‘Get the King away,’ de Valence said to d’Argentan, shouting above the howling din.
‘You get him away,’ d’Argentan replied tersely. ‘I am unaccustomed to fleeing.’
He reined round and de Valence, at once heart-leaped with admiration and cursing him for dereliction, took the King’s bridle in one metalled fist and started to force a way through the press to safety.
D’Argentan was all fire. As he had been in his youth, he thought, exultant and roaring with the moment. Third-best knight in Christendom – he would raise that ranking by seeking out and slaying the Bruce himself, if he had to carve through the entire Scotch army to do it.
Beginning with that weeping little scut in the iron hat …
Dog Boy saw the knight ride at him. It was the same one who had killed Patrick, a red figure with little silver goblets on his jupon, shieldless but with his sword drawn back ready to sweep down. Dog Boy was blinded by snot and tears and could not be sure if it was for Patrick, or all the others, or simply rage.
Or for himself, who was surely about to die. He flung the axe, almost wearily, in a last futile gesture.
D’Argentan saw it coming and raised his shield to block it. The shield I do not have, he remembered at the last. The axe whirled over his forearm and struck him on the chest, bouncing off. He had time to bless the padding and maille before he lost his balance, like a tyro, and fell with a clatter as the warhorse crow-hopped delicately over the dead.
There was a moment of disbelief, of sheer incredulity. Third-best knight in Christendom. It came to him then how that had been when he was younger, for a rank beginner would not have fallen so easily. Then d’Argentan realized he was flat on his back, half-draped over a dead horse, and began to struggle upright.
The figure landed on him with both feet, driving all the air out of him, so that he whooped and gasped and knew, with all the experience of his tourney years, that something had snapped in his chest.
‘Bastard,’ the man snarled and d’Argentan, struggling weakly, felt the visor wrenched up, stared into the black-bearded hate of the Scot; slaver dripped on his cheek.
He had time to feel unutterably weary, to wonder if God would forgive him his many sins.
Then Dog Boy drove the dagger into his eye and roared out revenge for Patrick.
‘On them,’ he bawled out, looking right and left. ‘They fail.’
ISABEL
I woke striped with light. I do not often sleep in the cage, save when the heat is oppressive as now; it does not happen often in Scotland. It annoys the gawpers, who come to see a scowl of witch, not a wee auld wummin snoring. Constance stirred me, then begged me to come into the chamber to eat the meal she had brought and was so flustered and secretive that I did, wondering. She presented her daring gift – mother’s milk. Brought from a wet nurse whose wee charge died, she told me, greatly daring. I did not want it, especially from a wet nurse whose charge had died – who was to say it was not the milk?I did not say this, for I knew why Constance had brought it. She would say it was because it was the perfect food for the old and invalid and begging my pardon as she did so, for insinuations – but it was all because of Sister Petra of Cologne, whose story had just reached Constance’s ears. That nun, so the story went, had eaten nothing else, nor moved much. She closeted herself in a tower and drank the mother’s milk through a reed in the door, waiting – so it was said – for her lover to come for her and she would have the face of the girl of fourteen he knew when they parted and she was forced to the veil. I did not ruin it for Constance by telling her the rest of the tale – how the other nuns grew tired of milking the village women, who were tired themselves of being heifers. So they simply stopped and Sister Petra, too weak to move after years of lying around, could not get out and died when her exertions at the door snapped her heartstring. When the nuns found Christian charity and courage enough to break down the door of the tower they found her, emaciated, wizened, dead and with the face of a 70-year-old, which matched her age to perfection.
I will not need mother’s milk to preserve my face for Hal – he will come before I age out another year. I read it in the pattern of the mother’s milk I threw in the bailey when Constance had gone. If Malise wants a witch to burn I can give him one, for God is dead and Heaven is ugly.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bannockburn
Feast of St John the Baptist, June 1314