‘I would not like to hear that she had died,’ she said coldly. ‘A wad in her mouth, tied with a bit of her habit cord, will suffice. Her wrists and ankles too, I think.’
Kirkpatrick obeyed her and Alise was trussed and staring, snoring through her damaged nose.
‘How the world turns, Sister,’ Isabel said, her gentle voice no less of a scathe than a hot iron. ‘If you had not contrived to have Constance kept from me, out of spite, it would be her across my door and not you. Malise will not be pleased — his power may have been removed, but his hate is not and he will visit it on you. It seems that you may burn in Hell before I do.’
‘Time we were away,’ Kirkpatrick interrupted and Hal stared miserably out at Sweetmilk, who pressed his face close to the bars and grinned a wet, wan farewell.
‘On yer way, lords. I will scrauchle free of this, dinna fret.’
‘Down to the bailey and out the gate,’ Isabel declared, shoving Hal out of the tower cell. ‘A nun and her braw escorts, headed back to her convent and away from all this Godless trouble.’
‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘you can strop your wits when you walk with your ladyship and no mistake.’
They slithered like dancing shadows down to the level where the guard lay, down the spiral of stairs further still; somewhere beyond they heard men cursing and picking their way carefully down the worn-smooth, steeply pitched Breakneck Stairs.
At the foot of the tower, Hal led the way out into the bailey, walking smartly, but more casually than his thundering heart; behind came Isabel, hands folded piously in the sleeves, scapular hood drawn up against the rain and to hide her face. Kirkpatrick, at the tail end, saw the great gates of the castle start to close, and Isabel called out sharply to let her and her escort through. The gate commander, a long-time garrison resident, looked at the black-shadowed Bride of Christ and shook his head.
‘Sorry, Sister, while the alarum is up, the yett is shut and the bridge raised as well in a meenit. You mun wait.’
The tile clattered at his feet and made them all leap away from it, looking round wildly. Above, Sweetmilk swung and capered and launched another so that the guards scattered. Someone yelled to fetch a latchbow and the gate commander, squinting up through the rain with a face like bad whey, crossed himself. It was an imp of Satan, for sure — Christ’s Wounds, this was a night when Hell had unlatched its door …
A man ran up with a crossbow spanned, slid in a leather-fletched bolt, aimed and shot. Just as he did so, the gate commander remembered the nun and turned to warn her to get to safety — but she was gone.
Then the body fell, a whirl of arms and legs crashing to the cobbles with a sickening wet thud; the gate commander was disappointed to see that it was no imp at all, just a man with his face twisted in agony and his head leaking into the gutter like a broken egg.
Hal knew Sweetmilk was dead and the sour sick of it dogged his heels as he wraithed through the last crack of the gate and across the bridge, which trembled and creaked under the raising windlass even as they scurried.
‘He saw we were shut in and contrived to help,’ he muttered. ‘God forgive us, he could never have survived the fall.’
Kirkpatrick, feral eyes flicking this way and that as they moved along the lee of buildings, growled back that the bolt would have killed him before that; it was meant as a soothe but did not balm the loss much. Isabel snapped the glare between them.
‘Best we do not stand here like a set mill, for I am resolved never to go back in that cage.’
Hal blinked the rain from his face, felt it scamper, erratic as running mice, down through his collar and back. She never would, he vowed, for he would die before he let it happen and, when he said it, had back the glow of a smile and a kiss on his wet cheek.
The streets were dark — they had called couvre-feu hours before — but not empty; the place was stuffed with the debris of war, the sour wash of those flung out of their old lives and forced to run for the dubious shelter of Berwick, with nothing more than hope to cling to.
Huddled in doorways and up covered wynds, soaked and starving, they made a mockery of the orders that were supposed to keep folk indoors, by law of the Governor. Too miserable even for the oblivion of sleep, they stretched pale hands out of the shadows: ‘Alms, for the love of Christ.’
‘Here is aid for us,’ Kirkpatrick voiced. ‘A nun, delivering succour to the poor, with two braw lads to keep her from harm …’
‘Until the cry is raised and Alise found like a goose trussed for a Yule table,’ Isabel answered. ‘Then two men and a nun will be all they look for.’ She looked pointedly at Hal and added: ‘One with a bloody great crossbow slung on his back.’
‘It was Sim Craw’s,’ he answered and she heard the bleak in his voice, knew it for what it was and brought one hand to her mouth as if to choke the misery that wanted to spill from it. Sim. Gone. There was no time for the tale of it, but she knew the truth and simply nodded silence on the matter of the crossbow.
They moved as swiftly as they dared, away from the brooding bulk of the castle, pausing now and then like mice on a dark larder floor when they saw the lambent sputter of torches that marked the Watch on their rounds.
‘Dog Boy did this,’ Isabel said suddenly, sinking into the lee of a rough wall. ‘I saw him when he came here and heard the alarm raised later — yet he escaped.’
‘Well minded,’ Hal said admiringly. ‘He did and was raised in station for his daring. The way he told the tale involved rooftops and running.’
He was half our ages, Kirkpatrick wanted to add but did not.
‘How did he get out?’ Isabel persisted patiently and Hal, nodding, frowned and thought.
‘The Briggate.’
The distant clanging of the alarm iron brought their heads up, like stags hearing a baying. There was shouting.
‘Shut fast now,’ Kirkpatrick mourned bitterly.
They went on all the same, walked round a corner and into four men of the Watch. They knew nothing yet and Isabel was on the point of saying so when Kirkpatrick, panicked, gave a sharp yelp like a dog. Hal saw the hackles of the Watch come up, already bristled by the alarm.
‘Run,’ he said.
They ran, she gathering up her wet habit and looping it through her belt as she went, making a pair of fat breeches to the knee so her legs moved more freely. They went down streets and up alleys like gimlets through butter, half stumbling over the cursing sleepers seeking the shelter of the narrowest of places, where the houses almost came together like an arch against the rain.
Up steps, over courts, and Kirkpatrick, turning to tumble a water-sodden butt in the path of their pursuers, was stunned to hear her laugh and Hal’s answering wild cry of ‘gardyloo’. Like bliddy weans, he thought bitterly, with no idea of the dangers here.
Panting, drenched, they paused to gasp in air and Hal clung to Isabel, who grinned back at him from her pearled face. The warp has found the weft, he thought, the song the throat. No matter what happens now I am as happy as when the sun first found shiny water and I know it is the same for her.
They moved on, at a gentler trot now, burst into a wynd and shrank back from fresh rush lights, mounted on a cart. Behind, the Watch flames bobbed — one less, Hal noted with grim satisfaction — and circled in confusion.
There was a smell here, a stink they all knew well, and Isabel covered her nose, while Hal and Kirkpatrick fell into the old trick of it, breathing through their open mouth.
The dead were here.
There were a heap of them. Brought and dumped, they were the ones too weak from hunger or disease to stay in this world any longer. Two men in rough sack overtunics worked with grunts under the poor light of damp torches to load them on the cart.