by P. J. Fox
He turned and, swinging the book in one large hand, strode into the field.
“Hart!” Rowena called. “What are you doing?”
“What I should’ve done a long time ago,” Hart replied, without turning.
Isla knew. She rose to her feet and waited, watching. Beside her, Rowena did the same. Only unlike Rowena, Isla knew what was coming. Except, even so, she couldn’t quite believe it. A minute ago, they’d been having lunch as usual and now—this.
A breeze had sprung up, rippling the grass and wrapping Isla’s skirts around her legs. Hart looked at neither of them, only straight ahead, his face a mask of grim determination. Tucking the book under his arm, he bent down and used his knife to scratch a hole in the earth which he then filled with grasses. Dry, dead grasses, the last vestiges of green like the shadow of a memory. They’d passed from summer into winter, with barely a pause for fall.
And then, straightening, Hart dropped the book in the hole and lit it on fire.
“Hart!” Rowena shrieked. “Hart,” she repeated, running down the short swale, “what are you doing?”
But Hart didn’t respond. He’d used his flint, completing the whole operation with a single practiced flick of the wrist. Now, ignoring Rowena, he tucked the flint back into his jerkin. She tugged on his arm, screaming, but he was as immovable as an oak tree. He just stared into the flames, and said nothing. Rowena, bending down, tried to beat them out. First with her hands and then with the hem of her skirt. Tears streamed down her face.
Isla understood why he’d done it, even if Rowena didn’t. Even if Hart himself didn’t. But she thought he’d been cruel.
The wind was picking up, and the smell was terrible: burning animal hide and pigments and glue. Isla was sad to see the book—to see any book—burn, even one that had been such a terrible influence. The Chivalrous Heart had been a rescue, by Rowena, from their own library and Rowena had loved it from the start, even though it challenged her meager reading skills. Many of the passages, Isla suspected, Rowena read only because she knew them by heart. But the book was old, and worn, and dried out, and had provided ready kindling for the flames. Rowena’s efforts at saving it succeeded only in spreading them.
Soon bits of flame, like angry eyes, dotted the ground around them. Black smoke curled and blew in the wind. The grass, too, was ready kindling for this greedy new force of destruction.
“Hart!” Rowena screamed. “I hate you!” There was desperation in her voice, and a horrible raw sorrow that hurt Isla’s heart.
Meanwhile, the fire was spreading. Isla could see the danger but, still, she did nothing. She was as poleaxed the day she’d been when Father Justin assaulted her. It was his face she saw in Hart’s for that one, terrifying second. The one that had stopped her in her tracks, leaving her unable to go forward or flee. His look of grim determination, the set of his mouth: the look of a man set on his task, however distasteful. A man who’d made up his mind not to see, or hear, his victim’s distress. She hated Hart, in that minute, and she hated Father Justin all over again for making her see this terrible thing in her only friend.
She heard boots behind her and still she didn’t move. Whether it was their yelling that had attracted attention, or the smell, people were coming to their aid. Soon several of the mercenaries, and the northerners, were furiously stamping out fires. A fire that Isla worried, for a few tense minutes, might yet burn beyond their control.
But it didn’t. Mercifully, it didn’t. Catastrophe was averted, through no help of her own.
Rowena sulked and Hart stared at nothing. He seemed oblivious to what he’d done. The mercenary captain, standing beside him, ran a hand through his hair. Smoke lingered in the air, acrid and unpleasant. The burning vellum smelled like the animal it had been made from. He’d been cursing Hart for a fool now for some minutes and still, Hart hadn’t responded. Isla watched as, with a visible effort, the mercenary captain got himself under control. “You could’ve lit the whole damn field on fire,” he said.
“Fuck you.”
“Really, now, that’s an intelligent response for—”
Hart punched him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“You’re an idiot,” Isla said.
