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Lionhearts

Page 72

by Nathan Makaryk


  David, holding the ladder.

  Charley closed his eyes, shook his head.

  Arthur swallowed. “Honestly, I close my eyes, I still think David’s alive. Think he’s going to come around that corner and whistle at me. I don’t know what it’s going to do to me. But I see what it’s done to you, and I don’t want that. I don’t want it, and David wouldn’t have wanted it for me none neither. He was always quick to help people, he died doing it. Maybe I can help you, then, Charley. Maybe we can help each other.”

  David, laughing with Zinn.

  Fuck, Arthur struggled against his pain. He, too, wanted to break the world in half. But then he considered what David would’ve wanted for him. If this was the person David would’ve wanted him to become.

  “Maybe we can make a peace,” Arthur said. “Listen, you’ve spent time with us. You’ve changed. Me and David, here in the Guard, we changed, too. When David died…” his stomach seized, he almost had to stop, “when David died, everything he’d gone through was for nothing. Nothing. At least I can carry forward, where he couldn’t. Make sure our time here amounts to something. I can’t lose what we gained here. Nobody would ever know the things we did, the people we helped. The people we didn’t. How fucking unfair would that be?”

  He thought of the messages they’d passed over the Nottingham walls, connecting loved ones. And of the stories that had ended in the middle, with no end. That couldn’t happen with him. It was too unfair, too unfair by far, to think that everything they’d gone through would vanish like that. It had to be for some reason.

  “I’ve got more amends to make, Charley. I’ve got to, for David’s sake. The people I killed in the last few days, thinking they were the French…” a boulder now, his guts, one he would always carry, “I don’t know how to even begin to fix that. It would take me a thousand years. I’m glad David never found out we were killing Englishmen, it would have destroyed him. All this fucking madness, there’s got to be an end to it, Charley! We have a chance to end this cycle. If you kill me, then it goes back to how it was, and we learn nothing. But stopping it all, finding peace, wouldn’t that be better than revenge? For your friend, and for mine?”

  The world was blurry, but for Charley’s uncertain face.

  “I need to think,” Charley gasped, and dropped to the ground and crossed his legs.

  One hand, the key. One hand, the knife.

  Charley stared, into the dirty straw on the floor. He was emotionless, as if waiting for any whim to take him in one direction or another. Arthur had no more words, he’d used them all. He was certain they weren’t good enough, he’d never been good at those damned things. But it was all he had, all he had left in the entire fucking world.

  For some time, there was nothing, just a quiet emptiness between them that was, at least, better than the rage that had held Arthur for the last few days.

  He didn’t know what he saw in Charley. An outlaw, a Guardsman. A victim, a murderer.

  The key, the knife.

  They stared at each other until the lantern’s oil gave out, as the sounds of war outside swelled and settled, as the air turned cold and colder. So long that Arthur’s eyelids eventually became heavy.

  “I’m going to trust you,” Arthur said at last, his throat raw and pained, and he let his eyes close.

  That was something he could thank David for. In the face of the worst, David had always chosen to trust.

  Bound before a man who wanted to kill him, Arthur chose to do the same.

  SIXTY-NINE

  CHARLEY DANCER

  THE KENNELS, NOTTINGHAM CASTLE

  HOURS LATER, CHARLEY DANCER rolled up off the floor and crossed to Arthur, who was still asleep, arms still chained behind him to the wall. He plunged Reg’s knife down into Arthur’s neck and chest a dozen times, then a dozen more. The dogs’ barking covered Arthur’s gurgled screams until he thrashed his last, then Bolt went back to the far end of the cell, curled into a ball, and fell asleep.

  SEVENTY

  JOHN LACKLAND

  NOTTINGHAM

  FRIDAY, 27TH DAY OF MARCH

  NO POWER, NO NAME, no money.

