The Red Knight

‘You didn’t come last night,’ he said. The very last thing he wanted to say.

She shrugged. ‘I fell asleep,’ she said. ‘Which, it seems to me, might be a wise course for you. My lord.’

Her tone was forbidding. There was nothing about her to suggest that they’d ever kissed, or had intimate conversation. Or even angry conversation.

‘But you wanted to see me,’ he said. I sound like a fool.

‘I wanted to tell you that you were perfectly correct. I plotted to meet you outside her door. And she used me, the old witch. I love her, but she’s throwing me at you. I was blind to it. She’s playing courtly love with you and substituting my body for hers. Or something.’ Amicia shrugged, and the motion was just visible in the starlight.

The silence stretched on. He didn’t know what to say. It sounded quite likely to him, and he didn’t see a way to make it seem better. And he found he had no desire to speak ill of the Abbess.

‘I’m sorry that I spoke so brusquely, anyway,’ he said.

‘Brusquely?’ she asked, and laughed. ‘You mean, you are sorry that you crushed my excuses and made light of my vanity and my piety? That you showed me up as a sorry hypocrite?’

‘I didn’t mean to do any of those things,’ he said. Not for the first time, he felt vastly her inferior. Legions of willing servant girls hadn’t prepared him for this.

‘I do love Jesus,’ she went on. ‘Although I’m not always sure what loving God should mean. And it hurts me, like a physical pain, that you deny God.’

‘I don’t deny God,’ he said. ‘I’m quite positive that the petty bastard exists.’

Her face, pale in the new moonlight, set hard.

I’m really too tired to do this, he thought. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself say. He thought of Michael and winced.

She put her hand to her mouth. ‘You have a funny way of showing it,’ she said.

He sat down suddenly. Like saying I love you, it wasn’t really a decision. His legs were done.

She reached out a hand to take his, and as their fingers met, she flinched.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Gentle Jesu, messire, you are in pain.’

She leaned over him, and she breathed on him. That’s how it felt.

He opened his defences, running into the tower. Prudentia shook her head, but her disapproval could be taken for granted for any woman, and he opened the door, secure that the walls of the fortress would protect him from the green storm.

No sooner did the door open, then she was all around him.

But the green was right behind her.

She was very distinct, and she looked the way ignorant men supposed ghosts to look – a pale and colourless picture of herself.

He reached out and took her hand.

‘You are letting me in?’ she asked. She looked around, clearly amazed. She curtsied to Prudentia. ‘Gracious and Living God, my lord – is she alive?’

‘She is alive in my memory,’ he said, with some dissimulation. He had some secrets too evil to share.

She twirled. ‘It’s magnificent! How many sigils have you?’

‘Sigils?’ he asked.

‘Signs. Workings. Phantasms.’

He shrugged. ‘More than twenty,’ he said. It wasn’t a lie. It was merely an encouragement to underestimation.

She chuckled. She was bigger here, her face slightly more elfin and slightly more feral. Her eyes glowed like a cat at night, and were just faintly almond-shaped. ‘I knew you when I first saw you,’ she said. ‘Wearing power like a cloak. The power of the Wild.’

He smiled. ‘We are two of a kind,’ he said.