King's Blood Page 10

  “Not,” said William, “if I can help it.”

  “Ah,” said the Huntsman, “but can you?”

  William looked about. His horse was dead. His protection was half-dead at his feet.

  He could think of nothing to do but what he had been doing. He heaved Robin up over his shoulder again, paused to balance the weight, and walked. Straight ahead. No flinching, no veering.

  “Yes,” the Huntsman said behind him. “Go as you have come. Every step you take, we grow stronger.”

  William set his teeth. He would not be provoked into turning back. The world of the living was ahead of him. He had to believe that.

  Belief, like words, had power. There was no shadowed wood in front of him, no Wild Hunt behind. Robin had taken ill. His horse had had a fall and died. That was all.

  “Yes,” said the Huntsman, exactly as close as he had been before. “Feed us. Make us strong.”

  It seemed William had choices. Turn back and fail. Go on and fail. Die where he stood, of cold and starvation if the Old Things would not kill him.

  “All that you do serves us,” the Huntsman said. “By all means, live and rule and turn your back on your blood and breeding.”

  William did not stop or turn, but he said, “I got my fill of that when I was in the nursery. ‘Don’t do that,’ my nurse would say—hoping that I’d do it. What do you want me to do? Put flesh on your bones? Make the woods green again?”

  The silence behind him should have been a relief. Unfortunately for William’s peace of mind, he knew better.

  He kept walking. It was all he knew how to do. He wanted his world back, his people, his crown. He wanted never to be trapped like this again.

  Maybe it was a dream, but it was a dream he could cling to. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed it into being.

  Robin twisted and began to thrash, taking William completely by surprise. They went down in a tangle.

  William was fighting for his life. The thing that had gone for his throat was not the Robin he thought he knew. This was red murder and strangling fingers, and teeth that snapped in his face, sharp as a wolf’s.

  He was at a severe disadvantage. This thing that wore Robin’s body wanted him dead. He wanted Robin alive.

  He kept the fingers from his throat and the teeth from his face, and pinned the thrashing legs and twisting body. It was taller than he was, but he outweighed it. He used that weight, and bound it to the earth.

  The earth heaved beneath them both. The air was full of voices, shrieks and cries, and the flutter of wings.

  He looked down into Robin’s eyes. They were blurred with confusion, but they were sane. Between William’s body and the earth, he was safe from the thing that had possessed him.

  Those eyes shifted past William and widened. That was all the warning William had.

  Could a bee sting through armor? It was a small pain, negligible, except that it grew so large. It burned and throbbed.

  The strength went out of William’s arms. He slipped to the ground beside Robin.

  He had fallen off the straight track—into mortal daylight, mortal earth, and blessed Somerset. A mist was closing in, but it was earthly mist, with no terrors of the Otherworld in it.

  Not that it mattered, he thought distantly. All the uncanniness that he needed was sunk in his breast above the heart: a black dart poisoned with a spell.

  His hand scrabbled at it. His fingers had no strength to grip. He was losing the light. His body burned with fever. He tried to speak, but the words would not come.

  This was the end, then. At least he got to die in the mortal world. That was a blessing, if a small one.

  He let go of pain and fever, then words and consciousness, sliding down the long steep slope into the dark.

  CHAPTER 15

  Anselm!”

  The Abbot of Bec lay motionless on his hard and familiar bed. His cell was protected by strong wards, set to keep out everything that hinted of magic. He had stopped short of swearing a vow never to wield his power, but in the years since Lanfranc died, apart from the wards that protected him from temptation, he had lived by a strictly mortal rule.

  Nevertheless, a voice called to him out of the air, clear as the cry of a trumpet. “Anselm! Wake!”

  He opened his eyes on lamplight and a face that could not possibly have arrived here by mortal ways.

  The late king’s daughter sat demurely beside his bed, gowned and veiled as a nun. Both the demureness and the habit were purely deceptive. This was a sorceress of enormous and unabashed power, a Guardian of Britain, a defender of all that Anselm had determined to reject.

