Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  That a dockworker had had his teeth kicked in for a bite of bread.

  That a group of men had slashed a girl’s ear to turn her in as a gang member.

  He was starting to recognize the voices, learn their stories.

  The two-year-old who missed his father? He hadn’t spoken in days now, and wouldn’t eat, either.

  The new baby whose father was unaccounted for? Something had gone wrong in childbirth, and her mother died a day later.

  The questions? They no longer came to ask who was alive. They came to ask why?

  Then they demanded it, in larger, angrier groups.

  After that, the lords of Worcester placed their men on the battlements with crossbows, and put a stop to letting the commonfolk approach the castle at all. Arthur missed those messages, he felt for those whose stories now ended in the middle, that he’d never heard the end of.

  That night there were sounds on the wind, of a desperate woman crying for help. Arthur and David had found a nook for themselves against the northwest wall. Down below the other side was the French Ward. The woman’s calls for help went unanswered, and her cries turned to screams. Arthur could do nothing, the sounds came whistling through a thin hole in the wall, meant to drain rainwater. Arthur tried to imagine a scenario in which her wails were battlecries, as she beat senseless whoever it was that was attacking her. But that fantasy vanished as her voice turned torturous, wrapped in a cruel harmony of men’s laughter. He and David yelled back through the hole, but into the wind, muffled by stone, they knew they couldn’t be heard. The sounds that followed … were too horrible to bear. They didn’t sleep that night. They wept, the both of them, unabashedly. Arthur held David’s hand until the noises stopped, and then longer.

  Sebastien and Matthias had been nearby, and had borne that night as well. They were joined by a rabbity fellow named Stephen Quick and a brute more beard than man, called Morg. The six of them spoke in the morning, now bound by something terrible.

  By noon, the six of them had become a dozen. Who wanted to do something. If they couldn’t fight back, they could help. Find ways, any ways, anything.

  The violence continued in the lower bailey, still unstopped by the Guard.

  On the eighth day, there emerged a leader from the chaos below, who called himself the baileyking.

  On the ninth, he was replaced rather bloodily by another.

  Half a dozen more companies arrived in support of Prince John. They took over the barracks. The high keep and the upper bailey were now completely restricted from the men of the Nottingham Guard, who were forced to sleep twelve to a room meant for four. The only value the new armies brought was an abundance of fresh supplies, as they were clearly expecting to stay for an extended amount of time.

  The prince was gathering his allies in preparation for something nobody understood. And the members of the Nottingham Guard, which Arthur and David had somehow come to identify themselves as, were effectively reduced to slave labor. They did the lowest work, they literally shoveled shit. They hoisted the new rations up over the walls—since passage through the lower bailey was obviously forbidden—and conspired to find ways to get some of it to the baileyfolk below.

  Part of the stables was demolished to supply the wood for cranes to move supplies over the western wall. David noted to Arthur that this was finally a viable escape path. But by this time, it wasn’t just “Arthur and David” anymore. They told themselves they were still trying to find a way to rescue Will Scarlet, but they hadn’t talked about him in a week. In reality, they didn’t want to abandon the other Guardsmen, who all wanted to find an end to this misery. Matthias prayed at every meal and never talked of running away. Morg pulled double duty to cover as the Henries continued passing letters over the wall, knowing they could get in trouble for it. These were men who wanted to do what little they could to make their tiny part of the planet a better place, instead of a worser one.

  Two weeks after Prince John seized Nottingham Castle, Sheriff de Ferrers was replaced with a man of little humor, loyal to the prince, named William Brewer. This announcement was coupled with the strange realization that nobody had actually heard from the previous Sheriff in days. Rumors spread that Prince John had beaten him to death as an example, and thrown him out his window at the top of the high keep—which became an enviable idea, as it was the only guaranteed way out of the castle. It was even given a name … the Ferrers Escape.

