The Red Knight

At the base of the little knoll where he’d made his last stand, he saw the gleam of moonlight, and one of the dark figures got to its feet, lit by four of the fair folk like some kind of ethereal bodyguard.

The man was painted black. Ranald remembered him. He came up the knoll, and Ranald awaited him, hands crossed on the haft of his axe.

‘Go,’ said the black man.

Ranald had to replay the word again. It was a shock to hear Gothic, and another to be told to go.

‘We are the Sossag people,’ the man said. ‘What the faeries return, we do not touch.’ The man’s eyes were brilliant in the darkness. ‘I am Ota Qwan of the Sossag. I offer you my hand in peace. I was dead. You were dead. Let us both walk away from here and live.’

Ranald was a brave man, veteran of fifty fights, and yet the relief that flooded him was like a mother’s kiss and the release of love, and never, ever had he felt he had so much to live for.

He looked down at the corpse of his cousin. ‘May I bargain with the faeries for him?’ he asked.

Their laughter was derisive.

Two! We gave two! And we will dine for days!

So sweet and rare.

Ranald knew what men said of the fair folk. So he bowed. ‘My thanks, fair people.’

Thank Peter!

Hee hee.

And they were gone.

Ranald reached down and took Lachlan’s great sword from his cold, dead hand. He unbuckled the scabbard from the great gold belt, and left the belt for spoil.

‘For his son,’ Ranald said to the black man, who shrugged.

‘I would meet this Peter,’ Ranald said.

They walked down the knoll together, and the Sossag all moved back.

One warrior, reeking of vomit, was weeping uncontrollably.

Ranald pulled the man to his feet, and put his arms around him. He didn’t know why himself. ‘Don’t know why you saved me,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’

‘He saved me,’ Ota Qwan said, his voice thick with wonder. ‘Somehow, the fairies chose to bring you back, too.’ Ota Qwan leaned forward. ‘I think you killed me.’

Ranald nodded. ‘I think I did.’

Peter sobbed, and was still.

‘I hurt,’ he said. ‘I’m cold.’

Ranald knew the cold to which he referred. He shook the man’s hand again, shouldered his dead cousin’s sword, and walked away to the east, through a corridor of silent Sossag warriors.

Lissen Carack – The Red Knight

A league from the convent, the captain began to relax and let the feeling of victory suffuse him.

They had almost thirty wagons, full of goods – many of them would be of no use, but he’d seen the armour in one, fine helmets, and weapons in another, and wine, oil, canvas cloth-

But it wasn’t rescuing the wagons that lifted his heart. Nor the capture of the wounded knight, a moment that he had yet to allow his mind to savour.

It was the men. Ten professional soldiers, three dozen guildsmen with bows – almost fifty stout men. If he could make it back to the fortress, he’d have hurt his adversary cruelly and gained in strength.

Half a league from the fortress, when it was plain that Lissen Carak was not afire, had not fallen to assault of black sorcery, he found himself whistling.

Sauce rode by his side. ‘A word?’ she asked.

‘Anything you like,’ he said.

‘Do you have to kill every single one of the monsters?’ she asked, and she spat like Bad Tom.

Looking carefully, he could see she was literally spitting mad.

‘I had that tusked thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t need you stealing my kills. If another man had done it, I’d gut him. Even Tom.’

The captain rode in silence for a few paces. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said.

‘Fuck you,’ she said.

‘I don’t mean that the way it sounds, Sauce,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it. If they see me, they come straight at me. It has been that way for as long as I’ve faced the Wild.’

Sauce didn’t wrinkle her lip – she wrinkled her whole face. ‘What?’ she asked, but her tone betrayed that she had noticed something of the sort.

He shrugged, but he was tired and wearing forty pounds of hauberk and armour, so it wasn’t all that evident a movement.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, lying.

She narrowed her eyes.

He didn’t offer any further information.

‘Who’s the knight?’ she asked.

The captain realised he was entering a whole field of cowpats with her questions. ‘Ask him when he wakes,’ the captain said.

‘He was going to kill you,’ she said. It was somewhere between a statement and a question.

‘Haven’t you ever been tempted yourself?’ Jacques asked from behind them.

Sauce’s clear, honest laugh rolled across the river and announced them to the Bridge Castle.

And the captain rode on, whistling.

In his head, he saw a beaten, angry adolescent, who said hot words – hot and true – to a man who was not his father, and rode away bent on death. He tried to reach out to that boy, across the years.

Whatever befalls us, he told the broken boy, today we won a great victory, and men, if any survive, will speak our name for a century.