King's Blood Page 6

“That was well done,” William said.

  The young man smoothed the mane on the grey’s neck and handed over the lead to a fiercely apologetic owner. “It’s nothing,” he said to them both. He bowed to the knight, then bowed low to William. “My lord,” he said.

  “You know me,” said William. God: if he had seen this boy before, surely he would have remembered.

  A smile hovered in the corner of the boy’s mouth. It never quite escaped to fill the rest of his face, but William felt as if the sun had grown suddenly, notably brighter. “My name is Robert,” the boy said, inconsequentially enough. “My father is sheriff in Kent.”

  “Robert?” said William, casting his glance across at least three of them on that shore, and God knew how many of the younger villagers might share the name as well; not to mention half of the Norman males in England. “Then you’re what? FitzHaimo?”

  “Robin,” the boy said. “Robin will do. I came to guide you where you need to go.”

  “I know the way to Winchester,” William said. He should have bristled, perhaps, but in that bright orbit, it was impossible.

  “Surely you do,” said the boy. Robin.

  William’s brows lowered. The light had darkened. His sight had cleared—enough at least to see what was behind that so-captivating face. “You’re one of them,” he said. “What was your mother? A nixie? A fey?”

  Robin laughed. It was a robust, mortal sound, for all the shimmer that was on him, that he was deigning at last to let William see. “She was a perfectly ordinary child of old gods, a Lady of Avalon. She didn’t corrupt me too badly. I’m not to turn you into a wizard or give you a devil’s horns. I’m to stand beside you, no more, and be whatever you need me to be.”

  “That’s a great deal,” William said.

  The boy lifted a shoulder in a wry half-shrug. “If you say so, my lord.”

  William gripped those shoulders. He made no effort to be gentle, but Robin did not even flinch. “I don’t want your magic, do you understand? I want none of it.”

  “Not the crown or the throne? Not even England?”

  “England I’ll take,” William said. “Britain can fend for itself.”

  “If you say so,” said Robin again, “my lord.”

  William snarled and let him go. If he had had half a grain of sense, he would have knocked the young fool flat. But he could not bring himself to bruise that pretty face.

  William glared into it. “Wherever you think you’re taking me, it’s Winchester I’m going to. You can follow or not. It’s your choice.”

  “I am free to choose,” Robin agreed amiably. He might have sounded like an idiot, if his eyes had not been so bright or so very aware. He knew perfectly well what he was doing, and just how far he could go.

  He was good, that one. Too good to meet with anger. William cuffed him because he deserved it, but lightly, and said, “Tell your mare up there that we’re riding to a crowning.”

  “She knows,” said Robin. He bowed, both lightly and without mockery, and strode to meet the mare, who was trotting purposefully down the hill.

  William would have known if they strayed from the mortal road. So he told himself, riding inland from the sea. The sun was still bright, the air warm and sweet; no rain threatened. In fields as they passed, folk were laboring: wielding scythes amid the gold of grain, gathering and binding the sheaves. Surely it was a trick of the eye that turned the scythes, like the grain, to gold.

  It seemed night should have fallen sooner than this. Had they not come to harbor after noon? And had they not been riding for hours? The horses seemed fresh enough, and none of the men complained. Yet William felt the stretch of time in belly and backside.

  The sun hung halfway between the zenith and the horizon. Shadow rose ahead of them: dark boles and woven branches of a wood. The road passed beneath the boughs.

  It was dark there, and chill after the unremitting warmth of sunlight. William had ridden and hunted in the forests of Britain since he was a child. He knew the smell and the feel of them; he knew what grew there and what ran there, what chattered or sang or grunted in the undergrowth.

  This wood was too dark. Its branches were bare but for a scatter of withered leaves. The mould underfoot was dank. When they came to the trickle of a stream, it was fouled with leaves and slime. The horses snorted at it; none would drink. Most preferred to leap over it rather than sully their hooves.

  William reined his horse to a jarring halt. “Enough,” he said. “Turn back. Whatever this is, it’s not the road to Winchester.”

  “My lord,” said Robin, “it is.”

  “I’m sure,” said William, much too sweetly, “in time, through many turns and twists, it could be said to lead there.”

  “Oh, no, my lord,” Robin said, “it’s perfectly straight.”

  “I know all about straight tracks,” William said with a growl in his throat. “We’re turning back. If you won’t show us where the ordinary winding road is, we’ll find it ourselves.”

  If Robin sighed, it was not audible to human ears. He bowed and shifted his mare aside, so that William could lead the way back out of the wood.

  William was not as sure of the way as he wanted his escort to believe. He could see the light ahead, and the track without turn or fork, but he had heard enough from his more willingly sorcerous kin to know that was no promise of easy or quick escape. Once magic got a grip, it hated to let go.

