The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  De Vrailly was slower rising.

  Gabriel had a moment when he might have gotten on de Vrailly before the other knight could get to his feet. It passed. Gabriel couldn’t have said whether he was chivalrous or merely tired and wounded, but the moment passed.

  He had a dagger, facing the best knight in the world with four feet of steel.

  He began to bounce up and down on his toes.

  De Vrailly had a moment of real fear when the horses hit, and then he was down, on his face in all the choking dust, and then back up—up with a missed attempt as his left leg almost refused its function. The second try he made it.

  The Red Knight was already on his feet. He had a long baselard in his right hand, the tip of it held with his left, and he was bouncing on his toes like a boxer.

  De Vrailly flicked a cut and the Red Knight parried on his heavy dagger blade.

  De Vrailly stepped forward and threw two cuts—a rising cut at the Red Knight’s dagger hand from the guard of the Boar and the consequent falling blow, but the latter was out of distance as the Red Knight skipped back.

  De Vrailly’s left leg failed, like a dull student. He didn’t fall, but suddenly the Red Knight was on him, covering into a close play. De Vrailly raised his hands—

  Gabriel bided his time, managed the distance between them, and made his covers—and when the Gallish knight moved, he faltered in his forward motion and his sword moved into empty air.

  Gabriel closed, powering into the bigger man with an effort of will that emerged as a shout. He got his left hand on de Vrailly’s hands—missed his pommel, and his left hand screamed at him.

  But he had all the time in the world to slam the baselard overhand into de Vrailly’s neck where the aventail met the shoulder.

  Except that the blow bounced, skidding off the mail as if off plate armour.

  Quick as a cat, Gabriel struck again and again, as even de Vrailly’s strength was not enough to push down the desperation of his arm. Three times his point struck home and failed to bite. No link broke. No penetration.

  The armour was protected.

  Gabriel was losing his fight with pain and with de Vrailly’s strength, and he slipped free and spun so that de Vrailly’s counter blow merely clipped the point of his own bascinet.

  Despite the hermetical working on the maille, a trickle of blood flowed down off de Vrailly’s shoulder onto his surcoat. The needle point of the baselard didn’t have to break a link to go a finger joint’s length into a man’s flesh.

  De Vrailly felt the fight-ending blows.

  And he knew.

  Inside the helmet, he sobbed once.

  But training powered his arms. His left shoulder had three shallow penetrations and the pain was immense but the muscle steady.

  He stepped back, rolled his great sword through a deceptive flourish—cut down from a high left side guard, his blow falling onto the Red Knight’s crossed hands, and then down and down, past the long tail with the weapon put behind him like a dragon’s tail and then rolling his hands precisely, his point coming in line—

  Gabriel saw the feint, covered the rising cut—and knew the sequence with the same imagination that could see a thousand dusty deaths and could read the angle of his opponent’s hands.

  Thrust with deception from the low line, said some distant part of his head to his strong right arm without communicating to any part of his brain that registered thoughts. His last cover had put him right leg forward, his dagger well back on the left side, point down.

  All. Or nothing.

  He rotated on his hips, the true volte stabile, and he caught the tip of his dagger between the index finger and thumb of his left hand. He didn’t think about it, and they worked well enough.

  Neither man was thinking. All that was fighting was training and will, muscle and steel. The men were lost in the fight. The fight was, in every way, the men.

  The thrust came forward. It was almost perfect, but again, at the moment of timing required, de Vrailly’s left leg was slow.

  For all that, the tip struck—not in the Red Knight’s exposed armpit, as intended, but on the very front of his breastplate of Morean steel. Then—an aching heartbeat late—the Red Knight’s dagger caught it near the middle third of the end and pushed it aside, so that the blade engraved a furrow up the Red Knight’s breastplate to the top ridge, hesitated—and passed off into empty air.

