Chapter 152

He came out of the beechwoods on the west bank, where my father’s archers lay.

He walked. A tall man in a plain dark coat with a high collar, bare-headed, hands empty, coming down through the trees by no track at all, and the snow did not seem to slow him. Behind him, at the edge of the wood, three pale men stopped and stood. One of them had a box under his arm, of red-brown wood, bound at the corners with brass.

The west slope spoke, the same sound of wind in leaves that was not wind. I saw the shafts go into him. Two in the chest of the dark coat, one in the shoulder. He did not check. At the bottom of the bank he paused, and drew the one from his shoulder, and turned it in his long fingers as a man looked at a pen someone had lent him, and laid it on the first ford stone, neatly, pointing downstream. There was nothing on it. No blood.

The slope went quiet. Somewhere up there my father had lifted his hand.

***

He came out over the stones as I had seen