Lady Knight

Riannon of Gast felt the first pain knifing down her chest as she craned her
neck to see the top of the castle keep through the narrow eye slits of her helm.
She gritted her teeth on a grunt. She could see no enemy archers or crossbowmen
on the roof of the keep. A couple of men dropped rocks from up there. The rocks
might crack a few heads of her soldiers breaking down the keep door, but would
not prevent the breach. She turned to the knight at her side.

“Get some archers up on the corner tower,” she said. He nodded and hurried away.

Agony stabbed under her skin from right shoulder to left hip.

Riannon grimaced as she waited for it to pass again.
Mighty Atuan, lord of
battle, that hurt.

The pains sprang from no wound taken this day, but had they flared while she
fought, they could have distracted her with fatal results. Since winter last,
the pains had grown stronger and more frequent.

Riannon wished she could slump and remove her heavy iron helm to feel the wind
on her sweaty face and to suck in air that did not have to pass through the
small holes in the metal, but the fighting was not yet done.

The defenders had foolishly left the stairs up to the first storey keep door
intact when they retreated inside. Her men had easy access to batter the door.
One of them fell screaming with half his brains dashed out by a dropped rock
before bowmen drove the defenders from the keep roof. The end would not be long
now.

Riannon stepped over the twisted body of one of the defenders and strode through
the smoky haze and noise filling the bailey. The dead of both sides lay in
bloody tangles scattered across the courtyard inside the walls. A fire had
broken out in the kitchen building. Pigs, which had been herded in to feed the
defenders, squealed their fright at the din, smoke, and stink of blood.

Not all the corpses strewn across the hard-packed earth were combatants. Flies
crawled across the face of a grey-haired woman sprawled near the entrance to the
temple. Women’s shrieks added to the last groans of the dying. Frightened
villagers had crowded into the castle for safety. Where their lord had retreated
into the fastness of the thick-walled keep once the battering ram had bashed
down the main gate, those who had sought his protection were left to the mercy
of the attackers. Had the fool surrendered, no one need have died here today.

“Sir?” The squire who halted near Riannon had blood spattered up along the mail
on his sword arm. The congealing scarlet stained the white stag badge of Roger
of Damory. “Lord Damory wishes you to know that a messenger has arrived from his
Grace, Count Berenger. His lordship wishes you to attend him, sir. He’s in his
tent.”

A pox on them both.
Riannon had no desire to learn in what manner his Grace
had changed his mind this time for the conduct of the siege. Whatever these new
instructions, they were somewhat late. Nor did it surprise her that Damory was
already back in his tent, no doubt quaffing wine and boasting of his cleverness
in command. However, since she was currently in service to his Grace, Count
Berenger of Tastamont, Riannon could not ignore his will, even when she thought
his Grace one of the most addle-pated fools ever born of woman. And one,
moreover, whom the gods should never have entrusted with the lordship of a
dovecote or midden, let alone one of the largest counties in the Eastern
Kingdoms. Nor could she tell his Grace that Damory, his son-in-law, was a lazy,
cowardly whoreson.

Before Riannon could speak, she heard a splintering and a cheer. She turned to
see the door of the keep staved in. Her men swarmed up the keep steps.
Attackers met them with flashing swords.

“Tell his lordship I shall be there presently,” she said.

Riannon strode towards the keep. A woman’s scream pierced the din. Riannon
lifted her bloody sword. She stalked to the temple and stepped past the body of
the old woman.

The gloom inside the temple seethed with cringing, sobbing people. Riannon saw
three men holding down a wailing young woman, her skirts wadded up past her
hips. One man climbed atop her. In two swift strides Riannon was close enough to
deliver a stunning blow to the back of his head with the flat of her sword. The
man crumpled. His accomplices jerked around. She saw outrage turn to surprise,
then fear. They wore white stag badges. She had issued the strongest orders
about honouring the sanctity of a holy place, and against rape. Bleakly, she
found it no surprise that Damory’s men would again prove so illdisciplined.

“Alan,” Riannon said.

Her squire, who had dogged her heels through the fighting, stepped forwards.

“Hang these men,” she said.

