by Gwynn White
“Sire,” Leonie screamed, disentangling herself. “Quick, come on!”
“Run! Run!” HM bellowed.
Gunfire spat from the top of the overhang. Leonie and HM shot back. The pink-flowering sawgrass up there shook, and a man’s upper body, complete with rifle, slipped over the top of the rocks and hung head down. The weapon fell, bounced off the cliff, and landed on Leonie’s side of the inlet among the vetch and daisies.
She dashed to pick it up. A Z4. Solid! The ROCK always had the best kit. She chucked away the revolver and tucked the Z4 into her shoulder. “Keep her moving!” she shouted at Barkin, who was dragging HRH away along the clifftop. “I’ll bring HM!”
She expected to see him on the cliff.
But he wasn’t. He was still on the other side. Still squeezing off shots at the part of the hillside that the cliff blocked from her view, but he was on the ground, propped awkwardly against the rocks, and blood stained his shirt Wessex crimson.
Leonie wailed and pumped out rounds at the top of the cliff, targeting any blade of grass that moved.
“Leave me!” HM shouted, his voice rough. “That’s an order!”
“And I’m disobeying it, Sire!”
“Go! Look after the princesses, Grant! I charge you solemnly—”
Leonie ran, sobbing. The ROCK were coming down the other side of the inlet. They might yet get away. But she was still twenty yards behind Barkin and HRH when crack-thump, chips of stone spurted off a crag in front of her. The fuckers had her in range again. She slid flat on her arse and rolled to face back the way she’d come. On the other side of the inlet, half a dozen black figures clustered around HM’s prone body. Black figures—and one fair-haired lad in a business suit, the traitor knight Sir Lackland.
She recognized Sir Malcolm Stuart. And there was Sir Alec Northumberland, his left sleeve pinned up. He stooped over HM. Steel flashed. A jubilant clamor erupted. Alec Northumberland straightened up and in his one hand he brandished the king’s head, swinging it by the hair.
Bracing her elbows on the ground, Leonie emptied the Z4’s magazine at them and had the joy of seeing them hit the ground. Couldn’t tell if she actually hurt anyone.
She ran on, changing mags as she went. The spare was duct-taped upside-down to the empty, a ROCK trick.
Bullets kicked up the turf. She neared Barkin and HRH, shouted at them to keep moving, and saw Barkin throw up his arms and fall forward. She caught up, flipped his body over with her foot. Pain burned in his eyes for an instant, or maybe it was just reflected clouds, and he was gone.
The princess stood staring at the corpse as if she didn’t understand what had happened.
Leonie hustled her to the top of the crag. The van was still there on the road but the pier was as deserted as ever. No yacht. The disappointment felt like a punch in the face and it made Leonie’s voice harsh. “Just slide down on your arse, if you can’t walk, Your Highness.”
She knelt behind the rocks, grit under her knees, tiny little blue flowers winking at her from the cracks.
One of the ROCK knights had started to climb across the cliff. She lined up her sights and squeezed off a single shot. She missed, but the knight retreated sharpish.
Thunder rolled down from the headland. Leonie jerked her gaze up. Black smoke boiled from Acton Castle, shot through with rags of flame. The ground shivered slightly, then settled.
S’pose Sir Robert wanted to destroy the evidence that he was a magician. Shame he couldn’t have blown the place up while the ROCK were still there.
She twisted to see if Princess Madelaine had reached the van yet.
Yarrow was helping the princess across the last bit of pasture.
Leonie fired once, twice more, eking out her ammo.
The smoke from Acton Castle streamed away in the wind.
HRH reached the van.
Leonie slithered down the crag feet first, holding the Z4 high. She yanked open the door of the van. “Move over, I’m driving.”
“Have they killed him?”
“Yes, now fucking shift your arse!”
Leonie burned rubber back along the coast road. Yarrow prayed aloud beside her. Both of the women in the back were crying hysterically.
Their survival depended on her now.
Look after the princesses, Grant. I charge you solemnly.
Out in the harbor floated a graceful white boat that had to be the Lady of Cornwall. Bloody thing was anchored. Hadn’t even moved.