  In the third week, Stephen Quick attempted to escape the castle by shimmying down the crane ropes. He was arrested by the prince’s army and vanished. The entirety of the Nottingham Guard was commanded to leave the middle bailey, to make room for all the prince’s allies, and to “secure the peace” in the lower bailey. But they all knew the truth, that they were being corralled. Punished. Controlled.

  That night, instead of obey these orders, Henry Left and Right held hands and took the Ferrers Escape over the western wall.

  And one month after Prince John seized Nottingham Castle, word came that a foreign army had landed at the port of Sandwich to the southeast, and was marching north.

  FIFTY

  ARABLE DE BUREL

  HUNTINGDON CASTLE

  SATURDAY, 14TH DAY OF MARCH

  ARABLE HAD ONLY ONCE in her life witnessed the bizarre spectacle of an armed battalion, dressed and organized, rank and file, spread out across the countryside. For her, it brought a numbing sensation that made her want to slip even deeper into her own mind than normal. It was absolutely baffling that hundreds of other people had gathered for a single common purpose that she herself could never believe was important at all.

  Sixteen years ago on a bright grey morning not unlike this one, it had been her father’s battalion, and the last time she would ever see him. He had summoned his loyal bannermen to rally in the fields outside the Burel household, back when it existed, back when it was a distinguished manor and not an overgrown dirt hill. Lord Raymond de Burel said no goodbyes to her that day, too consumed with his duties as a liegelord to remember his duties as a father. And besides, he expected to be back shortly—after joining the army of the Third Earl of Derbyshire, William de Ferrers, and his quick campaign to seize the castle of Nottingham.

  That battalion had marched off into the distance, which Arable had watched from the front balcony of their estate, having no words to describe the feeling of loss that drained her as it disappeared.

  This day she stood on a different balcony high up in the Heart Tower of Huntingdon Castle, looking down upon a different battalion, of larger size and scope. They marshalled in the distance, the smoke from their fire pits giving a dark and industrious face to the countryside. There was a similar sickening sense of being the outsider, that all of these humans had mutually decided the correct thing to do with their lives was to be here, at this moment, for Arable to gaze down upon.

  But this battalion was coming, not going.

  This battalion was not led by her father. This battalion was led by Lord Simon de Senlis, and he had come to take the things in life that he had decided were his.

  “He has more support than I thought,” Lord Robert said glumly. It was heartbreaking to see the defeat in his face. As heavily as Arable had rolled her eyes at the earl swashing his rapier throughout the Senlis manor nearly two months earlier, she could not deny that his adventurous spirit was infectious.

  Its absence practically deserved a funeral.

  “They’re on the wrong side of the Ouse if they mean to attack,” the countess criticized, as if hers was the military expertise. It didn’t matter which side of the river they were on, because Huntingdon wasn’t going to mount a defense. There would be no battle. Lord Robert, to his own shame, knew he must hand Lady Marion Fitzwalter over to face charges of treason. And then he would, very likely, hand the castle over to its new owners.

  And Arable would be unbound, again, left to the mercy of whichever cruel wind sought fit to blow her way.

  “I don’t see the Chancellor’s banners,�
� Magdalena continued, every muscle in her face raging against the captivity of her bones. “They have no authority here without him. Who are these people? De Senlis has gathered anyone with an axe to grind, hoping to mask the vacancy of his argument with the sheer variety of his followers. I see the Earl of Chester for Christ’s sake, what on earth is he doing here?”

  “It doesn’t matter, dear,” Robert grumbled. “We’ve lost.”

  He made no further explanation, and simply receded from the balcony’s stone rail like a boat in a calm river. Arable felt a great sadness for that departure, but also a small admiration. Whatever the future held for him, Lord Robert was not shying away from it with futile delays. He had made his peace with his mistakes and was marching now to own them. Owning one’s failures, Arable had learned time and time again, was better than owning nothing at all.

  “This is all Marion’s fault,” the Countess Magdalena snapped into the wind. “I told him we shouldn’t have welcomed her, and still he—”

  “Shut up.”

