The Red Knight (44 page)

She looked around for Sister Mary, whose week it was to run the laundry, and heard a man’s voice. It was a cultured voice, singing.

She listened intently. Singing a Gallish romance.

She couldn’t see him, but she could see the four Lanthorn girls in their shifts, giggling, preening and showing a great deal of leg and shoulder.

Miram’s eyes narrowed. The Lanthorn girls were what they were, but they didn’t need some smooth-talking
gentleman
to encourage them on their road to hell. Miram strode across
the damp floor and there he was, leaning in the laundry door. He had a lute, and he was not alone.

‘Your name, messire?’ she asked. She had pounced so swiftly that he was locked in indecision – keep playing, or flee?

‘Lyliard, ma soeur,’ he said sweetly.

‘You are a knight, messire?’ she asked.

He bowed.

‘None of these four unmarried maidens is of noble birth, messire. And while it may suit you to bed them, their pregnancies and their unwed lives will weigh heavily on my convent, my
sisters, and your soul.’ She smiled. ‘I hope we understand each other.’

Lyliard looked as if he’d been hit by a wyvern. ‘Ma soeur!’

‘You look like a squire,’ Sister Miram said to the young man at Lyliard’s elbow. He also had a lute and while he lacked Lyliard’s dash and polish Miram’s opinion
was he’d get there in time. And he was handsome, in a raffish, muscular way.

‘John of Reigate, sister.’ He was young enough to drop his eyes and look like a schoolboy caught out in a lark. Which he was. She had to remember that they killed for a living, but
they were still people.

The third man was the handsomest. He had polish
and
good looks. And he blushed.

‘And you are the captain’s squire,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Unfair. My fame proceeds me.’

‘Don’t ape your master,’ Miram said. ‘The three of you, gently born, should be ashamed of yourselves. Now go.’

Lyliard looked abashed. ‘Listen, sister, we merely crave some female company. We are not bad men.’

She sniffed. ‘Do you mean you would pay for what you take?’ She looked at all three of them. ‘You seduce innocents instead of committing out and out rape? Is that supposed to
impress me?’

The captain’s squire sniffed. His left hand patted the bandage around his waist. ‘You really have no idea who or what we are. What we face.’

Miram caught his eye and stepped very close, close as a lover. Almost nose to nose. His eyes were blue, and she had once been a woman to enjoy handsome men.

Hers were a deep, old green.

‘I know, young squire,’ she said.
‘I know exactly
what you face.’ She didn’t blink and he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her. ‘Save your
posturing for whores,
boy.
Now go and say twenty Pater Nosters, mean them, and think about what it might mean to be a knight.’

Michael would have liked to have stood his ground, but the moment her regard dropped away, he stumbled a step.

She smiled at the three of them, and they backed away from the door.

Sister Miram went back into the laundry, where the Lanthorn girls were huddling, terrified, and trying to cover their bare legs.

Sister Mary came in, carrying a huge basket. ‘Miram!’ she called out. ‘What’s amiss?’

‘The usual,’ Miram said. And started searching for her missing cap.

North of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn felt bitten by the old bear’s disdain. His walk back was full of thoughts about how the men in the Rock had, apparently, inflicted two defeats on him. He had to face
the hard truth; to the irks and boglins and even to the daemons, these little fiery pinpricks were defeats.

He didn’t really think that either of his lieutenents would challenge him, and he reached out more and more to the east as he walked, until he could feel the intense
wrongness
of
the invaders. They were not like the peasants, the nuns, and the shepherds in the fortress. They smelt of violence.

He had always hated their kind, even when he walked among them as a man.

Also in the fortress, surrounded by all that cold stone worked by man, the enchantments an aeon old and proof against all but his strongest enchantment, he could feel the Abbess, a sun of power,
with her nuns a star field behind her.

He flinched away from her.

And the tendrils of his questing power saw another, darker sun – the beacon that the daemons had seen – that Thurkan, the sharpest of the daemons, had seen and avoided. The shielded
one, who had resisted, however briefly, his workings on the battlefield.

The bears hadn’t refused him, precisely. But nor were they helping him with any force but a few angry warriors bent on revenge.
He drew deep breath of clean air and turned north,
back into the mountains, and lengthened his stride until he was all but running, his giant body now moving faster than the fastest horse. He could get where he wanted to with a phantasm, but he was
suddenly wary of using too much power. Power attracted other power, and in the Wild, that could spell a quick end – all too often, something bigger than you arrived unexpectedly. And ate
you.

