The Red Knight

Michael would have liked to have stood his ground, but the moment her regard dropped away, he stumbled a step.

She smiled at the three of them, and they backed away from the door.

Sister Miram went back into the laundry, where the Lanthorn girls were huddling, terrified, and trying to cover their bare legs.

Sister Mary came in, carrying a huge basket. ‘Miram!’ she called out. ‘What’s amiss?’

‘The usual,’ Miram said. And started searching for her missing cap.

North of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt bitten by the old bear’s disdain. His walk back was full of thoughts about how the men in the Rock had, apparently, inflicted two defeats on him. He had to face the hard truth; to the irks and boglins and even to the daemons, these little fiery pinpricks were defeats.

He didn’t really think that either of his lieutenents would challenge him, and he reached out more and more to the east as he walked, until he could feel the intense wrongness of the invaders. They were not like the peasants, the nuns, and the shepherds in the fortress. They smelt of violence.

He had always hated their kind, even when he walked among them as a man.

Also in the fortress, surrounded by all that cold stone worked by man, the enchantments an aeon old and proof against all but his strongest enchantment, he could feel the Abbess, a sun of power, with her nuns a star field behind her.

He flinched away from her.

And the tendrils of his questing power saw another, darker sun – the beacon that the daemons had seen – that Thurkan, the sharpest of the daemons, had seen and avoided. The shielded one, who had resisted, however briefly, his workings on the battlefield.

The bears hadn’t refused him, precisely. But nor were they helping him with any force but a few angry warriors bent on revenge. He drew deep breath of clean air and turned north, back into the mountains, and lengthened his stride until he was all but running, his giant body now moving faster than the fastest horse. He could get where he wanted to with a phantasm, but he was suddenly wary of using too much power. Power attracted other power, and in the Wild, that could spell a quick end – all too often, something bigger than you arrived unexpectedly. And ate you.

Even as he ran the forest highways, Thorn contemplated eating Turkan.

Lissen Carak – Kaitlin

The four Lanthorn girls were quick to recover from Sister Miram, and the afternoon found them coring winter apples behind the kitchens. There were no sisters and no novices.

The eldest Lanthorn girl was Elissa. She was dark haired, as tall as a man, thin, with long legs and very little figure and a nose like a hawk. Despite this men found her irresistible, mostly because she smiled a great deal and was selective in her use of the family’s principle weapon: a sharp tongue.

Mary was the second daughter. She was the very opposite of her elder sister; short, but not squat, with a full figure, guinea gold hair, a narrow waist and a snub nose. She thought herself a great beauty and was always puzzled when boys preferred Elissa.

Fran was brown haired, full-lipped and full hipped. She had her mother’s looks, her father’s brains and sense of honesty, and she seldom cared whether boys noticed her or not.

And Kaitlin was the youngest: just fifteen. She was not as tall as Elissa, not as full-figured as Mary, nor yet as witty, or as cutting, as Fran. She had pale brown hair that framed a heart-shaped face, and she appeared to be the quietest and most respectable of the Lanthorns.

‘Bitch,’ Fran said, tossing a core aside. ‘She thinks we’re going to be good little girls with pig shit on our feet for the rest of our lives.’

Elissa looked around carefully. ‘We have to play this right,’ she said thoughtfully. She ate a slice of of apple, deftly taking a knife from beneath her kirtle, cutting a slice, wiping the knife on her apron and putting back in her sheath faster than most people could follow. She looked down her long nose at Fran. ‘I hearby convene a meeting of the “Marry a Noble” club.’

‘Silly kids’ nonsense,’ Mary scoffed. She was eighteen. ‘No one around here is going to marry any of us.’ She flicked her eyes around the circle. ‘Maybe Kaitlin,’ she admitted.

Fran tossed an apple core viciously into the sty behind them. ‘If some people would stop making the beast with two backs with every farm boy in every blessed hay stack-’

Elissa’s smile didn’t even thin. ‘Ahh, Fran, you’ll go a virgin to your wedding, won’t ya?’ She snorted.

Fran’s next apple core hit Elissa in the nose and she hissed.

Mary shrugged. ‘Scarcely matters if I bed ’em or don’t,’ she said, ‘seeing they say I did, and folks believe ’em.’

The others nodded.