ROBERT LOW
The Lion at Bay

To Monique and Simon, who gave me the best part of Scotland – Lewis and Harris

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Author’s Note

List of Characters

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Robert Low

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Being a chronicle of the Kingdom in the Years of Trouble, written at Greyfriars Priory on the octave of Septuagisma, in the year of Our Lord one thousand three hundred and twenty-nine, 23rd year of the reign of King Robert I, God save and keep him.

In the year of Our Lord one thousand two hundred and ninety-nine, our goodly king, then simply Sir Robert, Earl of Carrick, found he could no longer work together with his enemy and fellow Guardian of Scotland, Red John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, who sought many and divers ways to undermine the good of the Kingdom.

Wherefore Sir Robert resigned, in order that Bishop Lamberton of St Andrews could become Guardian in his stead, hoping that, if Red John of Badenoch could find no favour in the Earl of Carrick, then surely he would not work against God. Meanwhile, Sir William Wallace, discredited after his failure to win at Falkirk, stayed in France, both for his safety and to seek the aid of King Philip IV for the good of the Kingdom.

The Kingdom was at war with itself and even with God – the Order of Poor Knights had incited the wrath of kings and popes by its pride and arrogance, so that they contrived in bringing it to heel. The Pope wished to join it with that other Holy Order, the Knights Hospitaller. The king of France wished, through his greed and perfidy, to bring it down entire and sent out agents to conspire to that end.

At this same moment, Edward was persuaded to release the imprisoned John Balliol, the King in whose name Scotland still resisted, into the custody of the Pope. The Comyn and Balliol, with Wallace in France, seemed set to force King Edward of England to agree to return John Balliol to the throne.

It was this, the imminent return of a king already deposed, unsuited to a throne he did not want and unwelcomed by much of the community he had abandoned, which spurred Sir Robert to seek his own peace with Longshanks, sure that the community of the Kingdom had set foot on the wrong path. Others were of a similar mind – though some, scurrilous and cruel, claimed that good Sir Robert had sold himself for Longshanks’ promise of the crown of Scotland and the hand of Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of the powerful Red Earl of Ulster.

For all that, the deed was done and Sir Robert, new husband and newly returned to the king’s peace, rode with King Edward the Plantagenet, the greying pard who had savaged Scotland summer after summer until the very earth groaned.

In the year of Our Gracious Lord thirteen hundred and four, the Kingdom was weary of war, the lords who fought it and the ruin they brought because of it. It seemed that even Longshanks grew tired of the ritual though he was determined to stamp his vengeful foot on the neck of the Kingdom, once and for all.

Uneasily, Sir Robert was forced to watch the last remnants of Scottish resistance crumble, as most of the nobility of Scotland scrambled to make their peace with Longshanks. Then, as the Kingdom’s enemies gathered to witness the fall of Stirling, last bastion of the Scottish defence, God raised both His Hands and changed the world.

The first Hand hovered over the Lord of Annandale and Robert Bruce’s goodly father, who fell ill unto death. When God decided to take him into His Grace, it would invest the son not only with the lands and titles of all the Bruce holdings, but the claim to the Kingdom’s crown. Sir Robert, aware of this sad and momentous event, was already laying the plans to bring about his kingship even as the last echoes of rebellion seemed to be fading.

The second of God’s Hands raised The Wallace out of France and back to Scotland, so that, just as it seemed King Edward had crushed all before him, one talon of the lion remained unsheathed.

And was as much sharpened against Sir Robert Bruce as any English.

CHAPTER ONE

The moors of Happrew, near Peebles

Sunday of Candelmas, the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, February, 1304

Cold rain and Black John.

Not the recipe for a happy war at the best of times, Sir Hal thought, but if you add to that the grim cliff of Bruce’s face these days, the endless march through February wet and the wreck and ruin and smoulder they passed through, then the gruel of it was all henbane and aloes.

The riders were dripping and miserable as old mud, the horses standing with their heads down, hipshot in a sea of tawny bracken and the clawed black roots of heather and furze; only the moss splashed a dazzle of green into the mirr.

They were quiet, too, Hal saw. The knights and serjeants were all concentrated concern over the well-being of their expensive coddled wrapped and riderless warhorses. Wet and sullen squires were set to checking hocks and hooves which had already been inspected a dozen times. The rounceys the owners actually rode were splattered with mud and weary, but they were of no account next to the destrier, any one of which could be sold for the price of a good manor in Lothian.

The Scots sat their shaggy, mud-raggled ponies uneasily, talking so softly that the suck of feathered garron hooves pulling from the soft ground, the clink and chink and tinkle of harness and blade sounded loud against their hush. Hal knew why they hunched and spoke in whispers and it had nothing to do with rain or the suspected presence of enemy.

This was Sheean Stank, which no-one cared for, a sudden knoll in a vast expanse of sucking bog and carse where the sheean folk – the sidhean – lived. No more than a score of feet higher than the land around, it seemed a great hill in the flat and everyone knew that this was where a man could be lifted out of this world and into the next, where the Faerie would keep him for what seemed a day, then release him, no older, into a world aged sixty or a hundred years.

Black John Segrave did not care for Faerie much. Cold iron, he had heard, did for those ungodly imps same as it did for Scotch rebels and it was probable that they were one and the same in a land whose features revealed the nature of it and the folk who lived in it – Foulbogskye, Slitrig, Wolf Rig, Bloody Bush. And Sheean Stank.

He glanced across at Bruce, Earl of Carrick and heir to Annandale, and tried to keep his face equable, for this was the new favourite of Longshanks, and the score of filthy Scotchmen surrounding him were supposedly experts in scouting this sort of terrain. Supposedly loyal to King Edward, too, though Segrave was beginning to doubt both claims – yet his king had tied them together with the one purpose, to rout out the last of the brigand rebels and bring their leaders to the leash. Particularly Wallace.

Yet he was being led by Scotch who could have been rebels themselves from their dress and manner. They were led by Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston, whom everyone called Hal, even his own ragged-arsed scum of a mesnie, and captained by a grizzled hog of a man called Sim Craw, whom Segrave would have hanged at another time just for the insolence in him.

Segrave did not trust any of them and wished that Sir Robert Clifford’s men had not become separated from him; there was a sudden sharp needle of fear at the last time he had split up a command, at Roslin the previous year. There had been ruin and death in it then – and a Sientcler involved, too, he recalled uneasily, another one of that arrogant breed, this time from Roslin itself; then, these two Sientclers had been enemies and now they were, ostensibly, friends.

He did not trust any of the Scots, even the most English of them – like the Earl of Carrick.

‘What think you, my lord?’ he demanded, his voice rheumed with damp. ‘Is the enemy hereabouts? Is it Wallace?’

‘So our intelligencers reported,’ Bruce replied easily and Hal saw the smile force itself across the heavy face. There was a beard, black and close-cropped in a strange way that included the droop of a moustache and a nap on the chin beneath, leaving the cheeks bare. Hal knew this was because no hair would grow on Bruce’s right cheek, so he had been forced to tailor his chin hair to suit, though it made him look, as Sim Craw had muttered, ‘like a wee Frenchie bachle o’ a music’ maister.’

A curlew piped somewhere and then a horseman burst over the hill and down the slope in a flat-out, belly-to-the ground gallop that brought heads up.

It was Dog Boy on the blowing garron, gasping harder than his horse, his mouth working, silent as a fresh-caught fish, black fuzz of beard dripping and the dags of his hair plastered to his cheeks. No iron hat could keep that thatch in, Hal thought with a wry smile to himself; he marvelled at what the years had made of the skelf-thin kennel lad he had found at Douglas – when was it? The eve of Wallace’s rebellion. Christ’s Wounds – eight years ago …

‘Take a breath,’ Sim advised Dog Boy smoothly, ‘afore ye try to speak.’

‘Though it would be good to learn what has sent you to us at the gallop,’ Segrave added, ‘before they come down on us.’

Hal saw Bruce’s eyes flicker.

‘No Roslin Glen here, my lord,’ Bruce said, viciously gentle and Segrave jerked as if stung.

It was almost a year to the day, Hal was reminded since Segrave made such a slorach of a raid similar to this that the English forces had been scattered in a few hours by Red John Comyn, Sir Simon Fraser and Hal’s Roslin kin and namesake, Sir Henry Sientcler.

Who had all then gone on to Herdmanston and burned it out. Hal grew sullen as old embers at the memory. Kin or not, the Sientclers of Roslin had been in the Scots camp then and Hal Sientcler of Herdmanston was in the Bruce camp. And Bruce was English. Again.

The price for following the Bruce was high – though not for Bruce himself, who had gained the daughter of the powerful Earl of Ulster as wife, new lands and the new favour of an old king who was wallowing in the winter of his years and had sired, so far, two wee bairns by his girlish French queen.

Now, of course, the Sientclers of Roslin had also bowed the knee, kissed the King’s foot and received back their own lands by a gracious Edward trying some velvet on the iron gauntlet.

Hal saw Segrave unconsciously touch his side, where three ribs had been broken when he was tumbled from his horse into the grin of Sir Simon Fraser and the other Scots lords, shredding Segrave dignity as well as likely bankrupting his purse for a ransom.

Worse than that was the moment when Fraser had argued for killing all the prisoners, fat ransoms or not. Fraser had been persuaded otherwise, but the screaming, belly-loosening fear of that lived with Segrave still.

Now Sir Simon Fraser was the last hold-out of the Scots lords who had been at Roslin Glen that day and the closer Segrave got to him, the closer he was to ridding himself of the stain of it. Bruce, however seemed determined to keep the memory of it alive and Segrave’s scowls grew blacker than his oil-boiled maille.

‘What have you seen?’ he spat, and Dog Boy, rain in his greasy new beard and streaking the filth on his face, finally managed to blurt out:

‘Weemin, my lord. Ower yon hill.’

There was silence and the men uncovering their great cosseted warhorses paused, wondering if it would be necessary. The grimy Scots looked on wordlessly, gripping the hafts of their Jeddart staffs, those lance-long weapons which combined spear, cutting edge and hook.

‘Women?’ Segrave repeated, bewildered.

‘How many, Dog Boy?’ Hal asked, seeing the slow blink of Segrave’s eyes counting down to explosive release.

‘A shilling’s worth,’ the boy replied, his breathing regular and then, with all the worldly experience of his bare score of years, added: ‘Fair quines too, in fine dresses.’

‘What in the name of God are a dozen women doing out here?’ Segrave snapped.

There came a low murmur from the men behind Bruce. The Earl smiled, bright and mild.

‘My lads mention Faerie, my lord,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps these are they. Pechs. Bogles. The Silent Moving Folk. Sheean.’

At each word, the men behind Hal shifted and made warding signs, some with the cross, others with older symbols they tried to make quick and hidden.

‘Christ be praised,’ growled Sim.

‘For ever and ever,’ men muttered automatically. Hal sighed; he knew Bruce was provoking Segrave, but forgetting the effect it had on men who believed. Only Dog Boy had dared ride to the top of the hill in the first place and Hal was proud of the courage that had taken. More of it was needed now.

‘Mair like a country event,’ he said into the locked stare of Bruce and Segrave and, at last, had the latter turn his wet eyes on him.

‘Country event?’

‘Mayhaps a tait o’ virgins,’ Sim flung in cheerfully. ‘Getting purified.’

The Dog Boy, still trying to control the trembling in his thighs at what he had done, was sure they were powrie women, for they were strange in their cavorting and one was almost certainly a bogle by the height and the raucous shouts. Still, he couldn’t be entirely certain and did not want to appear like a fool in front of Lord Hal.

‘They were dancin’,’ he ventured and wilted as all eyes clawed his face. ‘In a ring.’

The thrilling horror of it spilled on them like bad honey, sweet and rotted. Women dancing by themselves would bring the wrath of the Church; only sinners, pagans and the De’il’s own did such a thing. Dancing in a secret circle was proof of enough witchery to get all the women burned.

‘Sheean,’ growled Bangtail Hob from over Hal’s shoulder and the men growled their fearful agreement.

‘Christ be praised,’ repeated Sim, but the muttered response was lost when a man shouted out from the pack behind Segrave, ‘Faerie? Silent Folk? If you are afeared, my Scotch lords, then leave it to good, enlightened Christian Englishmen.’

Faces turned to stare at Sir Robert Malenfaunt, swarthy face darkened with rage and a scornful twist to his lips. Bruce merely smiled lightly, which was enough to crank Malenfaunt’s rage up a notch; here were all the men who had once tricked him over the Countess Isabel of Buchan’s ransom and, even if it had cost him nothing, Malenfaunt’s pride was worth any price.

Hal only remembered Isabel, who had been the prisoner ransomed from Malenfaunt into his arms. Just weeks later, Falkirk’s slaughter had ripped everything to shreds and forced her back to her husband. Hal had not seen her since and the dull ache of it was like cold iron in the heart of him.

Segrave regarded Malenfaunt with distaste, for he had heard things about the Berwick knight that were unsavoury. Yet he was forced to agree with the man’s sentiment here and was aware that others were already settling themselves into the high-cantled saddles of their powerful horses, placing domed bucket helms over their heads, taking lance and shield from hurrying squires.

He wanted to wait for Clifford, yet he wondered if the women were whores for the rebels; if so, they would have information …

‘Fetch me some Faerie virgins,’ Segrave said in French to Malenfaunt, ‘and we will purify them here.’

‘My lord,’ Hal began warningly and then stopped as, with a whoop and a roar, the warhorses surged forward in a great spray of mud. Someone yelled ‘til-est-hault’ as if it were a hunt.

But Segrave saw, for a fleeting moment, the spark of Hal’s defiant anger from a face beaten to leather by wind and weather, fretted with white lines at the corners of his eyes. Segrave cocked one insouciant challenge of an eyebrow at the flare and saw the storm-grey eyes turn to flint-blue – ‘Now we will see,’ Segrave declared, throwing up one hand to ward off the gouts kicked up by the disappearing horsemen.

Then Bruce’s voice cut through the tension.

‘There’s one of your Faerie women, my lord.’

They turned in time to see a fleeting swirl of disappearing skirts.

‘I would not want that yin, my lord,’ Sim Craw drawled and Segrave turned his wither on the white-streaked black beard and the broad, black-browed face it swamped. Unmoved, Sim nursed a powerful crossbow, wrapped against the rain, close to his great slab of body. ‘I like my weemin with their chins shaved,’ he noted casually.

There was a moment as the realization seeped in to Segrave, then he roared at a startled squire, ‘Bring them back. Bring them back – God curse it …’

He turned to Bruce, but too late. He had missed that man’s silent flick of signal; all he found was the back of the chevronned jupon, trailing a tippet of riders behind him away to the west.

Treachery. The word sprang at Segrave and he felt anger and fear in equal measure. A trap, by God, with Clifford a good gallop behind and Bruce running away and leaving him with yet another Scotch battle against odds. The thought settled something slimed and cold in his belly and he turned to survey his last score of men as the first hundred breasted the ridge and vanished.

Malenfaunt had spotted the women at once, tucking up their skirts and running for the shelter of the woods beyond them like scattering ducks. He gave a whoop, peeled off the constricting great helm and flung it away, along with the lance to free up one hand, then set his horse flying at the runner, leaning sideways a little in the saddle to make it easier to reach out and grab.

Those immediately behind checked a little, mainly because his powerful warhorse kicked up a spray of muddy gobbets, while to right and left lances and helms went bouncing, carelessly dangerous, as the knights followed Sir Robert Malenfaunt’s example and spurred on.

They saw Malenfaunt lean out as he slowed to a canter so as to better judge the snatch at the fleeing woman’s wimpled head. They saw the woman turn, the wimple and barbette flying away to free a wild tangle of infested hair, the face a bearded snarl; Malenfaunt had time to realize the enormous horror of it before the man dropped to a crouch, brought round the two-handed axe he held hidden in his skirts and scythed out the legs of the destrier.

It was the saving of Malenfaunt. At the same time as he was reeling through the air in a tumble of moss and trees and sky, the edge of the wood spat a sleet of arrows from two points. Between them, moving ragged and relentless, came a clot of spearmen; the shrieking falsities in women’s dresses raced to join them, their lure complete.

Segrave, down at the foot of the small hill, heard the whoops turn to shrieks, almost felt the blows that rang like bells on the shields of the unseen knights, audible even at this distance and through the muffle of the great iron bucket of his helm. He urged the huge warhorse forward, surging up the sodden slope, the handful of men behind him.

Ruin was beyond and Segrave saw it in a single glance when he breasted the rise. Horses were down, screaming and kicking, others cantering in aimless circles, the riders struggling to get up. Arrows sprouted from tussock and body, and a dark, bristling hedge of spearpoints – three hundred men in it if there was one – approaching. All the men who had ridden off with Malenfaunt were unhorsed, crawling like sheep, with horses scattering to every part, or kicking and dying.

He saw, too, the figure in black with surcoat and shield, the silver cinquefoiles bright as stars and his heart thundered up into his head in a howl of triumph – Fraser, who had all but ruined him in Roslin Glen. By God, Segrave swore, he will not do it again.

A flurry of arrows took the man next to him out of the saddle and set the great Frisian warhorse bolting, screaming from the pain of another two shafts in its chest, before it crashed to its knees and finally ploughed its proud Roman nose into a furrow of bog, kicking and snorting blood.

The men with him balked at charging a hedge of points backed by three-score of Selkirk archers, but Segrave had fire and rage shrieking in his head and was not about to stop.

Hal saw Segrave arrive, saw him charge, then Bruce, laughing out of his broad face with its music-master beard, pointed to the backs of the archers, took off his great helm and dropped it, then spurred his own warhorse forward.

He had led them in a perfect outflank and it was not a fight but a flat-out chasse. The archers heard the thunder of hooves just soon enough to let them turn their heads from the business of killing English to see a score or more of howling Scots on fast-moving little garrons come at their back.

Hal went through the wild scatter of them, trying to rein in the plunging horse and hack at a target, but he was sure he had hit no-one – the mount was no helpful destrier. He saw Bangtail Hob and others chasing running figures, circling in mad, short-legged gallops, for they were more used to fighting on foot than on horse, and he bawled at them, his voice deafening inside the full helm.

He pulled it up and off, pointed and flailed and roared until they all got the idea and started kicking their horses towards the clot of spearmen, who had started, frantically, to form a ring.

Too late, Hal thought, fighting the garron to a standstill, desperately trying to loop the helm into his belt – Segrave’s knot of riders, trailing up in ones and twos, smacked into it, picking spots between spears, riding the men into the muddy grass; the spearmen suddenly seemed to vomit running men, like the black yolk of a rotten egg.

Blades clanged, bringing Hal’s head round. He saw Bruce, perfect and poised on the powerful destrier, which baited under his firm rein, huge feet ploughing earth on the spot. Confronting Bruce, Hal saw, with a lurch that took his heart into his mouth, a familiar figure.

