Free The Black Prince: Part II by P. J. Fox Page B

the curse of spring but Hart rather liked them. The males fed mainly on nectar while the females fed on blood.
    Deciding that there was nothing to find there, the bug hoisted its bloated, grotesque body into the air and was gone.
    Dunkirk’s skin was still warm, but cooling.
    “I didn’t do anything!” Rudolph protested. “He just…I went to find him, like you said, the other night. I asked him for a chit. Like you said. He still hadn’t given it to me and well, since there was nothing else to do and—I mean, since you asked—I went to find him again.
    “He was just sitting here. And then he saw me, jumped up, and started yelling. Like was my fault that he only had one horse! He should have been
happy
with one horse.” Rudolph paused, caught his breath. “Anyway, then he started sweating. And then he started complaining that he had indigestion. And then he just—fell over.”
    But Hart understood what had happened. He’d seen it before. The sweating. The vellum-pale skin. Both of which got worse when he flew into his sudden and irrational fits of rage. Rudolph was right; he hadn’t done this to Dunkirk. Dunkirk, he of the missing horse, had done it to himself.
    Hart stood. Rudolph was still protesting. “Relax,” he said. “He died of heart failure.”
    “Oh.” Rudolph grew still. Contemplative. A long minute passed, while Rudolph summed himself up to ask his next question. He swallowed. “Are you, I mean—are you certain? Because I thought, you know…the sweating.” He swallowed again. “I thought maybe it was plague.”
    That was it.
    Hart grabbed him by the shoulders. Rudolph looked like he might wet himself but Hart didn’t care. “Gods, man. You’re a genius.” And then, to Arvid and the other men surrounding them, “start cutting down trees.”



TEN
    T hey pushed the makeshift trebuchet up to the edge of the moat, using logs to roll it along. Rolling logs was, Arvid claimed, a game among the tribes. A stupid game, thought Hart. No more interesting than barrel racing or axe throwing or, Gods be merciful, dwarf hurling. But at least Arvid had the skill to direct the men and, so far, no one had lost a leg.
    A thousand men at his disposal meant that the device had come together quickly. And they’d been working with a simple enough design: a rectangular frame formed the base, from which another frame rose at right angles. A tree trunk formed the throwing arm; attached to one end was a counterweight and, to the other, a sling.
    The standard rule was that the counterweight should have at least a hundred times the weight of the intended projectile. The biggest and most powerful trebuchets had counterweights enclosed in boxes the size of a peasant’s hut. Hart didn’t have skilled carpenters at his disposal; he’d commandeered Dunkirk’s traveling trunks and filled them with rocks. They’d taken ten men each to lift. Hopefully they’d be enough. Hart didn’t care that his creation was ugly; only that it achieved its intended purpose.
    Which was lying on the ground next to him.
    A trebuchet wasn’t a quick fire weapon, like a longbow. It took a team of men to operate, all working in unison. With each command to
heave
, the arm was brought down. And down. Until the sling rested against the ground. A slight misstep and the counterweight would come crashing down, crushing those men attempting to load it. Then the arm was loosed to another command and the projectile flew as far as several hundred paces through the air.
    The intended purpose to this feat of engineering was to breach walls.
    But there was, Hart knew, more than one way to breach a wall.
    He sent the same herald forward again to rouse the castellan’s attention. Or the earl’s. Or someone. Only today, unlike the previous day, plenty of eyes were already on him. They watched from between the crenellations on the battlements and undoubtedly through the arrow loops that served as windows, as well.
    The same pair of heads