“Go to hell, Blackmarch,” Walter grunted, his eyes lulling back a bit from the injury.
“Yeah, that’s likely,” Simon said softly, eyeing the four of them. He took note of Matthew’s battered armor and his posture and remarked, “It seems we’re not the only ones who have been through the thick of it.”
“Are you going to talk all day?” Jacob shouted, drawing his sword. “I grow tired of this!”
Simon knew the look in his eyes too well. It was a look of morbid and fatal resolve, someone who was done running, someone who was dangerous, and someone who would inflict as much pain on someone as possible if they were killing him. It was just the sort of brutal revenge that he could start with.
“If that if your wish,” Simon said, nodding to his men, then he announced, “Kill the men, and have your way with her. Lord Hamilton can accept a bit more tarnishing.”
There was a low and sinister chuckle that spread around the ring of knights as they slowly kicked their horses closer, closing the ring one step at a time. The four of them looked back and forth at each other, their panic level increasing steadily and the resolve to die visible on at least one of their faces.
“Any last words, you traitorous brats?” Simon called out, sitting back in his saddle as comfortably as he could, content to watch his remaining men do the rest of the work. “I’ll be sure to report them to a bishop!”
But then something else happened, something else that Simon had not expected. Something that he had not even dared to entertain the thought of, for it had never been a possibility or even a possible reality in some parallel universe. That was how unlikely it was of a thing, and yet it still happened, and Simon’s heart sank lower than his shattered shin.
A horn blew, and then another, and then a third, and on the hill just behind the small assembly they had made of their encirclement appeared a host of men. At first, they looked just like peasants come out to watch a bit of violence, as it was indeed a popular pastime, but as the mounted soldiers began appearing behind them, and their banners showed clear in the newly breaking sun, and they were unmistakable.
“He came!” Matthew exclaimed, the sound of joyous tears audible in his crackling voice.
“I don’t believe it,” Simon said again. There he was, the sad old man himself, the one who had started everything with his outrageous debts, the one who had cowered behind his walls for the longest time and let his children run amuck in the countryside, causing all sorts of trouble between nations and individuals. The old man himself. “I don’t believe it,” Simon repeated to himself.
The horn blew once more. Laila gave a laugh of joy. Jacob cried out to the sky in thanks to an imaginary god. Walter let a tear slide down his cheek. Simon frowned his face slackening into the pain that overtook him. There he was. Lord Willby mounted up with his noble robe blowing out behind him. He held his sword aloft and let it fall, and with that, his men charged.
There was no contest to be had. The twenty-odd knights were taken by surprise and were now outnumbered too significantly to make any difference. It was all over, and Simon knew it. He turned his horse away, much to the dismay of his men, and rode away without looking back. Behind him, he heard the cries of death, of defeat, of these brave Englishmen in a country not their own, serving a lord who cared not for them, dying at the brutal hands of other Englishmen in the middle of nowhere.
If Simon could have wept, he would have, but the only thing he could truly do was grit his teeth against the shocking pain of his mangled leg and make for the inn. It was all over. The horns kept blowing in the background as he got further and further away. There was nothing left. He had failed in every aspect of the word, and it broke him in a way he hadn’t felt since the Bannockburn. This was utter defeat, and it destroyed him.
He arrived back at the inn and found the yard sparse of horses, save a handful of seven or so. He could no longer think about how many horses should have been there versus how many he saw. He was a broken man, beaten down literally and mentally, and he just wanted to go home. He should have known returning to Scotland was folly. Nothing good ever happened up in that wretched country as far as he knew.
He tried to dismount but failed due to his injury and found himself collapsing into the fresh mud, his leg screaming out in protest all the while. “Bastard,” Simon said, cursing his own leg as he hauled himself to his one good foot. “Good for nothing, bastard!”
He finally found himself upright and began dragging his useless, splintered leg behind him as he limped to the doors of the inn, which were hanging open, letting in a beam of light that lit up the central tables.