Penzance turned out to be a pretty little town, pebbledashed houses painted white and yellow, striped awnings fluttering over shop windows already tarted up with Christmas tinsel. Wrong season for the seaside, so the streets were mostly empty. Leonie saw half a dozen ROCK knights loitering near a Rover parked in the town square. With split seconds to spare, she spun the wheel hand over hand. A lane opened up in front of her, winding uphill, away from the square.
“Yarrow. We need to swop vehicles. Any ideas?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Left up here. Keep on, keep on … Here.”
Leonie braked outside a weathered wooden gate. Yarrow got out and opened it. She drove into a yard with stacks of lumber leaning against the walls. A cat asleep on the bonnet of a decrepit Vauxhall. Sweet resiny smell. Big shed at the end of the yard, the skeleton of a boat balanced on a frame within. Pansies in tubs flanking a patriotic cobalt-blue door.
Everything was quiet.
Yarrow came out of the boatshed with another geezer. “This is my brother-in-law. His son’s the captain of the Lady of Cornwall, but they’ve heard nothing from up the hill.”
“The ROCK must’ve cut the phone lines. Doesn’t matter. Thanks for this, mate.”
The Vauxhall was another antique, but it would do. They wedged Princess Madelaine, Lady Elspeth, the baby, and the luggage into the back. At the last minute the boatbuilder’s wife hurried out with a picnic basket, which Leonie stowed in the footwell of the passenger seat, right beside her new favorite possession, the Z4.
Before getting into the car, she saluted the three old folk. “I hope Sir Robert’s not dead. But if he is, I’m sorry. I reckon he was a brave and loyal knight.”
Yarrow nodded, his old face shut down tight. “Where are you going?”
“Can’t tell you—” cos I don’t know— “but I ought to tell you this: I saw the king die. They’ll say he died in an accident, that’s the story they’ve already put out, but it’s not true. He died in action and he took a good few of them with him. It was a hero’s end.”
“It will be remembered,” the boatbuilder’s wife said. “Bless you, love, and be careful. May the Lord of Miracles protect you and their Highnesses.”
Which was all very well, but Leonie would rather have had a couple of her mates from the Company and a suitcase of ammo.
Only now, as she drove at a nice, safe, legal pace out of Penzance, with the boatbuilder’s dog-eared road atlas on the seat beside her, did she realize how much she’d always depended on other people, on having orders to follow and mates to back her up.
She wasn’t alone now, either, but with only two sniffling women and a crying baby in the back seat, it felt like it.
Hang on, she thought. This isn’t going to look right if anyone gives us a second glance. All three of them stuffed in the back and me playing chauffeur, as if they were noble or something …
She pulled into the car park of a big-box DIY store. “Here, you, Elspeth.” She deliberately dropped the m’lady, which made the lady-in-waiting scowl in surprise, but they’d all have to get used to it. “Come up here in the front and read the map for me.”
To her credit, Elspeth complied without argument. “Where are we going?” she said, tracing the squiggly lines with a blue-varnished fingernail. “Truro? Lord Cornwall may have had vassals there.”
Princess Madelaine spoke up for the first time since her crying jag back in the van. “No,” she said in a weak but very royal voice. “We are not going to Truro. We are going to my cou
sins in Kent.”
Leonie felt mildly surprised. It was a not-bad plan. Maybe Madelaine wasn’t completely clueless, after all.
29
Ran
The Next Day. November 24th, 1979. Dublin Castle
Sprinting along the fifth-floor hall of Dublin University, Ran bumped into Phyllicia Stuart. No one had remembered to tell her family not to send her and so she’d arrived yesterday with a dozen knights. “Randolph!”
“What do you want?”
“Will you read to me? Lady Vivienne said you would.”
“Read to you? What book is that?” He snatched it and was somewhat taken aback to see that it was the third volume in his own favorite series, the Chronicles of the Worldcracker. “Get your nurse to read it to you.”
“She won’t. She says it’s common. And everyone else is too busy.”
“Well, so am I!”
It was supposed to be a virtue, a Sauvage virtue, to keep calm and carry on even when the king had been murdered, and so Ran had been forced, impossibly, maddeningly, to sit through a full day of lessons. Now he was finally, finally free.
