‘These your boys, are they?’ her brother asks Cecily as she hurries beside him up the steps to the keep. He’s stiff from the fight and the hard riding that followed it, but otherwise hale.

‘They are. Edward and Edmund.’

‘Hope you’re ready for a fight, lads.’

‘They’re ready,’ says Richard.

‘Seems we’ve missed the first one already,’ Edward complains.

In the chamber above the hall Cecily pours wine for her brother, sits him down. She notices that her hands shake and realizes she’s never seen the aftermath of battle before. So many injured men. She’d thought they might be screaming, but they were silent for the most part, grey-faced and still after a three-day push across country to the security of Ludlow’s walls. Their blood was clotted black on bandages and blankets, the stench of rot already rising from the worst of them. They lie now in cots and on pallets in the great hall below, in ordered rows. Her brother has instructed that those most likely to die should be laid nearest the door, where they are tended by priests instead of physicians. Even here, Cecily observes, there is order. Economy and provision. She looks at Richard where he leans by the window. His face is pale. She’s never seen him injured, and her sons are not yet blooded. She swallows the thought of it, clenches a fist.

‘How many dead?’ she asks. It’s the most important question.

‘Less than five hundred of mine. So far. Near four times that of hers.’

‘Hers?’ says Richard.

‘Well, hers and her boy’s.’ Salisbury digs into his sleeve, draws out a silver something and throws it across the table, wings clattering. A swan. ‘I’ve more of them if you want them. I faced down eight thousand. They seemed keen I not reach Ludlow.’

‘They knew where you were headed then?’

‘You surely don’t imagine we’re not watched?’

Richard’s nod concedes the point.

It was a bad moment, her brother confesses, for he’d only half that number. But he hasn’t lived so long without learning a few tricks. He pulled a feint, he tells them, drew the enemy on to poor ground about a brook and turned on them. ‘They gave up then and ran.’ He rubs a fist across his grizzled chin. ‘I had to leave the dead unburied. Had to push on here before the bastards could bring up reinforcements.’ He shakes his head. ‘Never good.’

Cecily imagines it. The litter of bodies across Blore Heath, and the stream running red.