He lifted Alyson into Galahad’s saddle first, then Wat behind her. The boy clung to his sister with one arm and to the horse’s mane with the other, the knife still held awkwardly in his fist. Thomas took Galahad’s reins and began to walk.
“My lord,” one of the men said, voice hoarse. “Where do we go?”
Thomas looked back. Blackmere Field lay beyond the trees, hidden by smoke and distance, but he could still see it. He expected he would see it for the rest of his life. Every face. Every hand reaching. Hugh Tanner’s surprised eyes. Wexford’s blood on the rolls. The banners sinking in mud. The boy calling for his mother.
He had ridden out a soldier that morning, one more sword in another man’s cause.
He would return something else.
“To Ashcombe,” Thomas said.
The word tasted of ash and duty.
The men began to move. Slowly at first, limping, leaning, carrying what grief they could and leaving the rest to the crows. Hob pushed himself upright with a sound that would have shamed a wounded boar and fell into step beside Thomas.
“You cannot save them all,” Hob said quietly.
Thomas kept his eyes on the track ahead, on the grey ears of his horse, on the children wrapped in his ruined cloak.
“I know.”
Hob looked at him.
Thomas’s jaw ached where the cut had begun to stiffen. Blood dried at his neck. Each step sent pain through his side, his shoulder, and his hand. Behind him lay defeat. Before him waited hungry mouths, broken fences, widows, empty places attables, rents due to a crown that would remember exactly which banner he had followed.
He thought of Wexford’s words.
If Ashcombe looks weak, they will take her apart stone by stone.
Thomas tightened his grip on the reins. “I will save who is left.”
Hob said nothing for a while.
Above them, thunder muttered over the Malvern Hills, though the sky had been clear that morning. A strange wind moved through the hawthorn, lifting the smoke, carrying the smell of rain toward them.
Alyson turned in the saddle, her face pale within the folds of his cloak. “Are we safe now?”
No, Thomas thought. Not from kings. Not from neighbors with greedy eyes. Not from hunger, weather, grief, or memory. Not from the dead, who would walk beside him whether he wished them to or not.
But she was six years old and shaking, and the truth was too heavy a thing to put into such small hands.
So Thomas reached up, covered her cold fingers with his own, and lied as gently as he knew how.
“Aye, little one. You are safe with me.”
The thunder rolled again, closer this time. Thomas did not look back.
AMELIA
Present Day—England
There were exactly four things on Amelia Quinn’s itinerary for Saturday afternoon, and getting cornered by a drunk footballer named Gaz was not one of them.
She’d built the itinerary herself. Color-coded it on the flight over, because Bree had talked her into flying across the pond to England for a wedding to a man she had known for eight whole days, and when one’s beloved, ridiculous, slightly ditzy cousin decided to marry a professional footballer before the jet lag had finished unpacking, someone in the family needed a plan.
Amelia was very, very good at plans.
Plans were sensible. Plans kept the floor from dropping out from under you. Plans made sure the hotel reservation existed, the return flight had not been accidentally booked for March, and the bride remembered that legally marrying a man required more than champagne, cheekbones, and a feeling.
