and beside him was a Warlock: a wizard of the King. Together they had routed the Ghyer and smashed his little corps of brigands, but the man himself had escaped.
And now he is back, and he has more men, and he has my sister. A killer let loose in a land of women and children, the Ghyer’s thoughts would be turning to exacting a slow revenge now.
‘Reckon it’s him, ma’am?’ Grant asked her.
‘I cannot think who else it might be.’ She tried to take strength from the musket, but it seemed a leaden, useless thing to her.
Grant stopped his horse and nodded to himself. ‘Well, ma’am, it’s for you to say. You want to go on, then I’m your man.’ His glance towards her was nothing but simple sincerity.
‘I am very lucky to have you, Grant.’
He shrugged. ‘Grammaine gave me a home, ma’am, after I was done soldiering. There’s no easy way some debts can be paid.’
A blur of thoughts, like a flurry of bird wings, passed across her mind. How many men were there? She could not guess. What would they do if they caught her? She could only imagine, and her imagination surely understated the horrors and the cruelty. What did such men always do to the poor women who fell into their clutches? And yet if she turned back now, then they would do it to Alice. Vain and foolish Alice. Simple, trusting Alice.
I am stronger than she. I could endure such torments, perhaps, but she never could.
She had no idea in her head of what the next moments might bring, only that she had to act, because knowing she had not would be worse than facing the brigands themselves.
‘We go on,’ she decided, and wrestled the musket into a more comfortable position, virtually resting it atop her horse’s head.
And so it was that the two of them rode into the camp of the Ghyer.
The brigand had made his resting place in a hollow within the woods, where generations of woodcutting and charcoal-burning from the hill farmers had eaten a great bite into the trees. It was in this bite, ringed on three sides by looming forest, that the Ghyer lurked. On the fourth side, a winding track led up into the woods, and then off towards Chalcaster, taking in a score of farms and shepherds’ cotes on the way.
There was a flurry of startled movement as Emily and Grant emerged from the trees, but it could have been worse. That was the thought that occurred to Emily only later: It could have been worse. Here was not the army of bad men and villains that the Ghyer had once amassed, that her father and the King’s wizard had destroyed.
There were seven men encamped in the hollow, slouching around the scattered ash of a dead fire. Beyond them, the two Grammaine horses shared a hobble with a bent-backed farm nag. Emily’s eyes were only for Alice, though, and there she was, in her patriotic red dress.
Her sister’s face was so racked with emotion when she saw Emily that for a second it was impossible to read. Had she been ravished? What had they done to her? Then Alice gasped loudly, and Emily saw pure and utter relief there, magnified to such a size that it had been briefly unrecognizable. I am in time, she thought. Just in time.
Alice was not tied, but there were men close on either side of her. A purpled bruise was starting across one of the girl’s cheeks. Emily found that her musket, of its own accord, now pointed in the direction of her sister’s captors.
Only then did she spare the men themselves any attention.
There was Griff, she saw, on Alice’s right. The others were men of similar stamp: ragged runaways, refugees from the war. A pack of wretched criminals who had nothing to lose and for whom begging was too lowly an occupation.
Two of them had muskets, now pointed at Grant and herself. Against them, the muzzle of Grant’s blunderbuss seemed broad enough to take in the entire clearing. Knives had sprung into the hands of some of the brigands, and a woodsman’s long-hafted axe to the grip of another. One only had not drawn a weapon, although there was a pistol thrust into his sash.
‘Well, now, you have your father’s face, in a certain light, and obviously his bravery, although not his wisdom or his friends. What do you hope to gain?’
She studied his features, recalling the smooth and charming man