Knight's Shadow

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘On yours,’ a woman’s voice replied.

  ‘Everyone calm down,’ I said, holding up a hand in a peaceable fashion. ‘We’re not here to cause trouble.’

  The woman came closer. ‘You’ll cause us no trouble, travellers, if you turn back around and go the way you came.’ She had short brown hair and a sturdy frame. She might have been forty, but then again, she could have been in her twenties; village life in Tristia was not easy. She pointed a sword at Shuran. ‘The Knights will stay as our hostages.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be possible,’ Shuran said. ‘I’m fairly sure my orders include not being captured.’

  The woman ignored the Knight and looked more closely at me. ‘Are those Greatcoats you and your company are wearing?’

  ‘Why do they always assume he’s in charge?’ Brasti asked Kest.

  ‘Shut up, Brasti,’ Kest replied.

  ‘These are Greatcoats,’ I said.

  The woman grimaced. ‘Then you’ll be staying too. We don’t take kindly to those who steal greatcoats.’

  Valiana took an imprudent step closer to the woman. ‘You’ll not take from us what is ours by right,’ she said. ‘What makes you think we’re not Greatcoats?’

  An old man awkwardly holding a longbow, his arms shaking on the bent string, making me worry he’d end up killing one of us for no better reason than that his arm got tired, said, ‘Whoever heard of a Greatcoat mucking about with Knights?’

  Brasti looked at me as if this somehow proved his point.

  ‘My name is Falcio,’ I said to the woman, ‘First Cantor of the King’s Greatcoats. These are Kest, Brasti, Dari and Valiana. The Knights with us are—’

  The woman’s laughter cut me off. She turned to her men. ‘Look, boys, Duke Isault decided to put on a show for us. He’s sent actors to put on a play. “The Hero of Rijou and the Slayer of Saint Caveil”!’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ one of the men said, waiving a pitchfork in the air. ‘Falsio himself, here to liberate us! Come on, Vera, quit playing around. Let’s kill them and be done with it.’

  ‘Wait,’ Brasti said, ‘what about me?’

  ‘What about you?’ Vera asked.

  ‘I’m Brasti Goodbow. Haven’t you heard of me?’

  ‘’fraid not.’

  ‘Don’t worry though,’ the man with the pitchfork said, ‘we’ll kill you just as if you were famous, too.’

  Sir Shuran put a hand on the pommel of his warsword. ‘I think you’ll find us difficult to murder.’

  ‘There’s more of us than there are of you,’ Pitchfork said. He motioned around at the other villagers. Few among them looked like warriors; they were simply farmers and merchants. A young girl with a knife in her hand brandished it defiantly, and for an instant I mistook her for Aline. Saints, don’t let me start hallucinating while I’m awake.

  A few of Shuran’s Knights laughed aloud and Vera looked at them through narrowed eyes. ‘Giggle all you want, Sir Knights, but some of us have heard enough of your laughter to fill a lifetime.’ She nodded to one of her men on the other side and then the two of them pulled on ropes I now saw were looped around the branches of two trees lining the sides of the path and a set of crudely fashioned spears held together with more sapling trunks rose up from the ground. At the same time, twenty more villagers appeared behind the others, all carrying a bow or a sling or a sword or even just handfuls of rocks.

  I looked at Kest, who shook his head. I agreed; there wasn’t an easy way around this. All the time we were trying to navigate around the spears to reach our opponents, the villagers could pepper us with arrows and rocks.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sir Knights? Not laughing now?’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Because it seems to me that capturing the men sent to kill us and holding them hostage could hardly be a mistake.’

  ‘If we’d come to kill you,’ Sir Shuran said, ‘we would have brought thirty Knights and you’d all be dead by now. I am Sir Shuran, Knight-Commander of Aramor. Duke Isault sent us to settle your dispute in good faith.’

  The villagers looked wary. A lifetime spent trying to survive under the weight of the nobility and their greed hardly made for a great deal of trust.

  Vera turned to me. ‘You say you’re a Greatcoat. Prove it.’

  ‘How would you like me to do that?’

  ‘Tell me the Seventh Law of Property.’

