The Red Knight полностью

Tom nodded at the captain, and the captain felt a black rage boil up inside him. He worked on it – trying to shape it, trying to plug it. But it was like the brew they’d sent against the enemy – oily black, and when it hit fire-

Bad Tom took a deep breath and stepped back. ‘Beg your pardon, Captain,’ he said. He said it with as much assurance as he’d suggested everything else. ‘Overstepped, I expect.’

The captain swallowed bile. ‘Are my eyes glowing?’ he asked.

‘Little bit,’ Tom said. ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Captain?’

The captain leaned on the table, the burst of rage dying away and leaving fatigue and a headache of Archaic proportions. ‘Many things.’

‘You’re a freak, just like me. You ain’t like them. Me – I take what I want and let the rest go. You want them to love you.’ Tom shook his head. ‘They don’t love the likes of us, Captain. Even when I kill their enemies, they don’t love me. Eh? You know what a sin-eater is?’

That came out of nowhere. ‘I’ve heard the name.’

‘We have ’em up in the hills,. Usually some poor wee bastard with one eye or no hands or some other freak. When a man dies, or sometimes a woman, we put a piece of bread soaked in wine – they used to soak it in blood – on the corpse. Goes on the stomach and the heart. And the poor wee man comes and eats the bread, and takes all the dead’s sin on them. So the dead un goes off to heaven, and the poor wee man goes to hell.’ Tom was far away, in memory. The captain had never seen him that way before. It was odd, and a little scary, to be intimate with Bad Tom.

‘We’re sin-eaters, every one of us,’ Tom said. ‘You and me, sure – but Long Paw an’ Wilful Murder and Ser Hugo and Ser Milus and all the rest. Sauce too. Even that boy. We eat their sin. We kill their enemies, and then they send us away.’

The captain had a flash of the daemon eviscerating his horse. We eat their sin. Somehow, the words hit him like a thunderclap, and he sat back. When he was done with the thought – which cascaded away like a waterfall, taking his thoughts in every direction – he realised the shadows had changed. His wine was long gone, Bad Tom was gone, his legs were stiff, and his hand hurt.

Michael was standing in the doorway with a cup of wine in his hand.

The captain dredged a smile out of his reverie, shrugged and took the wine.

He drank.

‘Jacques went down to Bridge Castle with grain and came back with a message for you from Messire Gelfred,’ Michael said. ‘He says it’s urgent he speak to you.’

‘Then I’ll have to put my harness on,’ the captain said. He sounded whiney, even to himself. ‘Let’s get it done.’

The Albinkirk Road – Ser Gawin

He had lost track of time.

He wasn’t sure what he was any more.

Gawin rode through another spring day, surrounded by carpets of wildflowers that flowed like morning fog beneath his horse, rolling away in clumps and hummocks, a thousand perfect flowers in every glance, blue and purple, white and yellow. In the distance, all was a carpet of yellow green from the haze of sun on the mountainsides that were coming closer every day, their peaks woven like a tapestry in and out of the stands of trees that grew thicker and closer every mile.

He’d never had the least interest in flowers before.

‘Ser knight?’ asked the boy with the crossbow.

He looked at the boy, and the boy flinched. Gawin sighed.

‘Ye weren’t moving,’ the boy said.

Gawin pressed his spurs to his horse’s side, and shifted his weight, and his destrier moved off. His once-handsome dark leather bridle was stained with the death of fifty thousand flowers, because Archangel ate every flower he could reach as soon as he’d figured out that the once fierce hands on the reins weren’t likely to stop him eating. That’s what his misery meant to his war horse – more flowers to eat.

I am a coward and a bad knight. Gawin looked back at a life of malfeasance and tried to see where he’d gone wrong, and again and again he came back to a single moment – torturing his older brother. The five of them ganging up on Gabriel. Beating him. The pleasure of it – his screams-

Is that where it started? he asked himself.

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked again.

The horse’s head was down, and they’d stopped again.

‘Coming,’ Gawin muttered. Behind him, the convoy he was not guarding rolled north, and Gawin could see the Great Bend ahead, where the road turned to head west.

West towards the enemy. West, where his father’s castle waited full of his mother’s hate and his brother’s fear.

Why am I going west?

‘Ser knight?’ the boy asked. This time, there was fear in his voice. ‘What’s that?’

Gawin shook himself out of his waking dream. The goldsmith’s boy – Adrian? Allan? Henry? – was backing away from a clump of trees just to his left.

‘There’s something there,’ the boy said.

Gawin sighed. The Wild was not here. His horse stood among wildflowers, and last year this field had been ploughed.