The Red Knight

As if his laughter was a signal, the Inn burst into life. Tom and Ranald came in, and joined their table, and men and women came pouring in. Local farmers and shepherds from the hills arrived as the word spread, and the mercenaries who served the Keeper, and a tinker and his apprentices – the smith, and his apprentices too.

The common room could hold them all, well enough.

Men called for music, and Tom sang surprisingly well. Gawin turned to the captain amidst the uproar. ‘You used to play the harp,’ he said.

The captain frowned. ‘Not in years. And not here.’

But the Keeper had heard him. He took a harp down from the wall and put it in the captain’s arms. He shushed the room – something he did as easily as a magus might cast a spell.

‘There’s a man here as may be a harper,’ said the Keeper.

The captain cursed Gawin under his breath.

‘Give me some time,’ he said, when it was clear to him they wouldn’t let him off. He took the harp and his second cup of wine and walked out into the summer night of the yard.

It was quiet out there.

Sheep baaed, and cattle lowed, and the sounds of men in the Inn were muted, like the babble of a distant brook.

He started to tune the harp. There was a plectrum in the base-board, just where he would have expected it, and a clever mechanical key for the strings.

Let me, said Harmodius. It’s just mathematica.

He drew power, and cast – and his power manifested in the strings.

The rule of eight, rendered in sinew, said the dead Magus.

Thanks, said the captain. I always hated tuning.

He walked about the yard, plucked out a simple tune – the first he’d learned – and walked back into the Inn.

They fell quiet when he appeared, and he sat down with Gawin and played some simple stuff. He played There Was a Squire of Great Renown and everyone sang, and he played Green Sleeves and Lovely On the Water. He made mistakes, but the audience was forgiving.

‘Play for dancing!’ the young widow called.

The captain was about to admit he didn’t know any dances, but Harmodius forestalled him.

Allow me.

His fingers plucked the strings slowly, and a jig peeled out – slowly at first, and then faster and faster, and then it was a reel and then it was a hillman dance tune, sad and wild and high-

The captain watched his fingers fly over the strings, and wasn’t altogether pleased. But the music swept on, higher and higher, and the men fell out of the dance, and the women danced, skirts kirtled up, legs flashing, heads turning and Mag jumped up and leapt into the circle.

The harp grew warm under his hands.

Sarah Lachlan leaped and flashed like a salmon. Mag gave a turn and one of the Inn’s servants twirled in billow of skirts. The men applauded wildly as the hands on the harp fell still, and the captain seized control again.

Ahh, said Harmodius. I had forgotten.

Please don’t do that again, old man. The captain went to steady his own breathing. People were crowding around him, slapping his back.

‘I swear,’ said the Keeper. ‘You play like a man possessed.’

Later when men and women had paired off, when Mag had gone, bright eyed, to her room, and Ranald had been congratulated by every man and woman there, and when Ser Alcaeus had the Inn’s prettiest serving girl in his lap – he went back outside.

He stood under the stars, and listened to the cattle.

He played Green Grow the Rushes to them.

Harmodius snorted.

In the morning, they mounted for the ride north. None of the captain’s companions seemed to have a hard head and he was surprised to see the Keeper mount a fine riding horse, as eastern in its blood as the captain’s own.

The Keeper nodded to the captain. ‘You’re a fair harper and no mistake, m’lord. And a good sport.’

The captain bowed. ‘Your house is one of the finest I’ve ever visited,’ he said. ‘I could live here.’

‘You’d need to learn some more tunes first,’ Gawin said.

‘Coming to see the Wyrm?’ Ranald asked the Keeper.

He nodded. ‘This is my business as well as yours an’ Tom’s.

They rode.

There was a good path, the width of two horsemen, and it ran like a snake between the hills, and the bottoms of valleys were damp and the heights were rocky. They didn’t go fast.

Crossing the Irkill River took half a day, because the bridge was out. The Keeper begged a favour of the captain and sent Toby back to the Inn with the news.

‘This is my business,’ he said. ‘And I don’t like it.’ The bridge looked as if a battering ram had struck it – it was beaten to flinders, heavy oak beams now splinters.

That night they slept in a cot by a quiet burn. The farmer and his family moved out into a stone barn so that the gentles could use the beds.