  I was about to answer but Valiana was ahead of me. ‘There is no Seventh Law of Property.’

  Vera tried in vain to stare Valiana down, and watching them, I realised that the two weren’t as far apart in age as I’d thought. What differentiated them was that Valiana had spent her eighteen years living in security and luxury and Vera hadn’t.

  ‘Fine. What’s the Sixth Law then?’

  She didn’t hesitate. ‘“The taxing of a thing can never be more than a quarter of the yield it creates”.’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that she could quote the King’s Laws from memory. It made sense – after all, she’d spent most of her life training to be Queen. No doubt she’d learned all the laws of Tristia, even those the Dukes would never have allowed her to enforce.

  Vera eyed Valiana suspiciously. ‘Anyone who can read The Book of the King’s Laws could know that.’

  Valiana frowned. She really could look like the epitome of the arrogant noblewoman when she set her mind to it. ‘Then why did you bother asking?’

  ‘If you hadn’t known the answer I might have saved myself some time,’ she said.

  I looked out at the villagers who’d come ready to fight. I doubted even one of them knew the King’s Laws of Property, or any other laws for that matter. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked,’ I said. ‘Do you even know why the King wrote the Sixth Law of Property?’

  ‘So that the Dukes wouldn’t be able to deprive us of what we earn through our labours.’

  ‘That’s part of it,’ I acknowledged.

  ‘That’s the only part that matters.’

  ‘Not to a monarch,’ Valiana said. ‘If the Duke overtaxes your land here, it creates shortages of supplies of food, lumber and other resources for you to trade, and that then causes shortages in other goods, and eventually the whole system falls apart. The reason for the law is to prevent an economic collapse.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Vera asked.

  ‘So that you know that the King wanted you to pay your damned taxes,’ I said.

  Vera snorted. ‘You’re funny. When you’re dead I’ll mount your head on a spike and perhaps it’ll help me laugh when I’ve had a hard day working the fields.’

  ‘He’s not that funny when he’s dying,’ Brasti said. ‘He gets quite preachy.’

  I heard the sound of an arrow flying and felt the air shiver near my left cheek as it passed and landed in a tree just behind me. The old man’s arm had finally given out. Before I could react, one of Shuran’s men had brought his blade up and taken a step forward. ‘The penalty for attacking one of the Duke’s envoys is death, old man.’

  ‘Stop!’ I yelled, pulling my left rapier from its sheath.

  ‘The Trattari betray us!’ one of the other Knights said, and shifted position, ready to attack me.

  A moment later ten Knights were facing the five of us, two of the Knights holding suddenly loaded crossbows, while we were stuck between the sharpened logs the villagers had set all around us.

  ‘Falcio . . .’ Kest began.

  ‘I know the odds, damn it. Put down your swords,’ I said to the Knights. ‘This isn’t why we came here, Shuran.’

  The Knight-Commander hadn’t drawn his weapon. ‘I agree. That’s why I need you, your men and these villagers to put down their weapons. I can’t have people drawing on the Duke’s own Knights.’

  Vera sneered. ‘The incentive for killing all of us is considerably higher if we’re not holding weapons.’

  ‘Put down your weapons,’ Shuran repeated, ‘or I’ll have no c
hoice but to order my men to fight.’

  ‘You give that order,’ I said, ‘and I’ll order Brasti to kill you first.’

  The old man who had started all this leaned heavily on his bow, apparently unconcerned. ‘Now, see, this is more what you expect with Knights and Greatcoats.’

  One of the villagers started spinning a sling.

  ‘Brasti, keep an eye on that man. Vera, keep your people in check.’

  ‘Falcio?’ Brasti said.

  ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘It’s just that it would be helpful to me if you could let me know who I’m supposed to kill right now.’

  ‘I’m still trying to work that out.’

  A crashing sound came from the woods, nearly setting off the battle right then and there. A thin, awkward-looking young man emerged, out of breath and carrying a rapier in his hand. Few men other than me carry rapiers. I had met this one before.

  ‘Cairn?’ I asked incredulously.

  Guileless brown eyes beneath a mop of brown hair met mine. ‘Falcio?’ He ran up to me and dropped to his knees. ‘First Cantor! I can’t believe it’s you! Here in Carefal! Did you come to find me?’

