Prince of Thorns

“I know, I hate him too.” I flipped my visor.

The thing about flails is you’ve got to keep them moving. An important point that Sir William forgot when he found himself staring into an unfamiliar face. I took the opportunity to urge Alain’s horse forward, and to its credit the beast was fast enough to let me put four foot of razor-edged sword past Sir William’s guard.

It’s not the done thing to set to bloody slaughter at tourney. There’s rarely a Grand Mêlée in which somebody doesn’t die, but it’s normally a day later under the knives of the chirurgeons. The foe is generally unhorsed, or stunned in the saddle. A few fractures and a lot of bruising are the normal consolation prizes distributed among the entrants who don’t win. When a knight gets too thirsty for blood, he often finds himself meeting his opponent’s friends and family in unpleasant circumstances shortly after.

I of course had a rather different view of things. The fewer armed men left able-bodied after the tourney, the better. Besides, a broadsword isn’t the weapon to batter out submissions. It’s for killing, pure and simple.

Sir Arkle charged me, galloping nearly the full length of the field, a felled knight in his wake. As he closed the gap, he set to swinging his mace in a tight pattern just out of kilter with his horse’s gait. It looked worryingly well-practised.

If the sight of a heavy warhorse thundering toward you doesn’t make at least part of you want to up and run, then you’re a corpse. There’s no stopping a thing like that. A thousand pounds of muscle and bone, sweating and panting as it hurtles your way.

I rolled out of the saddle as Sir Arkle arrived. I didn’t just duck. He was ready for that. I fell. And yes it hurt. But not so much that it stopped me sticking old Alain’s sword into that blur of thrashing legs as Arkle hurtled past.

That’s another thing that isn’t done in tourney. You go for the man, not the horse. A trained warhorse is frighteningly expensive, and be assured that when you break one, the owner is going to come after you for the price of a replacement.

I levered myself up, cursing, splattered with horse blood.

Sir Arkle lay under his steed, deathly quiet and still, in contrast to the horse’s screaming and thrashing.

A lot of animals will suffer horrific injury in silence, but when they decide to complain, there’s no holds barred. If you’ve heard the screams of rabbits as they’re put to the knife, you’ll know what racket even such small creatures can make. It took two swings to fully silence Arkle’s horse. Another two for good measure to take its head off.

By the time I’d finished, I’d become the archetypal Red Knight, my armour bright with arterial blood. I had the stink of battle in my nose now, blood and shit, the taste of it on my lips, salt with sweat.

There weren’t many of us left standing in the tourney ring. Sir James stood amid a scatter of fallen knights at the far end, battling a man in fire-bronzed armour. Closer to hand an unhorsed knight with a war-hammer had just laid out his opponent. And that was it.

The hammer-man limped toward me, the iron plates around his knee buckled and grating.

“Yield.” I didn’t move. Didn’t so much as raise my sword.

A moment of silence. Nothing but the distant clash of weapons as Sir James of Hay put down his man. Nothing but the faint pitter-pat of blood dripping from my plate-mail.

Hammer-man let his hammer fall. “You’re not Alain Kennick.” He turned and limped toward the white tent where the healers waited.

Half of me wanted the fight. More than half of me wondered if a hammer between the eyes wasn’t a whole lot more appetizing than meeting with Corion again. It seemed impossible that he didn’t already know I was here, that those empty eyes hadn’t seen through Alain’s armour at the first moment. I glanced toward the stands, closer now. He watched me, they all did, but this was the man who’d given me the power to fell Brother Price, the man who whispered from the hook-briar, who poisoned my every move, pulling the strings toward hidden ends. Had he drawn me here, to this moment, tugging on his puppet lines?

Sir James of Hay put an end to my speculation. He dismounted, presumably having noted my lack of respect for horseflesh, and advanced with purpose in his stride. The sunlight coaxed few glimmers from the scarred plates of his armour. His heavy axe had done good work today. I saw blood on the armour spike.

“You’re a scary one,” I said.

He came on, stepping around Arkle’s horse.

“Not a talker?” I asked.

“Yield, boy,” he said. “One chance.”

“I’m not sure we even have choices, James, let alone chances. You should read—”