held awkwardly in his fist. Thomas took Galahad’s reins and began to walk.
“My lord,” one of the men said, voice hoarse. “Where do we go?”
Thomas looked back. Blackmere Field lay beyond the trees, hidden by smoke and distance, but he could still see it.
He expected he would see it for the rest of his life.
Every face. Every hand reaching. Hugh Tanner’s surprised eyes.
Wexford’s blood on the rolls. The banners sinking in mud. The boy calling for his mother.
He had ridden out a soldier that morning, one more sword in another man’s cause.
He would return something else.
“To Ashcombe,” Thomas said.
The word tasted of ash and duty.
The men began to move. Slowly at first, limping, leaning, carrying what grief they could and leaving the rest to the crows. Hob pushed himself upright with a sound that would have shamed a wounded boar and fell into step beside Thomas.
“You cannot save them all,” Hob said quietly.
Thomas kept his eyes on the track ahead, on the grey ears of his horse, on the children wrapped in his ruined cloak.
“I know.”
Hob looked at him.
Thomas’s jaw ached where the cut had begun to stiffen.
Blood dried at his neck. Each step sent pain through his side, his shoulder, and his hand.
Behind him lay defeat. Before him waited hungry mouths, broken fences, widows, empty places at tables, rents due to a crown that would remember exactly which banner he had followed.
He thought of Wexford’s words.
If Ashcombe looks weak, they will take her apart stone by stone.
Thomas tightened his grip on the reins. “I will save who is left.”
Hob said nothing for a while.
Above them, thunder muttered over the Malvern Hills, though the sky had been clear that morning. A strange wind moved through the hawthorn, lifting the smoke, carrying the smell of rain toward them.
Alyson turned in the saddle, her face pale within the folds of his cloak. “Are we safe now?”
No, Thomas thought. Not from kings. Not from neighbors with greedy eyes. Not from hunger, weather, grief, or memory. Not from the dead, who would walk beside him whether he wished them to or not.
But she was six years old and shaking, and the truth was too heavy a thing to put into such small hands.
So Thomas reached up, covered her cold fingers with his own, and lied as gently as he knew how.
“Aye, little one. You are safe with me.”
The thunder rolled again, closer this time. Thomas did not look back.