Thomas was already down. Wexford lay facedown, fingers twitching in the dirt. Thomas rolled him enough to see the man’s face. His eyes were wide, his mouth working as if he had discovered a final objection to the arrangement.
“My lord,” he rasped.
“Be still.”
“The rolls.” Wexford’s hand clawed weakly toward the scattered satchel. “The rents. Michaelmas.”
“Damn the rolls.”
Wexford made a sound that might have been laughter if there had been any breath in it. “Can’t. Someone must…account.”
Thomas looked at the papers darkening in the mud. Rents, yields, obligations, all the small scratchings by which a manor lived or failed. He knew too little of them. He had always known too little, because there had been older brothers once, older men, stewards, bailiffs, people who understood barns andleases and why a goose owed at Martinmas mattered while he soldiered.
He understood swords. A sword would not save Ashcombe from Michaelmas.
Wexford caught his sleeve. His grip was feeble, but his eyes had sharpened with fear. “They will come for the lands.”
Thomas leaned closer. “Who?”
“The king’s men. Neighbors. Those who smiled when you rode out.”
Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth.
“If Ashcombe looks weak, they will take her apart stone by stone.”
Thomas looked back toward the field, where weakness was being punished with merciless efficiency.
“When you return—” Wexford whispered. His fingers spasmed once, digging into Thomas’s sleeve.
Then he was gone. Thomas stared at him for a breath too long.
“My lord!” Hob shouted.
Thomas gathered what he could from the mud. A roll. Two broken tallies. The satchel, slick and torn. He slung it over his shoulder, caught Galahad’s reins, and mounted. An arrow nicked his boot as he turned the horse.
They rode. Not far. Not truly. Only far enough to leave the worst of the field behind, to reach the hollow where the old track dipped between hawthorn and ash. There, the surviving men collapsed as if cut loose from strings.
Thomas counted them, then counted again.
Seven. Out of twenty-three men who had ridden with him beneath Ashcombe’s banner, seven remained breathing.
Hob leaned against a tree and slid slowly down it, his injured arm cradled against his chest. “I’ll live,” he said before Thomas could ask.
“I did not ask.”
“You were about to. I spared us both the tenderness.”
Thomas almost laughed. It came out wrong, a sound scraped raw.
He moved among the men. Bound a wound with a strip torn from his own surcoat. Gave water to Osbern’s cousin, who shook so badly he spilled half of it down his chest. Took a dagger from a man who kept trying to stand, though his leg was opened from thigh to knee and he had no clear notion of where he was.
Beyond the trees, Blackmere Field roared on. Or mayhap it only lived now inside Thomas’s head.
A sound came from the ditch beside the track.
Not a soldier’s sound. Smaller.
Thomas turned to see two children crouched beneath the hedge.
