The Last Knight Read Online Free

stood at the front of the crowd, obviously considered himself to be on trial with his wife. Judging by the comments I overheard, he deserved to be.
    They defended themselves hotly—they had never been accused of such a thing! (The crowd laughed at this.) They couldn’t think who’d persecute them so maliciously. The deputies were blind, bought, acting out of spite, idiots…
    Then the clerk read the sum of the damages claimed by their victims—nearly a hundred gold roundels. The baker and his wife shrieked with outrage.
    This time the judicars silenced them. Or rather, the judicar who sat in the middle did. He had a narrow face, a gray-streaked beard, and a personality forceful enough to silence the bakers and the crowd.
    He said that the amount claimed seemed excessive. In fact, his clerk estimated that if every man, woman, and child in town had eaten an entire loaf of bread every day for a year, they still couldn’t have been cheated out of half that sum.
    The townsfolk laughed again, a little sheepishly. ’Tis known that when a criminal is caught, even folk with honest intent tend to imagine that more is owed them than they truly lost. And not everyone is honest.
    The judicars conferred, then decreed the baker’s wife guilty. She could redeem herself if all the loaves and all the flour the couple owned were portioned out to all customers who had accounts at their shop, and that further, she must pay five gold roundels to reimburse the court.
    The baker moaned that they were ruined, ruined, and his wife looked even more pinched. But in the opinion of the crowd it was a fair judgment.
    The next case up was the older man with the bruised face. The tapster from the inn where the fight took place testified that the old man had indeed started it—this time.
    A man of the same age and sort as the prisoner, standing to the right of the platform, said wait till next time and he’d do better. His speech was slurred by a badly swollen lip.
    The old man on the platform shouted, “You and what other three men?” then winced as his headache punished him.
    The crowd’s amusement told me this was an old feud that never caused great trouble. ’Twas the innkeeper who brought charges, and a bill for smashed furniture, a window, and the keg that had been hurled out the window.
    The judicars found the damages, thirteen gold roundels and four fracts, reasonable. They added the usual ten percent charge for the nuisance of having to replace everything, and five gold roundels to the court.
    The total made the old man flinch. When he protested that it would take him months to work that off, an embarrassed-looking woman in the front of the crowd told her “pa” that he’d no call to complain after the trouble and shame he’d caused his family.
    The stout young man beside her paid the fine, remarking cheerfully that he was going to get some help building that fence, after all. The crowd chuckled, and the judicars reminded the man that since he had redeemed his father-in-law, he was responsible for the old man’s behavior until he paid his debt.
    Then a deputy pushed the third prisoner, the young man, forward, and the crowd’s mood changed as if a cloud had swept over the sun.
    The young man was identified as most often calling himself Fisk—and it appeared that he had good reason for using several names.
    He had convinced a rug merchant in Meeton to invest in an undiscovered tin mine—which didn’t exist except in Fisk’s counterfeit samples. He had sold a woman who ran a dress shop a potion guaranteed to restore her lost youth and beauty. He had convinced a young spice merchant to finance an expedition to find the fabled cities of gold that belonged to the savages who dwelt in the desert. He had…
    The young man denied none of the charges, though his lips clamped tighter and tighter.
    Opinion in the crowd was mixed—there was little doubt of the man’s guilt, but his victims were not popular.
    Indeed, when the elderly