  Well, no power or money, at least. John was borrowing a stranger’s name—he took that of Nottingham’s captain, who’d died in the first day of the siege. For today’s purposes, John was now Fulcher de Grendon. An ugly name, made for old Scandinavian folklore with heroes and dragons. He was hoping that the rank of captain would make him just important enough to avoid being hanged by the French host, and also not so important for him to be definitely hanged.

  It was the morning of the third day of the siege, and the man who claimed to be King Richard consented to a meeting. Two men from the castle could safely go and speak with him. In disguise, John could visit the French army and see their trap for himself, assuming nobody recognized his dirtied face under the captain’s hood and tabard. He had no doubt they would offer to promote him from captain to baron if he returned to convince the great Prince John to surrender. Today he was just the proverbial messenger, whom no one was wicked enough to kill.

  The portcullis in the barbican ground open, charred timbers crumbling to clouds of ash around it. The lower bailey had been emptied of the enemy for this parley, but everywhere the scorched earth stank of soot. A hundred archers lined the battlements above him, but once he left the outer curtain wall he’d be unprotected, at the mercy of the army on the northern hill.

  He walked through that gate, with Will Scarlet at his right.

  Scarlet, who’d selected the pseudonym of Henry Russell for this venture, had his hands bound in front of him inside his cloak. John insisted upon it. If he truly was about to walk into this most uncunning of traps—if King Philip was going to pepper him with crossbow bolts the moment he was in range—then at least one of these Robin Hoods would die by his side. If John was going to meet his end today, he would at least do so on his own terms—with a heart full of lovely petty revenge.

  Two liars, heading out of the castle to meet a third.

  The remnants of wooden structures were nothing but gnarled black husks, there were great swaths of ash on the inner walls that crawled up toward the castle proper. A few small snakes of grey flitted to life in the occasional wind. And bodies. There were bodies, some burnt, some not. Some dismembered, some not. Some were already eaten by birds, some looked as if they might blink awake, stand, and walk away. John wondered absently if they were real people, with real problems. He preferred his view from the tower.

  From above, the walls of Nottingham were packed shoulder to shoulder, watching their long walk.

  “Did you really kill the last Sheriff?” John asked his unlikely companion.

  “I did.”

  “Huh.” Ahead, the open gates of the outer curtain wall. “What compelled you to do such a thing?”

  “I wanted things to be better.”

  On the other side of the gates, a blinding blanket of sky.

  “And were they?” John asked. “Were they better, afterward?”

  Will Scarlet, Henry Russell, Robin Hood—whoever he was—ground his jaw and spoke no more.

  Through the gates, outside of the castle for the first time in six weeks, John felt alarmingly naked. He had nothing but a borrowed tabard and a dead man’s name to protect him now. No power, no name, no money—a fun trick, to dabble anon in anonymity. But it came with no walls, no allies, no politics. No escape route aside from his admittedly silver tongue.

  The scope of the army was a sight beyond description. As the horizon grew, so did it. His eyes strained to understand it, there were eye muscles at play that had never focused on such a thing. A trio of French riders came to meet them. They brandished banners and shields with Richard’s lions rampant on a red field, even believably distressed. Their English, too, was notably convincing, though they were likely part of the English traitors. They kept their distance as they escorted John and Scarlet to the enemy line, as if the two of them posed a threat to their thousands.<
br />
  Every eye in every direction was upon him.

  Actually, John realized he could rather enjoy this. As much as he didn’t want to be the center of the country, he admittedly loved being the center of attention. And that center was a blisteringly small pinpoint on the top of his head. That Arable girl was wrong, more wrong than she would ever know. John was, in fact, the only damned human in the thousands of them present that was not a spectator.

  The terrain pushed up, their boots slipped in the beaten, mud-soaked earth. They pushed onto their knees to climb past the first lines of soldiers, then more, then more, then more. The siege engines that had hurled boulder after boulder for two days lay quiet to the left, to the right were the first tents striped in bold colors. John paid none of them heed—he instead studied the ground visible behind horses’ legs, and the edges of tents, and the shadows peeking around any obstacle. For the trap, for the Frenchmen, for the axe to fall.

