ROBERT LOW

The Lion Wakes

Copyright

HarperFiction

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

Copyright © Robert Low 2011

Map © John Gilkes 2011

Robert Low asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007337910

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007337934

Version: 2015-09-10

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while in some cases based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

To my wife, who is the sun on my shiny water: without her, I don’t sparkle

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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

Keep Reading

Author’s Note

List of Characters

Glossary

Also by Robert Low

About the Publisher

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-six, the Scots decided they had had enough of King Edward lording it over them with his appointed Balliol king and so declared. The English came north with fire and sword and the Law of Deuteronomy at Berwick, so that the slaughter caused the name of that town to be used as a watchword and rallying cry for ever after.

The defeated King John Balliol was brought to Edward’s feet, to be stripped of crown and regalia, the proud heraldry of his rank torn from his surcote, so that he was known as Toom Tabard – Empty Cote – ever after. The coronation regalia of Scotland – the Holy Rood and the Stone of Scone – was seized, while the Great Seal was ceremonially snapped in half.

Then King Edward rode south, giving control of what he now thought of as his own lands to a governor, to keep the Scots in thrall to him.

A man does good work,’ he declared, washing his hands of the place, ‘when he rids himself of such a turd.’

But the Scots would not bow the knee . . . there was rebellion in the north under Moray, the east under Frazier, in the west under a brigand called Wallace. Scotland’s bishops were defiant. Sir William Douglas, who was called The Hardy for his boldness, and had defended Berwick against King Edward, was captured and then pardoned into the king’s peace on his promise to serve in the English army in France. Not long after, he slipped his bonds of oath and came to join the rebels.

Stung to action by this last, King Edward ordered his loyal subjects in Scotland to oppose these rebels and Robert Bruce the Younger, Earl of Carrick, was sent to Douglas Castle, to slight the fortress and take Sir William’s wife and bairns hostage.

But when the lion wakes, everyone must beware its fangs . . .

Prologue

Douglas, Lanark

Feast of St Drostan the Hermit, July 11, 1296

The worst part had been the dark. No moon, no stars, just the whispering of lost souls searching the wind for a way home, or a body to slither into for the memories of warm blood and life. There had been owls and he did not like owls, for they shrieked like Cyhiraeth, goddess of woodland streams, who wraiths through the dark screaming at those about to die.

Gozelo knew he should not allow himself to believe in such matters, being a good Christian, but his grandmother, old Frisian that she had been, had stuffed his head with such tales when he’d been younger. It only came out when he was ruffled and fretted and even God would have to admit that this country He had clearly forsaken did ruffle and fret.

Not the country so much as the Cloaked Man. Gozelo shivered and dragged his own cloak tighter round him, moving on into the silvered dawn and happy to see the light. He had been heading for Carnwath, held by the Lord Somerville – English or not, he was at least light and heat and, above all, safety – but the dark had put paid to that and Gozelo was now certain he had missed that place and was headed for Douglas.

He worried that a man limping in on foot would be sent away with a curse and a waved spear. A man on a horse had status while one slithering through the wet summer dawn on ripped shoes, with a cloak and tunic stained with hard travel, was nothing at all, even if he was a Flemish Master Mason from Scone. Not only that, Gozelo knew that Douglas was home to a nest of former rebels, who could not be trusted to keep out the ones he was sure now hunted him.

Something whirred and Gozelo started, looked wildly round and hurried on. He should never have taken the task but that old mastiff-faced Bishop Wishart had cozened him into it with flattery and promises of a fat purse. Not that making the piece had been difficult and Manon had seen to the carvings; Gozelo did not doubt now that the poor stone worker was dead.

Then the Cloaked Man had appeared with a cart and a worn horse for it and the Fleming realised that they were taking the original and leaving the cuckoo in its place. Manon, he had been told, was paid and gone already; that was when the chill, cold as altar stone, had sunk into his very soul.

‘We take this to Roslin,’ the Cloaked Man had said in French. ‘There you will be paid, both for your skill and to keep your mouth closed on this matter.’

If it had just been the Cloaked Man who had schemed all this, Gozelo would never have countenanced it at all – but it had been a bishop, no less, who had broached the subject of it. Gozelo thought Bishop Wishart a singular churchman at the time, had basked in the warm flattery and the promise of riches until the long struggle after the cart, the relentless wet – Christ in Heaven, was there no other weather in this Scotland? – and the gibber of his own fears had melted his resolve like gold in the assay. The Cloaked Man, grim as a wet cliff, became more and more sinister with each passing mile until, no more than a good walk from Roslin, the last of Gozelo’s courage crumbled and he ran.

The Cloaked Man had thought hard about it. Gone off without the fat purse and in a panic for his life, having finally worked out the possibilities. Aye, well – smart wee man that he was, he would work out more when his legs stopped long enough to let his mind start running. Like how to make up the lack of fat purse. He would head for Lanark and the English sheriff, Heselrig, where he would tell all he knew.

It was, the Cloaked Man noted, just as Wishart had said, calling him aside with a quiet: ‘If you trust os vulvae, then you are a fool. Go with God, my son.’

The Cloaked Man had to admit the bishop had been right, both about the Fleming’s character and how his mouth, wet-lipped and surrounded by a silly fringe of beard and moustache, did look like a woman’s part if you turned your head sideways. The Latin of it, os vulvae, the Cloaked Man decided, sounded better than the English – cunt face.

Of course, the Cloaked Man reasoned, clucking the weary pony up to the castle at Roslin, this Fleming may just head on to Dumfries and the English border. He was a Master Mason, after all, and would not be short of work for long.

Sir William Sientcler, the Auld Templar of Roslin, gave him a good, fast hobin horse and a sharp, meaningful glance when this had all been laid out to him.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ he said and the Cloaked Man nodded. He would make sure.

Gozelo could see the faint lights in the dark and almost sobbed with the relief of it, for he was now close to Douglas and could find shelter there before going on to Lanark. He would tell all he knew, he thought viciously, for what the Cloaked Man had put him through. He had convinced himself that he had been right to run before he had been black murdered in the dark. He would never return to this country again and would tell all he knew to the English, even after what they had done to the Flemings – some of them kin – in Berwick. They would pay, too and offset the loss of the promised purse. What was a silly stone to him, after all?

The shape rose up from behind the last fringe of trees leading to the water meadow that ran down to the shrouded bulk of the fortress and the so-near lights. Gozelo screamed, high as an owl, but it was all too late.

‘You went off without your due,’ the Cloaked Man said mildly and Gozelo fell back, babbling wildly, in French, English – any language that came to him. He was only vaguely aware of his bowels running down his leg, his mind a mad whirl of pleas that his mouth could not get out quickly enough.

‘You’ll say nothing?’ the Cloaked Man repeated, catching one of them as it spewed out, and saw the Fleming nod so wildly it seemed his head would fly off.

The Cloaked Man nodded sympathetically, then reached up with both hands to draw back the hood and show himself to the moon. The pallid light of it did nothing for his face and made the four-sided sliver of steel in one fist wink; Gozelo shrieked so high only dogs could hear him.

‘Best mak’ siccar,’ said the Cloaked Man into the Fleming’s bewilderment, stepping close and punching once; Gozelo leaned against him like a spent lover, then was gently slid to the mulch and the undergrowth.

The Cloaked Man wiped the dagger clean on the Fleming’s cloak, took what he needed from the unresisting corpse and left, leading the horse until he was sure he was clear away.

It was, he suddenly realised, the day after Longshanks had decreed for all Scotland’s community of the realm to meet at Brechin and witness what happened to a king who defied English Edward.

There had been, no doubt, humiliation and lies and vicious-ness. Edward would already have packed up the Rood and the Seal and the Stone as he had threatened, stripping both King John Balliol and kingdom of authority.

But Longshanks did not have all of Scotland in his grasp – one small part of the Kingdom had been taken from his fist.

The Cloaked Man smiled, warmed by the thought even as the summer mirr soaked him.

Chapter One

Douglas Castle, almost a year later

Vigil of St Brendan the Voyager, May 1297

The hounds woke Dog Boy as they always did, stirring and snuffing round him. Where there had been heat was suddenly cool and growing colder until it hooked him, shivering, from sleep.

At his movement, the dogs were round him, tongues lolling, panting fetid breath in his face, whining with hopeful looks and fawning eyes to be fed. They knew the routine of the day as well as Dog Boy – better, according to the Berner’s right-hand, Malk.

Dog Boy struggled up, speeding the process as the cold air chewed him. He pulled straw from his hair and clothes, fumbled for his pattens and stumbled in the half-dark of the kennels, a long, low building of wattle and daub with timber pillars. There was no light for fear of fire and the rear wall was solid, cold stone, part of the brewhouse; the only light dappled through the chinks in the daub on to the straw floor, which stank as it did every morning.

He found a rough wool over-tunic on a hook near the leashes, pulled it over his head and fumbled his arms through the holes, blowing on his hands for it was cold just before the dawn. Someone coughed; heads appeared, dark knobs surfacing through the straw and the other kennel-lads struggled into a new day. The dogs whined and whimpered, wriggled and circled endlessly, tails working furiously, wanting fed.

‘Soft, soft,’ Dog Boy soothed. ‘Quietly. It won’t be long.’

Unless there was a hunt, of course, in which case the dogs would not be fed, for full bellies made poor runners and the runners were the hounds he, with a handful of other lads, was responsible for. Raches and limiers, they were, about thirty all told, and they circled and whined while the other hounds, partitioned off to keep them from each other’s throat, started up a hoarse, howling bark.

‘Swef, swef,’ Gib called out to silence them, showing off the French he had learned from Berner Philippe. The dogs ignored him and Dog Boy smiled to himself – the limiers were English Talbots, white sleuthhounds, all nose and no stamina; Dog Boy thought it unlikely they would know any French. The raches were all colours, Silesian-bred hounds forming the bulk of the pack and made for long running. Once the limiers marked the trail, the raches would follow relentlessly until they brought the prey to bay or dropped.

He thought it unlikely any of them would understand French – if dogs understood any language at all – but France was the place thought to be the home of hunting and so all the hounds were given their French names and the head houndsman was a Frenchman, given his title in French - berner. Yet the prey they hunted here was the same – hart, hind and boar, all the preserve of the Dale, the Water and beyond, the lands given by God and King into the hands of the Douglas.

Beyond the thin partition, the other boys stirred as the alaunts and levriers bayed and howled. Dog Boy shivered and it was not from the cold: there were twenty levriers in there, fighting grey gazehounds with cold eyes and snarls. Yet even they balked and put their tails down when the strangers, two great rough-coated and huge deerhounds, curled a leathery lip.

The levriers were capable of running down and tackling a young, velvet-horned hart or a doe, the alaunts could tackle a good stag if it had been brought to bay, but only the deer-hounds could run a prime stag into the ground and still have the wind left to drag it down.

Douglas had no deerhounds, so it came as a shock to see this pair arriving with Sir Hal of Herdmanston and his riders. It had seemed to Dog Boy that there were a lot of riders for a simple hunting party, but he had been put right on that by Jamie and others – Sir Hal had come in the guise of a hunting party, sent by his father to hold to the promise they’d made to the Douglas fortalice to defend it in time of threat. There was no larger a threat, it had seemed, than the Lord Bruce of Carrick and his men, come to punish the Lady and her sons for her husband’s rebellion against the English King Edward.

It had come as a shock to Dog Boy to see all those men – more folk than he had ever seen in his life before – flowing round the castle like spilled oil. It was even more a shock to see how unruly the Herdmanston dogs were, so that the wolf-howls of them set every hound in Douglasdale off. Berner Philippe had been furious – but, to everyone’s surprise, the sight and smell of Dog Boy had calmed the two great beasts almost at once.

‘This one is Mykel,’ Master Hal had told him, and the dog had looked at Dog Boy with great, limpid eyes. ‘It means great, an old Lothian word. The other is called Veldi, which means power in the same tongue.’

Dog Boy nodded, breathless with the attention of the towering, smiling Hal and his towering, smiling crew, with names like Bangtail Hob and Ill Made Jock. Veldi, pink tongue lolling from between the white reefs of its teeth, looked at Dog Boy, the blue-brown eyes unwinking, and he felt the sheer heartleap of surety that these dogs were angels in disguise.

He tried to say as much, but could only manage ‘angels’, which made the giants laugh. One clapped him on the shoulder, almost driving him into the ground with the strength of it.

‘Angels, is it? Wee lad of pairts you, are ye not?’ this one said – Dog Boy had heard the others call him Tod’s Wattie. ‘Ye’ll chirrup different first time these hoonds of hell mak’ ye birl yer hocks in the glaur.’

From his bitterness, Dog Boy knew the dogs had somersaulted Tod’s Wattie into mud at least once; he could have sworn Mykel winked at him and he laughed, which made Tod’s Wattie scowl and all the others slap their thighs at his expense.

Sir Hal, grinning, had told him to take good care of his pets and Dog Boy had looked up into the old-young face, bearded and with eyes like sea haar, and loved the man from that moment; Mykel nudged a rough muzzle under his arm and stared at him with huge blue-brown eyes.

Once, on the day he had arrived in Douglas, Dog Boy had seen a hound as big as Mykel. A wolfhound, he had learned, rough-coated and big as a pony it seemed – but Dog Boy knew that he had been smaller then and had an idea that the deerhounds were even longer in the leg.

That animal had died when Dog Boy was eight, two years after his mother, walking proud and desperate, had shepherded him through the gatehouse of this place, which had been wooden then. On it had hung the Douglas shield, with its three silver stars – mullets, Dog Boy had been told, though he could not see that they looked like fish. He now knew – because Jamie Douglas had told him – that it came from the French, molette, which was a six-arrayed star.

Jamie, despite their differences in rank, was his friend and could read and knew where France lay. Dog Boy could not read at all and had no idea even where England was and a vague idea that Scotland lay fairly close to Douglasdale.

He knew that the English of England had come to Douglasdale, all the same, for Jamie spoke of little else these days, bitter that his mother had given in without a fight; now the Carrick men swarmed inside and outside Douglas Castle and the Lord Bruce, young and certain of himself to the point of arrogance, had politely taken over, in the name of the English – even though he was not one.

The one certainty in Dog Boy’s life, the thing that he hugged to himself when everything else seemed to whirl like russet leaves in a high wind, was his age – eleven. He knew this because he heard his mother say it, knew her voice better than he did her face.

He could not remember his father, though he had a rag-edged memory of stumbling in the plough ruts behind a man making kissing sounds to two oxen which were not his own, watching the plough blade curve a wave out of the earth.

He could feel it yet between his naked toes, see the birds wheel and cry at the exposed beetles and worms. It had been his job to get to the worms first and tuck them safely back in the torn ground, for they were ploughers of the earth every bit as much as Man. He heard a voice say that and thought it might have been his father – but all that was gone, save for the moment when the great slab face of his da came down to his level, the crack-thumbed hands on either of his thin shoulders.

It had come at the moment after he had run across the fields clutching the rough bag with a slab of day-old porridge and two bannocks in it. Run like a deer to where his da stood with the oxen he was so proud of owning. No-one else had such a prize.

His da had looked at him for a long time and then crouched down into his face.

‘Tha runs fast as a wee dug,’ he said sadly. ‘Fast as any wee dug.’

The day after that his ma had walked him into the castle and stood looking at Berner. Dog Boy was ashamed these days that he could not quite remember his own ma’s face now, but he remembered her voice and the feel of her hand on the top of his combed head.

‘I have brung him,’ she said. ‘As Sire said I could, when he could run fast as the dugs. He is six.’

Since then, there had only been those stones and the dogs.

Malk, the Berner’s assistant, reckoned up Dog Boy’s age and marked it in the Rolls along with the birthing dates of all the hounds and their pedigrees. It did not matter to Dog Boy, for he did not know, that Malk could trace a hound’s lineage back through several generations and recorded Dog Boy only as a scion of ‘bound tenants’ from a huddle of cruck houses twenty miles away.

It would have been a surprise to Dog Boy to know that he had a name, too – Aleysandir, same as the king who fell off a Fife cliff and plunged the whole of Scotland into chaos in the year Dog Boy was born – but Dog Boy did not know any of that and had been Dog Boy for so long that he knew no other name now.

‘Get aff me, ye dungbags!’

The voice jerked Dog Boy guiltily back to the kennels; Gib was pushing dogs away and, beyond him, The Worm stretched and yawned noisily, straw sticking out from his unruly hair. Dog Boy scratched a fleabite and then half-crouched, his habitual pose at sudden noises and surprises, as the heavy door banged open, flooding in cold light and chill air.

‘Avaunt, whelps.’

Silhouetted briefly in the pale square light of the doorway, the figure paused slightly, then stepped in, flicking his dogwhip; the hounds knew him well and circled away from him, yet kept coming back, tails down, fawning and whimpering.

Berner Philippe had to stoop to avoid the low roof, though he was not tall. He wore a battered leather jack to protect the plain, stained-wool robe, itself worn to keep the pale-grey tunic clean from the dogs. He also wore his habitual sour sneer, which bristled his trimmed black beard.

‘Come on, come on, stir yourselves,’ he growled. ‘There’s work to be done – where is Gib?’

Gib stumbled forward, picking straw off himself and rubbing sleep from his eyes. He swept a bow, almost mocking, as he showed off his little command of French.

‘A votre service, Berner Philippe’

The scowl deepened a little as Philippe looked at him. This one was becoming too familiar by half. It wouldn’t do. He tongued the stump of a tooth, then forced a smile and patted the boy on the cheek.

‘Ah, lordling,’ he said lightly. ‘Such manners, eh?’

The others watched him caress Gib as he would do the dogs, chucking him under the chin, fondling behind one ear; it was as much part of the ritual of morning as waking, for Gib was the berner’s favourite.

There were six houndsmen under Berner Philippe. Together with the six piqueurs, the huntsmen, they considered themselves the true Disciples of Douglas, not the strutting men-at-arms, who numbered the same. If that were so, then Berner Philippe was St Peter, White Tam, the head piqueur was James, brother of Jesus, the Lady Eleanor was the Virgin Herself – and The Hardy was Christ in Person.

Thus was life arranged by Law and Custom, which is to say, by God.

‘Take five lads and clean this cesspit,’ said Philippe and looked from Dog Boy to Gib and back again. Then he nodded to Gib and watched as the boy shambled off to obey. He was getting bigger . . . too big, God’s Wounds. What had once been soft flesh was filling and hardening and, even to a nose used to stinks, Gib reeked more and more positively of dog every day.

Dog Boy stood, looking at the fetid straw as if there was a cunning picture in it, and Philippe wondered, as he had always done, why he had never taken to the lad. Too scrawny, probably. There was a new lad – Philippe’s head swung this way and that like a questing hound on a scent. What was his name . . . ? Hew, that was it. That was the name his parents had given him, but he was on the Rolls with an easily remembered nickname – a dog name, Falo, which meant ‘yellow’, and Philippe picked him out from the others by his cap of golden hair.

Disappointment. Too young – still, that blond hair, which spoke of decent ancestry implanted in the mongrel Scots, fell over the boy’s face as he gathered armfuls of stinking straw and Philippe’s groin tightened a little. Worth waiting for . . .

He caught sight of Dog Boy, edging, as always, into the shadows. Dog Boy felt more than saw the eyes fall on him and stopped, dull with despair.

‘You,’ Philippe said shortly, eyeing the thin-limbed, dark-eyed boy with the distaste he gave to all runts. ‘Mews. Gutterbluid wants you.’

Outside, the cold bit Dog Boy and he hugged himself, dragging himself to the mews across the expanse of Ward in a cold wind out of the charcoal sky. Dog Boy eyed the glowing coals where Winnie the smithwife was blowing life into the forge fire, sparks flying dangerously up to the stiffened thatch of the wagon shed and the great stretch of stables. Beyond was the palisade and ditch, the gatehouse, newly done in stone, and the wooden dovecote etched blackly against the slow, souring milk of a new dawn. Behind, the bulked towers and stone walls of the Keep humped up and lurked over him.

