The Scottish Boy

by Alex de Campi

The only question that remains is whether he’s missed the war.

Now, finally, the country is reaching a sort of springtime, under the hand of the young Edward of Windsor, and Harry is nineteen years old, the perfect age for a squire to prove himself in battle. Except, the battle was yesterday.

His real father, Sir Owen, is gone so long ago in the weeds of Bannockburn that his existence seems no more real than Sir Galahad’s: a perfect shadow, and a set of ghostly footsteps for good young boys to follow. And Harry stands alone in the midst of a camp seething in celebration of great victory, while he has only a pageant of ashes to share.

‘They’re what happens when power moves on and leaves you behind, m’boy,’ Montagu says. ‘Never forget that.’

He’s nineteen, an age where boys his class are normally riding from tournament to tournament, following the court’s progress around England the way flowers follow the sun. But instead he’s responsible for all these people, for whether they flourish or starve. All of them looking to him, to him, who accidentally wished a man dead, for wisdom and guidance.

And he can’t complain, for he had never thought to ask the cost of his dreams.

‘Without a doubt,’ Iain snorts. ‘In our family, murder and betrayal are commonplace. But lapses in etiquette? Unforgivable.’

The first thing Harry kills with his new sword is his own horse.

He becomes lost around Iain. It’s like the boy bewitches him. There are no boundaries; everything is possible, everything is permitted.

‘Because if all I get are crumbs, if I get less than the gnawed bones you toss to the dogs, I’ll take them.’ He sucks in a great ragged breath. ‘I’ll take them. Because it’s better than nothing, and I know too well what nothing tastes like.’

‘I will always come back to you. Always. Even if I have to drag myself out of the grave to do it.’

But this is his season, the dead end of autumn, when the life fades from all things. The season when he began to love, and when he said farewell to it a year later.

War is, after all, not nearly as complicated as a tournament.

There’s no point talking about the dead, but they haunt the living still – in a simmering mistrust between royal second cousins, each thinking the other would stoop to assassination to get his way.

Everything you throw into it just vanishes into the darkness.’ She folds her hands in her lap, staring at them. ‘That’s what loving you is like.’

‘Bury your ghosts, Harry, by the time you return. He would hate you like this.’ She looks at him then, as she departs for her bedchamber. ‘It means they’ve won.’

Because that’s the rub: for all his threats and ultimatums, his strategically placed fleet, the King of France does not actually go to war. He doesn’t even invade Gascony, the main holding of the Duchy of Aquitaine in the southwest. He just waits and watches as King Edward and twelve hundred of his best men spend England’s gold sitting in Flanders through September, arguing with potential allies. It’s an amazing non-tactic. Philip of Valois is either a dithering fool or the greatest military strategist of his age, and nobody in the English camp is quite sure which.

It’s something invented afterwards, in the war they describe in letters home. Met with an unfortunate accident is code for slain while unarmed and begging by an opposing knight. Succumbed to grief after her lord’s passing usually means raped and left for dead. Unfortunately the written word is stronger than memory, so the myth of glorious knighthood lingers onwards in the minds of boys and patient wives. Otherwise no mother would let her child ride to war.

‘Hold me,’ Iain whispers, almost silently, head bowed. ‘Nobody ever held me like you did.’ Harry throws his arms around Iain and pulls him down to the bed, and even though they’re both older now, scarred and hardened to the cruelty of the world, they still fit perfectly together.

And God, it’s so easy with Iain, laughing and fighting and fucking and somehow doing all three at once, here in a queen’s bedchamber in France, after they’ve both lived more lives than any one person has a right to hope for.

Iain’s face is transformed by ecstasy, beautiful in the way angels are, perfect and terrible.

‘It’s good to have you back,’ she whispers in his ear. ‘This before me is the man I married.’ ‘I’ll go to war no longer,’ Harry whispers back. ‘I am yours, and Dartington’s, and his, only.’