Chapter 18 #2
“We were Montfort’s men,” Thomas said. “Not all for the same reasons. Some for reform, some for the earl, some because their lord told them where to stand and men with hungry families rarely ask which great man’s pride has filled the road before them.
But I believed it.” His mouth twisted. “Saints help me, I believed it. I thought we were saving England from a king who would sell pieces of it to every foreign favorite who kissed his ring.”
Amelia had heard enough names to understand the big picture, if not the details. King Henry. Simon de Montfort. Prince Edward. Banners and barons and promises made in council chambers while ordinary men ended up in the mud.
Thomas looked toward the dark beams overhead, but she knew he didn’t see them, he was elsewhere.
“Then Edward came down on us at Evesham with the sun behind him and the river at our backs, and there was nowhere to go. Nowhere. Men speak of battles as if courage is a ladder a man may climb high enough to see his way out. It is not. Sometimes courage is a cup with a hole in the bottom. You may pour everything you have into it and still die thirsty.”
His jaw worked. The words came slowly, as if each one had to be dragged through a gate he had barred for years.
“It stopped being a battle. That is what folk do not understand. A battle has lines. Calls. Standards. Men you know on either side of you. Evesham became slaughter. Horses screaming. Men underfoot. Boys calling for their mothers. The banners down in the mud. The king’s men pressing and pressing until there was no air left in the world. ”
Amelia’s throat tightened.
The thunder sounded farther away, then came back hard, rattling the shutters.
Thomas drank deeply.
“I led twenty-three men beneath Ashcombe’s banner,” he said.
Amelia blinked.
In her draft of him, in the story the household told around the edges, the number had never quite settled. Men. Many. Too many. Numbers could make horror smaller sometimes, contain it in a figure. This one did the opposite.
Twenty-three.
A little village’s worth of sons, husbands, brothers, fathers.
“I came home with seven,” Thomas said.
The words fell between them and stayed there.
Seven.
Amelia thought of the hall by daylight. Hob grumbling over breakfast. Osbern laughing in the lists.
Martin teaching her words she was absolutely not allowed to repeat near Friar Huck.
Wat watching Thomas like the sun rose and set by his command.
Alyson leaning against Amelia’s skirt with leaves in her hair.
She thought of all the spaces she hadn’t known were empty.
“I know their names,” Thomas said.
“I know you do.”
“Aye,” he said, almost to himself. “I know them.”
He set the cup down.
“Wexford, who wrote like a spider crawled through ink and died in it, complained from here to Evesham that the mud would ruin his boots. Hugh Tanner, seventeen and too tall for the rest of himself. Will Miller’s second son, who lied about his age because he wanted to prove himself a man.”
His voice roughened. “Martin of the mill. Osbern’s brother. Little Rob Fletcher, who was not little at all, but every man called him that because he had been born early and his mother never let anyone forget it. Giles. Stephen. Peter. Alan.”
The names gathered in the hall, one by one.
Amelia felt them settle around the fire.
“The dead are greedy,” Thomas said quietly. “They want remembering. They want the living to carry what they cannot. I do. I carry them. Every last one.”
He touched two fingers to his temple, almost gently. “In here.”
Amelia’s chest hurt. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
He only looked down at his hands as if they belonged to another man.
“It was my command.”
He said it without heat, without argument, with the flat certainty of a man who had carved the words into himself long ago and called the wound truth.
“You led them,” Amelia said carefully. “You didn’t choose the field. You didn’t choose the weather, the river, Edward’s army, Montfort’s mistakes, or any of the men who put those boys there.”
“I called them to follow me.”
“And they did.”
“Aye.”
“Because they trusted you.”
His mouth tightened.
“That is not mercy, Amelia.”
The sound of her name in that voice, in that dark, struck her hard enough that she nearly forgot what she meant to say.
“You brought seven home.”
His eyes went cold. “I lost sixteen.”
“You brought seven home,” she said again, steady now because if she let him turn this into only blood, he would drown in it. “And Wat. And Alyson. Hob told me. Wat told me too.”
“I found the children in a ditch,” he said after a moment. “That is not heroism.”
“It is if you’re the child in the ditch.”
For a long while, neither of them spoke.
Rain filled the hall, not inside, though in several places that was becoming negotiable, but in sound.
It drummed on the roof, rushed from the eaves, hissed when the wind drove it against stone.
The world had shrunk to the low fire, the sleeping household, and Thomas with his ghosts.
At last he said, “I know what I am.”