The forge flames flared and danced brief eldritch shadows up the wall of one tower, to the narrow cross-slit window of the chapel, where light glowed, the honey-yellow of tallow candles; Brother Benedictus, the Chaplain, was already at his devotions, murmuring so that Dog Boy was almost sure he heard the words he knew so well:

Domine labia mea aperies. Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam. Deus in adiutorium meum intende.

Dog Boy, hurrying on past the bakehouse, already spewing stomach-gripping smells and smoke, muttered the expected response without thinking – Ave Maria, gracia plena. The rest of it followed him, circling faintly like a chill wind off the river – Gloria patri et filio et spiritui sancto. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in secula seculorum. Amen. Alleuya.

He went past the dovecote, with its steep little roof surmounted by a strange bird pecking its own chest, and saw Ferg the scullion fetching new loaves and grinning at him, for he knew the Latin words as well. Neither had a clear idea of what they meant and knew them by rote only.

Next to the bakehouse, the kitchen sheds were quiet and coldly pale, as were most of the buildings within the rough palisade separating the Ward from the Keep, where lay the Great Hall, the stables and barracks and some little gardens.

Somewhere, high up on the hourds, watchmen stamped and blew on their hands. Soon those wooden hoardings would be dismantled, for the need for them was gone now that the Lady had given in to the Carrick men.

There had been a moment of confusion a few days later when a new host appeared, smaller but no less fierce. Dog Boy had heard the leader of it hailed as the Earl of Buchan and Jamie had muttered that no-one was sure whether this Comyn lord was for or against King Edward.

Dog Boy had watched them arrive, with their banners and their shouting; it had been exciting for a while and he wondered if he would see fighting – but then it had all ended, just like that. It was a puzzle that the Lady of Douglas now treated the Invaders as Friends and the castle was crowded with them, while more were huddled in makeshift shelters all over the Ward and beyond.

‘Dog Boy,’ called a voice, and he turned to see Jamie stepping from the shadows. Dog Boy bowed and Jamie accepted it as his due, since he was The Hardy’s eldest, with black braies and a dagged hood, a fine knife in a sheath on his belt, good leather boots and a warm surcote.

He was of ages with Dog Boy, yet bigger and stronger because he trained with weapons and would one day take the three vows and become a knight. One day, too, he would become Jesus Christ, Dog Boy thought, when his father, The Hardy, died and left him the lordship of Douglas. Even now he was able to fly a tiercel gentle, a male peregrine, if he chose – the memory of where that bird roosted brought misery crashing back on Dog Boy.

‘Cold,’ Jamie offered with a grin. ‘Cold as a witch’s tit.’

Dog Boy grinned back at him. They were friends of a sort – even if Dog Boy wore worn, mud-coloured clothing and was of no consequence at all – because Jamie liked the dogs and had no mother, like Dog Boy. Dog Boy had questioned this once, because he had thought the Lady Eleanor was Jamie’s mother, but Jamie had put him on the straight road of that one.

‘My real mother was sent away,’ he said bluntly. ‘To a convent. This one is my father’s new woman and the sons he pupped on her are my stepbrothers.’

He turned and looked at Dog Boy then, savage as his tiercel.

‘But I am the heir and one day this will be mine,’ he added and Dog Boy had no doubt of it. It was what they shared, what cut through their stations. The same age, the same colouring, the same abandonment by ma and da. The same loneliness. It had all brought them together from the moment they could toddle and they had rattled around like two stones in a pouch ever since.

Both of them knew that changes were happening, all the same, as much to their rank as their bodies, and that unseen pressures were forcing them further and further apart. Dog Boy would never be anything more than he was now – Jamie would become a knight, like his father.

There had been no knights other than The Hardy in Douglas, though there had once been twenty men-at-arms, with stout jacks, swords and polearms. Now there were only six, for the rest were gone and Dog Boy felt the cold unease slide into him, the way it had done the year before when the four surviving men had carried a fifth in through the gate.

They also carried the news that The Hardy was imprisoned and all the other Douglas men were dead, together with some thousands of folk who had been living in Berwick when English Edward had captured it.

‘The blood came up ower the tops of my shoes,’ Thomas the Sergeant had told them, and he should know, for some of it was his and he wore the scar, raw as memory, down one side of his face. He had been the fifth man and, for a while, it looked as if he would die – but he was tough, folk said, hard as Sir William Douglas himself.

Jamie loved and feared his father in equal measure and the fact that Sir William had survived the siege and slaughter at Berwick and was fighting still, flooded his world – though Dog Boy did not quite understand all of it and Jamie explained it, as if schooling a hound.

It seemed that the Earl of Carrick, who was a young, dark Bruce called Robert, had arrived on orders from the English to punish the Lady because of her man’s siding with the uprisen Scots. The Lothian lord, the hard-eyed man with the big hounds, had come in the last drip of the candle to help the Lady defy this earl.

For reasons the Dog Boy could not quite grasp, he and the Lady had then surrendered to Earl Robert – but none of the dire consequences everyone else said was certain if you gave into Invaders had happened. Nothing much had happened at all, save that the Castle grew crowded.

Not long after that, another Earl had arrived at the gate, this one called Buchan. It seemed he and the Earl Robert did not care much for each other, but seemed to be on the same side. Which was not the one Sir William Douglas stood on.

Dog Boy had no clear idea why this Earl Buchan had arrived at all, but was surprised to find that the fox-haired Countess who had arrived with Earl Robert was, in fact, the wife of the Earl called Buchan. It was a whirl of leaves in a high wind to the Dog Boy and, finally, Jamie saw his audience’s interest slipping. He spasmed with childish irritation.

‘From your point of view, I suppose this war is only an annoyance of rolling maille in a barrel of sand to clean it, or having to practise archery.’

Dog Boy said nothing, aware his friend was angry and not quite sure why. There was guilt, too – he was supposed to attend archery practice like all the lower orders, but seldom did and no-one cared if the runty Dog Boy never turned up.

It didn’t bother him, missing out on the butts, for there had never been an enemy here until the Invaders – and they had ended up Friends. Yet, slowly, Dog Boy was becoming aware of a tremble in the fabric of life, could hear the cracking of the stones of Douglas Keep.

‘Faugh – you stink today,’ Jamie said suddenly, wrinkling his nose as the wind changed. ‘When did you wash last?’

‘Fair Day,’ Dog Boy replied indignantly. ‘Same as the rest, wi’ real soap and rose petals in the watter.’

‘Fair Day,’ Jamie exploded. ‘That was months since – I had a wash only last week, in a tub of piping hot water with Saracen scented soap.’

He winked what he thought was in knowing, lecherous fashion.

‘And a wench to scrub my back – eh?’

‘I dinna think your lady mother would suffer that,’ Dog Boy answered doubtfully, aware of the mysteries of dog and bitch but not yet sure how it translated to the mumblings and groans he heard sometimes in the night. He was aware, too, that there was a Rule about women. In Douglas there was a Rule about almost everything.

‘The Lady Eleanor is not my mother,’ Jamie answered, stiff and haughty. ‘She is my father’s wife.’

He frowned, all the same, for Dog Boy was right and yet Jamie had seen matters and heard more which only confused him about what was permitted and what was not. There were women in the castle – notably Agnes in the castle kitchen and some tirewomen for his stepmother and now the Countess of Buchan, who laughed a lot and had wild hair a wimple could not keep in check. She stayed in her own tower rooms, though, while her husband scowled in his proud, striped panoply in the Ward, and that was strange.

‘I’m off to get some bread,’ Jamie decided, throwing the matter over his shoulder. ‘Do you want some?’

Dog Boy’s mouth watered. The birds could wait; the smell of baking bread, newly turned from the ovens, brought both their heads up, sniffing and salivating.

‘Dog Boy!’

The voice slashed them apart, a soft rasp of sound like a blade drawn down a rough wall. Both boys shrank at the sound and turned to where the Falconer had appeared, as if sprung from the ground. He gathered his marten coat round him, wore his marten hat with its single eagle feather and if there were three other items of value in the entire world, it was said, Falconer did not know of them.

Those who said that did not call him Gutterbluid where he could hear it, since it meant ‘low-born whelp’. His real name was Sib, according to some, and he had the name Gutterbluid because it was one you gave to folk born in Peebles when you wanted to annoy them. No-one wanted to annoy Sib, so they simply called him Falconer and no-one liked him; Dog Boy liked him least of all.

‘You are dallying, boy,’ Falconer sibilated. Jamie, recovering, struck a shaky air of nonchalance, aware that he should try to conquer his fears if he was to be a knight.

‘I was addressing him, Falconer,’ he declared, then wilted beneath the black gaze of the man, whose eyes burned from his lean, brown face. No wonder, Jamie thought wildly, folk think he is a Saracen.

Falconer looked the boy up and down. Lisping pup, he thought. Falconer had more skills, more intelligence and more right to dignity – yet this little upstart was noble born and Falconer could only aspire to looking after what mean birds they could afford.

He wanted to cuff the boy round the ear but knew his place and the price for stepping out of it. So he bowed instead.

‘Your pardon, young master. When you are done, I will have my lure.’

Dog Boy saved Jamie from further torture by bobbing a bow to him and scuttling past Falconer towards the mews, where he slipped on the badger-skin gloves, and hunched, waiting. Jamie and Falconer stared at each other for a moment longer until the last of Jamie’s courage melted like rendered grease. Falconer, satisfied, curled a smile on one lip, bowed again and strode after Dog Boy.

The mews was dark, fetid with droppings, filled with a sound like great hanging banners fluttering faintly in a wide hall; the birds, a dozen or so, moving softly on their perches, claws scraping. Each bird stood in its own niche, or on a perch, motionless as a corbel carving, blind knights in plumed hoods. Dog Boy stepped in, basket held in the crook of one arm, a bloody little feathered body in one gloved hand.

He drew in a breath, heavy with the rank must of the birds, they scented him, exploding in a frenzy of frantic hunger, shrieking and screaming. The air was filled with the mad beating of wings and a sleet of feathers. They screeched and leaped to the furthest ends of the jesses, flinging themselves in desperate desire at Dog Boy, red-eyed and wild, battering him furiously.

Dog Boy winced and shoved the food at them, staggering down the passage between them, unable to strike back for fear of what Falconer would do, trying to protect himself from the wind and the storm of hate. Jamie’s gerfalcon careered off its perch and could not find its way back. One frenzied bird lashed out with a talon and scored a hit on the back of Dog Boy’s wrist as the glove slipped.

A hand fell on the blizzard-blinded youth, gripping him by the shoulder and pulling him from the whirl of feathers and claws and endless, endless shrieks. He was flung out the door to land in a sobbing heap and, after a while, got enough breath back to sit up, wiping tears and feathers from his face. There was a long, scarlet trail on the back of one hand and he sucked it, then slithered off the gloves, seeing the new, tufted rents in them.

He heard Falconer – soft, soft, he was saying. My beauties, all over now. Soft, soft, my children.

A shadow fell on Dog Boy and he jerked, started to wriggle away. Falconer . . .

It was Jamie, his mouth set in a stitched line. He held out a piece of bread without a word and Dog Boy took it. It steamed, fresh from the oven and was hot in Dog Boy’s mouth.

‘Finished?’

Dog Boy nodded, unable to speak, and Jamie held out his hand, took Dog Boy’s wrist and hauled him up. Together, they sprinted for the smithy, wriggling up to the forge block, picking metal shavings and bent nails from under their bodies.

Winnie the Smithwife, short, stocky and dark as a north dwarf, stuck her fire-reddened face, hair braided into thick plaits against flying sparks, down into their corner and grinned. She passed them down some small beer without a word, for she liked their being there, like little mice, while she pounded metal into shape. Warmed by the food and the fire, Dog Boy began to feel better.

‘Not much,’ Jamie said, studying Dog Boy’s new wound.

‘When I am lord here,’ he added, ‘this will end.’

Neither of them spoke after that, for there was nothing to say. This was Dog Boy’s other task in life – the birds were starved and then fed by him and only him. If they hunted and one was lost, Dog Boy was sent out to find it. No matter how much it had eaten, or whether the exultant joy of freedom gripped it, the sight and smell of Dog Boy, whirling bait on the end of a line, would make the bird stoop and be recaptured.

Hal saw them scamper as he passed, padding silent, on his way to see to the Herdmanston men and make sure they toggled their lips on any mention of what they had seen or heard about the Countess Isabel of Buchan and the young Bruce.

He did not like Gutterbluid, or the lure he made of the kennel laddie, and knew it for a punishment he suspected had been ordered by the Lady Eleanor. He suspected he knew why, too – but such was the way of the world, decreed by Law and Custom and, therefore, by God.

It did not help that the world was birling in ever more strange jigs these days, none stranger than finding that he had been sent to defend Douglas rights only to find his Roslin kin – and liege lord the Auld Templar Sir William Sientcler – riding with Bruce.

Hal had known that before he had set off, scraping almost every man Herdmanston possessed on the orders of his father and despite protests. There was scarce a man left to guard the yett of their own wee tower fortalice, but his father, rheumy eyed and grit-voiced, had thumped his shoulder when he had voiced this.

‘I hold to the promise made that the Sientclers of Herdmanston would defend the rights of the Douglas. There was no wee notary’s writing in it concerning gate guards or our kin’s involvement, lad.’

There was considerable relief, then, when the Lady Eleanor took Hal’s advice and surrendered to The Bruce and his Carrick men without demure, though she had scowled and all but accused him of treachery because the Auld Templar stood on the other side.

Hal had swallowed that and convinced her, sighing with relief when the gates were opened and young Bruce, the Earl of Carrick rode in and never so much as cocked an eye at the Lady’s truculence.

‘I was sent by my father,’ he told her, his bottom lip stuck out like a petulant shelf, ‘who was himself instructed by King Edward to punish Douglas for the rebellion of Sir William.’

He leaned forward on the crupper of the great horse while the Ward milled and fumed with men, some of them only half aware of the Lady Eleanor’s straight-backed defiance and the young Bruce’s attempts to be polite and reasonable.

‘Your man quit Edward’s army without permission, first chance he had,’ he declared flatly. ‘Now God alone knows where he is – but you could pick Sir Andrew Moray’s north rebellion as a likely destination. I have come from Annandale to take this place and slight it, Lady, as punishment. That I have not knocked it about too much, while putting you in my protection, means my duty is done, while you and your weans are safe.’

The rebel Scots may cry Bruce an Englishman, Hal thought, but the real thing would not have been so gentle with the Lady Eleanor of Douglas – but she was a fiery beacon of a woman and not yet raked to ashes by this sprig of a Bruce.

‘You do it because my husband’s wrath would chase ye to Hell if ye did other. As well young Hal Sientcler’s kinsman was with you, my lord Earl. A Templar guarantee. My boys and I thank you for it.’

The Auld Templar, his white beard like a fleece on his face, merely nodded but the young Bruce’s handsome face was spoiled by the pet of his lip at this implication that the Bruce word alone was suspect; seeing the scowl, the Lady of Douglas smiled benignly for the first time.

It was not a winsome look, all the same. The Lady Eleanor, Hal thought, has a face like a mastiff chewing a wasp, which was not a good look for someone whose love life was lauded in song and poem.

She was a virgin – Hal knew this because the harridan swore she was pure as snow on The Mounth. He didn’t argue, for the besom was as mad as a basket of leaping frogs – but if God Himself asked him to pick out the sole maiden in a line of women he would never, ever, have chosen Eleanor Douglas, wife of Sir William The Hardy.

Her fierce claim was supposed to make her legitimately bairned. That, Hal thought, would also make her two sons, Hugh and Archie, children of miracle and magic since she and The Hardy had been lovers long before they were kinched by the Church. Then The Hardy had abducted her, sent his existing wife to a convent and married Eleanor, risking the wrath of everyone to do it.

Not least her son, Hal thought, seeing the young Jamie standing, chin up and shoulders back beside his stepmother. Hal watched him holding his tremble as still as could and felt the jolt of it, that loss. Like his John, he thought bleakly. If Johnnie had lived he would be the age this boy is now.

The memory dragged him back to the Ward and the sight of Jamie and the kennel lad scurrying for the smithy, and he felt the familiar ache.

Sim Craw, following Hal into the blued morning, also saw the boys slip across the Ward – and the cloud in Hal’s eyes, like haar swirling over a grey-blue sea. He knew it for what it was at once, since every boy Hal glanced at reminded him of his dead son. Aye, and every dark-haired, laughing-eyed woman reminded him of his Jean. Bad enough to lose a son to the ague, but the mother as well was too much punishment from God for any man, and the two years since had not balmed the rawness much.

Sim had little time for boys. He liked Jamie Douglas, all the same, admired the fire in the lad the way he liked to see it in good hound pups. No signs and portents in the sky on the night James Douglas was born, he thought, just a mother suddenly sent away and a life at the hands of The Hardy, hard-mouthed, hard-handed and hard-headed. Unlike his step-siblings, quiet wee bairns that they were, James had inherited a lisp from his ma and the dark anger of his da, which he showed in sudden twists of rage.

Sim recalled the day before, when Buchan had arrived and everyone flew into a panic, for here was the main Comyn rival to the Bruces standing at the gates and no-one was sure whether he was in rebellion, since he should not be here at all.

Worse still, his wife was here, thinking her husband a few hundred or more good Scotch miles away with English Edward’s army heading for the French wars, so leaving her free for dalliance with the young Bruce.

So there had been a long minute or two when matters might have bubbled up and Sim had spanned his monstrous latchbow. The young Jamie, caught up in the moment, had raised himself on the tips of his toes and lost entirely the usual lisp that affected him when he roared, his boy’s body shaking with the fury in it, his child’s face red.

‘Ye are not getting in. Ye’ll all hang. We will hang you, so we will.’

‘Weesht,’ Sim had ordered and slapped the boy’s shoulder, only to get a glare in return.

‘Ye cannot speak to me like that,’ he spat back at Sim. ‘One day I will be a belted knight.’

There was a sharp slap and the boy yelped and held his ear. Sim put his gauntlet back on and rested his hand on the stock of his latchbow, unconcerned.

‘Now I have made ye a belted knight. If ye give your elders mair lip, Jamie Douglas, ye’ll be a twice belted knight.’

He mentioned the moment now to Hal, just to break the man’s gaze on the place where the boys had been. Jerked from the gaff of it, Hal managed a wan smile at Sim’s memory.

‘Bigod, I hope he has no good remembrance of it when he comes into his own,’ he said to Sim. ‘You’ll need that bliddy big bow to stop him giving ye a hard reply to that ear boxing.’

A sudden blare of raucous shouting snapped both their heads round and the great slab face of Sim Craw creased into one large frown.

‘Whit does he require here?’ he asked, and Hal did not need to ask the who of it, for the most noise came from in and around the great striped tent of the Earl of Buchan.

‘His wife, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Hal answered dryly, and Sim laughed, soft as sifting ashes. Somewhere up there, Hal thought, glancing up to the dark tower, is the Countess of Buchan, the bold and beautiful Isabel MacDuff, keeping to the lie that she had coincidentally turned up to visit Eleanor Douglas.

Buchan, it seemed, was the one man in all Scotland who did not know for sure that the young Bruce and Isabel were rattling each other like stoats and had been lovers, as Sim said, since the young Bruce’s stones had properly dropped.

For all the humour in it, this was no laughing matter. The Earl of Buchan was a Comyn, a friend to the Balliols of Galloway, who were Bruce’s arch-rivals. A Balliol king had been appointed four years before by Edward of England – and then stripped of his regalia only last year when he proved less than biddable. Now the kingdom was in turmoil, ostensibly ruled directly from Westminster.

But all the old kingdom rivalries bubbled in the cauldron of it and it would not take much for it all to boil over. Finding an unfaithful wife with her legs in the air would do it, Hal thought.

