and screamed on the end of its tether – then a second grey shape barrelled in and the ball of fighting hounds rolled and snarled and fought a little longer until the alaunt, outmatched even by one, broke from the pair of deerhounds and sped away.
Hal and Sim came up, trailing Tod’s Wattie, the Dog Boy with a fistful of leashes and a cursing Bangtail Hob in his wake. They all arrived in time to see the alaunt, close hauled by the ghost-grey shapes, suddenly fall over its own front feet, roll over and over and then sprawl, loose and still. The deer-hounds overran it and had to skid and backtrack, only to find their prey so dead they could only paw it, snarling and whining in a thwarted ecstasy of lost bloodlust, puzzled at the leather-fletched sapling which had sprouted from the hunting dog’s neck.
From out of a nearby copse strolled Kirkpatrick, latchbow casually over one shoulder.
A fine shot, Sim noted with a detached part of his brain. What was he doin’, sleekit in the trees with a latchbow? He could not find the voice for it – did not need to – as the Dog Boy ran to secure the hounds and Hal and Bruce exchanged looks.
‘If you are allowed to search the saddle-bags of yon Malise,’ Kirkpatrick said, in a voice as easy as if they were discussing horses at table, ‘you will surely find it full of hare shite. Terrifying for a wee leveret, to be shut up in the bouncing dark until needed. You will find also that the alaunt handler has been spirited away, though I will wager he’ll not long enjoy the payment he had for releasing yon monster on cue. You will not find him at all, I suspect.’
No-one spoke, until Bruce turned to the snorting, panting, wild-eyed rouncey and gathered up the reins, the trembling fear in him turning to anger at what had been revealed, at the cunning planning in it and, if truth be told, his own secret attempt against Buchan.
In his mind’s eye, for a fleeting, bowel-wrenching flicker, he saw the dog’s great jaws and the long, leaping shape of it – he wrenched to free the reins from the tangle, felt them give then catch again; irritated, he hauled with all his strength.
Death ripped up out of the earth and leered at him.
Douglas Castle The next day
The hunt ended like a trail of damp smoke, filtering back in near-silence to the castle. Bruce, too bright and brittle to be true, flirted even more outrageously with the Countess, though her exchanges seemed strained and she was too aware of Buchan’s glowering.
No-one could stop looking at the cart which held the body – though Hal had seen Kirkpatrick, riding silent and cat-hunched with a face as sightless and bland as a stone saint. Here was a man who had just seen his liege lord under attack and should be head-swinging alert – yet he stared ahead and saw nothing.
He should, Hal said to Sim later, be like a mouse sniffing moonlight for more owls.
‘You would so think,’ Sim agreed – but he was distracted, had come in from the dark night of the Ward to report that he’d seen the Countess, huckled like a bad apprentice across to the Earl of Buchan’s tent by Malise and two men in leather jacks and foul grins. The noises that came from it then set everyone’s teeth on edge.
In the comfort of the kitchen, old limbs wrapped to ease the ache, White Tam nodded approval; the Earl of Buchan had finally seen sense ower his wayward wummin.
‘A woman, a dog and an old oak tree,’ he intoned. ‘The more you beat them, the better they be.’
‘Why an oak tree, Master?’ demanded one of the scullions and Tam told him – sometimes such a tree stopped producing valuable acorns for the pigs, so some stout men, including the Smith with his forge hammer, would walk round it, hitting it hard. It started the sap up again and saved the tree.
Dog Boy, fetching scraps for the hounds, listened to the sick sounds and thought of the Countess being hit by a forge hammer. He did not think her sap would rise.
There was worse to come, at least for Hal, as the morning crept closer – the Auld Templar shifted out of the shadows like a wraith and, with a pause for a single deep breath, like a man ducking underwater, said:
‘I need to call on your aid.’
Hal felt the chill of it right there.
‘I am, as ever, fealtied to Roslin,’ he replied carefully and saw the old man’s head jerk at that. Aha – so I am right, he thought. He summons me as a liege lord.
‘Before my son came of age,’ the Auld Templar said slowly, ‘I was lord of Roslin. I taught the young Bruce how to fight.’
Hal said nothing, though that fact explained much about the Templar’s presence with the Earl of Carrick.
‘When my son was able, I handed him Roslin and gave my soul and arm to God,’ the Templar went on. ‘I have never regretted it – until now.’
He stared at Hal, pouch eyes flickered with torchlight.
‘I cannot be seen to fight for one side or the other,’ he went on. ‘But Roslin must jump.’
‘To the Bruce,’ Hal said bleakly and had back a nod.
‘The Sientcler Way,’ Hal added, hearing the desperation in his own voice. The Sientcler Way was always to have a branch of the family on either side of a conflict. That way, triumph or loss, the Sientclers always survived.
The Auld Templar shook his head.
‘This conflict is too large and the Sientclers are too thinned. This time, we must jump one way and pray to God.’
‘You wish me to serve the Bruce, in your stead,’ Hal declared flatly; the Templar nodded.
It was hardly a surprise. Roslin owed fealty to the Earl of March, Patrick of Dunbar – and so, therefore, did Herdmanston – but Earl Patrick was lockstepped with Longshanks and, with a son and grandson held by the English, the Auld Templar was inclined to those who opposed them.
‘My father,’ Hal began and the Auld Templar broke in.
‘Is at home,’ he said. ‘He sent word that the Earl of March refuses to help return my boys to me. Just punishment for rebellion, he says. The Earl of Carrick has promised help with ransoms.’
Well, there it was – sold for the price for two men from Roslin. Hal felt his mouth dry up. Herdmanston was put at risk and his father with it – yet he knew the Auld Templar had weighed that in the pan and still found the price acceptable.
‘Then we are bound – where?’ Hal asked, sealing it as surely as fisting a ring into wax. For a moment the Auld Templar looked broken and Hal realised the weight crushing those bony shoulders, wanted to offer some reassurance. The lie choked him – and the Auld Templar’s next words would have made mockery of it in any case.
‘Irvine,’ he said and forced a grin to split his snowy beard. ‘The Bruce is off to treat with rebels.’
Hal stared at the space where the Auld Templar had been long after the dark had swallowed the man – until Sim found him and, frowning, asked him why he was boring holes in the dark. Hal told him and Sim blew out his cheeks.
‘Rebels are we then?’ he declared and shrugged. ‘Bigod -that puts us at odds with the chiel who has also just asked for our aid. I would not mention it.’
The Earl of Buchan was in the undercroft, coldest hole in Douglas and the resting place of the mysterious body. In the soft, filtered light of early morning, you could see why the body had drained the blood from Bruce’s face when he’d had it torn from the mulch almost into his face.
Kirkpatrick, too, had looked stricken – but, then, no-one was chirruping songs to May at the sight of the half-eaten, rotted affair, undeniably human and undeniably a man of quality from the remains of his clothing and the rings still on his half-skeletal fingers.
Not robbed then, for a thief would have had his rings and searched under armpits and bollocks, the place sensible men kept most of their heavy coin. The dead man had a purse with some little coin