SEVENTEEN

WHILE HE KNEW that they would need soldiers, for a time Henry was happy playing with John. As they grew older, though, his friend was called away to court more often. These absences, which could last months, left Henry bored and angry, difficult to please and, in the privacy of his own mind, sad. There were too many adults towering over him, and all of them put demands on him. No one was any fun.

Thomas Markeley, his old arms instructor, took John’s place as a sparring partner during the lonely weeks when John was away. Henry liked Markeley well enough: a man of few words who tended to handle Henry much as he handled a horse, with brief instructions, pointing him in the right direction and giving him the occasional pat. Markeley was easy to understand. He had also been a soldier, and Henry studied him, trying to learn what he needed to know about such creatures.

John said that most people—”the people” was the phrase he used, an awkward concept to understand, as unlike the concept of a tribe, “the people” did not seem to include all the people in England—were more like Markeley than like anyone else Henry knew, but that most were not soldiers. They grew things, dug the earth and planted seeds (John having planted some in a patch of earth to prove to Henry that this was how plants came about, a little patch of greenery Henry sometimes visited when there was no one to play with). They kept animals captive and slaughtered them when it was time to eat. They made things. From this, Henry had formed an impression of the people of England as hungry and frightened. They kept their prey close to them where it couldn’t escape, but if the prey took sick and died, they couldn’t swim across the miles to find more. They stayed on little patches of ground, facing starvation if the ground didn’t yield food. They were forbidden to gather what they needed: it was called stealing and ended with a rope choking the life out of them. The king led them and told them what to do, but they couldn’t see or hear him. He was out of their reach, experienced only by report—but they must all know that he was old, that he had no good sons. Somehow he managed to keep away kings from other tribes, but Henry was certain of something, even though Markeley always changed the subject back to weapons when asked directly: the people needed their king to be strong, and he wasn’t. They would be frightened of other kings, and, more importantly, they would be ashamed.

This could be used to his advantage, Henry thought. People would want a strong king. If he managed it properly, offered them what they lacked, they ought to be pleased about it.

He would have liked to share the thought with John, but John was away.

Boredom was not something Henry had ever had to deal with in the sea. Every moment was a hunt, shoals of silver food bristling before him, dolphins crackling their threats across the leagues of water, avoiding the pinching fingers of the other children, questing across blue, empty deserts to find the currents that would take the tribe to its next destination. He had been active, frightened, alert, every waking moment. Taken into Allard’s house, he had remained frightened. But the years had passed and no one threatened him; the soldiers he heard so much about remained distant, unseen. He had learned, studied—at least with weapons—because he hadn’t known any other kind of life. John had introduced him to the idea of company. Left alone, he found the practice a little wearisome. He persevered, hefting his axe day after day, because there was nothing else to do. Sometimes, when the weather was too hot, he kept to his room, staring out of the window, one hand idly turning the crown Allard had given him when he was small.

The occasions John returned, Henry was too happy to see him to complain about his absence. He knew that John had to go to the court to learn about it. When he was sixteen, though, and beginning to chafe at this round of coming and going, training and promises with no sign of progress, another absence was called for, one that was neither welcome nor expected.

“John should go,” was the first Henry heard about it. Claybrook was already discussing the topic with Allard and John when Henry, who had heard rapid hoofbeats from across the estate and ridden back from his explorations to meet them, made an awkward entrance into the room.

Allard looked even more nervous than usual; Henry could hear his breath scraping in his throat. “Will you not go too?” he said.

“Yes, I must.” Claybrook gave an impatient wave. “But separately. I will have to join his Majesty’s party. And I will have to return to court afterwards. Philip takes more and more care, and her Majesty is less and less willing to help. I could not ride back to tell you about it. John will be free to return. He can go on his own: he would be in the way if I was caring for Philip. It would be natural enough to send him home after such a sight anyway.”

“What is to happen?” Henry broke in. John was sitting in a corner, looking smaller than usual. The sight made Henry angry and anxious.

“Henry.” Allard turned to him, reached out a hand and then thought better of it. “There is news from court. There may be no need for us to be alarmed, but it is most serious.”

“What?” Henry didn’t want preamble; in the time it took Allard to talk about the news, he could simply have said it and spared Henry some frightened seconds.

“It may not be—”

“John, what has happened?” Henry gave up on Allard, who after eleven years still would not learn that he should give straight answers.

