The Red Knight (The Traitor Son Cycle, #1)

by Miles Cameron

The Captain of Albinkirk, Ser John Crayford, had not started his life as a gentleman. It was a rank he’d achieved through pure talent. For violence.

the Captain of Albinkirk thanked God that the whelp had paid the toll with good grace and had good paper, as any incident between them would have gone badly. For him.

Abbess.” He touched his spurs ever so lightly to Grendel’s sides, and the stallion snorted and deigned to move forward into the rain.

No one laughed. Or rather, most of them laughed, and all of it was forced.

He walked past them without a swirl of his scarlet cloak, his whole will focused on his belief that his presence there was perfectly normal and started up the stairs. No heads turned, but one older nun stopped peering at her embroidery and glanced at the stairwell, raised an eyebrow, and then went back to her work. He heard a murmur from behind him.

He knew as soon he crossed the threshold that she’d elected to take them on. If she’d decided not to take them on, she wouldn’t have seen him again. Murder in the courtyard might have been closer to the mark. Except that all the soldiers she had couldn’t kill the eight of them in the courtyard. And she knew it. If she had eight good men, she’d never have sent for him to begin with. It was like Euclidean geometry. And the captain could never understand why other people couldn’t see all the angles.

A taproom boy from the inn rolled two small casks up, one at a time, placed a pair of boards across them and started serving cider and ale. He set up under the old oak that marked the centre of the market field, a stone’s throw from the bear master. Men began to drink.

“How many times has the Wild attacked men out of pure evil?” the knight asked. “If a man prods a hornet’s nest with a pitchfork and gets stung, does that make the hornets evil?”

“We are not like your men, who lie and lie and say these pretty things. We are Qwethnethogs!”

“Or I could say I am as much myself, and as much the Queen, naked, as I am clothed.”

For good swordsmen, it’s not enough to win. They need to win their own way. Learn a man’s way, and he becomes predictable.

Some of the other men-at-arms were applauding. Some were laughing. Michael looked like he was going to cry. But that was only because he had to clean the captain’s armour, and the captain was awash in sheep dip.

“This for thirty leopards?” Ranald asked. “Continental stuff,” the master replied. He didn’t actually sniff, but the sniff was there. Then the older man smiled, and held out a heavy pole with the ends wrapped in sacking. “This would cut it as a sharp knife cuts an apple.”

Come back in winter when my work is slow, and I’ll make you a helmet you could wear to fight a dragon.” The air seemed to chill. “Naming calls,” Edward said, crossing himself. “Don’t know what made me say that,” said the master. He shook his head. “But I’d make you a helmet.”

“Love only those worthy of your love. Love those who love themselves, and love all around them. Love the best—the best in arms, the first in the hall, the finest harpist, and the best chess player. Love no man for what he owns, but only for what he does.”

She smiled radiantly at them. “Begone,” she said. They fled, as adolescent boys do when faced with beautiful women.

He could see a long way in these woods.

And that meant other things could see him, especially when he was resplendent in mirror-white armour, scarlet and gilt.

He suspected that the Abbess was keeping him waiting on purpose; he understood her motives, he read her desire to humble him and keep him off guard; and despite knowing that he was angry, and thus off guard.

The calligraphy was inhuman in its perfection. In ten pages, he could not find a pen error. Who would labour so over such a bad book?

They want me to believe. Because my disbelief threatens their belief, and they need solace.

Jehannes drank more wine. “Can you fight every day?” he asked. The captain considered. “Yes,” he said. “You ought to be locked up, then. We can’t. Give it a rest, Captain.”

He looked at them for a long time, thought about having a temper-tantrum, and decided that no one was sober enough to bother.

Gelfred shrugged. “Does it brand me a traitor to say that sometimes the whole sick wheel of the world makes me want to kill?”

“I’m flattered you came to greet me in person,” Gawin said with another bow. Blodget grinned from ear to ear. Another thing I learned at court—men like to be flattered just as much as ladies, Gawin thought.

Edward took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said. And hoped that didn’t sound too cocky.

