Read Online The Black Prince: Part II by P. J. Fox - Free Book Online Page B

him!”
    “Don’t be daft,” said the other. He was addressing his companion, but his voice carried quite clearly across the water. “He’s not a lord. He’s some sort of peasant! We shouldn’t listen to him.”
    “I can scarce believe my ears, brother.”
    Hart could.
    He strode forward. Let them see that he was not afraid. That he would not cower in the shadows.
    He looked up. The pair of heads, so far above, were as small as a pair of harpaston balls. And indeed he felt as though he were playing harpaston: a brutal game characterized only by its glaring lack of rules. A favorite of Asher’s, he knew; his nephew enjoyed kicking around the ball and hollering like a madman or, sometimes, simply picking it up and charging across whatever boundary had been set up as the goal line.
    “Whom do I address?”
    “The castellan,” said the first head. The second head didn’t deign to respond.
    “My herald speaks truth. I represent the king and the king’s justice, and I am here to request your surrender.”
    “Preposterous!”
    The second man, who still hadn’t revealed either his name or position, was flustered. Hart, meanwhile, was the soul of calm. He wanted these men, and all who watched him from the windows, to see just how confident he was. In himself, in his army, and in the king. He stood before them, exposed. Without armor. Without protection of any kind, save for the justice he brought.
    “You have three days,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Today is the first day. I shall raise a white flag above the parley tent, indicating my and the king’s willingness to accept a peaceful surrender. Through this day, until sunrise tomorrow, none inside the castle shall be harmed. All shall receive a pardon and be free, thereafter, to go—or remain—in peace.
    “If no surrender is forthcoming, then come tomorrow’s dawn I shall raise a second flag. A red flag. After this point, when I breach your walls, the men will be killed. But I, because I am the soul of mercy and because the king is the soul of mercy, shall spare the women and children.”
    He paused.
    “On the third morning, all within shall rise to see a black flag. Thus signifying that you have exhausted my mercy. And the king’s. All within shall perish. My men are thirsty for vengeance,” he added. “I restrain them now, out of the writ that I come to enforce. But on the third day, and in the days to come, I shall not. Because on the third day I declare you outlaw.”
    The king’s justice was only for citizens. Let them throw away their citizenship and let them throw away its privileges. Hart didn’t care. He turned and, without further word, walked back across the bridge. Toward his camp. Toward his tent. Where he would wait.
    He didn’t turn. Refused to give his enemies even that small satisfaction. But during the whole of that walk, the longest of his life, the spot between his shoulder blades itched.



NINE
    T he night passed without incident.
    Watch fires blazed on the ramparts and before them, Hart saw the shadows of men. So the castellan and his crony weren’t alone in there. There had still been no sign of the earl, though, nor of his son. Balzac, whose man had disemboweled Hart in the mountains. Hart hadn’t asked where they were, because doing so would indicate a lack in his own intelligence. Let them think him omniscient.
    He’d waited but, to no one’s surprise, there had been no surrender. Neither had there been an offer of parley. House Salm, he could only conclude, hadn’t read its history books.
    The flags had been part of that kernel of an idea. In his nights alone at Caer Addanc, he’d grown fond of reading about a certain leader from the East. A man by the name of Temujin the Great, whose father had been killed by political rivals when he was only nine. After which he, his mother, and his six siblings had been expelled from their village and forced to survive on forage.
    Temujin had taken a wife after killing her brother in a