“Lord Hamilton!” he heard the young Kyle McGowan shout from within, and Simon’s heart sank further than he thought it ever could have. It truly was over. “Come out! Lord Hamilton! Show yourself!” Kyle McGowan continued to boom.
Simon turned around, dragging his leg back toward the horse he had ridden in on. He would lose the leg at this point. He was sure of it. He would be one of those peg-legged bastards running about London, begging for coins. The speed at which a negative scenario can overtake one’s head is astounding, and Sir Simon was fully falling victim to it. “Sir Simon Blackmarch!” the brat’s voice followed him, and Simon stopped, frowning. What was this inconvenience to his poorly planned escape? He was losing himself to the delirium of his injury, and he was fully aware of that fact, but it didn’t change the fact that he laughed after he corrected his frown.
“The young McGowan!” Simon lashed out verbally, turning slowly, hauling his dead leg along with him. “What brought you here? Out for a casual ride, are you?” Simon’s face was twisted into a ragged sneer, the pain of his wounds showing clearly through his tortured eyes and his posture, a grim determination on his face not to go quietly into oblivion.
“Where is your master?” Kyle asked, stepping forward into the threshold of the door. “Where is he? Tell me!”
Simon caught some movement to his right, and he spied the slippery Lord himself, moving to mount an idle horse, but struggling due to the gout in his leg. Simon grinned to see him fuss so and clearly cause himself pain at his foolhardy attempt to mount a horse in the muck without a proper hold of the saddle. How long had it been since he had ridden? Years. Years before, Simon had ever met him at least. Let the fat bastard struggle. It wasn’t Simon’s problem anymore.
“Is it worth my life?” Simon asked, bent awkwardly over his leg.
“You are not in any position to bargain!” Kyle shouted, stepping forward again, his blood-spattered, bulging muscles shining out from the sheen of perspiration in the new sunlight.
“I suppose not,” Simon mumbled, his eyes beginning to roll back a bit as he glanced down to his leg. It was broken beyond repair, and he knew that it was swelling beyond the confines of his mail, and all of it was far too painful. He wanted it gone. He wanted to go home. He wanted the touch of a woman. He wanted a good meal. Most of all, he wanted to be at peace, and he was quickly finding that he wanted Lord Hamilton dead. Someone had to answer for all this failure.
“Speak!” Kyle shouted, raising up his sword and stepping forward, preparing to strike the final blow. Simon glanced up at the Scotsman’s eyes, and for a moment before the end, he saw himself. He saw a troubled youth, who knew only the politics of the sword and the training yard and the tavern, who had placed his heart somewhere it shouldn’t have been but was committed to carrying that out, no matter that cost. This was a fine death. Simon approved. It had all come full circle.
“He’s just there,” Simon said, gesturing limply toward Lord Hamilton, but as he glanced that way, he saw the Lord holding a crossbow, and he saw the look in his eyes of someone who wanted to survive more than anything, even if his options were already exhausted, like a cornered hog in the pen trying to hide from the butcher’s blade. “That figures,” Simon said with a final chuckle. The vindictive pig still thought he was getting out of there, and Simon had become a loose end.
Lord Hamilton fired as Kyle closed the distance between himself and Simon. The bolt could have been aimed at either of them, but it only found one target. The last thing that Simon saw was the swirl of the clouds above as the deadly missile took him in the rib cage, splintering apart his mail and sending him down into the dirt. This was not how he intended to die, though it seemed fitting for Scotland to be his grave. He had escaped death a hundred times already in this rugged country and taken just as many lives.
He had lived a brutal life and never known much reprieve from all the suffering that endless warfare had caused him. Sometimes he imagined marriage, a house, a child, but those thoughts would fade the next time he struck a man down. This was all he knew, and he had always known it would be the end of him, but he still persisted, dreaming that one day, for no real reason that he could ever discern, it would end, and he would go home, wherever that was. Apparently, it was there in Scotland, the end of a hard road he had never dreamed he would travel on so long.
Simon gave a rasping last breath as his vision faded away, and the last thing he knew on Earth was the smell of the horse trodden muck filling up his nostrils.
