He rolled the cup between his palms. “They were right.”
The wind struck the hall doors with a hollow boom. Someone sleeping near the wall stirred, cursed softly, and settled again.
“We were Montfort’s men,” Thomas said. “Not all for the same reasons. Some for reform, some for the earl, some because their lord told them where to stand and men with hungry families rarely ask which great man’s pride has filled the road before them. But I believed it.” His mouth twisted. “Saints help me, I believed it. I thought we were saving England from a king who would sell pieces of it to every foreign favorite who kissed his ring.”
Amelia had heard enough names to understand the big picture, if not the details. King Henry. Simon de Montfort. Prince Edward. Banners and barons and promises made in council chambers while ordinary men ended up in the mud.
Thomas looked toward the dark beams overhead, but she knew he didn’t see them, he was elsewhere.
“Then Edward came down on us at Evesham with the sun behind him and the river at our backs, and there was nowhere to go. Nowhere. Men speak of battles as if courage is a ladder a man may climb high enough to see his way out. It is not. Sometimes courage is a cup with a hole in the bottom. You may pour everything you have into it and still die thirsty.”
His jaw worked. The words came slowly, as if each one had to be dragged through a gate he had barred for years.
“It stopped being a battle. That is what folk do not understand. A battle has lines. Calls. Standards. Men you know on either side of you. Evesham became slaughter. Horses screaming. Men underfoot. Boys calling for their mothers. The banners down in the mud. The king’s men pressing and pressing until there was no air left in the world.”
Amelia’s throat tightened.
The thunder sounded farther away, then came back hard, rattling the shutters.
Thomas drank deeply.
“I led twenty-three men beneath Ashcombe’s banner,” he said.
Amelia blinked.
In her draft of him, in the story the household told around the edges, the number had never quite settled. Men. Many. Too many. Numbers could make horror smaller sometimes, contain it in a figure. This one did the opposite.
Twenty-three.
A little village’s worth of sons, husbands, brothers, fathers.
“I came home with seven,” Thomas said.
The words fell between them and stayed there.
Seven.
Amelia thought of the hall by daylight. Hob grumbling over breakfast. Osbern laughing in the lists. Martin teaching her words she was absolutely not allowed to repeat near Friar Huck. Wat watching Thomas like the sun rose and set by his command. Alyson leaning against Amelia’s skirt with leaves in her hair. She thought of all the spaces she hadn’t known were empty.
“I know their names,” Thomas said.
“I know you do.”
“Aye,” he said, almost to himself. “I know them.”
He set the cup down.
“Wexford, who wrote like a spider crawled through ink and died in it, complained from here to Evesham that the mud would ruin his boots. Hugh Tanner, seventeen and too tall for the rest of himself. Will Miller’s second son, who lied about his age because he wanted to prove himself a man.”
His voice roughened. “Martin of the mill. Osbern’s brother. Little Rob Fletcher, who was not little at all, but every man called him that because he had been born early and his mother never let anyone forget it. Giles. Stephen. Peter. Alan.”
The names gathered in the hall, one by one.
Amelia felt them settle around the fire.
“The dead are greedy,” Thomas said quietly. “They want remembering. They want the living to carry what they cannot. I do. I carry them. Every last one.”
He touched two fingers to his temple, almost gently. “In here.”
