Wants to look into his eyes.

But the visor is jammed. Thomas scrapes it open and stares at him.

It is not Riven.

Thomas’s insides rebel and he vomits, scorching and sour, all over his hands and wrists, all over the steel plate, all over this knight.

He falls and rolls on to his back. The rain is wonderfully cold. He lets it fall into his eyes, mix with the blood and sweat.

He stares up into the grey rainclouds, watching them coiling and unfurling, gathering in fists and then drifting away like the smoke from a gun, and all the while the rain falls gently, and all around him he can hear the conclusion to the battle as men are finished off with screams and cries in a welter of blood.

Henry is there, still with that axe. He is threatening someone by the King’s tent.

‘Who by all the saints are you?’ Henry asks.

Thomas hears a reply and then a tall man appears, looking down. He is shaking his head, and saying something Thomas cannot understand. He has one of those boneless faces that reminds him of a brother in the priory who’d died from what the Dean described as an abundance of piety.

Then Thomas sees nothing. Sound and vision fade and silent whiteness envelops him.

Later he wakes to find himself propped against the canvas wall of a well-braced tent. He can taste blood and ash. A mug of ale is pressed into his hands but he cannot hold it. Someone takes it and presses it to his lips. He lets it run over his chin. A face looms into view.

‘You all right, Thomas?’ Dafydd shouts. He is splashed with blood, but alive, and grinning. Thomas’s head is ringing and he hears him as if from the distance. He keeps jabbing his arm, pointing at something, but Thomas can only see the backs of men drifting around the clearing between the tents. Dafydd is laughing.

‘New Henry caught him,’ he shouts. ‘Confined him to his tent. Imagine! A bloody archer from Kent capturing the King of all England, Henry the bloody Sixth! In his tent! A bloody archer!’

Thomas tries to move to see what is going on but the pain is too great.

‘We’ve done it!’ Dafydd is saying. ‘We’ve beaten them! We’ve killed all the nobs and captured the King of bloody England!’

Thomas manages to sit up. Owen presses more ale on him.

‘What happens now?’ Thomas asks.

‘We drink more ale!’

Owen pours it till it runs down his cheeks, leaving pink smears in his ash-smutted face.

‘The Earl of March’s gone down on his knee to the King, hasn’t he?’ Dafydd says. ‘But we all know who’s in charge now. There he is: the Earl of Warwick. Look at him.’