  The snippets of conversation around him were all still unnervingly English.

  John decided to ignore that fact for a few minutes longer.

  Eventually there was a larger tent than the rest, with larger guards, and a larger sense of impending death. Time refused to slow for him to enjoy the details of it, and soon enough he and the friendly assassin next to him were standing in front of a large collection of angry men with grizzled beards and crossed arms. The stink was impressive. One man, front and center—with sleepy eyes and a set jaw—was introduced as the King of England, Richard the Lionheart.

  “Well?” the man asked. “Am I him? What do you think?”

  John’s stomach twisted so hard it turned his guts into diamonds.

  Beside him, Will Scarlet repeated the question. “Is that the King?”

  John swallowed.

  “No. No it’s not.”

  Scarlet’s face turned bone white and his mouth opened, but John gave him a calming touch on his forearm. Then he pointed a finger at a nearby soldier at lazy attention near the back of the command tent, bearded, with a mail coif making an oval of his familiar face.

  “But that,” John said, “that’s the King.”

  John didn’t know if his brother recognized him in return. If he did, then it was perhaps all the more insulting when the actual Richard replied with a simple, “You may go back freely.”

  They did.

  And so the war ended with a sigh, with John left to wonder at the fascinating and prickly hollow new sensation of what it was like to be so spectacularly wrong about something.

  PART VIII

  LIAR’S NAIL

  SEVENTY-ONE

  MARION FITZWALTER

  NOTTINGHAM

  SATURDAY, 28TH DAY OF MARCH

  MARION HAD BEEN RIGHT when she said that everything would be better when King Richard returned. What she had not known was what the cost to get there would be.

  She did not fight the lump in her throat nor the tears in her eyes as she wandered the castle’s apron. Here, the fighting had been heaviest. The air was ribboned with white and black smoke still, and unidentifiable acrid odors. Here the ladders had been raised, even as arrows and hot oil came down from above. Here Richard’s armies had engaged with the defenders’ sortie when the gates had opened, and here they lay still. Men who did not hate each other, men who did not even disagree with each other—just men unfortunate enough to be on opposite sides of an epic misunderstanding.

  As early as yesterday, this was the most dangerous place in Nottinghamshire. Now, Marion needed little more than a heavy cloak and her riding boots to stand safely in the mud that had cost so many lives.

  Both the castle host and Richard’s allies tended the battlefield. Commonfolk picked their way like ghosts, looking for loved ones. Bodies were solemnly gathered onto carts and carried away. Knights would receive proper burials, no doubt, but footmen would likely share a communal grave. Men who had killed each other would now lie next to each other. The dirt didn’t care for which side they’d fought.

  The dead would never see the better England that Richard’s return promised. They’d suffered the worst of his absence, of the Chancellor’s corruption, and the verge of civil war. To think of how close they’d come to seeing daylight on the other side of their long night was more than Marion could bear. She already knew that she would spend months unraveling her own role in what had happened, and whether she could have avoided such unnecessary loss. Marion had yet to fully believe what the others told her—that she was headed toward something greater—but if they were right, it was her duty to grow from this. To make the future truly better.

  But her thoughts were decidedly less lofty at the moment.

  Robert was still unaccounted for.

  Arable was still unaccounted for.

  The Delaneys.

  Ahead of her, a corpse of a young man lay on his stomach, a short axe wedged between his shoulder blades. Based on his position, he must have been fleeing when he was killed. His weapon—she assumed it was his, at least—lay a foot from his hands, not a single drop of blood on it.

  “We should not be here, my lady,” Sir Amon said from atop his horse, picking a careful path behind her. “It’s not safe.”

  “Oh to hell with safe.” She did not bother to turn back. “Do you think one is going to wake up and attack me?”

