‘Thomas,’ she says, before he can speak. ‘You know that I do not believe in the will of God, but if He wills our deaths now, as it seems, then I give him thanks that at least we will be together at our end. I am glad of that, at least.’

He is silent for a moment. It is as if she’s taken his words away.

He rests his sword on his lap and sighs lengthily, a long plume of breath.

‘I wish . . .’ he begins. ‘I wish – we had more time. More time to just be. Like other people. With none of this.’ He gestures at her drawn sword and the approaching horsemen. ‘I wish we had more time for . . . for everything,’ he says.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’

She spurs her horse to him and stretches up. He leans down and their lips touch. She closes her eyes at the sensation, wishing it could last.

Then they pull away.

‘Go with God, Thomas,’ she says.

‘You too, Katherine. You too.’

30

EVEN WHILE HE can still taste her on his lips, he knows he must kill her.

It is what Walter would have done.

He will do it quickly, so quickly she’ll never know what is happening. He will draw the blade across her throat and she will be dead before she slumps from her saddle. It will be so easy and, once done, the giant will never be able to touch her.

He feels the nerves in his fingers prickle and the blood in his sword arm froth. He changes his grip on his sword hilt, draws back his arm. He lifts his arm.

But across the marshy ground Edmund Riven seems to sense what is afoot.

He yells and charges.

As he does so, Thomas sees a movement from the periphery of his eye, down by the woods at the end of the marsh, where nothing should be moving. It is a tiny blur, a blur that a man might register only after it is gone, but an archer would know it for what it was. An arrow shaft.

It slits through the air and catches Riven’s horse with a short thud. The horse staggers, cants four or five steps to the left, then dips. The horse’s head drops and its forelegs tangle as it runs. There is a crack like burning pinewood and the horse goes down. Edmund Riven is hurled from the saddle. He flies for a moment and then is gone. Behind him the horse rolls through the reeds and the waters.

The giant pulls up. The men behind too. A second shaft hums across the marsh and twists one out of his saddle, bundling him to the ground. A third follows. Thomas slips from his saddle and drags Katherine from hers. He drops to the ground and spreads his body over her, pressing her into the black mud.

‘Who are they?’ she cries out.