  “My lord abbot,” she said, “it’s time you woke from your dream and faced your destiny.”

  “My destiny is to be a man of God,” Anselm said.

  “So it is,” said Cecilia. “And now God calls you to Britain.”

  “God has nothing to do with it,” Anselm said.

  She rose. “The king needs you now. The Old Things have turned on him; he’s like to die of it.”

  “Why do you come to me?” Anselm demanded. “I have no arts to help him. That is your province, surely.”

  “He needs you,” she said.

  “I will not—” Anselm began.

  He never finished. She had caught hold of his wrist and pulled him to his feet. She was stronger than a woman had any right to be. While he was still staggering, off balance in body and mind, she opened the wall between the worlds.

  She must have laughed at his wards. This was magic so high and strong that there was no resisting it. He could only shut his eyes and suffer it to take him.

  The king lay on a high and royal bed in Gloucester. Despite the heat of a room banked with braziers, and a heap of coverlets of both wool and fur, he shuddered with unrelenting cold. His skin was icy to the touch; his mind was gone, wandering where no sane man would wish to follow.

  Anselm was a scholar, not a healer, but he was hardly immune to compassion. He bent over that white and shaking figure, and his heart softened in spite of itself. It did not matter if this was a king; he was a soul in torment, and Anselm was a man of God.

  William’s eyes opened. Anselm had recalled that they were blue, not this pale and wintry grey. Even they had had the color leached out of them.

  They wandered aimlessly until they found Anselm’s face. There, they stopped and held as if transfixed. William’s hand gripped Anselm’s with startling strength.

  His spirit was still far away. Anselm could feel it drawing him into a cold and distant place, through white emptiness and a broad expanse of shadow.

  William’s sister had trapped Anselm and drawn him to this stifling room in Gloucester, on the other side of the sea from Anselm’s proper place. Now William drew Anselm out of the world altogether into a kind of bleak damnation.

  It did no good to resist. The harder Anselm fought, the lower he fell.

  Through prayer and meditation and the lofty structures of philosophy, he had turned his back on everything else that he was. He knew what Lanfranc would have said to that: Lanfranc, whose only defiance of the Church’s law in all his life had been to be both sorcerer and priest. As grim a thing as the Saxons had done to the Old Things of Britain, they had done God’s will. Magic and the Church could not join together.

  “God made you,” William said.

  They were standing in a field of ice, blank and bleak and empty of life. William with his red-gold hair and fiery beard blazed unnaturally bright here—and his eyes were brilliant and startling blue. He looked like a new-lit flame.

  Anselm regarded him with no little surprise. “You were even more insistent than I that magic have no part in your realm.”

  “So I was,” William said. “Maybe I still am.”

  “That is not logical,” said Anselm.

  “Maybe not,” said William. “But I am practical. What I want and what is may have nothing to do with each other. Old Britain is doing its best to get rid of me. I’m not about to be got rid
of. If that means magic—then I’ll hold my nose and swallow it.”

  “That is practical,” Anselm granted him, not happily. “Still, why am I here? Your sister is stronger than I will ever be, and she accepts what she is.”

  “She can’t take the see of Canterbury,” William said.

  “Ah,” said Anselm. It struck him, distantly, that this was a very strange discussion to be having in the landscape of a nightmare.

  Or perhaps this was the perfect place for such a thing. If he had bad dreams, they were of being ripped from the peace of his monastery, flung out into the world, and forced to rule where he had wished only and ever to pray.

  “I do not want Canterbury,” he said. “You cannot force me to take it. Give it to one of the hundreds of men who want it.”

  “None of those several hundred is strong enough to do all the things that the Archbishop of Canterbury must do. Including,” said William, “the things that no one talks about.”

  “That cannot be true,” Anselm said. “The Church is full of sorcerers, some raised very high. Surely—”

  “None of them is bound to Britain.”