  ‘Get up,’ I said. The last time I’d seen Cairn was in Rijou, where he’d proven to be almost as eager to be a Greatcoat as he was unsuited to the role. I could tell things hadn’t changed since then.

  ‘I merely—’

  ‘First of all, you’re not a Greatcoat, so you don’t owe me any fealty, and second, Greatcoats don’t bow to anyone.’

  Brasti leaned forward and whispered as loudly as he could, ‘Except Dukes, as it turns out, when we want our lips to more comfortably reach their arses.’

  ‘Shut up, Brasti.’

  ‘Cairn, is this true?’ Vera asked. ‘Is this man really who he says he is?’

  Cairn stood up. ‘I don’t know who he says he is, but I know him to be Falcio val Mond, First Cantor of the Greatcoats.’ The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin. ‘He gave me this. I was one of his twelve jurors when he called an end to the Ganath Kalila. This is the Hero of Rijou – the man who inspired our rebellion!’

  I winced. Cairn’s voice was all pride mixed with religious fervour and, to me at least, he sounded like a halfwit who’d just discovered a Saint’s face in his cottage cheese. But looking around at the villagers I saw their expressions change, just a little, and understood just how badly they wanted to believe that there were heroes out there coming to save them. For the first time in a long while it looked like they were even willing to believe those heroes might be Greatcoats.

  Vera stepped forward until she was less than a foot away and looked into my face as if she were inspecting a coin to see if it had been forged. ‘Well then, “Hero of Rijou”,’ she said, ‘have you come to save us, or to betray us?’

  Chapter Twelve

  The Trial

  Carefal was a large village, as these things go. Perhaps two hundred people lived there in as much comfort as peasant farming ever allowed. It had a long main street, not paved but well enough maintained that a horse and cart could go down it without breaking a wheel. The thatch-roofed homes were modest, but looked reasonably weatherproof. I noticed not one but two churches, one to Coin, who was called Argentus in Aramor, and the other to Love, whom they referred to as Phenia – the two Gods who best represented the simple desires of simple folk. Mostly what struck me about Carefal, though, were the faces of the people lining the street. Men, women, elderly folk and small children all watched us go by and I felt as if we were on parade, except that no one was smiling and waving flags.

  When we reached the central square Cairn stood up on the plinth of a stone statue nearly as tall as one of the houses behind it. The figure represented was fat and looked ill-made for war, despite holding a war-axe and being improbably well dressed. I assumed it was meant to be either Duke Isault or one of his predecessors.

  ‘Friends of Carefal!’ Cairn shouted. ‘You know I am not a man for speeches.’

  Responses from the crowd ranged from ‘then shut up!’ to ‘thank the Saints for that’ to ‘since when are you a man?’ So apparently Cairn was held in roughly the same regard here as he had been in Rijou. To his credit, he ignored the jibes. ‘There, my friends,’ he said, pointing straight at me, ‘there stands Falcio val Mond, First Cantor of the Greatcoats. There stands the Hero of Rijou!’

  For a moment the crowd was silent. Then a small boy said, ‘I thought he was called “Falsio”.’

  Then they all went mad.

  The people of Carefal swarmed over me. Had Shuran’s Knights had the slightest real concern for my safety they would have attacked, but the Knight-Commander kept his men well back from the crowd. Hands touched me, not always in places I deemed entirely polite, and people shouted my name. Some asked questions that I couldn’t answer because I was too busy being pulled at by others. Eventually, though, the crowd’s voices coalesced into a steady chant of ‘Falsio! Falsio! Freedom for Carefal! Freedom for Carefal!’

  Vera and her men began pushing the others out of the way. ‘Enough!’ she shouted. ‘Are you all mad? Can you not see that ten Ducal Knights stand here? Can you not see that this man, this “Falsio” or “Falcio” or whatever he calls himself, has come here with them? Will you fawn over this trained dog while our village is seized by the Duke?’

  A few of the villagers continued to shout my name as if it were an answer, but eventually they settled down. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Kest looking at me. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I just thought you might like to know that this is the part where you calm the crowd down before a riot starts and everyone is massacred.’

