Quenild Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Silent Bridle. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

Quenild Faulkner was born in 1468 at Rochdale in Lancashire, the youngest child of Hugh Faulkner and his wife Idonea Slater, and she grew up in a house that smelled of hawk mews on one side and wet wool on the other. Her father, a falconer's son, had spent his youth training hawks for the great Lancastrian households, and he kept the habit of the mews long after he had turned to other work: a gauntlet hung by the door, a block perch stood in the yard, and the children learned early that a hooded bird must never be startled and a question must never be asked of a man who was counting. Her mother was a weaver, and the loom in the back room set the rhythm of the family's day. Quenild's earliest memory, as the family later told it, was of sitting under that loom among the dropped thrums of wool while the shuttle went over her head like a small quick animal. The town of her childhood was a place of stone and weather. Rochdale in the 1470s was a market town on the river Roch, ringed by the moors of the Pennine edge, and its living came from wool: the sheep on the tops, the fulling mills in the valleys, the cloth carried to the market cross on pack ponies. Oatcakes and thin ale were the daily bread, and in the hard months the household lived on pottage, salted mutton and whatever the hens allowed. Winter came early to the tops and left late. Quenild learned to read a sky before she learned to read a page, and she learned to walk over frozen ground without a sound, a skill her father praised and, in the family's telling, never explained. Her family were not ordinary wool folk, and she knew it by the age of seven. Hugh Faulkner, called The Red Falcon, was the man who had opened the Red Ledger in 1455, and the book that lay wrapped in oiled cloth in his chest was a tally of vampires taken on the Lancastrian side during the Wars of the Roses. Quenild's older siblings, Amice Faulkner, born in 1456, and Thomas Faulkner, born in 1458, were already being trained for the work. She was not. Her mother's death in 1475 left the youngest daughter with a weaver's loom she was expected to keep running, and with a father who was often away. The training she received in those years was oblique: her father taught her to keep a bow strung at the right tension, to judge the length of a shadow at dusk, and to sit still for the hour after sunset without speaking. She thought these were falconer's tricks. She was nineteen when Hugh died in 1487, and by then the tricks had become habits she could not have given up. After his death she took work as a dairymaid. It was a plain trade and an honest one, and it suited her. The dairy day began before light with the cows brought in from the byre, the pails scoured with sand and scalded, the milk set in wide shallow pans for the cream to rise, the butter churned in a barrel churn and worked with wooden pats, the cheeses pressed and turned on their boards. The work was slow and repetitive and it left the evenings free. She was known in the district as a woman who said little, who seldom laughed loudly, and who could quiet a nervous heifer with a hand on its neck. The people she worked among called her the girl who walked the boundaries at dusk, and not one of them ever asked her why. In 1490 she married Godfrey Danby, a drover, three years her senior, who took Lancashire cattle and Pennine sheep over the high roads to the markets of the north and back again. Drovers were a wandering and observant class, sleeping under hedges and hearing every rumour on the road, and Godfrey was a good-humoured man who never needed the ledger explained and was content to be told nothing more than that his wife kept her father's habits. They took a cottage near the coast, where the pasture ran down to the marsh and the dairy work was better paid, and Quenild's household grew in the ordinary way: Piers Faulkner was born in 1493 and Agnes Faulkner in 1494. Both took the Faulkner name, as the family's custom often allowed, and both grew up to be sturdy, unremarkable people, neither of them a slayer. Quenild raised them with a firm hand and a shut mouth, and she was easier on them than her own childhood might have suggested. The calling came to her in 1497, when she was twenty-nine and the children were small. A storm had come off the Irish Sea for two days and two nights, the kind that took slates from the roof and turned the marsh into a lake. When it broke, the tide left a ship high on the shingle below the dairy, a merchant vessel out of some western port, upright and undamaged in a way that struck the coastguard's boy as wrong. The full crew was aboard, every man lying where he had been working, and not one of them was living. There was no sign of drowning and no sign of a fight. Quenild, who had gone down at dusk with a milk-pail and no reason to be there, stood on the deck among the dead and felt the whole of her father's training close around her like a hand. She saw at once what the others did not: the wounds were small, they were in the throat, and the men were unnaturally clean. She was a vampire slayer from that hour, and she knew it the way she knew the taste of her own milk. Her craft was named Dusk Patrol, and it was less a technique than a discipline: the walking of a fixed circuit through the last hour of light and the first hour of dark, so that the same ground was seen at the same time on a hundred evenings and the smallest difference was noticed. She carried a yew bow, the staff cut and seasoned by a Rochdale bowyer years before, and a quiver of blackthorn stakes, hardened in the embers and tipped in iron. She was known in the ledger by the alias The Silent Bridle, because she was said never to speak on patrol and because a bridle, in the drover's world she married into, was the thing a man used to turn a large animal without a fight. She took her first vampire in the spring of 1498 on the coast road, and the Red Ledger records the entry in a small upright hand that is not Hugh's and not Thomas's. Over the next thirteen years she added a modest and careful tally, and she had a reputation among the northern hunters for never taking a chance she did not need to take. The rivalry with the Proctors touched her only at a distance, and gently. The world she lived in was the aftermath of Bosworth, when the two roses were joined and neither house forgave the other; her brother Thomas had married Isabel Proctor at York in 1486, and the families' books were now bound by blood, and still they kept their separate counts. She did not hate the Proctors, but she noted their entries. When a rumour reached the coast that a vampire the White Ledger had claimed had in fact been taken by a Red Ledger hand, she rode inland herself to see the wound, and she said only that it was a good clean kill and should be written down in the proper book. She was not concerned with the Guest, the vampire the ledgers call only by that name, who had escaped at Towton and whom each family blamed the other for losing. She thought the matter was for people with more time than she had. She died in 1511, aged forty-three, of exposure on a winter watch. The coast had been afflicted for weeks by a thing that came in with the fog, and she had gone out on the shingle on the coldest night of the year to hold a line she would not let anyone else hold. Godfrey found her at first light, sitting against a breakwater with her bow across her knees and her face turned to the sea. He outlived her by nine years and died in 1520. Piers and Agnes both lived on into 1558, dying in the same year, and each kept the yew bow in turn. Quenild is remembered in the Red Ledger as the dairymaid who walked the coast, and in the Slayerverse she is counted among the quiet hunters of the cadet branches, whose work is known chiefly because someone bothered to write it down.