close. They were all wearing their cloaks, and they had no possessions other than their clothes and their eating knives. With the crowd they went down the steps, over the bridge, across the lower compound, and through the gatehouse, stepping over the useless gates, leaving the castle without a pause. When they stepped off the bridge onto the field on the far side of the moat, the tension snapped like a cut bowstring, and they all began to talk about their ordeal in loud, excited voices. Jack listened idly as he walked along. Everybody was recalling how brave they had been. He had not been brave-he had simply run away.
Aliena was the only one who had been brave. When she came into the keep and found that instead of being a place of safety it was a trap, she had taken charge of the servants and children, telling them to sit down and keep quiet and stay out of the way of the fighting men, screaming at the Hamleighs' knights when they were rough with their prisoners or raised their swords against unarmed men and women, acting as if she were completely invulnerable.
His mother ruffled his hair. "What are you thinking about?"
"I was wondering what will happen to the princess."
She knew what he meant. "The Lady Aliena."
"She's like a princess in a poem, living in a castle. But knights aren't as virtuous as the poems say."
"That's true," Mother said grimly.
"What will become of her?"
She shook her head. "I really don't know."
"Her mother's dead."
"Then she'll have a hard time."
"I thought so." Jack paused. "She laughed at me because I didn't know about fathers. But I liked her all the same."
Mother put her arm around him. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about fathers."
He touched her hand, accepting her apology. They walked on in silence. From time to time a family would leave the road and head across the fields, making for the home of relatives or friends where they might beg some breakfast and think about what to do next. Most of the crowd stayed together as far as the crossroads, then they split up, some going north or south, some continuing straight on toward the market town of Shiring. Mother detached herself from Jack and put a hand on Tom's arm, making him stop. "Where shall we go?" she said.
He looked faintly surprised to be asked, as if he expected them all to follow wherever he led without asking questions. Jack had noticed that Mother often brought that surprised look to Tom's face. Perhaps his previous wife had been a different sort of person.
"We're going to Kingsbridge Priory," Tom said.
"Kingsbridge!" Mother seemed shaken. Jack wondered why.
Tom did not notice. "Last night I heard there's a new prior," he went on. "Usually a new man wants to make some repairs or alterations to the church."
"The old prior is dead?"
"Yes."
For some reason Mother was soothed by that news. She must have known the old prior, Jack thought, and disliked him.
Tom heard the troubled note in her voice at last. "Is there something wrong with Kingsbridge?" he asked her.
"I've been there. It's more than a day's journey."
Jack knew that it was not the length of the journey that bothered Mother, but Tom did not. "A little more," he said. "We can get there by midday tomorrow."
"All right,"
They walked on.
A little later Jack began to feel a pain in his belly. For a while he wondered what it was. He had not been hurt at the castle and Alfred had not punched him for two days. But eventually he realized what it was.
He was hungry again.
Chapter 4
I
KINGSBRIDGE CATHEDRAL was not a welcoming sight. It was a low, squat, massive structure with thick walls and tiny windows. It had been built long before Tom's time, in the days when builders had not realized the importance of proportion. Tom's generation knew that a straight, true wall was stronger than a thick one, and that walls could be pierced with large windows so long as the arch of the window was a perfect half-circle. From a distance the church looked lopsided, and when Tom got closer he saw why: one of the twin towers at the west end had fallen down. He was delighted. The new prior was likely to want it rebuilt. Hope quickened his pace. To have been hired, as he had been at Earlscastle, and then to see his new employer defeated in battle and captured was heartbreaking. He felt he could not