PROLOGUE
August 1265—Blackmere Field, near Evesham
Thomas Ashcombe knew the day was lost when the sky turned red.
Not with sunset. The sun still hung high above the field, a hard white coin behind the smoke, giving no mercy to the men dying beneath it. The red came from banners trampled into mud, from torn surcoats and open flesh, from the slick shine on sword blades and the churned ground beneath the horses’ hooves. It came from everywhere at once, until the whole world seemed made of blood and iron, and the screams of men who had risen that morning believing courage might be enough.
Courage, Thomas had learned, did not stop a mounted charge.
Nor did loyalty or prayer.
“Hold!” he bellowed, though his voice had gone raw an hour ago and the word tore at his throat like a hook. “Hold the line, damn you!”
The line did not hold. It bent, shuddered, and broke beneath the king’s men like rotten wood under a boot. Shields split. Spears snapped. A horse went down screaming, its rider trapped beneath it, clawing at the mud with both hands while men surged over him. Somewhere to Thomas’s left, a boy from Ashcombe, Will Miller’s second son, cried for his mother in a voice too young for such a field.
Thomas tried to reach him.
A mailed shoulder slammed into him. He staggered, caught his footing, and brought his sword up in time to turn aside a blow meant for his head. The force of it jarred his arm to the elbow. He struck back before thought could slow him, his blade finding the gap beneath the other man’s helm. The soldier dropped, and Thomas shoved past him, already searching for the boy.
He could no longer see him, there were too many bodies. Saints, there were too many bodies.
“Thomas!”
Hob’s voice cut through the din, rough as a millstone. Thomas turned and saw him twenty paces away, blood running down one side of his face from a split scalp, still swinging an axe with grim, ugly purpose. Hob had been with him since Wales, since before Ashcombe had ever been Thomas’s burden, and the sight of him upright in that sea of ruin struck Thomas with a relief so sharp it was almost pain.
“Back!” Hob shouted. “My lord, we must fall back!”
Thomas heard him, understood the words. Yet the part of him that had led these men here, that had taken their oaths and eaten beside them and listened to them boast of the ale they would drink when Montfort won the day, could not make his feet move.
Fall back from whom? From Wexford, who had kept the rolls in that cramped little hand and complained all the way fromAshcombe about the mud ruining his boots? From Osbern’s brother, who had kissed the little wooden cross around his neck before the first charge and said his wife would have his hide if he lost it? From Martin, who was wed three months and still blushed when men teased him about his bride? From Will Miller’s boy, who had called for his mother?
Thomas turned back toward the crush.
Hob reached him before he could take three steps. The man was built broad as a church door and twice as stubborn. He caught Thomas by the back of his hauberk and hauled.
“My lord!”
“Let go.”
“Nay.”
Thomas rounded on him, fury blazing hot enough to burn through fear and grief alike. “I said let go.”
“And I said no, which proves I’ve more wit than you this day.” Hob’s face was grey beneath the blood, his eyes bright and terrible. “They are gone.”
Thomas looked past him. The field had become a thing from hell.
Simon de Montfort’s men were being cut apart. Not beaten. Cut apart. The king’s banners snapped above the press, bright and pitiless, while the losing side folded inward beneath the weight of horses, steel, and the dreadful certainty of defeat. The air stank of sweat, blood, churned grass, and the hot copper reek of bodies. Smoke drifted from somewhere beyond the ridge. A crow already circled overhead, black wings patient as a priest.
“They are not all gone,” Thomas said.
Hob’s grip tightened. “They will be if you stay to die beside them.”
A rider came at them then, one of the royalists, his horse flecked white with foam and red at the chest. Thomas shoved Hob aside and took the impact on his shield. The blow drove himback three steps. Thomas ducked beneath the next slash, came up hard, and opened the man’s thigh from knee to hip.
The rider screamed and toppled.
Another man rushed in, then another. For a while there was only the work. Step, turn, cut, breathe if there was time. Thomas had always understood battle best in pieces. A wrist exposed. A foot placed badly. The twitch before a man struck high. The half breath between one killing and the next. He had won his reputation in those pieces, built it on mud and discipline and the stubborn refusal to die when better men had managed it. But today the pieces would not fit together.