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By Root 1240 0

the great muscles of an archer, but he possessed spite and he had sharp bony knuckles that he drove viciously into Hook’s face. “You piece of bitch-spawned shit,” Sir Martin spat, and hit again, trying to pulp Hook’s eyes. “You’re a dead man, Hook,” the priest shouted. “I’ll have you looking like that!” Sir Martin pointed at the nearest fire. Smoke was thick around the stake, but flames were bright at the pile’s base and, through the gray smoke, a figure could be seen straining like a bent bow. “You bastard!” Sir Martin said, hitting Hook again, “your mother was an open-legged whore and she shat you like the whore she was.” He hit Hook again and then a flare of fire streaked in the pyre’s smoke and a scream sounded in the marketplace like the squeal of a boar being gelded.

“What in God’s name is happening?” Sir Edward had heard the priest’s anger and had come into the stable yard to discover its cause.

The priest shuddered. His knuckles were bloody. He had managed to cut Hook’s lips and start blood from Hook’s nose, but little else. His eyes were wide open, full of anger and indignation, but Hook thought he saw the devil-madness deep inside them. “Hook hit me,” Sir Martin explained, “and he’s to be killed.”

Sir Edward looked from the snarling priest to the bloodied archer. “That’s for Lord Slayton to decide,” Sir Edward said.

“Then he’ll decide to hang him, won’t he?” Sir Martin snapped.

“Did you hit Sir Martin?” Sir Edward asked Hook.

Hook just nodded. Was it God who had spoken to him in the stable, he wondered, or the devil?

“He hit me,” Sir Martin said and then, with a sudden spasm, he ripped Hook’s jupon clean down its center, parting the moon from the stars. “He’s not worthy of that badge,” the priest said, throwing the torn surcoat into the mud. “Find some rope,” he ordered Robert Perrill, “rope or bowcord, then tie his hands! And take his sword!”

“I’ll take it,” Sir Edward said. He pulled Hook’s sword that belonged to Lord Slayton from its scabbard. “Give him to me, Perrill,” he ordered, then drew Hook into the yard’s gateway. “What happened?”

“He was going to rape the girl, Sir Edward,” Hook said, “he did rape her!”

“Well of course he raped her,” Sir Edward said impatiently, “it’s what the reverend Sir Martin does.”

“And God spoke to me,” Hook blurted out.

“He what?” Sir Edward stared at Hook as if the archer had just claimed that the sky had turned to buttermilk.

“God spoke to me,” Hook said miserably. He did not sound at all convincing.

Sir Edward said nothing. He stared at Hook a brief while longer, then turned to gaze at the marketplace where the burning man had stopped screaming. Instead he hung from the stake and his hair flared sudden and bright. The ropes that held him burned through and the body collapsed in a gout of flame. Two men-at-arms used pitchforks to thrust the sizzling corpse back into the heart of the fire.

“I heard a voice,” Hook said stubbornly.

Sir Edward nodded dismissively, as though acknowledging he had heard Hook’s words, but wanted to hear no more. “Where’s your bow?” he asked suddenly, still looking at the burning figure in the smoke.

“In the tavern taproom, Sir Edward, with the others.”

Sir Edward turned to the inn yard’s gate where Tom Perrill, grinning and with one hand stained with blood, had just appeared. “I’m sending you to the taproom,” Sir Edward said quietly, “and you’ll wait there. You’ll wait there so we can tie your wrists and take you home and arraign you in the manor court and then hang you from the oak outside the smithy.”

“Yes, Sir Edward,” Hook said in sullen obedience.

“What you will not do,” Sir Edward said, still in a soft voice, but more forcefully, “is walk out of the tavern’s front door. You will not walk into the heart of the city, Hook, and you will not find a street called Cheapside or look for an inn called the Two Cranes. And you will not go into the Two Cranes and enquire after a man called Henry of Calais. Are you listening to me, Hook?”

“Yes, Sir Edward.”

“Henry of Calais is recruiting archers,” Sir Edward said. A man in royal livery