“So we will,” she said. Her eyes flashed with her old vitality; her hair burned red-brown-gold in the sun, and she threw her head back. “She either fears her fate too much, or her deserts are small, who dareth not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all,” she said. “Go!”

One by one, her captains saluted. And then they sailed, rowed, rolled, or marched.

When they were all gone, she moved briskly to Prior Wishart. He bowed deeply; in some ways, with Gerald and Harmodius, he was her most loyal servant.

“I beg your pardon for making you wait,” she said. “I share your fears. I have a letter for you, for the royal post houses. You will go like the wind.”

Wishart bowed. “I still might have left an hour before,” he grumbled.

She smiled. “Not with the potent magister I will send with you to the relief of our fortress,” she said. “See that this valuable person arrives alive.”

Less than an hour later, a hundred belted Knights of the Order, their squires, and two hundred great warhorses trotted through the gates of Harndon, their steel-clad hooves ringing on the cobbles. Men and women came out to cheer them in their black cloaks and scarlet surcoats.

A single cloaked figure rode in their midst; slighter than the knights, and unarmoured, but wrapped close in a great black cloak with the eight-pointed white cross.

As soon as they passed over First Bridge, the whole array began to ride faster.

Arles—The Red Knight

Gabriel stood on the battlements of Arles watching the roads: east, west, north, and south. Arles stood at the crossroads.

“The gates open in seven days,” Michael said from behind him. “Or ten, or seventy. Christ.” He clasped his hands and leaned on the parapet.

The plain below Arles was covered in tents and hasty shelters. The autumn air was cool; the smoke of hundreds of campfires rose into the air, and the carefully laid-out camps ran into the distance. Close into the walls, the camps were full, where the Milice of Arles and the phalanx of scarecrows, as Michael called them to their faces, survivors of the Necromancer’s worms, drilled and lived. And there were the Scholae, their own horse lines and fires, their small hospital, and the mess tent of their officers, one of whom was now co-emperor.