chapter 1
The spring rain had fallen for a week on Restonbury Castle, but on the day before Will Odosson’s knighting the clouds parted and the sun came out to dry the steaming earth. Squires and bachelor knights poured out of the castle like wild ponies escaping through a broken gate, to work off their excess energy in hunting the Baron of Restonbury’s deer.
Will felt glad to ride out of the castle for a few hours. Knighthood was a solemn calling, and all during the long and rainy week Father Padraic the priest, and Master Finn the baron’s wizard, had taken the opportunity to put the finishing touches on years of lectures.
“If it wasn’t one of them, it was the other,” he said to his friend and fellow squire Tostig Raeda, the redheaded son of Restonbury’s shire-reeve. “I’ve heard enough about the mysteries of knighthood over the past seven days to last me the rest of my life.”
“They just want to make sure you don’t disgrace the barony when you ride out to the tourneys,” Tostig replied. “Nothing mysterious about that.”
“Just you wait,” put in Seamus of Ierne, another of the squires. He was a distant cousin of Will’s on Will’s mother’s side, and the youngest son in a family that had been noble long before Duke Rollo sailed from Norroena to break Anglia in half. “Once Will gets his spurs, he’ll be so full of mysteriousness the rest of us won’t be able to talk to him.”
Garth of Orwick—a Nordanglian, and at twenty-three the oldest of Baron Odo’s household knights—regarded the squires with mock severity. “A good thing, too,” he said. “Maybe we can get some work out of the rest of you for a change.”
“Who do you think’s been doing most of it all along?” Will asked. “Don’t worry, though—you’ve still got Ranulf if you need something done.”
As he spoke, Will glanced over at his younger brother, who was riding nearby. Ranulf looked both flattered and a little nervous—he was only twelve to Will’s eighteen, and hadn’t been a squire long enough to shed his awe of the knights with their white belts and gilded spurs and huge, thundering warhorses.
Will grinned. After his little brother had cleaned enough of the leather belts and polished enough of the spurs and rubbed down enough of the horses, he’d be looking at knighthood in a clearer light. Will opened his mouth to say as much, but before he could speak the hounds began to bay. Off in the woods the baron’s chief huntsman blew his horn to begin driving the prey toward the waiting knights.
Moments later, Will heard crashing noises in the underbrush. A white deer burst out from among the leaves. Against the bright golden green of the early spring foliage, the pale shape of the running deer gleamed like a streak of silver. The hounds ran faster as their quarry came into view, while the troop of knights and squires increased their speed to match.
Will galloped along with the rest. His horse, Grey Gyfre, soon brought him up to the forefront of the riders, overtaking the knights on their heavier chargers. The wind of his passage blew his ginger-colored hair off his forehead and back past his ears.
The white deer was drawing ahead again. The belling of the pack grew loud and fierce. Will leaned forward over Gyfre’s neck and strove to narrow the gap between himself and the plunging, panting deer. Somewhere behind him another knight shouted his name, and Tostig Raeda gave a high, piercing whistle. But the clamor of the hounds sounded even louder than the voices of his friends, and the drumming of Gyfre’s hooves on the woodland turf seemed to roar in his ears like the sea.
Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the white deer vanished. The voices of the pack fell silent. And Will saw that except for Grey Gyfre and a single lop-eared hound, he was alone in the forest.
He looked about for landmarks—some misshapen lump of rock or lightning-struck tree that might set this part of the forest off from all the others—and found nothing. He waited quietly for a few minutes, listening for the sound of the hunt in the distance. All he heard was his own slow, regular breathing, underlaid with the faint clink and squeak of Gyfre’s saddle and bridle, and the whuffling noises made by the hound as it sniffed around the roots of the trees.
Will frowned. He wasn’t afraid of the trolls and other unpleasant creatures who still infested the wilder parts of Suthanglia—not in broad daylight and this close to home, with a good horse under him and a sword by his side. But working his way back by the lie of the land and the angle of the sun was going to take time, and he didn’t have a hope of slipping into the castle unnoticed. He was, after all, the lord of Restonbury’s eldest son and heir, whose knighting tomorrow was the reason for all the celebration and overcrowding.
“Blast it,” he told the hound. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hearing about how I got lost in the woods the day before Duke Anlac made me a knight.”