A piece of the dark detached itself and made both men start; a wry chuckle made them drop their hands from hilts, half ashamed.

‘Aye, lads, it is reassuring to a man’s goodwill of himself that he can make two such doughty young warriors afraid still.’

The dark-clothed shape of the Auld Templar resolved into the familiar, his white beard trembling as he chuckled. Hal nodded, polite and cautious all the same for the Auld Templar represented Roslin and the Sientclers of Herdmanston owed them fealty.

‘Sir William. God be praised.’

‘For ever and ever,’ replied the Templar. ‘If ye have a moment, the pair of ye are requested.’

‘Aye? Who does so?’

Sim’s voice was light enough, but held no deference to rank. The Auld Templar did not seem put out by it.

‘The Earl of Carrick,’ he declared, which capped matters neatly enough. Meekly, they followed the Auld Templar into the weak, guttering lights of hall and tower.

The chamber they arrived in was well furnished, with a chest and a bench and a chair as well as fresh rushes, and perfumed with a scatter of summer flowers. Wax tapers burned honey into the dark, making the shadows tall and menacing – which, Hal thought, suited the mood of that place well enough.

‘Did you see him?’ demanded Bruce, pacing backwards and forwards, his bottom lip thrust out and his hands wild and waving. ‘Did you see the man? God’s Wounds, it took me all of my patience not to break my knuckles on his bloody smile.’

‘Very laudable, lord,’ answered a shadowed figure, sorting clothing with an expert touch. Hal had seen this one before, a dark shadow at the Bruce back. Kirkpatrick, he recalled.

Bruce kicked rushes and violets up in a shower.

‘Him with his silver nef and his serpent’s tongue,’ he spat. ‘Did he think the salt poisoned, then, that he brings that tooth out? An insult to the Lady Douglas, that – but there is the way of it, right enough. An insult on legs is Buchan. Him and his in-law, the Empty Cote king himself. Leam-leat. Did you hear him telling me how none of us would have done any better than John Balliol? Buchan – tha thu cho duaichnidh ri earr airde de a’ coisich deas damh.’

‘I did, my lord,’ Kirkpatrick replied quietly. ‘May I make so bold as to note that yourself has also a nef, a fine one of silver, with garnet and carnelian, and a fine eating knife and spoon snugged up in it. Nor does calling the Earl of Buchan two-faced, or – if I have the right of it – “as ugly as the north end of a south-facing ox” particularly helpful diplomacy. At least you did not do it to his face, even in the gaelic. I take it from this fine orchil-dyed linen I am laying out that your lordship is planning nocturnals.’

‘What?’

Bruce whirled, caught out by the casual drop of the last part into Kirkpatrick’s dry, wry flow. He caught the man’s eye, then looked away and waved his hands again.

‘Aye. No. Perchance . . . ach, man, did I flaunt my garnet and carnelian nef at him? Nor have I a serpent’s tongue taster, which is not an honourable thing.’

‘I have a poor grasp o’ the French,’ Sim hissed in Hal’s ear. ‘Whit in the name of all the saints is a bliddy nef?’

‘A wee fancy geegaw for holding your table doings,’ Hal whispered back out of the side of his mouth, while Bruce rampaged up and down. ‘Shaped like a boatie, for the high nobiles to show how grand they are.’

It was clear that Bruce was recalling the dinner earlier, when he and Buchan and all their entourage had smiled politely at one another while the undercurrents, thick as twisted ropes, flowed round and between them all.

‘And there he was, talking about having Balliol back,’ Bruce raged, throwing his arms wide and high with incredulity. ‘Balliol, bigod. Him who has abdicated. Was publicly stripped of his regalia and honour.’

‘A shame-day for the community of the realm,’ growled the Auld Templar from the shadows, heralding the eldritch-lit face that shoved out of them. It was grim and worn, that face, etched by things seen and matters done, honed by loss to a runestone draped with snow.

‘From wee baron to King of the Scots in one day,’ Sir William Sientcler added broadly, stroking his white-wool beard. ‘Had more good opinion of himself than a bishop has wee crosses – now he is reduced to ten hounds, a huntsman and a manor at Hitchin. He’ll no’ be back, if what he ranted and raved when he left is ony guide. John Balliol thinks himself well quit of Scotland, mark me.’

‘I am bettering,’ Bruce said with a wan smile. ‘I understood almost all of that.’

‘Aye, weel,’ replied Sir William blithely. ‘Try this – if ye don’t want the same to choke in your thrapple, mind that it was MacDuff an’ his fine conceit of himself that ruined King John Balliol, with his appeals for Edward to grant him his rights when King John blank refusit.’

Bruce waved one hand, the white sleeve of his bliaut flapping dangerously near a candle and setting all the shadows dancing.

‘Aye, I got the gist of that fine – but MacDuff of Fife was not the only one who used Edward like a fealtied lord and undermined the throne of Scotland. Others carried grievances to him as if he was king and not Balliol.’

Sir William nodded, his white-bearded blade of a face set hard.

‘Aye well – the Bruces never did swear fealty to John Balliol, if I recall, and I mention MacDuff,’ he replied, ‘less because he has raised rebellion in Fife, and more because ye are trailing the weeng with his niece and about to creep out into the dark to be at her beck an’ call, with her own man so close ye could spit on him.’

He met Bruce’s glower with a dark look of his own.

‘Doon that road is a pith of hemp, lord.’

The silence stretched, thick and dark. Then Bruce sucked his bottom lip in and sighed.

‘Trailing the weeng?’ he asked.

‘Swiving . . .’ began Sir William, and Kirkpatrick cleared his throat.

‘Indulging in an illicit liaison,’ he said blandly, and Sir William shrugged.

Bruce nodded, then cocked his head to one side. ‘Pith of hemp?’

‘A hangman’s noose,’ Sir William declared in a voice like a knell.

‘Serpent’s tongue?’ asked Sim, who had been bursting to ask about it since he had heard it mentioned earlier; Hal closed his eyes with the shock of it, felt all the eyes swing round and sear him.

After a moment, Bruce sat down sullenly on the bench and the tension misted to shreds.

‘A tooth for testing salt for poison,’ Kirkpatrick answered finally. He had a face the shadows did not treat kindly, long and lean as an edge with straight black hair on either side to his ears and eyes like gimlets. There was greyness and harsh lines like knifed clay in that face, which he used as a weapon.

‘From a serpent?’ Sim persisted.

‘A shark, usually,’ Bruce answered, grinning ruefully, ‘but folk like Buchan pay a fortune for it in the belief it came from the one in Eden.’

‘We are in the wrong business, sure,’ Sim declared, and Hal laid a hand along his forearm to silence him. Kirkpatrick saw it and studied the Herdmanston man, taking in the breadth of shoulder and chest, the broad, slightly flat face, neat-bearded and crop-haired.

Yet there were lines snaking from the edge of those grey-blue eyes that spoke of things seen and made him older. What was he – twenty and five? And nine, perhaps? With callouses on his palms that never came from plough or spade.

Kirkpatrick knew he was only the son of a minor knight from an impoverished manor, an offshoot of nearby Roslin, which was why Sir William was vouching for him. The Auld Templar of Roslin had lost his son and grandson both at the battle near Dunbar last year. Captured and held, they were luckier than others who had faced the English, fresh from bloody slaughter at Berwick and not inclined to hold their hand.

Neither Sientcler had yet been ransomed, so the Auld Templar had gained permission to come out of his austere, near-monkish life to take control of Roslin until one or both were returned.

‘Sir William tells me you are like a son to him, the last Sientcler who is young, free, with a strong arm and a sensible head,’ Bruce said in French.

Hal looked at Sir William and nodded his thanks, though the truth was that he was unsure whether he should be thankful at all. There were children still at Roslin – two boys and a girl, none of them older than eight, but sprigs from the Sientcler tree. Whatever the Auld Templar thought of Hal of Herdmanston it was not as an heir to supplant his great-grandchildren at Roslin.

‘It is because of him I bring you into this circle,’ Bruce went on. ‘He tells me you and your father esteem me, even though you are Patrick of Dunbar’s men.’

Hal glanced daggers at Sir William, for he did not like the sound of that at all. The Sientclers were fealtied to Patrick of Dunbar, Earl of March and firm supporter of King Edward – yet, while the Roslin branch rebelled, Hal had persuaded his father to give it lip service, yet do nothing.

He heard his father telling him, yet again, that people who sat on the fence only ended up with a ridge along their arse; but Bruce and the Balliols were expert fence-sitters and only expected everyone else to jump one side or the other.

‘My faither,’ Hal began, then switched to French. ‘My father was with Sir William and your grandfather in the Crusade, with King Edward when he was a young Prince.’

‘Aye,’ answered Bruce, ‘I recall Sir John. The Auld Sire of Herdmanston they call him now, I believe, and still with a deal of the lion’s snarl he had when younger.’

He stopped, plucking at some loose threads on his tight sleeve.

‘My grandfather only joined the crusade because my own father had no spine for it,’ he added bitterly.

‘Honour thy father,’ Sir William offered up gruffly. ‘Your grand-da was a man who loved a good fecht – one reason they cried him The Competitor. Captured by that rebellious lord Montfort at Lewes. It was fortunate Montfort was ended at Evesham, else the ransom your father had to negotiate would have been crippling. Had little thanks for his effort, if I recall.’

Bruce apologised with a weary flap of one hand; to Hal this seemed an old rigg of an argument, much ploughed.

‘You came here with two marvellous hounds,’ Bruce said suddenly.

‘Hunting, lord,’ Hal managed, and the lie stuck in his teeth a moment before he got it out. Bruce and Sir William both laughed, while Kirkpatrick watched, still as a waiting stoat.

‘Two dogs and thirty riders with Jeddart staffs and swords and latch-bows,’ Sir William replied wryly. ‘What were ye huntin’, young Hal – pachyderms from the heathen lands?’

‘It was a fine enough ruse to get you into Douglas the day before me,’ Bruce interrupted, ‘and I am glad you saw sense in obeying your fealtied lord over it, so that we did not have to come to blows. Now I need your dogs.’

Hal looked at Sir William and wanted to say that, simply because he had seen sense and trusted to the Auld Templar’s promises, he was not following after Sir William in the train of Robert Bruce. That’s what he wanted to say, but could not find the courage to defy both the Auld Templar and the Earl of Carrick at one and the same time.

‘The dugs – hounds, lord?’ he spluttered eventually and looked to Sim for help, though all he had there was the great empty barrel of his face, a vacant sea with bemused eyes.

Bruce nodded. ‘For hunting,’ he added with a smile. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘To what end?’ Sir William demanded, and Bruce turned fish-cold eyes on him, speaking in precise, clipped English.

‘The kingdom is on fire, Sir William, and I have word that Bishop Wishart is come to Irvine. That old mastiff is looking to fan the flames in this part of the realm, be sure of it. The Hardy has absconded from Edward’s army and now I find Buchan has done the same.’

‘He has a writ from King Edward to be here,’ Kirkpatrick reminded Bruce, who gave a dismissive wave.

‘He is here. A Comyn of Buchan is back. Can you not feel the hot wind of it? Things are changing.’

Hal felt the cold sink of that in his belly. Rebellion. Again. Another Berwick; Hal caught Sim’s eye and they both remembered the bloody moments dissuading Edward’s foragers away from the squat square of Herdmanston following the Scots defeat at nearby Dunbar.

‘So we hunt?’ Sir William demanded with a snort, hauling his own tunic to a more comfortable position as he sat – Hal caught the small red cross on the breast that revealed the old warrior’s Templar attachment.

‘We do,’ Bruce answered. ‘All smiles and politeness, whilst Buchan tries to find out which way I will jump and I try not to let on. I know he will not jump at all if he can arrange it – but if he does it will be at the best moment he can manage to discomfort the Bruces.’

‘Aye, weel, your own leap is badly marked – but you may have to jump sooner than you think,’ Sir William pointed out sharply, and Bruce thrust out his lip and scowled.

‘We will see. My father is the one with the claim to the throne, though Longshanks saw fit to appoint another. It is how my father jumps that matters and he does not so much as shift in his seat at Carlisle.’

‘Which gives you a deal of freedom to find trouble,’ Hal added, only realising he had spoken aloud when the words were out.

He swallowed as Bruce turned the cold eyes on him; it was well known that the tourney-loving, spendthrift Earl of Carrick was in debt to King Edward, who had so plainly taken a liking to the young Bruce that he had been prepared to lavish loans on him. There was a moment of iced glare – then the dark eyes sparked into warmth as Bruce smiled.

‘Aye. To get into trouble as a wayward young son, which will let me get out of it again as easily. More freedom than Sir William here, who has all the weight of the Order bearing down on him – and the Order takes instruction from England.’

‘Clifton is a fair Chaplain in Ballantrodoch,’ the Auld Templar growled. ‘He gave me leave to return to Roslin until my bairns are released, though the new Scottish Master, John of Sawtrey, will follow what the English Master De Jay tells him. The pair are Englishmen first and Templars second. It was De Jay put my boy in the Tower.’

‘I follow that well enough,’ Bruce said and put one hand on the old Templar’s shoulder. He knew, as did everyone in the room, that those held in the Tower seldom came out alive.

‘If God is on the side of the right, then you will be rewarded . . . how is it you say it? At the hinter end?’

‘Not bad, Lord,’ Sir William answered. ‘We’ll mak’ a Scot of you yet.’

For a moment, the air thickened and Bruce went still and quiet.

‘I am a Scot, Sir William,’ he said eventually, his voice thin.

The moment perched there like a crow in a tree – but this was Sir William, who had taught Bruce to fight from the moment his wee hand could properly close round a hilt, and Bruce knew the old man would not be cowed by a scowling youth, earl or not.

He had sympathy for the Auld Templar. The Order was adrift since the loss of the Holy Land and, though it owed allegiance only to the Pope, Sir Brian de Jay was a tulchan, at the beck of King Edward.

Eventually, Bruce eased a little and smiled into the blank, fearless face.

‘Anyway – tomorrow we hunt and find out if we are hunted in turn,’ he said.

‘Aye, there’s smart for ye,’ Sim burst out admiringly. ‘Och, ye kin strop yer wits sharper listenin’ to yer lordship and no mistake. There’s a kinch in the rope of it, all the same. Yon Buchan might try and salt yer broth – a hunt is a fine place for it.’

‘What did he say – a kinch? Rope?’ demanded Bruce.

‘He congratulates you on your dagger-like mind, lord,’ Kirkpatrick translated sarcastically into French, ‘but declares a snag. Buchan may try and spoil matters – salt your broth.’

Bruce ignored Kirkpatrick’s tone and Hal saw that the man, more than servant, less than equal, was permitted such liberties. A dark, close-hugged man of ages with himself, this Roger Kirkpatrick was a cousin of the young Bruce and a landless knight from Closeburn, where his namesake was lord. This one had nothing at all and was tied to the fortunes of the Carrick earl as an ox to the plough. And as ugly, Hal noted, a dark, brooding hood of a man whose eyes were never still.

‘Salt my broth,’ Bruce repeated and laughed, adding in English, ‘Aye, Buchan could arrange that at a hunt – a sprinkle of arrow, a shake of wee latchbow bolts, carelessly placed. Which is why I would have a wee parcel of your riders, Hal of Herdmanston.’

‘You have a wheen of yer own,’ Hal pointed out and Bruce smiled, sharp-faced as a weasel.

‘I do. Annandale men, who belong to my father and will not follow me entire. My own Carrick men – good footmen, a handful of archers and some loyal men-at-arms. None with the skills your rogues have and, more importantly, all recognisable as my own. I want the Comyn made uneasy as to who is who – especially Buchan’s man, the one called Malise.’

‘Him with the face like a weasel,’ Kirkpatrick said.

‘Malise,’ Sir William answered. ‘Bellejambe. Brother of Farquhar, the one English Edward made archdeacon at Caithness this year.’

‘An ill-favoured swine,’ Kirkpatrick said from a face like a mummer’s mask, a moment that almost made Hal burst with loud laughing; wisely, he bit his lip on it, his thoughts reeling.

‘Slayings in secret,’ he said aloud, while he was thinking, suddenly, that he did not know whether his father would leap with Bruce or Balliol. It was possible he would hold to King John Balliol, the Toom Tabard – Empty Cote – as still the rightful king of Scots, which would put him in the Balliol and Comyn camp. It seemed – how he had managed it was a mystery all the same – Hal had landed in the Bruce one.

Sir William saw Hal’s stricken face. He liked the boy, this kinsman namesake for his shackled grandson, and had hopes for him. The thought of his grandson brought back a surge of anger against Sir Brian de Jay, who had been instrumental in making sure that his son had been sent to the Tower. He would have had grandson Henry in there, too, the Auld Templar thought, but was foiled – the man hates the Sientclers because they wield influence in the Order.

Thanks be to God, he offered, that grandson Henry is held in a decent English manor, waiting for the day Roslin pays for his release. In the winter that was his heart, he knew his son would never return alive from the Tower.

Yet that was not the greatest weight on his soul. That concerned the Order and how – Christ forbid it – De Jay might bring it to the service of Longshanks. The day Poor Knights marched against fellow Christians was the day they were ruined; the thought made him shake his snowed head.

‘War is a sore matter at best,’ he said, to no-one in particular. ‘War atween folk of the same kingdom is worst.’

Bruce stirred a little from looking at the violet tunic, then nodded to Kirkpatrick, who sighed blackly and handed it over. Linen fit for trailing the weeng, Hal thought savagely. I have lashed myself to a man who thinks with his loins.

The day Buchan and Bruce had come to Douglas, he recalled, had been a feast dedicated to Saint Dympna.

Patron saint of the mad.

Chapter Two

Douglas Castle, later that day

Vigil of St Brendan the Voyager, May 1297

They waited for the Lady, knights, servants, hounds, huntsmen and all, milling madly as they circled horses already excited. The dogs strained at the leashes and leaped and turned, so that the hound-boys, cursing, had to untangle the leashes to load them in their wooden cages on the carts.

Gib had the two great deerhounds like statues on either side of him and turned to sneer at Dog Boy. The Berner had given the stranger’s dogs into Gib’s care because Dog Boy was less than nothing and now Gib thought himself above all the sweat and confusion and that the two great hounds leashed in either fist were stone-patient because of him. Dog Boy knew better, knew that it was the presence of the big Tod’s Wattie nearby.

Hal frowned, because the deerhounds, if they had chosen, could leap into the mad affray and four men would not hold them if their blood was up, never mind a tall, scowling boy with the beginning of muscle and a round face fringed with sandy hair. With his lashes and brows and snub nose, it all contrived to make him look like an annoyed piglet; he was not the one with the charm over the deerhounds and Hal knew the Berner had arranged this deliberately, as a snub, or to huff and puff up his authority.

The one with the hound-skill – Hal sought him out, caught his breath at the stillness, the stitched fury in the hem of his lips, the violet dark under his hooded eyes and the dags of black hair. Darker than Johnnie, he thought . . . as he had thought last night, the lad had the colouring and look of Jamie and might well be one of The Hardy’s byblows, handed in to the French hound-master of Douglas for keeping. Hal switched his gaze to fasten on Berner Philippe, standing on the fringes of the maelstrom and directing his underlings with short barks of French.

The weight of those eyes brought the Berner’s head up and he found the grey stare of the Lothian man, blanched, flushed and looked away, feeling anger and . . . yes, fear. He knew this Sientcler had been given the Dog Boy by the Lady, passed to him without so much as a ‘by your leave, Berner’, and that had rankled.

When told – told, by God’s Wounds – that the Dog Boy would look after the deerhounds he had decided, obstinately, to hand them to Gib. It was, he knew, no more than a cocked leg marking his territory – all dogs in Douglas were his responsibility, no matter if they were visitors or not – and he did not like being dictated to by some minor lordling of the Sientclers, who all thought themselves far too fine for ordinary folk.

