Free Heretic by Bernard Cornwell

horses, but the bulk of Thomas’s force was now inside the castle and its gate was again locked. The dead watchman lay on the wall with two goose-feathered shafts sticking from his chest. No one else had detected the invaders. Castillon d’Arbizon either slept or drank.
    And then the screams began.
     

 
     
    I T HAD NOT OCCURRED to Thomas that the beghard girl who was to die in the morning would be imprisoned in the castle. He had thought the town would have its own jail, but she had evidently been given into the garrison’s keeping and now she was screaming insults at the newly imprisoned men in the other cells and her noise was unsettling the archers and men-at-arms who had climbed Castillon d’Arbizon’s wall and taken the castle. The jailer’s plump wife, who spoke a little French, had shouted for the English to kill the girl. “She’s a beghard,” the woman claimed, “in league with the devil!”
    Sir Guillaume d’Evecque had agreed with the woman. “Bring her up to the courtyard,” he told Thomas, “and I’ll hack off her damn head.”
    “She must burn,” Thomas said. “That’s what the Church has decreed.”
    “So who burns her?”
    Thomas shrugged. “The town sergeants? Maybe us, I don’t know.”
    “Then if you won’t let me kill her now,” Sir Guillaume said, “at least shut her goddamned mouth.” He drew his knife and offered it to Thomas. “Cut her tongue out.”
    Thomas ignored the blade. He had still not found time to change out of his friar’s robe, so he lifted its skirts and went down to the dungeons where the girl was shouting in French to tell the captives in the other cells that they would all die and that the devil would dance on their bones to a tune played by demons. Thomas lit a rush lantern from the flickering remnants of a torch, then went to the beghard’s cell and pulled back the two bolts.
    She quietened at the sound of the bolts and then, as he pushed the heavy door open, she scuffled back to the cell’s far wall. Jake had followed Thomas down the steps and, seeing the girl in the lantern’s dim light, he sniggered. “I can keep her quiet for you,” he offered.
    “Go and get some sleep, Jake,” Thomas said.
    “No, I don’t mind,” Jake persisted.
    “Sleep!” Thomas snapped, suddenly angry because the girl looked so vulnerable.
    She was vulnerable because she was naked. Naked as a new-laid egg, arrow-thin, deathly pale, flea-bitten, greasy-haired, wide-eyed and feral. She sat in the filthy straw, her arms wrapped about her drawn-up knees to hide her nakedness, then took a deep breath is if summoning her last dregs of courage. “You’re English,” she said in French. Her voice was hoarse from her screaming.
    “I’m English,” Thomas agreed.
    “But an English priest is as bad as any other,” she accused him.
    “Probably,” Thomas agreed. He put the lantern on the floor and sat beside the open door because the stench in the cell was so overwhelming. “I want you to stop your screaming,” he went on, “because it upsets people.”
    She rolled her eyes at those words. “Tomorrow they are going to burn me,” she said, “so you think I care if fools are upset tonight?”
    “You should care for your soul,” Thomas said, but his fervent words brought no response from the beghard. The rush wick burned badly and its horn shade turned the dim light a leprous, flickering yellow. “Why did they leave you naked?” he asked.
    “Because I tore a strip from my dress and tried to strangle the jailer.” She said it calmly, but with a defiant look as though daring Thomas to disapprove.
    Thomas almost smiled at the thought of so slight a girl attacking the stout jailer, but he resisted his amusement. “What’s your name?” he asked instead.
    She was still defiant. “I have no name,” she said. “They made me a heretic and took my name away. I’m cast out of Christendom. I’m already halfway to the next world.” She looked away from him with an