  Arable inhaled, deeply, hoping to capture a fraction of the resolve Lord Robert had in this, the moment of his decline. Rather than scratch and spit and complain about its unjustness like the countess, Arable meant to keep her head held loftily high, all the way to the gallows if need be. After all, she had imagined a moment like this a thousand times. There was always a someday when Lord Beneger de Wendenal or his men would find her, and exact his vengeance upon her for the crime of being her father’s daughter. She had proclaimed herself a Burel proudly for the world to recognize at the council, and she had no doubt that information had spread—especially now that there was nobody left to protect her.

  If Simon de Senlis did not claim that easy prize for himself, it would come soon after.

  Hopefully soon. She did not want to run again.

  The lump seized Arable’s throat, her chest froze. There was a small but unmistakably horrible difference in facing persecution now, compared to the last sixteen years. That critical distinction had made her first kick in Arable’s belly only a few nights earlier.

  “How dare you.” The countess recoiled. Arable had already forgotten she’d told the woman to shut her mouth. “How dare y—”

  “Rather easily,” Arable answered, not caring to hide her scoff. “That’s how I dare. It simply involves taking a risk, and bearing its consequences. You’re not really familiar with that sort of accountability, are you?”

  She leveled her eyes on the countess, for once refusing to shy away from her gaze. Everything about the woman read as a shallow performance now, rather than a commanding presence. From the calculated angles of her shoulders to the flaking skin around her pursed lips, Arable recognized Magdalena as an empty vessel, driven by an emptier soul.

  “You arranged the council,” Arable continued, “and let Marion hang for it. It was your idea, but you refused to back it for fear of your reputation. Well here it is, here’s the price of your vanity—it’s come to your castle walls to strip it away from you. You called for a rebellion you didn’t believe in, because you saw advantage there, never intending to do any of the real work. This is what happens when you have no convictions, Countess. You lose.”

  The woman made noises, insolent exhalations, and then silence. Outside, on whichever side of the Great Ouse they damned well pleased, the battalion sounded its horns.

  “Well,” Magdalena swallowed, “you lose as well.”

  “I certainly do,” Arable answered. “But I’m used to it, because I’ve risked everything before, over and over in fact. Whereas this is something new for you, isn’t it? Talk to me in a decade, perhaps you’ll be halfway to a decent person.”

  Down below, a small group was kicking up dust—a trio or so of riders from the battalion, approaching the bridge over the Ouse. The beginning of the end. Arable turned to leave the balcony, though she stopped one last time to study the desperate figure of Countess Magdalena de Bohun, arching her back as she clawed at the railing that, like the world, would not bend in her grasp.

  “I realized something about you,” Arable said, not caring at all that this would be a petty insult. “You were wed to Lord Robert nearly twenty years ago, were you not?”

  “I was,” she answered, turning her head just barely. “The moment I was of marrying age, my father—”

  “Yes, you’ve told us a dozen times. The great Earl of Hereford, marrying his daughters out across the country to earls or their heirs. Lady Margery to the Earl of Warwickshire, Lady Maud to the Earl of Oxfordshire, and you … here.”

  “To the Earl of Huntingdonshire.”

  “Except he wasn’t earl then.”

  The countess had absolutely no reaction.

  “This was the Tower de Senlis then. Lord Robert’s father was just another bannerman to the de Senlis family. That’s what you were married into. I suppose you were wicked even then, weren’t you? Imagine, the legendary Earl of Hereford, his daughters a prize for any man to fight over, and he could find no husband for you more prestigious than the son of an unimportant marcher lord. Nobody else would take you.”

  Magdalena swallowed. “I like to think my father knew that Lord Robert’s family was on the rise.”

  “Yes.” Arable smiled. “I imagine you would like to think that.”

  The air was split again by the sounds of horns, much closer now, announcing the arrival of the men below.