The autumn bracken hair was dulled and iron-streaked, the beard wild, untamed as it had been in the days when Hal had first seen him, before he’d had it neatly trimmed as befitted Scotland’s sole Guardian. Yet he stood tall – Christ, he was even taller than Hal remembered – and the hand-and-a-half was twirled easy and light in one hand, the other holding a scarred shield with the memory of his heraldry on it, a white lion rampant on red.

Wallace took a step, feinted and struck, then sprang back. Bruce, light and easy as Wallace himself, parried and the blades rang; the warhorse, arch-necked, snorted and half-reared, wanting to strike out and held in by its rider.

‘Get you gone, Will,’ Bruce said coldly. ‘Get back to France, if you are wise, but get you gone. The war is all but over and you are finished. Mark me’

‘My wee lord of Carrick,’ Wallace acknowledged lightly, a grin splitting his beard. ‘Get ye to Hell, Englishman. And if ye care to step aff yon big beast ye ride, I will mark ye, certes.’

Bruce shook his head, almost wearily; someone called out and Hal saw the scuttling shape of a figure he knew well, a Wallace man – the loyal Fergus, his black boiled-leather carapace scarred and stained. Beetle, they called him and it was apt.

With Fergus and his broad-axe guarding his back, Wallace backed warily off. He was expecting Bruce to press, the surprise clear in his face when that did not happen. Hal saw Bangtail Hob and Ill-Made Jock circle, caught their eye and brought them to a halt; if this was to end in a fight, then it was Bruce’s own, though he felt sick at the thought of it, sicker still at the idea of having ridden down men he might once have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with. This was what we are brought down to, he thought bitterly, to where even the best of us can only find it in their hearts to battle one another.

‘Get you to France, Will,’ Bruce repeated softly. ‘If you remain, you are finished.’

‘If I remain,’ Wallace said in good French, sliding further into the dripping trees, ‘you cannot get started.’

Then, like a wraith, he was gone. Hal heard Segrave calling out to the newly-arrived Clifford and bellowing curses because, somewhere in the trees and confusion, both Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser had vanished.

Hal turned to where Bruce, his face a slab of wet rock, broke his stare from the hole Wallace had left in the air and settled it bleakly on Hal.

‘Not a word,’ he said and turned away, leaving Hal wondering if he spoke of personal censure or admitting to Segrave that he had let Wallace go. Sim Craw came up in time to hear this and sniffed, then blew rain and snot from the side of his nose, making his own mind up.

‘Good advice,’ he declared, ‘for if Black John hears that we had Will Wallace an’ let him loup away like a running hound …’

He did not need to finish. The rain lisped down as the sun came out and curlews peeped as if horror and blood and dying had not visited the Sheean Stank.

‘Faerie,’ growled Dog Boy to Bangtail, half-ashamed as he stared at the dead in women’s dresses.

Cambuskenneth Abbey, Stirling

Feast of St Ternan, confessor of the Picts, June, 1304.

‘You missed your chance there, my lord earl.’

Bruce did not turn his head, merely flicked his eyes at the broad grinning face of Bishop Wishart, the shadows and planes of it made grotesque by the flickering tallow lights.

‘There is one bishop too many in this game,’ he growled, which made Wishart chuckle fruitily and Hal, frowning with concentration, realize his inadequacy with chess. He was sure he had blundered, surer still that Bruce had missed an en passant; had he done it by accident – the rule was new and not much used – or was it some cunning ploy to lure him into even worse trouble?

‘Aye, well,’ came the blade-rasp voice of Kirkpatrick, looming from the shadows. ‘Here is yet another.’

A figure in simple brown robes and tonsure swept past him into the light, swift enough to cause the flames to flicker and set shadows dancing madly. He was, Hal saw, astoundingly young to be a senior prelate, his round face smooth and bland, yet his eyes black and shrewd, while the beginnings of a paunch were belied by slim, white, long-fingered hands, one of which he extended.

‘Christ be praised,’ the prelate said portentously.

‘For ever and ever.’

Bruce rose, kissed the fingers with dutiful deference, then scowled.

‘At last,’ he said sullenly. ‘We have been waiting, my lord bishop and my time is limited away from the King’s side.’

‘How is the good king of England?’ Lamberton demanded cheerfully.

‘Sickeningly well,’ Bruce replied with a wry twist of grin. ‘He sits at Stirling and plays with his great toys, while his wife and her women look on through an oriole he has made in their quarters. It is a great sport, it seems, for the ladies to watch huge stones being hurled at the walls while they stitch. His two new babes gurgle with delight.’

‘I hear he has several great engines,’ Lamberton declared, accepting wine from Wishart’s hand and settling himself with a satisfied sigh. ‘One called Segrave, I believe, which fires great heavy balls – now there is apt for you. I know this because of all the complaints I have had from wee abbots about the lead stripped from their roofs to make them.’

‘You had better pray for fine weather, else we will all be dripping,’ ‘Bruce replied sourly. ‘Cambuskenneth has also lost all the roofing, save from over the altar, so that God at least will not be offended. And Edward Plantagenet now has twelve war engines. One of them is my own, sent from Lochmaben – minus the throwing arm, mark you, which mysteriously took a wrong turn and will arrive too late to be of use.’

‘He has Greek Fire, too, I hear,’ Wishart added, with a disapproving shake of his head, ‘and weapons that burst with the Hellish taint of brimstone.’

There was silence for a moment and Hal did not know what the others were thinking, but his mind was on the stunning sight and sound of those very weapons, great gouts of flame and blasts that hurled earth and stones into the air, fire that ran like water and could not be quenched. Yet the walls of Stirling, pocked and scorched, still held.

‘Aye, well,’ Lamberton declared suddenly, rubbing his hands as if presenting them to a fire. ‘Be of cheer – Stirling holds out yet, when all else has given in. Young Oliphant has done well there.’

‘Young Oliphant holds out because Longshanks refused to accept his capitulation,’ Bruce replied flatly. ‘He offered it a week since. The King wants to see his newest engine in action, the great Warwolf. Fifty folk it takes to handle it and Edward is determined to have it fling stones at Oliphant’s head before that man is allowed to come out.’

There was silence, broken only by the soft, slippering sound of hesitant feet. Then Lamberton sighed.

‘Then all are finally given in,’ he said. ‘Save Wallace.’

Bruce shot the bishop a hard look; Lamberton owed his appointment to Wallace when he was Guardian and needing all the gentilhomme allies he could garner; Bruce wondered how deep the bishop’s obligement went.

Other diehards, finally persuaded to give in, had also been initially excluded from Edward’s conditions for submission. Yet even they had been forgiven in the end, by a Longshanks who had learned a little from all the previous attempts and was trying the kidskin glove as well as the maille mitten.

All forgiven – all but Wallace.

‘That is one problem we are here to discuss,’ Bruce began, then broke off as a new figure shuffled painfully into the light. Bent, with a face like a ravaged hawk and iron-grey hair straggling round his ears from under a conical felted hat, the man nodded and muttered thanks to Kirkpatrick as he was helped into a chair, then refused wine with a wave of one weary hand.

‘John Duns,’ Bishop Wishart announced and the man managed a smile out of a yellow face. Bruce knew the priest by reputation – a man with a mind like a steel trap – but was shocked by his appearance. The cleric was scarce forty.

‘The new lord of Annandale,’ said Duns, his voice wisped as silk, but his eyes steady on Bruce’s own. ‘Which title also brings you the claim to the throne of Scotland. Which brings you here.’

‘I am here because the realm needs it,’ Bruce replied. ‘It needs a king.’

‘Just so,’ Wishart said smoothly, before anyone else could speak. ‘Let us first offer prayers to God that each man here preserves the tone of this meeting, as it were, from the ears of those who do us harm. On pain of endless tortures in Hell – not to mention on earth.’

‘And an agreed fine,’ Lamberton added, just as smoothly, ‘that would cripple a nation never mind a wee prelate in it. Was that necessary?’

‘It was – but let us pray to Saint Giles,’ Wishart responded with some steel, ‘patron saint of cripples everywhere, that such a thing will never come to pass.’

The soft murmur of the bishops, moth-wings of holiness, brought the face of his father flickering across Bruce’s mind. Prayers would still be being murmured for him, Bruce thought, circling round Holm Abbey like trapped birds. He tried to remember the old man in a better light than the one which usually lit his memory.

Saint-hagged, heavy-witted old man was what he recalled. Burned books and a splintered lute was what he recalled. Beatings, was what he recalled, for paying ‘too much mind to that auld reprobate’s teachings’.

The auld reprobate had been his grandfather, who had dinned into him the Bruce claims to kingship and pointedly scorned, as he did so, his own son’s inadequacy in that regard. With some justice, Bruce thought to himself – grandda worked tirelessly to the end to further the kingship cause of the Bruces – God blind me, was he not called The Competitor for it – and my father, apart from one timid plea to Longshanks, did little.

Yet when he heard there was a last breathed message from his father, brought by Kirkpatrick, for a moment Bruce’s heart leaped at the promise of a final affection, for all the marring of their relationship by mutual stubbornness and temper. Then hope faltered, stumbled and fell for the last time.

Not before Longshanks is dead.

Simple and stark, his final advice, with all the love in it the elder Bruce was capable of bestowing. That was the legacy of the Bruces; that and the Curse of Malachy, Bruce added silently, as his fingertips brushed against the hairless cheek.

Hal saw the unconscious gesture and knew at once what Bruce was thinking.

So did Kirkpatrick and he and Hal exchanged a brief glance while the candles flickered, each man knowing just enough of the tale – something about a previous Annandale Bruce thwarting Malachy the holy man by promising to release a condemned felon and then hanging him in secret. The said priest was angered and cursed the Bruces, a curse made more powerful still when Malachy eventually became a saint.

It had hagged Bruce’s father, who had dedicated a deal of Annandale rents to endowing the saint’s last resting place at Clairveaux with perpetual candles and masses in an attempt to ease the burden of it.

Bruce fought against the fear of it more often than he would allow – Kirkpatrick knew it well enough never to admit that the man who had breathed his last fetid breath on to this Bruce’s cheek years before had been named Malachy.

Kirkpatrick. Bland as gruel, with a face that could settle to any shape save pretty and was more than servant, less than friend to the Bruce. A dagger of a man and a ferret for Bruce, sent down the darkest holes to rout out the truths hidden there – especially about the stone-carver. Everyone else here thought he had been called Manon, a dying man Bruce was sure knew a secret and was taking it to the grave, so that he had bent close to him in the hope of hearing his last words. The carver had vomited out blood – and the last administered Host, a white wafer floating like a boat in a flood into the Bruce face.

Afterwards, Bruce’s right cheek had flared with red pustules, but soon they had faded to dots of white – and now no beard would grow on it; Bruce already thought this little flaw a part of the curse – to know the full of it, Kirkpatrick thought, might cause no end of turmoil in the man’s mind.

As if he had heard, Bruce’s eyes flickered and he dropped his hand, dragged back to the dark room and the eldritch dancing shadows.

‘I can count on your lordships’ support,’ he said, cutting into Wishart’s final amen. ‘I am sure of Atholl and Lennox and a great part of the lesser lords – Hay of Borthwick, Neil Campbell of Lochawe for some of the names.’

‘You are assured of the bishoprics of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld and Scone,’ Wishart declared with some pride and looked pointedly at Lamberton, who stroked his hairless chin and smiled.

‘Moray, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Brechin more certainly. I have yet to sound out the abbot of Inchcolm, but I understand he esteems you well, my lord earl.’

‘You may have the Abbot of Arbroath,’ John Duns declared, ‘provided he is my clerk, Bernard of Kilwinning. A good man, who knows all my thoughts and deserves such an appointment – Longshanks threw him out of Kilwinning Abbey for his loyalty to the Kingdom’s cause.’

‘You cannot crown pawns in this game,’ Lamberton rebuked sternly. ‘Only kings.’

Duns shrugged.

‘No game of chess here, my lords. A horse fair, perhaps, though Bernard is scarcely equine, albeit he works as hard as one – and has the same appetite, that I can attest. He is, reluctant though I am to admit it, too fine to be my clerk and be taken off to Paris when I return.’

It was hard to take in, Hal thought. With the English king not a handful of miles away throwing stones at Stirling, last defended fortress of a failed rebellion, this wee room in the campanile of Cambuskenneth birled with fetid plans and trading in favours to make another, with Robert Bruce a defiant king.

Yet it was not enough, Hal thought. Two earls, a wheen of bishops and a rickle of wee lords was not enough when a man planned to make himself king. He did not even realize he had said as much until the silence and the still cold of the stares jerked his head up.

‘Kirkpatrick I know,’ John Duns said softly, looking steadily at Hal with his black gaze. ‘This one is a stranger to me.’

‘Hal – Sir Henry Sientcler,’ Bruce declared brusquely. ‘Of Herdmanston.’

The black eyes flared a little and John Duns nodded.

‘Ah, yes – the one who cuckolded the Earl of Buchan. I understand his wife, Countess Isabel, is locked up like a prize heifer these days because of it. The pair of ye had little luck from that sin.’

Hal looked at him for a moment, a grey stare that Bruce did not like, for he had seen it on a calm sea not long before a storm broke.

‘You will be John Duns, expelled from university in Paris,’ Hal replied eventually. ‘Hooring, I hear. Dying of the bad humours that has made in your body.’

It was softly vicious and Duns mouth went pursed – like a cat’s arse, Bruce noted with some delight. Then Hal offered a bitter smile.

‘I am sure there is more to each of our haecceity than these singular events,’ he said and Duns blinked in surprise. His face lost the rising colour and the tight mouth slowly widened into a smile.

‘You know my doctrine, then?’ he demanded and Hal made an ambivalent gesture of one hand.

‘He is a singular wee lord,’ Bruce interrupted and clapped Hal on one shoulder, as if he was showing off one of his particularly clever dogs.

‘You will know it yourself, of course,’ Duns said wryly. ‘I ken your brother does.’

Now Bruce’s stare was sea-cold; young Alexander Bruce was the scholar of the family and reputedly the best Cambridge had. Bruce himself had arranged and paid for the obligatory feast that celebrated Alexander’s acquisition of Master of Arts the year before – but the implication that the youth was the only educated one in the family rankled.

‘I know of your haecceity, the “thisness” that supposedly makes each of us singular,’ he replied, his voice a chill gimlet. ‘I am less convinced by your arguments for the immaculate conception of Mary. I consider it sophistry – but that is not why we are here.’

‘Ye have the right of it, my lord,’ Hal interrupted, making Bruce’s scowl deepen at the effrontery. ‘I know why each of us is here – myself an’ Kirkpatrick because the lord o’ Annandale commands, the bishops because their advice and support is necessary. I dinna ken why this Master Duns is here.’

Kirkpatrick, his sharp hound’s head swivelling backwards and forwards as he followed their exchange, bridled at the presumption of the wee lord from Herdmanston and, almost in the same thought, admired the courage that spoke up. He was sullen at Duns for his ‘Kirkpatrick I know’, the sort of dismissive phrase that was like the fondle of fingers behind a hound’s ear. He was Bruce’s sleuthhound, sure enough, but did not care to be reminded of it so callously.

He started his mouth working on the sharp retort it had taken him all this time to come up with – then caught Wishart’s eye. The bishop’s frown brought spider-leg brows down over his pouched eyes.

‘Master Duns,’ he said before Kirkpatrick could speak, his smiling rich voice soothing the ruffled waters, ‘has a shrewd mind, which we will need for the essential task of squaring a circle.’

‘Aye,’ Bruce replied laconically. ‘Trying to get the Comyn to agree to my claims without actually telling them what we plan.’

‘That is certainly one problem,’ Wishart replied. ‘There is another.’

Lamberton sighed and waved one languid hand.

‘Let us not dance,’ he declared flatly. ‘We have to find a way to convince the Comyn that our cause is just and that the Earl of Annandale has claim to the crown. More than that, of course, we have to justify it to them and all the others.’

‘Justify?’

Bruce’s chin was thrust out truculently, but the sullen petted-lip pout of old was long gone and now he looked stern, like a dominie about to chastise a pupil.

‘Ye are about to usurp a throne, my lord,’ Lamberton declared wryly. ‘It will take a cunning argument to convince Strathearn and Buchan and the Dunbar of March, among others, that you have the right to it.’

‘Usurp a throne?’ Bruce spat back and Wishart held up one hand, his voice steel.

‘King John Balliol,’ he declared and let the name perch there, a raven in the tree of their plans. Balliol, in whose name the rebellion had been raised and the reason Bruce had quit the rebels and sought his own peace with Edward two years ago.

Hal knew that was when the rumours of Balliol returning – handed over by the Pope back to Scotland – had first been mooted by a Longshanks desperately fending off the French and Scots at either ends of his kingdom. The arrival of an old king into the ambitions of Bruce was not something the Earl of Carrick could suffer – so he had accepted Longshanks’ peace and rewards, in the hope of keeping his claims to kingship alive by persuading Edward that a Bruce was a better bet than a Balliol for a peaceful Kingdom.

Yet, not long after that, in a bitter twist of events, had come the Battle of the Golden Spurs, when the Flemings had crushed the flower of French chivalry at Courtrai. Common folk in great squares of spears, Hal had heard, had tumbled so many French knights in the mud that their gilded spurs had made a considerable mound.

It had forced the stunned French to make peace with Edward and freed Longshanks to descend on the north – the result sat outside the walls of Stirling, hurling balls of fire and holding victory tourneys that the newly pardoned Scots lords had to watch in grim, polite silence.

It had also ended any plans to bring Balliol back to his old throne – yet the Kingdom had fought in his name until now. And failed; Bruce was determined to change this.

‘Balliol was stripped of his regalia,’ Bruce reminded everyone roughly, though his growl was muted. ‘By the same king who made him.’

‘The lords of this realm made him by common consent,’ Lamberton pointed out and had a dismissive wave of hand from Bruce.

‘Nevertheless,’ Lamberton persisted softly. ‘Balliol is still king of this realm in the eyes of those who have consistently fought to preserve it. Wallace among them.’

‘The community of this realm are finished with fighting,’ Bruce snapped back angrily. ‘Unless it is to be first in the queue for Edward’s peace. Wallace is finished. No matter the harsh of it, that is the truth. This is no longer a Kingdom, my lords – in all the wee documents from Westminster it is writ as “land” and nothing more. Edward rules it now and his conditions for a return to his loving embrace include charging each lord of this “land” to seek out and capture Will Wallace. That man is not so well loved that such a command will go begging for long.’

‘The matter of Balliol is simple,’ John Duns said and all heads turned to him. His yellowed face was haughty, his fine fingers laced; Wishart felt a stab of annoyance at the infuriating arrogance of the man, tempered with respect for the intellect and steel will that went with it.