  “This area is not secured,” he answered. “There’s no knowing who is left in the city with a grudge to bear. And the dead bring disease, my lady, you would be—”

  “Nowhere in the world is safe,” she cut him off. “I should think this has proven the point.”

  The immediacy of the war had been her excuse to avoid this next conversation. Now that it was over, there was no point in delaying it. And with such tangible proof of her responsibilities around her, she was ashamed to have even put it off.

  “You’re selfish, Amon,” she said. “Do you know that?”

  He held back a slight gasp. Good. She’d meant to hurt him. “I have given much of myself for your safety, my lady. It pains me to hear that you do not recognize that.”

  She ignored his protest. “You see the world only in terms of your charge. In whether or not something is safe for me, not whether it’s inherently right. That’s why you abducted me, it’s how you convinced yourself it was honorable to do so. I won’t be in need of your service any longer.”

  “My charge is not—”

  “I know.” She’d heard it before. “It’s my father’s to decide. I’ll be writing him a letter today to demand that he discharge you, and replace you with someone else. There are, after all, a great many other knights suddenly returned to England in need of retainer.”

  His horse shuffled in the mud behind her. She wouldn’t look at him. There were too many bodies here, of young men who deserved her pity so very much more than he.

  “As you say. But I will continue to watch over you until—”

  “If I see you, I’ll cut my arm open.” She knelt down and picked the unbloodied sword from the ground, held its point to her wrist. “Do you understand? If you care about my safety so much, then know that the closer you are to me, the more damage I will do to myself. So protect me, then, by removing yourself from my sight.”

  She wasn’t proud of dismissing him so, but she had no emotion to spare for him.

  The soldier with the axe in his back, Marion didn’t know him. But at the same time, she knew him a thousand times. He was everyone she was fighting for, and everyone whose fate she did not yet know. He was all her responsibilities, and especially those she’d shied away from. Her thoughts turned to Will Scarlet, whom she’d once been so eager to cut out of her life. It had been a profound shock to see him again in King Richard’s command tent, side by side with Prince John of all people—and Marion was apparently the only person who had recognized either of them. She would give a great many things to learn what bizarre events had placed the two of them in that moment. Despite all her frustrations from the winter, she was dying to find out what had happened on Will
’s half of their diverged road. She missed him, and perhaps, too, the adventurous side of her past that had vanished along with him. She wanted the opportunity to say farewell to both of those. Maybe even to apologize. But the world was rarely so tidy as to allow her that opportunity. She doubted she’d ever get that closure.

  But whatever had happened to Will Scarlet, that, too, was her responsibility. To see to it that it never had to happen again.

  Amon’s horse huffed and moved away, but Marion focused on the dead man on the ground until his every horrid feature was memorized. She wasn’t sure if she was happy that Amon left, or even more disappointed in him. But if ever there was a good time to clean the slate, this was it.

  Each body here, there was no knowing what brought them to Nottingham. Some had followed their king’s orders to Jerusalem and back, some had marched for their liegelord, some had defended their city, their castle, because they didn’t know of another way. Because their leaders only knew how to solve their disputes by spilling blood. Because it was the way they saw the world. Like Amon, they could only think of solutions that fit their skills.

  Hammers, all of them, who thought they could pound the world until it was made of nails.

  * * *

  SHE STORMED RIGHT PAST the line of noblemen waiting for a word with their King, which stretched the length of the war camp. Men who were vying for his recognition, men who wanted to remind him they were here on this day. Men who wanted land from their rivals, positions for their children. Men who had risked the lives of those beneath them, whose loss they would never mourn. Marion Fitzwalter refused to wait patiently behind men who wanted to profit from the dead, and be congratulated for it.

  When she reached the entrance flaps to the command tent, a pair of foolhardy sentinels blocked her way. If she thought back upon it later, she would never remember what—if anything—she said to move them. Perhaps an entire life of suppressed rage had been funneled into a single cold glare, which set the two guards succinctly back to their places.

 

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