The hound lolled out its tongue and grinned at him.
“Learn to live with it, you say?” Will sighed. “You’re probably right. Well, let’s get started.”
He stayed where he was for a moment or so longer, sorting out his memories of the chase. The forest lay to the north and west of Restonbury, and the hunting party had set out heading northward. But which way had the deer led them after that? He wasn’t sure. After some thought, he decided to ride southward, in the hope of breaking free of the forest. Once out in the open, he could spot the grey stone towers of Restonbury Castle as soon as they thrust up over the horizon.
He squinted upward through the green leaves at the general position of the sun and started out toward what he hoped would be the south. He’d been riding for a few minutes in that direction when he heard a commotion in the underbrush ahead: hoarse shouts, a cracked voice shrieking, and the high-pitched squeal of an unhappy pig.
The noise was loud enough to mask the sound of his approach. The angry yells grew louder, the curses more bitter. Will urged his horse onward in the direction of the noise.
He rode out of the underbrush into a forest glade. A narrow footpath, half overgrown, came out of the woods to his left and ran across the open ground into the shadows of the trees on the other side. An old woman in drab homespun stood in the middle of the path, her hands clenched on one end of a stout rope. The other end of the rope was tied around the neck of a well-fleshed milk-white pig. Two large men with drawn swords circled around them both.
“Come on now, granny,” one man said. The words were soft and wheedling, but the heavy blade in his right hand gave his voice the lie. “We don’t want to hurt you. Just give us the piggie and go on your way.”
As he spoke, the other man lunged for the pig. The plump beast squirmed free with surprising agility. It gave a fierce squeal and dashed out of the outlaw’s reach.
The woman wound the rope even tighter around her knobby, work-soiled hands. “He’s mine, I tell you,” she said, hauling the pig in close against her patched and mended skirt. “He’s all that I have.”
“He’s too good an animal for the likes of you,” said the man who had grabbed for the pig. “I’ll wager you stole him from some lord’s pigsty.”
“I never did!” cried the old woman. “I bought him for tuppence at the market-fair in Delminster.”
The other man seized her from behind as she spoke. “You should have saved your coppers, granny. He’s ours now. Take the pig, Osbert.”
Will reined in Gyfre to a stop and drew his sword. The blade left its sheath with a steely whisper. He moistened his lips with his tongue.
“Leave the woman alone.”
The two outlaws turned at the sound of his voice. They looked from his bare sword to the horse he sat on—no knight’s warhorse, as he was not yet a knight, but a trim, fast animal—and then back at him. The man who had been holding the old woman spoke first.
“Here, now, son. You wouldn’t take advantage of us by using that beast, would you? Where’s the honor in that? Dismount and fight us man to man.”
Will looked at the two outlaws. Neither one was armored, and neither had a shield. Will wore his coat of mail and carried his shield slung on his back. Mounted, he held every advantage except that of numbers alone, and even at two against one the men on foot would be hard pressed.
“I’m not Baron Odo’s executioner,” he said. “Go away, and leave Restonbury in peace.”
He held his breath, hoping that the outlaws would take the chance to escape without a fight. But the two men didn’t run. Instead they looked at each other and lifted their swords.
The second outlaw looked back at Will and sneered. “Come on and ride us down, boy. Show how brave a lord on horseback can be against poor folk on foot.”
Will felt the heat of anger rise in his cheeks. He swung down from the saddle onto the turf and slid his left arm through the straps of his shield.
“No,” he said. “You asked for combat on foot, and you can have it.”
The outlaws said nothing. The first man shifted his sword into a two-handed grip and took a step forward to Will’s right. A few feet away, his fellow moved out toward Will’s left.
Will saw the easy smoothness of the maneuver and felt his mouth go dry. Too late, he realized the truth: He wasn’t facing untrained peasants driven to banditry by misfortune or the cruelties of a harsh overlord. These two had fought as a team for a long time. It showed in the steady pace of their advance, in how they moved in on him together while keeping out of each other’s reach—and in the practiced way they’d goaded him into offering an uneven contest.
They’d played him for a fool, and now he was likely to die of it. He hoped the old woman had taken her pig and run off while she had the chance, so that some good, at least, would come of the fight; but he didn’t dare glance away from the outlaws to see if she had gone.