Even as he ran the forest highways, Thorn contemplated eating Turkan.

Lissen Carak – Kaitlin

The four Lanthorn girls were quick to recover from Sister Miram, and the afternoon found them coring winter apples behind the kitchens. There were no sisters and no novices.

The eldest Lanthorn girl was Elissa. She was dark haired, as tall as a man, thin, with long legs and very little figure and a nose like a hawk. Despite this men found her irresistible, mostly
because she smiled a great deal and was selective in her use of the family’s principle weapon: a sharp tongue.

Mary was the second daughter. She was the very opposite of her elder sister; short, but not squat, with a full figure, guinea gold hair, a narrow waist and a snub nose. She thought herself a
great beauty and was always puzzled when boys preferred Elissa.

Fran was brown haired, full-lipped and full hipped. She had her mother’s looks, her father’s brains and sense of honesty, and she seldom cared whether boys noticed her or not.

And Kaitlin was the youngest: just fifteen. She was not as tall as Elissa, not as full-figured as Mary, nor yet as witty, or as cutting, as Fran. She had pale brown hair that framed a
heart-shaped face, and she appeared to be the quietest and most respectable of the Lanthorns.

‘Bitch,’ Fran said, tossing a core aside. ‘She thinks we’re going to be good little girls with pig shit on our feet for the rest of our lives.’

Elissa looked around carefully. ‘We have to play this right,’ she said thoughtfully. She ate a slice of of apple, deftly taking a knife from beneath her kirtle, cutting a slice,
wiping the knife on her apron and putting back in her sheath faster than most people could follow. She looked down her long nose at Fran. ‘I hearby convene a meeting of the “Marry a
Noble” club.’

‘Silly kids’ nonsense,’ Mary scoffed. She was eighteen. ‘No one around here is going to marry any of us.’ She flicked her eyes around the circle. ‘Maybe
Kaitlin,’ she admitted.

Fran tossed an apple core viciously into the sty behind them. ‘If
some people
would stop making the beast with two backs with every farm boy in every blessed hay
stack—’

Elissa’s smile didn’t even thin. ‘Ahh, Fran, you’ll go a virgin to your wedding, won’t ya?’ She snorted.

Fran’s next apple core hit Elissa in the nose and she hissed.

Mary shrugged. ‘Scarcely matters if I bed ’em or don’t,’ she said, ‘seeing they say I did, and folks believe ’em.’

The others nodded.

Elissa shrugged. ‘Listen, the men-at-arms don’t talk to the farmers. They don’t know
shit
about our lives. And even the archers—’ She shrugged. ‘The
archers have more money than any
farm boy
in this place. The men-at-arms—’

‘They ain’t all gents,’ Mary said. ‘I wouldn’t touch that Bad Tom if I had armour on.’

Fran shrugged. ‘I rather like him.’

‘You’re dumber than I thought then. Aren’t you supposed to be the smartest, fastest one? He gives me the creeps.’ Mary shivered.

Elissa raised a hand for silence. ‘That’s as may be. What I’m saying is that we—’ She looked around. ‘We have something. Of value.’ She smiled. The
smile lit her face and turned her from a square jawed young harridan into a very attractive woman. Mary turned and saw that Elissa’s smile was for a middle-aged squire just walking past the
kitchen with a pail of ash. Off to polish armour somewhere.

Elissa folded up her smile and put it away. ‘There’s sixty men-at-arms,’ she said. ‘Sixty chances one of them might marry one of us.’

Mary snorted.

But Fran leaned forward, the apple in her hand forgotten. ‘You might have something there,’ she said.

Elissa and Fran weren’t usually allies. But Elissa met her look and both smiled.

‘So we don’t,’ Elissa said. ‘We just don’t. That’s all you have to do, girls.
Don’t
. Let’s see what we’re offered.’

Mary wasn’t so sure. ‘So what. We don’t bed them? What else do we do? You’re planning to learn to shoot a bow? Go to Mag and take up fine sewing?’

Elissa shook her head.

‘Lis won’t stop opening her legs for any likely lad,’ Mary said.

