Alain de Clairmont

Beneath a pale morning haze, Acre vanished behind them, its walls and towers fading until they were no more than a jagged shadow against the eastern sky. Alain de Clairmont stood at the stern long after the harbour had disappeared, one gloved hand closed around the damp rail while the sea rose and fell beneath him with the slow, indifferent breathing of some immense creature.

He had imagined this departure often during the years abroad. In fever, in battle, and in the black hours before dawn when the camp lay quiet save for the shifting of horses and the groans of men too wounded to sleep, he had pictured France waiting beyond the water. Green fields beneath rain. Cold rivers. Pale stone. The chapel bell at Clairmont carrying over the valley.

Home had become less a place than a desperate, bitter prayer.

Now that the ship was bearing him toward it, Alain discovered that relief could be almost as cruel as despair.

He slept badly throughout the crossing. The narrow berth seemed to move even when the sea was calm, and every groan of timber woke him with his hand reaching for a sword. Salt stiffened his dark hair. His beard grew rough along his jaw. The old wound near his hip throbbed in the damp, while his left knee objected bitterly each time he descended the ladder to the lower deck.

None of it troubled him as much as the distance still remaining.

At night he took out the small bundle of letters he had carried through heat, rain, blood, and one disastrous river crossing. The parchment had softened along the folds. Several lines were blurred beyond reading, though he knew them by memory now. He never opened them where another man might see. He merely held them beneath the weak light of a ship's lantern and listened to the creaking hull while France drew nearer.

Marseille appeared beneath a sky heavy with winter rain.

The harbour was crowded with merchant vessels, fishing boats, sailors, porters, pilgrims, and men shouting over one another in half a dozen tongues. After Acre, the noise should have felt familiar. Instead it struck Alain with the strange unreality of a dream. French voices moved around him. Church bells rang above red roofs. A woman laughed sharply beneath a covered walkway, and the sound stopped him so abruptly that one of his remaining men nearly walked into his back.

"Monseigneur?"

Alain resumed walking without explanation.

There had been twenty-seven men beneath the Clairmont banner when he departed France. Now, only six returned with him.

The others had been buried beneath foreign soil, lost at sea, taken by fever, or left behind because their wounds made travel impossible. Alain carried every absence like an additional weight beneath his cloak.

Pomme waited in the confusion of the docks, stamping one dark forehoof against the wet stone while a nervous sailor struggled to hold her. She was black save for a small white mark beneath her forelock, older now and leaner through the flanks, though no less proud. Alain had ridden her away from Clairmont years before, when her coat had shone and both of them had possessed more courage than sense. A marriage gift given before his departure, she had carried him through dust storms, skirmishes, ruined roads, and the long retreat from places whose names he no longer wished to speak.

The mare turned at the sound of his step.

Her ears came forward. A low breath left her, almost a rumble, and Alain felt something in his chest pull painfully tight.

"Oui, ma belle," he murmured, laying his forehead briefly against hers. "We are nearly done."

Pomme, who had bitten a groom in Acre and kicked a knight from Poitou hard enough to crack a rib, stood perfectly still beneath his hand.

They left Marseille beneath steady rain and turned north.

The road stretched before them through dark vineyards, stony hills, swollen rivers, and villages gathered tightly around their churches. Each mile brought familiar food, familiar prayers, and familiar faces, yet the closer Alain came to Clairmont, the more unsettled he became.

At an inn near Lyon, a serving girl dropped a wooden platter behind him.

The crack against the floor sent Alain to his feet with his dagger drawn before the room had time to fall silent.

For one terrible instant, there was no inn. No hearth. No rain striking the shutters. Only white stone beneath a punishing sun and men rushing through smoke. Alain could not breathe.

Then the girl began to cry.

Alain stared at the knife in his hand.

"Mon Dieu," he muttered.

He sheathed it at once, placed enough coin on the table to replace every platter in the house, and left without finishing his meal.

Winter settled harder over the road. Frost silvered the fields each morning. Bare branches clawed at low skies, and the wind found every weakness in Alain's cloak. His men complained quietly of the cold, but he welcomed it. Cold was French. Cold was clean. It smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke rather than dust, sweat, and old blood.

With every passing day, he imagined the gates closed against him. Word of his death might have been accepted at last. His lands might have passed into another man's keeping. His name might have become something spoken gently in the chapel and nowhere else.

The thoughts that followed were worse.

He drove them away by riding until his injured knee burned and Pomme's breath steamed heavily in the air. The mare endured his urgency with the patience of an old companion, though she began looking back at him whenever he pressed her too hard, as if questioning which of them possessed the greater sense.

On the final morning, the clouds broke.

The road climbed through familiar woodland, where the trees stood black and bare against a washed blue sky. Alain recognized the bend before the old wayside cross. He recognized the stream below it and the low stone bridge his father had ordered repaired when Alain was a boy. Moss covered the same cracked saint carved into the cross's base.

He reined in without meaning to.

His men stopped behind him.

Beyond the trees, pale towers rose over the valley.

Clairmont.

For years he had seen those towers in fragments. In dreams they had burned, crumbled, or vanished whenever he drew near. Now they remained beneath the winter sun, their light blue and white banner moving above the keep.

Alain's throat closed around the sight.

"Home," one of the men said.

The formation loosened as they urged their horses forward, no longer marching with the careful discipline of soldiers but riding with the ragged haste of men who had finally reached the end of the world.

The village appeared first, larger than Alain remembered, with new thatch upon several roofs and smoke rising from chimneys. A child carrying kindling stopped to stare at the riders. Two women outside the bakehouse fell silent. A smith looked up from the hoof he was shaping and shaded his eyes against the pale sun.

No one shouted Alain's name.

Why would they?

The men approaching Clairmont looked more like beggars than returning knights. Their cloaks were stained by weeks upon the road. Their beards had grown wild, their armour battered and mismatched beneath layers of wool and leather. No bright banner announced them. The strip of blue cloth tied below Alain's saddle was faded almost grey, and the device upon his surcoat had been worn nearly smooth by dust, rain, and salt.

Whispers followed them along the road, naming them pilgrims, mercenaries, or merely more men displaced by a distant war.

Alain kept his hood drawn low. He had imagined recognition rushing toward him with bells and cries, yet the anonymity was almost a mercy. It gave him a few more moments in which to remain merely a traveller approaching the place he loved, rather than a dead lord returning to reclaim his life.

Alain guided his horse through the gate and into the courtyard. The familiar space seemed at once too small and impossibly vast. The well remained at its centre. Smoke drifted from the kitchens. Stable boys paused beside their buckets, while servants gathered cautiously in the thresholds of the hall and storehouses to stare at the bedraggled riders entering beneath the faded remains of Clairmont blue.

No one hurried forward to welcome them.

The guards exchanged uncertain looks. One followed them into the bailey, spear still held ready.

"Your names and your business here."

One of Alain's surviving men glanced toward him, waiting.

Alain scarcely heard the question. Every carefully composed word of apology, explanation, and devotion had vanished the moment he crossed the gate. His gaze travelled over the windows, the galleries, the chapel path, and the gathering household, searching every face for the only one that mattered.

She was not there.

His mouth tightened.

"Where is my wife?"