The captain’s eyes were a calm green again and the threat of emotional violence seemed to have subsided. He shrugged. “Do you know the questions that are asked of a knight at his making, my lord?”

The bishop nodded.

“I believe in those questions,” the captain said. “Who will protect the weak? Who will defy the enemy? Who will defend the widow and the orphan, the king, and the queen? Even, when forced to it, Holy Mother Church?”

The bishop blinked. “Jesus said we should turn the other cheek. Jesus said nothing of a triumph by violence.”

“Yes, well.” The captain smiled. “I think Jesus would have had a hard time with Bad Tom.” His riding gloves struck the steel of his cuisses with a snap.

“For now, though, the answer to those questions is—I will. I will defy the enemy. I’ve finished sacrificing my pieces one at a time.” He shook himself.

The bishop smiled. “You aren’t even talking to me, are you?”

The captain shrugged.

“I’m going to send you a new chaplain,” the bishop said.

Snap went the gloves.

“Make sure he’s a good jouster,” the captain said.

Ser Alcaeus was drawn to the walls. In his life, he had known much sweetness and much horror, but no experience had equalled the intensity—and the terror—of the minutes after the walls were breached in the siege of Albinkirk. He went to the stretch of northern walls that he had held, and met there—to his stupefaction—a young crossbowman he had known during the siege.

“By Saint George,” Ser Alcaeus said. He embraced the man. “Stefan?”

“Mark, and it please my lord,” the young man said.

“I thought you were dead,” Ser Alcaeus said.

Mark shrugged. “I thought so, too. I fell from the wall.” He shrugged. “I woke up hungry and with two broken legs.” He shrugged again. “Nothing found me to eat me, I guess.” He barked an uncomfortable laugh. “Now I guard the same stretch of wall.”

They looked out over the north and west together.

To the north, the Wild stretched on like a dark carpet, the great trees in the middle distance fading into the tall mountains of the Adnacrags and their white-clad peaks. A single road, wide enough for one wagon, wound out of the wooded hills at the edge of sight along the stable banks of the Canata river that came, cold and black, out of the mountains and descended into the valley through abandoned farmsteads and newly colonized steads and a handful of tilled fields from families that had survived the siege and planted last season.

There was a convoy on the road, glittering with spear points. It was still a good league from the walls, and yet it seemed to flare with colour.