‘Lis can do as she likes. She’s old and we’re not.’ Fran looked around. ‘Captain’s not bad looking.’

Elissa made a crude noise. ‘He’s doing one of the nuns.’

‘He ain’t!’ said Kaitlin. She’d been silent thus far, but some things couldn’t be allowed to pass.

‘Oh, you’re an expert, are ya?’ asked Mary.

‘I clean his room,’ Kaitlin said. She blushed. ‘Sometimes.’

Elissa looked at her. ‘You, young maiden, are a dark horse.’

‘I ain’t!’ Kaitlin said, prepared for their mockery.

‘You go right in his room?’ Elissa asked.

‘Almost every day.’ Kaitlin looked around. ‘What?’

Elissa shrugged. ‘One of us could be in his bed.’

Kaitlin put a hand to her mouth. Mary spat. Fran, frankly, looked as if she was considering it.

‘Too desperate,’ Fran pronounced. ‘He’s scary, too.’

‘Creepy,’ said Mary.

‘His squire’s pretty as a picture,’ Elissa said.

Kaitlin blushed. Luckily the rest weren’t watching.

North-west of Lissen Carak – Thorn

Thorn needed to know more. He needed his friend in the Rock to be less coy. Thorn summoned birds from the air even as he ran through the woods in the failing light. Now he was
climbing ridges. The descent on the north side was never as steep as the ascent had been, and he was going higher and higher into the mountains. The trees thinned, and he moved faster as the land
opened up.

A pair of ravens descended to his fists as if they were hawks to a knight. He spoke to them, planted messages in their wise heads, and sent them to the fortress. No one ever suspected ravens.
They rose above him and then soared away to the south-east, and he turned and saw how very high he had come.

He looked out over the wilderness. At his feet – far, far below – was the chain of beaver ponds like miniature lakes sparkling in the last of the sun. The stream that connected them
was a thread of silver, visible here and there in the warp and weft of trees.

He turned and climbed higher. The trail was steeper now, and he was not so fast. He had to use his long, powerful arms to pull himself from tree to tree. The stream began to descend in a series
of waterfalls at his side.

Finally, he pulled himself over a slick rock and raised himself by main force to the top, his arms spread wide, grunting with effort as they lifted the full weight of his giant body. At his feet
was a pool, deep and black, and a waterfall dropped a hundred feet into it. The spray coated him in moments. He stooped and drank deep of the magic pool.

A head broke the surface, just an arm’s length away, and he started.

Who drinks in my pool?

The words appeared in his mind without a sound being spoken.

‘I am called Thorn,’ he said.

The creature rose from the pool, black water flowing from him. As he moved up the side of the pool he grew and grew. His skin was jet-black and shone like obsidian.

He moved fast yet appeared to be perfectly still; the transitions were difficult to catch, movement always seemed to happen at the corner of Thorn’s eye. And when the creature fully
emerged, he was a quarter taller than the sorcerer.

A shining black stone golem, with no face, no eyes, no mouth.

I do not know you.

‘I know a little of you,’ Thorn said. ‘I know that I need allies. Your kind are said to be fearsome warriors.’

I can feel your power. It is considerable.

‘I can see your speed and strength. They, too, are considerable.’ Thorn nodded.

Enough talk. What do you WANT?

The mind shout almost brought Thorn to his knees. ‘I want a dozen of your kind as my guards. As soldiers.’

The smooth monster threw back his head and laughed, and suddenly there was a mouth after all, with cruel teeth. The stone of his face – if it was stone – seemed to flow like water.
We serve no one.

Thorn would have smiled if he still had the ability to. Instead, he simply cast his binding. Simultaneously, he shielded his mind from the shout that was sure to follow.

The troll stiffened. He screamed, and his teeth clashed like rocks in a flooded stream, and his smooth arms grew hands and talons that reached for Thorn.

The sorcerer didn’t stir. The net of his will settled in sparkling green strands over the creature and tightened, and that quickly it was over.

I will slay you and all your kind in ways too horrible for your mind to encompass.

Thorn turned. ‘No you will not,’ he said. ‘Now, obey. We have more of your kind to find, and a long night ahead of us.’

The troll thrashed in his binding like a wolf in a cage. He screamed, his bell-like voice ringing across the wilderness.