Duns had not been expelled from Paris for whoring, as Hal had declared, but for defying the Pope. And he was dying of some slow wasting disease that Wishart prayed to God to make slower still, since the loss of Duns would be a tragedy. Yet he was hard to suffer, all the same …

‘We must remake the doctrine of the throne,’ Duns went on. ‘As a contract, between the King and community of the Kingdom, to the effect that the Kingdom itself reserves the right to remove an unfit king. Such an unfit king, of course, will be one who permits the freedom of this realm to be usurped by an invader, as John Balliol does, preferring gilded captivity to a struggle for freedom. Which, gentilhommes, is something no man gives up save with his life. As long as a hundred of us remain to defend it, we will do so.’

They stared at him and he sat, head tilted and preening just a little, for he knew he had slit the Gordian of it – even Kirkpatrick, blinking with the effort of understanding it, could see the breathtaking genius.

‘That last is not my own,’ Duns added lightly, ‘but Bernard of Kilwinning’s.’

Bruce cocked one warning eyebrow.

‘That is the only part that is not mere elegant sophistry,’ he countered levelly. ‘Dangerous, too. The best defence for this kingdom has been the confusion and discord of England, thanks to Edward’s own nobiles and their attempts to foist Ordinances on his power. Think ye this realm needs such curb on royal power?’

‘There is only one ordinance in such a contract,’ Duns replied calmly, ‘and that is to defend the freedom of the Kingdom. Hardly a curb of royal power, to insist that a good king do that which he would anyway.’

Bruce nodded, reluctantly. John Balliol had defended the Kingdom and suffered for it – since then, of course, he had haunted the French court and the papal skirts defending nothing at all, so Duns’ sophistry worked well enough.

Yet Bruce was English enough to see that the crown of this kingdom was not the same as any other. Kings in Scotland, he had long since discovered, differed from those anywhere else because they had long admitted that God alone did not have the final say in who ruled. The reality for a King of Scots was that his right to rule had long since been removed from God and handed, via the noble community of the realm, to the Kingdom’s every burgher and minor landowner – aye, and even the cottars and drovers who lived there; it was a wise claimant who made his peace with that.

Not King of Scotland, but King of Scots and there was a wealth of subtle meaning in the difference.

Wishart saw Bruce acquiesce, slapped his meaty hands together and beamed. John Duns was clever, Hal thought, but his kenspeckled words were not enough to convince the Comyn Earl of Buchan, or the Comyn Lord of Badenoch, whose kin John Balliol was. The Lord of Badenoch had his own claim to the kingship and, even if everyone else allowed that John Balliol was too much empty cote to be endured, it was unlikely the Comyn would step aside for Bruce.

Hal did not even have to voice it, for Lamberton did and the arguments swirled like the greasy, tainted smoke of the tallow until Bruce held up one hand and silenced them all.

‘Red John Comyn is a problem,’ he declared, ‘which we must address soon. Sooner still is the one called Wallace.’

He looked round the room of shadowed faces.

‘He must be persuaded to quit the realm,’ Bruce said. ‘For his own safety and because nothing can proceed while he rants and ravages in the name of King John Balliol. That rebellion is ended, my lords, and will never be resurrected; the next time this kingdom wars against the invader will be under my banner. A royal one, lords – and against Edward the son, not the father.’

‘If what you say is true,’ Lamberton with a wry, fox smile, ‘that might see you with grey hairs of your own. Is Longshanks not in the finest of health, with a new young queen and two wee bairns tumbling like cubs?’

‘Besides,’ Wishart added mournfully, ‘Wallace is unlikely to be moved by the argument that he stands in the way of your advancement, my lord Robert. Nor has he been much concerned over his own safety in the past.’

‘Leave Wallace and Red John Comyn to me,’ Bruce declared grimly and then shot a twisted smile at John Duns. ‘God and time will take care of King Edward.’

‘Affectio Commodi,’ he added and John Duns acknowledged it with a tilt of his head.

Affectio Commodi, the Duns doctrine of morality, where happiness is assigned to ‘affection for the advantage’ and true morality to affectio iustito, an affection to justice.

Hal remembered the times the wee dominie his father had hired ‘to pit poalish on the boy’ had lectured on that, hands behind his back and eyes shut. Hal had struggled with it then and was more than relieved when the wee priest had given up and gone off to find more fertile pastures.

Justice or advantage. Hal did not need to look at Bruce to see the choice made and had it confirmed later, when he and Kirkpatrick, obedient to the summons, went to the Bruce’s quarters.

In contrast to the roomful of plots, this blazed with light from fat beeswax candles and sconces, the flagged floor liberal with fresh rushes. Herbal posies were stuffed into wall crevices and looped round the crucifix which glared malevolently from the rough wall at the men who lolled carelessly beneath it.

They were young men, faces full of impudence and freckles, half-dressed in fine linen shirts, rich-dyed tunics and coloured hose, lounging in a welter of discarded jerkins and cloaks, baldrics, sheaths and ox-blood boots of Cordovan leather with fashionable high heels. A couple of gazehounds nosed the rushes, searching between jug and goblet for the remains of roast meats and chewed fruit.

One of these languid men was Edward Bruce, a warped portrait of his brother, big shouldered, large chested and with the same face, only as if it had been squeezed from forehead and chin. It made his eyes slitted and his grin wider – unlike his brother, he grinned all the time.

Hal saw Kirkpatrick stiffen a little and felt a slight, sudden stab of justified satisfaction; for years Kirkpatrick had been the only retainer Bruce had closeted with him, a shadowy ferreter of secrets – aye, and worse – at Bruce’s beck and call. This was the reward for it – supplanted by those Bruce needed more.

Let him taste the bitter fruit of it, as I have, Hal thought savagely. My father dead, my home burned by my own kin after the battle at Roslin Glen, good friends dead in the mud of Stirling and Falkirk. Little reward for the middling folk who had ended up in the Bruce camp.

And Isabel. Her loss burned most of all. Gone back to the Earl of Buchan on the promise that her lover and his home would not be harmed. For six years Hal and she had kept to the bargain, though there was not a day he did not think of her and wondered if she still thought of him.

And for what? Buchan had found a way to burn Herdmanston to ruin anyway and would, Hal knew, seek a way to kill him. He will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap – his father’s bleak warning echoed down the years.

Now all that was left was shackled to the fortunes of Bruce. Kirkpatrick shared the chains of it, Hal saw, though he had not considered the man an unwilling supplicant until recently, when this fresh mesnie had grown around the new Lord of Annandale and Carrick.

Not great lords, either, but an earl’s bachelor knights, fashionable, preened and coiffed. They stared at Hal and Kirkpatrick as if two aged wolves had stepped into the room, a mixture of sneer at what they considered to be old men out of touch with the new reality, the coming man that was Bruce, and envy that their lord and master treated so closely with such a pair.

Bruce showed the truth of it when he did not bother to announce Hal or Kirkpatrick and indicated that they should draw apart. Into the shadows, Hal saw with a sharp, bitter smile, where we belong.

‘Wallace,’ Bruce said in a voice so low it was more crouched than a sniffing rat. Neither Hal nor Kirkpatrick replied and Bruce, his eyes baleful in the dim, raked both their faces with an unsmiling gaze.

‘Find him. Tell him he has my love – but he must quit Scotland before it is too late for him. If nothing else, he will end up making the name of his captors odious in Scotland, for they will be Scots men, mark me. That is part of Edward’s scheme.’

Kirkpatrick, his eyes like faint lights in the cave of his face, nodded briefly and Hal jerked his head at the distant murmur and laughter at someone’s poor attempts to play and sing in the Langue D’Oc of a troubadour.

‘Finding him will be hard,’ he said, more harshly than he had intended. ‘He is a hunted man and unlikely to caw the craic, cheek for jowl, with any as declares they are friends.’

Bruce smiled. There had been a time when this would have been as incoherent as a dog’s bark, but time and exposure had improved his ear.

‘You speak their way,’ he said to Hal in elegant French, ‘and understand a decent tongue besides, so you can walk in both camps easily enough. Better yet – you have dealt with Wallace before this and the man knows you. Trusts you even. In case he does not, Kirkpatrick knows what to do when men come at you from the shadows.’

‘A comforting thought,’ Kirkpatrick answered in equally good French, though his burr added a vicious twist to the wry delivery. He jerked his head backwards at the coterie of quietly murmuring knights.

‘Why not ask Crawford there? Is he not kin to Wallace?’

Bruce merely looked at him until Kirkpatrick dropped his eyes. Only the auld dugs would do for this, he thought. At least it means he trusts us, as he does no others.

Hal cleared his throat, a sign the other men knew meant he had something difficult to hoik up on the way. They waited.

‘Wallace kens what is hid in Roslin,’ Hal said flatly. Bruce said nothing, though the problem had nagged him. He had arranged for the Stone of Scone to be supplanted by a cuckoo and the real one carried off to Roslin. Murder had been involved in it and, in the end, Wallace had found out. He had done nothing then – Falkirk fixed that – and said nothing since; Bruce now wrestled with the problem of whether he would keep his silence.

The Earl eventually shrugged, as if it no longer mattered.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and then turned away.

Later, in the cool breeze of a summer’s night, Hal stood with Kirkpatrick and watched the flaring fire from Stirling, heard the sometime thump as the wind veered.

‘Edward will be getting a lashin’ from his young queen,’ Kirkpatrick noted wryly, ‘for keeping the royal bairns up wi’ such racket.’

‘He is not short of pith for an auld man,’ Hal answered. ‘I fear our earl will have to be doucelike patient if he waits for Longshanks to get kisted up afore he makes his move.’

‘If Wallace remains it will be longer than that,’ Kirkpatrick answered. ‘So we had better be on the trail of it.’

‘What did he mean,’ Hal said, ‘by his parting words?’

‘Mak’ siccar?’ Kirkpatrick smiled sharply. ‘Make sure. Make sure Wallace is found and given the message, of course. That he stands in the way.’

Hal watched Kirkpatrick slide into the shadows and wondered.

Stirling Castle

Vigil of Saint James the Apostle, July, 1304.

He knelt in the leprous sweat of full panoply, hearing the coughs and grunts of all the other penitents suffering in the heat – yet ahead of him, Bruce saw the straight back and brilliant white head of the King, rising up from the humble bow to look to where the prisoners knelt, humbler still; he could imagine the smile on Edward’s face.

Oliphant’s face was a grey mask, not all of it from the ashes dumped on his head; together with the hemp noose round his neck, it marked his contrition and the final humiliation of surrender. Behind him, as suitable a backdrop as a cross for Jesus, the great rearing throwing arms of the Berefray, the parson, Segrave and the notorious Warwolf leered triumphantly at the pocked and blackened walls of Stirling.

‘O gracious God, we remember before thee this day thy servant and apostle James, first among the Twelve to suffer martyrdom for the Name of Jesus Christ …’

The Bishop of Ross was a pawky wee man with a matching voice, Hal thought, and then offered apology to God for the impiety, true though it was.

Still, he was also a prelate trusted by the English, more so than the ones he and Kirkpatrick and Bruce had quit only weeks before at Cambuskenneth. Better still, being full of his own self-importance, he had handled the entire affair of the surrender of Stirling fortress with suitable gravitas.

Just as well, for a single snigger would have undone the wonderful mummery of it – the stern, implacable Edward, ordering the gralloching of Oliphant and the other supplicants staggering out of Stirling with their hempen collars, draped in white serks and ashes. The lisping French of the beautiful young Queen, begging her imperious husband to relent and spare them, for the grace of God and on this day of days, the Vigil of St James the Martyr.

Three times she and her women, Bruce’s Irish countess among them, had pleaded and twice Edward had loftily refused, perfectly coiffured silver head and rouged cheeks tilted defiantly skywards, while everyone watched and tried to remain suitably dignified.

And then, when the weeping and wailing had worked its inevitable magic and the rebels were spared, the collective sigh exhaled by everyone watching all but rippled the trampled grass.

‘God be praised,’ finished the bishop.

‘For ever and ever.’

The reply from a host of murmured lips was like a covey of birds taking flight and the rest of the Augustinians went off into chant and slow march, swinging their censers; the acrid thread of incense caught Bruce by the throat and Hal heard the subtle little catch of breath next to him.

Head bowed, draped so that Bruce could only see the half-moon of eyelash on cheek, his wife was young and beautiful. Creamed flesh and black hair, a true Irish princess was Elizabeth and Bruce tried to think of her and not her powerful father, the de Burgh Earl of Ulster.

She was polite and deferential in public, a delight in private, so that love with Elizabeth de Burgh was no sweating work of grossness. He did what he wanted, feeling her writhe and knowing that she took pleasure in it, so that there was for him, too.

Yet, afterwards, there was always the memory of his first wife, Belle, his hand on her small, heaving bosom, feeling her life drain away, seeing the baby she left. Poor Marjorie, he thought with a sharp pang of guilt and regret, I have not done well by that child.

And before, with Belle, there had been times when he felt he could believe in the power of sheean magic, in that lazy hour of lying together when outlines hazed and a sunbeam slant, danced with golden motes.

In the day Elizabeth de Burgh was dutiful. In the night, she was wanton and that was workable – in the night, he thought, I lose my ability to see. But Belle was slim as a wand, with breasts like nuts. Elizabeth is as lush as the lands she brings to me, Bruce thought, so that even the dark cannot turn back time. The Curse of Malachy, he thought, to have the world and taste only ashes – would it be like this even when he was king?

Elizabeth rose, smoothing her dress, adjusting her wimple, smiling at him gently, making an expression of winsome regret as she began to move to the side of the equally young Queen, who smiled with bland eyes below a pale forehead and brows almost blonde. For all her youth, three faint lines already touched that brow, as if the age of her husband was leaching her youth.

Ashes. The taste drifted to his mouth, palpable, so that he turned in time to see a brown-hooded figure signing the cross at a man in white, neck-roped and clouded with flying ashes where he had shaken himself free of them. The ceremony over, Oliphant was smiling at the chance to wash and get back into decent clothes.

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ intoned the monk. ‘Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae …’

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Not that Oliphant faced death now or anything near it, Bruce thought. He had won himself a deal of fame by holding out so long and even managed to avoid serious injury or penance; Bruce nodded acknowledgement to the man and had back a grin that bordered on sneer from the grey-smeared face.

Bruce felt movement at his elbow and turned into the curious stare of Hal, felt unnerved as he often did when he found the man looking at him. He did it more and more these days, as if silently accusing, though Bruce did not know for what – unless the Countess Buchan, of course, the poor wee man’s lost light of love, who had been Bruce’s initiation into the serious arts of the bedchamber once.

Hardly that, for he has known of that since the beginning and made his peace with it. Herdmanston, then? Burned out, it needed rebuilding and I promised him aid in it, but God’s Blood, the man was on wages for himself and thirty riders which took the rents of a couple of good manors. Surely he realized that rebuilding his wee rickle of stones in Lothian was no great priority when a throne was a stake?

Yet he smiled, at him and Kirkpatrick both; they were useful, though not the pillars to support a man who would be king. Still, he needed their questing-dog purpose even if, so far, it had come to nothing; he knew they smarted over their failure to find Wallace, knew also that they would not give up if only because of their rivalry in it. Bruce’s smile widened; divide and conquer, the first rule of kings.

The monk and Bruce watched the prisoners stumble off, then the monk turned and Bruce gave a start, for he knew the face. So did Hal, coming up on his elbow and seeing the smeared smile of the little man, whom he remembered as one less than holy.

‘Benda ti istran plegrin: benda, marqueta, maidin. Benda, benda stringa da da agugeta colorada,’ the monk intoned with a grin as brown as his robe.

‘Kirkpatrick,’ Bruce called and the shadow was beside him instantly, scowling; Hal became aware of the rest of Bruce’s mesnie, suspicious and sullen, closing in.

‘Lamprecht,’ Kirkpatrick said, as if the name was soiled fruit in his mouth. The man admitted his name with a bow and a quick flick of his head left and right, to see who was within earshot; he did not like the presence of so many armed men and said so, then repeated the phrase he had used before.

‘Andara, andara, o ti bastonara,’ Kirkpatrick growled in response, and Hal saw the looks that passed between Bruce’s noblemen – but none asked what they all wanted to know, namely what tongue the man used.

Hal knew, from the last time he had met the little pardoner; it was lingua franca, the old crusader language, a patois of every tongue spoken along the Middle Sea, with more than a dash of heathen in it. Pilgrims used it and the last time Hal had seen this Lamprecht – at least six years ago – he had been claiming himself to be one, with shell badge in a wide-brimmed hat and a collection of relics and indulgences. The meeting had not been profitable for him, nor the ones he had been involved with and Kirkpatrick had, Hal recalled, threatened him with a knife. What had brought the skulking wee pardoner back here, of all places?

‘What is he saying?’ Bruce demanded and Kirkpatrick, who was the only one who spoke the tongue, revealed that the little man, his pouched face shrouded in rough brown wool, was begging alms. Kirkpatrick had told him to go or be beaten.

‘Peregrin taybo cristian, si querer andar Jordan, pilla per tis jornis pan que no trobar pan ne vin.’

‘Good Christian pilgrim, if you want to journey to the Jordan, take bread with you, for you will find no bread or wine,’ Kirkpatrick translated it and someone laughed as the priest held out one grimy hand with half a chewed loaf in it.

‘Is he trying to sell you bread?’ demanded Edward Bruce, his voice rising with incredulity. ‘Be off, priest,’ he added though he did it politely, for there was no telling what powers a pilgrim friar had – or what such a one might become after death. The Curse of Malachy, Bruce thought wryly, seeing his brother’s scowling fear.

Hal saw the gleam in Lamprecht’s eyes, like animals in the dark of the cowl. He glanced at Bruce and saw he had seen the same. There was a moment – then Bruce reached out, took the bread and turned to Kirkpatrick.

‘Give him a coin.’

Pilgrim Lamprecht, with obvious delight, took the coin from under Kirkpatrick’s scowl, frowned at how small it was, then made it disappear.

‘Cambuskenneth,’ he said, clear as new water, then he was gone, leaving bemused men looking at his scuttling back. Edward Bruce looked at the bread, then smiled his broad, slit-eyed grin, his cheeks knobbed as late apples.

‘I would not eat that if I were you, brother.’

He went off, hooting, while the others trailed after him. Bruce looked at the half-loaf, rough maslin with a grey dough interior, indented as if someone had poked a finger in it. He scooped, found something hard and pulled it out; Kirkpatrick whistled, then looked right and left while Bruce closed his fist on the object and moved on, nodding and smiling as if it was the everyday thing for the powerful lord of Carrick and Annadale to be holding one half of a poor loaf.

But all of them had seen the red gleam of a ruby, big and round as a robin’s egg and that itself would have been marvel enough. Bruce knew more, had known that ruby and its eleven cousins when they had been snugged up next to each other along the length and breadth of a reliquary cross last seen tucked under the arm of an English knight heading south to Westminster.