  “I am not—”

  “Believe me,” said William, “I didn’t want to be, either—not that way. But I am. So are you. Can’t you feel it? It’s like chains going down into the ground.”

  “This is all a lure and a trap,” Anselm said bitterly. “Are you even ill? Is that a deception, too?”

  “Oh, I’m poisoned,” said William, “and I’ll be lucky if I come out alive. Britain will need you even more if I fail. Henry’s not ready yet. He’s still reiving his way through Normandy.”

  “An heir of your own body—” Anselm began.

  William looked him hard in the face. “Don’t delude yourself,” he said.

  But Anselm was not going to listen to that. “Even a man of your . . . proclivities can force himself to stomach a woman for the sake of his line’s continuance. Caesar—Alexander—”

  “Not in this life,” said William.

  “That remains to be seen,” Anselm said grimly.

  “So. You’re going to hang about and hope to see it?”

  Anselm could feel the jaws of the trap closing on him. William had maneuvered him into them. And here he was, on the verge of accepting the one thing in the world that he wanted least.

  “If you force this on me,” Anselm said, “you may live to regret it.”

  “I’ll be happy to do the living,” said William. “Now bring me out. You know the way.”

  “I don’t—” Anselm began.

  “Then I’ll die,” William said.

  It was tempting—so much so that Anselm crossed himself, here in the world of nightmare, and resolved to do penance when he was in the world of the living again. Even to save his own peace, he could not let a man die.

  Years ago he had learned to walk the paths of dream, to find his way from the depths to the waking world. Some of that skill remained; he had made use of it in prayer, when he meditated on the nature of God. It was painful to turn it to this irretrievably secular use.

  He made of this place a house of many rooms, a palace of memory. Down its familiar passages and its steps of reason and logic, he led the king. William followed in silence. What he saw, if he could see anything, Anselm neither knew nor cared.

  The light drew slowly closer. Each door that opened, opened on a larger and airier room. William had begun to drag at Anselm’s hand, weighing like a stone. Anselm set his teeth and trudged onward.

  The outer gate rose wide and tall. Anselm had not built it so. In his memory it was a wall of glass that would melt away before the waking world. This was the gate of a stronghold, with portcullis and drawbridge, and no doubt a moat.

  Such sorrow it must be to be a king. Or was it simpler and more terrible than that? Was this what it was to be William the Bastard’s child?

  Anselm was forgetting discipline and losing strength to distraction. He forced his mind into focus. William’s weight of reluctance had slowed him almost into immobility.

  One more step. One more, and they would both be safe. It was no great distance; the gate was already growing transparent, and he could almost see mortal light beyond it. And yet it was the most difficult step that had ever been. Even the thought of it was daunting.

  William had turned to ice and stone. Anselm could let him go. It would have been terribly easy.

  Ease had never been his virtue. He set his whole will and as much of his body as could reach into this place, and heaved William out into the light.

  The king lay weak and pale, but he was awake and alive. He had not spoken in the day and night since he came out of his Otherworldly fever.

  Anselm was still there. People were not asking questions. The human will was an odd thing, and human understanding could alter itself to fit the world however it chose. For all Anselm knew, a shade of himself had shown itself in Bec, then departed in the direction of England. The Lady Cecilia was thorough and altogether ruthless.

  He had found a place among the clerks, with decent light, ink, parchment, and freedom to do as he pleased. The nature of God that had so preoccupied him in Bec was slipping away here in Gloucester. Small weird beings kept flitting in through the window above his head and dangling from the rafters.

  They were as pestilent as gnats. They fed on magic, and basked in it; the greater it was, the more of them there were to plague one’s peace. Here in Britain they were larger and more solid than they were in Gaul—as if this troubled country bred them to be stronger.

  He had no desire to study the nature of the fey. He was a theologian, not a magus.

