For a moment he thinks he has lost Riven, but then he comes, a dark shape against the snow, moving like a spider. He climbs over a fallen bough among the trees on the edge of the copse. He seems exhausted, as if he will fall at any moment.

Thomas draws the string with the last ounces of his strength, getting his back into the bow, and he holds the stance for a long moment, and he waits, waits for the perfect moment, concentrating on nothing but Riven, who moves into line.

And then the bow explodes.

The arrow flits into the gloom and a chunk of the bow’s belly lashes against Thomas’s temple.

Darkness swallows him whole.

39

THEY MOVED UP to the village of Lead in the morning and took over the little church surrounded by fishponds, and they have had nothing to eat or drink all day, and so when two of Hastings’s men bring in Sir John at dusk, Katherine is exhausted and so hungry that she does not at first recognise him.

His face and beard are crusted in blood. He cannot talk, and no one can tell what is wrong with him. Hastings’s men have removed his harness to lighten their load, they say, and they’d found it dented, but there seems to be no wound.

‘Face down he was,’ one of them goes on. ‘Almost drowning in the soup.’

She recognises him when she peels off his linen cap. He does not appear wounded, yet he lies there with waxy skin and anyone looking at him would have given him up for dead.

‘Let us find him somewhere more comfortable to lie,’ she says.

One of the friars looks up from the other side of the chapel.

‘A space here,’ he calls, and he stoops to close the eyes of a dead boy. Mayhew summons the other friars to take the body away, and they carry Sir John across the blood-smutted straw. In the light of a rush they stare while Mayhew runs his fingers over the body. What is wrong with him? She cannot say. There is no obvious wound, yet his breath is quick and shallow, and when they remove his arming jacket they find his chest is sunk.

‘I have seen something like this once before,’ Mayhew says, though he does not look happy with the thought. He rinses water through Sir John’s white hair, washing the blood away, and then runs his fingers over the skull.

‘Here,’ he says. ‘Feel.’

He stands beside her and guides her fingers. She can feel nothing at first; then there is a slight depression. She wonders if she can feel the slightest sensation of grating bone when she applies pressure.

‘A blow,’ Mayhew says. ‘He came in without his helmet, but he must have been wearing it when he was hit.’

‘It saved his life,’ she says.

Mayhew looks doubtful.

‘Perhaps,’ he says.

‘So what can we do?’