Inside the jewelled and gilded crucifix-casket, Bruce knew, had lain the Holy Black Rood of Scotland, the holiest relic of the Kingdom and, together with the Stone of Scone, as much the mark of a coronation as the crown itself.

CHAPTER TWO

Riccarton, Ayrshire

Transfiguration of Christ, August, 1304

Mattie Broon first caught sight of them as he plodded through the drizzle, his idiot son lumbering awkwardly at his side and jumping in puddles. Late in a wet August afternoon for Mattie to be heading out to his sheep, folk said later. Too long in Creishie Jean’s alehouse, the knowing said. Too slow and indulgent with that daftie boy said those who knew better.

Mattie saw the cattle first, small black shapes with long, curved horns. Being a sheepman he did not care for cattle much and was surprised to see them, for this was no drover’s road. The dogs came next, rough-coated slinkers moving the score or so stirks along the road.

First came long shadows, eldritch as Faerie, from men walking determinedly on foot, four of them – no five. One a priest, or a pilgrim lay brother – Mattie had never known such a thing before. His original thought, that they had stolen the beasts, was now thrown into confusion, for surely no priest would be party to cattle-lifting?

The cattle lumbered over the low ground, a seemingly disorganized mob of shaggy bodies and wickedly curving horns. The topsman – Mattie presumed – lifted one hand in greeting and to show it was empty, that they meant no harm.

No harm, Mattie snorted to himself. It was clear they were circling the beasts, planning to make camp and he shifted away from them, ignoring the plaintive repeat of questions from his son. He moved off a little way and hunkered, hearing their rough laughter, the lowing of cattle and sharp barks of the dogs clamouring to be fed.

When the breeze brought the smell of onions and oatmeal with the whisper of grass Mattie rose up, chivvied his son from digging in the mud and moved off. His sheep would be untended, but he knew that this would have to be told to Heidsman. He would know what to do.

The drovers watched him go from under the loops of rough wool drawn up over their heads, eating stolidly from horn spoon and wooden bowl, save for the young, dark one who was making a fuss of the fawning hounds.

‘Is he away?’ asked Hal, who had his back to the man. Kirkpatrick flicked his eyes up and toed a loose brand back towards the fire.

‘Heading away, fast,’ he growled. ‘Herding the boy like a coo. No right in the head, that boy.’

‘Away to fetch the maister,’ Sim Craw said and looked over at the Dog Boy. ‘Leave the dugs, man. Sit and eat – nivver miss a meal, for ye dinna ken when the next will appear.’

Dog Boy gave a last friendly cuff to the fawning beasts and then went to the fire, taking his bowl and spoon from Sim and offering a wide grin in payment. Hal smiled with him – the Dog Boy was enjoying himself, even if it was only a couple of sleekit cattle dogs he worked with and the price for it was spending the last weeks looking at the shitty arses of a dozen scrubby kine. He was the only one with any joy of the affair.

‘I said,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, ‘that this idea of pretending to be drovers was bad. We are nowheres close to a drove road, so any who spy us will think we stole the baists.’

‘Which is for why we brought our own wee priest,’ Sim replied, bowing his neck to Lamprecht and having back a brown sneer for it. ‘No stolen kine here, wi’ a wee friar in tow.’

It was one reason they had brought Lamprecht from Stirling weeks since and not the most important, Kirkpatrick thought. He caught himself staring at Sim, taking in the slab of a face, the span of shoulder, the grizzled beard. More iron than black in that beard, he thought and that monster crossbow he used to span constantly with a heave of those shoulders is now latched back with the belly hook and belt more and more these days. We are all getting old, he thought moodily.

Sim Craw felt the eyes on him and spared Kirkpatrick a brief flick of glance, which took in the sharp, long-nosed mummer’s mask of a face, little knife points of dagged hair, wintered here and there, plastered wetly to hollowed cheeks. Bigod the wee man was ugly.

The only one uglier, Sim Craw agreed with himself, was yon murderous Malise Bellejambe, the Earl o’ Buchan’s man just as Kirkpatrick was Bruce’s murderous wee man. It seemed to Sim that every highborn in the land needed a murderous wee man like a shadow and he was ruffled as a wet cat at the idea that he and Hal were somehow included in that mesnie.

‘Farthing for that thought,’ Hal offered, seeing Sim’s familiar glazed scowl. The man blinked and grinned loosely.

‘Malise Bellejambe,’ he answered and saw the cloud darken Hal’s face. He wished he had not answered so truthfully now, for Malise was dark and unfinished business, a man who, for sure, had killed Tod’s Wattie and two prime deerhounds as well as a yielded English lord waiting for ransom. There were other killings that could be laid at his feet, though none of them could be proved – but the worst about Malise Bellejambe was that he was Isabel’s keeper, the Earl of Buchan’s snarling guard dog on his wife and one reason why Hal had kept away from her these past years.

Hal was spared the brooding of it by the arrival of the Heidsman, with a bustle of curious and concerned locals at his back, one of them the local priest. In his pretend role of topsman of the drovers, Hal stood up and moved to greet him, being polite but not fawning.

‘Christ be praised,’ the priest announced.

‘For ever and ever,’ Hal responded and there was a slight ease of the tension now that it was established that the strange drovers were neither Faerie nor imps of Satan, who could never get such words past their lips. He saw the idiot boy laughing with the fawning dogs and Dog Boy grinning with him, the shared delight in hounds an instant bond.

After that, matters were established quickly enough – that this was an overnight camp only and that the cattle would not be allowed to stray into plots of beet, or the fields of uncut hay. The priest, Hal saw out of the corner of one eye, moved to greet his brother in Christ and Hal felt a momentary stab of concern.

‘Whit where are ye drivin’ the baists?’

The question took him by the chin and forced his head back into the frowning chap-cheeked concern of the Heidsman’s face. He grinned without parting his lips.

‘Here an’ there. To those who might need the comfort of good beef.’

It was as clear as waving a saltire who the cattle were meant for and Hal had hopes that the Heidsman in Riccarton, a Wallace stronghold, would be sympathetic. He was not wrong, but a few idle questions later had determined that, supporters though they were, no-one in Riccarton knew where the Wallace was – or even his uncle Adam, who was also on the outlaw. Riccarton’s wee keep was now garrisoned by English, which made it doubly unlikely that Wallace would be nearby.

The priest appeared puzzled.

‘He speaks awfy strange, yon friar,’ he said to the Heidsman and Hal forced his smile wide, a satchel of innocence.

‘He is a pilgrim, from the Holy Land,’ he replied and that was enough, it seemed, not only to answer the puzzle of his strange way of speaking, but to gain Lamprecht a measure of spurious respect.

Dog Boy heard the boy’s father call him and the daftie turned reluctantly away, then smiled, innocent as God himself, at the scowl that was Lamprecht.

‘Shell,’ he said and the pardoner waved him away like an annoying fly. Sulkily, the boy turned away, muttering about how he wanted the shell and was never given it.

The deputation moved away, satisfied; Hal returned to sit by the fire, where he told them that Wallace was not lurking around here.

‘Aye well, it was a poor chance at best,’ Sim sighed. ‘Still – we have the other matter.’

The other matter felt the eyes on him and stopped, spoon halfway to his gums, food sliding on to the raggle of his beard. I take it back, Sim thought to himself, Lamprecht is uglier even than Malise Bellejambe.

Lamprecht saw the faces, knew what they were thinking and hoped they had not worked out that he was about to take himself off very soon; hoped, even more fervently, that they would not discover the truth of it all until it was too late and his revenge sprung. He remembered the time five years ago at least he and the lord and his retinue had met, in the lazar at Berwick. The one with Satan’s face, the Kirkpatrick who spoke the lingua, had held a knife at his throat then.

The prick of it burned yet and it took all his will not to reach up one comforting hand to the spot, thus giving away his thoughts to the same Satan. Now the revenge was his. Dar cinquecento diavoli, che portar tua malora …

Five hundred devils made no appearance to take the curse that was Kirkpatrick, so Lamprecht finished the action of spoon and mouth, chewed, swallowed and grinned.

‘Non andar bonu?’

‘Speak a decent tongue, ye wee heathen,’ growled Sim and Lamprecht scowled back at him.

‘Questo diavolo ignorante non consoce il merito,’ Lamprecht began, stopped, took a breath and began again, speaking deliberately to Hal, his English wavering like a sailor finding his land-legs. ‘This devil does not know talent when he sees it. I am to help. I have the thing. You want the thing. Capir?’

He had the thing. Truth was, Hal thought, he had a portion of the thing, which he had brought out like a cradled bairn when Hal and Kirkpatrick had come with the Earl Bruce, chasing the promise of that single ruby.

Lamprecht had unwrapped the sacking lovingly in the amber light of wax candles and the dancing shadows of the pilgrim’s cell he had claimed at Cambuskenneth.

Even half the thing took Hal’s breath away and the whole, an ell length at least, must have been an ache on the eye.

Bruce had taken the gilded fragment, the lower end of a cross lid, badly hacked off. Five similar rubies studded it and the nest for the prised-out sixth revealed the depth of beaten gold. Bruce, slow with wonder, nestled the ruby Lamprecht had given him into it, watched the perfect fit for a moment, then removed it again.

‘It is from the Westminster,’ Lamprecht had said, his voice reverently low. ‘From the furfanta – the swindler. Pardon … the robbery. Of the King’s treasure.’

In the quiet of the cell no-one had spoken, for they had all heard of this, taken delight in it if truth was told. While Longshanks ravaged up and down Scotland, a nest of thieves – his own canons of the minster among them – had stolen the Crown treasure from Westminster. That had been almost a year ago and the howling rage that was Edward had not diminished, if the arrests and racks and beheadings were anything to go by.

Nor had it all been recovered. Pieces of it were turning up all over the country – and abroad, too, Bruce had heard. Yet this was singular. This was part of the reliquary of the Black Rood, taken from Scone on the day Longshanks stripped John Balliol of everything that made him a king and a man and the Kingdom of everything that made it a realm.

‘Si,’ Lamprecht had said, as if reading Bruce’s thoughts. ‘I have this from Pudlicote man. For … some small services.’

‘Who is Pudlicote?’ Kirkpatrick had demanded and Bruce, turning the rubied cross over in his fingers so that it flared bloody in the light, knew the answer.

‘Baron of the thieves,’ he had said darkly. ‘Clever in the planning, stupid afterwards in spraying Crown jewels all over the county as if they were baubles. He paid the price for it – his flayed skin is nailed to the door of the Minster now.’

‘Si,’ Lamprecht had agreed. ‘Pudlicote is discovered – all is lost. Cosa bisogno cunciar? Pardone – what am I to do?’

‘What DID you do?’ Kirkpatrick had asked.

‘Ran,’ Lamprecht had revealed. ‘Ran with Jop. Jop had half, I have half. Six Apostles each and we go our way. Jop comes to the north.’

The rubies, all twelve, were known as the Apostles, said to contain the very blood of Christ – but even they were not as valuable as the sliver of dark wood they had decorated.

‘And the Rood itself?’ Bruce had demanded. Lamprecht, pausing, tried not to look sly. Failed. Then he had shrugged his rat-boned shoulders and offered a brown smile.

‘Jop knows where relic is. Piece of Holy Cross which is of this land.’

He had then managed, at last, a sly, knowing look.

‘Bishops of here will want it back. Jop, he will not tell me where it is – cane. Cornudo.’

‘This Jop,’ Bruce had said slowly. ‘A small man. Bald.’

‘He is not. Big. Fat belly. Much hairy. He is man who bears the standard. Ti credir per mi, mi pudir assicurar per ti.’

‘I do believe you,’ Bruce had answered grimly.

‘Ti star nobilé, è non star fabbola – sorry, permit me. As you are noble, this is no fable. I have no money. For this piece and the information, I ask only a paltry. A twenty pound of silver.’

That had all but choked Kirkpatrick and made Hal blink. That price would keep Sim Craw for a year in England – six months longer if he stayed north of Berwick.

‘Does Jop have the Rood?’ Bruce had demanded.

‘If not, he know where,’ Lamprecht had replied. ‘I cannot get in to him. You go to where he is – you know this place?’

‘I do,’ Bruce had answered, then handed the gilded prize back, which surprised Hal – but not Kirkpatrick, who knew that possession of such an artefact would result in punishments from Edward that Hell would balk at. He scowled, however, when he realized the sixth Apostle was staying with Bruce – but at least a single, flawless ruby of price was explainable in the purse of an earl.

‘If Jop helps us, you shall have twice the price,’ Bruce had declared and Lamprecht’s grin was wide and foul. It did not waver when he was told that he would have to go along, for that had been taken into account in his planning – was the necessary risk in it.

There were more questions – the Kirkpatrick man especially was all lowered brow and suspicion, wanting to know why Lamprecht had come to Bruce at such risk when he had, clearly, riches enough. Lamprecht, scornfully, had pointed out that losing such a gem to the Earl of Carrick was no loss, when even attempting to sell one would have a pilgrim like him arrested, drawn and quartered.

‘In an earl’s purse, is to be expected,’ he had sneered. ‘In mine, not.’

Some of what Lamprecht had said was true – he could hardly sell what he had and hope to make money on the deal, or even escape. So he thought to profit from information with a man who would want to know about the Rood – though that fact brought its own unease. Bruce was, ostensibly, a loyal follower of King Edward so Lamprecht risked his neck bringing it to such a man – unless his loyalty was known differently. And if such as Lamprecht knew it, then Longshanks knew it; the thought brought a shiver up Hal’s spine.

Kirkpatrick had subsided, glowering with unease, while Lamprecht kept the lie in the tale as a hugging secret close to the burning core of him, trying not to show a vengeful smile when he looked at the Lothian lord and Kirkpatrick.

It did not take long for Bruce to reveal who Jop was, for the only Jop of the description was Gilbert of Beverley, a sometime lay brother who had been paid by the abbey to carry its borrowed Holy Standard in Edward’s army when he came north to fight Falkirk. A fine imposing sight Gilbert had made, too, having the height and width of shoulder for banner-bearing, which might have given the English something of a clue as to who he was.

They found out soon enough. Gilbert, known as Jop to all his Wallace relatives, had promptly scurried off and joined them in rebellion, only to quit that when matters grew warm. He had vanished shortly after and now they all knew where and why.

His arrival back in Scotland had come as no surprise to folk, who thought he had just lain low for a while. Now he was snugged up in Riccarton’s chapel to Saint Mirin, having claimed ‘the knowledge of Latin’ to wriggle out from under Edward’s harsh law into the court of the Church, who had some sympathy towards ex-rebels.

There would be no church or God, though, which would keep him from the wrath of Longshanks if he ever discovered Jop was one of the thieves of the Crown’s treasure from the minster.

The fire sparked, little worm-embers snapping Hal from remembrance. That cloistered conversation had been a month ago and Lamprecht had grown no more easier to be with since. Neither him nor his tale, Hal thought.

‘Jop,’ he said and wanted to say more on this cousin of the Wallace, who had none of the man’s better qualities save height. He did not need to say more on it, all the same, for each man recognized the problem of Jop and, eventually, Sim voiced it.

‘This Jop,’ Sim said, breaking Hal’s reverie. ‘Is tight-fastened in a kirk. It will be as hard to crack open as Riccarton’s Keep, I am thinking.’

‘Less soldiery in the kirk,’ Kirkpatrick declared. ‘I hear the English have stuffed the keep wi’ English, to mak’ siccar The Ogre takes no rest there. They must be sleeping three to a cot in that wee place.’

‘Aye, weel, they will be dressed soon enough if a wee priest hurls up crying that mad drovers are beatin’ in his chapel door,’ growled Sim and Kirkpatrick’s laugh was low and mirthless.

‘Ye should get abroad more, Sim Craw,’ Kirkpatrick declared, his accent broadening, as it always did when he spoke with the likes of Sim. He could make it refined and French, too, when he chose and Hal realized this was part of the shifting shadow of the man.

‘Whit why?’ demanded Sim truculently.

‘Ye would learn things. Like the time there was an auld priest o’ Riccarton,’ Kirkpatrick answered. ‘Years since. Had the falling sickness, which laid him out as if he had died. He had such a fear o’ what would happen that even a week’s wake and a belled coffin was too little precaution for him – so he took steps to mak’ siccar he would never be buried alive.’

He had them all now, locked tight in the shackles of his eyes and words.

‘He had a lidless kist made and passage cut from the chapel crypt into the graveyard beyond,’ Kirkpatrick went on, ‘in case they tombed him up alive.’

‘Did he ever have use o’ it?’ demanded the round-eyed Dog Boy and Kirkpatrick shook his head.

‘Went on a pilgrimage to Rome, for relief o’ his condition and sins. Drowned at sea.’

‘Ah, bigod,’ sighed Sim, shaking a rueful head. ‘What is set on ye will no’ go past ye, certes.’

‘So the passage is there still?’ demanded Hal and Kirkpatrick nodded, his grin catching the firelight in the dark.

‘We will be in and out o’ Saint Mirin’s wee house, easy as beggary.’

He looked at where the sun was dying, seeping red into the horizon like blood from a flayed skin; insects hummed and wheeped in the iron-filing twilight.

‘When it gets dark,’ he said.

Sim grunted as he levered himself up. Tapping Dog Boy on the shoulder, he went out to check on the cattle and the dogs, followed by the boy. Dog Boy kept glancing behind them.

‘Are yer sins hagging ye?’ Sim demanded eventually and Dog Boy shook his head, then shrugged.

‘Lamprecht,’ he said and Sim nodded.

‘There is something not right,’ Dog Boy insisted.

‘God’s Hook, laddie, ye have said a true thing there – stop twitching in the dark and help me with these God-cursed stirks.’

Hal watched them go, hearing them mutter, while Lamprecht slithered off into a bower of leaves and branches, clutching his precious bundle to him and muttering morosely about the discomfort. Hal felt like telling him he was lucky it was summer still, for in winter the drovers made a bowl-shaped withy of sticks, then broke the ice on any stream or loch, dipped their cloaks and spread them out over the withy to freeze into a shelter.

‘Sim Craw must favour one o’ those cattle,’ Kirkpatrick said with a lopsided smile, ‘since he cares for them a deal, it seems.’

Hal did not reply; Sim Craw had bought bullocks and horse both from Stirk Davey in Biggar and had them cheap on the promise that Davey would buy them back if they were returned undamaged. It meant Sim and Hal would keep the money, which had come from Bruce for the purpose, and it would go into the trickle of silver that would, one day, become the pool to rebuild Herdmanston.

Instead, he wondered aloud his fears regarding Lamprecht and that it all might be a trap set by Longshanks himself to test Bruce loyalty.

‘It might,’ Kirkpatrick agreed laconically, ‘though such subtle work is not the mark of that king. If he suspects our earl to that extent, he would be hauling in folk likely to speak of it under the Question. Confessions would be enough without all this mummery.’