Amelia’s fingers tightened around the edge of her cloak.
“I am a sword.” He lifted one shoulder, as if this were simple and not the saddest thing she had ever heard.
“A sword is useful. You can build naught with it, mend naught, grow naught. It will not coax grain from a field or keep accounts from turning into lies. It will not make children laugh, nor bread rise, nor an old woman’s rent vanish because mercy once put it in the wrong column. ”
Amelia swallowed.
“But it will keep the people behind it alive a while longer,” Thomas said. “And that is no small thing. It is the thing I have. Mayhap the only thing.”
“That isn’t true.”
He ignored that, or couldn’t hear it.
“So I stand where I am put. I mend what walls I can. I get the grain in.” A brief ghost of humor crossed his face, gone almost before it arrived. “Well. You get the grain in.”
“I had help.”
“You had all of Ashcombe by the scruff of the neck.”
“Only because Ashcombe needed scruffing.”
This time his mouth moved, barely.
Then it faded.
“I do not let myself reckon what it cost to learn I was good for nothing else,” he said, “because that road has no bottom, and I have a castle to wake for in the morning.”
There it was. The heart of it. Not the battle. The sentence he had passed on himself after it.
Amelia knew that feeling. Not the mud, not the screaming horses, not the banner trampled into blood. She had never stood in command while men died because they trusted her. But she understood deciding what you were meant to be, and then living inside that decision like a cell.
She had been the useful one since childhood.
The organized one. The girl who remembered permission slips, doctor’s appointments, grocery lists, due dates, deadlines, passwords, flight numbers, and where her mother had left the keys.
The woman who could make three hundred moving pieces land in the right place at the right time and still go home to a silent apartment where no one had noticed if she landed too.
Useful was safe. It asked for nothing. Useful did not have to admit it was lonely. She had built a whole careful life on that foundation and called it a personality.
“You’re not a sword,” she said.
Thomas exhaled. “Mistress—”
“You’re not.”
She leaned forward, and the firelight shifted between them, red-gold and wavering.
She had never in her life wanted so badly to reach across the space and put her hand over someone else’s.
She did not. Some lines you felt before you understood them, and the space between them tonight was full of sleeping people, rules older than her country, grief, danger, and wanting.
She kept her hands clasped in the cloak.
“A sword wouldn’t sit up all night because the roof leaks on the orphans.”
His gaze flickered.
“A sword wouldn’t let a strange woman who fell out of the sky reorganize his entire household.”
“You did not fall from the sky.”
“The stableboys remain unconvinced.”
That ghost almost-smile appeared and vanished.
“A sword wouldn’t remember that Wat likes the heel of the loaf because it makes him feel older to chew something hard. A sword wouldn’t let Alyson braid Galahad’s mane with blue thread even though that horse looked personally insulted by the entire experience.”
Thomas’s brows drew together. “She told you that?”
“Alyson tells me everything.”
“She was meant to use brown thread.”
“That was your concern?”
“He is a warhorse.”
“He had bows.”
“He had one bow, and it was small.”
Amelia almost laughed, then felt the ache beneath it and gentled her voice.
“A sword wouldn’t notice that I keep reaching for water like an idiot and have a cup of sweet well water set by my place every morning, even though everyone here thinks I’m mad for wanting it. You think I didn’t know that was you?”
Thomas went still.
“Edith set that out,” he said.
“Edith told me it was you.”
A flicker of pure betrayal crossed his face. “Edith talks too much. She is a menace.”
“She’s very fond of you.”
“She has a curious way of showing it.”
“She feeds you.”
“She feeds everyone.”
“She gives you the best apples.”
His mouth shut.
Amelia pointed at him. “Aha.”
“There is no aha.”
“There absolutely is. That was an aha face.”
“I do not have an aha face.”
“You have at least six faces now. I’ve been keeping track.”
His eyes narrowed, but not with anger. “Have you?”
“Oh yes. Scowl one is ordinary displeasure. Scowl two is someone has touched the horse. Scowl three is Walter has found a roll. Scowl four is Hob has said something appalling. Scowl five is someone is lying to you.”
“And six?”
She met his eyes across the coals.
“Six is when you’re trying not to feel something.”
The humor left him.
For one heartbeat, Amelia thought she had gone too far. It would be just like her, wouldn’t it? To trip on a moment so fragile it had somehow survived battlefields, storms, seven centuries, and propriety, and crush it under her big modern mouth.
But Thomas didn’t look away.