arrow out of his quiver. He nocked it and realigned his quarry, but before he could shoot, he was trammeled to one side by a pair of booted feet. The bow and arrow were startled out of his grip as a solid weight crushed into his shoulders. An instinctive grab for the hilt of his sword was cut short by the familiarity of a high-pitched voice cursing at him from the clump of thicket.
“What do you think you are doing, Addle-Brain!” Sparrow shrieked in a strident whisper. “Christ’s blood, are you mad? Has the whole world gone mad this night!”
Gil’s fury gave him no chance to vent an intelligible answer. Beyond the fringe of trees, Onfroi de la Haye’s screams were causing a minor eruption of chaos in the Wardieu encampment. Torches were blazing to life. A flurry of shouted orders was bringing a small army of armoured feet running down the slope toward the hem of trees. In seconds, the woods would be swarming with knights and men-at-arms.
Sparrow extricated himself from the thickets and gave Gil a resounding thump in the ribs even as the taller outlaw was bending over to search for his fallen bow.
“Move, you ape! Run to deeper cover before they fetch the hounds and loose them on us!”
“I almost had her!” Gil spat, crashing through the tangle of saplings and gorse behind the fleeing Sparrow. “I would have had her too, by Christ, if you had not swooped down on me like the wrath of hell! Where did you come from? What the devil are you doing so far from camp?”
“What am I doing so far from camp? What are you doing so far from camp! And what do you mean you almost had her … had who?”
“Nicolaa de la Haye,” Gil snarled. “The sheriff’s godless wife.”
“Nicolaa de la Haye!” Sparrow exclaimed, tumbling to an abrupt halt. “But I thought—”
“You thought I was aiming elswhere? You thought I would set out on this miserably dank night to risk the ire of the Black Wolf by piercing the one breast in all Christendom he chooses to reserve for himself? You think me that much of a fool?”
“Would that I thought so highly of you, you hulking bandysnatch!” Sparrow retorted. One ear was tuned to the camp and he heard the sudden howl of dogs, a sound that raised a cool prickle of sweat across his brow. He hated dogs. Loathed the mangy, fang-toothed demons as much as he had the capacity to loathe any of God’s creations. An early attraction in one of the fairs he had been sold into had been the pitting of a manacled dwarf against a salivating, red-eyed demon hound from Hades. Both his body and his mind were scarred from those horrific bouts, and he could barely tolerate the gentle, tamed beasts that had attached themselves to the Wolf’s camp.
“Do you realize the trouble you have caused me?” he demanded, running again. “Do you have half a head’s worth of notion how many different treasons I have condemned you of over the past few hours? Skewering the Dragon would have at least made the trip worthwhile, but you, you poxy snipe, you tell me now you had not even that much ambition! You tell me all you wanted was the skewered bosom of the Lincoln Bawd!”
“I almost had her too, damn my luck. A beat sooner … a blink sooner and she would have been as neatly spitted as a suckling pig.”
“A more deserving fate I could not envision for you, Gil of the Golden Eyes!”
“I did not ask you to follow me,” Gil countered. “Nor will I thank you for interfering, if that is what you expect.”
“Save your gratitude and your sweat for the hounds,” Sparrow snorted. “Perhaps your luck will fare better and they will tear you apart before the Dragon’s men have a chance to mould a copper mask to your face. And before milord hears of this folly and pins your ears to your heels!”
“He will only hear of it if you tell him.”
“Aha! Now the knave begs favours!”
They weaved and bobbed from one shadowy stand of trees to another, moving as swiftly as they dared in the darkness. The sound of their braying pursuers had veered to the west of them, but both knew it would not take long for the pointed noses to relocate their scent.
Gil, seeing how hard Sparrow was churning his legs to keep apace with his own longer, lither ones, felt as