Dublin University, where he had his lessons alongside the best and the brightest of Ireland, overlooked the west end of the bailey of Dublin Castle. Outside the windows, a flock of starlings splashed up from the elm trees in the bailey. Only a couple of hours of precious daylight remained.
“All right,” Ran said. “I’ve read this.” He kept walking along the hall towards the elevator. Phyllicia trotted at his side. “Edward Lancashire, who’s going to be the next true king, is a squire to King William the Third, remember from the last book, but King William won’t take him to the big tourney, so he ends up staying at the Tower. Then the servants start getting killed, and it turns out to be a vampire! And Edward has to hunt him in the dungeons under the Tower. But they can’t kill him because vampires are immortal. So then King William’s mortal enemy, Louis of France, comes to treacherously attack London while everyone’s away at the tourney. So Stingo strikes a bargain with the vampire, and he holds London against the French, and meanwhile Edward flies on his dragon to the tourney to warn the king, and he arrives in the middle of the aerials and the judges are so impressed that they give him a special prize, a bottle of holy water, what a sell. Then they go home and there’s a terrific battle scene because Louis has been turned into a vampire too. But King William kills him with the Worldcracker. The end.”
Phyllicia’s mouth wobbled. “Now you’ve ruined it!”
Ran shrugged. “You should be able to read for yourself at your age. You’re five, aren’t you?”
“What happened to the original vampire?”
“I don’t know, it never said. Vampires are immortal. Unless you kill them with the Worldcracker, of course. They drink your blooood.”
Two men were waiting for the elevator. One of them, fat, with food stains on his waistcoat, duck-walked in circles. The other one was drawing patterns with a biro on the back of his hand. They were savants, who often seemed to live in a different world from everyone else. They bowed politely, though, and stepped back from the elevator doors to let Ran go first. “Ground floor,” Ran said to the operator, because he had to get rid of Phyllicia.
The two children stood side by side, mirrors reflecting their figures and the liveried operator on his stool.
“My grandfather’s dead,” Phyllicia said.
“I know.” Ran had actually forgotten. “I’m very sorry.”
“That makes my father Lord Stuart. But he’s under house arrest in London.”
“What?”
“They won’t let him out until he agrees to acclaim Prince Michael.”
“What are you talking about? House arrest? Did a house arrest him?”
Phyllicia giggled, but her face immediately settled back into its pout. “I heard my knights saying it.”
They stepped out on the ground floor. The foyer was empty except for a few savants chatting at the cafeteria in the corner. Beyond the big glass doors, the bailey was full of cars. Overcoated people stood around talking in the cold. They were probably just chauffeurs, but their studied idleness reminded Ran of knights before a tourney. He felt a twinge of the old sick tension that used to build up while he waited in the armory for his events. “What’s your father done to be arrested for?”
“Nothing! He hasn’t done anything! But the king won’t let him go.”
“What king? The king’s dead!” Your grandfather slew him. Actually, that was probably why her father had been arrested. If one person in a family was guilty, all the rest fell under suspicion.
“The new king; Lord Day—”
“He’s not the king, just the regent!”
“—and my uncles might go to war to free him. Your mother might join us, too. I don’t want there to be a war …”
Ran pulled Phyllicia across the foyer to the security guards at the door. “She can’t find her nurse. Could you look after her? I have to go.”
Ran leapt up the stairs. Past the Theoretical Research Institute on the first floor, past the Business School on the second floor, and past the library where he did languages and literature, which used to be his favorite subject, but now seemed as dull as all the rest. He burst out of the stairwell on the fourth floor, which was the Childe Roland Chivalry Center.
Ran’s father had established Chivalry Centers in all the larger towns of Ireland, where lowborn boys were taught stave fighting and riding, just in case some of them might be good enough for tourney. The Childe Roland Center was special. It was the administrative headquarters of the Overwhelm, the tourney team of House Sauvage.
Mustering his courage, Ran went into the Strategy Room.
Guy stood at the big sandbox with a lot of other people. One was Hanna O’Cinneide, Piers’s girlfriend. Most of the others were strangers, apart from Colin Argent, who saw Ran and beckoned to him. Ran wriggled through the crowd so he could see into the sandbox.
