They rode inland from Spindlestone, more quietly now. The men had been sobered by what they’d seen in the village, and were looking for a trail, some trace of the direction the raiders might have taken. Guy and Bors were out in front, scanning the track on both sides.
Lance watched, too. There had to be something—horse droppings, the print of a hoof in the mud. This was the only route out, and he didn’t think they’d missed much on the way in. He struggled against a sense of crawling unease. The frosted hawthorns were blindingly white in the sun, the fields around them dancing with light, but it didn’t feel like the same morning or the same world in which they’d set out.
Up ahead, Guy’s horse suddenly baulked. She’d tucked her haunches low, and Guy was struggling to keep his seat while she danced and reared. When he could, he spared a hand from the reins and gestured to them to approach.
Lance’s heart sank. This wasn’t another slaughtered sheep or cow. The shape on the ground was too eloquent, too finely wrought. Too bloody human, Lance thought. It had been one thing to see a beast torn up so. He would have to brace up to look at such butchery inflicted on a man. And he wanted even less for Art to see. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Will you let me go ahead?”
“What? Why?”
“Just to make sure everything’s—”
“Are you trying to shield me?” Art glanced round, but the others were out of earshot. “Do you have any idea of the war zones I’ve ridden through? I’ve walked across battlefields with a dagger in my hand, sorting out the living from the dead.”
“I know all that. But...”
“But still you’re trying.” He gave Lance a long look, in which yearning, gratitude and resentment were potently mixed. “I wish I could let you,” he said roughly. “But it’s impossible. Come on.”
Worse than the man’s ruined corpse was the child weeping over it. Art dismounted, threw his reins at the nearest soldier and crouched beside the little boy. Coel’s battle-hardened soldiers, his own seasoned men, stood around in silence, trying not to look. “I don’t understand,” Guy said unsteadily. “I never saw a man slain like this. What kind of people are they, these raiders?”
Arthur looked up, hollow-eyed. “The dead kind, when I find them. And I will do worse to them than this.” He detached the child from its grip on the dead man’s shirt, took the boy in his arms and rocked him while his howls tore the sunny day to rags. He gestured to Drustan, who for all his airs was a kindly man, with sons of his own back in Cerniw. “Take this child back to the village. See if he has anyone there. If not, he must go to Din Guardi. Coel must take him in as a page—I’ll see to his training and his keep.”
He got up and handed the child bodily to Drustan, who made a face as bloodstained hands clenched in his fine woollen tunic, then tenderly embraced his burden. Art turned to look at the rest of them, and Lance saw with prickling horror that the man he knew had vanished, replaced by something as wild and inhuman as whatever had caused these deaths. “Divide into parties of three. Ride this country. Quarter it. Go into villages—if anyone’s harbouring these bastards, kill them, too. Make an example. Meet me here at sunset. And God help you if one of you doesn’t bring me back a head on a spike.”
He rode off without a word. He hadn’t assigned Lance or Guy to a place in his rough division of the troops, and so, after trading troubled glances, they set off at a gallop after him.
Lance wasn’t sure Art knew they were there. He didn’t look back, or even slow his pace until they reached the first hamlet on their route. Finding no signs of trouble, he clapped his heels to his stallion’s flanks once more, and pounded on.
Village after village, all along the wide coastal plain. There were Anglians in the area, plenty of them, but they were settlers, putting down tentative roots in a new country. It was hard to tell their hamlets apart from those of the Britons and Celts. The men they passed on the road were armed with nothing more deadly than shovels and hoes, and cringed back wide-eyed into the hedgerows at their headlong approach. Arthur led onward, through woods and rough country, moorland and bog. By the time the light began to fail, the horses were trembling with weariness beneath them, and Lance, who had kept his distance and his silence, began to wonder if he should ride up hard and grab Art’s reins.
He hesitated, but not out of fear or respect. He was painfully sorry for his friend, and would no more have hesitated to tackle the king of the Britons than he had the boy he’d met on the moors three years before. But Guy was here, and it was his place to appeal to his younger brother—or, if necessary, ride him off the road. Lance urged Balana closer to his snorting, panting mare. “It’s getting dark, Guy. One of us should stop him.”
“And you think it should be me,” Guy said wearily. “And you’re right, but… I’ve never seen him like this. All right, wait here. I’ll catch him up.”
Lance reined in and waited quietly, keeping a watchful eye on the darkening countryside around them. In the distance he heard a scuffle of hoofbeats—as if Guy had indeed ridden him down into the bushes at the side of the track—and then scraps of a brief argument, conducted in a mix of courtly Latin and very plain Kernewek.
After a while, they made their way back towards him. Art was expressionless, colourless under the dust and marks of a day’s hard riding. He came to a stop before Lance, as if called to give an account of himself there. “My brother tells me,” he said, not meeting Lance’s eyes, “that I’m misusing my men in keeping them out so long on a fruitless mission. I agree, to the extent that I will ride back to the meeting place and send all of you home. But for myself, I reserve the right to stay out here and search.”
Guy drew a breath to protest, but Arthur turned on him in anguish. “What use am I otherwise?” he cried. “How can I claim to be king of these people, to defend them from invasion, if I can’t find one murderous raider?” And with that, he put his heels to the weary stallion’s flanks and sped off once more into the dusk.
He was moving too fast to be caught. Lance, seized with a formless dread of letting him out of his sight, started after him, Guy on his heels. “Lance!” Guy shouted, and he slowed up long enough to let him draw abreast. “Lance, distract him. Head him off.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Think of something. I’ll meet up with the men back at Spindlestone. Can’t let them see him like this.”
“Why?” Lance demanded. “He’s upset, that’s all. And just a man himself.”
“Ah, no. You’re wrong, Lance. That’s just what he can’t be. Make him follow you. Go on!”
***
It was a neat piece of playacting, for a man unused to anything but truth. “Art!” Lance bellowed at the top of his lungs, turning Balana’s head westward. “Art, I see them!”