“Your angel has said this?” Gaston asked, with obvious interest. His cousin’s encounter with an angel had benefited the whole family, but it was still a matter that puzzled him. “My angel has commanded it. I am but heaven’s tool, cousin.” De Vrailly said it without the least irony.

cat shifted by the width of its tail and shot the Magus a disdainful look. “I feed you, you wretch,” Harmodius muttered.

He took a heavy flax mop and scrubbed the floor, eliminating every trace of the complex chalk pattern that had decorated it like an elaborate Southern rug. Then, despite his age and his heavy robes, he was down on his knees with a square of white linen, scrubbing even the cracks between the slate slabs until there was not a trace of pale blue chalk. However eager he was, he was also fastidious about this—that no trace of one phantasm should linger while he performed another. Experience had taught him that lesson well.

“I should not do this today,” he told the fattest cat. The big feline didn’t seem to care.

He carried a sword as tall as a man and wickedly barbed, and his head held both alien horror and angelic beauty in one—an ebony-black beak inlaid with gold; huge, almond shaped eyes, deep and endless blue like twin sapphires, and a bony crest filled with hair, like the decoration on an Archaic helmet.

Bill rather liked the quiet creature, which spoke only when it had something to say. Irks had something about them. It was hard to pin down, but they had some kind of nobility

He was very proud of his fire when he’d finished, and he thought that if the Wild took him here, at least he’d started the damned fire first.

Curiosity—the kind that gets cats killed—pulled the two of them forward.

Men tire quickly when they are scared. A patrol in hostile terrain is the most tiring thing a soldier can do short of violence.

The trees were dense, and branches reached for him, but a man in armour can run through a thicket of thorns and not take a scratch.

There are different types of soldier. Some men are trained to stand under fire, waiting for their turn to inflict death. Others are like hunters, slipping from cover to cover.

Boglins and irks were crossing the stream at the foot of the ridge, led by a golden bear, as tall as a war horse and shining gold like the sun. When it roared, its voice filled the woods like a storm wind. “What the fuck is that?” asked Tom. “By god, I want a cut at that!”

He punched at the nearest and impaled him, took two cuts on his leg armour, and suddenly it had been worth it to wear the stuff all afternoon.

He longed to say, “Because I will it so.”

The cat looked up at him with aged disinterest.

Peter lay in abject misery for a moment. So, naturally, they kicked him.

Hector sighed. The dead man’s retinue stood rooted to the ground in shock—a shock that would last a few more heartbeats. “Stop!” Hector said. It was a delicate art—to command without threatening them and provoking the very reaction he sought to avoid.

service, of complaints about the rain of blasphemous oaths falling from the walls, now fully manned. “All you cock suckers get your fucking arses in armour or I’ll chew off the top of your sodding skulls and fuck your brains,” Bad Tom was dressing down a dozen men-at-arms just going onto the wall. His tone was conversational and yet it fell into a moment of silence and was carried everywhere inside the fortress. An older sister stared at her Abbess in mute appeal.

He was tall—huge, really, with arms the size of most men’s legs, mounted on a horse the size of a small house.

was James the crossbowman. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Just stand still.” The boy hauled the helmet right off his head. He pulled off the gauntlets. And Alcaeus slumped to the ground, his back against the colonnade. Ser John appeared in front of him. “I need you on the walls.” Alcaeus groaned. The boy stood in front of him. “Let him breathe! He saved everyone!” Ser John snorted. “They ain’t saved until they’s saved, boy. Ser knight? To the walls.” Alcaeus reached out a hand. Ser John caught it, and pulled him to his feet.

walls. Tell me your plan. If it’s good enough, I’ll claim it’s my own and use it. There are stupid answers but there’s no right answer. If your answer is good, you live and make a little money. If your answer is bad, you fail and die and just for extra points, a lot of harmless people, some actual nuns and a bunch of farmers will die with you.”

“If the initiative is in the woods, I’ll seize it in the woods,”

“Have you seen it?” she asked. “Yes.” “Did you understand?” she asked, flipping the pages. “No,” he admitted. There is nothing a young man enjoys less than telling the object of his affection how little he knows.

He reached to kiss her, but she made the dismissive motion women make when boys are tiresome.