  Gabriel knew he’d been hit—but he pushed the blade away, his point in line, guided by the minimal pressure of his maimed left hand. The target drifted across his sight and he turned his high cover into a thrust. He used his left hand to guide the thrust, and when de Vrailly’s desperately rising hands slammed into his left arm, in front at the moment of contact, he had a galvanic shock like a hermetical attack, and his own dagger sliced effortlessly through the chamois glove inside the palm of his steel gauntlet and cut deeply into his left palm even as his point went forward between his fingers—

  It caught on the bent metal of the damaged edge of de Vrailly’s helmet. The outer helmet was not hardened steel, or had been softened by repeated blows, and the point caught—harmlessly.

  Without any intention beyond desperation, the Red Knight slammed his right foot down on de Vrailly’s left.

  De Vrailly’s left leg crumpled. Neither man could keep his balance, and they fell together.

  Michael had long since begun to ride forward. The two horses had separated—de Vrailly’s charger was hurt, but still snorted with fury. Gabriel’s Ataelus reared once more—and de Vrailly’s horse shied away.

  The dust was so thick around the horses and men that Michael could no longer see even the glint of swords or armour. He opened his helmet and raised a hand—a sign of peace—and rode forward, even as Du Corse and another knight came forward with the herald.

  Behind him, Ser Michael roared, “Stand your ground, or by God,” and there were murmurs.

  In the Gallish ranks, men pushed forward. The centre of their line seemed to swell—as if about to give birth to a battle.

  Archers in the company began to nock shafts.

  Du Corse raised a hand. As he wore only an arming coat and had no weapon, his gesture carried.

  Michael tugged his sword from its scabbard and dropped it on the ground.

  The herald began to wave his green pennant back and forth.

  Michael was close enough now to see into the haze of dust.

  Both men were down.

  And as he cantered up, with Du Corse converging from another angle, Michael saw no movement at all. The two men lay in a huddle of limbs and arms.

  Gabriel never lost consciousness.

  He had time to panic about his position, and to realize that he was atop de Vrailly, and de Vrailly was not moving. Gabriel’s chin strap was broken, his neck hurt savagely, and his bascinet was twisted enough on his head to make seeing difficult. And his head was ringing.

  He realized that he was covered in blood. It was an odd, slow realization—the stickiness of his right hand, the sheet of pain from his left with its slickness, the taste of blood in his own mouth and nose all slowly added together into a universe of blood.

  He couldn’t use his left hand, trapped between them, at all.

  He tried to pull at his dagger to get in another blow, all with aching slowness, and it came free with a slick, wet feeling that told him where it had been.

  He used the dagger to push off the ground, and got to his knees. Shook his head to clear his vision, and ignored all the pains, and settled his visor so that he could see.

  But no further blow was required. Somewhere in the fall, his dagger’s point had slipped from its position on the outer helm, baulked of its prey. It had followed the path of least resistance, probably driven by their contact with the ground, sliding in between the helmets, through de Vrailly’s left eye.

  The great knight was dead.

  Gabriel Muriens sat back on his knees, his weight on de Vrailly’s breastplate. He heard hoof beats. He d
ropped his dagger, having to shake it from his sticky fingers, and scrabbled with the buckle of his chin strap until he could pull his own helmet off his head, and then he drank in the air. He drank it in, again and again, blind to the men gathering around him.

  He finally raised his head, and there was the herald, and Du Corse. And Michael. He thought of Gavin, whose fight this ought to have been. Many, many thoughts came into him then, as if he’d been an empty vessel and now he was again filled.

  He wept.

  And Ser Michael put an arm under his and raised him to his feet. “Come, my captain,” he said. “These worthy gentlemen want to take the body of their friend, and go.”

  The words passed over Gabriel, and left no mark. But other men shouted orders, and other men made plans and, in an hour, the Galles were headed south in a dejected company, with Jean de Vrailly borne on a litter between four horses.

  Ser Gerald Random followed them at a discreet distance with a tithe of the Harndon militia.

  The rest of the Red Knight’s little army turned on their heels and marched north. The day was not so old, and the men had not fought a battle. There was a great deal of grumbling, and Michael halted them, lectured them in a voice reminiscent of the old captain, and then promised double pay for the next month.

