STREETS OF NOTTINGHAM
THE SKY WAS BLACK, though it was but only midafternoon. Quillen covered his mouth and nose with his jerkin whenever they were outside, and his eyes stung from the ash in the air. None of them knew what exactly to make of the raging smoke that erupted still from the castle’s first bailey, but not one of them was naïve enough to think that the castle being on fire could count as a good thing.
He was still paired with Lord Beneger and the earl Robert of Huntingdon, though they had lost Gilbert some time ago in one of the many instances when they’d been separated from Sir Robert FitzOdo. Their day was spent in waves of attack and retreat, running at sometimes breakneck speeds through the streets parallel to those the main English army occupied, trying to keep up with FitzOdo and his mobilized pockets of followers in the city. At times the three of them fought reluctantly alongside those citizens just to keep near FitzOdo, at other times they worked against them—notifying the army that they were about to be assaulted, in the hopes of dissuading any more needless killing. More than a few times Quill stopped to wonder what exactly their mission had devolved into.
“Why not head back to the Trip to Jerusalem?” he asked at the next opportunity. “We can secure it now, and defend it if FitzOdo comes back later.”
“There are only three of us, Peveril.” Lord Beneger was clearly loath to explain himself. “You’ve seen how many followers FitzOdo has. We can’t defend that tavern from him if he comes back to it. Our only chance is stop him out here.”
“Then let’s just stab him already!” They’d been near FitzOdo all day, sometimes fighting side by side.
Beneger shook his head. “If we confront him while he’s with his people, they’ll eviscerate us. But if we can isolate him, then we can control him. That’s the key to winning your battles, Peveril. Only participate in fights you know you can win.”
Lord Robert’s bated breath told Quill that he was having similar doubts.
“Arable might need us,” Quill argued. “They might already be back. This wasn’t the plan.”
“The plan was to stop FitzOdo, to clear a path for her.”
“Killing the knight doesn’t change anything.” Lord Robert’s voice was careful. “If his followers all go back to the Trip later, as you say, they’ll still overwhelm us—with or without him. But if we go back now, at least we can be there if Arable’s group is successful.”
Lord Beneger’s brow hardened on them. “If we go back, our only strategy is to hope for the best. Out here, we have our best opportunity to strike.”
“Ben,” Quill said, not even meaning to be so informal, “FitzOdo did a lot of things in the name of Robin Hood, but he wasn’t…”
The look he received was as good as a slap in the face.
“Don’t,” was all Beneger said. But Quill couldn’t help but wonder if they were chasing FitzOdo for the wrong reasons. If Beneger had become so obsessed with hunting down his son’s murderer that he could not see the folly in what they were doing now. The Grieving Father of Nottingham was already beyond fatigued by their day of skirmishes he was ill suited for. The man was on the wrong side of age to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who did not know him. It was his reputation and name that made people give him his leave, but in the midst of a melee with strangers he was just an older man with silvering hair—quite the easy combatant at a glance. Quill recalled with unease his first encounter with Lord Beneger in the spiral stairwell, where he had broken his knife against the stone wall. His best days were behind him, and still he pushed on.
This was a man driven to a single goal. And it was not the right one.
Quill was about to suggest to Lord Robert that they leave Beneger to his revenge, when the earl pointed a finger through the grey haze of the street. “There.”
FitzOdo was retreating from the group he’d met. He was carrying a heavy glaive now, and the awkward dimensions of the massive axe prevented him from running.
“He’s leaving them.”
“And heading toward the Trip,” Beneger added. “What did I tell you? It’s now, then.”
Quill cursed under his breath.
Even though they’d been more or less hoping for this opportunity for hours, Quill had been leaning toward the less. He’d hoped the war would take care of the FitzOdo problem on its own. Not to mention that Quill had never sparred anyone with a glaive before, and he was fairly certain his head might pop itself off just to save the trouble.
But instead he loped through the crooked alley to the left, where they hoped to intercept the Coward Knight on his way back to the inn.
There was a compelling part of Quill that wanted to raise his hands and claim privilege—that he could walk away and return to a home of comfort in Derby, leaving this mess to the commonfolk and soldiers who were much better prepared for killing and dying. But both his companions had more prestige than he, and showed no signs of hesitation. Huntingdon was an earl, for God’s sake, and here he was leaping through city streets like some sort of brazen vigilante. It was the coward in Quill that made him want to flee, he knew that. He knew it, he accepted it, he’d happily write home about it and scream it from the rooftops if it meant he didn’t have to hold any of his innards in his hands this day.
When they rounded the corner into a small squarish plaza, the behemoth shape of Sir Robert FitzOdo was standing in wait, expecting them, the long cleavered blade of his polearm held at a casual but dangerous angle. His voice, unnaturally deep. “Made your decision finally, did you?”