He liked less the feel of that skewering stare on him, all the same, busied himself with leashes and orders, all the time feeling the grey eyes on him, like an itch he could not scratch.

Buchan sat Bradacus expertly and fumed with a false smile. The hunt had been the Bruce’s idea at table the night before and he had spent all night twisting the sense of it to try to the Bruce advantage in it. Short of a plot to kill him from a covert, he had failed to unravel it, but since he’d had nothing else to occupy him the time wasted had scarcely mattered. The bitterness of that welled up with last night’s brawn in mustard, a nauseous gas that tasted as vile as his marriage to the MacDuff bitch.

It had seemed an advantageous match, to him and the MacDuff of Fife. Yet Isabel’s own kin, bywords for greed and viciousness, had slain her father, which was no great incentive for joing the family. Even at the handseling of it, Red John Comyn of Badenoch had tilted his head to one side and smeared a twisted grin on his face.

‘I hope the lands are worth it, cousin,’ he had said savagely to Buchan, ‘for ye’ll be sleeping with a she-wolf to own them.’

Buchan shivered at the claw-nailed memory of the marriage night, when he had broken into Isabel MacDuff. He had done it since – every time she was returned from her wanderings – and it was now part of the bit, as much as lock, key and forbiddings to make her a dutiful wife, fit for the title of Countess of Buchan. That and the getting of an heir, which she had so far failed to do; Buchan was still not sure whether she used wile to prevent it or was barren.

Now here she was, supposedly ridden to Douglas on an innocent visit and using Bradacus’ stablemate, Balius, to do it. Christ’s Wounds, it was bad enough that she was unchaperoned – though she claimed such from the Douglas woman – but without so much as a servant and riding a prime Andalusian warhorse in a country lurking with brigands was beyond apology.

She could be dead and the horse a rickle of chewed bones . . . he did not know whether he desired the first more than he feared the second, but here she was, snugged up in a tower, refusing him his rights while he languished in his striped panoply in the outer ward, too conscious of his dignity to make a fuss over it.

That dropped the measure of her closer to the nunnery he was considering. He was wondering, too, if she and Bruce . . . He shook that thought away. He did not think she would dare – but he had set Malise to scout it out.

Now he sat and fretted, waiting for her to appear so they could begin this accursed hunt, though if matters went as well as the plans laid, the Gordian knot of the Bruces would be cut. Preferably, he thought moodily, before Bruce’s secret blade.

Which, of course, was why he and his men chosen for this hunt were armed as if for war, in maille and blazoned surcoats; he noted that the Bruce was resplendant in chevroned jupon, bareheaded and smiling at the warbling attempts of young Jamie Douglas to sing and play while controlling a restive mount. Yet he had men with him, unmarked by Carrick livery so that no-one could be sure who they belonged to.

He looked them over; well armed and mounted on decent garrons. They looked like they had bitten hard on life and broken no teeth – none more so than their leader, the young lord from Herdmanston.

Hal felt the eyes on him and turned to where the Earl sat on his great, sweating destrier, swathed in a black, marten-trimmed cloak and wearing maille under it. The face framed by a quilted arming cap was broad, had been handsome before the fat had colonised extra chins, was clean-shaven and sweating pink as a baby’s backside.

The Earl of Buchan was a dozen years older than Bruce, but what advantage in strength that gave the younger man was offset, Hal thought, by the cunning concealed in those hooded Comyn eyes.

Buchan acknowledged the Herdmanston’s polite neck-bow with one of his own. Bradacus pawed grass and snorted, making Buchan pat him idly, feeling the sweat-slick of his neck even through the leather glove.

He should have begged a palfrey instead of riding a destrier to a hunt, he thought moodily, but could not bring himself to beg for anything from the Douglases or Bruces. Now a good 25 merks of prime warhorse was foundering – not to mention the one his wife had appropriated, and he was not sure whether he fretted more for her taking a warhorse on a jaunt or for her clear, rolling-eyed flirting with Bruce at table the night before.

Brawn in mustard and a casserole of wheat berries, pigeon, mushrooms, carrots, onions and leaves – violet leaves and lilac flowers, the Lady Douglas had said proudly. With rose petals. Buchan could still feel the pressure of it in his bowels and had been farting as badly as the warhorse was sweating.

It had been a strange meal, to say the least. Old Brother Benedictus had graced the provender and that was the last he said before he fell asleep with his head in his rose petals and gravy. The high table – himself, Bruce, the ladies, wee Jamie Douglas, the Inchmartins, Davey Siward and others -had been stiffly cautious.

All save Isabel, that is. The lesser lights had yapped among themselves, friendly enough save for those close to the salt, when the glowering and scowling began at who had been placed above and below it.

Conversation had been muted, shadowed by the distant cloud that was King Edward – even in France, Buchan thought moodily, Longshanks casts a long shadow. He had put Bruce right on a few points and been pleased about it, while giving nothing away to clumsy probings about his intentions regarding the rebelling Moray.

‘Exitus acta probat,’ he had answered thickly, choking on Isabel’s smiles and soft conversation with the Lady, talking right across him and ignoring him calculatedly.

‘I hope the result does validate the deeds,’ a cold-eyed Bruce had answered in French, ‘but that’s a wonderful wide and double-edged blade you wield there.’

Hal would have been surprised to find that he and Buchan shared the same thoughts, though his had been prompted by the sight of the Dog Boy, whose life had been wrenched apart and reformed at last night’s feast as casually as tossing a bone to a dog.

‘Your hounds are settled?’ Eleanor Douglas had called out to Hal, who had been placed – to his astonishment – at the top of the lesser trestle and within touching distance of the high table. He thought she was trying to unlatch the tension round her and went willing with it. Then he found she only added to it.

‘Yon lad is a soothe to them, mistress,’ he had replied, one ear bent to the grim, clipped exchanges between Buchan and Bruce.

‘It pleases me, then, to give you the boy,’ the Lady said, smiling. Hal saw the sudden, stricken look from Jamie, spoon halfway to his mouth, and realised that the Lady knew it, too.

‘Jamie will have me a wicked stepma from the stories,’ she went on, not looking at her stepson, ‘but he spends ower much time with that low-born chiel, so it is time they were parted and he learns the way of his station.’

Hal had felt the cleft of the stick and, with it, a spring of savage realisation – the hound-boy is a byblow of The Hardy, he thought to himself, and the wummin finds every chance to have revenge on wayward husband and her increasingly fretting stepson. Gutterbluid was one and now I am another – a dangerous game, mistress. He glanced at Jamie, seeing the stiff line of the boy, the cliff he made of his face.

‘I shall take careful care of the laddie,’ he had said, pointedly looking at Jamie and not her, ‘for if he quietens those imps of mine, he is worth his weight.’

He realised the worth of his gift only later and, staring at the scrawny lad, marvelled at the calm he brought to those great beasts; the Berner’s mean spirit came back to make Hal frown harder and he suddenly became aware that he was doing it while glaring at the Earl of Buchan.

Hastily, he formed a weak smile of apology, then turned away, but he realised later that Buchan had not been aware of him at all, had been concentrating, like a snake on a vole, on the arrival of his wife.

She appeared, a spot of blood on the vert of the day, smiling brightly and inclining her head graciously to her scowling husband, the huntsmen and hound boys. She sat astraddle, on a caparisoned palfrey – at least she is not riding my other warhorse this time, Buchan thought viciously – while the Lady of Douglas, demure and aware of her rank, rode sidesaddle and was led by Gutterbluid, who had her hawk on his wrist.

Isabel wore russet and gold and, incongruously to Hal, worn, travel-stained half-boots more suited to a man than a Countess, but the hooded cloak was bright as a Christmas berry. Hal realised all of it was borrowed from the Lady Douglas – save the boots, which were her own and all she had arrived with bar a green dress, an old travel cloak and a fine pair of slippers.

Jamie rode alongside her, a lute in one hand; he winked at Dog Boy, who managed a wan smile and the pair of them shared the sadness of this, their final moments together in all their lives to this point.

‘Wife,’ growled Buchan with a nod of grudged greeting and had back a cool smile.

‘La,’ she then said loudly, cutting through all the noise of dogs and horses and men. ‘Lord Robert – finches.’

Buchan brooded from under the lowered lintel of his brows at Bruce and his wife, playing the same silly game they had played all through last night at table. He felt the temper in him rising like a turd in a drain.

‘Easy. A chirmyng,’ Bruce replied. ‘Now one for you – herons.’

Hal saw the way Isabel pouted, her eyes sapphire fire and her hair all sheened with copper lights; he felt his mouth grow dry and stared. Buchan saw that too, and that irked him like a bad summer groin itch that only inflamed the more you scratched it.

‘A siege,’ she answered after only a short pause. ‘My throw – boys.’

Bruce frowned and squinted while the hunt whirled round them like leaves, not touching the pair of them, as if they sat in a maelstrom which did not ruffle a hair on either head. But Hal watched Buchan watching them and saw the hatred there, so that when Bruce gave in and Isabel clapped her hands with delight, Hal saw the Comyn lord almost lift off his saddle with rage.

‘Ha,’ she declared, triumphantly. ‘I have come out on top again.’

Then, as Bruce’s face flamed, Hal heard her add, ‘A blush of boys.’

‘If ye are done with your games,’ White Tam growled from the knotted root of his face, ‘we may commence the hunt.

‘My lord,’ he added, seeing Bruce’s scowl and managing to invest the term with more scathe than a scold’s bridle. Since White Tam was the Douglas head huntsman and more valued than even Gutterbluid the Falconer, Bruce could only smile and acknowledge the man with a polite inclination of his head.

‘Now we will begin,’ White Tam declared and flapped one hand; the cavalcade moved laboriously off, throwing clots up over the grass from the track that led into the forest alongside the Douglas Water. Dog Boy watched Gib being pulled into the wake of the hound cart by the deerhounds.

‘Peace, o my stricken lute, warbled Jamie shakily and plucked one or two notes, though the effect was spoiled by his having to break off and steer the horse.

‘Bloody queer battue this,’ Sim Craw growled, coming up to Hal’s elbow. Buchan and Bruce were armed and mailled, though they had left helms behind as a sop to false friendship and because what they wore was already a trial in the damp May warmth.

Buchan even rode his expensive warhorse, Sim pointed out, as if he expected trouble, while the shadow of Malise Bellejambe jounced at his back on a rouncey fitted with fat saddle-packs on either side.

‘Or would mak’ trouble,’ Hal answered and Sim stroked his grizzled chin and touched the stock of the great bow slung to one side of his rough-coated horse, watching the constantly shifting eyes of Bellejambe. Kirkpatrick, he noted, was nowhere to be seen and the entire fouled affair made him more savage at the mouth of the barrel-chested Griff, a foul-tempered garron, small, hairy and strong.

All his men rode the same mounts, small horses ideally suited for rough trod and long rides in the dark and the wet, with only a handful of oats and rainwater at the end of it. They could run for hours and sleep in snowdrifts, but would not stand up to a mass of men on horses the like of Buchan’s Bradacus – but Hal was Christ-damned if he would be caught in a fight on a mere gelded ambler.

Sim and two hands of riders, wearing as much protection as they could strap on, followed him and they were not sure whether they were here for hunt or herschip, since they were armed with long knives and Jeddart staffs.

Bruce’s smile was wry when he looked at them. It was hardly a hunting weapon, the Jeddart, an eight-foot shaft reinforced with iron for the last third, fitted with polearm spearpoint, a thin sliver of blade on one side and a hook like a shepherd’s crook on the other. Men skilled with it could lance from horseback, or dismount and form a small huddle of points, capable of hooking a rider out of the saddle, or slicing his expensive horse to ruin. Bruce, for all he thought they looked like mounted ruffians, saw the strength and use of them.

‘If you were April’s lad-ee and I were Lord of May, Jamie twittered as they scowled along the river road, the sun shining like a jest on their mockery.

They swung off the road, the carts lurching and the caged dogs whining eagerly. Dog Boy saw the forest, dark and musked, pearled with dawn rain. The trees, so darkly green they looked black, sprawled over hills alive with hidden life, tangled with bracken and scrub.

A place of red caps, dunters and powries, Sim Craw thought to himself and shivered at the idea of those Faeries. He liked the flat, long roll of Merse and March, bleak as an old whore’s heart; forests made him hunch his shoulders and draw in his neck.

The trees closed in and the road vanished behind them as the sun turned faint, staining the woods with dapple; the flies closed in, whirring and nipping, so that horses fretted and twitched.

‘What do they eat when we’re elsewhere?’ Bangtail whined, slapping his neck, but no-one wanted to open his mouth enough to answer, in case he closed it on cleg.

The Lady smiled at Hal and he remembered her turning to him in the Ward after Buchan and Bruce had gone off, arm in arm like returned brothers. He remembered it particularly for the astonishment in seeing her snub-nosed, chap-cheeked pig of a face softened by concern.

‘I know what this day has cost,’ she had murmured in gentle, courtly French and both the language and the sentiment had shocked him even more. Then she’d added, in gruff Scots, ‘Not me nor the boy here will be after forgetting, either. Ye’ll be sae cantie as a sou in glaur whenever ye come to Douglas after this.’

Sae cantie as a sou in glaur – happy as a pig in muck – and not the best offer Hal had ever had; for all her courtly French and De Lovaine breeding, the Lady of Douglas had the mouth of a shawled washerwoman when she chose. Hal thanked her all the same, while watching Buchan watching Bruce and the pair breaking off only to watch Isabel MacDuff.

The Lady of Douglas turned and spoke to White Tam, waving flies from her face. The old huntsman was like some gnarled tree, Buchan thought, but he knew the business well enough still. White Tam signalled and the whole cavalcade stopped; the hounds milled in their cages, yelping and whining.

A nod from the huntsman to Malk, and the houndsmen struck off the road and up into the trees with the carts, the dog boys leaning in to push over the scrub and rough; everyone followed and in a few steps it seemed to everyone as if the forest had moved, stepped closer and loomed over them, sucking up all noise until even Jamie gave up on his love dirges.

White Tam stood up slightly in the stirrups, a bulky, redfaced figure with a cockerel shock of dirty-snow hair which gave him his name. He had a beard which reminded Hal of an old goat and had one eye; the other, Hal had heard, had been lost fighting men from Galloway, in a struggle with a bear and in a tavern brawl. Any one, Hal thought, was possible.

The head hunstman rode like a half-empty bag of grain perched on a saddle. His back hurt and his limbs ached so much nowadays that even what sun there was in these times did nothing for him. It would have astonished everyone who thought they knew the old hunter to learn that he did not like this forest and the more he had discovered about it, the less he cared for it. He liked it least at this time of year and, at this moment, actively detested it, for the stags were coming into their best and the hunt would be long, hot and tiring.

The huntsman thought this whole farce the worst idea anyone had come up with, for a battue usually achieved little, spoiled the game for miles around for months and foundered good horses and dogs. He drew the ratty fur collar of his stained cloak tighter round him – he had another slung on the back of the horse, for experience had taught him that, on a hunt, you never knew where your bed might be – and prayed to the Virgin that he would not have to spend the dark of night in this place. Distantly, he heard the halloo and thrash of the beaters.

White Tam glanced sideways at the Sientclers, the Auld Templar of Roslin and the younger Sientcler from somewhere Tam had never heard of. His hounds, mind you, were a pretty pair and he wondered if they could hunt as well as they looked.

He watched the Lady Eleanor cooing to her hooded tiercel and exchanging pleasantries with Buchan and saw – because he knew her well now – that she was as sincere as poor gilt with the earl. That yin was an oaf, White Tam thought, who rides a quality mount to a hunt and would regret it when his muscled stallion turned into an expensive founder. An Andalusian cross with Frisian, he noted with expert eye, worth seven times the price of the mount he rode himself. Bliddy erse.

He considered the young Bruce, easy and laughing with Buchan’s wife. If she was mine, White Tam thought, I’d have gralloched the pair of them for makin’ the beast with two backs. It seemed that Buchan was blind or, White Tam thought to himself with years of observation behind it, behaving like most nobiles – biding his time, pretending nothing was happening to his dignity and honour, then striking from the dark and behind.

White Tam knew that men come to a battue armed as if for war was no unusual matter, for that style of hunt was designed for the very purpose of training young knights and squires for battle. Still, the old hunter had spoored out the air of the thing and could taste taint in it. The young Sientcler had confirmed it when he had come to Tam, enquiring about aspects of the hunt and frowning over them.

‘So we will lose each other, then,’ he had said almost wearily. ‘In the trees. Folk will scatter like chaff.’

‘Just so,’ White Tam had agreed, seeing the worry in the man and growing concerned himself; he did not want rival lords stalking one another in Douglas forests. So he spilled his fears to the Herdmanston lord, telling the man how there was always something went wrong on a hunt if people did not hark to the Rule of it all. Foundered horses, careless arrows – there had been injuries in the past and especially in a battue. Beside that, a bad shot, a wild spear throw, a stroke of ill luck, all frequently left an animal wounded and running and it was a matter of honour for the person who had inflicted the damage to pursue it, so that it did not suffer for longer than necessary. Alone, if necessary, and whether he was a magnate of the Kingdom or a wee Lothian lord.

‘Provided it is stag or boar,’ White Tam had added, wiping sweat drips from his nose. ‘Stag, as it is the noblest of God’s creations next to Man and boar for they are the most vicious of God’s creations next to Man and the worst when sair hurt.’

Anything else, he had told Hal pointedly, can be left to die.

Now he rose in the stirrups and held up a hand like a knotted red furze root, mottled as a trout’s belly. Then he turned to Malk, who was valet de limier for the day.

‘Roland,’ he said quietly and the dog was hauled out of one cartload. White Tam dismounted stiffly and, grunting, levered himself to kneel by the hound; they regarded each other sombrely and White Tam stroked the grey muzzle of it with a tenderness which surprised Hal.

‘Old man,’ he said. ‘Beau chien, go with God. Seek. Seek.’

He handed the leash to the grim-faced Malk and Roland darted off, tongue lolling, moving swiftly from point to point, bush to root, head down and snuffling impatiently as he hauled Malk after him. He paused, stiffened, loped a few feet, then determinedly pushed through the scrub and off into the trees at a fast, lumbering lope. The houndsmen and dog boys followed after, struggling with the carts.

Hal turned to Tod’s Wattie, who merely grinned and jerked his head: Gib came up on foot, the two deerhounds loping steadily ahead and hauling him along like a wagon. Hal returned the grin and knew that Tod’s Wattie would keep a close eye on the boy and, with a sudden sharpness deep in him, saw the dark dog boy slogging through the bracken.

Sim Craw saw it too and caught his breath – wee Jamie’s likeness, just as Hal had pointed out. Now there is a mystery . . .

‘Follow Sir Wullie and stay the gither,’ Hal said loudly, so that his men could hear. ‘Spread the word – bide together. If something happens, follow me or Sim. I do not want folk scattered, eechie-ochie. Do this badly and I will think shame to be seen with you.’

The men grunted and growled their assent and Sim urged his horse close to Hal.

‘What of the wummin, then?’ he asked, babe innocent. ‘Mayhap ye would rather chase the hurdies of the Coontess of Buchan?’

Hal shot him daggers and felt his face flame. God’s curses, had he been so obviously smit with Isabel MacDuff’s charms?

‘Let that flea stick to the wall,’ he warned and Sim held up a placatory hand.

‘I only ask what’s to be done,’ he said with a slight smile and the mock of it in his eyes. ‘Leave the Coontess to her husband – or Bruce, who is sookin’ in with her, as any can spy but the blind man wed on to her?’

Hal shot a look at the Countess, a flame in the dim light under the green-black trees, remembering how she had shone in the dark, too.

He had been fumbling his way to the jakes after the awkward feast, flitting as mouse-quiet as he could through the chill, grey, shadowed castle to the latrine hole. Halfway up the turn of a stair he had heard voices and stopped, knowing one was hers almost before the sound had cleared his ear. He moved on, so that he could peer over the top step along the darkened passage.

