tree was heavier than I had imagined and for a moment I didn’t think I could topple it. I braced my legs and put my shoulder to the task. The thing fell without a sound, then exploded into a million pieces against the steps. I could have blinded half of Ancrath’s aristocracy had their eyes been on the throne rather than the fight before them. As it was I peppered their backs with shards of glass. The costumed throng at the base of the royal dais turned into a screaming mass. Noble-born women ran their hands through hair confined by diamond tiaras, and brought them out sliced and bloody. Lords in thread-of-gold slippers, coiled in the latest fashions, hopped howling on a carpet of broken glass.
Sir Makin and Sir Galen lowered their swords and watched in amazement.
When Father stood, everyone fell silent, cuts or no cuts.
Everyone except me. He opened his mouth to speak and I spoke first.
‘The lessons Makin learned on the road did not include tourney games. Wars are not won with jousting or chivalry. The lessons Makin learned are the same lessons I learned. Unfortunately Sir Makin would rather die than offend his king by demonstrating them.’ I didn’t raise my voice. That kept them quiet. ‘Father,’ I turned to face him direct. ‘I’ll show you what I’ve learned. I’ll fight your pet Teuton. If a man of my little experience can defeat your champion then you should be happy to reinstate Sir Makin, neh?’ I fell back into road-speak, hoping to stir his anger.
‘You’re not a man, boy, and your challenge is an insult to Sir Galen, not worthy of consideration.’ He spoke through clenched teeth. I’d never seen him so angry. In fact, I’d never seen him angry.
‘An insult? Maybe.’ I felt a smile bubbling up and let it show. ‘But I am a man. I came of age three days ago, Father. I’m fit for marriage now. A valuable commodity. And I claim this fight as my Year Gift. Or would you turn your back on three centuries of Ancrath tradition and deny me my coming of age boon?’
The veins in his neck stood proud and his hands flexed as if hungry for a sword. I didn’t think it safe to count on his good will.
‘If I die the succession will be clear,’ I said. ‘Your Scorron whore will give you a new son, and you’ll be rid of me. Gone for good, like Mother and William. And you won’t have to send dear old Father Gomst trawling the mire to prove it.’ I took a moment to bow toward the Queen. ‘No offence, your majesty.’
‘Galen!’ Father’s voice was a roar. ‘Kill this devil, for he’s no son of mine!’
I ran then, crunching emerald leaves under hard leather. Sir Galen charged from the centre star, trailing his black sword behind him, shouting for my blood. He came fast enough, but the fight with Makin had taken some of his wind. I knocked an old woman from my path, she went down spitting teeth, pearls spilling from her broken necklace.
I won free of the courtiers and kept on running, angled away from Galen. He’d given up the shouting but I could hear him behind me, the thud of his boots and the rasp of his breath. He must have been a hand above six foot, but lighter armour and fresher wind made up for my shorter legs. As we ran, I pulled out my sword. There were charms enough in its edge to put a notch in that Turkman blade. I threw it away. I didn’t need the weight.
Little space remained to me. The left wall loomed just yards ahead, Galen moments behind.
I’d been aiming for one guardsman in particular, a younger fellow with fair sideburns and an open mouth. By the time he realized I wasn’t veering away, it was too late. I hit him with the vambrace over my right forearm. The blow hammered his head back against the wall and he slid down it with no further interest in the proceedings. I caught the crossbow in my left hand, turned, and shot Galen through the bridge of the nose.
The bolt barely made it through his skull. It’s one of the drawbacks in keeping them loaded, but still it should have been tightened only hours before. In any event, most of the Teuton’s brain left by the back of his head and he fell down very dead.
The silence would have been utter but for the whimpering of the old woman on the floor back by the dais. I looked back over the crowd of nobles, cut and bloody, at Galen lying with his arms flung out, at the sparkling ruins of the glass tree reaching toward the throne-room doors.
‘Was the show to your liking, Father?’ I asked. ‘I’ve heard that the court has been quiet in Sir Makin’s absence.’
And for the first time in my life I heard my father laugh. A chuckle at first, then louder, then a howling gale such that he had to hold his throne to stand.
21
‘Get out.’ Father’s laughing fit left him without warning, snuffed like a candle. He spoke into the silence. ‘Get out. I’ll talk to the boy now.’ The boy, not ‘my son’. I didn’t miss that edge.
And they went. The high and the mighty, the lords and the ladies, the guards helping the injured, two of them dragging Galen’s corpse. Makin followed after Galen, crunch, crunch, crunch, across the broken glass, as if to make sure no life remained in him. Katherine let herself be led by a table knight. She stopped though, at the base of the dais, and gave me a look as if she’d just that moment seen me for what I was. I sketched her a mocking bow, a reflex, like reaching for a blade. It hurt to see the hatred on her face, pure and astonished, but sometimes a bit of pain’s just what we need: to cauterize the wound, burn out the infection. She saw me and I saw her, both of us stripped of pretence in that empty moment, newlyweds naked for their conjugals. I saw her for the same weakness I’d recognized when first we rode back into the green fields of Ancrath. That soft seduction of need and want, an equation of dependence that eases under the skin, so slow and sweet, only to lay a man open at the very time he most needs his strength. Oh, it hurt right enough, but I finished my bow and watched her back as they led her out.
The Queen went too, flanked by knights right and left, slightly awkward down the steps, a hint of a waddle. I could see the swell of her belly now, as she walked. My half-brother if Sageous’s prediction held true. Heir to the throne should I die. Just a swelling now, just a hint, but sometimes that’s all it takes. I recalled Brother Kane from the road, cut on the bicep when we took the village of Holt.
‘’T’ain’t nothing, little Jorgy,’ he’d said when I offered to heat a knife. ‘Some farm boy with a rusty hoe. It don’t go deep.’
‘It’s swelling,’ I told him. ‘Needs hot iron.’ If it’s not too late already.
‘Fuck that, not for some farm boy with a hoe,’ Kane said.
He died hard, did Kane. Three days later and his arm lay as thick as my waist, weeping pus greener than snot, and with a stench so bad we left him screaming to die alone. It don’t go deep – but sometimes the shallow cut bites to the bone if you don’t deal with it hard and fast.
Just a swelling. I watched the Queen go.
Sageous stayed. His eyes kept returning to the shattered ruin of the tree. You’d have thought he’d lost his lover.
‘Pagan, see to the Queen,’ Father said. ‘She may need calming.’
A dismissal, plain and simple, but Sageous was too distracted to see it. He looked up from the glittering remains of the trunk I’d toppled. ‘Sire, I…’
You what, heathen? You want something? It’s not your place to want.