“FitzOdo,” Lord Beneger said, catching his breath. “You have crimes to answer for.”
“And you think now’s the time for the answering, then?” The knight’s lips pulled back into a farcical grin. “Oh, because I’m alone. You’ve been following me all day, but justice waits until you think you have the advantage, does it? Fickle thing, your justice.”
Beneger swallowed. “You have abused your power for months. Your only charge in this city was to track down Robin Hood, and instead you—”
“Robin Hood’s dead!” FitzOdo howled. “Anybody can pretend to be him, because there is no Robin Hood. He’s a whisper in the night, he’s a fucking myth. You can’t catch a myth, you can only change its details. That’s what I did. I did the impossible—I killed a dead man. And in so doing, I saved this fucking city.”
Quill couldn’t hide his laugh. He pointed at the black smoke that made a dark canopy, streaming over the buildings around them. “It doesn’t look saved to me.”
“Shut your cunt mouth, Peveril.”
He did.
“A few months ago,” the knight continued, “nobody in this city would have lifted a finger in defense of it. They would have thought their precious Robin Hood would do it for them. Well, where was he today?”
As if to make a point on it, a curl of wind whistled through the alley, bringing with it specks of glowing ash.
“Exactly. I taught the people to stand up for themselves, and that’s what we did today. This city should be sacked, but instead it’s intact. The words you should be looking for are thank you.”
“If you are so certain you’ve acted honorably,” the earl Robert said, defiantly flipping his half cape over his shoulder, exposing the hilt of his rapier, “then submit yourself to us. We shall hear the full account of your actions. Perhaps the King himself will judge in your favor.”
FitzOdo’s jaw hardened, his eyes made a very obvious summation of the earl. “Well there’s the thing. I did not act honorably. After all, I’m the Coward Knight, aren’t I? I earned that name here, in these streets, when I infiltrated the last army that tried to siege the castle. Saved the city then, too, and labeled with dishonor. But you know what? I don’t need your respect. I don’t need the pissant King’s respect either. The only worthy man I know is King Henry, and I’ve done him proud, rest his soul, in this fetid shit world he left behind. So go fuck yourselves with your honorable. And get out of my way so I can save some more lives.”
Metal on metal, Robert and Beneger drew their weapons. Quill did the same a moment later, his delay earning a new barrel of laughter from FitzOdo.
“You’re mad at me for killing a few people,” he chuckled, “and yet you insist on adding yourselves to that list?”
“You kill us, it will be in a fair fight,” Beneger said evenly. “But you tortured the innocent. Beat them, burnt them, murdered them. You don’t deserve to be in the Black Guard, much less to be called a knight. If you will not come with us willingly, we’ll take you by force, FitzOdo.”
“Say my fucking name!” the bald knight snapped. “I’m a goddamned knight, I knelt before the King himself, you will say fucking sir when you address me!”
Oh, Quill sometimes hated himself, because he couldn’t keep from saying it.
“Very well. Fucking Sir it is.”
Like a raging bull, the battle began with a kick in the dirt. Fucking Sir dashed his feet in fury through a pile of ash that had already rained down, causing the three of them to recoil. A second later the plume was split by the heft of his axehead, forcing them to startle backward and give the monster space. Beneger, in their middle, split distance with the earl and signaled Quill to circle sideways, that they could surround him. It seemed an obvious advantage to Quill, even with his rudimentary knowledge of the finer points of killing things—and three against one seemed like the type of mathematics that ought to settle the fight easily.
Instead, FitzOdo somehow threatened all of them at once. The long pole of his glaive meant he was always poised against two of them, and he flicked constantly at the third, daring an attack. Beneger made a couple feints with his sword but FitzOdo practically snarled them off, while the earl seemed more interested in making light footwork than risking any sort of attack. Quill was left waiting for an opening—surely FitzOdo’s bare back would present itself eventually, and then it was simply a matter of stabbing it with his stabstick.
FitzOdo attacked first, a swing that started at Robert and ended at Beneger, and Quill tried to leap forward into the gap, but the glaive was already rounding and came careening low in a slice that Quill only avoided by throwing his legs backward; which had the predictable effect of landing him stomachwise on the ground. He panicked and rolled, only barely able to hold onto his sword as he did so, expecting his body to neatly split in two as FitzOdo came for a second round. But Ben distracted him, and the first shrill howls of steel on steel split the air as Quill scrambled to get his feet under him again.
A series of cracks continued as FitzOdo struck forward violently, again and again, pushing Beneger backward. Beneger managed to parry the thick blade’s thrusts to alternating sides as he retreated, but it was obvious there was more force behind those strikes than Beneger could handle. Quill ran forward along with Robert to engage him from behind, but the man had clearly anticipated that. He pivoted and flung his weapon up at both of them—Robert wisely ducked to the side, while Quill brought his sword up on instinct and felt the impact rock his entire body. His arms were flung wildly against his own face and he was pushed backward, his forearms reverberating with the violence of the attack.