  “You never belonged here,” Arable finished. “You’re finally returning to the life you deserve, one smothered in obscurity. The reason you’re afraid of losing everything is because you don’t have the skills to climb up again.” She opened the door to re-enter the castle, and descend to meet their enemy. “Which is precisely why I’m not afraid.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A SINGLE complication.

  “Lady Marion’s not here.” Friar Tuck folded his arms into his robes while John Little stood at his side, solemn as a stone angel.

  “Good,” Lord Robert answered. The entire castle was gathering, come to crowd the front gates, which Lord Robert intended on opening to their opponent very shortly. “I’d prefer to speak with de Senlis before she arrives. I may just be able to negotiate her safety, if she doesn’t spoil it with any more nonsense of turning herself in.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Tuck replied. “She’s not in the castle, she left in the night.”

  Arable was shocked, as were the others. “She ran?”

  “Wasn’t her choice, so don’t blame her none,” John explained. “Sir Amon and the Delaney brothers took her, by force mind you. An’ I imagine she’ll take all the three of them apart the moment she has a chance. But they left, an’ wouldn’t say where they meant to take her, only that there’d be no point in you giving chase an’ that you’ll never see her again.”

  Lord Robert looked positively devastated. “They abducted her?”

  “For her own good,” John answered defensively. “But yes.”

  On the other side of the gate, the herald horns sounded again.

  For a few tense moments, Lord Robert stared blankly into the sky and Arable couldn’t guess how he would react. Arable felt untethered herself, not sure if she should be furious at Amon, terrified for the danger it put on the rest of them, or just jealous she wasn’t with them.

  John Little held his hands up. “We didn’t have a hand in it, my lord.”

  “I know,” Robert answered, with no outburst at all. “I just would have liked to say goodbye to her. I’m glad she’s safe. It’s not as though de Senlis really cared about capturing her anyway. She was always just a means to get to me.” He directed his men stationed at the wheels beside the gate. “Go on, open it. If nothing else, I’ll get to enjoy the look on his face when I tell him he can’t have his little prize.

  “Oh! And also,” he stuttered, realizing he had more profound responsibilities to deal with. He turned around and tried to address the crowd as one. “I apologize deeply for what is to come. You have all proven yourselves with
distinction. It has been my deepest privilege to lead you, and my shame to have led you where I did. I seek nothing for my own well-being, but will negotiate for each of yours. You have my word.”

  He nodded once, twice, as if deciding those words were good enough. The crowd gave him little reaction, though not from any lack of sympathy. Eventually, Robert connected again with the gatemen, nodded, and the castle opened its mouth.

  Slowly revealed before the entrance of Huntingdon Castle were six men on horseback. Arable took a moment to memorize it, knowing she would likely think back upon this image for many years to come, were she lucky enough to live so long. The riders were silhouetted by the glowing sky, one endless luminescent cloud with no distinction. Behind them, the makings of their war littered the countryside in the distance. The horses bore the sigils of Derbyshire, of Cheshire, and of Huntingdonshire—an insult that Lord Robert must surrender to a man bearing his own livery. But more than these facts, Arable remembered the disappointments. What ought to feel like an unforgettable grandeur was marred in the mundane. The gates wobbled as they caught upturned clods of mud. One of the horses sidestepped and tugged at its reins, and had to be led in a circle to return again. The ecstatic shriek of a young child playing within the courtyard, who did not understand what was happening. A flurry of gnats that hovered briefly by their heads, which they swatted away.

  Historic moments were full of these, Arable had no doubt. The world continued in their midst, like the cloud of gnats, no matter what happened to the largest pieces.

  “You’ve returned early, de Senlis!” Lord Robert bellowed, one last grasp at his showman’s routine. “And brought so many of your friends! Hardly necessary.”

  “They’re not here for you,” de Senlis’s voice returned, but not from the lead rider. As the horsemen made their way into the courtyard, Arable realized that de Senlis was at their edge, not their middle.

  “I regret that the Lady Marion Fitzwalter is—”