Gawin nodded. ‘And no one knows who you are,’ he said.
‘You do,’ the captain said. ‘And the old wizard, Harmodius.’
Gawin nodded. ‘I gave him a wide birth,’ he said. ‘Would you help me sit up?’
The captain found himself obligingly raising his brother on his pillows – even fluffing one of them. His brother, who had killed Prudentia at his mother’s orders.
‘Mother said she was corrupting you,’ Gawin said, suddenly, as if reading his mind. But even as he got those words out, his voice broke. ‘She wasn’t, was she? We murdered her.’
The captain sat back down before his knees could give way. He wanted to flee. To have this conversation another day. Another year.
The truth was that the truth was too horrible to share. Shameful, horrible, and deeply wounding to everyone it could possibly touch. The captain sat and looked at Gawin, who still believed that they were brothers. That lie, at least, was intact.
‘Prudentia knew something she shouldn’t have,’ the captain found himself saying. He sounded remarkably calm. He was quite proud of himself, just for a moment.
Gawin made a choked noise. ‘So Mater got us to kill her,’ he said, after another mammoth pause.
‘Just as she egged you on every day to torment me,’ the captain said bitterly.
Gawin shrugged. ‘I realised that, even before you left. Richard never saw it, but I did.’ He looked out the arrow slit by his head. ‘I did something terrible, down in Lorica. I got some good men killed and I did something despicable.’
Suddenly the captain found Gawin’s eyes locked on his again. ‘When I was kneeling in the mud, acting the craven, I realised that I had to avenge myself or go mad. And – and let me fucking say this, brother - I realised in one flash that I had been the instrument of your destruction, as surely as if I’d killed you myself. You think it didn’t touch me? When we found your body, and how did you pull that off? – when we found your body, I rode away into the Wild. I was gone – off my head. I knew who killed Lord Gabriel. I did. Dickon and I did, together. We hated you into death, didn’t we?’ He shook his head. ‘Except now you are not dead, and I’m not sure where that leaves us. You are a magus?’ he asked.
The captain sighed. ‘Mater had me trained as a magus,’ he said. ‘By Prudentia. Even while telling you two how effeminate I was, and what a poor knight I made. I had sworn never to reveal my studies – to her, to God, to all the saints.’ He laughed bitterly.
‘Oh, my God,’ Gawin groaned. ‘Prudentia was a magus. So . . . oh, my God. Mater provided the arrow.’
‘Of Witch Bane,’ the captain said.
Gawin was whiter, if anything, than when the captain had first seen him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We both knew you loved her.’
The captain shrugged.
‘Gabriel-’
‘Gabriel, Viscount Murien is dead,’ the captain said. ‘I am the captain. Some men call me the Red Knight.’
‘Red Knight? Like some nameless bastard?’ Gawin said. ‘You’re my brother, Gabriel Moderatus Murien, the heir of the Duke of the North, son of the king’s sister.’
‘Oh, I’m the son of the king’s sister all right,’ the captain said, and then clamped down, before any more came out.
Gawin choked. He sat up, and cursed. A slow thread of scarlet worked its way across his groin. ‘No!’ he muttered.
The captain nodded. ‘Yes. If it makes you feel any better, we’re only half brothers,’ he said.
‘Sweet Christ and his five wounds,’ Gawin said.
The captain came to a decision – the kind of decision he made, where he threw out one set of options and adopted another, like life on the battlefield. He moved his chair closer to his half-brother. ‘Tell me this terrible fucking thing you did in Lorica,’ he said. He took Gawin’s hand. ‘Tell me, and I’ll forgive you for killing Prudentia. She already forgives you. I’ll explain sometime. Tell me what happened in Lorica, and let’s start again, from age nine, when we were friends.’
Gawin lay back, so that their eyes broke contact. ‘The price of your forgiveness is steep, brother.’ He was suddenly red as blood. Then he hung his head. ‘I am deeply ashamed. I would not confess this to a priest.’
‘I’m no priest, and I have plenty of which to be ashamed. Some day I, too, will explain. Now tell me.’
‘Why?’ Gawin asked. ‘Why? You’ll only hate me more – add contempt to the list of your grievances. I played the caitiff, I was craven and I grovelled under another man’s sword.’ Tears came down his face. ‘I failed and lost. I was nothing. For my sins, Satan sent this,’ and he pulled down his shirt to show the scales that had grown from his waist to his neck on the right side.
The captain looked at his brother – still so proud, even after such a thing happened, and all unknowing of his own pride. So easy to understand others the captain thought with wry amusement. And surprising sorrow. He couldn’t keep his emotional distance with Gawin.
‘Losing is not, in and of itself, a sin.’ The captain rubbed his beard. ‘It took me years to learn that, but I did. Failure is not sin. Wallowing in failure-’ he hung his own head ‘-is something at which I can excel, if I allow it to myself, but that’s more like the sin.’
‘You sound like a man of God,’ Gawin said.
‘Fuck God,’ the captain said.
‘Gabriel!’
‘Seriously, Gawin, what has God ever done for me?’ the captain laughed. ‘If I awaken after a sword thrust with the eternal flames burning my sorry arse, I’ll spit in the maker’s face, because that’s all I was ever offered in a rigged game, and I will have played it anyway.’
That blasphemy ended all conversation for a long time. The sun was setting.
Gawin rolled his hips a little. ‘My groin is bleeding again. Can you re-wrap it? I can’t stomach the nursing sisters wrapping my groin.’
‘Crap,’ the captain said. What had been a thread of scarlet was now a rapidly spreading stain – a pool of blood. ‘Jesus wept! No, I’m getting expert help.’ He laughed. ‘We’ll both likely die of the family curse – overweening pride – but I don’t have to actively help you die.’ He scraped his chair back. ‘Amicia?’ he called. ‘Amicia?’
She came so quickly that he knew – knew from her face, as well – that she’d heard every word they had said.
And she had a length of boiled linen in one hand and a pair of sharp scissors in the other. ‘Hold him down and this will go faster,’ she said, all business.
Gawin turned his face away.
‘Really,’ the captain said, when the bandage was off, ‘you should enjoy having such a beauty work on your groin.’
Amicia paused. He looked into her eyes for the first time in days and felt like a fool. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered weakly.
But she held his gaze. And then he saw her wink at Gawin. ‘A secret for a secret,’ she said, with that not-a-smile in the corner of her mouth. She bent over the long wound on the young knight’s leg, and when her lips were a finger’s width from his thigh, she breathed out – a long breath – and as she breathed, the wound closed. The captain saw the power flow through her, a great pulse of power, as great as anything he’d ever handled.
In his sight, it was bright green.
She looked up from her work and just a flicker of her eyes, and in them was a charge and a promise and in that flicker of a heartbeat he accepted both.
‘What did she do?’ Gawin asked. The captain’s broad torso was blocking his ability to see. ‘It’s all numb.’
‘A poultice,’ the captain said cheerfully. The room suddenly smelled of summer flowers. She was wrapping fresh linen around the wound, sponging off the fresh blood and the older dried blood.
Gawin tried to sit up, and the captain held him down. Under his left hand, something felt very wrong with his half-brother’s shoulder, and he rolled the edge of his shirt collar back.
Gawin’s shoulder was finely scaled, like a fish, or a wyvern. The captain ran his hand over it, and behind him, Amicia’s breath came in a sharp gasp.
Gawin groaned. ‘And you think you are cursed by God?’
Amicia ran her hand over the young knight’s scales, and the captain found himself instantly jealous.