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EITHER NO TIME or an eternity had elapsed. Sleep, or more likely sporadic unconsciousness, came easily to Drake and without memory. When the door finally cranked open, he roused, incapacitated, disoriented, and hurting beyond misery.
“Good news,” Rufus said. “His eminent lordship the senior fitzAlan has delivered your ransom posthaste.”
A second man cut the cord binding his ankles. The two hefted Drake up by the armpits. His cramped legs didn’t work very well. His head was the size of melon and his thinking hazy. He moaned words that were incomprehensible even to him.
“Aren’t you the lucky one,” Rufus said cheerfully to Drake. “We won’t have to hang you.”
His breath stinking of aqua vitae, Seward belied his partner’s gay declaration with a voice filled with dread. “You know why we have to do this, Drake. If ... if we let you go ... you’d geld us ... like you did Maynard.”
Drake shook his head in protest, but he wasn’t about to convince either man, drunk as louts, of his honorable intentions, much less persuade either what a bad idea it was to hang him. A very bad idea indeed.
“Not to mention he murdered him,” Rufus said to Seward. “Or did you forget so soon?”
Rufus fitzHugh and Seward Twyford transported their bloody burden up a wheel staircase, through the kitchen, down a winding passage, and past a creaking postern gate. For the distance, they blathered on how they planned to celebrate when the deed was done. Two lasses, five flagons, three days, two nights, and a cozy fire, a formula so contrived as to forget they snuffed out the life of a friend.
Drake sniffed the air, night air, fresh and sweet, and heavy with the scent of sage. Crickets hummed. Horses nickered nearby. Together they hiked up a steep incline, Rufus walking on the right, his grip on Drake’s elbow overconfident and slack, and Seward taking up his left, the same side as the castle’s barbican.
“Got any piss left, Drake?” Seward asked, crowing like a loon, his voice reverberating against the castle wall.
They were convinced Drake hadn’t enough spit left to put up the least of a fight, and even if he did, they didn’t give a damn since they were soused past caring.
Seward was unprepared when Drake slammed him against the wall. When his skull collided with limestone, the young knight grunted and slumped onto the pathway with a dull thud. Seward Twyford was clearly past being soused out of his mind.
Drake pointed his face in Rufus’s direction. Though cruel and crazy, Rufus was a coward at heart. He backed away, uttering, “No, Drake, no.” He lost his footing on the gravelly path. Drake lowered his head and drove the top of his skull straight into his gut. Both men went down with a violent lurch. Quick as the wind, Drake spun on his shoulders and locked his legs around Rufus’s throat. The besotted lad flailed his hands against the chokehold to no avail. His offering to the gods, bent on reversing fortune, stepped up the pressure until Rufus went slack. Drake kicked the senseless carcass away.
The quiet was total except for strained breathing coming from three men who had seen death and escaped at the last possible moment.
Drake struggled to his knees and thence to his feet. Letting his sense of smell take over, he followed the sage and raced into the night. The terrain was uneven and rocky. Tripping over a knoll, Drake somersaulted down the rolling decline. He found himself lying on his back and panting through blood-packed nostrils. The gag bit into his mouth, making it hard to breathe. His hands, prisoners inside unyielding ropes, had lost all sensation. His eyes, trapped in darkness, yearned for sight. He was exhausted beyond fatigue and possibly beyond death. Easy enough to lie there until his hangmen revived and came to reclaim him. Easy to let the lull of the night take him into its gentle embrace. Easy to admit defeat and go to his Maker. He slipped into unconsciousness and stayed there for he knew not how long.
A second wind stirred him back to awareness. It might have been the foulness of the breeze. Or the mournful call of a distant owl. Or the icy-fingered chill of the dark. Or his own soul awakening him back to life.
He refused to surrender into that good night. Maybe another night, he thought, when he was an old man, and dawn seemed too far away to even be imagined.
He used the hard ground to scrape the blindfold from around his eyes, but the cloth was secured in such a manner that his best efforts proved useless. He attempted to work the gag free in the same way, but it dug into the corners of his mouth and refused to budge. One of those knights knew how to tie a good knot, blast the man, and one day he’d get his recompense in kind.
He clambered onto unsteady legs and ran like the devil. Having lost all sense of direction, he might have been heading straight back to the castle, but he let momentum and the winds carry him forward. Let fate be his master, either to free him or damn him to perdition.
Limping along, he faltered more times than not, taking one step forward for two steps backward, constantly fearful that his captors would catch up and take him to the hanging tree branded with his name. He collided with more than one shrub, slammed into tree after tree, and collided with a boulder that left behind a sickly ripping sound followed by fiery pain that traveled the length of his shin. Each time, he managed to rise, gather his bearings, and head into the unknown, letting his hearing guide him into the balmy, bug-infested darkness.
He was wholly familiar with the terrain surrounding Twyford Castle: its footpaths, wagon roads, hazards, and hiding places. To the west flowed the Itchen, less than a quarter-mile distant and a viable escape route if he didn’t drown in the tumid waters. North led to Winchester, three short miles to safety, but a far distance for a beaten, blind, and bound man on foot. The surest path lay south toward Itchendel, two miles distant but a road that would assuredly be watched once Seward and Rufus roused from their joint stupors and alerted Graham and the others. East led into sparse meadows, pastureland, fields, and chalky downs, the route least likely to be trailed since it would be an exhausting trek and the hardest to track.
Having regained his bearings and applying his senses to ferret out wind, odors, and sounds, he left the river behind and fled eastward, shaping in his mind a map that would circle back and come up on Itchendel from the south. It would be a long march, some six or seven miles of uneven terrain, but a way home if he didn’t fall into a senseless stupor; if exhaustion didn’t give out quicker than night; if the elements didn’t overtake him; if five would-be hangmen didn’t catch up with him; and if maggots didn’t feast on his carcass before dawn.
His breath came in great rasping huffs. The ground rose treacherously upward. His feet twisted on plowed furrows, ragged tree roots, unseen brush, jagged rocks, and unexpected hollows. He lost his balance and toppled more than once. Each time, it became more difficult to get up. He thought he heard footsteps tracking him until they blended in with the trill of a nightjar. The rhythm of a horse’s hoofs was soon drowned out by the flowing gurgle of the Itchen.
He bumped into something solid. A tree. No, a man, the same height as himself.
He grunted, butted with his elbow, and swung to the left. The man’s right arm trapped him. He swung to the right. But the man’s left arm shot out. The night stalker finally spoke. “Drake.”
Recognizing the voice, he said the other man’s name. Though it came out as two muffled snorts from behind the gag, the utterance was entirely coherent inside his head.
Stephen.