“Yes, sir.”

The woman rose and clutched her torn bodice closed. She gave Riannon a surprise
in being neither priestess, servant, nor peasant refugee. Her pale blue gown
might have belonged to a lady’s maid or gentlewoman.

“My thanks, sir.” The woman dropped a practised curtsy.

Under other circumstances, Riannon would have tarried to learn more, but she had
a capture still to make and a siege to end. At the door, she ordered two
trustworthy men to guard the temple and ensure no further violations took place.

In the keep, the defenders had already been beaten back from their best
positions in the constricted entry. Riannon pushed past her own men to gain the
main chamber. The fighting blazed savage. Two defending knights in gory mail
hauberks stood back to back near a broken overturned chest. Another pair fought
a desperate guard on the far door. They must realise they were doomed. Bodies of
their fallen comrades and Riannon’s men already littered the floor. The knights’
diligence and courage were more than their lord deserved. They certainly did not
warrant a hopeless death while their master barricaded himself in a chamber
above.

“Stop!” Riannon shouldered aside one of her men. “Halt!”

Saer Warin, a stocky Bralland-born knight, bellowed for a cease. Like Riannon,
he grabbed a soldier and pulled him back when he might have entered the fray. A
quick-thinking pair of squires blocked the door.

A few more blows clanged before the fighting stopped. The four blood-spattered
defenders breathed heavily. Their mailed shoulders lifted and fell from their
exertions. Two wore the older style helmets with only nasal guards protecting
their faces, so their confusion was easy to see. All kept their bloody swords at
the ready.

“There’s no need for slaughter,” Riannon said. “His Grace of Tastamont wishes
your lord’s submission, not his death. You do him no dishonour by yielding.”

The one with a black beard jutting out of his mail coif stared warily up at
Riannon’s helm as though he tried to read her expression through the metal. His
gaze dropped to fix on her chest. He would see the black, eight-pointed star
painted on the blood-spattered white linen surcoat she wore over her mail shirt.

“A Knight of the Star,” he said. “If you give your word, sir, that our lord
isn’t to be slain here, we’ll ask if we may surrender.”

“You have it,” she said.

He pounded on the door at his back and called to whoever stood behind it to
convey their predicament to his lordship.

One of the wounded groaned and writhed on the floor. Riannon signalled for men
to remove him. He screamed as his comrades lifted him. Riannon had seen enough
wounds to know that he would not live until dawn, no matter how many
healer-priests laboured over him.

As she waited, her old wounds throbbed to unholy life again, though mercifully
for but a brief span. When Lord Grammaire finally appeared, Riannon unlaced her
helm and removed it as a courtesy to his lordship.

The sleek Grammaire, whose yellow surcoat showed no blemish from the fight,
grinned sardonically up at her. “I’d heard rumours of the scar-faced one, but I
wouldn’t have wagered a groat there was sufficient gold in all the kingdom to
induce a Knight of the Star to sully himself in the service of our noble Lord
Berenger.”

Riannon ignored both his scathingly sarcastic tone and the open criticism of her
patron. “Do I have your surrender, my lord?”

“You have my castle,” he said. “I doubt me not that my life is worth less than
dog’s piss, but who’d rather not hang tomorrow than be hacked to death today?
Here.”

Riannon accepted his sword. Whatever new ideas Count Berenger’s messenger had
brought, his lordship could not but be pleased to forgo them now that Grammaire
had surrendered.

Riannon paused in the bailey to slip her hands free of her mail mittens. She
pushed her mail coif, and the linen one beneath it, back from her head and ran
her fingers through her sweaty, short-cropped hair. It was a relief to feel the
breeze, no matter how warm and smoky, on her head.

Riannon took a wineskin from her ever-resourceful squire. She drank a long pull
before resuming her walk towards the broken gate and the delayed meeting with
Lord Damory.

Even so peevish and capricious a master as Count Berenger must reward her well
for this success. Were he to finally make good his vague offers of the lordship
of a manor or two, she would not refuse. Men had served worse masters and kept
their personal honour intact. His son, at least, promised to be a lord she would
be proud to serve. And what knight would not be happier with his own lands and
the prospect of more in the service of a wealthy lord, rather than continue the
rootless and uncertain life and rewards to be found at tourneys and wars?

