2

The javelin hummed, a surprisingly low sound, like the approach of a large moth.

The weapon descended with a gathering speed, its sound increasingly high-pitched—and shockingly close to Simon. When it lanced home the projectile was—at that last instant—invisible. And then suddenly it was all too visible once again, the wooden shaft erupting from the back of a struggling mortal like a long, wooden extension of the poacher’s backbone.

Edric reached out for a support that was not there—a staff, perhaps, or the arm of a vanished friend. He reached to cling to Bel’s bridle and missed. He fell to the ground. Simon knew that the injury was grievous, but wanted to believe that shock and suddenness would render Edric insensible to the pain.

“Quiet yourself, dear Edric,” exclaimed Simon, reaching down from his saddle to grasp the jutting shaft.

His gloved hand reached—but he could not bring himself to seize the shaft, thinking that the effort would only stir more agony in the man. The poacher hitched himself nearly double, trying to turn around, struggling to work his body inside out as Prince Henry approached.

Edric managed a final laugh—a bloody, ragged gash of a smile—as though the cruel joke was not lost on him: the poacher pinched.

Simon had once seen a woodcutter bleed to death from an accidental wound, and he had seen neighboring farmers sicken and fade despite the prayers of family and friends. But he had never seen a man die at the hands of another, certainly not as Edric was dying, the prince probing and stabbing with the weapon as the poor soul lay bleeding within the shadows of the horsemen.

Simon breathed a prayer to Heaven for the broken-bodied, now silent Edric. The man expired in the blood-soaked earth, his sins unconfessed, and Simon felt the coming sorrow of Edric’s wife and children in their ramshackle homestead. He could not bring himself to look at the prince, let alone the marshal.

“My lord prince,” Simon began, when he could make a sound. He was going to add a word of welcome—stiff and unfelt courtesy, but necessary all the same. Could you not have given him a lash or two, and sent him home?

His death was legal, Simon knew. Poaching the king’s game was a capital crime, and the king had commanded swift punishment to such criminals. But still—Simon remembered Edric’s chuckle, and the way he danced on market day, quick-footed in work and play.

Simon would have asked, Why, my lord prince, did you have to kill him?

But Prince Henry himself wore a sad smile. “I thank you, friend, whoever you are,” said the prince. “You did well to block his escape—although it is a shame to see a man die so.”

The royal huntsman arrived at last. Oin fitzBigot had allowed Simon to ride in the New Forest since boyhood, if not to actually hunt there. “My lord prince,” said Oin, “this is Simon Foldre.”

“Who?” asked the prince absently.

“My lord,” said Oin, “I told you he’d make a good hunting companion to the king’s friend Walter Tirel from Picardy.”

Simon’s heart leaped at the sound of the well-known noble name. And at the promise of a royal hunt—that sort of honor had always been beyond the reach of Simon and his widowed mother. No one but the king and his favorites could legally so much as bend a bow in New Forest.

The royal marshal was silent, eyeing the shadowy oaks beyond the grazing land. Like the king, the marshal was a red-haired man with blue eyes, and a fighting man’s thick neck and deep chest. Roland was in charge of the king’s personal security, and he protected the gateways, halls, larder, and kennels of the king with his personal attention and the well-honed talents of his staff. In the absence of the prince, Simon would have hazarded his future in a confrontation with Roland right then.

From within the woods now came a series of shrills on a horn, answered by a distant series of similar blasts from near the river, a woodsman’s code.

Roland said, “Already word of this poacher’s death is spreading, all the way to the salt shore. Let them all respect King William’s property.”

Simon was impressed at the marshal’s ability to interpret the horn blowers’ code, but not surprised. It was said, half in jest, that Roland met with spiders every night, collecting information on everything from cowpox to taxes.

There were lingering figures on the forest verge, no doubt apprentice poachers, stunned at the fate of their master. No human beings actually lived in the woods, although there were tales of half-mad felons who had escaped the law for so many years they had grown cloven hooves and horns.

The shadowy observers ran off. Only one lingered at the edge of the sunlight, one of Edric’s nephews, unless Simon was mistaken, waiting until he could safely steal forth and claim his uncle’s body.

Not three months earlier Simon had come upon Roland wrestling a goose girl to the ground near the bridgehead. Simon had heard a gasping plea for help, parted the saplings, heard the young woman’s grateful thanks, and found himself eye to eye with Roland as the young woman escaped.

“He’s the sole son of your father’s loyal swordsman Fulcher Foldre,” Oin was saying. “Fulcher married an English beauty, a duke’s daughter.”

“Is that right?” inquired Henry. He was dark-haired and had dark eyes, and usually spoke quietly. His cloak bore a silver-and-jet pin shaped like a falcon or a griffin, or some other beaked creature. This single ornament, Simon guessed, was worth more than all the plates, pitchers, swords, and charms of a noble English household.

“My lord prince, my mother’s father,” Simon said, “was Usher of Aldham.”

“Oh, yes?” said Prince Henry with mildest interest, melancholy, it seemed, at participating in the death of the poacher.

“And Usher’s family,” Simon continued, “called these fields home since Noah’s flood.”

Roland reached down and seized the projecting shaft of the javelin. He withdrew the weapon from Edric’s body with a twist. “This dead felon, Simon,” said the marshal, “could make a similar claim, along with many a marsh leech in England.”

Simon was speechless at this insult. He was not fully armed, but he was far from defenseless. Men out riding for hunting or sport usually carried a stabbing sword. Simon had a formidable blade at his belt, with which his father had once frightened off a party of drunken English squires.

Simon’s hand went to the hilt of this weapon.