Hart ignored her. He knew that. What he’d done was incredibly stupid. Moreover, he’d compounded his problems by starting a fight with the man who’d helped him. A fight he’d lost. He held the compress to his eye and wished that Isla would disappear. She was well meaning but she, too, in her own way was an idiot. He could feel her eyes on him, the weight of her gaze. She thought she knew everything, especially these days. But she didn’t.
He leaned back against the fence post, one leg bent and one out in front of him. His boots pinched; he needed a new pair. Women’s slippers were stupid little things that barely constrained the foot at all; men’s boots were heavy and awkward and, if they didn’t fit right, a bloody miserable nightmare. These hadn’t been made for him; he’d won them at a dice game. Which had been convenient, as at the time his old pair had been literally peeling apart in shreds. He supposed, idly, that he’d get a new pair in the North.
For such things did a man sell his soul. He cracked his eye. Isla was gone.
He sighed.
Boots—and what else? A roof over his head, a bed. Food to eat. In the bards’ tales, men fought and died for honor. They sacrificed life and love for noble causes like loyalty. All their liege lord had to do was remind them of their duty and off they went, pennants snapping in the breeze. Hart had been too young to fight in this last war, but he knew that was a load of hogwash. And he had fought: on his own land, protecting his own borders.
Protecting hopeless, beleaguered people from a father who’d never recognize him—or them. His plight was, in its own way, just as hopeless as theirs. Because what Isla didn’t know, because she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, was that Hart had to leave. She imagined, being smart enough but fundamentally ill-educated on these subjects, that Hart could have simply stayed behind. Continued to do what he’d always done, which was drink and chase women and act as his father’s unpaid castellan.
What she didn’t know was that Hart’s days at the manor had always been numbered—as numbered as her own. He represented a threat, just as she did. He was another mouth to feed, another voice that might sway opinion away from their father. Only unlike Isla, he didn’t represent a potential source of profit in that he couldn’t be married off. Isla thought the earl had no use for women, and she was right about that, but he had even less use for illegitimate sons whose only purpose lay in confusing the issue of inheritance.
He’d left ahead of being kicked out. He should’ve left the year before, and over the past season had grown increasingly worried about someone driving home the point by serving him poisoned ale. But—and Isla didn’t know this either—he hadn’t been able to leave her.
She was right. He was an idiot. But he’d watched her, working so hard, and been obscurely frightened. He couldn’t articulate what had upset him so; he didn’t have a gift for words, like she did. He was bright enough, after his own fashion, but he wasn’t a man of letters and had never hoped to be. He couldn’t read, and he couldn’t write, and he didn’t care. And if Isla’s experience with Rowena was any indication, books were exactly the tool of the Dark One that the church claimed.
That book. That Gods-be-damned book. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself, the sudden spike of rage that had made him grab it from Rowena’s hands and light it on fire. But he’d heard her droning on about honor so many times and—and she’d hurt Isla and that alone was enough to make him furious. He loved Isla in a way he’d never loved Rowena.
But if he was really honest with himself, there was more. He’d like to pretend that his motives were altruistic, or at least pure, but they weren’t. Rowena’s endless droning about honor bothered him, because it cut to the heart of what he, himself, feared. What kept him up at night. The man who no one thought was capable of thinking abou
t things at all.
He shifted again, and groaned. He really did feel like shit. Luckily for him, his father had taken the vapors again and decided to stop for the night. He could rest, and do nothing, and repel any suggestions that he be of service with mumbles and threatening glares. Of course, come morning, he’d wish he’d gotten back in the saddle. He’d be as stiff as a board and riding would be agony. But that…was tomorrow. This was now and, although he knew he should, right now he didn’t care.
What did he care about?
The truth was, he didn’t know. He’d thought he’d known, a long time ago. Or, at least, what felt like a long time ago.
Hart knew why Isla hated Rowena and he knew, too, why Rowena hated Isla. Far more, and far more deeply. Isla was just hurt; given enough time and distance, she’d get over it. But Rowena…Hart might not be a philosopher, but he understood jealousy.