The great wooden mangonels, which had creaked and thudded to hurl boulders to
crack against the walls, were silent for the first time in days. The
artillerymen celebrated with looted ale and wine. Riannon strode past them
across the churned ground to where Damory’s gaudy yellow and red tent stood.
Doubtless the celebrations in there included a heavy dose of
self-congratulation. Ere nightfall, if not sooner, Damory would convince himself
that he was solely responsible for the success of the siege and had taken
Grammaire’s surrender himself.

Pain sliced through Riannon’s body. She stopped with a gasp. The whole length of
the crosswise scar on her torso felt as though dagger blades jabbed into her
flesh. The wineskin dropped from nerveless fingers and she drew her arms
protectively against her chest.

“Sir?” Alan stepped in front of her.

Riannon grabbed his shoulder to keep herself from collapsing. Pain first burned
with white-hot heat, then seared with cold.
Mighty Atuan, help me!

“Is it your old wounds, lady?” Alan said.

“Tent,” she said.

Riannon grunted as her squire hooked her arm around his neck and supported her
to her tent.

Almighty gods, it hurt as badly as her initial wounding, when the strangely
singing sword had scythed through the iron rings of her hauberk, sliced the
padded gambeson beneath, and carved her flesh. She should have died then. The
ghost pain flayed her with such intensity that Riannon whispered to Alan to
fetch a priest. The alacrity with which he bolted from the tent confirmed that
she must look as close unto death as she felt.

Two days later, a sore and stiff Riannon rode half a mile to the sprawling
basilica complex where Count Berenger lodged with his large retinue. She had
been out of her wits still when he suddenly arrived. Her body, aching with every
step of her horse, wished she were still abed. His Grace, though always alive to
his own comfort and leisure, was not one to feel much sympathy for the weakness
of others. Riannon thought it little short of miraculous that he had sent a gift
of food and wine to her from his own table. Mayhap it was a sign that he was
finally ready to reward her with land.

Riannon suppressed a grunt as she dismounted. Whatever ailed her lingered yet,
though the healer-priest had not seen anything other than old scars.

In the main hall, Lord Damory lolled beside his father-in-law. The abbot,
wearing what must be his best brown robes, looked incongruously solemn amongst
the laughing, drinking men in their bright tunics and hose. Riannon did not see
Lord Grammaire. She wondered what the count had done with his defiant vassal.

Saer Warin, the Brallandese knight, detached himself from the noisy group to
intercept Riannon. He looked grim.

“It’s good to see you about again, Gast,” he said. “I didn’t know you were
injured.”

“Not recently,” Riannon said. “Wounds three years old are plaguing me. What
news?”

Warin glanced to the hearth where the count laughed loudly and slapped a thigh.
“He’s well pleased. And in an unusually open-handed mood. Wish me well, for I
leave to get married. He has granted me a widow with two manors.”

Warin sounded more relieved at the prospect of departing than delighted with his
good marriage. Riannon was unsurprised when he admitted, quietly, that Damory
had taken full credit for the success of the siege and capture of Lord
Grammaire. As a hired knight she stood in no position to gainsay the count’s
son-in-law. Well, let him wear his borrowed glory, as long as she received a
more tangible reward. The gods, if not his conscience, would know the truth of
the matter.

Lord Damory caught sight of her and beckoned her closer. “Gast! We feared you in
a winding sheet when we heard of the leeches hovering about you.”

Riannon’s chest ached fiercely as she lowered herself to one knee before Count
Berenger. He smiled at her over his wine goblet.

“Gast,” he said. “Roger has been speaking well of you. He says that you’ve been
a most diligent captain. I’m well pleased to have solved the problem of that
snake Grammaire. Here. Take this as a sign of my favour.”

Riannon heard murmurs of amazement and envy from the watching men as the count
pulled off one of his rings. The chunky gold was warm and weighty in her palm.
Her hopes soared. Warin had not been jesting about this lavish dispensing of
largesse.