‘Sim at work,’ Dog Boy answered grimly and they climbed on.
Up on the battlements, Aggie had had enough of crooning and hoping. She turned to go, paused to wave farewell to Leckie, but saw only the vague shape in the far shadows, so she shrugged and turned away heading for the stairhead; the babe wailed a little as the rain hit his wee face.
‘Hush you, hush you,’ she sang, folding him into the safe warmth of a cloak corner. ‘The Black Douglas will no’ get ye the night, wee lamb.’
‘In truth, wee lamb,’ said a voice in her ear, even as a horned, calloused hand closed off her screams, ‘your ma is almost completely mistook in that regard.’
Frixco, following Hal to the top of the wind of stair that led to the hall, paused uncertainly. Screams had never been part of a Shrove feast before. Nor the clash of steel and shouts – perhaps a fight had broken out? Frixco was anxious not to miss it and turned to scowl and urge Hal on, saw the Prisoner’s face and whirled to look behind him.
Horror shrieked up the steps at him, one eye dangling from a bloody cord, his face a mass of gore and his mouth wide, every tooth outlined in red.
‘Back,’ his brother screamed. ‘Back. Up the stairs and bar the door. The Black is here …’
Frixco, stunned as a slaughter-ox, stood open-mouthed at the bloodied vision of his brother and the men spilling after him, turning fearfully to guard his back with drawn knives. William de Fiennes, his face a raw agony, half-blind and wholly afraid, slapped his brother’s gawp from him in a fury of panic.
Behind him, Hal saw Jamie Douglas, a flash as if scrawled against the dark by a bolt of lightning and as sure to him as if seven years had not passed at all: wild black hair flying, a sword in one hand, a dirk in the other. And at his back, as strange as a two-headed calf, was another Jamie Douglas, standing fierce guard on a shivering girl with a swaddled wean in her arms.
It was only after, shoved and kicked into the chapel, with men piling up what little furniture there was against the door – all fourteen carved Stations included – that Hal realized that it had been Dog Boy he had seen.
Sim saw the men on the stairs, falling back with shields up to protect their lord; he was hurt bad was Sir William de Fiennes, for Sim had done it with a backlashed blow from a dirk and panted that out to Jamie Douglas as they crashed into the hall.
‘Poked oot his eye,’ he declared and Jamie nodded thoughtfully; both men agreed that such a wound might colour a man’s decision to resist.
They did not debate it long, for a sudden rush of new foes spilled on them and Sim crashed through a scatter of benches towards them, his breath harsh in his ears. There were men running away from him, to the back of the hall where there was no way out. On the table to his left, Red Rowan kicked through a slurry of sauce and meat and gruel, kicking trenchers like a boy jumping in puddles; he turned to grin at Sim and then seemed to be hauled backwards, though Sim knew fine well it was the force of the quarrel hitting him with a deep shunk of sound.
Sim leaped towards the man with the latchbow, who gave up feverishly attempting to span it, tried to swing it like a club, shrieking out his fear and anger. Sim’s sword blurred in the hazed candle-reek and cut into the man’s neck, so that his shouting was choked off in a gurgle; Sim kicked the body away with his boot, scooping up half a round of cheese on the way, so that it flew into the air.
‘Aaahh!’
Sim spun, blocking the snake-like blow with a frantic movement, though the stun of it almost lifted the sword out of his hand. The man who had rushed at him, yelling, was elderly, with a white beard and rheumy eyes; he jumped back and waved his weapon threateningly.
A fire iron, Sim saw. He is attacking me with a fire iron. A retired soldier, said the thought flickering through his mind as he chopped hard at the man’s knee. The man dodged; Sim felt his foot skid on a soggy trencher and then was on his arse, legs and arms flailing.
The old man screamed, wet-mouthed, and raised the fire iron high – but the point of a sword erupted out and upwards from his chest so hard and fierce that it went on into the underside of his jaw. He wailed, high and thin, falling away to reveal the grinning face of Jamie Douglas, staggering as the man’s weight dragged the sword down; he struggled to work his blade free.
‘Christ betimes, that was almost too good to waste: a brace of auld yins at it like Rolands. You will have little better entertainment at this feast.’