In all, just the eighteen of them now. When they’d set out on their errand, there’d been over sixty in their party. But illness, some battlefield wounds that had gone bad and one or two skirmishes on the way home had whittled their number down. Now, those left, still intent on seeing this lie through, looked like men ready to lie down in the winter coldness and let sleep take them.

‘Sire! Look!’ shouted one of the squires, pointing up the forest track.

Geoffrey turned back in his saddle and squinted at the bright blanket of undisturbed snow ahead of them. He could make out the perfectly still form of a man swathed in a dark hooded cloak, standing in the middle of the rutted track.

Geoffrey’s sense of caution stirred him to rein in Edith and raise a gloved hand. He heard the column of bone-weary horses and men shuffle to a halt behind him.

‘We are about King’s business, make way!’

The hooded figure remained perfectly still. The forest was utterly silent, save for the cawing of a murder of crows circling high above in the winter sky, the rasping of the horses’ breath and the clink of a harness as one of the pack horses stirred uneasily.

‘Do ye hear?’

The figure seemed not to. Geoffrey switched tongues. ‘Nous faisons les affaires de rois!’

A breeze tugged at the hooded cape, but the man within remained perfectly still.

This is not good.

Geoffrey looked at the trees either side of the track: perfect ambush terrain. They’d been jumped before by bandits on the Continent in woods much like this. The mistake back then — a mistake that had cost them a good knight and two sergeants-at-arms — had been not to form up the moment the first of them had appeared. He raised his hand and balled it to a fist — the signal for the rest to dismount and make ready for a fight.