And suddenly his sternum cracked and he collapsed to the ground.
FitzOdo had struck him square in the chest with the wooden end of his long handle, which was the only reason he was not dead yet. But his vision rippled with bright lights and stars and hot lances sliced through his ribs when he tried to inhale. My ribs are broken, Quill gasped, I can’t breathe. He groaned and grabbed at his chest, kicking himself backward on the ground with his feet, gulping down air in short shallow bursts. His hands were quivering uncontrollably, and he grabbed his entire chest as if to keep it from sliding apart in halves.
He could only watch, in agony, as FitzOdo stomped the ground again with his unreasonably thick legs, punched forward with his glaive held horizontally in his hands, and then charged Lord Beneger de Wendenal. Once, twice, Ben’s sword made contact with the cleaver but only accidentally, and then the huge protruding tooth of the glaive was in his side and Ben screamed, falling back with the momentum of the blows. Quill had to blink to make certain what had happened; it looked like Ben had taken the blade mostly in the armpit. It was very possible the man’s arm was halfway severed at the shoulder, and he clutched the wound in his left hand, blood seeping through his fingers.
Lord Beneger was going to die, and Quill was going to watch it happen.
And then he was probably going to die as well.
It had barely been a minute, and FitzOdo had dispatched two of them. So much for mathematics.
“It occurs to me,” the Earl of Huntingdon’s voice was calm, baiting FitzOdo to turn around before finishing Beneger off, “that you don’t know who I am.”
“You’re a corpse,” the knight said. “You just don’t know it yet.”
“I suppose that’s true for everyone,” the earl laughed. “But in life, we share a given name of Robert, though my title is the Earl of Huntingdon.”
“Huh.” FitzOdo frowned. “Don’t think I’ve ever killed an earl before.”
“So you don’t know who I am.” He reached down and slowly draped his fingers through the ash on the ground, then pulled up a handful that he rubbed into his palms. “It’s no surprise, nobody really does. After I became earl, that was the only title anyone cared about. The same way you probably want people to remember you for whatever it is you did in the Kings’ War, I wish people remembered me for my laurels, too.”
“And what’s that?” FitzOdo smiled. “Longest shit streak?”
“Yes, but let’s not change the subject. No, I’m not my father’s firstborn son. I shouldn’t have inherited the earldom, my older brother should have had it.” He clapped his hands several times, pleased with the puff of grey smoke they made. He flexed his fingers, he stretched his arms. “But I distinguished myself in tournaments for years, so much so that my name became famous. People came from halfway across the country if they heard I was going to be in a tilt, or a melee, simply to watch my fighting style. You don’t know it, sir, but you are squaring off against the Champion of Salisbury, the Champion of Canterbury, and of Kent.”
At this he whipped his rapier out again, deadly level and parallel with the ground, one foot planted firmly forward in a deep thrust.
FitzOdo seemed only barely amused. “Never heard of you.”
“Nor I, you.” He moved again, backward, angling sideways, his boots silently slipping past each other like cat’s paws, his other hand holding the tip of his demicape out gingerly as he danced. “You know, a lot of people who’ve never heard of me make fun of me for this weapon. Say it’s too light, that it’s a dandy’s toy, and not made for proper combat. And it’s true, I think its blade would snap if you so much as touched it with that monstrous thing.”
The wooden pole of the glaive pounded the ground.
“Her name is Tesoro. An epee isn’t much good for cutting, but she’s good for making little, tiny holes. And by the end of this, you’ll be full of them. And if you’d ever seen me fight before, you’d be smart enough to surrender right now.”
Quill wondered if the earl was bluffing. Perhaps trying to give himself, or Ben, some time to recover. But watching the man move now, his muscles expertly trained, the sinews in his arms seemed purpose-made, and Quill believed every word of it. The man was as graceful as water, but he wasted not even a single drop of energy. His thin frame and needle blade made a striking silhouette compared to the ox of FitzOdo and his two-handed glaive, and Quill could not help but marvel.
FitzOdo clearly meant to make short work of the duel. He swung wide and level with his glaive at full extension, then wheeled it around to slice down two times and into a brutal thrust forward, the way he had gored Lord Beneger. But at every swing the earl sidestepped, leaned, hopped nimbly away, and then danced himself in a long sweep to safety.
The knight shuddered to regain his momentum, but when his face reeled back on his opponent it was full of shock. “Fffffucker…”
“Three,” the earl Robert said, nodding his head slightly. “How many would you like?”
Quill hadn’t even realized that the earl had jabbed his rapier’s tip out during each of his evasions, and FitzOdo clasped his hand over his thigh, where a small circle of blood marked an injury. Where the others were, Quill was not sure.
