Read Online Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors by Conn Iggulden - Free Book Online

bones and rust and shallow graves in Towton Field.
    Richard sank a fraction deeper into the cup of his hands, trying to ignore the shameless gasping a dozen feet behind him. The struggle to raise the crown and keep it seemed a nobler time, without a doubt. Before Warwick of all people had turned on them, making a traitor of Richard’s own brother, George of Clarence, kidnapping King Edward himself and holding him as a prisoner. Warwick had held back from royal murder, which was about all the good they could say of him. Up to that last blush, he had committed all the forms of treason named in law.
    A peculiar knocking began to sound, echoing in the corridor at the top of the steps. The young duke raised his head to listen, then raised his eyes to the heavens above. He was not being summoned. His brother had left some part of his armour on and was denting the wall with complete abandon. Richard did not smile as he’d used to. There had been too many nights, no, too many months of drunken tourneybouts, of fighting, wenching and huge feasts thrown down the open maw that was the king of England. Though Edward had not yet seen his thirtieth year, he had become too tight in his old armour and perforce paid fortunes for new sets with room to breathe.
    Richard himself remained lean, his waist and back like seamed saddle-leather. When he remarked on the difference between them to his brother, Edward would only grin and pat his stomach and tell him a man needed a little meat. It was infuriating. He did not know whether it was that the rewards of the world had come too easily, or that Edward simply lacked the wit to appreciate and earn his luck. No man for a hundred miles would have begrudged the king a few local girls, nor the huge number of wineskins or jugs of ale he could empty at a sitting. Yet Richard had argued even so for them to return to London, to wait in dignity and calm restraint for his brother’s fourth child to be born.
    ‘It will be a girl,’ Edward had said, glowering at him on the sparring yard at Windsor. On that day, they had faced only jousting posts of padded oak. It had not been spoken aloud between them, but the brothers made a point of not facing each other. In his most private thoughts, Richard thought he had the skill and perhaps the speed, but his brother was a killing knight. His opponents were often carried from the tourney field, no matter how light the mood had been at first. Edward did not spar well, though he fought like an archangel.
    Richard shifted on his step, looking across the tavern. There were a few old soaks wandering in as the twilight sank into darkness outside. Richard watched as three of them spotted the king’s guards and stood in indecision, licking dry lips. Their eyes flickered to the jugs of ale and then up to him, the slim swordsman blocking the upper floor andwatching everything that moved. One touched his forelock to him on instinct and backed out. Two more decided to stay, the choice visible in the slight rise of their heads and the way their shoulders dropped and settled back. They were free men after all, with coins they had earned. Richard smiled at the sight of their courage, feeling the small act raise his own spirits.
    The world was hard and full of pain. He woke each morning with such a band of agony across his shoulders that he could barely move. Only his stretches and exercises could ease it down to the sullen aches he endured the rest of the time. He did not complain, though he had been given much to endure. Men lived with suffering, that was all there was to it. They killed what they ate. They lost their wives as they gave birth and even then, every family rich or poor found children cold and stiff in the mornings, burying them with their grief in frozen ground.
    A duke was different again, Richard knew, a man who trained to exhaustion each day against the time he would stand in battle, or perhaps simply face another in armour who wished to take away everything he