  The road seemed quiet enough. No branches fell to stop them; the trees kept their places, as grey and lifeless as ever. As sure as he was that this was not an earthly road, William could see no magic here, not anywhere. The place was empty of it—dead.

  He caught Robin’s eye. The boy was riding beside him, apparently unperturbed by William’s show of rebellion. “No bolts of lightning?” William asked him. “No armies of the Old Things to haul me back to whatever ritual I’m running out of?”

  “No,” said Robin. “Nothing. That’s what’s here. Nothing.”

  “It’s not the way to Winchester.”

  “It was once,” Robin said.

  William glared.

  Robin grinned. No one had been so signally unafraid of William since he learned to use a sword. It was not the fearlessness of a fool; the boy honestly was at ease, and undismayed.

  The grin died. His face was suddenly somber. “You need to see,” he said. “This is what the Saxons are trying to make of Britain. They don’t know it; in half a thousand years, they never succeeded in killing the land, only in driving out the soul of it. But once we came, they had hate to arm them, and determination to undo all that we’ve done.”

  “That isn’t my world,” William said. “Can you understand that? I’m not the wizard-king they forced my father to be.”

  “He chose you,” said Robin. “Now you’ve seen. If the Saxons win back England, this is what will become of it.”

  “The Saxons will not win back England,” William said grimly.

  “Good,” said Robin.

  The brightness had come back to his face. The plain light of day was on it, red-tinged with sunset. They had come out of the wood onto the mortal road.

  It was not a straight track; it followed the curves of the land. And that was exactly as it should be.

  William drew a deep breath as he surveyed it. He straightened in the saddle. “We’ll ride as late as we can,” he said. “The sooner we’re in Winchester, the better for us all.”

  He did not look back to see if the rest of them followed. A king learned to expect it.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sacred offices in chapel made Edith think of a spider weaving her web. Abbess Christina spun each strand. The nuns’ voices lifted it up. Where it rose, the world was a little greyer, the light a little dimmer. The air did not fill the lungs as thoroughly.

  This trapped magic and wrapped it close and took it out of the world. Abbess Christina did not know that that was what it did. She thought she was praying—aloud for whatever the Church wanted her to
pray for that day, and in her heart for the Normans’ fall.

  She had been praying harder since word came from Normandy that the king was dead. She had hated him with a true Christian hate; she had prayed not only for his death but for his destruction.

  It seemed her prayers had been answered. Now she was praying that the new king would be weak and a fool, and would fall quickly. The spider-threads were so thick that Edith could barely sit through the offices. She kept getting dizzy and wanting to fall over.

  Sister Cecilia was not doing anything to help. Her voice in the offices was sweet and clear, and the air was a little lighter for it, but that was all. Sometimes Edith thought she was helping with the web—making it thicker and heavier, until it sank under its own weight.

  Then the rest of the abbey was cleaner, and the parts of it that were farthest away from the chapel glistened with magic. Everything was gathering in one place and closing itself off. It would eat itself, Edith thought.

  It was a war. The whole of Britain was the battlefield. Parts of it were riddled with rot like a bad cheese, and parts of it were going bad. The parts that were still good were struggling.

  And now the king was dead. Cecilia seemed calm. She was waiting for the new king to come, and taking care not to fret.

  But Edith could feel deep underneath how Cecilia was afraid. Too much was changing. She was strong, but not strong enough in herself to shift the whole of the tide. The other Guardians were doing what they could, but they were far away, and there were not enough of them.

  Edith wanted to help, though she did not know what she could do. She was too young and small, and all she had was magic. She knew very little about how to use it.

  She could pray. But prayer was dangerous here. It could help, or it could do terrible harm.

  In the end she decided that if she prayed in one of the sunlit cloisters far from the chapel, it might not turn all webby and twisted. She slipped away when the novices were given their hour of recreation. That was supposed to be something suitable and approved, such as reading from the lives of the saints or working on an altar-cloth.

  If anyone asked, she would call it meditation on her sins. The sun was bright and the grass was very green. Bees were humming in the little orchard that grew along the wall, a row of pear-trees cut and shaped and tortured into lying flat against the stones. For trees so twisted out of their natural shape, they seemed remarkably happy. They were thick with leaves, and their fruit was round and sweet.

  She breathed in the scent, but she was too well trained to steal a pear. Not that she cared about sin, but discipline was important. It helped her to keep her mind on what she was praying for.

  The bees’ song had words in it. It was not a language she knew, but there was no mistaking what it was. She had been praying as she was taught, kneeling on the grass, hands together and head bowed. Now she raised her head and opened her eyes to the brightness all about her.