John shrugged unhappily. “They say someone has found a bastard, and they are going to burn him.” Henry froze. “Not you, we think. In Cornwall, far south of here. They say he is young, only four years old or so. And they have caught him. But it will stir the country up. People are talking about whether they will really burn the child or kill him first, give him an easier death. But we do not think they will. Princess Erzebet is looking very fierce about it.”

Henry shook his head, urgency swamping him. “Do we have soldiers now? We could stop them, could we not?”

“Henry, we cannot.” Allard sounded almost as unhappy as John.

Henry turned on Claybrook. “You talk of soldiers. Why have I seen none? We could go to Cornwall and stop them doing this.”

Claybrook gave a polite smile. In this conversation, it looked utterly wrong, and Henry glowered. “We are not yet ready, my lord.”

“He may be right, sir,” John said to his father. “I do not think the people will wish to see a child burn. Henry and I are well grown now. Maybe this would be a good moment to strike.”

“Not unless we wish to put this child on the throne,” Claybrook said, a sharp edge in his voice. “And it is Henry we wish to crown, not this Cornwall infant.”

“He could be my son,” Henry said. “You say that the King is weak because he has not enough sons. This boy could be mine.”

“You are too young to be his father, my lord,” Claybrook said, as if correcting a mistake.

“I am not a fool, I know this,” Henry snapped. “But if we could take the throne, then I could say he was my son and that would make him so. You say England needs deepsmen boys. There would be two of us.” In fact, Henry had ill memories of deepsmen boys, but this child was smaller than him, weaker, and could not hurt him. With Henry’s dominance assured, the infant might be useful. And whether or not he would like the child, Henry could not stand the thought of a burning. If England could burn one bastard, it could burn another, and the child’s death would bring him a long step closer to the scorching pyre.

“This boy would be a threat to you, my lord.” Henry noticed with anger that Claybrook’s voice, so biting when speaking to his son, had turned back to courtesy and calm when addressing Henry.

“I could settle such a threat if it happened,” Henry said. “But it is not coming from him now.”

“This is useless talk, my lord,” Claybrook said. “It cannot be done.”

“Why do you not want to save the child?” Henry demanded.

Claybrook gave him a politic smile. “England would accept one bastard on the throne, my lord. England would become used to him in time, if he could hold it. But England would never accept two bastards at once. One bastard would become a king, if he were strong enough. But the king is king by birth. Two bastards together would destroy the very notion of kingship.”

“England would accept a king that ruled,” Henry said, his voice unfamiliarly choked as fury made it harder to speak. “You are—are talking songs. These are thoughts, not real things.” His vocabulary was beginning to desert him in the cold haze of his anger.

“My lord,” Claybrook said firmly, “we have not the soldiers.”

“Then what have you been doing for eight years?” Henry looked over and saw John sitting silent in his chair, gnawing his knuckles as Henry shouted at his father. Henry drew a breath, held it, held it, let the seconds stretch as his lungs settled around their hoard of air.

A silence hung in the room.

Henry let the breath out of his lungs, drew another. “John, could we raise soldiers?” he said.

John swallowed, avoiding his father’s eyes. “Probably not fast enough,” he said. “And possibly not many enough. The burning will happen soon. It takes many days to bring an army together. Weeks, usually.”

“Could it be done?”

“Possibly.” John looked at Henry, his shoulders hunched as if to hide him from the adults staring at him. “But probably it would fail. And then we would go on the pyre together.”

Henry looked at John for a moment, refusing to drop his gaze. The air in the room was too thick, too windless for comfort. He lowered his voice, sitting down on the floor. “Can you go to this burning?”

“My lord …” Claybrook began.

“I do not speak to you.” Henry did not shout, but his words rang around the room, resonant as a cry in the sea, and everyone flinched at the sound.

John shrugged. “If I must. You will wish for news straight away, yes?”

“Will you stay awhile after you come back?”

John nodded. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Then you should go. Go alone. Do not bring a servant, no one who will make a noise or want to talk to you while you are there. Listen to what the people say, and tell me about it.”

“I will do that.” John’s face, normally pink of cheek and bright of eye, was dull in the half-lit room.

“You do not look well,” Henry said. “Will it make you ill to see it?”

John straightened up, shook his head rapidly, his curls flying about his face. “It will not kill me,” he said. There was a moment when his face struggled for composure, but then his old grin was back, almost as wide as before. “I shall be as brave as a soldier about it, Henry. It may do me good to see what we face, make me cautious.”

“If you cannot watch it, you should tell me so,” Henry said.

