The Red Knight

The light became richer, the stream began to sing.

‘Oh!’ she said, and reached out to the well-

The well-cover and the pump-handle vanished, and the stream beneath their feet roared to life.

‘Oh!’ she said. Her eyes were tightly closed. ‘Oh, my God!’

He sighed. It was not the denouement he had hoped for.

But outside the palaces of the Aethereal, men were calling his name.

He leaned over and kissed her, all the sweeter for being there.

‘I must go,’ he said.

‘Those are Royal Guardsmen,’ Red Beard shouted, pointing to the south across the river, and back east of the bridge. ‘I know them.’

‘Horses,’ the captain said to Michael. ‘War horse for you, another for me, a mount for the red giant. Ser Milus, you are in command until I return. Send to the fortress for a healer. Tell them that the Queen of Alba is dying.’ He was hard put to leave her. It wasn’t his way to turn his back on a project. He had a new reserve of power – but she needed a fine, trained hand. And he needed to have something left for the fight.

They carried her past him.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered to himself. He reached out and put a hand on her naked shoulder. He gave her all the power he had – everything that he had taken through Amicia at the well, and all he had taken from the sun.

He sagged away from her. Spat the taste of bile into the water, and fell to his knees.

She made a sound and her eyes rolled up.

Michael caught his shoulder, and put a canteen in his fist. He drank. There was wine in the canteen, mixed with the water, and he spat it out, then drank more.

‘Get me up,’ he said.

Red Beard got under his other shoulder. ‘You’re a warlock?’ he asked brusquely.

The captain had to laugh. ‘I’ll forgive you your imprecise terminology.’

The wine was good.

Michael handed him a chunk of honey cake. ‘Eat.’

He ate.

He let the sun fall on his face and hands, and he ate.

Fifteen feet away, Ser Milus was trying to find the bottom of a leather jack of water. He nodded, sputtered. ‘Is the fight over?’

The captain shrugged. ‘It ought to be,’ he muttered. He could hear them fetching horses – could hear the heavy clop-clop of the hooves on the cobblestones of the Bridge Castle’s yard, and the rattle-slap of the tack going on.

‘Jacques has him,’ Michael said.

‘I hate that horse,’ the captain said. He finished his honey cake, swallowed more wine and water, and made himself run up the ladders to the top of the Bridge Castle’s north tower.

Sixty feet above the flood plain many mysteries were explained.

He couldn’t see beyond the ridges south of the river, but the brilliant sparkle of armour told him that the men-at-arms pouring over the last ridge had to be the Royal Army.

To the west the trees were full of boglins, and north, almost a mile away, a trio of creatures – each larger than war horses – emerged from the woods with a long line of infantry on either hand.

The new trebuchet mounted in the ruins of the north tower of the fortress loosed – thump-crack - and the hail of stones fell short of the Wild creatures, but they shied away anyway.

But as far as he could see, along the woods’ edge, the undergrowth boiled with motion.

‘Why are you still here? Even if you win you won’t take the fortress. You’ve lost, you fool,’ the captain muttered. ‘Let it go. Live to fight another day.’ He shook his head.

For a mad moment, he thought of reaching out to Thorn. Because if Thorn stayed to fight, some of his men were going to die, and he’d come to love them. Even Sym.

I’m tired and maudlin.

He scrambled down the ladder and found Jacques holding his new charger. Michael was at the postern gate. Jack Kaves waved.

The captain got a leg over his saddle and groaned. The big stallion shied and tossed his head.

‘I hate this horse.’ He looked down at Jacques. ‘Go straight for Jehannes, now.’

‘Ser Jehannes is wounded,’ he said.

‘Tom, then.’

‘Tom’s the man, aye,’ Jacques said.

‘Get every man-at-arms of the company mounted, and by the foot of the ridge,’ he said. ‘All the farmers and all the guildsmen along the trench and to the fort, here.’

Jacques nodded. ‘Just for the sake of conversation,’ he said, ‘we could keep the fortress.’ His smile was transparently empty of guile, like a boy who has just thrown a rock at a hornets nest and remains unrepentant.

The captain nodded. ‘We could. Hold it for ransom. Sell it to the highest bidder.’ He sounded wistful. ‘We could be the baddest. The Knights of Ill-Repute. Rich. Feared.’ He shrugged. ‘Sometime in the last month we became paladins, Jacques.’

Jacques nodded. ‘’Bout time, my prince.’