Even now Hal could not be sure if the secret of the hidden Stone was what had brought Buchan and Dunbar to his door, or revenge for Isabel. The one surety was that it had nothing to do with Malenfaunt’s spurious claims and that he was the string-worked mommet in this.
Not that it mattered much, since the cursed slab of sandstone, painfully and frantically manhandled up the stairs, across the plank bridge and into the keep, now lay in the Yett Hall, covered with a linen cloth and used as a table for Isabel’s accoutrements for treating the wounded. Both it and she would be paraded in triumph if Herdmanston fell, Hal was sure – as sure as he was that the only part of himself that would be paraded would be his head.
Hal followed Sim’s wet-black backside to the hatchway and down the steep stairwell to his own bedroom, stood there for a moment, dripping rain and staring at the shuttered folly of a window with its niched stone seats.
Out there somewhere, Buchan would be waiting, impatient as a wet cat to see his gloating revenge on his wife’s lover. Malenfaunt brooded vengeance on all things Bruce, but Dunbar and the rest were here in a flush of righteous wrath for the killing of Badenoch – and that was yet another reason Hal would never make it from this place alive if it fell.
A shape shifted, dragging him back to the present, where the Dog Boy sat with a bow in one hand, peering out between the shutters to make sure no-one was thinking of scaling up to this great weakness in the wall. He turned and grinned, his face dark with new beard, his forearms muscled from working with the big deerhounds.
‘Aye til the fore, my lord,’ he said and Sim grunted acknowledgement of still being alive over his shoulder as he clattered down the stairs to the hall.
Hal paused a moment and forced a grin in return; the Dog Boy, as dark and saturnine as the day he had come from Douglas when he was twelve, still reminded Hal of the son who lay dead under the stone cross nearby, together with his wife and his father.
A stone cross, he recalled bitterly, about forty paces from the bloody springald, the graves trampled and spoiled by the boots of the ingeniator and his minions, who stored their gear in the stone chapel.
Down in the dim of the Big Hall Alehouse Maggie and a handful of mothers – a Jane here and a Bess and a Muriel there, all from nearby cottar huts – cluttered round the meagre fire in the large hearth, singing quiet songs to calm the fretting weans. Isabel was at a nearby truckle bed, checking on the occupant and turned as Hal clacked across the sparsely-rushed flagstones.
‘No worse,’ she declared and then bent and sniffed. ‘Still smells like a privy hole, mark you.’
The figure on the bed chuckled weakly and Hal stepped to where he could see him, dark hair wild and ruffled, lopsided face pale as poor hope and a stain still leaking into the clean wrappings Isabel had only just bound him with.
‘After three days,’ said Ill-Made weakly, ‘twa things stink – fish and an unwanted guest.’
Hal said nothing. Ill-Made had been hit three days ago by a crossbow bolt, a half-spent ricochet, the shaft shattered and the head ragged, which was why he had not died at once. Digging it out of his armpit had cost him more blood than he could afford, all the same and Hal knew, with sick certainty, that he would go to join the four others who had died in the seven days of siege.
There were at least a dozen less of the besieging hundreds who surrounded the tower, most of them casualties of the first day, storming up the stair to where the six foot gap had to be spanned to a lip at the foot of the oak door.
Splintering that door with axe and fire had cost them most of the dozen and others were picked off by Sim and Dog Boy from the roof, until the springald had appeared and the besiegers had drawn back.
It had taken most of a day to assemble the confection of sticks and metal – but after that it had started plunking great, long, fat-headed bolts at the ruined doorway entrance, hoping to smash the grilled yett beyond. Scabbed stonework showed they had not hit it yet, but the tireless whirr and bang of it, the creakingly painful reloading, grated on everyone.
Isobel came up to him, hair tendrilling out from under her headcover, her fingers bloody from ministering to Ill-Made; the springald bolt cracked again, though it was only the noise that jangled everyone for the walls of Herdmanston, at this level, were thick enough for rooms to have been scabbed out of the inside and still leave a forearm’s length of solidity.
‘What will they do now?’ she asked in French, so that his answer would not be understood by Maggie and the others and he could speak freely.