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said. He went back into the abbey church. The monks were leaving and the candles were being snuffed out, but there was enough light left to see into the half-opened stone casket that stood in its place of honour behind the altar. Saint Junien lay there, his hands crossed and the yellow-brown skin of his face stretched tightly across his skull. The eye sockets were empty and the shrunken lips pulled back to show five yellow teeth. He wore a Benedictine habit, and in his hands was a simple wooden cross.
    ‘Rest in peace,’ Fra Ferdinand said to the corpse, and reached in to touch the saint’s hands. ‘And how will you make sure your enemies can’t use
la Malice
?’ he asked Thomas.
    ‘By doing what you wanted to do,’ Thomas said. ‘I’ll hide it.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Where no one can find it, of course.’
    ‘Sir Thomas,’ Sir Reginald Cobham called from the far end of the nave, ‘you’re coming with us!’
    Fra Ferdinand put a hand on Thomas’s arm to stop him leaving. ‘Do you promise me?’
    ‘Promise you what?’
    ‘You’ll hide it?’
    ‘I swear on Saint Junien,’ Thomas said. He turned and put his right hand on the dead saint’s forehead. The skin felt like smoothed vellum beneath his fingers. ‘I swear I will lose
la Malice
for ever,’ he said, ‘I swear it by Saint Junien, and may he intercede with God to send me to everlasting hell if I break this solemn promise.’
    The friar nodded, satisfied. ‘Then I’ll help you.’
    ‘By praying?’
    The Black Friar smiled. ‘By praying,’ he said. ‘And if you keep your oath my work is done. I’ll return to Mouthoumet. It’s as good a place to die as any.’ He touched Thomas’s shoulder. ‘You have my blessing,’ he said.
    ‘Sir Thomas!’
    ‘Coming, Sir Reginald!’
    Sir Reginald led Thomas briskly down the abbey steps to the cobbled street where two wagons were being loaded with beans, grain, cheese, and dried fish from the monastery stores. ‘We’re the rearguard,’ Sir Reginald explained, ‘which means goddamned nothing because we’re ahead of the prince’s army right now. But he’s up on the hill.’ He pointed north to where Thomas could see the tree-fringed loom of a high hill dark in the wan moonlight. ‘The French are somewhere beyond, God knows where, but not far.’
    ‘We’ll be fighting them?’
    ‘Christ only knows. I think the prince would like to get closer to Gascony? We’re short of food. If we stay here more than a couple of days we’ll strip the country bare, but if we keep going south the bloody French might get ahead of us. They march fast.’ He said all this as he paced beside the wagons, which were being loaded by archers. ‘But it’ll be the devil’s own job to get away from here. They’re close, and we’ll need to get the wagons and packhorses across the river without the bastards attacking us. We’ll see what the morning brings. Is that wine?’ He called the question to an archer heaving a barrel onto a cart.
    ‘Yes, Sir Reginald!’
    ‘How much is there?’
    ‘Six barrels like this.’
    ‘Keep your thieving hands off it!’
    ‘Yes, Sir Reginald!’
    ‘They won’t, of course,’ Sir Reginald said to Thomas, ‘but we need it for the horses.’
    ‘For the horses?’ Thomas asked.
    ‘There’s no water on the hill; poor beasts are thirsty. So we give them wine instead. They’ll be wobbly in the morning, but we fight on foot so it doesn’t matter.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘God, that’s a pretty woman.’ Thomas thought he was talking of Bertille who was standing with Genevieve, but then Sir Reginald frowned. ‘What happened to her eye?’
    ‘One of the cardinal’s priests tried to gouge it.’
    ‘Jesus God! There are some evil bastards in the church. And he’s been sent to make peace?’
    ‘I think the Pope would rather see the prince surrender,’ Thomas said.
    ‘Ha! I hope we fight.’ He said those four words grimly. ‘And I think we will, I think we’ll have to, I think they’ll make us fight, and I think we’ll win. I want to see our archers cut the bastards down.’
    And Thomas remembered the bodkin striking Sculley’s breastplate. The arrows were made in their hundreds of thousands in England, but were they well made? He had seen too many crumple. And Sir Reginald thought there would be a battle.
    And the steel of the arrowheads was weak.
     
    The king could not sleep.
    He had dined with his eldest son, the dauphin, and with his youngest boy, Philippe, and