She was at the door of her room, barefoot and bundled in a great bearskin bedcover and clearly naked underneath it. Her hair was a russet ember in the shadows, tumbling in tendrils down white shoulders.

At the side of her door hung a shield, a little affair glowing unnaturally white in the grey dim, with a bar of blue across the top and the Douglas mullets bright on it. A gauntlet hung over it.

‘Young Jamie’s shield,’ she explained to the shadow, who clasped her close. ‘He hung it there with the metal glove, look there. He has sworn to be my knight and champion and hangs that there to prove it. If any refuse to admit that I am the most beauteous maid in all the world, they must strike the shield with the glove and be prepared to fight.’

The shadow shifted and laughed softly at this flummery while Isabel pouted hotly up into his mouth. For a moment, Hal’s breath had caught in his throat and he wished he was looking down, feeling that warmth on his lips.

‘Shall I strike it for you?’ she’d asked archly, and raised her long, white fingers, which spilled the fur from her shoulders and one impossible white breast, ruby-tipped like flame in the grey; Hal’s breath caught in his throat. ‘A tap, perhaps, just to see if he storms along the corridor.’

‘No need,’ the shadow declared, moving closer to the heat of her. ‘I have no argument with what he defends.’

She reached and he grunted. She smiled up into his eyes, moved a hand.

‘Nevertheless, Sir Knight,’ she said, slightly breathy. ‘It seems your lance is raised.’

‘Raised,’ the shadow agreed, guiding her into the doorway, so that the firelight fell on his face.

‘But not yet couched,’ Bruce added and the door closed on the pair of them.

A low, hackle-prickling bay snapped Hal from his revery and the caged hounds went wild.

‘Wind, wind!’ White Tam called out hoarsely – and unnecessarily, for everyone was heading towards the sound; Hal saw that Isabel had handed her hawk to the loping, hunched figure of the Falconer and was now spurring her horse away. Bruce, who had been admiring Eleanor’s hawk, now thrust it back at the Falconer and followed, the pair of them forging ahead. Hal heard her laugh as Bruce blew a long, rasping discordance on a horn.

The limiers, hauling against their leashes as the luckless dog boys panted after, forged stealthily off in the eerie silence bred into them, the scent Roland had spoored for them strong in their snouts.

Malk appeared with Roland, the hound panting and trembling with excitement. He struggled at the leash and sounded a long, rolling cry from his outstretched throat that was choked off as Malk hauled savagely on the leash.

‘Enough!’ growled White Tam and shot Philippe a harsh look, which carried censure and poison in equal measure. He saw the Berner’s mouth grow tight and then he was bellowing invective at the luckless Malk.

‘Hand him up,’ demanded White Tam and Malk, scowling, hauled the squirming Roland off the ground and up on to the front of the old huntsman’s saddle.

‘Swef, swef, my beauty. Good boy.’

White Tam suffered the frantic face licks and fawning of the hound, then tucked it under one arm and turned to Hal with a wry smile.

‘What a pity that when the nose is perfect, the legs have to go, eh?’

Roland was returned to Malk, who took him as if he were gold and carried him gently back to the cage. White Tam, frowning, looked down at the berner.

‘We will have Belle, Crocard, Sanspeur and Malfoisin,’ he declared. ‘Release the rapprocheurs.’

The hounds were drawn out and let slip, flying off like thrown darts, coursing left and right. Dog Boy saw Gib stagger a little under the slight strain of the two deerhounds, but a word from Tod’s Wattie made them turn their heads reproachfully and whine.

Dog Boy saw Falo start to run after the speeding dogs, leashes flapping in his sweating hands and remembered all the times he had been the one with that thankless, exhausting task. Now he had been handed to this new lord and it was no longer part of his life. He realised, with a sudden leap of joy, so hard it was almost rage, that he was done with Gutterbluid and his birds, too.

Behind Falo the peasant beaters struggled to keep up, locals rounded up for the purpose and, in the mid-summer famine between harvests, weak with hunger and finding the going hard on foot; the rapprocheurs’ sudden distant baying was wolfen.

Cursing, Hal saw the whole hunt fragment and stuck to the plan of following the Auld Templar, knowing Sir William would stick close to the Bruce and that Isabel would be tight-locked to the earl as well. If any Buchan treachery was visited, it would fall on that trio and Hal was determined to save the Auld Templar, if no-one else.

He forced through the nag of branches, looking right and left to make sure his men did the same. He urged Griff after the disappearing arse of Bruce’s mare, growling irritatedly as one of the Inchmartins loomed up, his stallion caught in the madness, plunging and fighting for the bit.

White Tam sounded a horn, but others blared, confusing just where the true line of the hunt lay; Hal heard the huntsman berate anyone who could hear about ‘tootling fools’ and suspected the culprit was Bruce.

A sweating horse crashed through some hazel scrub near Dog Boy and almost scattered Gib from the deerhounds, who sprang and growled. Alarmed and barely hanging on, Jamie Douglas had time to wave before the horse drove on through the trees.

A few chaotic, exhausting yards further on, Hal burst through the undergrowth to see Jamie sliding from the back of the sweat-streaked rouncey, which stood with flanks heaving. The boy examined it swiftly, then turned as Hal and the riders came up.

‘Lame,’ he declared mournfully, then stroked the animal’s muzzle and grinned a bright, sweaty grin.

‘Good while it lasted,’ he shouted and started to lead the horse slowly from the wood. Hal drove on; a thin branch whipped blood from his cheek and a series of short horn blasts brought his head round, for he knew that was the signal for the ‘vue’, that the quarry was in sight of the body of the hunt – and that he was heading in the wrong direction. Which, because he had been following the distant sight of red, made him angry.

‘Ach, ye shouffleing, hot-arsed, hollow-ee’ed, belled harlot,’ he bellowed, and men laughed.

‘The quine will not be happy at that,’ Sim Craw noted, but Hal’s scowl was black and withering, so he wisely fastened his lip and followed after. Two or three plunges later, Hal reined in and sent Bangtail Hob and Thom Bell after the Countess, to make sure she found her way safely back to join the hunt.

They forged on, ducking branches – something smacked hard on Hal’s forehead, wrenching his head back; stars whirled and he felt himself reel in the saddle. When he recovered himself, Sim Craw was grinning wildly at him.

‘Are ye done duntin’ trees?’ he demanded and looked critically at Hal. ‘No damage. Yer still as braw as the sun on shiny watter.’

Tod’s Wattie came up, shepherding a panting Gib and the running deerhounds, who were not even out of breath – but they were on long leashes now, held by Tod’s Wattie from the back of his horse, and starting to dance and whine with the smell of the blood, begging to be let loose. Dog Boy trotted up and Hal saw that, because he was not being hauled at breakneck pace by dogs, he was breathing even and clean; they grinned at one another.

Tod’s Wattie threw the leashes to Gib, who wrapped them determinedly in his fists, truculent as a boar pig. Horsemen milled in a sweating group; a few peasants stumbled to the boles of trees and sank down, exhaustion rising from them like haze. Horse slaver frothed on unseen breezes.

‘Bien aller,’ bellowed White Tam and raised the horn to his blue, fleshy lips, the haroo, haroo of it springing the whole crowd into frantic movement again. Berner Philippe, breathing ragged, gasped out a desperate plea for space for his hounds and White Tam rasped out another blast on his horn.

‘Hark to the line,’ he bellowed. ‘Oyez! Ware hounds. Ware hounds.’

The stag burst from the undergrowth and, a moment later, a tangled trail of baying hounds followed, skidding in confusion as the beast changed direction and bounded away.

It stank and steamed, rippling with muscle and sheened like a copper statuette, the great horned crown of it soaring away into the trees as it sprang, scattering hounds and leaping majestically, leaving the dogs floundering in its wake. The powerful alaunts had been released too soon, White Tam saw, and had already been left behind, for they had no stamina, only massive strength.

‘Il est hault, he roared, purple-faced. Tl est hault, il est hault, il est hault.’

‘Tallyho to you, too,’ muttered Hal and then tipped a nod to Tod’s Wattie, who grinned and nudged Gib.

White Tam cursed and banged the horn furiously on the cantle, for he could see the stag dashing away – then two grey streaks shot swiftly past on either side of him, silent as graveshrouds. They overtook the running stag, barging in on one side and forcing it to turn at bay. The deerhounds . . . White Tam almost cried out with the delight of it.

Dog Boy gawped. He had never seen such speed, nor such brave savagery. Mykel dashed for the rear; the stag spun. Veldi darted in; the stag spun – the hound seized it by the nose and the stag shook it off, spraying furious blood. But Mykel had a hock in his jaws and the back end of the beast sank as the rest of the pack came up and piled on it.

Even then the stag was not done. It bellowed, fearful and desperate, swung the massive antlered head and a dog yelped and rolled out like a black and tan ball, so that Dog Boy felt a kick in him, sure that it had been Sanspeur.

Tod’s Wattie shouted once, twice, three times but the grey deerhounds clung on and the stag hurled itself off into the forest, staggering, stumbling, dragging the deerhounds and the rest of the pack in a whirling ball. Hal bellowed with annoyance when he saw Mykel ripped free from the hindquarters of the beast, the leash that should have been removed before he’d been released snagged on something in the undergrowth.

Choking, the hound floundered, trying to get back into the fray, gasping for breath and doing itself no good by its own frantic, lunging efforts. Tod’s Wattie lashed out at Gib, who knew he had erred but was too afraid of the hound to go forward and release it – but a small shape barrelled past him, right to where the gagging deerhound whirled and snarled.

Dog Boy ignored the sight of the fangs, sprang out his eating knife and sawed the cord free from the dog’s neck, the white, sharp teeth rasping, snapping close to his face and wrists. Released, Mykel sprang forward at once with a hoarse, high howl and, the other hand caught in its hackled ruff, Dog Boy went with it, grimly hanging on – Hal saw the blood on the dog’s muzzle and marvelled at the boy’s bravery and sharp eyes.

Mykel checked then, rounded on Dog Boy and he saw the maw of it, the reeking heat of the muzzle. Then the deerhound whined with concern and licked him, so that the stag blood smeared over Dog Boy’s face. When Tod’s Wattie came up with Hal and the others, he turned and grinned at Hal, nodding appreciatively because the boy, heedless of teeth and covered in blood and slaver, was examining Mykel’s mouth to make sure all the blood belonged to the stag.

Tod’s Wattie tied on a new leash, scowling at Gib. Hal leaned down towards Dog Boy and Sim Craw saw the concern.

‘Yer a bit bloody, boy,’ Hal said awkwardly and Dog Boy looked at him while the huge beast of a deerhound panted and fawned on him. He smiled beatifically. There was something huge and ecstatic in his chest and the raw power of it locked with this new lord and made them, it seemed, one.

‘So is yourself, maister.’

Sim Craw’s laugh was a horn bellow of its own and Hal, ruefully touching his cheek and forehead, looked at the blood on his gloved fingers, acknowledged the boy with a wave and went on after the hunt.

The pack was milling and snarling and dashing backwards and forwards, save for the powerful alaunts, who had caught up at last and charged in. One was locked to the stag’s throat, another to one thin, proud leg and a third to the animal’s groin, jerking it this way and that. The stag’s dulling eyes were anguished and hopeless and, too weary now to fight, it suffered the agony in a silence broken only by the bellow rasp of its breathing, blowing a thin mist of blood from flaring nostrils.

White Tam, reeling precariously in his saddle, barked out orders and the hound and huntsmen moved in with whips and blades to leash the dogs and give the beast the grace of death.

‘A fine stag,’ he said to Hal, beaming. ‘Though it is early in the year and there will be finer come July. What will you take for yon dugs?’

Hal merely looked at him, raised an eyebrow and smiled. White Tam slapped one hand on his knee and belched out a laugh.

‘Just so, just so – I would not part with them neither.’

Dog Boy heard this as if from a distance, for his world had folded to the anguish on Berner Philippe’s face and the mournful dark eye of Sanspeur. The rache whined and tried to lick Dog Boy’s hand and, for a moment, they knelt shoulder to shoulder, the Berner and Dog Boy.

‘Swef, swef, ma belle, Philippe said and saw that the leg was smashed beyond repair. There was a moment when he became aware of the boy and looked at him, the thought of what he had to do next a harsh misery in his eyes, and Dog Boy saw it. The Berner felt something sharp and sweet, a pang which drove the breath from him when he looked into the eyes of the dog he would have to kill. He loved this dog. The knife flashed like a dragonfly in sunlight.

‘Fetch a mattock,’ he grunted and, when nothing happened, jerked his head to the boy. Then he saw the look on Dog Boy’s face as he stared at the filming eyes of the dying dog and the harsh words clogged in his throat. He found, suddenly, that he was ashamed of how hard he grown in the years between now and when he had been Dog Boy’s age.

‘If you please,’ he added, yet still could not keep the slightest of sneers from it. Dog Boy blinked, nodded and fetched a mattock and a spade, while the dogs were hauled away and the stag butchered. Between them, they dug a hole under a tree, where the ground was mossy and still springy and put the dog in it, then covered it with mould, black leaves and earth.

Sanspeur, Philippe thought. Without fear. She had been without fear, too and that had been her undoing. It was better to be afraid, he thought to himself, and stay alive. The boy, Dog Boy, knew this – Philippe turned and found himself alone, saw the boy moving from him, back to the big deerhounds and the hard, armed men he now belonged to. He did not look afraid at all.

There was a flurry off to one side, a flash of berry red, and Isabel appeared, cheeks flushed, hood back and her fox-pelt hair wisping from under the elaborate green and gold padded headpiece, her face wrinkling distaste at the blood and guts and flies. Behind her came Bruce, riding easily, and after them Bangtail Hob and Thom Bell, all black scowls and slick with a sweat that was mead for midges.

‘There’s your wummin,’ Sim said close to Hal’s elbow. ‘Safe enow. What was it ye called her – a hot-arsed . . . what?’

Then he chuckled and urged ahead before Hal could spit out for him to mind his business.

‘Martens,’ Isabel called out gaily and Bruce, laughing, came up with it almost at once – a richesse. Hal saw Buchan scowl and, fleetingly, wondered where Kirkpatrick was.

A tan, white-scutted shape burst out of the undergrowth, almost under the hooves of Bradacus, which made the great warhorse rear. Buchan, roaring and red-faced, sawed at the reins as he and the horse spun in a dancing half-circle, then lashed out with both rear hooves, catching Bruce’s horse a glancing blow.

Bruce’s rouncey, panicked beyond measure, squealed and bolted, the rider reeling with the surprise of it, while the dogs went mad and even the big deerhounds lurched forward, to be brought short by Dog Boy and Tod’s Wattie’s tongue.

Isabel threw back her head and laughed until she was almost helpless.

‘Hares,’ she called out to Bruce’s wild, tilting back and Hal, despite himself, felt the flicker of his groin and shifted in the saddle. Then he realised the Berner was bellowing and half-turned to see the biggest brute of the alaunts, unused in the hunt and fighting fresh, rip its chains out of its handler’s fists and speed off after Bruce, snarling.

There was a frozen moment when Hal looked at Sim and both glanced to where Malise, off his horse, stared after the fleeing hound with a look halfway between feral snarl and triumph. In a glance so fast Hal nearly missed it, he then turned and looked at the alaunt handler, who looked back at him.

The chill of it soured deep into Hal’s belly. The hound had been deliberately released – and a trained warhorse frightened by a leaping hare?

‘Sim . . .’ he said, even as he kicked Griff, but the man had seen it for himself and spurred after Hal, bellowing for Tod’s Wattie and Bangtail Hob. Buchan, bringing Bradacus miraculously back under control, watched them crash through the undergrowth in pursuit of Bruce and tried not to smile.

White Tam, hunched on the mare, ploughed on relentlessly while the hunt swirled and whirled around him, knowing the truth of matters – that he was too old and slow these days, so that he reached the hunt when it was all over bar the cutting up. White Tam knew the ritual of cutting up well now, talked more and more in a language gravy-rich with os and suet, argos and croteys, grease and fiants.

He was aware only of the vanishing of Bruce and the others as an annoyance by well-bred oafs who chased hares.

‘Go after the Earl of Carrick,’ he ordered those nearest. ‘Mak’ siccar he does not tumble on his high-born arse.’

Bruce, half-clinging on for dear life, finally got control of the rouncey and became aware, suddenly and with a catch of fear in his throat, that he was alone. He turned this way and that, hearing shouts but confused as to direction then, for fear his anxiety would cause the trembling horse to bolt again, he got off the animal and stroked it quiet, neck and muzzle.

The leveret was long gone and he shook his head at the shame of having let his mount bolt, even if it had been sorely provoked by a kicking destrier. Hares, he thought with a savage wryness. A husk of hares – he would take delight in telling her.

He looked round at the oak and hornbeam, the sun glaring cross-grained through branches, thinly prowling over his face like delicate, warm cat paws. The bracken was crushed here, there was a smell of broken grass and turned earth and the iron tang of blood, which made Bruce uneasy. The mystery of how a hare, which was not a forest animal at all, had been there at all nagged him a little and the worry of plots surfaced like sick.

Then he realised this was where the stag had been brought to bay by the deerhounds and relaxed a little, which in turn brought the rouncey to an even breathing. Even so, there was a musk that puzzled him, the more so because it came from the rouncey’s sweat-foamed sides and the saddle; he had been smelling it all day.

The alaunt came out of the undergrowth like an uncurling black snake, a matted crow of snarls that skidded, paused and padded, slow and purposeful, the shoulders hunched and working, the slaver dripping from open jaws.

Bruce narrowed his eyes, then felt the first stirrings of fear – it was stalking him. Then, with a deep panic he had to grip himself to fight, he realised what the musk smell was and that hare scent, blood and glands, had been deliberately smeared on saddle and horse flank. A deal of hare scent, too, now transferred to himself.

There was a pause and Bruce fought to free the dagger at his belt, cursing, seeing the inevitable in the gathering tremble of the beast’s haunches. Somewhere, he heard shouts and the blare of a hunting horn – too far, he thought wildly. Too far . . .

The black shape launched forward, low and fast, boring in to disembowel this strange, large, two-legged prey that smelled right and looked wrong. The rouncey squealed and reared and danced away, reins caught in the bracken, and the alaunt, confused by scent from two victims, paused, chose the smaller one and, snarling, tore forward.

There was a streak through the grass, a fast-moving brindle arrow, rough-haired and uncombed. It struck the flank of the alaunt in mid-leap and Bruce, one forearm up to protect his throat, reeling back and already feeling the weight and the teeth of the affair, saw an explosion of snarls and a ball of fur and fang rolling over and over until it separated, paused and then alaunt and Mykel surged back at each other like butting rams.

Their bodies whirled and curled, opened and shut. Fangs snapped and throats snarled; one of them squealed and bloody slaver flew. Bruce, shocked, could only watch while the rouncey danced and screamed on the end of its tether – then a second grey shape barrelled in and the ball of fighting hounds rolled and snarled and fought a little longer until the alaunt, outmatched even by one, broke from the pair of deerhounds and sped away.

Hal and Sim came up, trailing Tod’s Wattie, the Dog Boy with a fistful of leashes and a cursing Bangtail Hob in his wake. They all arrived in time to see the alaunt, close hauled by the ghost-grey shapes, suddenly fall over its own front feet, roll over and over and then sprawl, loose and still. The deer-hounds overran it and had to skid and backtrack, only to find their prey so dead they could only paw it, snarling and whining in a thwarted ecstasy of lost bloodlust, puzzled at the leather-fletched sapling which had sprouted from the hunting dog’s neck.

From out of a nearby copse strolled Kirkpatrick, latchbow casually over one shoulder.