The first man gave a yell and dashed at Will, swinging his sword as he ran. The sun made the steel into a blazing bar of light as it came down. Will watched it, fascinated—but no amount of fascination could take away what he’d practiced every day of his life since he first held a wooden sword in one childish hand. His shield came up to block the blow, and his sword swung round in a counter-strike.
The outlaw’s sword crashed into the metal rim of Will’s shield, and Will’s left arm vibrated clear up to the shoulder with the force of the impact. The man was strong. Will’s own sword continued its arc inward toward the outlaw’s left side, but the other man twisted out of the way and the blade met nothing but air. Worse, the blow pulled Will out of line so that his shield was lowered and his right shoulder exposed.
Clumsy, he thought. With moves like that I deserve to lose this fight.
The outlaw laughed at him, saying, “We’ll sell your horse in Delminster tomorrow, boy. Ride him down, Osbert!”
Then Will saw that the second man had gone over to Gyfre and leapt into the saddle. “Now who’s the lord on horseback?” he shouted, and kicked the horse in the ribs with both heels.
But Gyfre had been well trained by Restonbury’s master of horse and would not move for any rider but his own. He tossed his head at the outlaw’s kicks and curses, and stood as if he’d taken root.
Will knew that this would be his last, best chance. He brought his shield up and shoved it toward the man in front of him. He struck again and again as he pushed forward, but the outlaw knocked aside each blow, and the return strokes came just as fast.
“Osbert!” the outlaw shouted. “Leave that horse and get over here!”
Will swung at the lower part of the outlaw’s legs, and this time his luck held—the man brought his sword down into the way of the feint, leaving his side and upper thigh unprotected. Will swept his blade upward in a rising blow and felt a dull impact as the sharp edge bit into flesh. A red stain spread out over the dirty wool of the man’s cross-gartered hose. He fell, grasping his wounded leg with both hands.
Before Will could recover, the second outlaw had jumped down from Gyfre’s back and come to join the fight. Osbert gripped his sword one-handed; with his free hand, he grabbed the rim of Will’s shield and pulled. Will pulled back, trying to bring his shield into line before Osbert could strike through the opening their tug-of-war had created.
Will was off balance, and Osbert had the strength of desperation in his arm. The battle might have been lost—except that something grey flashed into Will’s field of vision, and the lop-eared hound leapt snarling onto the outlaw’s back.
Osbert staggered and lost his grip on the rim of the shield. Once again Will’s long hours of training let him go on without stopping to think. He thrust his blade out toward the other man’s chest. The point met solid resistance, then pushed on forward, and the man went down.
Something heavy and hard struck Will across the backs of both legs, slamming his mail against his flesh and forcing him to his knees. The man he’d taken out earlier had swung at him from the ground, striking hard enough to hamstring him if his armor hadn’t taken the blow.
The wounded outlaw laughed—a breathless, choking noise mixed with gasps of pain. Lunging forward again from where he lay, he drove in another blow with the strength of his arms and shoulders alone. Will rolled away and cut down with his sword. The man lay still.
Will pushed himself up onto his knees. His muscles trembled from the effort of the fight, and the blood rushed in his ears. The backs of his legs hurt where the sword had crashed into them. His armor had kept the blade from cutting into his flesh, but he’d have blue and purple bruises before nightfall just the same.
He shook his head to clear it and got to his feet. The lop-eared hound danced up to him, tail wagging. He slipped his left arm out of the shield straps and scratched the animal behind the ears.
“Good dog,” he said. “If it weren’t for you…”
He let the sentence trail off unfinished and looked about the sunlit glade. He’d nearly died here, through his own foolishness. If he’d stayed on horseback, the outlaws would never have had a chance. And if he’d just given his father’s battle cry and charged at them full tilt, they probably would have broken and run away without even bothering to fight.
Now both men lay dead on the trampled grass, and he was alive, though he wasn’t certain he deserved to be. A few yards away the old woman still stood, with the white pig on its length of rope pressing against her legs like a frightened puppy.
Will let out his breath. All this, he thought, over a pig.
Copyright © 1992 by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
Copyright © 2023 by Sherwood Smith
