‘I will also stay,’ he announced, ‘to guard our way to safety.’
Jamie, suddenly realizing that this was not his quest and given a suitable task of bravery and honour, nodded and grinned. With a brief look of raised-eyebrow relief, Kirkpatrick passed Hal and led the way towards the Hog Tower, skulking along the walkway, pressed to the crenellations.
There was a door and he imagined it would be shut and barred, which was the way if the castle was guarded, all perjink and proper. He tested it, heard the bar behind it clunk softly in the pins and did not know how they would get it open. He turned to say so to Hal, found that man’s face turned up and pebbling with moonlit rain.
Hal stared up at the cage, clamped like a barnacle to the outside of the tower. She was there, the thickness of a wall, a few long strides away …
Kirkpatrick saw it, too, and blinked the rainmist off his eyebrows.
‘A quick and strong young man’, he hissed, ‘could be up on that and inside in no time.’
It took a moment for Sweetmilk to realize Kirkpatrick was staring at him and he blenched when he did so.
‘Aye, right,’ he whispered back scornfully. ‘In through the door it does not have, for what would be the point of that on the outside of a cage hung a long drop from the ground?’
‘It has a wee slanty half-roof,’ Kirkpatrick pointed out, ‘to shed the rain. With wooden shingles, easily removed. The bars, too, are wooden — ye might snap yer way in.’
Sweetmilk eyed the half-roof, no more than a ledge to shoot rain into the courtyard below, and then the wrist-thick timber grill of the cage. He looked at Hal and saw the misery there, the rain like tears; he does not want to tell me to do something so foolish, Sweetmilk thought. But he wants his woman free.
All folk’s plans for the best seem to involve me putting myself in the hardest places, he thought, moving to the wet rock of the tower and looking for handholds. Well, I came through the bloody horror at Stirling, so I will come through this also. He fumbled the dirk into his belt, ignoring Kirkpatrick’s advice to take it in his teeth. An idiot would suggest that, he wanted to say, for all it does is make you look like a red murderer and put cuts on your tongue and lips.
He felt between the weathered mortar of the stones for crevices and nicks and little ledges. Christ’s Wounds, this would not be easy.
Hal watched him swing up and out; he held his breath, seeing that Sweetmilk had removed his shoes and tied them round his neck. Clever — slick-smooth leather soles were no help at all and Sweetmilk’s shoes were more status than necessity for a man with such horned and calloused bare feet.
As if to mock them, the rain started in earnest, a hissing curtain that shrouded everything to a few feet and sent rivulets and streams coursing down between the stones of the tower. Sweetmilk, arms and feet screaming in strained agony, reached up one wobbling hand and grasped the underside supports of the cage.
For a moment he swung free, dangling by one hand like a limp banner while everyone held their breath. Then he swung up the other hand and slapped it on to the timber. Slowly, laboriously, he drew himself up and then hung on the outside of the cage, a grey figure in the misting rain.
‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘he climbs like a babery ape.’
‘He will fall like a bliddy stone,’ Hal muttered.
Then the bar clunked out of the pins and and the door started to open outwards. Kirkpatrick, swift as shadow, moved into the swinging lee of it while Hal, caught like a thief in a larder, could only crouch and freeze, the rain dropping in his dry, open mouth, looking up into the shrouded, murderous stare of Sweetmilk, who clung to the outside of the cage, not daring to move.
A man shouldered through the open doorway, cloak shrouding his head and shoulders, unlacing his braies and hunched up against the rain so that he saw only the tops of his own shoes.
‘Dinna loit on anyone,’ a voice called out from behind him and the man, head down and drawn in, cursed and stood between the merlons, fumbling out his prick.
‘No sensible soul is abroad on a night like this,’ he growled back, and grunted as his stream joined the rain. There was a moment, a long moment, when he stood and emptied himself, enjoying the feel and wishing it would hurry — he would have gone into the Witch’s cell and used her pot if it had not been for the sleeper across her door. That and the fact that she was called the Witch, of course.
He shivered at the thought. Fine-looking woman, mark ye, for all her age … He turned sideways and stared into the face of a rainsoaked man, crouching like a hare on the walkway where he should not have been. The man grinned a sickly grin, his hair plastered wetly down his face in pewter daggers.
‘Who the f-’
He was cut off, mid-flow, from speech, piss and life as Kirkpatrick took a step from the shadows and shoved.
‘Gardyloo,’ he muttered as the man fell off the wall, his last curse trailing behind him as he whirled his arms and legs in a futile dance in the air. There was a distant thud.
Hal was already past them both, into the dark of the tower. Stairs, circling up and down; Hal went up, to where a light flickered.
‘Hurry up and close the door, else the candle will go out.’
The voice was booming loud in the enclosed space and Hal froze; then he edged up and round until he could peer over the last edge of the floor level above. The man sitting at the table, idly working at a leather strap, stared straight back at him, astonished.
They sprang for one another at the same time and Hal’s wet soles slipped, so that he fell on the last part of the stair. Should have hung my shoes round my neck, like Sweetmilk, he thought wildly, and had to fall back a few steps as the man came down at him, sword out.
Disadvantaged in every way, Hal thought, armed only with a knife, below a man with a longer weapon on a spiralling stair designed to suit him and not me. Sparks flew as the man struck and missed; Hal saw him glance wildly over his shoulder, saw the iron rod dangling from a hook, waiting to be struck like a ringing bell.
The man slashed once more and sprang back, heading for the alarm iron; Hal was after him, stumbling, stabbing wildly. He felt the blow up his arm, the grate of it on bone and the man gave a sharp cry and fell, slamming face-first on to the table even as he groped for a soothing grasp on his pinked heel. Hal leaped on him, heard the air drive out with a choking gasp and battered his own head on the table so that it whirled with bright light and stars.
Dazed, he rolled free, blood in his mouth, and felt the man scrabble up — and a dark shape moved past him like a wind from a grave; the man yelped as Kirkpatrick’s arm snaked round his neck and drew it back. The dagger gleamed in the guttering candle flame like a basilisk eye before the man’s throat smothered the wink of it.
‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick muttered and held the kicking man until the breath left him; there was blood everywhere, spattering in pats as the man struggled his last.
Hal rolled on to all fours, spitting, to see Kirkpatrick wiping his bloody hand on the man’s tunic, following it up with the dagger; his entire sleeve was sodden with gore.
‘Aye til the fore,’ he growled and Hal, blinking the last of his daze away, climbed wearily to his feet and started up the stairs, Kirkpatrick behind.
The shape was wraithed and black, hidden in the shadows and would have clattered the pair of them back down the stairs if a sharp warning voice had not called out.
‘Look out for her.’
Hal saw the black shroud of nun rush from the shadows and had time to stick out a fist so that the woman, already starting to shriek, ran her face on to the ram of it. Her scream choked off into a grunt, her legs flew out from under her and she clattered limply to the flags at the foot of the door.
That voice, Hal thought. It is her.
The door was barred from the outside and he lifted it easily and wrenched it open.