  All the company cheered, and even Master Pye’s armourers set up three hearty huzzahs.

  And two leagues further on, at their third halt, the Queen rode down the column with the Red Knight at her side, clad in an arming doublet, bare-headed, and with his left arm in a sling, but with his sword at his side. As they rode, the army cheered, so that the cheers welled up at the front and carried all the way to the back, rippling along, and then the militia marched faster, and the men changed horses with more will.

  Back at the front of the column, the Red Knight reined in.

  “I confess that I feared you dead,” said the Queen.

  “Me, too,” Gabriel admitted. It was the first sign of the return of humour. As he said later to his brother, he had been somewhere else.

  “You proved the better knight,” the Queen said.

  Gabriel looked at her, in all her earthly beauty. He frowned. “Really?” he asked. He shook his head.

  Silence returned. The queen found she could not speak, because, as she later told Blanche, there was something greater than human in his face, and he was so clearly somewhere else.

  He broke the spell. “Now that we have broken the—rebellion? Were they rebels?” He looked out over the fields of the Brogat, brown and green, like a counterpane of linen in squares and rectangles and occasional crazy rhomboids to the edge of the horizon. Nearer at hand, spring flowers glowed at the verge of the dusty road, white and brilliant red poppies.

  “They won’t rally. Du Corse is a professional. He wants to return to Galle and we want him to return to Galle. I think your grace should rest a few days in Lorica and then ride south to your capital. Ser Gerald will have all in hand.”

  “Yes, Ser Gerald is like to be my chancellor,” the Queen said. She frowned in her turn. “You know, we are not yet a government. I cannot rule of my own right. There must be a regency council.” She glanced back, where the Earl of Towbray rode silently next to his son, having elected to change sides once more. “I should include all of the great magnates of my realm.”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel, who was not as interested in this as he might have been.

  “You are the Earl of Westwall. You were my husband’s only other child. Let us mince no words, Ser Gabriel. Will you be regent?” She smiled.

  “Oh, Desiderata,” he said, and she smiled at her name. “I cannot see being the Earl of Westwall. I think that must be for Gavin.”

  “You are a strange man,” she said. “Why?”

  The Red Knight frowned and made a face. “A long story. But if you know that the King was my father, you must know all you need to know. I will not pretend to be the Earl of Westwall. Gavin will be a better earl than I—he loves the people and the place and all the monsters there. I will be happy in Thrake.” He smiled a wan smile. “I think—that it is a little premature to think of all this, when the battles we have just fought are merely the prelude. The musicians are only warming up, and the dancers stretch their legs.”

  Desiderata rocked her head from side to side. “Perhaps. But I think that ruling is always like this—it is always a terrible crisis of one sort or another. Bad rulers use these crises as excuses not to handle routine, and things decay. Under my hand, there will be no decay. I will build a rose garden that men will remember until the sun fails and the moon falls.”

  “Madame, sometimes I fear that you sound like my mother,” he said. He winced, because in the change in his reins he’d just managed to hurt his hand. But then he smiled. “But in truth, she would have been a great queen—as you will be. I think you should be your own Regent, your grace.”

  This was, perhaps, too much truth for the Queen of Alba, and she narrowed her eyes until she saw the blood dripping from his bandages and remembered that he had just given her back her kingdom.

  In fact, he had two broken fingers and a deep cut across his hand that would probably maim him to some extent for the rest of his life, unless Amicia could work her miracles.

  I put Jean de Vrailly in the dust.

  My mother is dead.

  Gabriel rode into the sunset, towards Lorica.

  They made camp, having ridden forty miles in two days and fought a battle and lined up for a second. At the news that the Galles had dispersed, and that Gerald Random was marching on Harndon, Lorica opened its gates to the Queen with many an embarrassed flourish.

  Blanche had the Queen’s new lodgings—the abbot’s guest chambers in the magnificent abbey of Saint Katherine of Tartary—swept and clean. She had a cradle for the babe and coverlets from Lorica’s many ladies and great bourgeois who were suddenly all too willing to play host to the Queen and her son, the King.

