There were too many enemies. Too few of his own left standing. The shouts that had guided him were gone, swallowed by the roar. His arm grew heavy. The mail at his side had split. Blood slid warm beneath his tunic, though whether it was his own or someone else’s he could not tell.
“Thomas!”
This time the voice was younger. Perkin? Nay, not Perkin. Perkin was safe at Ashcombe, still too green to carry anything sharper than a pitchfork. This was Hugh Tanner, seventeen and long-limbed, with straw in his hair more often than sense in his head.
He stood half a dozen paces away with a spear in both hands and terror written plain across his face.
“My lord, I cannot find my father.”
The words struck harder than any blade.
Thomas moved toward him. “Hugh, to me.”
The boy took one step before the arrow found him. It was a small sound he made. Not a scream. Almost surprise. He looked down at the shaft jutting from beneath his collarbone, then up at him as though Thomas might explain how such a thing had been allowed to happen.
Thomas caught him as he fell.
“I’ve got you,” he said, though he did not. He had never had him. He had brought the boy here under a banner and a cause, and fine words men used before fields became slaughterhouses.
Hugh’s hand clutched at his sleeve. His fingers were already cold.
“My father,” the boy whispered.
“I will find him.”
The boy’s grip loosened, his eyes fixed on something beyond Thomas’s shoulder, and the breath left him in a soft, wet sigh.
For a moment Thomas knelt in the mud with the dead boy in his arms and heard nothing.
Not the shouting nor the horses. Not Hob cursing behind him. Nothing but the strange hollow ringing that came after a blow to the head, though no blow had landed.
He laid Hugh down gently, as if gentleness mattered now.
The world came back all at once as he rose.
A mace glanced off his helm, sending white sparks through his vision. Another blow clipped his jaw, not clean enough to break bone but sharp enough to split flesh from ear to chin. Heat flashed. Blood filled his mouth. He spat it into the mud and drove his sword forward with both hands.
The man before him died with surprise on his face.
Thomas hoped the next one looked the same. He had taken two more steps into the press when Hob crashed into him from the side, nearly taking both of them down.
“Enough!” Hob snarled.
Thomas swung at him before he realized who it was. Hob ducked, grabbed him around the middle with his good arm, and dragged him backward with a strength born of rage and desperation.
“Cease, you witless dolt!”
“Leave me!”
“Nay. I’ve no wish to carry your corpse home, and I’ll not tell Edith I left you here because you were too thick-skulled to live.”
“Those are my men.”
“Aye,” Hob said, and there was no humor in him now. “And those still breathing need you more than the dead.”
Thomas struck him then.
Not with the sword. Some last frayed thread of sense kept him from that. But his fist caught Hob across the mouth, and the man reeled back, blood on his teeth.