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beginning to be noticed in higher circles, something that would harm his chances of advancement. Hood was right, he had conducted himself no differently to the majority of Royalist officers in the wake of Bolton’s fall, but Stryker would be damned before he saw the young man throw his prospects away for the sake of a fine claret. And yet, deep down, he knew that his interference only seemed to breed resentment. He made to turn. ‘Clean yourself up. Meet me at The Swan.’
    ‘Sir,’ Hood said, though his watery stare had flickered to the open door.
    Stryker caught the gesture and hooked the door with his foot, toeing it closed. Behind it, nestled against the wall, was a substantial flagon. He could see dark liquid just below the brim. Stryker looked back, saw the longing in Hood’s eyes, noticed how the lieutenant’s hands trembled.
    The door swung open, concealing the flagon. ‘Major Stryker? Is he present?’
    Stryker and Hood both turned to the doorway. Under the rotten lintel, wreathed in sunlight, stood a tall, finely dressed man. He wore the caged helmet and russet breastplate of a harquebusier, with lace at his falling band collar, a silver gorget at his throat, and a blue coat that was threaded in silver all the way down the sleeves.
    Stryker squinted, but the light at the man’s back turned his features almost black by contrast. ‘He is, sir.’
    ‘Ah, good,’ the newcomer said, his voice loud and well educated. ‘Get him out here, would you? I have no wish to speak within these walls, for it smells like a latrine.’
     
    ‘One of my lads claimed he’d seen you in there,’ the dismounted cavalryman said as Stryker and Hood joined him outside. He breathed deeply and theatrically, and unfastened his helm, letting shoulder-length tousles of richly golden hair cascade around the leather straps running between back- and breast-plate. He tossed it to one of the troopers who ringed the group like iron sentinels, and smoothed his thin moustache between gloved thumb and forefinger. ‘Seemed unlikely, but here you are.’ His grin was permanent, etched by a sword slash that had left cleaved his mouth and healed in puckered lines so that his lips, forever upturned, appeared to stretch into his cheeks. But his smile was genuine in its warmth. ‘Well met, Sergeant-Major. Ha! Major. A pleasure to name you by your new rank, sir.’
    ‘Thank you, Sir Richard,’ Stryker said, returning the smile. ‘I am not entirely accustomed to it myself, truth told.’
    Sir Richard laughed at that. ‘And how does life treat you in your new role?’
    In truth, life was decidedly more dangerous. Everything had changed. He was still a soldier, still bled for the cause of the king, and yet so much now was alien to him. The sea had changed all that. It had taken a ship called the Kestrel , tossed it and smashed it and turned it to a tangled wreck of floating rigging and splintered spars. On that ship had been Stryker and his company, sailing for the Isles of Scilly and a cache of gold, and they had been sucked into the icy depths with the stricken vessel. A handful – Stryker and Skellen among them – had been thrown up on a hostile shore, and though they had faced yet more tribulation before their mission was complete, they had been the fortunate ones. Stryker’s Company of Foot had been shattered, and the remnants – both the wreck’s survivors and those remaining in quarters with the Oxford Army – no longer amounted to a unit worth salvaging. They had been scattered, dispersed amongst the rest of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s regiment, leaving the officers with nowhere to belong. The common term was reformado , an officer without a command, and that was the status under which Stryker and Lieutenant Hood had found themselves operating. The king’s nephew – and his majesty’s greatest warrior – had long meddled in Stryker’s affairs, often dispatching him on clandestine duties in the face of Sir Edmund’s understandable