Which was true enough to silence Hal to brooding on Kirkpatrick himself, until he finally voiced what had been on his mind for long enough regarding the man.

‘Whit why do ye serve the Earl?’

The answering smile was bland, with some puzzle quirking the edge of it.

‘Same as yersel’,’ he replied and saw Hal’s laconic lip-curl, faint in the growing dim.

‘Ill luck and circumstance then.’

‘Circumstance, certes,’ Kirkpatrick answered, the slow, considered words of it forged in a steel that did not pass Hal by. ‘Ill luck? Hardly that for you, my lord. What have ye suffered?’

A lost wife and son to ague. A light of love to politics. A keep to fire and pillage, done by those he counted kin and friends.

‘There is more,’ he finished sarcastically and Kirkpatrick stirred a little, then poked the fire so that flames rose and embers flared away and died like little ruby hopes.

‘Your wife and boy are a decade gone,’ he replied sudden as a slap. ‘Others have suffered loss o’ dear yins, from ague, plague an’ worse. Your light o’ love is someone else’s and you have been apart from her for five years at least, so the brooding is of your own making. Your wee keep was slighted a bit – it is lacking the timber floors and is blackened, but the folk still huddle around it, you still collect rents an’ your kin in Roslin manage it and oversee the repairs. Yourself provides the siller, from the rents, the money the Earl pays you as retinue … and what you can skim.’

He stopped and turned his firelit blade of a face, challenging and grim, towards Hal.

‘Where is the suffering in this?’

‘You think you are worse?’ Hal bridled and Kirkpatrick sighed.

‘Ye have a dubbin’ as knight, the arms to prove it and lands,’ he answered, the wormwood of his voice a thickened gruel of bitterness, his face shrouded. ‘Yer da, blessed wee man that he was, had no learnin’ beyond weaponry and a wee bit tallying – but he made sure ye could read and write like a canting priest and provided other learning betimes.’

‘I am a Kirkpatrick o’ Closeburn, kin to the Bruces – my namesake holds the place from the Annandale Bruces, yet he has been more seen in the company o’ those who are King Edward’s men through an’ through. My namesake is the lord, and I am the poor relation, who has no way with letters or writin’, for who would bother hiring a wee dominie to teach the likes o’ me that?’

Hal shifted uncomfortably, remembering his own teacher and how he had fretted against him; here was a man who was bitter that he never had the same.

‘I speak the French, mind you,’ he went on – breaking into that tongue and speaking as much to the fire and his own thoughts as to Hal. ‘And some of the Gaelic learned from the Bruce. And a little Latin, for the responses. And the lingua franca yon little toad Lamprecht uses, learned while in France and … elsewhere.’

He stopped, paused, then continued in French, as if to prove his point.

‘I have never been touched by sword on shoulder, nor handed a set of gilded spurs. I can bear the arms of Closeburn, but so tainted with lowly markings for my station that it is less shameful to bear none at all. I can use the weapons of a knight, but I have never sat a warhorse in my life, nor expect it.’

He broke off, bringing his stare back to fall on Hal’s face. He shook off the French, like a dog coming from a stream.

‘Yet the Bruce esteems me for the talents I have, which are considerable. I ken the hearts o’ men and women both, ken when they lie and when they plot. I ken how to use a sword, my wee lord o’ Herdmanston, but I ken best how to wield a dirk in the night.’

There was a chill after this that the flames could not dispel. Hal cleared his throat.

‘You expect advantage from all this, from the Earl when he is king?’

‘Weesht on that,’ Kirkpatrick answered softly, then sighed.

‘I did so,’ he added flatly. ‘Now I see that what an earl wants an’ what a king requires are differing things.’

He was silent for a little while, leaving the fire to speak in pops and spits. Then he stirred.

‘When I was barely toddlin’,’ he said, ‘I got into the habit of makin’ watter wherever I stood.’

He broke off at Hal’s chuckle, his scowl softening, then vanishing entirely into a smile of his own.

‘Aye, a rare vision, I daresay, but I was a bairn, for all that. My ma warned me never to piss in her herb garden, which were vegetables and did not benefit from such a waterin’. Being an obedient boy, I never did so, preferring to keep it in until I could spray the chickens, which was better fun entire. Until the day the rooster turned and pecked me on the pizzle.’

Hal’s laugh was a sharp bark, quickly cut off lest he offend. Kirkpatrick’s chuckle was reassuring.

‘Jist so. A painful experience and it was so for a time. Peelin’ scab and stickiness was the least o’ it – but my mither soothed me with ministrations and good advice she thought a boy like me might remember. Chickens is vegetables, she says to me.’

He stirred the fire again so that sparks flew.

‘Since then,’ he added, ‘I have been aware that nothin’ is as it appears.’

‘Nothin’ is, certes,’ Hal agreed morosely. ‘I fought at the brig o’ Stirlin’ and at Callendar woods with Wallace – yet these last months I have been fighting against the same men whose shoulders I once rubbed.’

‘So?’

The challenge made Hal bristle.

‘So it is no way for a future king of Scots to behave, cleaving his own folk. They will not care for it, I am thinking.’

Kirkpatrick waved one hand, which had the added effect of scattering the midges.

‘Sma’ folk,’ he growled and jerked his shadowed head at where Sim and Dog Boy sat, shadows against the last of the bloodstained sky. ‘D’ye think they care who rules them? As long as they have their livelihood, the De’il could wear the crown. It is the nobiles of this kingdom Bruce will have to worry ower.’

Hal thought about it. He had seen the sma’ folk, barefoot, shit-legged, trembling, yet determinedly hanging on to their long spears and immovable from the shoulders of the men next to them. Not noble, some not even landed, unable in many cases to understand the very speech of the man next to them and with the men from north and south of The Mounth suspicious of one another, they came together for one reason. They had cared enough to be angered.

Though it had been slow and long in the growing, a realization was sprouting in Hal that there was a kingdom here that the commonality marked enough to defend – more to the point, it was one where the bare-footed shitlegs considered they had as much say in who ruled them as any earl. He said as much to Kirkpatrick.

‘Mayhap,’ Kirkpatrick growled at this, trying to shrug the matter off and failing, for he was no longer as sure as he once had been.

Chickens is vegetables, he thought.

CHAPTER THREE

Balmullo, Fife

The same night

They brought him in the dark on a litter, a milling crowd of riders and footmen strangely silent save for a grunt here, a hissed warning there. They hefted the litter up the steep stairs and across the span of wooden walkway to the door of the stout stone house.

There were lights from torches that let the curious, peeping from the wattle buildings clustered around Balmullo, see who it was who had arrived, but not who they carried in. The Earl of Buchan, visiting his wife, they saw; one or two of the women, swaddled in shawls, added ‘puir sowl’ to that, for it was hard enough for the Countess of Buchan to have to endure the presence of the Earl’s creature as her gaoler without The Man Himself descending on her for his rights.

The creature met the litter at the door, spider-black and hair-thin with a face somehow twisted out of true. The nose, speckled with the fade of old pox-marks, was bent and twisted and there was a permanent stain, like a birthmark or blood bruise, on one cheek where he had once been hit with an iron skillet. There was a chin on the man, but not much of one and it made the teeth stick out like a rat from between damp lips limned by a wisped fringe of beard and moustache, greying now.

He was preparing, Isabel saw, to be scraping and deferential to his master, the Earl of Buchan, in the hope of preferment away from his duties at Balmullo. No more than a mastiff, she thought, set to watch as much as guard and knowing he is hated.

Yet the mastiff that was Malise Belljambe had to stand aside when the grunting men sweated through the yett and into the main hall with their burden, who said nothing beyond a muffled curse when they set him down too hard.

Malise did not want to tangle with the carriers, who stank of sweat, woodsmoke and old blood; the leader lay in the litter like the Devil at rest, but a lesser imp, in his black carapace of boiled leather, spat curses at the careless handlers in a tongue Malise knew to be the Gaelic used by those strange caterans north of The Mounth.

Buchan followed, peeling off his gloves and shifting to remove his cloak from over his head without unpinning it, seeing Malise scuttle to help him. He nodded only a brief recognition – Malise was a mammet, no more, useful for the scut work that was necessary in these savage times. Then the light from the sconce flared in the night breeze and lit up his wife.

He took a breath, for he had not seen her in some months and had managed to forget how she could look, fresh from bed. Her hair was still richly coppered and, even when he knew there was artifice involved in that, the knowledge did not spoil matters. She was beautiful still, the body hinting at slender promise even wrapped in nightclothes and a fur-trimmed gown. Her eyes, lapis in the torchlight, were hard and cold as those gems and he felt the old slither of resentment and anger, quickly beaten down, for he had not come to quarrel.

She saw the cat and dog of that chase itself across a face heavier than before. He seemed weightier altogether, she thought, surprised at how six months could make such a difference. Then she saw that it was not fat – though there were colonies of that round his middle and chin – but a droop to the once-powerful shoulders, as if he carried too much across them.

His hair was pewter, his eyes glass and iron; for a moment Isabel wondered if he would wave imperiously to the bedchamber and follow her in, as he usually did – though less this last year than ever, she noted.

Buchan thought of it, then dismissed it. He had almost done with grunting and sweating on her for no result – even the pleasure of it was licked away by her dignified detachment as she left him at the end of it, he spent and ashamed at his grossness.

No offspring came from it and, for a long time, he had wondered whether this was natural or contrived by her – but he had had other women since and in numbers, too, as if to make up for the lack she offered, and none had conceived. Buchan was beginning, with a nag of fear he could not dismiss, to realize that the problem lay with himself.

‘Wife,’ he grunted at her in the end and she acknowledged matters with a cool, curt bow and then brought forward a servant and a tray with wine and food on it.

‘Malise,’ she declared, ‘see to the care of the others and the stabling of their horses. Find room for them all where you can – but be polite in the asking.’

Malise hovered malevolently for a moment, caught Buchan’s eye and bowed obsequiously.

‘My lord’s visit?’ Isabel asked and Buchan, goblet in hand, nodded to the litter, perched near the fire and surrounded by the grim-faced men.

‘Wallace,’ he growled. ‘He is sick from a wound, so I brought him here. You have some skill with the medical and can be trusted not to blabber.’

She tried hard not to blink, to stay as stone, but it was difficult. Wallace was outlawed and harbouring him was as good as a death sentence to Buchan, only just returned to the favour of King Edward. Her skill with ‘the medical’ was one more perversion of her sex and station and she had thought that, if her husband had considered it all, it was to add it to the black sin of her.

Isabel looked her husband full in his fleshy, pouch-eyed face and had back a cool, wordless stare; she realized, suddenly, what the stooping weight he bore was and that there was steel in the man – more so than even she had thought, with his dogged persistence in carrying on resistance to the English, whether openly or covert.

‘I will take to your chambers,’ he gruffed, ‘so that folk will spread the word that this was merely the Earl coming to take his rights of his wife. Happily for you, I need sleep more than your loins for the moment, so you need not fash over it.’

He did not wait, but barrelled off into the hall’s dim, smoke from the torches fluttering like dark insinuation in his wake.

The men round the litter parted deferentially when she came up and the figure on it, half propped up on his elbow, gave her a grin from a familiar face, sheened and grey.

‘Coontess. Good to greet ye, certes – though I am sorry to be trailin’ trouble to yer hall.’

She had last seen him before the battle at Stirling and was shocked. The hunted years had leached the autumn bracken from his hair and streaked a grey turning to silver. The great size of him was the same, but there had never been much fat to start with, so that hunger had started in to wasting muscle that hard running was turning twisted and clenched like hawsers. The smell of him was rank, like the crew who surrounded him, overlayed with another, pungent stink that Isabel knew well.

She inspected the leg, seeing the green-black lump on it just below the knee, the fret of little red lines.

‘Took a dunt some time back,’ Wallace said cheerfully. ‘At Happrew. Cracked the bone in my shin, but it seemed to knit well enough. Then came this.’

‘There is rot in it,’ Isabel said flatly and Wallace chuckled harshly.

‘I ken that, lady,’ he replied. ‘Pain, too – if ye as much as blaw on it, it hurts as bad as if ye had struck me.’

‘We will needs do more than blow on it,’ Isabel answered and Wallace’s throat apple bobbed twice, then he nodded. The smile was gone.

‘Ah spier ye, lady – fit’s gan wrang?’

The voice was thick, the accent strange from the black-carapaced Fergus the Beetle. Isabel explained as best as she thought the man would understand and he nodded, blued bottom teeth sucking his top lip, brows lowered in a frown and eyes peering from the tangle of hair and beard, his face dark from sun and dirt, sheened with grease as protection against wind and rain.

‘Ah howkit oot a daud o’ muck frae it,’ he told her. ‘Black as the De’il’s erse, beggin’ the blissin’ o’ ye, lady. Wull he gan live yet?’

‘Away with ye, Fergus,’ Wallace said gently, hearing this. ‘Leave the good wummin to her skill.’

She had water heated and brought, with cloths and a keen, sharp skewer; Wallace followed it with his eyes, then met hers. Isabel felt clammy at what she had to do to a wound that hurt with a breeze on it, but he swallowed once, then nodded.

‘Hold him,’ she ordered and his men went to shoulders and feet. She hovered the skewer over it and saw him brace – then she struck.

He howled, thrashed, vomited and fainted. The skewer went flying from her hand and skittered across the rushed flags; even as it did she knew she had failed.

It took ten minutes for him to recover. Slick with new sweat, he managed a wan grin from the whey of his face.

‘I have the idea o’ it, now, lady,’ he said and held out his hand for the skewer. ‘Ye have the strength o’ purpose but no arm for the deed.’

She handed it to him and he wrapped all but the last fingerjoint length of it in a cloth while she watched, fascinated and appalled. Could she do this if it were her suffering?

He placed the tip of the skewer gently, just where she indicated and the blue-black mass seemed to Isabel to be pulsing now. Then he nodded to Fergus and the others, who came up and placed their hands on him in readiness.

‘Bigod,’ he said, lifted one great fist and hammered it down on the handle of the skewer.

When he came to his senses for the second time she had placed both fists on either side of the punctured wound and squeezed a festering, stinking mass of green-black pus until the blood flowed cleanly. Then she washed it in clean water and bound it in a warm bran poultice and made him a drink of henbane, knotgrass and yarrow.

He drank it obediently, made a face.

‘What did ye lace into this?’

She told him.

‘I stirred in some honey,’ she added, ‘which is what you do wi’ wee boys.’

He grinned, though his face was still pale.

‘I thought ye had poured in a pint o’ my pish, rather than taste it yersel’ to find what is sufferin’ me.’

She tidied up stinking cloths and bowls, moving soft so that the men, Fergus among them, would not be woken, though she doubted a shrieking Devil could have stirred them.

‘I have no need to lick your piss, or cast your astrology,’ she told Wallace, smiling the while, ‘for it would still come out the same – yon wound had black bile in it. If ye keep the cloths clean and take rest, ye will be none the worse in a few days.’

He experimented and grinned admiringly at her.

‘Och, the pain is vanished entire already. I will sleep the night a bit an’ be gone away by mornin’.’

‘You need more rest than that,’ she argued. ‘Some decent meals would not go amiss either.’

He frowned and shook his infested tangle of hair.

‘I have not far to go. Tam Halliday at Moffat is a safe place. We go there when all else has failed us.’

She looked sharply at him.

‘You should not be tellin’ me that, where other ears can hear. That said in a kitchen is told in a hall, sir.’

He shrugged and gave her back a lopsided smile.

‘Yer husband kens fine I am headed for there. He is safe now – I am here, am I not, at his instruction?’

‘Is he so safe, then?’

The words were out before she could stop them and he cocked his head on one side.

‘Give yer tongue more Fair days than yer head, lady,’ he replied, his smile robbing it of sting. ‘He has good points, has yer husband.’

She flushed at his chiding and he sighed a little and waved one hand.

‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the man is a lion in his own cause.’

‘His cause is himself,’ Isabel persisted warningly and Wallace nodded.

‘Exactly so – and so it is that he has need o’ me. His cause is the spoiling of Bruce, ever the Comyn way, which is why he needs me, to keep Bruce dangling on declaring a kingship that belongs to John Balliol.’

He paused and the smile grew broader.

‘Mind, I would not be as sure o’ the new wee Lord o’ Badenoch, Comyn though he is.’

She nodded, knowing Red John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch since his father’s death, had his own claims to the throne. A cousin to her husband and more important because of his lineage, that wee red-headed lord could be tempted – save that he was still currently imprisoned for his part in the rebellion. She had no doubt that he would wheedle his way out, as everyone else had.

She thought of Hal and wondered where he was.

‘I will let you sleep, Sir William,’ she answered, turning away with the light.

‘Have ye seen ony o’ yer man?’ he asked, soft, gentle – and vicious as a slap. It made her turn and put one hand to her throat at the sudden rush of memories. All she could do was shake her head and he gave a long, slow series of nods in answer.

‘A good man is Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ he went on, speaking low, his face almost vanished in the dim beyond her light.

‘Not a name welcomed by some in this house,’ she managed.

‘Blue’s beauty, red’s all taken, green is grief and yellow forsaken,’ he replied, half to himself and she heard his chuckle. ‘I still have memory o’ the words o’ love, ye see, for all that it seems to have passed me by.’

‘Leave,’ she said suddenly, flooded with sadness for the man. ‘Leave this land. Find a life elsewhere. Peace …’

The chuckle was dry, rasping as talons on a wall.

‘Too late.’

His eyes glazed and she knew he was looking to a future that might have been.

‘Is John Balliol worth this?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Is any king?’

Wallace snapped from his reverie.

‘There speaks the Eden serpent’s yin true friend,’ he replied, though his grin took any venom from it. He leaned forward a little, his face set, his eyes hot.

‘John Balliol is our liege-lord,’ he said. ‘To fight for anything else in this riven kingdom is simply to forge your own chains on behalf of some usurping tyrant.’

He leaned back on the pillow and managed a tired smile.

‘And if that is too fine coming from the brigand likes of me, then settle for this – too many men would bid me to a roast an’ stick me with the spit these days. I have picked my road and will walk to the end o’ it.’

She felt a wave of sorrow and, suddenly, his face formed in the sconce light as he rose up and thrust his stare at her, serious as a stabbing. For a moment she thought he had felt her pity and was ashamed of it – then realized that all the pity came from him.

‘Your road, lady, is forked an’ ye have stood at the cross for too long. Birk will burn be it burn drawn; sauch will sab if it were simmer sawn. Mark me.’

In the morning, he bid her farewell with thanks and a gift which she hid from Buchan. Then he and all his men were gone, leaving only the sour smell and the litter behind. Buchan, risen and breakfasted early, was able to take leave of his wife at the house door in daylight, as if only he and his entourage had arrived.

