Lion at Bay by Robert Low

been allowed to live a wee while longer.’
    ‘Aye weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled, aware that he had been hasty with the knife – but Christ’s Bones, the man was coming at him. The wee priest, on the other hand, was neither here nor there. For certes, Kirkpatrick said to himself with grim humour, he will, by now, wish he is no longer here – and explained to Hal, patient as a mother, why it would have been better if he had died.
    ‘The wee priest kens folk were spyin’ Jop out. He kens the name Lamprecht, which was spoke out for all to hear,’ he whispered, flat and cold. ‘That name has already reached Comyn ears, which is why Malise is sent out. It will, for certes, be whispered in Longshanks’ own by now.’
    Hal said nothing, for the truth of it was a cold burn, like the wound along his ribs. Jop was better dead, if only for his own sake; the King’s questioners would not have stinted on their store of agony – for all Edward Longshanks proudly pontificated about there being no torture in his realm – and the priest would be telling all he knew to anyone who would listen.
    The more Hal thought on it, the more he wondered about what might have been inadvertently revealed that night. His dreams were cold-sweated with what the priest might be saying, but Hal knew he would have been hard put to kill the man for it. Nor was he sure he could kill Lamprecht as coldly.
    Yet the nagging why of it was a skelf in the finger. Why had Lamprecht come back to the north in the first place, after all that had happened to him? Just to risk himself for the chance of revenge on those who had wronged him, as he saw it? It was possible, as Kirkpatrick put it, that he nursed a flame of hate. And Buchan would be interested because a Bruce was involved in it.
    ‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick said in answer to the last, a short chuckle saucing his bitter growl, ‘as to that last, you underestimate the sour charm you exert on that earl – he might be spying the chance of vengeance on you himself. The bright shine on this is that Buchan, who can never resist the charms of seeing Bruce or yourself discomfited has sent Malise Bellejambe after Lamprecht and so he is let loose from being the chain-dog o’ your light of love.’
    ‘A perfect chance for me to rescue her,’ Hal replied laconically, ‘save that I am here.’
    And five years lie between us like a moat, he added to himself; she may not even welcome a gallant knight’s rescue, never mind a worn lover with blood on his hands.
    ‘Besides,’ he added, bitter with the memory, ‘Buchan has already had vengeance on me. Why would he suddenly want more?’
    Kirkpatrick, shuffling himself comfortable in the middle of a snoring, growling pack of other pilgrims, did not say what he thought – that perhaps, even now, the Earl’s bold countess had mentioned Hal’s hated name aloud. Worse yet, cried it out when her husband broke into her, as Kirkpatrick heard he was wont to do, like a drover earmarking a prize heifer.
    It would be enough, he thought, to drive the Earl to visit some final judgement on the man who so cuckolded him. Christ’s Bones, if it were mine I would be so driven.
    Yet it was not only the lord of Herdmanston that Buchan pursued, but Bruce. The wee Lothian knight was simply a hurdle in the way of that, for the Comyn would do all they could to bring down a Bruce. And the same reversed.
    Somewhere, the monks began a chanting singsong litany and a bell rang.
    ‘No rest for any this night,’ he muttered in French.
    ‘It is the Christ Mass,’ Hal answered him, with a chide in the tone of it.
    ‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled back, ‘like most weans, He benefited from the peace o’ silence in the cradle. A good observance for these times, I am thinking.’
    ‘Yer a black sinner,’ Hal replied, with a twist of smile robbing the poison of it.
    ‘Ye are a dogged besom o’ righteousness, Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ Kirkpatrick answered, ‘but ye are mainly for