John shook his head again. “No,” he said. “We will see more deaths than this before we get to the throne.” He smiled again. Henry could see that the smile was forced, but he was not going to hurt his friend’s pride by pointing it out. “After all, it will not be you on the pyre.”

John rode away that night. Henry had insisted on accompanying him to the edge of the estate, and with Claybrook already gone to catch the royal party, Allard made no objection; his face was sad and frightened, but he knew better than to quarrel with Henry in his current mood. Henry and John rode quietly together, no sound but the hooves of their horses drumming against the damp earth. The air was cool on Henry’s skin, damp and pleasant, and the moon cut a sharp slice of light in the black sky above. It was a bright night, easily bright enough to ride by.

At the edge of the grounds, Henry patted the neck of John’s horse and said, “I will see you soon.” John looked at him and nodded, his mouth pinched shut, his face grey in the moonlight. He turned his face without speaking and, after a moment, kicked his horse to a trot and set off.

Henry sat by himself, listening to the sound of the hooves as it faded in the distance. In the still, moist air, sound carried far, and he could hear great distances: owls hooting from miles away, the rush of a river, the scuttle of mice in the underbrush. In that great quiet, John’s horse was the loudest thing for miles.

After a few minutes, when he was sure that he was out of John’s earshot, he followed.

John was easy to track. His horse pattered along, a steady, sustainable pace: John had never liked to press his animals too hard. Neither did he like to be alone; Henry could hear him whispering under his breath: “Good beast. On we go …” He sang songs to keep himself company, talked to his horse, clattered his teeth together to make noise to go along with him. The sound of his loneliness made Henry sorry that he was trailing so far behind, but irritated him a little as well. Henry knew about hunting at night. If this were in the sea, with all the noise John was making, a shark would have taken him in the first ten minutes.

Hour after hour they kept on. He did not know where the burning was to be held, but the distances were still greater than Henry, used to cantering in circles within a few miles of land, had ever ridden in his life. The trees did not change, the earth smelled fresh and black and the wind parted before him as it always did, but despite the danger of the journey, the openness, the wild risk of discovery, something in Henry relaxed. After years imprisoned, he was travelling the miles again.

The thought of the bastard had driven him almost mad when he had first resolved to follow John. Henry was too old to think he could somehow rescue the poor landed brat, but he had to go anyway. They were going to burn him. Were it not for Allard—it was a thought that had never spurred him to gratitude before, but he felt a surprising stirring of it now—that would have been him. This child, his kinsman, was headed for the pyre, and Henry had to see it. Even if the boy didn’t know he was there, Henry had to be near him. Whether he was destined for the throne or the fire, Henry didn’t know, but the flames were something he needed to see. The thought of them made his heart pound so loud in his chest he could hear it over the noise of John’s horse, and that made him angry. He was going to face the flames, match his courage against them and stare them down.

It was early the next morning, grey dawn seeping through the sky, that Henry finally decided he had hidden long enough. John’s horse stopped pacing in the distance and Henry heard a slithering dismount, the familiar voice saying, “Good girl. Just a little rest and we will go on …” It was time to make his approach. As the sky whitened, Henry could feel his chest constrict; a dark sky was like a dark sea overhead, soft and expansive, deep enough to hide in, but with light capping the day he was beginning to feel exposed. They were on a dirt road, tufts of long grass straggling at the sides and brambles leaning toothed, drunken legs this way and that, and Henry didn’t like it. He’d never seen this place before.

John sat shut-eyed on the ground, his horse cropping the grass beside him. He didn’t see Henry coming. A small flare of frustration briefly warmed the chill in Henry’s bones: John shouldn’t be so easy to track. It was careless. How would he survive if they were ever hunted?

“You should not close your eyes on a strange road,” he said, riding forward, and John’s eyes flew open. He stared at Henry, his mouth hanging open and his face pale.

“Good morrow,” Henry continued, seeing that John wasn’t going to say anything. The sight of his friend speechless made him uncomfortable, and there was nothing to do but carry on and wait for John’s spirits to catch up. He hoped it would be soon; Henry was not good at being the cheerful one. “I am coming with you.”

John looked frantically back and forth, up and down the road. There was no one in sight; brown puddles shivered in the wind and the grass bobbed beside them, but the road was clear. “Get back into the woods!” John leaped to his feet, making a grab for Henry’s bridle. Henry’s horse turned its head and Henry grabbed at the reins, steadying it. “Henry, hide yourself! Get into the woods! What do you do here?”

“I am coming to the burning,” Henry said. “Leave my horse be, you will frighten him.”