So called because it would once have been an actual box full of sand, the sandbox was a table with raised edges. It usually held a scale model of whichever stadium the Overwhelm would be fighting in next, with blue-painted water features, plastic trees, and tiny knights on horseback. But now an unfamiliar relief map was spread out on the table: a map of all Great Britain.
Ran found Dublin, a grey splotch on the coast of the Irish Sea, There was Dublin Castle in the middle of the city, a green blob with a weensy castle in it, the size of his littlest fingernail. It gave him a queer, dizzy feeling, as if he were looking down at himself … as if, within the tiny castle, a tinier Ran might be looking down at a map in a sandbox, and so on, and on, and on.
Guy cut through the talk around the table. “For now, doing nothing gives us the advantage.”
One of the men Ran didn’t know swept his pointer across Wales. A group of tiny diecast tanks and soldiers had been arranged there. The man knocked them over with his pointer. “So much for the leadership we had looked for from Sauvage,” he sneered. He stared coldly at Ran for a moment, then dropped his pointer on the table and walked off to the other end of the room.
Guy drove his hands into his loosely bunned hair. Then he turned to Ran. “What do you want?”
I’m the Lord Protector of Ireland. You’re talking about war—I ought to have been here! But what came out of Ran’s mouth was: “We’re going for a ride. Remember? You promised!”
“So you did, Guy,” Colin said.
“Saints,” Guy breathed. There was some laughter from the other men around the table. Guy flushed. Then he said loudly, “Fair enough. Time we took a break, anyway. Feel free to insult me in my absence.”
They went up to the mews. Ran rushed off to fetch Honor, saddled her, and rushed back out to the yard, afraid Guy and Colin would escape him again. They were wrangling their dragons into cold-weather coats, assisted by a groom apiece who held the beasts while Guy and Colin crawled under their bellies to buckle the huge, padded garments. Colin was going to ride Egad Sir,
the big mackerel buck who had belonged to Piers.
The dragons’ coats were Sauvage green, with swan logos on the flanks. “I think I might change our device when I am the earl,” Ran said loudly. “I might make it a dragon.”
Guy lay on his back, fastening the buckles between Utterly Hopeless’s legs. “Can’t do that,” he grunted. “The German house of Bismarck has dragon devices locked up. Anyway, the swan goes back to when Sauvages were kings.”
“At least your badge isn’t as wet as ours,” Colin said. “A seagull? I ask you!”
When they were in the air, Guy shouted, “Where are we going, anyway?”
“Wicklow Forest!” Ran screamed back.
In the last twelve hours, the media encampment outside the Cork Hill Gate had bloated into a village. Colin perilously guided Egad Sir down to buzz them. The downdraft from the dragon’s wings knocked over tripods and a camp stove, cueing a panicky dance of firefighting. Colin swept back up to Guy and Ran, laughing his head off. Of course, many of the reporters were his friends and colleagues.
They flew over the city. Streetlamps shone out in the twilight. The sky was still light over the sea, the clouds streaked by the lemony glow of the sinking sun.
“Do you know where you’re going, Ran?” Guy shouted.
“Yes! Wicklow Forest!”
The Forest started just a few miles beyond the outskirts of Dublin. Crows startled up from the bare branches of chestnuts and sycamores. Further on, it was solid evergreens.
Ran wouldn’t have known how to find the clearing again. But Honor did. Before Guy could get too cross, it appeared below them, a round eye with the standing stone for its pupil.
It was smaller than Ran remembered from this morning. He had left as soon as he hid the Worldcracker, getting home early enough to convince the sleepy stablehands that he’d just taken Honor out for an early ride. His nurse had been furious when he admitted summoning Honor to his window. He wouldn’t be able to get away with that again. But it wouldn’t matter, when Guy had Worldcracker.
Ran just knew that his brother would be able to wield the legendary sword. He couldn’t. As Piers had said, he was a nine-year-old incurable with two left feet. But Guy—Guy was the greatest knight in Britain! Who cared that he was a bastard? In the Chronicles of the Worldcracker, it was not always the obvious heir who ended up being the true king.