A fine shot, Sim noted with a detached part of his brain. What was he doin’, sleekit in the trees with a latchbow? He could not find the voice for it – did not need to – as the Dog Boy ran to secure the hounds and Hal and Bruce exchanged looks.

‘If you are allowed to search the saddle-bags of yon Malise,’ Kirkpatrick said, in a voice as easy as if they were discussing horses at table, ‘you will surely find it full of hare shite. Terrifying for a wee leveret, to be shut up in the bouncing dark until needed. You will find also that the alaunt handler has been spirited away, though I will wager he’ll not long enjoy the payment he had for releasing yon monster on cue. You will not find him at all, I suspect.’

No-one spoke, until Bruce turned to the snorting, panting, wild-eyed rouncey and gathered up the reins, the trembling fear in him turning to anger at what had been revealed, at the cunning planning in it and, if truth be told, his own secret attempt against Buchan.

In his mind’s eye, for a fleeting, bowel-wrenching flicker, he saw the dog’s great jaws and the long, leaping shape of it – he wrenched to free the reins from the tangle, felt them give then catch again; irritated, he hauled with all his strength.

Death ripped up out of the earth and leered at him.

Douglas Castle The next day

The hunt ended like a trail of damp smoke, filtering back in near-silence to the castle. Bruce, too bright and brittle to be true, flirted even more outrageously with the Countess, though her exchanges seemed strained and she was too aware of Buchan’s glowering.

No-one could stop looking at the cart which held the body – though Hal had seen Kirkpatrick, riding silent and cat-hunched with a face as sightless and bland as a stone saint. Here was a man who had just seen his liege lord under attack and should be head-swinging alert – yet he stared ahead and saw nothing.

He should, Hal said to Sim later, be like a mouse sniffing moonlight for more owls.

‘You would so think,’ Sim agreed – but he was distracted, had come in from the dark night of the Ward to report that he’d seen the Countess, huckled like a bad apprentice across to the Earl of Buchan’s tent by Malise and two men in leather jacks and foul grins. The noises that came from it then set everyone’s teeth on edge.

In the comfort of the kitchen, old limbs wrapped to ease the ache, White Tam nodded approval; the Earl of Buchan had finally seen sense ower his wayward wummin.

‘A woman, a dog and an old oak tree,’ he intoned. ‘The more you beat them, the better they be.’

‘Why an oak tree, Master?’ demanded one of the scullions and Tam told him – sometimes such a tree stopped producing valuable acorns for the pigs, so some stout men, including the Smith with his forge hammer, would walk round it, hitting it hard. It started the sap up again and saved the tree.

Dog Boy, fetching scraps for the hounds, listened to the sick sounds and thought of the Countess being hit by a forge hammer. He did not think her sap would rise.

There was worse to come, at least for Hal, as the morning crept closer – the Auld Templar shifted out of the shadows like a wraith and, with a pause for a single deep breath, like a man ducking underwater, said:

‘I need to call on your aid.’

Hal felt the chill of it right there.

‘I am, as ever, fealtied to Roslin,’ he replied carefully and saw the old man’s head jerk at that. Aha – so I am right, he thought. He summons me as a liege lord.

‘Before my son came of age,’ the Auld Templar said slowly, ‘I was lord of Roslin. I taught the young Bruce how to fight.’

Hal said nothing, though that fact explained much about the Templar’s presence with the Earl of Carrick.

‘When my son was able, I handed him Roslin and gave my soul and arm to God,’ the Templar went on. ‘I have never regretted it – until now.’

He stared at Hal, pouch eyes flickered with torchlight.

‘I cannot be seen to fight for one side or the other,’ he went on. ‘But Roslin must jump.’

‘To the Bruce,’ Hal said bleakly and had back a nod.

‘The Sientcler Way,’ Hal added, hearing the desperation in his own voice. The Sientcler Way was always to have a branch of the family on either side of a conflict. That way, triumph or loss, the Sientclers always survived.

The Auld Templar shook his head.

‘This conflict is too large and the Sientclers are too thinned. This time, we must jump one way and pray to God.’

‘You wish me to serve the Bruce, in your stead,’ Hal declared flatly; the Templar nodded.

It was hardly a surprise. Roslin owed fealty to the Earl of March, Patrick of Dunbar – and so, therefore, did Herdmanston – but Earl Patrick was lockstepped with Longshanks and, with a son and grandson held by the English, the Auld Templar was inclined to those who opposed them.

‘My father,’ Hal began and the Auld Templar broke in.

‘Is at home,’ he said. ‘He sent word that the Earl of March refuses to help return my boys to me. Just punishment for rebellion, he says. The Earl of Carrick has promised help with ransoms.’

Well, there it was – sold for the price for two men from Roslin. Hal felt his mouth dry up. Herdmanston was put at risk and his father with it – yet he knew the Auld Templar had weighed that in the pan and still found the price acceptable.

‘Then we are bound – where?’ Hal asked, sealing it as surely as fisting a ring into wax. For a moment the Auld Templar looked broken and Hal realised the weight crushing those bony shoulders, wanted to offer some reassurance. The lie choked him – and the Auld Templar’s next words would have made mockery of it in any case.

‘Irvine,’ he said and forced a grin to split his snowy beard. ‘The Bruce is off to treat with rebels.’

Hal stared at the space where the Auld Templar had been long after the dark had swallowed the man – until Sim found him and, frowning, asked him why he was boring holes in the dark. Hal told him and Sim blew out his cheeks.

‘Rebels are we then?’ he declared and shrugged. ‘Bigod -that puts us at odds with the chiel who has also just asked for our aid. I would not mention it.’

The Earl of Buchan was in the undercroft, coldest hole in Douglas and the resting place of the mysterious body. In the soft, filtered light of early morning, you could see why the body had drained the blood from Bruce’s face when he’d had it torn from the mulch almost into his face.

Kirkpatrick, too, had looked stricken – but, then, no-one was chirruping songs to May at the sight of the half-eaten, rotted affair, undeniably human and undeniably a man of quality from the remains of his clothing and the rings still on his half-skeletal fingers.

Not robbed then, for a thief would have had his rings and searched under armpits and bollocks, the place sensible men kept most of their heavy coin. The dead man had a purse with some little coin in it still snugged up in a scrip with what looked to be spare braies, but no weapon. No-one, at first, wanted to go near the corpse save Kirkpatrick and, when he left it, he closeted himself with Bruce.

Grimacing with distaste, Buchan had assumed the mantle of responsibility for it and now beckoned Hal and Sim Craw to where the reeking remains lay on the slabbed floor. He spoke in slow, perfect English so that Sim Craw, whose French was poor, could understand.

‘White Tam has had a look but the most he can tell is that it is a year dead at least,’ Buchan had declared. ‘He says he is just a huntsman, but that yourself and Sim Craw are the very men for looking over bodies killed by violence. I am inclined to agree.’

Hal did not care for this unwelcomed skill handed to him by White Tam, nor did he want to be closeted with Buchan following the events of the hunt and the Auld Templar, but it appeared the earl was not put out at having his plans foiled by a wee lord from Lothian and a pair of splendid dogs. Hal had to admire the blithe dismissal of what would have been red murder if he had been allowed to succeed – but he did not want to be cheek by jowl with this man, who held a writ from the distant thunder that was King Edward to hunt out rebels in the north.

He thought to refuse the earl, using the excuse of not wanting to go near the festering remains, but he had seen Kirkpatrick’s face in the instant the effigy had been torn up by Bruce’s reins and in the long ride back. Now such a refusal was a blatant lie his curiosity undermined. Swallowing, driven by the desire of knowing, Hal had looked at Sim Craw, who had shrugged his padded shoulders in return.

‘A wise man wavers, a fool is fixed,’ he growled meaningfully, then sighed when he saw it made no difference, following Hal to the side of the thing, trying to breathe through his mouth to keep the stink out of his nose.

‘Christ be praised,’ Buchan said, putting a hand over his lower face.

‘For ever and ever,’ the other two intoned.

Then Sim poked his gauntleted hand in the ruin of it, peeled back something which could have been cloth or rotted flesh and pointed to a small mark on a patch of mottled blue-black.

‘Stabbed,’ he declared. ‘Upward. Thin-bladed dagger – look at the edges here. A wee fluted affair by the look. Straight to his heart and killit him dead.’

Hal and Sim looked at each other. It was an expert stroke from a particular weapon and only a man who killed with it regularly would keep a dagger like that about him. Wildly, Hal almost asked Buchan if he and Bruce had hunted in these woods before and had lost a henchman. He thought of the two deerhounds, slathered with balm and praises, and the dead alaunt, bitterly buried by the Berner.

‘So,’ Sim declared. ‘A particular slaying – what make ye of this, Hal? When the slayer was throwin’ him down, d’ye think?’

It was a cloth scrap, a few threads and patch no bigger than a fingernail, caught in the buckle of the dead man’s scrip baldric. It could have been from the man’s own cloak, or another part of his clothing for all the cloth was rotted and colour-drained, but Hal did not think so and said as much.

Sim thought and stroked the grizzle of his chin, disturbed a louse and chased it until he caught it in two fingers and flicked it casually away. He turned to Hal and Buchan, who was wishing he could leave the festering place but was determined, on his honour and duty as an earl of the realm, to stay as long as the others.

‘This is the way of it, I am thinking,’ Sim said. ‘A man yon poor soul knows comes to him, so getting near enough to strike. They are in the dark, ken, and neb to neb, which is secretive to me. Then the chiel with the dagger strikes . . .’

He mimicked the blow, then grabbed Hal by the front of his clothes and heaved him, as if throwing him over on to the ground. He was strong and Hal was taken by surprise, stumbled and was held up by Sim, who smiled triumphantly and nodded down to where the pair of them were locked, buckle to buckle, Sim’s leg between Hal’s two.

Hal staggered upright as Sim let go, then explained what had just happened to the bewildered Buchan, who had understood one in six words of Sim’s explanation in Lowland Lothian. Like wood popping in a fire, the earl thought.

‘Aye,’ Hal said at the end of it, ‘that would do it, right enough – well worked, Sim Craw.’

‘Which does not explain,’ Buchan said, ‘who this man is. He is no peasant with these clothes – Kirkpatrick said as much when he was here.’

‘Did he so?’ mused Sim, then looked closely at the dead man, half yellow bone, half black strips of rot, some cloth, some flesh. An insect scuttled from a sleeve, down over the knucklebones, slithering under a mottled leather pouch. Sim worried the pouch loose, trying to ignore the crack of the small bones and the waft of new rot that came with him disturbing the body. He opened it, shook the contents on to the palm of his hand and they peered. Silver coins, a lump of metal with horsehair string attached, a medallion stamped with the Virgin and Child.

‘No robbery, then,’ Hal declared, then frowned and indicated the brown, skeletal hand.

‘Yet a finger has been cut.’

‘To get at a tight-fitting ring,’ Sim said, with the air of man who was no stranger to it, and Buchan lifted an eyebrow at the revelation.

‘Yet no other rings are taken,’ he pointed out, and Hal sighed.

‘A wee cat’s cradle of clues, right enow,’ he declared, looking at the contents of the purse. The medallion was a common enough token, a pardoner’s stock in trade to ward off evil, but the teardrop metal lump and string was a puzzler.

‘Fishing?’ Buchan suggested hesitantly and Hal frowned; he did not know what it was but fishing seemed unlikely. Besides, it was knotted in regular progression and unravelled to at least the height of a man.

‘It is a plumb line,’ Sim said. ‘A mason uses it to mark where he wants stone cut – see, you chalk the string, hold the free end and let the weight dangle, then pluck it like a harp string to leave a chalk line on the stone.’

‘The knots?’

‘Measurement,’ Sim answered.

‘A mason?’ Buchan repeated, having picked that part out ‘Is this certes?’

Hal looked at Sim, eyebrows raised quizzically.

‘Am I certes? Is a wee dug bound by a blood puddin’?’ Sim answered indignantly. ‘I am Leadhoose born, up by the wee priory of St Machutus what the Tironensians live in. My father was lifted to work with the monks, who were God’s gift for buildin’.’

‘Tironensians. I know that order,’ Buchan said, recognising that word in the welter of thick-accented braid Scots. ‘They are strict Benedictines, finding glory in manual labour. They are skilled – did they not do the work at the abbeys in Selkirk, Arbroath and Kelso? You think this mason is a Benedictine from that place?’

‘Mayhap, though he is not clothed like any monk I ken,’ Sim declared. ‘But my da was lifted from the cartin’ to work with them at the quarrystanes and then came to Herdmanston to dig a well. Until I was of age to go off with young Hal here, I worked at the digging and the drystane. I ken a plumb line – the knots are measured in Roman feet.’

He closed his eyes, the better to remember.

‘Saint Augustine says six is the perfect number because the sum and product of its factors – one, two, and three – are the same. Thus a thirty-six-foot square is the divine perfection, much favoured by masons who build for the church. Christ be praised.’

He opened his eyes into the astounded stares of Hal and the Earl of Buchan and then blinked with embarrassment as they stumbled over the rote response, almost dumbed by the revelation of a Sim with numbers.

‘Aye, weel – tallyin’ is not my strength, though I ken the cost of a night’s drink. But my da dinned plumb lines into me, for ye can dig neither well nor build as much as a cruck hoose without it.’

‘You think it was a mason from St Machutus?’ the earl demanded, narrow eyed and cock-headed with trying to understand. Sim shook his head.

‘It’s a mason, certes. And a master, if his fine cloots are any guide.’

‘Aye,’ Hal said wryly. ‘Since English Edward knocked about some fine fortresses last year, I daresay there are a wheen of master masons at work in Scotland.’

‘Not our problem,’ Buchan said suddenly, eager to be gone from the place. He plucked weight, string, medallion and coins from Sim’s palm and tossed them carelessly back into the mess on the table.

‘Evidence,’ he declared. ‘We will wrap this up and deliver it to the English Justiciar at Scone. Let Ormsby deal with it. I have a rebellion to put down.’

Irvine

Feast of St Venantius of Camerino, May, 1297

The sconces made the shadows lurch and leer, transported a bishop to a beast. Not that Wishart looked much like the foremost prelate in Scotland, sitting like a great bear in his undershift, the grey hair curling up under the stained neck of it above which was a face like a mastiff hit with a spade.

‘More of a hunt than you had bargained, eh, Rob?’ he growled and Bruce managed a wan smile. ‘Then to find a corpse . . . Do we ken who it is, then?’

The last was accompanied by a sharp look, but Bruce refused to meet it and shook his head dismissively.

‘Buchan carted the remains off to Ormsby at Scone. I said to go to Sheriff Heselrig at Lanark, but he insisted on going to the Justiciar.’

He broke off and shot looks at the men crowded into the main hall of the Bourtreehill manor.

‘Did he know? Did Buchan know that Heselrig was already dead and Lanark torched?’ he hissed and Wishart flapped an impatient hand, as if waving away an annoying fly.

‘Tish, tosh,’ he said in his meaty voice. ‘He did not. No-one knew until it was done.’

‘Now all the realm knows,’ growled a voice, and The Hardy stuck his slab of a face into the light, scowling at Bruce; Hal saw that he was a coarser, meatier version of Jamie. ‘While you were taking over my home, Wallace here was ridding the country of an evil.’

‘You and he were, if the truth be told, torching our lands around Turnberry,’ Bruce countered in French, swift and vicious as a stooping hawk. ‘That’s why my father was charged to bring you to heel by sending me to Douglas – as well, my lord, that I had less belly for the work than you, else your wife and bairns would not be tucked up safe a short walk away.’

‘You were seen as English,’ The Hardy muttered, though he shifted uncomfortably as he spoke; they both knew that The Douglas had simply been taking the opportunity to plunder the Bruce lands.

‘That was not the reason Buchan tried to have me killed,’ Bruce spat back, and The Hardy shrugged.

‘More to do with his wife, I should think,’ he said meaningfully, and Bruce flushed at that. Hal had seen the Countess early the next day, mounted on a sensible sidesaddled palfrey and led by Malise out of Douglas, with four big men and the Earl of Buchan’s warhorse in tow. Headed back to Balmullo, he had heard from Agnes, who had been her tirewoman while she stayed in Douglas. Ill-used to the point of bruises, she had added.

‘He tried to have me killed,’ Bruce persisted and Hal bit his lip on why Kirkpatrick had been loose in the woods with a crossbow, but the sick meaning of it all rose in him, cloyed with despair; the most powerful lords in Scotland savaged each other with plot and counterplot, while the Kingdom slid into chaos.

‘Aye, indeed,’ Wishart said, as if he had read Hal’s mind, ‘it’s as well, then, that Wallace here put a stop to the Douglas raids on the Bruce, in favour of discomfort to the English in Lanark. A proper blow. A true rebellion.’

Douglas scowled at the implication, but the man in question shifted slightly, the light falling on his beard making it flare with sharp red flame. The side of his face was hacked out by the shadows and, even sitting, the power of the man was clear to Hal and everyone else. His eyes were hooded and dark, the nose a blade.

‘Heselrig was a turd,’ Wallace growled. ‘A wee bachle of a mannie, better dead and his English fort burned. He was set to assize me and mine for a trifle and would have been savage at it.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ Wishart said, as if soothing a truculent bairn. ‘Now I will speak privily with the Earl of Carrick, who has come, it seems, to add his support to the community of the realm.’

‘Has he just,’ answered Wallace flatly and stood up, so that Hal saw the size of him – enough of a tower for him to take a step back. Wallace was clearly used to this and merely grinned, while The Hardy followed him as he ducked through the door, arguing about where to strike next.

Wishart looked expectantly at Kirkpatrick and Hal, but Bruce started to pace and glower at him.

‘They are mine,’ he said, as if that explained everything. Hal bit his lip on the matter, though he knew he should have walked away from the mess of it, before the wrapping chains of fealty to the Roslin Sientclers shackled him to a lost cause.

He glanced over at Kirkpatrick and saw the hooded stare he had back. Noble-born, Hal thought, and carries a sword, though he probably does not use it well. Not knighted, with no lands of his own – yet cunning and smart. An intelligencer for The Bruce, then, a wee ferret of secrets – and a man Bruce could send to red murder a rival.

‘So – you and Buchan, plootering about in the woods like bairns, tryin’ to red murder yin another?’ Wishart scathed. ‘Hardly politic. Scarcely gentilhommes of the community of the realm, let alone belted earls. Then there is this ither matter – ye never saw the body, then?’

Bruce rounded on him like a savaging dog, popping the French out like a badly sparking fire.

‘Body? Never mind that – what in God’s name are you up to now, Wishart? The man’s a bloody-handed outlaw. Barely noble – community of the realm, my arse.’

Wishart sipped from a blue-glass goblet, a strangely delicate gesture from such a sausage-fingered man, Hal thought. The bishop stared up into Bruce’s thrusting lip and sighed.

‘Wallace,’ he said heavily. ‘The man’s a noble, but barely as you say. The man’s an outlaw, no argument there.’

‘And this is your new choice for Scotland’s king, is it?’ Bruce demanded sneeringly. ‘It is certainly an answer to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol, but not one, I think, that your “community of the realm” will welcome. A lesser son, a family barely raised above the level? Christ’s Bones, was he not bound to be a canting priest, the last refuge of poor nobiles?

‘Aye, weel – some become bishops,’ Wishart answered mildly, dabbing his lips with a napkin, though the stains down the front of his serk bore witness to previous carelessness and Bruce had the grace to flush and begin to protest about present company. Wishart waved him silent.

‘Wallace is no priest,’ he answered. ‘No red spurs nor dubbing neither, but his father owns a rickle of land and his mother is a Crawfurd, dochter of a Sheriff of Ayr – so he is no chiel with hurdies flappin’ out the back of his breeks. Besides, he is a bonnie fighter – as bonnie as any I have ever seen. As a solution to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol it takes preference over murder plots on a chasse, my lord.’

‘Is that all it takes, then?’ Bruce demanded thickly. ‘You would throw over the Bruce claim for a “bonnie fighter”?’