“To Hell with your horse, Henry. Do you mean to have us killed? How did you follow me?”

Henry shrugged. “I could hear you from a mile away. I wish to come to—”

“Henry, you can’t! Go back, please. You will be killed. We will both be killed if you are seen, and if you are not seen my father will kill me when we get home anyway. Henry, please go back.” John’s face was drained of colour, his eyes wide. His hand, reached out for the bridle, was frozen in mid-air, and Henry could see it shake.

“I will not give you up if anyone sees me,” Henry said. “But I shall come to the burning.”

“No you will not. Not with me.” From the ground, John was far taller than Henry, but secure in his saddle, Henry could see the top of John’s head, an unaccustomed sight. “Henry, I cannot take you with me. You must go home.”

Henry leaned down and patted John on the shoulder. John flinched like a nervous animal, but Henry felt no aggression, just a sense of friendship. He wasn’t going to get John hurt. “I do not know the way,” he said. “I only followed the sound of your hooves. I will get lost.”

“Then I will take you.”

Henry shook his head. “I will not let you. You cannot fight me, John. Either we go to the burning together, or I go on alone and try to find it by myself. You can sit in the mud beside this road and wonder where I am.”

John swallowed, looking at Henry’s sharp, small teeth and narrow nose, his black eyes and white skin. “Your face will reveal you, Henry. You would be taken the moment you saw another person. You cannot go into a crowd.”

Henry gave him an innocent stare. “Then you must protect me, John. You are my friend. Protect me from my folly.”

John looked for a moment, then shook his head. It was a gesture Henry had often seen before, when an argument had broken down with John laughing and giving way. He wasn’t laughing now, though. He drew a deep breath, and shook his head again. When he looked back, his face was set more in its own lines—though still pale as bread. “Is that your only cloak?” he asked.

Henry nodded. It was thin wool, grey and warm-smelling, and kept out the cold but little; he had never much cared for warm clothes.

“We must change, then,” John said. “Mine has a hood. Here, take it.” Henry shrugged off his own cloak and reached down for John’s, a dark grey affair of heavier fabric. “Put it on and pull it over your face. I swear, Henry, if this does not work then we must go home.”

Henry settled the cloak around his shoulders and pulled up the hood. It weighed down on him, thick and oppressive, blunting the bite of the morning air, smothering him from the world. John pulled Henry’s thinner mantle around his own frame, shivering. “You landsmen are always cold,” Henry said. “My cloak is too small for you. Look, it barely reaches your knees.”

“I am a good friend to wear it,” John said, clapping his arms around himself. “Raise your hood.”

Henry pulled the hood up around his face. The fabric, warm from its former wearer, covered his ears, shuttered his vision, enshrouding his head in dullness. To be so screened from his surroundings made Henry more nervous than before, and his hand twitched, wanting to pull it off.

“Further forward,” John said. His teeth were chattering. “How far forward can it go?”

Henry reluctantly covered his face. The cloth hung down on his forehead, like a ceiling blocking out the sky. The further forward the hood, the more vulnerable he felt, but John seemed to relax. “Well,” he said, “that is not perfect, but if you keep your head lowered, it will do well enough. Pull it down. Keep it over the tops of your boots, so nobody can see your legs.”

The folds of the cloak were difficult to arrange, but Henry twined his legs back, tucking the cloth over them. “Good enough?”

John shook his head. “We are lucky I am taller than you. That cloak is barely big enough as it is.” He pressed his hands against his forehead, fingers splaying over the white skin. “I do not like this, Henry.”

Henry bared his teeth from the depths of the hood. “I do not like this hood, but I wear it to please you.”

“Why must you see this burning?” John lowered his hands, looking up at his friend.

Henry did not know how to answer. He shook his head. “I wish to know what is happening,” he said in the end. “And I wish to know the worst that can happen to me.”

“If you wish to know that, let us go home now and I will set fire to a cat for you,” John said.

Henry shook his head again. “I wish to know what I am fighting against.”

John said little on the rest of the journey, and Henry said nothing either. The two of them plodded side by side, down the road. The first time someone passed them Henry’s hands tightened on his reins so fast that the horse shied, but the traveller only raised his hand and nodded, saying, “Good morrow.” John hailed him in return, and they passed on. The stranger was a man dressed much like Allard, with yellow hair and a pink face, startling in his unfamiliarity, but gone down the road, no threat, no danger. Henry resisted the urge to turn and stare after him. If all goes well, he told himself, I shall rule that man one day. I will not have to hide from him. I will show him my face, and he will bow.

