For one heartbeat they stared at each other.
Then Hob laughed. It was a terrible sound. Broken and furious and half mad with pain.
“There he is,” Hob said. “There’s the lord of Ashcombe. Now use that temper to get the living out of here.”
The words cut through him.
The living.
Thomas turned, blinking sweat and blood from his eyes, and saw them. Saints, not many left at all. A knot of Ashcombe men gathered near the broken remnants of a hedgerow, pressed hard by royalist foot soldiers. One man limped. Another leaned on a spear as if it alone kept him upright. Wexford was there, clutching a leather satchel to his chest with one arm while trying to hold a dagger with the other.
Near them, a horse without a rider dragged its reins through the mud.
Galahad.
Thomas’s grey warhorse tossed his head, white blaze bright beneath the filth, eyes rolling as men shouted around him. By some mercy, the beast was alive. By some greater mercy, he had not bolted.
Thomas whistled, sharp and piercing.
The great horse shoved through the chaos, ears flat, hooves striking too near the fallen. Thomas caught the reins and vaultedinto the saddle with less grace than habit. His ribs protested. His jaw throbbed. The world tilted and righted itself.
From the height of the horse, he could see what he had not seen from the mud.
The battle was ended. Men were merely taking time to die. Montfort’s banner was down.
A cry went up somewhere beyond the smoke, fierce and triumphant. The king’s men had found their victory and meant to wring every drop from it.
Thomas looked toward the Ashcombe men and lifted his sword.
“To me!” he shouted. “Ashcombe, to me!”
Hob bellowed the same, louder than any wounded man had a right to be. The remaining men stumbled, limped, fought, and dragged one another toward the hedgerow, toward Thomas, toward anything that looked like command in a world that had lost all sense.
A royalist knight saw the movement and spurred toward them.
Thomas met him halfway.
The strike jarred his arm nearly numb. The knight was fresh, or fresh enough, his surcoat clean where Thomas’s was hacked and dark with blood. He hated him for it. Hated the smoothness of his sword arm, the polished edge of his shield, the plume on his helm that had not yet been torn away.
The man struck high. Thomas leaned low, let the blade glance over his shoulder, and drove his own sword beneath the shield.
The knight folded over the wound with a grunt.
Thomas wrenched the blade free and shoved him from the saddle.
“Move!” he roared.
They moved. Not bravely now. Bravery had burned away. What remained was harder and uglier. Survival. Hob took the rear. Thomas rode the edge, using Galahad’s bulk to break space where there was none, turning aside blows, cutting when he had to, shouting himself hoarse until the small remainder of Ashcombe’s men spilled through a gap in the hedge and down toward the old track.
Arrows hissed after them.
One struck the ground near Galahad’s hoof. Another hit Wexford in the back.
The bailiff gave a shocked little grunt and pitched forward. The leather satchel burst open when he fell, spilling rolls, loose notes, a broken tally, and God knew what else into the bloody mud.
Thomas wheeled the horse.
Hob swore. “Leave him!”