  I turned back to the villagers. Saints, but Kest was right: there was a smouldering need in the way they looked at me. It’d been five years since the King died: five years of gradual decay – the steady, day-by-day loss of faith in one’s rulers and one’s country and ultimately, oneself. Who wouldn’t seek out the first strong voice that made sense to follow? And if the only option for self-worth was reckless and doomed rebellion, well, at least it was something, wasn’t it?

  ‘My name is Falcio val Mond,’ I said, and resisted the urge to add, pronounced Fal-key-oh, ‘and yes, I am the First Cantor of the King’s Greatcoats. I was at Rijou—’ The crowd roared. ‘Yes, well, like most stories you’ve heard it’s probably grown substantially more heroic and noble in the retelling.’ That bought me a laugh, thank the Saints. ‘I’m not here to start a war. I’m here to stop one. Those Knights aren’t wearing armour for show. If you attack them, they will fight back. If you overwhelm them, others will come and they’ll kill each and every one of you. And the only heroic thing I or my fellow Greatcoats will be able to do is die right alongside you. Look to your families. Look to your children. There’s nothing noble about falling under the footsteps of an army and leaving the corpses of young ones behind.’

  The crowd began to settle down, though the looks of hope and admiration were quickly changing to despair and disgust.

  ‘I’m curious,’ Dariana said. ‘Is this the same speech you gave in Rijou? Because if it is, I have to say, I think the troubadour told it better.’

  ‘Falcio’s right,’ Valiana said, turning to the crowd. ‘If you don’t back down now, you’re going to be killed. Every man and woman in your village will die, and for what?’

  ‘They’ll die too,’ Vera said, pointing at the Knights. ‘And once a few nobles go hungry because there’s no one to harvest the crops, well, let’s just say I think Isault will put his stomach above his pride!’ She drew cheers with that last line.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Valiana replied. ‘I know something of the way the Dukes think. They will never allow rebellion to persist in their duchies. Their rule is too precarious for that.’

  ‘But that’s good, ain’t it?’ the old man with the bow asked.

  ‘No. It’s not good. The fragility of ducal rule means they can never be seen as weak – they would rather bu
rn their duchies to the ground than lose face in front of their rivals.’

  ‘Then what’s left for us but suffering to please their egos?’

  Some of the peasants looked at me as if I might contradict Valiana’s words. Part of me wanted to: when a tree is rotten to the core, what’s left but to cut it down?

  ‘The Law,’ I said aloud. ‘What’s left is the Law.’

  ‘What would you have us do?’ Vera asked. ‘Set down our weapons and starve to death? Is that what your Law gives us to look forward to?’

  ‘Have you had a bad harvest?’ I asked.

  Vera snarled, ‘We’ve had one of the best harvests in ten years,’ she said.

  ‘Then what—?’

  ‘They’re taxing us to death!’ she snapped. ‘Your armoured friends over there and their fat Dukes are pushing us to starvation.’

  Shuran stepped forward and for a moment Vera looked like she might attack, but blessedly the big Knight held his hands up. ‘If I may?’

  Vera nodded acquiescence, but didn’t give an inch. I had to admire her.

  ‘I believe the dispute has to do with where this town sits.’

  ‘You mean geographically,’ I asked, ‘or politically?’

  ‘Both, as it turns out. Carefal lies on the border between Aramor and Luth. There have been . . . well, disagreements as to which duchy it belongs to.’

  ‘In other words, they both tax us!’ Vera said.

  Cairn stepped forward as if he was going to try to make an effort to speak on behalf of the village, but Vera pushed him back. Apparently the glow of my reputation didn’t extend down to him.

  Valiana confronted Shuran. ‘You’re saying these people pay taxes twice? There’s no precedent in Ducal law for such a thing.’

  ‘No,’ Shuran corrected her, ‘after a number of border skirmishes the Dukes of Aramor and Luth came to an understanding; Aramor collects the tax in even years and Luth in the odd.’

  ‘And both tax us past what is fair,’ Vera said.

  ‘As it happens, both Aramor and Luth tax at the rate set by the old King: one quarter of the yield.’