As the numbers of people increased, though, Henry grew uncomfortable. John was right, many of them wore cloaks, and as they thickened on the road, becoming a crowd, a shoal of cumbersome horses and riders, more and more of them pulled hoods up covering the bewildering variety of faces, as if to shield them. There was nothing in any of their features that needed hiding. They just drew up their hoods, covering their heads from what surrounded them.

The pyre had loomed immense in Henry’s mind, casting a black, flickering shadow over his spirit, but the sight of it was so mundane that for a moment he couldn’t believe this was what they had come so far to see. A tall stake of wood, roughly hewn and set in the ground, surrounded by bundles of fuel, a simple cone heaped around a stick, like a pile of snow with a spade stuck in it. It was not tall like a tree or black like ink. Just a fireplace heaped up in an open field.

“Henry.” John’s voice was low, too low for anyone but him to hear. “We should stay at the back of the crowd. If we are too close to the front, we will have to dismount, and then you will have to walk.”

And then people would see his legs. Then he might as well climb up on the pyre and lie down to sleep out the last few minutes of his life. Henry said nothing, but pulled hard on his horse’s reins and dug in his heels, forcing the animal to back up.

Having followed John all night, ridden so far and tired his horse to get here, Henry expected the burning to begin at once, but it was hours of waiting before anything happened. People arrived, people upon people. Henry was no judge of clothes, but they had more the look of Claybrook than of Allard or the servants; tall people, people on fine horses with servants attending them. More and more. Henry hung at the outskirts of the crowd and backed up his horse more with each arrival, and they kept on coming. The sight was overwhelming. In all his life, he had known fewer than a dozen people. Now there were scores of them, thronging together, a great gathering, all strangers, numerous, various, terrifying.

It was some time, too long, before an unfamiliar sound came to Henry’s ears, piercing and sharp. He looked up, reached to tug on John’s arm.

“Your hand,” John hissed, pushing him away.

Henry hid his webs back in his fists, folding his fingers around the reins. “What is that?” he whispered.

“The fanfare. The King is coming. Can you not understand it? It is meant to be the deepsmen’s language.”

Henry listened, frowning with angry concentration. There was something of the creak and drone of his mother tongue there, and he knew court musicians were supposed to imitate the deepsmen’s language with their instruments. Probably there was something to hear in that displeasing mix of sounds, but he wasn’t about to converse with it. He shook his head. “It means nothing,” he said.

There was a rustle, the snort of horses and the sound of voices whispering, and the crowd pushed back. Henry found his legs being jostled by other men; to his alarm, he could feel knees, calves, the clear shape of others being pressed into his skin. If he could feel them, they could feel him. “Back up, back up,” he hissed to John, yanking hard at his horse’s mouth. The animal, over-driven and exhausted, jumped under his pulling, and Henry loosened the reins in panic: if the creature reared now, it would tumble him onto the ground, legs strewn out for the world to see. Heart thrashing against his ribs, he took a gentler grip and pulled back, trying to see John around the suffocating hood.

Preoccupied with his battle to get out of the crush, Henry missed the royal litters’ arrival. When he looked up, there was an array of people, a man, a woman, both crowned and stiff-backed, and something else, a fat shape slumped beside the woman—but they did not have their faces to him, and he couldn’t see. His hands convulsed in frustration; if he had his axe, he could ride up to them now, three hard swings and this whole parade would be over with. If it weren’t for the crowd. They were too far away from him, and he couldn’t see their faces. They could be landsmen, could be deepsmen, could be anything.

There were no speeches. The crowned woman raised her hand, and brought it down again. There was a murmur, and then men were coming forward, dragging behind them a shuffling, lurching figure, whose weeping rang in Henry’s ears, got inside them like an itch, a burr he couldn’t dig out. He looked at John, desperate and bewildered. “That is not a bastard,” he said.

John shook his head, raised a hand to shush him. “That is the man who found him,” he said. He opened his mouth to say more, then stopped, shook his head again and laughed. It was not a happy sound.

The man wept, and when his leg touched the ground, he groaned.

Guards climbed up the pyre, dragging the man after them. Yanked his hands above his head, tied them with rope, left him hanging there, lopsided, his face contorted, his body flopping with sobs, helpless as a dying cod. His voice, coming out in broken lumps, was the only sound in the field.

Other men followed. In their arms they carried someone, a shape Henry recognised instantly. Two tails, pallid skin, a thick sturdy waist and a fan of webs between its fingers. A child. His child, his brother. It struck Henry, as the child was tied up back-to-back with its finder, that the boy might actually be his brother. His mother had found a landsman to her taste once before. The thought gave him a passing moment of hostility towards the little shape on the pyre.

