The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles by John Jakes

plucked him up and were hurling him toward a new kind of future. Fortune’s wind might be savage, he decided. But to be seized and swept along by it was much more exciting than to live forever becalmed.
    Leaning into the blizzard, he fought it like a physical enemy. He was determined to reach the village and return home in record time, just for the sake of doing it. Concentrating on making speed, he was totally unprepared for an unexpected sound.
    He halted on the snowy road, listening. Had the wind played tricks?
    No. He heard voices crying out.
    One was thin; a boy’s, perhaps. The others were lower. Harsh.
    Directly ahead, he saw where the storm had not yet concealed the tracks of a horse. The tracks led off to the right, into the great, black, wind-tormented pines. The thin voice sounded again—
    From back in those trees!
    Phillipe began to run.
    Following the cries and the drifted horse tracks, he quickly passed into the forest. Not much farther on, he spied a boy defending himself from two ragged attackers.
    The boy wore a long-skirted coat and a tricorn hat, the hat somehow staying on his red head as he darted from side to side, fending off the lunges of the other two by means of a sharp-pointed, lancelike weapon that looked all of seven feet long. In the swirling snow beyond the struggle, a small, tethered sorrel horse snorted and whinnied in alarm. Phillipe kept running.
    “You little sod!” shouted one of the attackers. The boy had slashed the lance tip from right to left and caught the stouter of the two brigands across the face.
    The injured man reeled back, cursing. As he stumbled, he turned. Phillipe saw him head on. Even with a mittened hand clasped to his gashed cheek and a shabby fur hat cocked over his forehead, his face seemed to leap out at Phillipe through the slanting snow.
    Auguste.
    “Circle him, circle! Grab that damned thing!” the other attacker screamed. Phillipe recognized the voice of cousin Bertram.
    The boy—twelve or thirteen at the most—darted to his left, manipulating the lance with trained grace. Bertram ran at him, a knife gripped in his right mitten.
    “The hell with holding him for money!” Auguste yelled over the wind. “He’s ripped my face to pieces—do the same to him!”
    And that was just what Bertram intended, it seemed, as Phillipe ran the last yards to the clearing and shouted, “Here! Stop!”
    The cry distracted the boy, whose clubbed red hair was the only patch of color in the gray and white scene. Phillipe saw a face frightened yet determined. But when the boy turned suddenly, he lost his footing.
    While the boy slipped and slid, Bertram seized the lance shaft, wrenched it from the boy’s grasp and threw it away behind him.
    Phillipe ducked as the lance struck pine boughs near his cheek, showering him with snow. Bertram slashed over and down with the dagger. But the boy dove between his legs and the cut missed.
    Then Phillipe looked at the closer of the two attackers. Auguste drew his mitten away from his bloody face, gaping. The three-inch wound below one startled eye glistened pink where the skin had been laid open. As he recognized Phillipe, his face grew even more ugly.
    “You’d have been wiser not to answer his cries for help, little lord.”
    Blood spattered on the snow from the point of Auguste’s chin. His red mitten fumbled at his waist, producing a dagger similar to the one Bertram kept stabbing at the intended victim. The boy’s tricorn hat had finally fallen off as he jumped one way, then another like an acrobat, trying to avoid the slashes.
    Hate and hurt in his dark eyes, Auguste charged. The knife was aimed at Phillipe’s belly.
    Phillipe had no time to think. He simply reacted, reaching for the nearest weapon—the lance fallen nearby. He thrust with both hands, hard.
    Auguste screamed, unable to check his forward momentum. His run impaled him on the head of the lance. Phillipe let go, jumping backward as Auguste fell, raising powdery