Rowena had, from the beginning, fully intended to marry Tristan. On that point, Isla seemed curiously myopic. She, unusually, had taken Rowena’s caterwauling at face value. And in that, Hart thought, she’d been blinded by love—and by her own sense of duty. A sense of duty that, for all her quoting, Rowena scarce understood.
But Hart, not in the least blinded, had seen what Isla hadn’t: that Rowena wanted power. To always be beautiful and, failing that, to always be the center of attention. To be, if not desired, then feared. She might love Rudolph Bengough, or at least the idea of him, after her own fashion; but the love she’d always envisioned sharing was the kind of love described in The Chivalrous Heart. Pure love, untainted by physical contact.
Rowena wanted to love her knight from afar, to pine for him, while duty “forced” her to the side of a man like Tristan. A man for whom love would never be a consideration. And, indeed, Hart suspected that Rowena would prefer this. To have a man who, while he plied her with gifts, otherwise ignored her. Of course, such men didn’t exist in real life unless they were homosexual. Real men gave women gifts in return for their regard; or from mutual regard, if the two were in love. But love…required sex.
As Isla had apparently discovered. Rowena might have been appeased if her sister, having stolen her beau from under her nose, had then been miserable. But Isla’s and Tristan’s nocturnal exploits were famous throughout Enzie. There wasn’t a moment, during his visit, when the two hadn’t been creeping off alone together. They could barely keep their hands off each other and the way he fed her from his trencher was sickening.
Really, no wonder Rowena was upset. Isla had captivated Tristan almost from that first night and proceeded to provoke a reaction in him that Hart was sure no one else ever had. Hart saw how he’d studied Isla, that first night at dinner; how his eyes tracked her every movement. And Hart, roué though he was, had been concerned; he hadn’t liked the idea of Tristan presenting himself at Isla’s bedroom door in the middle of the night and forcing himself on her. Hart was a man, himself, and he recognized that look for what it was.
So he’d set about befriending the duke, in the interests of gauging what kind of person he was. In the beginning, he’d had no intention of forming a friendship. Nor had he thought such a thing possible; Hart, though he feigned nonchalance, was keenly aware of the divide between them. But the duke, for all his ice cold mien, had proven an easy conversationalist. He talked to Hart, readily and as an equal, about subjects ranging from weapons to horseflesh. He showed no aversion to Hart’s status.
And, in the end, he’d offered Hart a place in his household should he choose to come north.
Hart had no choice. He had to accept. Even if he’d hated the duke—and he did still have serious reservations—he’d have had to accept. Because he had nowhere else to go.
The alternative was seeking out service with Rudolph. And Hart doubted very much that Rudolph would even have him. Rudolph, he thought sourly, would probably rather bleed to death in some roadside ditch than have a bastard defend him.
“You lost.”
Hart cracked his eye open. The other was still firmly under the compress. It was Callas.
They were alone; everyone else was taking advantage of the free afternoon to laze about in their tents or stretch their legs. Isla was nowhere in sight, and for that Hart felt profoundly grateful. Underneath his anger, he suspected that he felt guilt. He thought about explaining to Callas that Rowena was hell-bent on committing treason; that that so-called “tailor,” Eir—who wasn’t human, regardless of what Isla claimed—had listened in on more than one conversation where Rowena had talked of overthrowing the king and had undoubtedly heard her this afternoon, and that Rowena herself was too much of an idiot to realize her danger. The other women might be upset with him for stealing her favorite toy and making her cry, but the chit’s getting arrested wouldn’t help anyone’s cause.
He thought about explaining that the alternative would’ve been beating Rowena to a pulp and leaving her in the grass to rot.
Instead he said, “fuck you.”
Callas began sharpening one of his knives, oiling the blade and moving it over the whetstone with long, smooth strokes. “You’re original,” he commented. His tone was bland.
“Don’t ask me what I’m doing,” Hart said. “I don’t know.”
