THOMAS
Trouble rode in on a gray gelding with silver on its bridle, making Thomas dislike the rider before the man had spoken a single word.
To be fair, Thomas had disliked Sir Roger Belmaine for years. The feeling had merely ripened with age, like cheese left too long in the sun.
The last of the barley had been brought in yestereve, and for the first time in too many days the yard did not look as if the whole manor waited for the sky to fall. Men moved with less weight on their shoulders. Women called to one another as they crossed from kitchen to well, and their voices carried laughter instead of worry. Even the weather had repented. The morning shone clean and blue, with a light wind off the Avon stirring the dust and ruffling the hens, who complained as if the Lord had made the breeze for the sole purpose of vexing poultry.
Thomas stood near the east wall with Hob, both of them pretending an argument over stonework wasn’t an excellent way to spend a morning.
“It will hold,” Hob said, squinting at the wall.
“It leans.”
“So do I, and I’m still here.”
“You creak more than the wall.”
“Aye, but no one has asked me to keep the pigs out.”
“They might, if the wall falls.”
Hob scratched his beard, considering. “I’d do better than some.”
Thomas had almost smiled when the watch called from the gate.
“Riders!”
The word moved through the yard like a bucket of cold water thrown over a sleeping man. Wat froze with a pail in both hands, water slopping over his shoes. Alyson peered from behind Edith’s skirts, her eyes round as apples. Walter, crossing the yard with a roll tucked beneath one arm, stopped so abruptly that a chicken ran into his shoe and squawked as if he’d done it on purpose.
Six men rode up the track. Good cloaks. Better horses, with steel at their sides. At the head of them came Sir Roger Belmaine.
Of course he smiled. Men like Belmaine always smiled when they thought they smelled weakness.
Thomas remembered that smile. Belmaine had not been at Blackmere, no matter how freely he spoke of battle in halls where the wine flowed and no man’s boots sank into the blood and the muck. He had listened to the tales afterward with bright eyes and a soft belly, eager for the breach, the bodies, the desperate stand, and the knight who had walked out of it when so many better men had not.
Everyone liked a tale until they met the man inside it.
Belmaine held land east of the Avon and had backed the king’s side, which meant he had chosen well, prospered better, and bled little. While Thomas had come home to a gutted manor, thin stores, and suspicion following him like smoke, Belmainehad come home to favor, grants, and coffers that seemed to fatten every season.
He was two score, smooth-faced and broad through the belly, soft in the way of a man who paid others to do his killing. His dark cloak was trimmed in fur, though the morning was warm. A silver clasp flashed at his shoulder. His gloves were fine leather, and his boots looked new.
The gelding beneath him was sleek and overfed. Thomas disliked the horse on principle.
Belmaine swung down without waiting for invitation and handed the reins to one of his own men rather than to an Ashcombe lad, which was a small insult and therefore the sort most difficult to answer.
“Ashcombe,” Belmaine called, arms wide, warmth spilling from him like watered ale. “God’s truth, it gladdens me to see you whole.”
Thomas crossed the yard because a man did not greet a neighbor from a distance unless he meant open insult, and Thomas could not afford open insult.
Not yet.
Belmaine clasped Thomas’s hand in both of his. For the briefest moment, something flickered behind Belmaine’s smile. Memory, mayhap. Belmaine had seen him after Blackmere, mud to the knees, blood to the elbows, half blind from the cut above his eye, and still carrying his sword.
Then the smile returned, smooth as cream.
“We heard such things,” Belmaine said. “Such things. I told my steward, I said, Thomas Ashcombe is far too stubborn to die in a field, and here you stand, proving me right.”
“Disappointing many, no doubt.”
