‘We’re sin-eaters, every one of us,’ Tom said. ‘You and me, sure – but Long Paw an’ Wilful Murder and Ser Hugo and Ser Milus and all the rest. Sauce too. Even that boy. We eat their sin. We kill their enemies, and then they send us away.’
The captain had a flash of the daemon eviscerating his horse. We eat their sin. Somehow, the words hit him like a thunderclap, and he sat back. When he was done with the thought – which cascaded away like a waterfall, taking his thoughts in every direction – he realised the shadows had changed. His wine was long gone, Bad Tom was gone, his legs were stiff, and his hand hurt.
Michael was standing in the doorway with a cup of wine in his hand.
The captain dredged a smile out of his reverie, shrugged and took the wine.
He drank.
‘Jacques went down to Bridge Castle with grain and came back with a message for you from Messire Gelfred,’ Michael said. ‘He says it’s urgent he speak to you.’
‘Then I’ll have to put my harness on,’ the captain said. He sounded whiney, even to himself. ‘Let’s get it done.’
The Albinkirk Road – Ser Gawin
He had lost track of time.
He wasn’t sure what he was any more.
Gawin rode through another spring day, surrounded by carpets of wildflowers that flowed like morning fog beneath his horse, rolling away in clumps and hummocks, a thousand perfect flowers in every glance, blue and purple, white and yellow. In the distance, all was a carpet of yellow green from the haze of sun on the mountainsides that were coming closer every day, their peaks woven like a tapestry in and out of the stands of trees that grew thicker and closer every mile.
He’d never had the least interest in flowers before.
‘Ser knight?’ asked the boy with the crossbow.
He looked at the boy, and the boy flinched. Gawin sighed.
‘Ye weren’t moving,’ the boy said.
Gawin pressed his spurs to his horse’s side, and shifted his weight, and his destrier moved off. His once-handsome dark leather bridle was stained with the death of fifty thousand flowers, because Archangel ate every flower he could reach as soon as he’d figured out that the once fierce hands on the reins weren’t likely to stop him eating. That’s what his misery meant to his war horse – more flowers to eat.
I am a coward and a bad knight. Gawin looked back at a life of malfeasance and tried to see where he’d gone wrong, and again and again he came back to a single moment – torturing his older brother. The five of them ganging up on Gabriel. Beating him. The pleasure of it – his screams-
Is that where it started? he asked himself.
‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked again.
The horse’s head was down, and they’d stopped again.
‘Coming,’ Gawin muttered. Behind him, the convoy he was not guarding rolled north, and Gawin could see the Great Bend ahead, where the road turned to head west.
West towards the enemy. West, where his father’s castle waited full of his mother’s hate and his brother’s fear.
Why am I going west?
‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked. This time, there was fear in his voice. ‘What’s that?’
Gawin shook himself out of his waking dream. The goldsmith’s boy – Adrian? Allan? Henry? – was backing away from a clump of trees just to his left.
‘There’s something there,’ the boy said.
Gawin sighed. The Wild was not here. His horse stood among wildflowers, and last year this field had been ploughed.
Then he saw the sickly-pale arm, light brown, shiny like a cockroach, holding a stone-tipped javelin. He saw it and it saw him in the same moment, and he leaned to the left with the habit of hard training and ripped his long sword from its scabbard.
The boglin threw its weapon.
Gawin cut the shaft out of the air.
The boglin gave a thin scream of anger, balked of its prey, and the goldsmith’s boy shot it. His crossbow loosed with a snap and the bolt went home into the creature with a slurpy thud and came straight out the other side in a spray of gore, leaving the small horror to flop bonelessly on the wildflowers for as long as a trout might take to die, making much the same gasping motions with its toothless mouth, and then its eyes filmed over and it was gone.
‘They always have gold,’ the goldsmith’s boy said, taking a step towards it.
‘Step back, young master, and load that latch again.’ Gawin was shocked at his voice – calm, commanding. Alive.
The boy obeyed.
Gawin backed Archangel slowly, watching the nearest woods.
‘Run for the wagons, boy. Sound the alarm.’
There was more movement, more javelin heads, a flash of that hideous cockroach brown, and the boy turned and ran.
Gawin slammed his visor down.
He wasn’t in full armour. Most of it was in a goldsmith’s wagon, wrapped in tallow and coarse sacking in two wicker baskets because he had no squires to keep it. And because wearing it might have meant something.
So he was wearing his stained jupon, his boots, his beautiful steel gauntlets and his bassinet, riding a horse worth more than three of the wagons full of fine wools he was protecting. He backed Archangel faster, sawing the reins back and forth as his destrier all but trotted backwards.
The first javelin came out of the woods, high. He had his sword in his right hand, all the way down by his left side, the position his father’s master at arms had taught him. He could hear the man saying ‘Cut up, mind! Not into your own horse, ye daft thing!’
He cut up, severing the weapon’s haft and breaking its flight.
Behind him, he heard the boy yelling ‘To arms! To arms!’
He risked a long glance back at the convoy. It was hard to focus through the piercing of his visor, hard to pick up distant movement, but he thought he could see Old Bob directing men in all directions.
He turned back to see the air full of javelins, and he cut – up, down, up again as fast as thought. A javelin haft caught him in the side of head and rang his helmet like a bell, even with his padded arming cap. He smelt his own blood.
Turned his horse’s head – because once they’d all thrown, he had a moment to get around, and get away.
Two of them were running for him. They were fast, moving like insects – so low to the ground that they were a danger to horses’ legs. Archangel reared, pivoted on his hind legs, and a powerful forefoot shot out like a boxer’s punch.
Gawin flicked his sword out along his fingers, lengthening his grip until he was holding only the disc-shaped pommel and, in the same motion, made a wrist cut down and back.
Archangel’s boglin popped like a ripe melon, its chest and neck caving in with a dull thud and a fine spray of ichor. Gawin’s screeched as the cold iron pierced its hide – iron was poison to its kind, and it screamed its hate as its tiny soul rose from its corpse like a minute thundercloud that dissipated on the first whiff of breeze.
All at once they were away, the big horse galloping easily over the wildflowers. Gawin had trouble breathing. His visor seemed to cut all the air from his lungs and his chest was tight.
As he rode, he could see there were other knots of the things – perhaps four or five groups of them spread across the flowers like shit stains on a pretty dress, and suddenly he was filled with a fey energy, a will to do a great deed and die in the accomplishment.
I am a knight, he thought fiercely.
Gawin sat up in the saddle, holding his long, sharp sword with new purpose, and he turned Archangel and raised it at the boglins. Something dead within him rekindled as the sun lit the blade like a torch.
He felt the touch of something divine, and he saluted as if riding in a tournament.
‘Blessed Saint George,’ he prayed, ‘let me die as I wish I had lived.’
He put his spurs to Archangel – gently, a nudge rather than a rake – and the great horse thundered forward.
The boglins scattered. Javelins flew past and then he was among them, through them, using his knees to turn Archangel in a long curve toward the next clump, who were already running for the trees.