Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Thomas had no intention of giving the comte the time he would need to stand in that armor.

He circled now; it was only a matter of seconds before he would see the correct angle for the killing blow.

Chrétien, Comte d’Évreux, dug in with his heels to swivel on his ass, keeping his sword high to parry. The sword seemed to weigh as much as a small tree. The bearded cuckold had put the sun behind him and was about to kill him. With a whoring axe, as if he were a whoring capon. He tried to remember a prayer but couldn’t think of one.

The ignorant knight’s squire, who had stayed out of it until this moment, now saw his chance to earn the comte’s favor at no great risk to himself; he walked up behind Thomas and clubbed him in the head with the iron-capped back end of his poleaxe.

Thomas went to his knees.

Curiously, the man who hit him fell down, too.

Thomas looked at his former squire, who had been shouting at the ignorant knight. He stopped now and looked at Thomas, seeing he was in need of help. He started walking toward his former master, then stopped as if another thought had occurred to him.

Something was wrong, though.

He tried to speak, but couldn’t, and Thomas saw why.

An arrow had sprouted from the front of his head, all the way down to the fletching.

One eye filled with blood and he fell.

Thomas fell, too, his dizziness taking him as the clearing erupted with the whistle and crack of arrows striking home, and with the cries of those they struck.

The last sounds he heard were the brutish grunts and drawls of English as the routiers came out of the trees to finish their work.

Janus Blount, the leader of the English and Gascon brigands, led his men down through the stand of trees that sloped to the clearing. He had counted twenty horses before it started, and fifteen still stood near the stream, waiting to be led or mounted by men now dead.

“Shite,” he called, “Who shot the page?”

Nobody answered. The boy lay curled around his chest wound, still alive but dying. Janus looked down at the tearful, shuddering boy and saw that his wound was hopeless. He knew of a monastery with a handful of monks still alive in it, but this little bird was stuck too deep to make the journey. He would die in minutes, and long minutes they would be. The brigand put his callused palm against the page’s soft cheek and said, “Sorry, lad.” He punched his rondel dagger up under the boy’s sternum and, when he finally lay still, thumbed his eyes closed.

“Christ!” he roared. “Did you see what I just had to do because of one of you blind pricks? And I’ll do the same to any man that looses on a woman or a child again, understand? You look first. This doesn’t fucking go, you hear?” The thirty Englishmen, many of whom had served under him when he was a centenar under King Edward, all said, “Aye, sir.” His Gascon second in command repeated the order in French, and the dozen Gascons nodded, too.

He walked to the body of a very rich knight, a big, young fellow in exquisite armor that had nonetheless failed to stop the arrow that went through his aventail under the chin. He sorted through the pouch on the fellow’s belt and took the coins out, tossing aside a piece of rolled parchment bound with a cloth-of-gold ribbon.

“What were you quarreling about, then, eh?” he asked the dead man jovially. His Gascon was just picking up the dead knight’s facedown adversary by the hair, meaning to cut his throat, when Janus glanced over. The big man was still breathing, but not for long. The knife was under the chin, angling for the jugular behind the half-white beard.

That beard.

“Attends!” he said.

The Gascon looked at him, still holding a fistful of greasy longish hair, so comfortable with killing that he might as well have been holding a flower he was about to be asked not to gather.

“Je regards son visage,” Blount said.

The Gascon lifted the head higher, the eyes in it rolling white.

It was the man from the stews.

The big Frenchman who had walked into the Stews of the Arch like a goddamned bear and caused them all to piss their tubs. He could have killed half of them, maybe the lot, but didn’t.

Blount had no idea what had stayed the Frenchy’s hand, but quid pro quo was one of the few Latin terms he knew and he was a big believer in it.

“Not him,” he said. Then, in case somebody else happened over, he shouted it and pointed down at the man.

Not him.

Now the routiers killed the rest, took their money and horses, and melted back into the woods.

The wind had started up.

Thomas woke with his head in a woman’s lap.

Not a woman’s.

A girl’s.

Her luminous, almost lupine gray eyes looked down into his as she wiped his temples. It was hard to focus—everything looked blurry. Something moved behind her, and he thought he saw wings.

He had trouble remembering the last time he had seen her, yet it seemed very important that he should.

“You left wildflowers,” he said.

“What?” she said, smiling.

He slept.

Near dark, he woke again, and smelled food.

Delphine had made a good, hot fire from blackthorn wood, and over that she boiled thyme, chard, and turnips in a soldier’s wide-brimmed helmet. He heard a sound that at first seemed quite natural, but which he then remembered as wondrous.

A horse’s whinny.

Jibreel stood eating grass near the stream, handsome and brown with white forelegs.

“He wouldn’t go away,” she said.

“He was mine.”

She nodded.

“He remembers you. There’s another horse hanging around, but it’s scared. A little horse.”

“We’ll catch him,” Thomas said. “Can you ride?”

“Just a donkey.”

“That’s something. I’ll teach you.”

He sat up against his tree, rubbing the back of his head and looking at her. He remembered being thumped now. Why didn’t his head hurt?

And the girl. Was she just a cat’s whisker taller? Was there the hint of a curve in her hips?

“You’re different,” he said.

“So are you.”

She handed him a few sloe berries to eat.

He ate their flesh, then spat out the pits, making a face.

“They’ll be sweeter after a frost,” she said.

“You know what we’ve come to do now, don’t you?”

“Yes. Mostly.”

“I won’t like it, will I?”

“Why should you? I don’t like it.”

“Oh shit,” he said.

“You’re not that different, are you?”

He shook his head, smiling.

“But you’re ready,” she said. “We’re both ready.”

He looked at her for a long while.

“What?” she said.

“I know what’s different about you.”

“What?”

“You’ve got tits.”

She shook her head slowly at him.

“It’s true. Just little ones, but they’re there.”

She threw a sloe berry, which hit him exactly in the middle of the forehead.

“I think you spout vulgarity all the time because you’re afraid to see the big part of yourself that’s good.”

“And I think you’re changing the subject. We have to hide those.”

“I will,” she said.

She came nearer to him now and showed him a piece of parchment rolled up in a ribbon of cloth-of-gold.

“What’s that? The deed to a manor?”

“It’s an invitation.”

“To what?”

“To dine with His Holiness at a great feast of warriors.”

“An invitation for the dead one over there, not for me.”

“You are the dead one.”

Thomas blinked at her, not understanding her game.

She went over to the dead comte and unbuckled his polished helm, pulling it off him. She brought it over to Thomas.