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 deerhounds 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.