His eye hurt like a motherfucker. It was still swelling, too, the skin hot and tender to the touch. He’d taken a pretty good walloping at the hands of the mercenary. The man who spoke like he’d had private tutors and never discussed his past. Well, the war had made mysteries of other men. The mercenary captain, whoever he was, had probably fought for the wrong side. Or come home after getting his pardon to discover his mother—or wife—raped and murdered and his manor burned.
“What are you thinking about?”
Hart hated that question. Why did he ask that question? He cracked an eye again. “Rape and murder,” he said.
“You’ll fit in fine in the North.”
“Aye,” Hart agreed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
TWENTY-NINE
The two men walked through the field. Callas was right, damn him; Hart needed to move or he’d freeze up like a statue. The problem was, he hadn’t been kidding: everything hurt. Places he hadn’t even known he’d had hurt. He hadn’t been trounced this badly since he was first learning to fight. Which made him nervous about the future, for yet another reason. Clearly, even more so than he’d realized, he’d been a big fish in a small pond.
What was martial skill in Enzie? Hart had a vision of himself being sent off to restore order in some remote hamlet and having his bollocks bitten off by someone’s aged grandmother. Who’d undoubtedly have more skill in her little finger than he had in his entire sword arm. He’d come to think of himself as quite the trick, living in a place where his biggest competition was peasants driven to crime by desperation. They couldn’t fight worth a Gods-be-damned; before they’d become outlaws, they’d been farmers.
As a boy, Hart had dreamed of becoming a knight. Bastards sometimes became knights, if they had sufficient skill. But as a man, he’d seen that dream dwindle into dust. Not because he didn’t have the skill—he hadn’t truly realized that until this afternoon—but because he didn’t have the money.
The ignorant imagined knights to be glorious creatures. But the truth was, outside of the ballads knighthood was more of a curse than a blessing. A regular man at arms had his kit provided to him. If he owned his own horse, then so much the better but otherwise he’d be given a mount from the stables. All he had to do, in exchange for horse and boots and all the rest, was prove that he could fight.
But a knight was expected to provide his own horse, a destrier naturally, as well as his own suit of armor. A destrier could cost as much as fifty guineas, a suit of armor three times that. And in a kingdom where the average knight’s pay rarely exceeded a hundred guineas per annum—if the knight was even paid at all—those two items alone represented a heavy investment. More than most men, knights or no, could save in a lifetime.
In short, to be a knight,
one had to be rich. Or have patrons who were rich. Especially since, in truth, knights often weren’t paid. As weren’t regular men at arms. During protracted wars especially, coffers often emptied. The difference was that a regular man at arms could go home. Back to his fields, or his brewery. The system of mutual obligation that bound them all protected a peasant’s rights in that fashion, if in no other. But a knight was expected to fight on, not for wages but for honor.
While at the same time paying his own grooms, handlers and farriers. The average knight, no matter what his financial situation, finished every war in debt. That was, if he finished at all.
He stopped and, crossing his arms, stared out at nothing. They were in the middle of the field, with no one in sight in any direction. A field that, if Hart guessed aright, hadn’t been plowed in several seasons. Just one more farm, abandoned during the war. A war that, although supposedly over, continued to dominate all their lives.
“You’re from the North,” he said to Callas, standing beside him. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“You’re having second thoughts,” Callas said. That wasn’t a question, either.
“Yes.”
“Born and raised,” Callas told him. He, too, stared out at nothing.
“What’s it like?”
Callas considered the question. “The same, I’d imagine, as growing up in any place. It’s what you know; it’s home. If you’re asking, does my father beat my mother and do we sacrifice virgins behind the garderobe, the answer is no. My parents are happy. I’m the middle of nine: five boys and four girls, all survived. My oldest brother is a blacksmith, and married with a child of his own.
“He works with my father, who is also a blacksmith. Before that he was a soldier for the duke’s father.” He turned to Hart. “What is it, exactly, that you want to know?”
