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said.
    ‘If you want to stay beautiful,’ Thomas said, ‘don’t be a soldier. And throw me my clothes.’
    Keane kicked the clothes into the river rather than touch them. Thomas kneaded them, trampled them, scrubbed at them with a rock till no more stain coloured the water, then he plunged the mail coat in and out of a pool, trying to rid the links and leather of the stink. He ducked his head a last time, ran fingers through his hair, and climbed onto the bank. He wrung out the clothes as best he could, then put them on still wet. He carried the mail coat. It would be another warm day and his shirt and hose would dry fast enough. ‘North,’ he said curtly. The first thing was to find the men-at-arms he had left at the ruined mill.
    ‘Horses and weapons, you said?’ Keane asked.
    ‘How much are they offering for me?’
    ‘The weight of your right hand in gold coins, I heard.’
    ‘My hand?’ Thomas asked, then understood. ‘Because I’m an archer.’
    ‘That’s just the beginning. The weight of your right hand in gold and the weight of your severed head in silver. They hate English archers.’
    ‘It’s a small fortune,’ Thomas said, ‘so I dare say the horses and weapons will find us.’
    ‘Find us?’
    ‘Soon enough folk will wonder if I escaped the city, so they’ll come looking. Till then we keep going north.’
    Thomas thought of Genevieve as he walked. She had been terrified when he first met her, and why not? A pyre had been made outside her prison and she was supposed to have been burned as a heretic, and the prospect of that holy fire was a scar in her memory. It would be torturing her now. He assumed she and Hugh were safe for the moment, at least until Roland could find Bertille, but what then? The virgin knight was mocked for his rectitude, but he was famed for being incorruptible, so would he meekly exchange Genevieve and Hugh for Bertille? Or would he think it his sacred duty to give Genevieve to the church so it could finish the business it had started so long ago? Thomas desperately needed to reach Karyl and his other men-at-arms. He needed men, he needed weapons, he needed a horse.
    They were following the river northwards. The sun rose higher and the olive trees gave way to vineyards. He could see five men and three women tilling between the terraces a mile or so away, but otherwise the countryside was empty. He kept to the low ground where he could, but always heading towards the hills. Roland, he thought, would be at least five leagues away from the city by now. ‘I should have killed him,’ he said.
    ‘Roland?’
    ‘I had an archer aiming at his fat head. I should have let him shoot.’
    ‘A hard man to kill, that one. He looks willowy, doesn’t he? But I saw him fight in Toulouse and, by Jesus, he’s fast! Quick as a snake.’
    ‘I need to get ahead of him,’ Thomas was talking more to himself than to Keane. But why Toulouse? ‘Because it’s safe,’ he said aloud.
    ‘Safe?’
    ‘Toulouse,’ Thomas said, ‘we can’t follow him into Toulouse. It belongs to the Count of Armagnac, and his men patrol the road north, but that means it’s a safe route for de Verrec.’ De Verrec needed to keep Genevieve unharmed till she was exchanged. Then the answer was tumbling in his head. ‘He’s not going to Toulouse, he’s taking the road through Gignac.’
    Keane looked blank. ‘Gignac?’
    ‘There’s a road through Gignac, it joins the main road north from Toulouse. He’ll be safer on that route.’
    ‘You’re sure the man is going north?’
    ‘He’s going to Labrouillade!’ That was the obvious destination. Genevieve could be held there until Bertille was surrendered.
    ‘How far’s Labrouillade?’
    ‘Five or six days on horseback,’ Thomas said. ‘And we can go through the hills, it’s quicker.’ Or it would be quicker if he was sure that no
coredor
ambushed him on the way. He needed his men-at-arms. He needed his archers with their long war bows and goose-fledged arrows. He needed a miracle.
    There were villages ahead. They had to be skirted. The countryside was coming alive as more men went to the fields or vineyards. Those labourers were all far away, but Thomas had grown up in the countryside and knew that such men missed nothing. Most of them would never travel more than a few miles from home in all their lives, but they knew every tree, bush and beast within that small area, and something as small as the flight of a bird could alert them to an