Ben Josef trembled from shock. Blood dripped from his severed fingers.

‘There must be more, old man,’ said Tibalt. He pulled a fighting axe from his belt and in frustration smashed its honed blade into a spindle chair. ‘The King paid you to go with the Captal de Buch. What treasure did he give you? What precious stones?’

‘The only thing precious to me are the rings you cut from my hand. They were my wife’s,’ ben Josef gasped through his pain.

One man strode in from the night’s conflagration. He gripped a terrified Andrés.

‘Is this the boy we seek?’ said the routier.

Tibalt snatched at the lad’s hair and pulled back his head. How well did he remember Lázaro? He had been delirious in the cell with Beyard and the others and by the time they reached Pamplona he had already deserted Blackstone.

‘It must be him,’ he said, though there was doubt in his mind.

Andrés fell to his knees begging. ‘I am nobody, lord. Nobody.’

‘He’s not Lázaro,’ said de Hayle.

‘That’s right. He’s a peasant boy I brought to Blackstone. Remember your time at Blackstone’s camp. You must have seen the boy there.’

‘This is not Lázaro?’

‘No. He came here to help me on his way home. His name is Andrés. He is not the lad you seek. Sir Ranulph knows it.’

The routier holding Andrés grinned and hefted a money purse. ‘He had this. It’s enough for drink and whores in the next town.’

De Hayle looked down at the terrified boy, and then glanced at the routier. ‘The three years since the boy ran from the court would blur anyone’s memory.’

‘Leave him, I beg you,’ said ben Josef.

The mercenaries looked at each other, Tibalt and de Hayle letting their thoughts follow the same route.

‘Providing he didn’t blab his true identity,’ said Tibalt.

De Hayle nodded. ‘We’ll deliver his head and see if it’s convincing enough.’ He gestured towards the oak table. Andrés screamed. Ben Josef cried out. The boy struggled; the routier hit him with his fist and then dragged him across the width of the table, pressing his weight onto the boy’s back as Tibalt snatched at Andrés’s hair, tugged hard and then struck down with the axe.

The head severed, the boy’s body convulsed. Blood poured onto the floor. Ben Josef wept aloud, cries to God, cries of animal pain. He moaned and sobbed, chin pressed hard into his chest, eyes squeezed tightly closed to avoid looking at Tibalt ramming the boy’s head into the rundlet’s brine.

The routier grinned and tossed aside the corpse. ‘Let’s get out of here. The old man’s right. The militia will come up from the town.’ He thumped the rundlet’s lid closed and hefted the barrel.