Then two men stepped forward with lit torches.

Flame caught quickly on to fuel, lapping round it like a climbing vine, ragged edges roaring in the wind. The man’s sobs rose quickly to screams, but it was the child’s voice that Henry heard: the shrilling cry of an animal, the shriek in the language he had not heard for many years from any throat but his own: Help me! Help me!

A man in robes was standing grim-faced before the pyre, making square gestures and muttering something in what Henry supposed was Latin. One of his legs was faulty and he stood at an angle. As the heat washed over him, stinging his skin, it seemed to Henry as if the whole of creation was lurching, sick and crooked in this dry, hard world where no water cushioned you, where you landed as you fell with nothing to break the blow.

The child screamed for his mother. No help to you now, Henry thought, ash in his throat. She pushed you out here to meet this.

There was a racket coming from the royal gathering, the lumpen shape of the man beside the queen rocking and yelling in his chair. People were standing beside him, squeezing water over his skin, and the sight made Henry so sick with anger that his stomach heaved. With another twist in his heart, Henry recognised a man standing beside them, directing their motions. It was Robert Claybrook.

The flames were rising and the screams were fading. Henry caught a glimpse of bubbling skin as they finally tore their way upwards to close over the child’s head. On the firewood below, something frothed and hissed: fat melting off as the meat cooked. The smell was no worse than any other roasted joint, any other hearth fire Henry had ever encountered. Now it seemed he had always been right in his hatred of both.

The fire roared for a long time and no one spoke. With the sight of the child gone, Henry had no more reason to stay. They were at the back; they could set out and go. As Henry turned to tell John to come with him, he looked down, and horror broke through his body in a wave of cold that blotted out the heat of the fire.

His leg was uncovered. Something, some movement, had pushed the cloak back, and there it lay, a limp snake down the side of his horse, accusing him.

Henry covered it with a frantic tug, and looked around him. All eyes were still on the pyre. No one was looking at him. He was safe, surely he was safe; if anyone had spotted him, he’d be burning right now, thrown in with the others; why waste wood when there was a fire already lit? A laugh coiled in his throat; he was getting light-headed and stupid. Time to go.

Henry backed his horse out of the crowd, slowly and carefully. The movement was enough to get John’s attention, and the two of them set out together.

A little way down the road, they heard a voice hailing them: “John? John!” Recognising Robert Claybrook, the boys stopped their horses.

“Dismount,” Claybrook said. The fire had flushed his face, making it scarlet, and his voice was hard. Henry slithered down after John; the horse would need rest soon anyway, or it would collapse.

“John.” Claybrook’s voice was clipped. “Who is that with you?”

“Henry, sir.” John spoke to the ground, barely above a whisper. The sound of it hurt Henry’s ears.

“The fault is mine,” Henry said quickly. “I followed him all the way and would not go home; he stayed with me to make sure I concealed myself well.”

Claybrook gave Henry a brief look. His eyes glittered as he turned back to his son. “You brought him here,” he said.

John did not look up.

“Answer me.”

John lifted his head a little; his face was haggard. Henry could see his legs were shaking. Claybrook stood over his son, and raised a hand.

Henry stepped between them and raised his arm, poised to strike a backhanded blow.

Claybrook fell back. He took another quick look at John, then at Henry standing with his hand still raised.

Henry stood braced. “If you punish him for this I shall know it,” he said. “It was my doing. Punish me, if you can. But I will know it if you touch John.”

Claybrook stood frozen before him for a moment. Then he turned, walked back to his horse and gathered his reins in his hand. Henry could hear his ragged breathing as he went. “I must return to his Majesty,” he said.

Henry stood, beginning to stagger, watching him ride off, but John pulled on his sleeve. “We must go now, stay ahead of the crowds,” he said. Henry nodded, and the two of them clambered back into their saddles.

They went down the road in silence.

“Let us go through the woods,” Henry said after a while. John turned his mare without saying anything, and the shade of the trees covered them both.

“We can rest when we get to Allard’s land,” Henry said. “Sleep in the woods for a few hours.” The idea of it, earth against his back and the clean smell of leaves, birds chattering in the trees and the grass sighing and bending under the wind, and dark, oblivious sleep, filled him with yearning.

“He will be worried about you,” John said. His voice was very small.

“Yes,” Henry said. “I suppose I must say I am sorry.”