Jacques smiled grimly and gave the boy a kick. ‘Sorry, ma’am. We has some bad habits from the Continent, but we won’t take your things.’
But you would under other circumstances, and anything else you fancied, she thought.
Johne took her by her shoulders. It was a familiar, comfortable thing, and yet a little too possessive for her taste, even in a crisis.
‘I have a locking box,’ he said. ‘There’s room in it for your cup and ring. And any silver you have.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘Mag, we may never come back. This is war – war with the Wild. When it’s done, we may not have homes to return to.’
‘Gentle Jesu!’ she let slip. Took a shuddering breath, and nodded. ‘Very well.’ She scooped up the cup and ring, tipped over a brick in her fireplace and took out all her silver – forty-one pennies – and handed it all to the bailli. She saved out one penny, and she gave it to Jacques.
‘This much again if my donkeys make it to the fortress,’ she said primly.
He looked at it for a moment. Bit it. And flipped it to the boy. ‘You heard the lady,’ he said. He nodded to her. ‘I’m the captain’s valet, ma’am. A piece of gold is more my price. But Tom told me to see to you, and you are seen to.’ He gave her a quick salute and was out her door, headed for Simon Carter’s house.
She looked at the boy. He didn’t seem very different from any other boy she knew. ‘You can load a donkey?’ she asked.
He nodded very seriously. ‘Do you-’ he looked around. He was as skinny as a scarecrow and gawky the way only growing boys can be. ‘Do you have any food?’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘You’ll be taking it all anyways, won’t you, my dear?’ she asked. ‘Have some mince pie.’
Toby ate the mince pie with a determination that made her smile. While she watched him, still packing her hampers, he ate the piece he was given and then filched a second as he headed for her donkey.
A pair of archers appeared next. They lacked something that Ser Thomas and Jacques the valet had both possessed. They looked dangerous.
‘What have we here?’ asked the first one through the door. ‘Where’s the husband, then, my beauty?’ His voice was flat, and so were his eyes.
The second man had no teeth and too much smile. His haubergeon was not well kept, and he seemed like a half-wit.
‘Mind your own business,’ she said, her voice as sharp as steel.
Dead-eyes didn’t even pause. He reached out, grabbed her arm, and when she fought him he swept her legs out from under her and shoved her to the floor. His face didn’t change expression.
‘House’s protected,’ said the skinny boy said from the kitchen. ‘Best mind yourself, Wilful.’
The dead-eyed archer spat. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘I want to go back to the Continent. If I wanted to be a nurse-maid-’
Mag was so stunned she couldn’t react.
The archer leaned down and stuck his hand in the front of her cotehardie. Gave her breast a squeeze. ‘Later,’ he said.
She shrieked. and punched him in the crotch.
He stumbled back, and the other one grabbed her hair, as if this was a practised routine-
There was a sharp crack and she fell backwards, because the archer had released her. He was kneeling on the floor with blood pouring out of his face. Thomas was standing over him, a stick in his hand.
‘I tol’ em that this house was protected!’ the thin boy shouted.
‘Did you?’ The big man said. He eyed the two archers.
‘We was gentle as lambs!’ said the one with dead eyes.
‘Fucking archers. Piss off and get on with it,’ the big man said, and offered her a hand up.
The two archers got to their feet and went out the back to collect her chickens and her sheep and all the grain from her shed, all the roots in her cellar. They were methodical, and when she followed them into the shed, the dead-eyed one gave her a look that struck fear into her. He meant her harm.
But soon enough the boy had her donkeys rigged and loaded, and she put her husband’s pack on her back, her two baskets in her arms, and went out into the square.
From where she stood, her house looked perfectly normal.
She tried to imagine it burned. An empty basement yawning at the sun. She could see the place where she rested her back when she sewed, rubbed shiny with use, and she wondered if she would ever find such a well-lit spot.
The Carters were next to be ready – they were, after all, a family of carters with two heavy carts of their own and draught animals, and six boys and men to do the lifting. The bailli’s housekeeper was next, with his rugs – Mag had lain on one of those rugs, and she blushed at the thought. She was still mulling over her instinctive use of his name – his Christian name-
The Lanthorns were the last, their four sluttish daughters sullen, and Goodwife Lanthorn, in her usual despair, wandered the village’s column of animals, begging for space for her bag and a basket of linen. Lis the laundress was surrounded by soldiers, who competed to carry her goods. But she knew many of them by name, having washed their linens, and she was both safely middle-aged and comely, an ideal combination in the soldiers’ eyes.
At last the Lanthorns were packed – all four daughters eyeing the soldiers – and the column began to move.
Three hours after the men-at-arms rode into Abbington, the town was empty.
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Ser John gave him a company of crossbowmen – members of the town’s guilds, all of them a little too shiny in their guild colours. Blue and red predominated, from the furriers, the leading guild of Albinkirk. He might have laughed to think that he, cousin to the Emperor, was commanding a band of common-born crossbowmen. It would have amused him, but . . .
They came at sunset, out of the setting sun.
The fields looked as if they were crawling with insects and then, without a shout or a signal the irks changed direction and were coming up the walls. Ser Alcaeus had never seen anything like it, and it made his skin crawl.
There were daemons among them, a dozen or more, fast, lithe, elegant and deadly. And they simply ran up the walls.
His crossbowmen loosed and loosed into the horde coming at them, and he did his best to walk up and down behind them on the crenellations, murmuring words of encouragement and praising their steadiness. He knew how to command, he’d just never done it before.
The first wave almost took the wall. A daemon came right over and started killing guildsmen. It was nothing but luck that its great sword bounced off a journeyman armourer’s breastplate and the man’s mates got their bolts into the lethal thing. It still took four more men down while it died, but the sight of the dead daemon stiffened the guildsmen’s spines.
They staved off the second wave. The daemons had grown careful and led from the back. Alcaeus tried to get his crossbowmen to snipe at them, but there was never a moment when they could do anything but fight the most present danger.
A guild captain came to him where he was standing, leaning heavily on his pole-axe because he knew enough not to waste energy in armour. The man saluted.
‘M’lord,’ he said. ‘We’re almost out of bolts. Every lad brings twenty.’
Ser Alcaeus blinked. ‘Where do you get more?’
‘I was hoping you would know,’ said the guild officer.
Ser Alcaeus sent a runner, but he already knew the answer.
The third wave got over the walls behind them, they heard it go. The sounds of fighting changed, there was sudden shrieking and his men started to look over their shoulders.
He wished he had his squire – a veteran of fifty battles. But the man had died protecting him in the ambush and so he had no one to ask for advice.
Ser Alcaeus set his jaw and prepared to die well.
He walked along the wall again as the shadows lengthened. His section was about a hundred paces, end to end – Albinkirk was a big town, even to Ser Alcaeus who hailed from the biggest city in the world.
He stopped when he saw three of his men looking back at the town.