‘I’ll have this,’ he says.

Thomas turns away. He can still feel the man’s fingers on his ankle. He finds the man in red, lying face down, crumpled against the far bank. Thomas thinks he recognises the coat. It is the same madder red. As he turns the body, it slips to the road. Thomas’s arrow is broken, jammed in the visor. He inserts his knife into the hinge on the other side and levers it open.

It is not Riven.

It is a man with a thick moustache and a spider’s web of blood spreading across his face. His eyes are open, curiously blue, looking into the far distance. Thomas waves away a blowfly.

‘May God have mercy on your immortal soul,’ he murmurs. ‘And grant you eternal rest.’

He makes the sign of the cross over the man and then Richard appears at his shoulder.

‘Let me see,’ he says, and he stares into the dead man’s face.

‘It is not him,’ he says. ‘He was never here. Never here.’

He gestures across at the man in white, lying between his horse’s legs.

There are black marks on the man’s tabard but they are not birds. They are ornate, curlicued crosses, arranged in the same three, two, one pattern that distinguishes Riven’s livery.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘Kit mistook the banner.’

The dead man is fat, with leathery skin, quite elderly; he does not even look like an Englishman.

Richard is in despair. Geoffrey and the other men pass among the dead men, lifting their visors where they have not already been shaken loose.

‘We will find him,’ Thomas says. ‘I know it.’

Richard nods.

They stand like that for a moment, shoulder to shoulder. They become aware of a presence. A man stands behind them. It is the captain of the Newnham garrison, the one who lent Richard the practice bow. He stares at them speculatively. Behind him stand his sergeant and three of the garrison ordinaries, bills in hand. They are the men who’d jeered at them as they had passed over Newnham Bridge. Now they are silent, staring at the carnage, counting the bodies. The bells in both churches in the village begin ringing again.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ the captain asks. ‘You’re the archers who can’t shoot to save yourselves a barrel of ale.’

Richard stands up and wipes the blood from his palm on the front of his shirt. He is about to say something when his attention is taken by something else, over the man’s shoulder. A party of men in costly burnished plate is walking towards them. One of them carries a blue and murrey battle standard emblazoned with a white lion, the others their pollaxes.