‘The Bruce claim is safe enough,’ Wishart said, suddenly steely. ‘Wallace is no candidate for a throne – besides, we have a king. John Balliol is king and Wallace is fighting in his name.’

‘Balliol abdicated,’ Bruce roared and Kirkpatrick laid a hand on his arm, which the earl shook off angrily, though he lowered his voice to a hoarse hiss, spraying Wishart’s face.

‘He abdicated. Christ and All His Saints – Edward stripped the regalia off him, so that he is Toom Tabard, Empty Cote, from now until Hell freezes over. There is no king in Scotland.’

‘That,’ replied Wishart, slowly wiping Bruce off his face and staring steadily back at the pop-eyed earl, ‘is never what we admit. Ever. The kingdom must have a king, clear and indivisible from the English, and Balliol is the name we fight in. That name and the Wallace one gains us fighting men – enough, so far, to slay the sheriff of Lanark and burn his place round his ears. Now the south is in rebellion as well as the north and east.’

‘Foolish,’ Bruce ranted, pacing and waving. ‘They are outlaws, cut-throats and raiders, not trained fighting men -they won’t stand in the field and certainly not led by the likes of Wallace. Your desperation for a clear and indivisible king blinds you.’

He leaned forward and his voice grew softer, more menacing while the shadows did things to his eyes that Hal did not like.

‘Only the nobiles can lead men to fight Edward,’ he declared. ‘Not small folk like Wallace. In the end, the gentilhommes – your precious “community of the realm” – is what will keep your Church free of interference from Edward, which is really what you finaigle for. Answerable only to the Pope, is that not it, Bishop?’

‘Sir Andrew Moray is noble,’ Wishart pointed out, bland as a nun’s smile, and that made Bruce pause. Aha, Hal thought, the bold Bruce does not like the idea of Moray. Moray and Wallace as Guardians of the Realm would go a long way to appeasing nobles appalled at the idea of a Wallace alone.

Bruce would not then be at the centre of things – he had not been party to any of it so far, nor would he have been if he had not turned up on his own, dangling The Hardy’s family as security of his intentions and looking for the approbation of the other finely born in Wishart’s enterprise. Hal, dragged along in the Auld Templar’s wake, had wondered, every step of the way, what had prompted Bruce to suddenly become so hot for rebellion and Sim had remarked that Bruce’s da would not care for it much.

Bruce the son had not got much out of it. The Hardy had been grudgingly polite, the Stewart brothers and Sir Alexander Lindsay had been cool at best while Wallace himself, amiable, giant and seemingly bland, had looked the Earl of Carrick up and down shrewdly and wondered aloud why ‘Bruce the Englishman’ had decided to jump the fence. Now they were all glowering on the other side of the door, still wondering the same.

It was exactly what Wishart now asked.

‘If you have set your face against this enterprise and my choice of captain,’ Wishart grunted, slopping wine on his knuckles, ‘why are you here when your da is in Carlisle, no doubt setting out his explanations to Percy and Clifford of why his son has gone over to Edward’s enemies? I would have thought, my lord, that you would be bending your efforts against Buchan – and a body found in the woods.’

Hal leaned forward, for this was something he wanted to know as keenly – Bruce was young, his father’s son in every way until now, and his family had been expelled from their Scottish lands by the dozen previous Guardians, only just returned to them by Edward’s power. Why here? Why now?

Hal was sure the uncovered corpse had something to do with it, surer still that Wishart and Bruce shared the secret of it. He was also more certain than ever that he should not be here, mired in the midden of it all – how in the name of God and all His Saints had he become a rebel, sudden and easy as putting on a cloak?

He became aware of eyes, turned into the black, considered gaze of Kirkpatrick and held it for a long while before breaking away.

Bruce frowned, the lip pouted and the chin thrust out, so that the shadows turned his broad-chinned face to a brief, flickering devil’s mask – then he moved and the illusion shattered; he smiled.

‘I am a Scot, when all said and done. And a gentilhomme of your community of the realm, bishop,’ he answered smoothly, then plucked the prelate’s glass from his fat, beringed fingers and drained it, a lopsided grin on his face.

‘Besides – you have your fighting bear,’ he answered. ‘You need, perhaps, someone to point him in the right direction. To point you all in the right direction.’

Wishart closed one speculative eye, reached out and took the glass back from Bruce with an irritated gesture.

‘And where would that be, young Carrick?’

‘Scone,’ Bruce declared. ‘Kick England’s Justiciar, Ormsby, up the arse, the same way we did Heselrig.’

Hal heard the ‘we’ and saw that Wishart had as well, but the bishop did not even try to correct Bruce. Instead he smiled and Hal was sure some subtle message passed between the pair.

‘Aye,’ Wishart said speculatively. ‘Not a bad choice. To make sure of . . . matters. I will put it to the Wallace.’

He lifted the empty glass in a toast to Bruce, who acknowledged it with a nod, then smiled a shark-show of teeth at Hal.

Chapter Three

Scone Priory

Feast of Saints Castus and Aemilius, martyrs – May, 1297

Dusk was hurrying on and dark clipping its heels, so that the heads and shoulders were stained black against the flames. Hal could hear the guttural snarls and spits of them, as fired as the sparks that flew; it had been a long time since he had heard such a large crowd of men all speaking Lowland and it brought back ugly memories of last year, when he and others had padded, cat-cautious and sick to their stomachs, in the fester that was Berwick after the English had gone.

The cooked-meat smells didn’t help, for Hal knew the sweet, rich smell had nothing to do with food.

They came up through the huddle of wattle and daub that clustered round the priory like shellfish on a rock, crashing through the backland courts and the head riggs, splintering crude privy shelters, tossing torches, their own yelling drowned by the screams of the fleeing.

No looting or rape until the fighting is done, Wallace had said before they had set off, and Bruce, frowning at the impudence of the man, had been forced to agree, since the host was clearly his alone to command. At least there was no Buchan salting the wound of it – he was gone into his own lands, ostensibly to prevent Moray from joining with Wallace and managing to look the other way at the crucial moment.

Hal strode alongside outlaw roughs from all over Ayrshire, kerns and caterans from north of The Mounth, all here for love of this giant called Wallace and what he could do. Hal saw him stride up the rutted track between the mean houses, blood-dyed with flames, surrounded by whirling sparks.

He had a long tunic and a belted surcoat over that, no helmet and bare legs and feet; he was hardly different from the wild men he led save that he was head and shoulders above the tallest and carried a hand-and-a-half, a sword most men would have clutched in two fists but which he carried in one.

Hal and Sim and the Herdmanston men were on foot for there was little point in trying to plooter through flames and back courts on horses, but Bruce and his Carrick men were mounted, trying to force through the mob up the main track to Scone priory. Hal heard him yelling ‘A Bruce, a Bruce,’ to try to keep his men from spilling off the road into the foundering tangle on either side.

‘Christ save us,’ Sim Craw panted, shouldering some dark shape away from him with a curse. ‘What a mob. An army, bigod? A sorry rabble – the English will scatter this like chooks in a yard, first chance they get.’

It was true, but the English had no army here, only fleeing clerks, monks who wished they had never taken Edward’s offer of Scottish prebenderies and a few soldiers. There were screams ahead and Hal saw Wallace’s head come up, like a hound licking scent from the air. A snarling maurauder, wool cloak rolled up round his neck like a ruff, leaped a rickety fence, the woman he was chasing stumbling over her skirts and shrieking, he laughing with the mad joy of it.

Wallace never seemed to pause, but shot out his free hand and caught the man by the thick wool plaid, hauling him clean off his feet to dangle like a scruff-held cat, his toes scraping the road as Wallace walked steadily along.

‘I warned ye,’ Wallace growled into the man’s face and, in the light of the flames, Hal could see the utter terror burned into the man’s eyes. Then Wallace hurled him away like an apple core, striding on as if nothing had barred his way.

‘He’s feeling a wee bit black-bilious,’ Sim Craw offered, but Hal never had a chance to reply, for the first serious resistance burst on them.

They roared out from the great dark bulk of the stone priory, a handful of desperately charging soldiers, the sometime-men hired to help collect taxes or bring in accused. They had padded jacks, heater shields, spears and all the skills of one-armed cripples. They were local men, who did not want to fight at all and were not English – save the one who led them, waving a sword and shouting; Hal couldn’t hear what he said.

Surprise worked for them, all the same; they hit the leading straggle of Wallace men, who scattered away from them, too late. One, turning to run, was skewered and fell, screaming. The sword-armed leader hacked at another, who leaped away, cursing.

Wallace ploughed into them as if he was iron, the great sword whirring left and right, hardly pausing. He parried a spear thrust; his men rallied, sprang forward with hoarse shouts and daggers and spears of their own.

The soldiers scattered in their turn and a knot came stumbling towards Hal, who had blundered darkly into the midden of a back court, dragging his handful of men with him. Cursing, he saw Bangtail Hob and Ill Made Jock leaping as if in a dance with three men, while Sim Craw, spitting challenges and taunts, hurled himself at two more. Somewhere, he could hear Maggie’s Davey screaming.

Hal found a single dark shape in his way, saw the thrust of spear and batted it away with a yell, cut back, ducked, whirled and felt his second blow catch as if on cloth. There was a whimpering yelp and Hal saw the dark shape stagger away from him, run a few steps, then fall.

He followed, feeling the clotted black rot of the midden squelch under his boots. The shape mewed and clawed away from him, the fish heads and offal squeezing up between his fingers as he crawled.

Hal hit him on the back of the head, feeling the eggshell crunch of it, hearing the sharp cry. The shape went slack and still; Hal rolled him over, to make sure he was dead.

An unexceptional face, beardless and streaked with midden filth, a wish-mark clear on one cheek. A boy, no more.

Alive, but barely.

‘Mither,’ he said and Hal swallowed the bile rising in him, for he knew what his sword had done to the back of the boy’s head and that he would never see his mother.

‘Stop gawpin’ at him like a raw speugh,’ Sim growled in his ear. ‘Finish it . . .’

He broke off when he saw how old the boy was and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, looked at Hal’s face and knew his head was full of wee Johnnie.

Sim knelt and whipped out his boot knife, slit the throat, swift and expert, closing the boy’s eyes as he did so. Then he straightened, stepping in to break the shackle of Hal’s stare on the boy’s face.

‘Done and done – lose the memory o’ it,’ he gruffed, and Hal, blinking, nodded back into the screams and the flames. Bangtail Hob and Jock came up, supporting a third man between them.

‘Aye, we are braw rebels us, for we have gave this place freedom, certes,’ Bangtail offered cheerfully and the sagging man in the middle cursed. Hal saw it was Maggie’s Davey, then caught the reek of him and backed off a step.

‘Aye,’ declared Ill Made Jock bitterly, ‘well may ye shy away – you do not have to lug him around.’

‘I fell ower a privy,’ Davey moaned. ‘I have broke my neb, sure.’

‘I wish to Christ I had broke mine,’ Sim offered viciously, ‘so that I could not smell your stink. That must have been the De’il’s own jakes ye fell in.’

‘Bide here,’ Hal said to the three men, then jerked his head savagely at Sim Craw to follow him. He wanted away from the smell and the memory of the dead boy’s wish-marked face.

Sim looked at the dead boy. Nothing like wee John, he thought bleakly, but every young lad stared back at Hal with his dead son’s face, Sim knew. There will be more and more of wee dead boys when this rebellion takes hold, he added to himself, ducking under the eyes of the boy which, though closed, seemed to stare at him accusingly.

They came up through the screams and the flame-stains, crouching against lurid shadows that might have been friend or enemy – but, in the end, Hal and Sim realised there were no enemies left, only the madmen of Wallace’s army, fired by blood and running prey.

Hal stepped over a corpse, visible only in the dark because of the grey hair – a dark-robed Augustinian monk, his scapular sodden with his own blood. Sim grimaced and looked round at the fire and shadows and shrieking. Like Hell he thought, as painted on the wall of any church he had ever been in.

‘Priests yet,’ Hal said and left the rest unsaid. Boys and priests, a fine start to resistance and made no better by the sight of Bruce, sitting on his arch-necked, prancing warhorse in the kitchen gardens, scattering herbs and beets while waving a sword, his jupon glowing in the light so that the chevron on it looked as if the dark had slashed it. Christ’s Bones, he thought savagely – I will quit this madness, first chance I have . . .

‘Look,’ Sim said suddenly. ‘It’s yon Kirkpatrick.’

Hal saw the man, sliding off the back of a good horse and throwing the reins to Bruce, an act which was singular in itself – an earl holding the mount of his servant? Hal and Sim looked at each other, then Sim followed after, into the splintering of wood and breaking glass that was now the priory. With only the slightest of uneasy pauses, Hal padded after him.

They turned warily, swords out and gleaming; a shape lurched past, arms full of brasswork, saw them and turned away so hastily that a bowl dropped and clanged on the flagstones. Somewhere, there was singing and Hal realised they had lost Kirkpatrick in the shadows.

They moved towards the sound, found the door, opened it as cautious as mice from holes and felt the shadowed shift of bodies as the monks inside saw their two meagre candles waver in the sudden breeze from the open door. Someone whimpered.

‘A happy death is one of the greatest and the last blessings of God in this life,’ said a sonorous voice and Hal saw the black-robed Prior step into the light of one candle, his arms raised as if in surrender, his face turned to the rafter shadows.

‘We dedicate this Vigil to St Joseph, the Foster Father of our Judge and Saviour. His power is dreaded by the Devil. His death is the most singularly privileged and happiest death ever recorded as he died in the Presence and care of Jesus and the Blessed Mary. St Joseph will obtain for us that same privilege at our passage from this life to eternity.’

‘There is cheery,’ Sim muttered and someone came up close behind Hal and stuck his face over one shoulder, so that Hal saw the sweat-grease painted on it and smelled the man’s onion breath. A cattle-lifting hoor’s byblow, Hal thought viciously.

‘Here is the English and riches, then,’ the man spat out of the thicket of his beard and turned to call out to others.

Sim’s sword hilt smashed the words to silence, broke nose bones and sent the man to the flagstones as if he was a slaughtered ox.

‘May St Bega of Kilbucho have mercy on me,’ Sim declared, waving a cross-sign piously over the stunned man as he snored through the blood. Hal closed the door on the refuge of slow-chanting monks and looked at the felled cateran; he was sure his friends would come sooner rather than later and they had given the clerics a respite only.

‘Kirkpatrick,’ he said, shoving the fate of the monks to one side. Sim nodded. They went on.

‘Who is St Bega and where the bliddy hell is Kilbucho?’ demanded Hal as they crept along into the great, dark hall of the place, where only the shift of air allowed the impression of a lofty ceiling. Sim grinned.

‘Up near Biggar,’ Sim said mildly, peering left and right as they moved. ‘Very big on St Bee there, they are. I thought we could do with her charms here, for her only miracle.’

‘Oh aye? Good, was it?’

‘If ye had seen it,’ Sim said in a hissed whisper that did not move his lips, ‘ye’d have begged a blessin’. Seems there was a noble who handed a monastery a wheen o’lands, but a lawsuit later developed about their extent.’

He moved in crouching half-circles, stepping carefully and speaking in a hoarse whisper, half to himself.

‘The monks feared that they’d be ransacked. The day appointed for boundary-walk arrived – and there was a thick snowfall on all the surrounding lands but not a flake on the lands of the priory, so you could see where the boundary really was. The monks were smiling like biled haddies.’

‘We could use some of her frost in here,’ Hal answered, wiping his streaming face.

‘Christ be praised,’ Sim declared, chuckling.

‘For ever and ever,’ Hal responded piously, then held up a warning hand as they rounded a dark corner and came into an open area with an altar at one end and a series of fearsomely expensive painted glass windows staining the flagstones with coloured light from the fires that burned beyond. To the left was a door, slightly open, where light flickered and flared, falling luridly on the faded, peeling painting that graced one wall.

Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Hal noted. Apt enough . . .

Sim thumped him on the shoulder and nodded to where, clear and blood-dyed by flames, Kirkpatrick shoved papers methodically into a fire he had started in the middle of the room. His shadow bobbed and stretched like a mad goblin.

Hal started to move when one of the glass windows above the altar shattered in an explosion of shards and lead which clattered and spattered over the altar and flagstones. There was a burst of laughter from beyond, then a series of angry shouts.

Hal glanced back into the room and cursed – Kirkpatrick was gone. He and Sim went in, their boots crunching on broken pottery and more glass; Sim circled while Hal stamped at the flames of the fire, which threatened to spread along the thin rushes over the flagstones. In the end Sim suddenly poured the contents of a pot on it and the fire went out, sizzling and reeking of more than char.

‘What was in yon?’ Hal demanded and Sim glanced at the pot and made a face.

‘Ormsby pish, or I am no judge,’ he answered, and Hal, looking round, realised this was the Justiciar’s bedroom, with table, chair and straw-packed box bed; a wall hanging stirred in the night breeze through an open-shuttered window. Sim looked at the hanging, saw that it was a banner with a red shield of little crosses split diagonally by a gold bar.

Hal, making grunting noises of disgust, fished in the damp char for documents, squinting at them in the half-light and stuffing one or two inside his jack. There was a dovecote of similar rolls against one wall, the contents half-scattered on the straw, but Sim dragged down the fancy hanging, taken by the gilding work in it.

‘Ormsby’s arms,’ growled a voice, making both men whirl round to where Wallace bulked out the staining light beyond the doorway. He had sword and dagger in each hand and a smear of blood on a face split by a huge grin. He nodded at the limp cloth clutched in Sim’s fist.

‘Ormsby’s arms,’ he repeated. ‘We will add his head to them, by an’ by and mak’ a man of him.’

No-one spoke as Wallace stepped in, careful in bare feet, his head seeming to brush the roof.

‘A good thought, comin’ here, lads, but Ormsby has fled his bedroom. Out of yon unshuttered wind hole in his nightserk, so I am told. That must have been a sight – what have ye there?’

‘Papers,’ Hal declared, feeling the ones he had hidden burn his side as if still aflame. ‘There was a fire.’

Wallace peered and nodded, then looked at the chambered library on the wall.

‘State papers, nae doubt,’ he declared, ‘if the Justiciar of Scotland saw fit to try and burn them. So they might be of use – when I find a body that can read the Latin better than me.’

‘It will be hard,’ Hal said, not correcting Wallace on who had been doing the burning. ‘Sim put the flames out with a pint of the great man’s pish.’

‘Did he so?’ Wallace laughed and shook his head. ‘Well, I will find a wee clever man with a poor nose to read them.’

Hal, who was also uncomfortably aware that he was not admitting his own reading skills, laughed uneasily and Wallace strode back to the door, then paused and turned.

‘Mind you,’ he said, innocent as a priests’s underdrawers, ‘I am wondering why yon chiel of The Bruce – Kirkpatrick is it?’

Hal nodded, feeling the burn of the eyes, while the sconce torch did bloody things to the Wallace face.

‘Aye,’ Wallace mused. ‘Him. Now why would he birl his hurdies out that self-same unshuttered window not long since, as if the De’il was nipping his arse?’

He looked from Hal to Sim and back. Outside, something smashed and there were screams. Wallace shifted slightly.

‘I had best at least try to bring them to order,’ he said, his smile stained with fire, ‘though it is much like herdin’ cats. I will seek you later, lads.’

His departure left a hole in the room into which silence rushed. Then Sim let out his breath and Hal realised he had been holding his own.

‘I do not ken about the English,’ Sim said softly, ‘but he scares the shite out of me.’

Nor is he as green as he is kail-looking, Hal thought and decided it was time the pair of them were elsewhere.

The quiet of the chapel refuge was feted with a blaze of expensive waxen light and the soft hiss of babbled prayers, so that the flames flickered as the huddled canons gasped for air.