  As if the thought had brought him, one of the king’s long-curled pages appeared beside Anselm’s lectern and bowed extravagantly. “Good Father,” he said, “his majesty begs that you attend him.”

  Anselm wondered how much begging there actually had been. He saw no purpose in refusal, although the fey were swarming about his head. The boy seemed oblivious to them, though how he could be, Anselm could not imagine. They were buzzing like bees.

  He quelled the urge to swat them, tidied his lectern, pinched out his candle, and laid his pens away with care. The page shifted from foot to foot. An impatient servant of a less than patient master—Anselm sighed. Sweet heaven, what this world was coming to.

  He was no more pleased by what he saw on his way to the king’s chamber. Rain had set in before dawn; now, at midmorning, it was a drumming downpour. Courtiers who would have been out riding or hunting or practicing at arms were hanging about in the hall and the corridors. As if to mock the dimness of the day, they had put on their most extravagant plumage: silks and furs, jewels and gold.

  The fashion for long curled hair had conquered this realm. So had another and even more pernicious madness. Anselm passed by it twice on his way to the king: lovers entwined in corners. One pair was kissing passionately. The other looked to be doing rather more than that. Which was not an uncommon sin among courtiers—but there was not a woman among them.

  Anselm’s teeth set. The sooner he answered the king’s summons, the sooner he could win leave to go. Then he would shut himself up in Bec, with wards far stronger than those which Cecilia had penetrated with such contemptuous ease, and not even the Lord Pope would lure him out again.

  She was there in the king’s bedchamber, side by side with another black-clad woman. A tall young man stood by the bed—a guard, though ranked high. He was dressed like a nobleman of considerable wealth. That, thought Anselm, must be the notorious sheriff’s son, fair Robin as rumor called him.

  He was neither as effete nor as visibly dissolute as Anselm might have expected. He had the look of a fighting man, but the eyes that rested on Anselm were bright with intelligence—and something else.

  They were all sorcerers here, all but the king. He was lying with his eyes shut, but Anselm could feel that he was awake. He looked like a well-preserved corpse: hair and beard unnaturally bright, skin greyish-pale. His cheeks w
ere sunken, his eyes hollow.

  Still, he was alive. He spoke clearly enough, a strong man’s voice out of that image of death. “I owe you thanks. You saved my soul.”

  “It was my duty, Majesty,” Anselm said.

  William’s eyes opened. They were blue—not faded silver as they had been before. “You do your duty well.”

  “I am sworn to obedience,” Anselm said.

  The corner of William’s mouth twitched upward. “Are you now?”

  Anselm’s back tightened between the shoulder blades. There was a purr in those words—a rumble of satisfaction. Anselm could feel the bars of the cage closing in, even as a pair of monks glided into the room.

  They bowed low to the king and lower to Anselm. Anselm looked in a kind of despair at what they carried. Cope and miter and crozier, and on a silken napkin a ring that gleamed with gold and amethyst.

  “My lord,” the king said. His sister lent him her arm, shifting him and banking him with pillows until he sat nearly upright. “Duty calls. You will obey.”

  “I will not—” Anselm began.

  The monks were large men, broad of shoulder, with muscles honed by long hours in their monastery’s fields. Their grip on Anselm was light but firm. Soft hands laid the cope on Anselm’s shoulders and set the miter on his head.

  He clenched his fists against the crozier and the ring, but the monks were relentless. They pried at his right fist. He resisted with all his strength—though the pain of aging joints and merciless prying brought him near to tears. For a moment as he met those cold eyes, he knew they would break his hand if they must—but they settled for pressing ring and crozier to it. The metal of both burned his skin like ice.

  He glared into the eyes of the two ladies. Cecilia he knew too well. The other he knew not at all—and yet he felt in her a deep familiarity.

  “Another age,” she said in a low sweet voice. “Another lifetime. You were always contrary, my old friend and enemy. But the gods will have their way.”

  “There is no god unless it is God,” Anselm said grimly.