Next for bairning, Hal thought, for sure – Dog Boy was ploughing that willing furrow already, he was sure, just as Sim Craw and Alehouse Maggie could be heard all over the tower.
The whole world was rutting, he thought, including himself. He lay with her russet spill of hair across his chest, aching and exhausted in the best way, from work and love. The wool was good, the harvest was good, the only deaths were those expected and the rents for Roslin ready for the start of next year, in March.
Yet the nag was there, of when the blow would fall and how hard and who Buchan would get to do it. There was no question of the Earl openly demanding his wife back; she had been put aside in a nunnery, after all, like a discarded pair of shoes. Still, they were Comyn shoes and stepping into them gained parts of Fife, so they would not be left in a corner of a tower in Lothian for long.
A hoolet screeched, threading the night with terror. A wind blew, cool and holding the promise of rain, rattling the shutters of that folly of a window, built by his father for his mother and a breach in the defence of a tower. Hal thanked his da for it, all the same, as his mother had when she sat in the nook of it, sewing and looking out. Now Isabel did the same.
If there was no war, he thought, sliding towards sleep, I would not worry so much about that silly window. But Bruce is moving and war is on the wind …
He wondered, sinking into the sweet softness of sleep, where Kirkpatrick was.
Next day, he tried to slough off the unease with a deer hunt, though the chances of success were slight and the manner of it was not to his liking – a ‘bow and stable’, which was usually the province of the old and infirm. I am both, he had to admit to Sim Craw, who merely grunted as he climbed aboard his garron and heaved up his monster crossbow across one shoulder. Only Dog Boy, young and fit, revelled in the moment of it, in sole charge of the deerhounds he had been training.
They rode out to Roslin’s deer park through a glory of stubbled gold where rooks and crows rose up, protesting loudly. They nodded to wardens and shepherds while clouds swelled over the land from the Firth.
‘Weather is comin’,’ Sim noted, when they were in the deer park’s coppiced edges, negotiating the formidable earth barriers and leaps that allowed the roe and hart in but not out.
‘Is it now?’ Hal noted mildly and with some humour, for Sim Craw fancied himself a foreteller of rain and storm though the truth was he would know it poured at the same time as everyone else.
They paused at the entrance to a long, coppiced stretch, while the two deerhounds panted with lolling tongues, tasting the stink of the wolf head nailed high on an oak. It was a warning to poachers on two or four legs, Hal knew and would have paid it no regard – save that the sight reminded him of Wallace.
‘It is how every wolf’s head ends up,’ Sim declared when Hal spoke his thoughts. ‘Unless it is wise enow to run out o’ the country entire.’
It was then that the roe leaped from one side of the wood, paused to stare at them, no more than a lance-length away, so that Hal swore he saw himself reflected in the beautiful deep pool of perfectly-fringed glaucous eye.
Then, with a powerful heave, it leaped up into the far side of trees. After the first stunned moment – the dogs shot forward, baying exultantly, ripping their leashes from Dog Boy’s hands.
‘Ah, ye hoor slips …’
Dog Boy danced with the pain of the weals on his palms, cursing his charges who disappeared into the trees, trailing leashes and howls. Sim Craw, reeling with laughter, almost fell from the garron, which set Hal laughing and even the Dog Boy joined in, alternately blowing on his palms and on the hunting horn, the sound he had been training the dogs to return to.
What had sent the deer out into the path? The question was rolling like spit on Hal’s tongue when he felt the garron judder as if kicked, felt it rise up under him with a shriek – then there was only a birling of sky and trees and a great blast of pain as he landed, driving the breath from him and the pain of his half-healed ribs through him like a lance.
Sim Craw knew in an eyeblink what had happened, so that the two men who spilled from the trees, one casting aside the crossbow and dragging out a long knife, came as no surprise to him.
He kicked his own horse hard, feeling its shock and the surge of it, then rode at the men. They balked; one had a spear and waved it, but Sim Craw hurled the heavy, unloaded crossbow at him, spilling him backwards even as Sim launched himself from his horse at the second man, dragging out his own long knife and roaring like a mad bull.
Hal, struggling and wheezing upright, slapped a dazed Dog Boy hard on the shoulder as two more men closed in, all wild hair and red mouths and frantic, desperate eyes and sharp steel in their hands