‘Wife,’ he said, grunting up on to the palfrey. He felt a sudden rush of utter sadness, for her as much as himself and for what might have been if matters had twisted differently. She was beautiful still, while the events of the night before and the reason for his coming at all showed the strength and skills of her. A fine countess she would have made.

Then the memories of all her stravaigin’, her slights and breathtaking dishonours wrenched pity from him and he nodded over her head, to the spider-leg thin Malise at her back.

‘Watch,’ he said and turned the horse’s head.

She stood as if dutifully mourning his going, but her mind turned Wallace’s words over and over. Wood will burn even if drawn through water and the willow will droop if sown out of season.

Five years she had resisted her natural inclinations, shackled by the knowledge that, if she stuck to the bargain, Hal would remain safe from Buchan’s wrath.

Did he still hold feelings for her, after all these years?

Could she fortress herself against the promise of them for longer?

Riccarton Chapel

Midnight

The tchik, tchik seemed like a forge hammer on an anvil in the chill dark of the place, bouncing off the hidden stones; the sparks seemed big as cartwheels. It did not seem possible for any one of them not to start a major conflagration, never mind smoulder some firestarter charcoal into embered life.

‘There are dead folk here,’ Sim Craw intoned. Lamprecht snorted; he heard the fear in the man’s voice and it pleased him to see this great beast rendered trembling by the dark and the dead. Neither of them held any fears for Lamprecht.

‘That is the usual purpose o’ a crypt,’ Kirkpatrick said dryly and his face was suddenly looming out of the dark, reddened as an imp’s in the fires of Hell, cheeks puffed as he blew the spark into a tiny blossom of flame, fed the nub end of a candle to it and then the candle to the lantern.

Light bloomed, making them blink and look away even as they crept closer to it. For all his insouciant airs, Hal thought, Kirkpatrick is as ruffled as the rest of us; he had heard the lantern’s loose horn panels rattle in the tremble of the man’s hand. Then he looked at the red-dyed devil face of Lamprecht and corrected himself. All ruffled save this, he thought.

Four stone kists glowered in the flickering shadows and Hal saw that every wall of the place was niched with small, square holes. The common folk are turfed up in the chapel yard but this place is reserved for the priests, Hal thought, with the stone tombs for the start of it then, when only the bones are left, they are stuffed in a hole in the wall. Cloistered in death as in life.

‘Is this the very kist, then?’ Sim hissed and Hal saw the only one without a heavy cover.

‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick grunted, moving to the door at the top of three worn stone steps. It led to the inside of the chapel and Hal hoped it would be an easier opening than the one that had led to this place.

Choked with weeds and disuse, it had to be dug out and each grunt and thump of it panicking them with discovery. They had brought three of the steers with them, to pretend they were gathering them up from grazing among the dead, but it was not much of an excuse. Dog Boy had been left at the entrance, as much for the trinity of kine as a guard for the backs of the ones in the crypt.

‘Ach – it is empty.’

Sim’s voice was still a hissed whisper, but disappointment had robbed him of his fear, so that it was loud and seemed louder still in the echo of the place.

‘Weesht.’

Kirkpatrick’s scowl was matched by a notched eyebrow of Sim’s own.

‘I only thought there might be someone in it,’ he protested. Loudly.

‘I have no care if Christ’s very bones are in it,’ Kirkpatrick spat back. ‘I should have handed ye a horn and had ye announce us.’

‘Open the bliddy door,’ Sim responded in a low mutter and Kirkpatrick drew out his dagger, the four sides of it winking malevolently. Hal and Sim waited, half-crouched as if the niches of the place would erupt shrieking demons, but there was only the smell of stone and old must. Yet the square holes of the place seemed like accusing black eyes on Hal’s back.

The rending creak was a rasp along all their nerves, so that Kirkpatrick stopped at once and everyone froze.

‘No horn needed,’ Sim growled bitterly and Hal silenced him, deciding that matters had gone far enough between him and Kirkpatrick. The latter put away his four-sided dirk and heaved the door open, heedless of the shrieking grate of it.

‘Who is in here anyway?’ he demanded into their wincing. ‘A rickle of old bones, yon wee priest and Jop himself, too huddled in a hole to be a bother.’

Jop was not cowering, for they found him after creeping, mouse-quiet, through the chapel, a place as simple as a barn, no transepts, with a second-storey campanile and beams just visible in the light.

Vine leaves painted an eye-watering green adorned the corbels and capitals of pillars built into the half-stone walls and lurid, flaming scenes from the scriptures jumped out from rough white plaster on every side; Hell burned more fiery in the glimmer of Kirkpatrick’s lantern.

There was a font near the door, no more than a large bowl on a plinth and, apart from an altar on a dais, nothing else but a worn flagged floor. Above the altar was a painting of Saint Christopher bearing the Christ Child, who scowled disapprovingly at the unlit sanctuary lamp.

There was no sign of the priest they had seen earlier – but Jop was up and fiercely challenging when they came through the door to his room, up some stairs of the wooden campanile and one level below the belfry itself.

‘Who’s this – who the De’il are you?’

He was big, Hal admitted, seemingly bigger in the low-ceilinged room, already crowded with a truckle bed, a stout kist and a brazier of red coals. Copper hair, a fierce eye, big shoulders – for a moment they all three thought they had stumbled on The Wallace by accident.

Yet a second glance told the truth of it – the face was the same, but as if someone had stuck bellows in the mouth and puffed it up. The eye was fierce, but the heart behind it was not. The height was the same, but the shoulders were fatty and the belly an ale cask.

‘Jop,’ Kirkpatrick declared and hauled out the four-sided dirk, so that the big man backed away, collided with the truckle and sat so hard Hal heard it splinter.

‘Who sent ye?’ the man hoarsed out and Kirkpatrick chuckled.

‘Nobody in London, if that is what ye think,’ he replied. ‘Though ye will speak of that place afore we are through.’

‘No English neither,’ Hal added. ‘Though Longshanks will be anxious to ask you aboot the cross ye have snugged up somewheres.’

Jop blinked and sagged, which brought a vicious chuckle from Kirkpatrick.

‘Aye, we ken of it. Ye will tell us where we can find it.’

‘It were only half the cross. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, the coo shite, had half of it,’ he offered to Kirkpatrick. ‘We helped shift some loot from the back o’ the minster where it had been hid, for Mabs in Sty Lane, though it was ower treacherous to try at that time, wi’ Pudlicote’s skin still wet on Westminster’s door.’

‘And did you take it to yer kin, The Wallace?’ Hal asked.

‘Him?’

Jop was scorning and wiped some sweat from his palm across dry lips, watching the wink of the knife.

‘If ye see him, offer my blissin’,’ he said sourly. ‘God be wi’ The Wallace, for he ne’er took from a man but all he had.’

‘Meaning?’ demanded Hal, and Jop, his tongue like a lizard, spilled it all out like water from a spout.

He had sought out Wallace in the hope that his kin might shelter him and buy the gilded half-cross he had brought with him, for it was well known The Wallace had the hard cash of a dozen good raids.

Hal and Kirkpatrick shared brief glances.

‘So Wallace knows all this?’ demanded Kirkpatrick and Jop curled a lip.

‘Aye, he does. Laughed. Then took the shine,’ he said in a bitter whine. ‘I had six and Lamprecht had six. Bliddy Wallace took mine, for The Cause he says.’

He spat into the coals of the brazier.

‘Kin,’ he added venomously.

‘And the Rood?’ demanded Hal.

Jop’s face almost folded in half with the frown.

‘The Rood? Lamprecht had that, coveted it above all else … here, did he send ye?’

Hal and Kirkpatrick shot savage, stunned glances at each other, for it was clear the pardoner had cozened them all and lured them here. As if their thoughts had summoned up the Devil, the clank of a poor-iron bell above their heads was a shattering explosion.

Jop reeled up and bellowed with the shock of it, so that Kirkpatrick reared back; Jop, seeing his chance, lashed out and the blow slammed Hal backwards into the wall with a crack. Sim sprang forward and he and Jop locked with each other like rutting rams.

In an instant, all was chaos and fury. Sim and Jop strained and staggered, knocking over the brazier with a clatter, spilling hot coals in a glowing mockery of rubies; Kirkpatrick, cursing, started forward, was hit by the struggling pair and knocked sideways and over the kist.

Hal hauled himself up, saw the smoulder of old rushes and started stamping on the bloom of flame. Sim and Jop finally crashed into the bed, fell on it, broke the poles and rolled on to the floor. There was a thump and a roar, then Sim rose up and staggered back a step or two.

‘Ease up, Jop,’ he bellowed. ‘Doucely, man – we mean ye no harm.’

‘Murderers. Thieves. Lamprecht …’

Kirkpatrick fought the panic in him – the noise of the fight, the shouting, Hal’s mad stamping on flames was all fit to wake the dead in the crypt. Jop roared forward in a rush of fear and Sim, caught off balance, went sideways. Kirkpatrick, fast and unthinking as a hornet in a fist, whirled and struck.

Jop gave a coughing grunt, swayed a little with a look of amazement on his face as he stared at where Kirkpatrick had punched him … not a hard blow …

Then the dagger thrust to his heart felled him, and like a tree he crashed to the rushed floor, his head bouncing hard enough to let everyone know he was dead.

Hal’s feet finally stopped stamping on the flames.

‘Christ be praised,’ he murmured, shocked.

‘For ever and ever,’ Kirkpatrick intoned reverently, then wiped the dagger clean on Jop’s tunic, pinched out a coal smouldering in the man’s hair and straightened.

‘Murder was no part of this,’ Hal accused.

‘It is now,’ Kirkpatrick answered, his sneer bloody in the light and there was no denying the logic of it, which made Hal click his teeth shut.

‘We should be away,’ Sim interrupted, then jerked as the bell boomed out again, loud as the doors of Hell opening.

‘Christ’s Bones …’ hissed Kirkpatrick.

‘Lamprecht,’ Sim spat and Kirkpatrick’s curse was pungent.

‘We should be away from here,’ Hal warned, but Kirkpatrick was already at the door and the others followed him. At the lintel, Kirkpatrick paused, turned and kicked the overturned brazier so that the last coals spilled out, the soft flaring chasing him out of the room.

They moved swiftly into the dim of the hall, where their shadows scored the walls in a mad dance. Someone loomed out of the dark, making Hal shout with surprise.

‘Hold,’ called a voice and Kirkpatrick whirled and struck, rat-swift and hard – save that his wrist was suddenly shackled. He gave a roar and a jerk, but Sim held the grip.

‘Christ’s Wounds,’ he spat. ‘Would ye kill a priest now?’

The wee priest, woken and brought to the body of the chapel by the noises, had fallen in his shock and sat looking up in horror at the glittering dagger and the gripped wrist that stopped it coming down on him. Sim let it go, moving swiftly to put himself between the dirk and the priest, whom he hauled up by the front of his robe, staring down into the little man’s anguished twist of a face.

‘Do ye ken me?’ he demanded and had to repeat it before the priest blinked and focused on him.

‘Ye are thieves an’ violators o’ the house o’ God … oooff.’

The air was driven out of him by Sim’s belly-blow and a second massive fist crashed behind his ear and sent him slamming to the ground.

‘Good,’ Sim said and Kirkpatrick moved to go round him. Hal caught the man’s elbow and hauled him back.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick hissed and Hal jerked roughly on the arm he held.

‘No need. You heard the man – he does not ken who we are and so can tell them nothin’. Have you no’ had killing enough?’

‘He has lots he can spill …’ Kirkpatrick hissed back, trying to tear himself free.

‘Not blood this night,’ answered Hal grimly and locked his stare with a hard one of his own.

The boom of the pounded door opening racked them from the moment; Kirkpatrick cursed and they were off like hares for the crypt door, scurrying through as smoke spilled out of Jop’s room behind them, stumbling down the crypt stairs and between the kists, then out into the rain-washed night, where they sucked in air and a mirr of rain soft as the lick of a fawning dog.

There was no moon, no stars, just the wet of the grass beneath their feet; then behind, flames flicked and Hal realized that Kirkpatrick had tossed the lantern aside in the crypt. Beyond that, a dull glow showed where the church burned.

The guards had come up fast, for they had been waiting, night after night, in hourly expectation of capturing the creeping, sleekit Wallace, and the dull clanking of the church bell had spilled them out, ready armed. They were holding axe and sword – one had a spear – with heater shields, maille and helmets so they thought they had the edge on three men in drover’s rags with no more than knives.

Hal cursed; the English garrison from Riccarton had not been part of their plan – though it was clear to Hal that it had been an integral part of Lamprecht’s.

The guards closed in; there was a wild whirl of grunts and the belling of steel on steel. Sparks flew from the blades and a spear from the shadows, flung at Hal by a desperate hand and falling short to skitter madly along the rutted track.

Sim’s roar was so close it made Hal’s ear buzz and he jerked back as a sword came at him, managing to fend it off with the dirk, though the blow numbed his arm and all but ripped the weapon from his grasp.

He ducked, spun, slashed and felt the blade catch, heard a howl. A blade slithered at him and he only just managed to turn sideways so that it slid through his tunic, leaving a strange cold line under his ribs. The man behind it stumbled on, unable to stop and off balance so that Hal’s knife thrusts, three quick viper strikes in his unprotected neck dumped the man onto the muddy track.

Kirkpatrick was snarling like a pit-fighting dog in a mad jig with two guards. More were coming up and the bobbing lights of their lanterns were clear; behind, Hal heard curses and the crypt door splinter, half turned to see the last flare of flame as more guards stamped out the fish-oil flames of the thrown lantern and freed the entrance into the chapel cemetery.

They were in deep trouble, Hal knew, as two men came at him. He stepped, half-turned and slammed a shoulder into the nearest, sending him reeling back and cutting him with a slash. Then something hit him on the back of the head and the world wobbled, a place of whirling dirt and muddy water.

He found himself on his hands and knees, forced himself to rear upright, slashing wildly, feeling the back of his head start to burn, hearing the roar of his own sucking breathing. His mouth was full of the salted metal tang of blood and he felt the sudden talon grasp of fingers on his shoulder; he wondered, almost idly, what had happened to the Dog Boy.

The hand wrenched him round and he swung weakly, felt his knife hand clamped and a voice hissed:

‘It’s me. Sim. Leave off that.’

Then, in the misted haze of his head, Hal heard the bawling of cattle and almost laughed. Sim, on the other hand, was cursing and dragging him sideways; the pair of them fell in the mud and rolled over as black shapes clattered past, bellowing their annoyance. A slim, dark shadow yelped and nipped at their heels.

Hal shook himself back to the road and the night and the mud, in time to see the little black cattle, horns like curved scimitars, stampeding off down the road in a scatter of mud and water and English garrison.

‘Time to be away,’ said a calm voice – Dog Boy – and they wraithed off into the night, Dog Boy calling up his cattle dogs as he went. By the time lack of breath forced them to stop, he was frowning, for one of the pair had not responded.

‘I fear it is killed,’ he growled. ‘Good Beauchien,’ he added, patting the other.

Beauchien, Hal thought and laughed, then winced at what that did to his head. Sim was fussing round his ribs and muttering, so that Hal realized, with a sudden shock, that he had been badly cut. Kirkpatrick nodded admiringly to the Dog Boy.

‘Timely appearance,’ he said. ‘That trick wi’ the kine saved our hides, certes.’

‘I had the wit of Lamprecht’s intent too late,’ Dog Boy said mournfully apologetic. ‘I am sorry.’

‘What wit?’ Sim demanded, peering at the dark stain along Hal’s ribs and tutting disapproval.

‘The daftie boy,’ Dog Boy said. ‘He wanted the shell from yon pardoner’s hat but it was only later that I realized he had asked for it before and also been refused.’

He stopped and stared at the slowly comprehending faces.

‘Lamprecht came here before and the daftie boy saw him. I am betting sure the pardoner went to see Jop – and then went to find us and the Earl Robert. I dinna ken why, but I was sure no good was in it.’

A plaintive bawling snapped the silence and Sim cursed.

‘Stirk Davey’s coos are scattered,’ he moaned. ‘The Riccarton English will be sooking the juice off steaks afore the morn’s done – and we are out by a pretty penny.’

Hal thought that a harsh judgement on a timely use of charging cattle, but his head hurt so much that he felt sick and could not speak for a long time. When he did, it was not cows that he spoke of.

Instead, his question fell on them like a crow on a dead eye, made them realize who was missing.

‘Where’s Lamprecht?’

CHAPTER FOUR

Lincoln

Nativity of Christ (Christ’s Mass Day), 1304

Steam from horses and riders blended with the fine gruel of churned up mud and snow in a sluggish mist that was filled with shouts and grunts and clashes of steel so that the men behind Bruce shifted on their horses.

‘Wait,’ he commanded and he felt them settle – all but brother Edward, of course, who muttered and fretted on his right.

Bruce looked at the wild, swirling mêlée, men hammering one another with blunted weapons, howling with glee, breaking off to bring their blowing horses round in a tight circle and hurl themselves back into the mad knotted tangle of fighting.

‘Now,’ Edward growled impatiently. ‘There he is …’

‘Wait.’

Beyond the mud-frothed field loomed the great, dark snow-patched bulk of the castle, where the ladies of the court watched from the comfort of a high tower, surrounded by charcoal braziers, swaddled in comforting furs and gloved, so that their applause would sound like the pat of mouse feet.

‘Now,’ Edward repeated, his voice rising slightly.

‘Wait.’

‘Aaah.’

Bruce heard the long, frustrated growl, saw the surge of the powerful destrier and cursed his brother even as he signalled the others to follow the spray of kicked-up mud. With a great howl of release, Bruce’s mesnie burst from the cover of the copse of trees and fell on the struggling mass.

Too soon, Bruce realized. Far too soon – the target saw Edward descend, the trail of riders behind him, and broke from the fight to face them, howling from underneath the bucket helm for his own men to help him. De Valence, he bellowed. De Valence.

Edward’s light, unarmoured horse balked and swerved as de Valence’s powerful warhorse reared and flailed with lethal hooves, the blue and white, mud-stained caparison flapping. Coming in on the other side, Bruce leaned and grabbed a handful of de Valence’s surcoat, took a smashing blow on his mailed arm which numbed it, causing him to lose his grip.

De Valence, off balance on the plunging destrier, gave a sharp, muffled cry and fell sideways, raking one spur along the caparisoned back of the warhorse. It screamed and bolted; de Valence, his other foot caught, bounced off behind it, yelling once as he carved a rut through the mud and into the dangerous, prancing pack.

‘Him,’ yelled Edward and his brother screwed round in the saddle as a figure – the one who had hit him, he realized – tried to get away from the Bruce men. ‘Rab – get him.’

Bruce reacted like a stoat on a rabbit, without thinking, seizing the man round the waist and hauling him bodily out of the saddle ignoring the curses and kicks and flails. He carried the man out of the maelstrom mêlée and dumped him like a sack of metal pots.