In rage the knight attacked again. This time the earl flipped his cape up off his shoulder and swatted its heavy fabric at the glaive’s blade, more effective than any shield at quelling its bite. He turned under the man’s arm and pricked the inside of FitzOdo’s chest, high up where his plating left him unprotected. The axe came around again and found nothing, again and again, flurries of ash rose to surround them as they spun, the bullfighter and the bull.
Quill was well shy of recovered and he could not yet inhale without agony, but the commotion of the fight was traveling away. He took the chance to half crawl his way over to Lord Beneger. The man was on his back, controlling his breaths into short bursts, his hand clasped at his armpit.
“Let me see,” Quill said, and met Ben’s eyes. There was fear there, maybe the first time he’d seen the man with anything but a stoic certainty.
His clothes were sopped with blood, torn open enough that Quill could see the wound beneath. It was less in the armpit than he thought, and mercifully in the arm itself rather than his chest. Still, a thick flap of muscle was opened wide, and Quill bit down against his nausea as he kneaded the meat back in place and folded the man’s arm against his chest. “Keep pressure here. I think you could be sewn up again,” he said, as if he had any real knowledge on it, “but you’re losing blood. We’ve got to take care of you fast. Let me wrap you, we’ll get out of here.”
“FitzOdo…” Beneger murmured.
“Will wait. This first.” He glanced backward at the two Roberts, continuing as they were before. The earl spent most of his time trip-stepping and baiting the knight, but never attempting any attack. He only reacted and found another place to prick the tip of his rapier, in an arm, a leg, only an inch or so in, but the knight was clearly fatiguing at the accumulation of tiny wounds.
Quill tore his own shirt over his head and then into strips, which wrapped around Lord Beneger’s arm. Before the last loop he found a short but sturdy stick nearby and included it under the wrappings. Once the last tie was done, he gave Beneger a warning before twisting the stick like a lever, tightening the straps clearly past the point of comfort. “Hold this,” he said, putting Beneger’s good hand on the stick. “Keep it there.”
He helped the man up, but frankly had no idea where to go. There were normally physickers in the Parliament Ward, but there was an army between them and there, even if they weren’t in hiding. The castle was burning, and there was no way Ben could survive the tunnels to get back out to the King’s camps. If there were other options, Quill didn’t know them.
FitzOdo yelled, and Quill turned his attention back to the fight. The knight was close to the earl and suddenly threw his glaive with both hands out directly into the earl’s face. Unprepared for such an audacious attack, Robert’s rapier whipped out wildly, but the wooden pole still knocked him back, and a second later FitzOdo’s empty hands reached out—the left grabbed the earl by the throat, and the right smashed into his face.
And again.
It was hard to say this was a punch. If Quill punched someone, the reaction would be a giggle. This was more like a battering ram. The third punch left the Earl of Huntingdon with blood bursting from his nose and lips. His legs were weak, and when FitzOdo let go, the man slumped to the ground like a rag doll.
Goddamn, this Coward Knight was everything Quill hated about the world. Men who thought their strength was the measure of how right they were. Men who defined themselves in terms of how much pain they could inflict on others, or take upon themselves.
Quillen Peveril was no good at hurting other people, and even worse at being hurt, which is why he was so reluctant to impose himself into the troubles of the world. But watching a meat mountain smash the face of a graceful lord made Quill know one thing, with absolutely no doubt. That between himself and Fucking Sir Robert FitzOdo, Quill was the infinitely better man.
The knight tried to bend down to retrieve his weapon, but winced at the attempt. He was spotted all over, like a pox, with little blood roses. The earl had crippled the man, and while Quill was not much of a threat to anything besides ignorance, he was fairly certain he had enough wits about him to take out an unarmed man who was already bleeding out. The earl had done the hard work, Quill just had to finish him off.
And so the youngest son of the great Peveril family, famous only for getting lost in the caves of the Peak, who had since identified himself solely by the quantity of things he did not do, chose to act. He left Lord Beneger leaning against a wall, picked up his sword, and screamed at his opponent. “FitzOdo!”
The beast turned, his mouth gaping, trying to determine who had the temerity to challenge him.
Quill looked forward to telling his children about this someday. When he was Lord of the Peak, head of Peveril Castle. Perhaps with his wife Arable. Their children would know that the scourge of Nottingham was felled by a man a quarter his size, who was very likely pissing himself just to do so.
Perhaps he’d leave that part out of the story.
“Surrender yourself,” Quill threatened.
“Fuck you,” FitzOdo spat. And despite his injuries, he reached down, grabbed his weapon off the ground, and made a riotous charge at Quill that he had not expected.
Quill tried to strategize but there was no time, he held his sword out in front of him as if the man might simply impale himself, felt his sword batted away and flung from his hands, then the blade swung and there was only a single moment of pain before the dark.