Cramped as it was, a clear space existed where Bruce knelt, though he did not bow his head. There was a fire in him, a strange, glowing flow that seemed to run through his whole body, so fierce at times that he trembled and jerked with it.

He looked at the painted walls of the chapel. In a cowshed, Mary nursed the newborn Child by her naked breast in a bed, while Joseph watched from a wooden chair to the right. They smiled at Bruce. In the foreground, the heads of an ox and an ass turned and regarded him with their bright, mournful eyes. An angel stood and regarded him coldly in the background and above, in Latin, the words The Annunciation to the Shepherds seemed to glow like the fire in his body.

Bruce bowed his head, unable to look at the face of the smiling Virgin, or the disapproval of the angel. The deed was done, the secret safe according to the gospel of Kirkpatrick, breathing hard from having had to run from burning the evidence.

More sin to heap on his stained soul. Bruce thought of the man he had killed, a perfect stroke as he cantered past the running figure; it was only afterwards he had seen it to be an old priest. Longshanks had replaced a lot of the livings here with prelates of his own and these were, Bruce knew, much hated and fair game for the lesser folk – but a priest, English or not, was a hard death on the soul of a noble, never mind an earl.

The Curse of Malachy – his hands trembled and the candle in it spilled wax down on to the black-haired back of it, cooling to perfect pearls.

The Curse of Malachy. His father had given the Clairveaux church where the saint was buried a grant of Annandale land in return for perpetual candles, and Bruce, for all he sneered at the spine his father seemed to have lost, knew that it was because of the Curse of Malachy. Every Bruce feared it as they feared nothing else.

The canons chanted and he tried to blot out the Curse and the thought that it had led him to slay one of their brothers on holy ground. Innocents, he thought. The innocents always die.

He saw the tiles in front of him, an expanse of cracked grey. Letters wavered, small and faint, in the top corner of one and felt a desperate need to see them clearly. Squinting, he read them: ‘D i us Me Fecit. The mark of the maker, Bruce thought. Alfredius? Godfridus?

Then it came to him. Dominus Me Fecit. God Made Me. He felt his hand tremble so violently that the candle went out and wax spilled on to his knuckles. The mark of the maker. God Made Me. I am what I am.

‘My lord of Carrick.’

The voice brought him round and his sight wavered, blinded by staring at the candle and the tiles.

‘God Made Me,’ he muttered.

‘As he did us all,’ the voice answered, gruff and fruited with good living. Wishart, he recognised.

The chanting stopped as all the heads turned; the Prior stumbled forward and knelt while Wishart thrust out one hand to have his ring kissed. The ring was not visible under the armoured gauntlet and the Prior hesitated, then placed his lips on the cold, articulated iron segments.

Wishart hardly looked at him, watching Bruce get up. The Malachy Curse, no doubt, he thought to himself, seeing the grim face on the young lord of Carrick. It had hagged his father all his life, but Wishart had hoped it had passed this one by.

He knew the tale of it, vaguely – something about a previous Annandale Bruce promising a priest that he would release a condemned felon and then hanging him in secret. The said priest was angered and cursed the Bruces – which did not seem very saintly to Wishart, but God moves mysteriously and that is what Malachy eventually became. A saint.

The Bruces had been living under the shadow of it ever since and there was something, Wishart admitted to himself, in young Robert’s assertion that it had unmanned his father completely. Hardly surprising, Wishart thought, when you find that a canting, irritating wee priest you have as a thwarted dinner guest later turns out to be Malachy, one of God’s anointed, with the power of angels at his disposal. At the very least, you would have to question your luck. More seriously, every sick cow, murrained sheep and blighted crop was laid at the door of the Curse, so that the Bruces had sullen and growling commons to constantly appease.

‘I was praying,’ Bruce declared accusingly, and the Bishop blinked, looked down and waved the Prior to his feet.

‘So you were,’ he replied, as cheerfully as he could manage, ‘and I will be joining you afore long, mark me. Prior, your robing room will be perfect for a quiet meeting.’

The Prior bobbed. He was not about to beg for what he knew all the canons wanted – an end to the plunder and pillage and an assurance that no more robed prelates would be killed – for it did not seem the time for it, when the Bishop of Glasgow stood in maille coat and braies and coif. Ironically, the mace dangling from one armoured fist was the only reminder that he was a Bishop of the Church in Scotland and forbidden to use an edge on any man – though not, it seemed, forbidden to bludgeon one to death.

Bruce looked at the warrior Bishop, thinking the old man might expire of apoplexy wearing all that padding and metal in this heat. Thinking, also, that Wishart had the strained look of a man either unable to cope with a bad turd or bad news.

He followed the lumbering Bishop into the cramped, hot robing room and was surprised to find Wallace there, sitting on the only bench and leaning on his hand-and-a-half. He made no move to get up with due deference, which irritated Bruce, though he forgot it the instant Wishart spoke.

‘The Lords Percy and Clifford have raised forces and are marching up through Dumfries,’ Wishart said without preamble. ‘Fifty thousand men, or so I am told.’

Wallace never blinked, but his fists closed tighter on the hilt of the sword and Bruce heard the point of it grind into the stone floor. He saw Wishart’s stricken face and knew the truth of matters at once.

‘You had counted on more time,’ he accused and Wishart nodded grimly.

‘Until next Spring,’ he growled. ‘Edward is far to the south with an army he wants to take to Flanders to fight the French and he and the likes of the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford are in a sulk ower baron rights and tolts on wool. I didnae think there would be a force got ready until too late in the season, so would wait out the winter and come in Spring. I had . . .’

‘You had forgot the English Marcher lords,’ Wallace interrupted, and his stare was cold on Wishart’s red, sweat-sheened face. ‘You had forgot the shadow of Longshanks is long, Bishop, and growing ever closer. How is that from a man who is, folk tell me, a master of cunning?’

Wishart clanked as he flapped one dismissive hand.

‘I did not expect Percy nor Clifford to raise forces,’ he grunted. ‘I thought they would not thole the cost of it, since they made such noises about the money for Edward’s French affair. Besides – Percy is De Warenne’s grandson and would not want to make the old Earl of Surrey look a fool for governing Scotland as Viceroy from his estates in England.’

Bruce laughed, nasty and harsh.

‘Aye, well,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘There is you, scheming away and thumping every pulpit about how this is a kingdom, a realm separate from the English and with its own king – so much, it seems, that you have lost sight of what the English think.’

‘Aye, ye would ken that well enow,’ Wallace answered blackly, and Bruce’s smile had no mirth in it that any of the other two could see.

‘Percy and Clifford do not like Edward’s foreign wars,’ Bruce said bitterly. ‘But this is not a foreign war. Edward treats these lands not as another realm but as part of his own – so Percy and Clifford cannot avoid raising forces to put down a home rebellion, no matter how it makes grandda De Warenne look. To do otherwise is treason. Besides – Edward is coming and none of his lords in the north will want to face him without having done something. Even the Earl of Surrey will have to lever himself off his De Warenne arse and play the soldier once more.’

Wishart looked miserably at the floor, then straightened, blew out of pursed, fleshy lips and nodded.

‘Aye, right enough,’ he said. ‘It was a misjudgement. Now we have to deal with it.’

‘Deal with it?’ Bruce bellowed. ‘How do manage that, d’ye think? Even allowing for your spies seeing triple, the English have too many men, it appears. A fifth of fifty thousand would be enough, for nothing I have seen persuades me that this rabble Wallace leads will stand in the open field against them.’

He broke off, breathing heavily, then nodded grimly at Wallace.

‘No offence.’

‘None ta’en,’ Wallace replied, suddenly cheerful. ‘You have the right of it, for sure – mine are men best fighting out of the hills and woods, my lords. So that is where we will go.’

Wishart looked as if he would protest and Bruce felt a sharp stab of anger at the presumption of Wallace, about to up and go without so much as a by-your-leave bow – but he swallowed the bile of it and nodded soberly.

‘Aye, that will be the way of it – but you should go with what men you have and what will go with you who are free of obligation to myself and the other nobles.’

Wallace turned narrowed eyes and gazed at Bruce from under lowered brows.

‘And yourself, lord of Carrick?’

‘I will gather up the Douglas, the Bishop here and others and we will make what resistance we can from our fortresses. The English will have to deal with us and that will buy you time to cause havoc.’

Wallace stared at Bruce a long time, then slowly nodded.

‘Longshanks is coming. This will cost you dear,’ he said, looking from Wishart to Bruce and back.

‘In the noble cause,’ Wishart declared and Wallace clasped them both, wrist to wrist, then went out, silent as a wraith for all his bulk. It suddenly seemed to the others that the room had doubled in size. No-one spoke for a moment, then Wishart cleared his throat.

‘And the truth?’ he demanded. Bruce looked coldly at him.

‘My purpose in joining this now-failed enterprise has already been achieved,’ he said pointedly. ‘The mason is buried anew.’

Wishart nodded weary agreement.

‘So we will get ourselves to Irvine with what men we have and prepare to negotiate,’ Bruce added. Wishart’s belly quivered under the armour as he dragged himself haughtily upright. ‘Ye’d yield? Without a fight?’

Bruce’s bottom lip stuck out like a shovel and Wishart, who knew the sign well, found some caution.

‘The king himself will come north,’ Bruce growled angrily. ‘Like the black wind he is. Wallace will fight – he has to, for he has no lands to his own name and is an outlaw, no more. You lose nothing bar some dignity for having to kneel and kiss Edward’s ring, for the Church lands are sacrosanct.’

He thrust his mace of a face into Wishart’s own.

‘But we,’ he said, slapping the chevroned jupon, ‘risk losing everything. We, the community of the realm you depend on to free it. Edward will come north with his scowl and his evil eye – I could lose Carrick and my father Annandale. God’s Blood, Wishart, I place my rights to the crown in jeopardy here. Douglas will lose his Lanark lands – do you want us all fastened up in Berwick, or the Tower?’

More to the point of it, Wishart thought bitterly, is that Buchan and the rest of the Comyn, ostensibly supporting Edward but covertly allowing Moray’s rebels free rein, would come out smelling as if they’d been dipped in crushed rose petals. They play this game of kings more skilfully than the young Bruce, he saw, who needed some cunning heads round him.

‘Of course,’ he said, bowing to the inevitable, ‘negotiation is tricky business. Involved and sometimes lengthy. And what of Wallace?’

Bruce grunted sourly.

‘Wallace owes nothing save allegiance to a deposed king who wishes nothing to do with his kingdom,’ he growled. ‘He owns no lands, suffers the worry of no tenant and looks down his sword at each man he meets, asking only if he is for The Wallace. If not, he is against him.’

‘No bad thing in these days,’ Wishart countered defiantly.

‘Simplistic,’ Bruce spat back over his shoulder as headed for the door. ‘And probably brief. Whether negotiations are long or short, it will come out as it always does – with us on our knees.’

He paused and turned.

‘Save for Wallace,’ he added. ‘He is of little account. Longshanks will never forgive him.’

I am of account, he was thinking as he spoke. God Made Me – and he made me to be a king.

The liberators of Scone toasted each other, their hero Wallace and even Bruce and the bishops. The alehouse was the only building not ransacked or burned, more sacred than any church to men with a thirst on them. Dark save for a few sconced torches gasping for breath in the cloy of the place, it heaved with bodies, stank of vomit and piss and stale sweat.

Sim, by main force, had found a corner and two scarred horn cups to blow the froth off, but Hal took time drinking his, squinting at the damp yellowed, blackened scraps he had pulled out from under his jack.

‘What does it say, then?’ the unlettered Sim demanded, loosening the ties of his own studded, padded jack and trying to struggle out of it in the roasting heat of the place.

‘If there was light I would tell ye,’ Hal muttered. It was too dark to see other than that the writing was cramped and in Latin. Still, he was fairly sure it concerned the death of the mason and was an investigation of his clothing, which had included a beaver hat tucked into his belt and cut in the Flemish style. Apart from that and a signature – Bartholomew Bisset – Hal could make out nothing more; he would have to wait for daylight.

‘Kirkpatrick was burning this?’ Sim muttered and paused as a loud jeering and catcalling erupted. A woman had come in.

‘Aye, so it seems,’ Hal said. The why of it escaped him, which he mentioned, sipping the beer and grimacing, for it was the temperature of broth. He felt the sweat sliding down him – the summer night was muggy and the rough walls of the place were leprous and dripping.

‘Christ, I cannot think in here,’ Hal said and started to rise, only to find the woman in front of him, so sudden that he recoiled.

‘My son,’ she said, her face twisted and worn with grief. ‘Have ye seen him? A wee boy only. I have looked everywhere. Ye’ll know him clear, for he has a wish-mark on his face.’

She paused and managed a wan smile, but it was clear the tears had not all been wrung out of her on a long, fruitless night of search.

‘Strawberry,’ she added. ‘I ken well wishing for strawberries afore he was born. I had a wee passion for them . . .’

The boy’s face, smeared with dung and midden filth, the strawberry stain bright in the flames . . .

‘No,’ Hal said desperately. ‘No.’

The lies choked him and he dived headfirst into anger, the sudden face of his own dead son a knife-sharp image etched so bright he was blinded by it.

‘Get away, wummin,’ he blustered, ducking past her grief and hope, heading out of the linen-thick fug into the smoke-stained breath of the street. ‘Am I the fount of knowledge? What do I ken of your son, mistress . . . ?’

He banged past her into the rutted street and stood, trembling like a whipped dog, sucking in air lashed with char and burned meat; after the inside of the alehouse, even that seemed nectarine. He gulped it and shook his head. Johnnie . . . the loss of him was an ache that only added to the misery of this night, this entire enterprise.

Christ’s Bones – could matters get worse?

‘Wallace sends for us,’ said the growl of Sim’s voice, and his blackness bulked up at Hal’s shoulder, his face pale and sheened, his stare pointed. Over his shoulder a man waited, dark and impatient, to take them to The Wallace.

‘He wants to ask aboot a dead mason,’ Sim added mournfully.

Wallace was in Ormsby’s chambers, stirring the half-burned papers with the tip of a bollock dagger, while bare-legged kerns grinned savagely at a trembling canon. Outside, the rest of Wallace’s army had muted itself to a roar.

‘I have had a wee chance to consider matters,’ Wallace said, slowly and in good English, Hal noted, so that the priest could follow it easily enough. Wallace jerked his head at the priest, but kept his eyes on Hal and Sim.

‘This is Brother Gregor,’ he said, while Hal stood, feeling like he was six and in trouble with his da. ‘Brother Gregor has been . . . persuaded . . . to help. He reads Latin and had it dinned into him in Hexham Priory.’

He broke off and grinned at the shaking English monk.

‘I well ken how that feels,’ he said with some sympathy, ‘though I never learned as much as I should, for my teachers were not inclined to belt me more than the once.’

Hal flicked a look at Brother Gregor, who stood with his eyes down and his hands trembling; he had an idea what sort of persuasion had been used – but why would you need to threaten a priest to read some documents? Why would a priest refuse in the first place?

‘Brawlie,’ Wallace said admiringly when Hal muttered this out. ‘Your mind could cut yourself, it is that sharp – and so ye are the very man for what I have in mind.’

‘Which is?’ Hal ventured.

Wallace turned to the nearest kern and whatever he did with eyes and nods got Brother Gregor huckled out, leaving Wallace alone with Hal and Sim; the night wind sighed in through the unshuttered window, stirring the Ormsby wall hanging which Sim had replaced.

‘I guddled about in the slorach of this,’ Wallace said, indicating the charred, damp mess of papers that Hal had not dared take once Wallace had spotted them, ‘and fished out some choice morsels – but the canons of this place refused to read them.’

He paused and looked at them.

‘Only yin man could put the fear of God into them over this and that is the wee English Prior. Now where did he find courage for that?’

Bishop Wishart, Hal thought at once, and said so. Wallace nodded slowly.

‘Aye. Promises made atween Christians, as it were. Well, I then sought Brother Gregor and almost had to hold his feet to the fire to persuade him to the work,’ Wallace went on. ‘In the end, he came up with a Scone mason red-murdered near Douglas and a report in a wee, crabbed hand by some scribbler called Bartholomew Bisset. That man is a notary to Ormsby. He has gone out the window as well but I will get him and put him to the question.’

He broke off and looked steadily at Hal until the eyes seemed to be burning holes; Hal fought not to look away and eventually Wallace nodded.

‘Ye are joined to Bruce,’ he said and then grinned and picked the polished table idly with his dagger point. ‘But not willing. Nor favouring me neither.’

‘I thought we were all on the same side,’ Hal lied and then felt ashamed at the scornful stare he had back for his false naivety, admitting it with a shrug.

‘Bruce and the Bishops and others are off to Irvine,’ Wallace declared and cocked one eyebrow to show what he thought of that.

‘Percy and Clifford are coming with an English army and Wishart has made a right slaister of matters, so Scotland’s gentilhommes are waving their hands and sounding off like a kist of whistles. I am away to the hills and the trees and most of the fighting men are with me – sorry, but a wheen of yer own are among them.’

Hal knew this already; the fealtied Herdmanston men, all five of them, were with him as well as one or two of the sokemen – free men holding lands under Herdmanston jurisdiction -but the bulk of Hal’s March riders, out for plunder, had joined Wallace.

‘Welcome men,’ Wallace admitted, smiling. ‘Nearest I have to heavy horse.’

‘They will run at the sight of such,’ Sim growled and Wallace nodded.

‘As will I,’ he answered vehemently and laughed along with Sim.

‘Here’s the bit,’ he went on, losing the smile. ‘Ye can come with me or go with Bruce. He says he an’ the rest of the bold community of the realm are away to put their fortresses in order.’

He looked sideways, sly as a secret.

‘That’s as may be.’

Hal looked at him and saw the truth – felt the truth in the kick of his insides. They would truce their way out of it and the relief washed into his face.

Wallace saw that Hal had worked it out – saw, too, the reaction and nodded slowly.

‘Aye,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Ye have lands to lose, same as they. Not me, though. I do not think there will a kiss of peace for me, eh?’

Hal acknowledged it with a blank face and the shame-sickness that drove bile into his throat. Sim, realist that he was, merely grunted agreement; it was the safest way out of the mire they had plootered into – truced back into the King’s peace and forgiven all their sins on a promise not to do it again.

‘Well,’ Wallace said. ‘Go with Bruce then and go with God. Still – I wish I had yer help. I would like to root out why Kirkpatrick tried to burn these papers, why Wishart bound these wee priests to keep their lips stitched – and what the bold Bruce interest is in it.’

‘Ye want my help?’ Hal asked. ‘Even though I am in the Bruce camp?’

‘In,’ Wallace pointed out, ‘but not of.’

‘For a man who sees everyone not for him as against him, that’s a quim hair of difference to put yer trust in,’ Hal answered and Wallace grinned and raised the dagger, so that the torchlight stepped carefully along the razor edges.

‘An edge as thin as this,’ he admitted, ‘which I have been entrusting my life to for a while now.’

‘Still,’ he added, standing suddenly and shoving the dagger back in its belt-sheath, ‘ye are done with the business. Go with God, Sir Hal – though admit to me, afore ye do, that you are curious ower this matter.’

Hal did so with a grudging nod.

‘I will not be a spy against Bruce,’ he added firmly, ‘nor for him against yourself.’

Wallace towered over him, placing one grimed ham-hand on his shoulder; just the weight of it felt like a maille hauberk.

‘Aye, I jaloused that and would not ask. But mark me, Sir Hal – soon ye will needs decide what cote ye will wear. The longer ye take, the more badly it will fit.’

Hal and Sim had stumbled back into the chares and vennels of the priory garth, where light was spilling a sour stain on the horizon as dawn fought the dark over ownership of the hills.

He could scarcely believe that he had stumbled into rebellion so easily and offered a prayer of thanks to God that there was a way out of it; all he had to do was sit at Irvine with The Bruce and the others and make sure that the lesser lords such as himself were not overlooked in the negotiations.

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