Malenfaunt, dazed and bruised, felt rough hands on him; someone tried to tear off the bucket helm, but it was laced to his shoulders. Then a voice, rough as a badger’s rear-end, bellowed into the breathing holes for him to yield. He waved one hand, sore and sick with the knowledge of what this might cost him – and at the hands of the Bruces, whom he already hated. Even the satisfaction of having saved de Valence from capture did not balm it much.

Bruce saw the man’s device, knew the man for Malenfaunt and rounded on his grinning brother.

‘We struck for an eagle,’ he said bitterly, ‘but ended with a chick.’

Edward scowled; the friendly scramble of tourney continued to whirl like the mad scrapping of dogs, to celebrate the birthday of Christ.

Abbey of Evesham, Worcester

The same night

Kirkpatrick slid to Hal’s side.

‘Gone to London,’ he grunted softly out of the side of his mouth, rubbing his hands at the flames of the great fire and not looking at Hal. He hawked, then spat in the fire so that the sizzle made those nearest growl at his bad manners. Kirkpatrick’s grin back at them – travellers and pilgrims all – was feral, as befitted his pose as a hireling soldier, rough as a forge-file and not to be trifled with.

‘Had that from three of his kind, bone-hunting wee shites like himself. Heading for Compostella, says one o’ them.’

‘They ken it is him?’ Hal demanded and Kirkpatrick nodded.

‘Aye,’ he said in a whisper. ‘An ugly dung-drop who speaks strangely and is named Lamprecht? Not hard to find even if he keeps his name hidden. Besides, he was a known face to the wee priests here.’

Hal stared moodily at the fire, while the wind howled and battered. There was snow in that wind and the travel next day would be hard and slow – they would probably have to lead their horses for most of it, so there was another curse to lay at the door of the wee pardoner, whose cunning had robbed an earl and almost led Hal and Kirkpatrick and others to their death. Hal shifted and winced; the cut under his ribs was still scabbed and leaking.

‘Should have watched him closer in the first place,’ Kirkpatrick said, as if in answer. ‘Should have dealt with him and Jop both in that night.’

Hal turned brooding eyes on him.

‘Easy as that, is it? Killed then or killed soon,’ he replied bitterly. ‘Scarce makes a difference – murder is murder.’

‘Weesht,’ hissed Kirkpatrick, looking right and left. ‘Keep that sort o’ speech laced.’

He leaned forward, so that his lips were closer, his breath tickling the hair in Hal’s ear.

‘That bell did not ring itself and it was clear that was what wee by-blow Lamprecht came for, not any Rood or rubies. He rang it out and set us in the path o’ the English garrison for revenge and now he has the power to do the Bruce a bad turn, for the Earl has revealed himself in his desire for the Rood, as plain as if he had nailed his claim to the crown to the door of St Giles. And if the Bruce suffers, we suffer.’

‘Jop is beyond us. Lamprecht is a creishy wee fox,’ Hal replied, ‘who has contrived to get us killed and failed. He is running and will want to take his ill-gotten goods away. We should let him.’

Kirkpatrick made a head gesture to say perhaps, perhaps not. There was merit in the Herdmanston lord’s appreciation of matters – the wee pardoner was certainly headed south, from monastery to abbey, priory to chapel, all places where he was sure of a free meal and a safe bed for the night. But the wee bastard had the Rood and Bruce, for all that pursuing it was a danger to him – and so all those round him – could not see it pass him by and do nothing.

Returning to London was certainly not safe for Lamprecht, Kirkpatrick thought, so it may be that Hal has it right and Lamprecht was planning to carry on to the coast and a ship to France. Back to the eastern Middle Sea, where his riches could be sold with no questions asked and where his way of speaking would not mark him.

‘He was daft to try what he did,’ Hal muttered. ‘He must hold a hard hate for what we did to him that night in the leper house of Berwick.’

Kirkpatrick flapped a hand, keeping his voice low as he hissed a reply.

‘We did nothing much – showed him a blade and slapped him once or twice. He was fortunate – for his partnering of that moudiwart bastard Malise Bellejambe he should have been throat-cut there and then.’

‘Your answer to all,’ Hal replied tersely and Kirkpatrick looked back at him from under lowered brows.

‘That way we would not now be dealing with a nursed flame that will not be put out as easily as spit on a spark,’ he said. ‘Our saving grace is that the wee pardoner is stupid enough to try and play intrigue with the nobiles, whose lives entire are spent in makin’ and breakin’ plots and plans more cunning than any Lamprecht may devise.’

‘Like Buchan?’

Kirkpatrick nodded grimly.

‘Throw a Comyn in the air and ye discover a wee man thumbin’ his neb at a Bruce when he lands. Buchan has sent yon Malise in pursuit of Lamprecht, to find out what he has that the Bruce chases.’

‘Death for the wee pardoner, then,’ Hal growled sullenly, ‘no matter who reaches him first.’

Kirkpatrick, swaddling himself in cloak, surged with irritation.

‘Christ, man, ye are a pot o’ cold gruel,’ he spat in a sibilant hiss. ‘Make your mind to it – the wee pardoner is a killed man and ye had better buckle to the bit if it is yourself has to do it. Else it will be us killed. As well that Jop is cold – as yon wee Riccarton priest should be betimes.’

‘Yon priest kens nothin’,’ Hal muttered bitterly, ‘though Jop might have explained what Lamprecht intended, had he been allowed to live a wee while longer.’

‘Aye weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled, aware that he had been hasty with the knife – but Christ’s Bones, the man was coming at him. The wee priest, on the other hand, was neither here nor there. For certes, Kirkpatrick said to himself with grim humour, he will, by now, wish he is no longer here – and explained to Hal, patient as a mother, why it would have been better if he had died.

‘The wee priest kens folk were spyin’ Jop out. He kens the name Lamprecht, which was spoke out for all to hear,’ he whispered, flat and cold. ‘That name has already reached Comyn ears, which is why Malise is sent out. It will, for certes, be whispered in Longshanks’ own by now.’

Hal said nothing, for the truth of it was a cold burn, like the wound along his ribs. Jop was better dead, if only for his own sake; the King’s questioners would not have stinted on their store of agony – for all Edward Longshanks proudly pontificated about there being no torture in his realm – and the priest would be telling all he knew to anyone who would listen.

The more Hal thought on it, the more he wondered about what might have been inadvertently revealed that night. His dreams were cold-sweated with what the priest might be saying, but Hal knew he would have been hard put to kill the man for it. Nor was he sure he could kill Lamprecht as coldly.

Yet the nagging why of it was a skelf in the finger. Why had Lamprecht come back to the north in the first place, after all that had happened to him? Just to risk himself for the chance of revenge on those who had wronged him, as he saw it? It was possible, as Kirkpatrick put it, that he nursed a flame of hate. And Buchan would be interested because a Bruce was involved in it.

‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick said in answer to the last, a short chuckle saucing his bitter growl, ‘as to that last, you underestimate the sour charm you exert on that earl – he might be spying the chance of vengeance on you himself. The bright shine on this is that Buchan, who can never resist the charms of seeing Bruce or yourself discomfited has sent Malise Bellejambe after Lamprecht and so he is let loose from being the chain-dog o’ your light of love.’

‘A perfect chance for me to rescue her,’ Hal replied laconically, ‘save that I am here.’

And five years lie between us like a moat, he added to himself; she may not even welcome a gallant knight’s rescue, never mind a worn lover with blood on his hands.

‘Besides,’ he added, bitter with the memory, ‘Buchan has already had vengeance on me. Why would he suddenly want more?’

Kirkpatrick, shuffling himself comfortable in the middle of a snoring, growling pack of other pilgrims, did not say what he thought – that perhaps, even now, the Earl’s bold countess had mentioned Hal’s hated name aloud. Worse yet, cried it out when her husband broke into her, as Kirkpatrick heard he was wont to do, like a drover earmarking a prize heifer.

It would be enough, he thought, to drive the Earl to visit some final judgement on the man who so cuckolded him. Christ’s Bones, if it were mine I would be so driven.

Yet it was not only the lord of Herdmanston that Buchan pursued, but Bruce. The wee Lothian knight was simply a hurdle in the way of that, for the Comyn would do all they could to bring down a Bruce. And the same reversed.

Somewhere, the monks began a chanting singsong litany and a bell rang.

‘No rest for any this night,’ he muttered in French.

‘It is the Christ Mass,’ Hal answered him, with a chide in the tone of it.

‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled back, ‘like most weans, He benefited from the peace o’ silence in the cradle. A good observance for these times, I am thinking.’

‘Yer a black sinner,’ Hal replied, with a twist of smile robbing the poison of it.

‘Ye are a dogged besom o’ righteousness, Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ Kirkpatrick answered, ‘but ye are mainly for sense, save ower that wummin.’

‘Christ,’ Hal growled back at him, ‘enough hagging me with that. If you had a wummin you cared an ounce for yourself, man, you would know the sense in what I feel for Isabel of Mar.’

Kirkpatrick laughed, though there was little warmth in it.

‘You once asked me as to what I wanted from serving the Bruce,’ he said suddenly. ‘So I ask you in return, Hal of Herdmanston – what is it keeps you here, if you carp at the work Bruce has for us? Siller? Your fortalice restored? Yon wee coontess?’

I miss Herdmanston, thought Hal. And Bangtail and Dog Boy, sent out to chase after Wallace and neither of them up to the task of it. And Sim, who oversees Herdmanston’s rebuilding. And women to talk to rather than swive in a sweaty, meaningless rattle. And bairns laughing, with sticky faces. And men building rather than tearing apart. And an end of folk the likes of Malise – aye, and Kirkpatrick himself.

Above all, there was her and the music of laughing she had returned to his life, a music that had ended when his wife and son slipped out of the world. A music that, for five years, he had lived without, with no prospect of it in the black void that was today, would be tomorrow and would be still the next God-damned year. That’s what he wanted back, what he hoped Bruce would somehow help him achieve.

‘Music,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and left the man arrowing frowns on his face.

Music?

In the end, sleep stole Kirkpatrick away from making sense of it.

Lincoln

The same night

Music flared loud as light, half-drowned by talk in the Great Hall, where banners wafted like sails and the sconces jigged in the rising haze. Sweating servants scurried in the sea of people, bright finery and roaring chatter while the musicians strummed and blew and rapped out Douce Dame Jolie as if Machaut himself were there to hear played what he had written.

Sir Aymer de Valence, limping and lush with glee, told the tale – yet again – of his daring escape from the clutches of Bruce by the mad expedient of hurling himself from his own horse into the middle of the mêlée. All the gilded coterie, the King’s close friends and those who wanted to be, applauded, laughing – all save Malenfaunt, bruised and furious that the sacrifice he had made for de Valence was no part of the tale.

‘Turned the German Method back on you,’ de Valence yelled across and Bruce raised his goblet in smiling acknowledgement of the feat, all the while studying the ones around the bright-faced young heir to the earldom of Pembroke.

Had de Valence paid Malenfaunt’s hefty ransom? Bruce pondered it; though his mother held the Pembroke lands, de Valence had the family holdings in France and so could well afford it.

If not him, then who? It was certes Malenfaunt himself did not have such coin, nor any call on someone rich enough, for all he was part of the mesnie of de Valence. Yet he had ransomed himself and his horse and his harness, which had not been cheap.

The music shrilled; dancers, circling in a sweaty estampie, bobbed and weaved and laughed. The slow drumbeat thump-thump, insistent as nagging, finally silenced the players; one by one the last of the half-drunk dancers stopped stamping, blearily ashamed. Heads turned to where the Lincoln steward stood with his iron-tipped staff rapping a steady beat and, behind him, the King.

He looked every inch regal, too, Bruce thought. He stood with one mottled hand on a dagger hilt of narwhal ivory and jacinth, coiffed and silvered, prinked and rouged, brilliant in murreyed Samite and orphrey bands, but draped in a fine blue-wool cloak – no Provence perse here, of course, but good English wool; even in dress, Edward was politic.

He had good reason to look pleased with himself, too and the lavish Swan Feast was simply the statement of it, fit for the monarch of two realms. With the French king humbled to peace and with his Gascony lands secured, Edward straddled a sovereignty over the island nation that none before him had ever enjoyed.

He was sixty-six years old – less than half a year would take him past the point of being the longest-lived king England had known. Nor, Bruce added moodily to himself, was he showing any signs of ailing anytime soon – it was clear to everyone that his young queen was pregnant again.

The Plantagenet voice was equally firm and ringing loud when he spoke, of discordance made harmony, of lambs returned to the fold. Bruce watched some of the lambs – Buchan and the recently freed Lord of Badenoch for two, smiling wolves in fine wool clothing, watching him in return and offering their lying, polite nods across the rushed floor.

Then there was Wishart, wrapped in prelate purple as rich as his complexion, and Sir John Moubray with his lowered scorn of brow. My ox team, Bruce thought to himself, the three of us shackled to Longshanks to bring the Kingdom – no, the land – of the Scots to order for his nephew, John of Brittany, to rule as governor. That was a platform Bruce had a use for.

Yet even now the Comyn were exerting themselves, insidious as serpent coils, and Bruce could feel them undermining him with an inclusion of extra ‘assistance’ on this concordat of nobiles. Like mice, he thought, eating the cake from the inside out.

One by one, the summoned Scots lords came forward, knelt and swore their fealty in return for the favour of the silvered king and the restoration of their lands with only hefty fines as punishment. Bruce was last of all; once he would have bridled at this affront to his honour and dignity – he had once before, signing the Ragman Roll – but he had been younger and more foolish then.

Smiling, a beneficent old uncle, Longshanks raised him up pointedly, so others would see the favour – Bruce saw the silk and velvet Caernarvon scowl as Gaveston whispered something in his ear; Gaveston was a mistake, Bruce saw, and not the bettering influence Edward had hoped for his son.

The music returned, the talk, the bellowed laughter and the mingling. It was then that Edward sprang the steel trap, signalling Wishart and Moubray and Bruce close to the high seat. In front of him was a wrapped bundle, which he twitched open with a small flourish.

Bruce’s heart faltered a beat, then started to run at the sight of the battered gilt. The rubies had been removed, but the Rood reliquary, blackened and charred still glowed with gilt; Jop’s half, Bruce thought, trying to gather the wild scatter of his thoughts.

‘Taken from Riccarton, my lords,’ Edward growled, his drooping eye baleful, ‘which was a Wallace holding in the lands of the Scotch.’

Behind him, the prince and others craned curiously to see better and it was a mark of things that Edward let them.

‘Indeed?’ Wishart replied, frowning, his voice innocent. ‘That looks greatly like the cover for the Black Rood, which Your Grace took to the safety of the minster.’

‘It is the same,’ snapped Edward, then waved one hand dismissively. ‘Removed by thieves last year. Now it seems likely your Scotch were responsible, my lords. A chapel was left in flames at Riccarton and a man murdered, a certain Gilbert of Beverley also known as Jop; a search of his belongings discovered this. A miracle it was not consumed by flame, my lords.’

‘Christ be praised,’ intoned Wishart.

‘For ever and ever.’

‘Gilbert of Beverley,’ Moubray pointed out sourly, ‘is an Englishman.’

The drooping eye raked him.

‘Kin to the Wallace.’

The King presented the fact significantly, like a lawyer ending his case.

‘Has Your Grace made enquiries?’ Wishart asked blandly and the King’s drooping eye twitched a little as he considered if the bishop’s innocence was real. In the end, he made a small flicking gesture of dismissal.

‘The local priest claimed only to be witness to the invasion and torching of the house of God. He might have said more than he did, save that God gathered him to His Bosom. His heart gave out.’

‘Aye,’ sighed Wishart with beatific sadness, ‘the Question will do that to a man.’

The King looked hard at him.

‘There is no torture permitted in this realm,’ he declared. ‘Only the rule of Law.’

No-one spoke and the lie hung there.

Bruce remained silent, trying not to let the relief that flooded him rise up and swamp his face, wondering wildly how long the priest’s heart had lasted before it had stopped the mouth. What had the priest told Longshanks, Bruce wondered? Not enough, certes, or I would not be standing here, watching that eye droop like a closing shutter …

In the end, Edward was forced to continue.

‘Find the rest of this reliquary and the relic that was in it,’ he demanded. ‘Find Wallace – mark this, my lords, the Scotch who wish to return fully to my grace, who wish remittance of their fines and full return of their lands, have until forty days from now to hand Wallace over. They will be watched to see how they do.’

‘There are Scots loyal to you,’ Wishart declared, which was stepping carefully with words, Bruce thought. Then a voice crashed in like a stone in a pool.

‘All Scotch are thieves.’

Eyes turned and Malenfaunt, leaning through the huddle around the prince, drew back a little – but his eyes were fixed firmly on Bruce. The King, about to storm the man into the rushes and out of the castle for his impudence, paused.

He had heard rumours about the lord of Annandale, of course, but whispered by Bruce’s enemies … still, it might pay to let this hound run a little. Besides, his wayward son and that bastard of a serpent, Gaveston, were watching, so a lesson in kingship might be timely.

‘You have something to say, sirra?’ he rasped and Bruce saw Malenfaunt quail a little, lick his lips and flick one snake-tongue glance sideways. Bruce followed the glance and came into the sardonic face of John the Red Comyn.

‘I merely insist, Your Grace, that all Scotch are thieves,’ Malenfaunt said, almost desperately. He was not so sure as he had been concerning this. Bruce, he had been told, was no true knight, preferring the German Method of fighting, and his reputation as the second best knight in Christendom was badly earned. Malenfaunt had seen for himself the tactics used and paid for them. Or Badenoch had, since the ransom Bruce had demanded was beyond the means of any Malenfaunt.

‘All Scots, my lord?’ Bruce answered softly, with a wry smile and Malenfaunt felt the surge of anger in him, the flaring rage against the man who had cozened him out of the Countess of Buchan years before, who had laid him in the mud yesterday with a foul trick. It was the sneering smile on Bruce that angered Malenfaunt and anger was as good as courage for what he had been set to do.

‘Some more than others,’ he replied. ‘Thieves of honour especially, who swear one thing and do another at the expense of their better’s mercy.’

That was clear enough and even Wishart’s warning hand on his arm did no good. Bruce shook it off and any sense with it.

‘You will defend that, of course, before God,’ he replied and Malenfaunt felt the cold, sick slide of fear in his belly. Bruce did not seem afraid at all, for a man who could not fight like a true knight …

‘In your beard,’ he spat back. ‘God defend the right.’

‘Swef, swef,’ Wishart demanded, attempting to patch the tearing hole of this. ‘The King forbids such combats à l’outrance …’

‘Usually,’ the King replied and staved in the hull of Wishart’s hopes. Usually. The King had not meant matters to go this far, yet he had recently removed Bruce from the sheriffdoms of Ayr and Lanark because of the whispers, seeing the dangers in handing too much power to the man.