  Blanche went about her duties with a correct deference and a somewhat distant manner, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, because they were. News of the Red Knight’s victory came in the late evening, before sunset; she had just two hours to move the Queen from the captain’s pavilion into the city, and that left her little time to consider—anything.

  He was alive, and victorious.

  He probably wouldn’t even remember that she was alive. A kiss in moonlight—he no doubt had one a day. And bad cess to him.

  And yet…

  I could be—someone. I think he would be easy to love. I could work with Sukey and help Nell.

  Through the whole move, she was supported with ruthless efficiency by Lady Almspend. Blanche had always disliked the cold, scholarly woman more than a little; Lady Almspend could rattle off orders without a care for the chaos she caused below stairs. But in the midst of the fast-moving events of the evening, she was a rock of strength, and Blanche was shocked to find herself treated as an equal, a partner, consulted and debated with and never ordered.

  Lady Almspend, knowing her lover safe, was a very kind, gentle, and considerate woman. And she had a superb memory for the locations of things, from hairbrushes to diaper cloth. Moreover, she seemed to know everyone, from her time as royal chancellor and, with the Queen triumphant, Lady Rebecca suddenly seemed to have many, many friends in Lorica.

  She produced a wet nurse as if out of the air, a fine, large girl, newly married, with a baby just barely born within the sacred banns and a fine jolly manner and lots of milk. The young King took to her left breast immediately and with relish. Her name was Rowan, and her baby son’s name was Diccon.

  “An’ what will we call the li’l King?” Rowan asked, settling into a chair with a babe on each breast.

  Lady Almspend turned to Blanche and gave a theatrical shrug. “We haven’t named him or baptized him,” she admitted.

  “Oh, they die like flies at this age, don’t they just,” Rowan said. “Oh, my pardon, ladies. But they do. But I have good milk, and I’ll keep h
im alive, by the rood and all the saints.”

  Blanche was not, ordinarily, a political thinker. But just for a moment she froze and wondered what would happen if the little King were to die. Children died.

  She fell to her knees, crossed herself, and prayed.

  For the first time in her life, but not the last, she wished that she did not know so much. So much of what was at stake, of what people could do, would do, might do.

  When she rose, the Queen was arriving at the gates. Blanche watched her reception from the tower balcony, with Lady Almspend.

  “Will we go north, my lady?” Blanche asked.

  “Call me Becca,” Lady Almspend said.

  Again, the breath was stolen out of Blanche’s lungs. “I’m a laundress, my lady,” she said.

  Rebecca Almspend had always dressed very plainly—to the amusement of the maids and laundresses. She wore dark, shapeless woollen hose under ill-fitted kirtles and large, practical, warm gowns in winter.

  All the palace knew when she fell in love first with Ranald of the Royal Guard, because her shoes grew more pointed, her hose began to fit and even be of silk, and her kirtles seemed to shrink to fit her slight figure. But even today, a day of triumph, she wore a simple, dark blue overgown over a matching kirtle of no great distinction and with plain buttons and not so very many of them, while Blanche wore the magnificent brown wool kirtle that Sukey had given her, which fit her so well as to turn men’s heads wherever she walked. It was not quite indecorous, but the bust and the hips lay on the edge of too tight and the long line of buttons of fine gilt silver on the sleeves were worth her laundry wages for a year and more.

  Becca looked at her, head to toe, brown slipper to coiffed head, and laughed. “Well, if anyone entered and wanted to know which of us was a great lady and which a laundress, I’ll wager I’d be the laundress. Fie, girl—you saved the Queen’s life and you’ve been her constant companion—you birthed her son. You can be anything you wish. You have only to ask. Desiderata is the most generous creature in the world, and wouldn’t hesitate to raise you. Lady? Duchess? My sweet, if we survive this war, it will be a new world. I am determined that women will be born anew in this new world. So I say—be a lady.”