Knight's Shadow Read Free Page A

children behind in the mountains when there wasn’t any danger coming?’
    The anger on the Tailor’s face was replaced by suspicion and she looked around again, then shouted to one of the men tending his garden, ‘You, Cragthen! What are you about?’
    The man was in his middle years, balding, with a fringe of brown hair and a short beard. ‘Just looking after my verden roots,’ he said.
    The Tailor started walking towards him, pulling a knife from her coat. ‘Then what are you burying in the dirt, Cragthen, when we’re so close to the harvest?’
    The man rose to his feet, his eyes flitting between us and other villagers who were beginning to gather round. ‘You weren’t supposed to be here this long – it’s our village, damn you, not yours. We have families to think of. The Duchess Trin—’
    The Tailor reached forward with her left hand and grabbed Cragthen by the shirt. ‘What fool thing have you done, Cragthen? You think you’re scared of Trin? Cross me and I’ll give you something to fear that’s a lot worse than an eighteen-year-old whore who beds her uncle for his armies and fancies herself a Queen.’
    At first Cragthen looked cowed by the Tailor, but then he managed to pull away and shouted, ‘We have children, damn you!’ as he turned and fled towards the far end of the village.
    ‘Stop him!’ the Tailor shouted.
    It took only moments for two of her Greatcoats to catch up with Cragthen. As they hauled him back he said urgently, ‘Let me go!’ His voice was low but full of terror. ‘Please, please, no! If they see me talking to you they’ll kill her!’
    The Tailor bent down to look at what Cragthen had been planting and I joined her. ‘Hells,’ she grunted, looking at the mixture of black earth and a dark yellowish-green powder.
    ‘What is it?’ I asked.
    ‘Nightmist – the damned fool is setting nightmist!’
    I looked around at the rest of the villagers, at the other men who had also been busy working their gardens, and saw some were lugging over-full pails from the pump, water spilling over the sides.
    ‘Don’t let them pour that water on the ground!’ I shouted, but as soon as the village men saw the Greatcoats coming towards them they dumped the contents of their pails onto the freshly turned earth.
    ‘Too late,’ the Tailor sighed as the first drops of water hit the nightmist and grey-black smoke thick as bog water began to fill the air. Even a handful of the mixture – sulphur and yellowflake and Saints-know-whatever-else goes into it – can fill a hundred yards with smoke so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The villagers had put down bucketfuls.
    I turned to the Tailor. ‘Tell me where Aline is – now!’
    ‘She went for a walk to see that giant bloody horse of hers,’ she said, pointing down the path. ‘Don’t just stand there wobbling: go!’
    Kest and Brasti ran ahead of me, and as I followed, we began to hear the heavy thumping of marching men and the raucous clangour of metal on metal.
    Had we guessed what was going on even a few minutes sooner we might have been better prepared, but instead, I had been lying in bed paralysed like a broken old man. Now our enemies were about to launch an attack that could only have one purpose: to kill the daughter of my King.
    *
    The billowing black fog overtook me before I’d gone ten paces down the path. Though the sun still shone above me and the sky remained clear and blue, down here on the ground the world was shadows painted on top of other shadows.
    I pointed my rapiers out in front of me and waved them around like the feelers on an ant, moving in smooth arcs high and low, quiet as I could: I needed to find my enemies before they could find me, and before they found Aline. I longed to call out for her, to hear her voice and know she was alive so that I could make my way to her, but to do so would just make her a target for Trin’s men.
    A dreamlike chaos settled over the village: one moment