He felt a sharp pang of annoyance and sadness; he did not want to lose Bruce to his own foolish ambition, so perhaps a humbling would be good for him. It was clear this Malenfaunt creature had been set to the task by Bruce’s enemies, but he could be leashed by a king. He would have a word with both men, make it clear that, despite the use of edged weapons, death was not the finale here – though defeat in the sight of God would be humbling enough for either of them.

Afterwards, reeling with the surprise of it, Bruce was still wondering how he had landed in such a mire. Wishart was sure of how – and why.

‘You lost yer head, my lord,’ he declared bitterly and Bruce had to admit that was true enough, cursing himself for it.

‘A family trait,’ he managed lightly. ‘I thought my brother Edward had stolen most of it for himself, mark you.’

‘No laughing matter,’ Wishart spat back. ‘It is clear who has put this Malenfaunt up to it – Badenoch and Buchan both gave him the siller that ransomed him from his tourney loss. Now he is in debt to that pair and flung in like a dog in a pitfight.’

‘They must rate him highly, then,’ Bruce replied sourly, ‘if they think to humble me using such poor fare.’

Wishart waved an impatient hand and broke fluidly into French without missing a heartbeat.

‘They win, no matter the outcome. If you beat Malenfaunt, then Buchan and Badenoch have revenge on the man who captured the Countess of Buchan and held her to ransom. If you are defeated, they have humbled you. Better still for Badenoch if you were killed in such a combat – and those will be Malenfaunt’s instructions, mark me.’

He broke off and shook his head sorrowfully.

‘And The Plantagenet, of course, permits it in the hope of bringing you tumbling, my lord earl,’ he added. ‘Mark me, the King will send word soon that you are not to kill. He will send the same to Malenfaunt – though that one may ignore it. But a defeat over such a matter will ruin your honour, leave you ostracized at court, denied the peace of God and so left at the mercy of the royal favour.’

‘If he defeats me,’ Bruce declared, then frowned and shook his head. ‘Malenfaunt is a brave man, for all that, to put himself, with no great reputation as a knight, against me.’

Wishart snorted. In times of stress, Bruce noted wryly, he reverts to his roots and the lisping French was banished like mist.

‘Think yersel’ all silk and siller? Aye, mayhap – second-best knight in Christendom after the German emperor? When was the last time ye jousted à l’outrance, my lord earl? Using the French Method and bound to it?’

Bruce thought and the sudden, thin sliver of fear speared him. A long time, he had to admit. The French Method – charging home on a warhorse trained to bowl a man over – was one he had used as a youth on the tourney circuit.

Then he had learned the German Method – riding a lighter horse, avoiding the mad rushes of French Method knights and attacking from behind or the side in the mêlée. It was called ‘German’ as a sneer by the French, for everyone knew it was a Saracen trick learned by crusading German knights of the Empire and brought back by them. Better for prizes and sensible in war, it was not considered honourable for the nobiles of the civilized world to the west. Worse even than that, it was not French.

Acceptable – barely – in the whirl of the mêlée, it was not permitted in that perfect contest of skill and bravery, the joust, which was the epitome of the French Method, preferred by the young and daring.

This joust was à l’outrance and there was no German Method permitted at the edge of extremity.

For God was watching.

Lincoln

The day after – The Feast of St John the Evangelist, December, 1304

It was cold, so that the King was ushered to a seat with heated cushions and swathed in warm furs alongside his wife. In the striped pavilion, with the horse gently steaming and two coal braziers smouldering, Bruce saw the leprous sheen on his maille as the trembling squire helped him into the jupon emblazoned with his arms.

The horse shifted, clattered bit metal and champed froth. Bruce eyed the beast, which had been given to him by his brother since he had no decent warhorse for a joust like this. Castillians his were, fine, fast and strong but no match in a stand-up fight with something like this terror, all muscle and vein like an erect prick, with heavy legs and hindquarters. A Lombard, crossed with Germans, his brother had told him – black as the De’il’s face and called, with bitter irony, Phoebus.

Somewhere outside, Malenfaunt stood with his own horse in a similar pavilion; custom decreed that neither should see each other once the processions and oaths and mummery of it all had been concluded, save at the very moment of combat. The mummery, Bruce thought to himself wryly, had possibly been the worst part of the affair.

The King had processed, the witnesses and bishops and officials of the tourney had processed, the ladies of the court had processed – including the stiff, disapproving Elizabeth. When presented with the news of the affair from her husband, she had raised one scornful eyebrow, and had spoken not one word to him in all the hours since. He could scarcely blame her – her honour was braided with his own and if he fell from grace, so did she.

Speeches had been exchanged, blessings given, oaths made regarding the anathema of using weapons forged by spells, or with spells placed on them. Lances had been measured, so that neither had an advantage and, for the same reason, agreement had been reached over the number and type of weapons carried – it was, as always, three lances, the same axe each, their own sword and a dagger or estoc of their choice.

After those had been exhausted or broken, it would be fists and teeth, Bruce thought grimly.

The rules regarding the conduct of squires and the hundreds who thronged to watch had been read out – no-one horsed on pain of death, no-one else armed on pain of death or loss of property – for this was no raucous entertainment, but a solemnity of chivalry to decide which knight was favoured by Heaven. It was decreed by custom and Law and, therefore, by God.

Bruce, moving stiffly and talking in single words, was aware that all the procession and pomp and conspicuous legality was because, when all else was done, there were no rules at all in that rectangle of tilt field.

Outside his tented pavilion was a low hum like a disturbed byke; they were removing the altar, crucifix and prayer book on which each man had sworn to defend the right of his honour before God. Bruce nodded for the squire to leg him up on to Phoebus and the horse, knowing what was expected of him, trembled a little, baiting on the spot so that the splendid drape of his covering flapped. Bruce settled himself with a creaking of new leather.

‘Faites vos devoirs,’ a voice called and the squire handed Bruce up his helmet.

‘Faites vos devoirs.’

The squires dragged back and fastened the flaps of the pavilion and the crowd spotted him, swelling up to a roar of approval, drowning the final ritual call for both men to ‘do their duty’.

The two caparisoned beasts moved out, led and flanked by squires, on to a tiltyard cleared of snow and laboriously sanded. The Tourney Marshal waited with one white glove in his raised hand. He paused; the crowd fell silent.

At least this is the last act of ribaldry, Bruce thought, and glanced at Malenfaunt, seeing how pale he was and how his face, framed in maille coif, seemed clenched like a fist. He wondered if his own was as stiff and tight and if the reason for appearing unhelmed was less to do with making sure the combatants were who they were supposed to be than for each of them to savour the fear of the other.

‘Laissez-les aller,’ the Marshal said, dropping the glove. Let them go. The squires bustled, handing up shield and lance; the first was slid through two straps on the left arm, the latter rammed firmly into the fewter attached to the stirrup.

Bruce half-turned to where Elizabeth sat, raised the lance in salute, seeing his squires scatter from him. The handing of the lance was the last allowable contact from human hands that either would receive until matters were over.

He took his helm from his saddle bow and slid it over his head, plunging himself into the dark cave of it, split only by the framed rectangle of view from the slit. His breath, magnified, wheezed in and out and he tried to slow it, feeling the end of his nose rasp against the metal. Opposite, the inhuman steel face of Malenfaunt stared blankly back at him.

From now on, Bruce thought, we are alone in this. Save for God.

Woods at Pittenweem

The Feast of St John the Evangelist, December, 1304

If it was not for the bad luck, Bangtail thought to himself, I would have no luck at all. It was bad enough having lost the cast of a dice to the Dog Boy without having the sour memory of losing the last of his dignity to the chiel as well.

Now Dog Boy was riding back to the comfort of Edinburgh and on to Sim at Herdmanston while Bangtail Hob, once the Dog Boy’s better in every way, followed the guide up a muddy trail in the freezing cold.

Once, but no longer. The memory of it burned him with shame and loss. He had woken, warm and languorous in the tangled bed under the eaves of Mariotta’s Howf in Kinghorn only this morning. A glorious, roaring night it had been, him and the Dog Boy both; Mariotta’s was a favourite of Bangtail’s and had been for years after Mariotta herself had gone to the worms.

He had woken in time to hear the rhythmic beat and grunt and squeal, in time to see the quine from last night sit up and stretch and yawn, her body white and marked here and there with ingrained dirt and the bruising of too-rough hands, but lithe still. She turned, smiling with a deal of teeth left, as he grunted upright and rubbed his eyes. The bed shook.

‘Sorry to have been sae much trouble,’ Bangtail growled, nodding at her bruises. The bed rattled and the squeals grew louder but Bangtail could not see behind the quine.

‘Och,’ she said gently, patting him like a dog, ‘ye were no bother, Bangtail – ye nivver are. It is the youngster ye brought that is loosening all our teeth.’

And there it was, laid out like bad road for Bangtail to glower on. Dog Boy, still ploughing exultantly and Bangtail who was ‘nivver any trouble’. His years whirled up like leaves and crashed on him like anvils; he had aches and the thinning hair on him was less straw and more silvered. He had to roll out of his bed most nights to piss.

He was old.

So it came as no surprise when the throw of dice – to see who would go with the Wallace guide, for only one was permitted – went against him. Grinning, Dog Boy saddled the garron and rode off back to Herdmanston, leaving Bangtail sour and scowling into his ale.

An hour later the Wallace guide had arrived, sleekit and slinking – as well ye might, Bangtail thought, wi’ half the country huntin’ ye like a staig. He went out, saddled the garron and rode to where the guide had hissed to meet him, then watched the man wraithing from cover, twitched as a coney in the open.

The man had no horse and started to run ahead, a long, loping wolf-run born of long use – and that was the measure of how far Wallace’s band had sunk. Without horses, they could no longer strike hard and fast and vanish. Without horses they were mere outlaws, locked to a place and easy to track.

The running man, in hodden wool with more stain than colour, said little, which suited Bangtail, brooding on his lot and the new reality of his life. Deliver the message from the Bruce, he said to himself, then get back to Herdmanston and begin huntin’ a new life, that included his own ingle-nook and a good wummin. The thought of dying, alone and cold and old, made him shiver. The thought of a wife made him shiver, too and he did not know which one was worse.

The guide vanished. Bangtail stopped the garron and sat it for a moment, staring at the hole where he had been and then, in the trees to his left, the shadows merged, edged themselves, took shape and stepped from the gloom; Bangtail’s mouth went dry.

Dark with the long grime of old dirt, wearing worn cloth, odd tanned hides, strips of fur, raggles of rusted maille and metal, they had skin the colour of old bog water, where you could see it through the tangle of hair and beard. They had spears and axes and round shields – one or two carried the shields of knights and Bangtail knew where they had come from. Some of them were women, he saw suddenly and swallowed hard at their eyes.

‘Christ be praised,’ Bangtail whispered.

‘For ever and ever,’ answered a cheerful voice and one man stepped from the others. His nose was broken and he was taller than the others, but he was not Wallace.

‘Noo ye ken we are not bogles,’ this one said in a broad growl of Braid and the others laughed, a sound like whetting steel with no mirth in it at all. Then Broken Nose gave a signal and Bangtail obeyed it, climbing off the garron, seeing the others close in on it with feverish eyes. He did not think he would get it back, nor the pack with his spare clothes, nor the weapons they took from him and the thought made him uneasy.

Wallace was easy enough to recognize when Bangtail arrived in his presence – head and shoulders taller than the others, dressed no differently save for the hand-and-a-half slung carelessly from one shoulder. Yet he was etched like a blade, elbows and knees knobbed on too-thin flesh, the muscle on him corded.

‘Ye are Bangtail Hob,’ Wallace said and had a nod in reply.

‘Ye are seekin’ me, it seems. Whit why – to join us?’

‘God, naw.’

The cry was out before Bangtail could smother it and he heard the growl from them, saw the cold-eyed, curled-lip gleam and started to back out of the hole he had walked himself into.

‘I have done my fighting with ye,’ he answered, trying to make amends and having to drown the spear in his throat with swallowed spit. ‘At Cambuskenneth and again in the trees at Callendar.’

‘Ye were there?’ Wallace remarked and Bangtail bridled at the mild sneer in it.

‘With lord Henry o’ Herdmanston. We saved yer skin yon day,’ he answered harshly.

Now Wallace remembered and the cold stone of what had to be done sat in his belly even deeper. He remembered the day and how the brace of Templar knights had almost ridden him down save for the skill and courage of Hal of Herdmanston and another – Sim Craw, that was it. Sim and his big latchbow.

And this one, or so he claimed. Wallace tried to see this Bangtail’s face on a man that day but could not make it work.

‘So – ye do not wish to stand with us, wee man,’ he said lightly. ‘Why, then, are ye here?’

Bangtail breathed in.

‘The Earl of Carrick bids ye friendship and his regard and offers what help ye might need to quit the realm for your own safety for there are those who would do you harm and give you in to the English.’

It was delivered all of a piece and Bangtail could not get the words out of his mouth fast enough. There were growls and it was not Bangtail’s feverish imagination that heard dissent. Wallace was silent for a time, then shifted.

‘Well, ye have delivered Bruce’s message. He has gave me it afore, but refuses to listen to any of my answers. Mayhap he will listen to this one.’

Bangtail’s skin crawled when Wallace said no more and the man with the broken nose grinned, wolf sharp and evil.

‘I came here thinkin’ this to be a perjink well-conducted meet,’ he hoarsed out. ‘Held by an honourable chiel.’

Wallace nodded, almost sadly. Men grabbed Bangtail’s arms and he struggled briefly, his heart pounding. He could not believe this was happening.

‘Ye thought wrang-wisely,’ Wallace said, gentle, bitter and sad, a note that chilled Bangtail to his belly. ‘We are trailbaston. Outlaws. You see how it is – we need time here an’ if I let ye loose, we will have to be on the move. Besides – yer master needs my answer.’

‘I will say not one thing about your presence here,’ Bangtail protested and was appalled at the whine that had appeared in his voice.

‘So you say,’ Wallace replied flatly, ‘but there was a man with ye and there may be more. I have others to think on besides my own self.’

‘I fought for you!’ Bangtail howled, seeing it now and struggling, far too late. Broken-Nose, grinning, started to unsheath a dagger and Wallace laid a hand on his wrist. For a moment, hope leaped like a salmon in Bangtail.

‘No,’ Wallace said firmly, then drew his own. ‘He deserves this at least.’

The blow drove the air from Bangtail and he sat, released from the arms, trying to suck in a breath and leaking snot and tears. Then the burn of it hit him. Then the pain. He found himself on his back, staring through the latticed trees, feeling a wry laugh bubble in him at the thought of how this had come about. Two threes instead of two fives and here he was in his worst nightmare – dying alone, cold and old …

‘Hang him from yon tree near Mariotta’s place,’ Wallace ordered Long Jack, feeling as if he had been slimed with someone’s sick.

‘You were not always as hard,’ said Jinnet’s Jean, starting to strip Bangtail of his welcome clothes and boots. Wallace said nothing, though he wanted to snarl that he did it for them, though it choked him.

Freedom, he thought. This is what it feels like.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lincoln

The Feast of St John the Evangelist, December, 1304

It was all familiar, but tainted with the rust of long neglect and Bruce was alarmed by how fumbling he felt. He saw the distant shape of Malenfaunt on a powerful, arch-necked beast – not his own, for certes; Bruce wondered if it was one of Buchan’s, or even one of the King’s.

He saw the sudden clench and curl of it, knew that Malenfaunt was spurring the beast and, with a sick lurch, dug his heels in to Phoebus, feeling the huge muscled rump gather and spring, almost rocking him backwards so that the lance wavered wildly.

Seventy ells separated them and they were at lance-length in the time it took to say ‘Sire Pere, qui es es ceaus’. Bruce saw his lance slide over the top of Malenfaunt’s shield and miss his helmet by the length of a horse whisker – then the clatter of lance on his own shield slammed him sideways, reeling him in the saddle. Phoebus faltered, lost rhythm and rocked Bruce back upright before cantering on.

Stunned, shocked, Bruce fought the horse round. Christ’s Bones, he shrieked to himself, his breathing a thunderous roar inside the helm, what madness drove me to this? Possession by some imp of Satan?

The Curse of Malachy, a voice nagged at the back of his mind.

Then Phoebus was round and he was thundering back down the tiltyard, trying to keep the long ash shaft’s bouncing point somewhere in the region of Malenfaunt’s unscarred shield.

Malenfaunt, snatching up his second lance from the rack, was blazed with a relief bordering on the exultant – Bruce was inept. He could not fight like this, as Buchan had said and that lance stroke was one a still-wet squire would have scorned.

He wrenched the head of the beast round, feeling it fight back against the cruel barb of the bit and cursing it until he deafened himself in the helmet. Then he levelled his lance and rowelled the animal into a great, leaping canter, hearing his own voice howling.

Bruce saw the mad plunge of it and felt, as well as the fear, an anger that burned it away like morning mist. He was an earl, one of the recognized best knights of Christendom and would not be made afraid by anyone. He sat deeper in the cantled saddle, straightened his legs out in the stirrups, urged Phoebus with his weight alone and sprang forward.

They clashed and the crowd roared at the perfection of the strokes, two lances burying their leafed points in each shield and shattering with a simultaneous crack that shivered splinters higher in the air than anyone could have thrown.

Bruce rocked with the blow and Phoebus staggered sideways, crossing feet over each other, at first delicate as a cat and then stumbling like a drunk. Malenfaunt felt his head snap and his teeth cracked wickedly on his tongue; the horse was flung from a canter to a dead stop and sank back on its powerful haunches, skidding furrows along the sand.

Bruce reached the far end, reined round, sobbing for breath. He threw down the splintered lance butt, worried the shattered point out of his shield and flung it away, more to give him and horse breathing space than anything. At the far end, he saw Malenfaunt drop his own shattered lance and seem to sit there while the horse snorted and shifted beneath him.

Had he given in? Too injured to continue? In his heart, Bruce knew the lie of it; this was à l’outrance and there was no giving in at the edge of extremity, until one or the other was forced to it, for a loss here stripped you of honour and dignity. Under the rules, it stripped you of life, too, since your opponent had the right – the duty – to kill you and the very least that could be expected was that the tongue with which you swore your falsehood to God would be removed.

For God was watching.

So also was the King and he had sent a stern-eyed squire to inform Bruce that there was to be no death in this and that his opponent had agreed to the same. Mistakes can be made, Bruce thought grimly to himself, at the edge of extremity.

Malenfaunt was now realizing how great a mistake had been made and that Bruce had all the skills others claimed for him – he had just been faltering until they came to him. From now, Malenfaunt thought with a sick sensation that threatened to loose his bowels, Bruce would be deadly with the lance – so best not to give him the advantage.

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