  She had slid sidewise out of the world again. Mostly she did it because she wished to, but sometimes, as now, it happened of itself. She was no more frightened than she ever was. Whatever world this was, it meant her no harm. The creatures who lived in it either paid her no mind or watched her in quiet interest. She could go where she liked and do as she pleased, and nothing seemed to matter.

  Today she found herself on the edge of a wood. The wood was dark. The trees in it were all dead. There was a smell to it, a slow, cold reek that made her think of an opened grave.

  There was light behind her. The grass was still green, the sun still bright. But what the abbess was doing in the chapel, someone or something had done to a great swath of the Otherworld.

  She backed away from it. This was nothing she could help.

  She nearly fell into a pool that had not been there when she came that way before. It was round and clear and reflected the sky. Somehow she knew that it was very deep; it went all the way to the heart of the world.

  Cecilia was sitting by the pool. She had not been there before, either. She glanced at Edith, but most of her attention was on the water. “Look,” she said.

  Edith followed her stare. The water was pure, clear blue. Then it began to shimmer. Shapes were moving in it.

  At first she thought they were fish swimming below. Then she realized that they were men. There was a man riding with a company of other men—knights in armor on big strong horses. He was not a big man compared to the others, but he carried himself very straight. His hair was gold and his beard was red. He had no magic in him, but there was power—she could feel it even through the water. It made her think of her father, how he was king and knew it, and so did everyone else.

  Then the vision shifted. She saw another man. He looked a little like the first, but where that one was red and gold, he was ruddy brown, and his face was shaven clean. He was younger than the other, though still much older than Edith.

  He had magic. Great roaring tides of it. He might be even stronger than Cecilia.

  “That is my brother,” Cecilia’s voice said beside her, soft and clear. “They both are.”

  “They’re Normans,” Edith said. She turned to stare at Cecilia. “So are you.”

  Cecilia nodded. “Does that disturb you?”

  Edith frowned. “Does the abbess know?”

  Cecilia’s shoulders lifted in a shrug.

  “She’ll hate you if she finds out.”

  “She will,” Cecilia said. Then after a pause: “Do you?”

  Edith thought about it. “My mother would want me to,” she said after a while. “My father might. Or he might not. My godfather is a Norman, you know. His name is Robert.”

  “Yes,” Cecilia said. “That’s another of my brothers.”

  “Really? Is everybody your brother?”

  Cecilia laughed. “Not quite,” she said. “But they do get about.”

  “Father says,” said Edith, “that everybody has to live in the world, and Normans aren’t going to go away. Better be friends with them than dead enemies. Mother says she’d rather be dead. They fight over it.”

  “I can imagine they would,” Cecilia said. “So? Which of them do you agree with?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Edith.

  Cecilia nodded. That surprised Edith. Everyone else tried to force her to one side or the other. Cecilia only said, “You have to choose for yourself. I can only guide you; I can’t act for you. No one can. Remember that.”

  “That’s not what Mother says,” said Edith.

  “Most likely not,” Cecilia said.

  The water rippled and shifted, then melted away. When Edith looked up, Cecilia was gone. Edith was sitting on ordinary grass under an ordinary sky, and a nun loomed over her like a standing stone.

  “Mother Abbess would speak with you,” the nun said. Edith did not remember her name. She was tall and quiet and rather old, like all the nuns.

  Edith thought she might have to find her own way to the abbess, but Sister turned in the way they all had after they took their vows, as if she had no feet but instead ran on wheels, and glided across the grass toward the grey shadow of the cloister. Edith followed as quickly as she could. She still had feet and legs, and they were rather small still; she had to scramble to keep up.

  Mother Abbess might not have moved at all since the first and last time Edith had been summoned to an audience. Her room was as cold and grey as it had been before. If the chapel was a spider’s web, this was the larder, closed off from any glimmer of light or breath of living air.

  Abbess Christina had kept Edith waiting in the anteroom for a long while. Edith was dizzy with lack of breath when at last she was ushered into the presence. She had to struggle to walk steadily, to bow the proper degree and then stand with proper humility: hands folded in front of her, head bowed, eyes lowered.

  She could feel that cold scrutiny on her. The walls were closing in. All that saved her was memory of the brightness she had come from, and Cecilia’s voice telling her that she was free to choose what
she would do.

  “It is time,” Abbess Christina said, “that you begin the instruction for which your mother sent you.”

  That startled Edith into speaking without thinking. “But, lady, I already have. I’ve been studying Saxon and Latin and Norman and—”

  The abbess cut her off with chill precision. “Additional instruction befitting your blood and breeding. Sister Gunnhild will take you in hand for an hour each day. She will teach you what a daughter of kings has most need to know.”

  Edith looked up under her lashes. The nun who had fetched her from the far end of the cloister was still in the room. Edith peered through the shadows, picking out white hands tightly folded, and a pale face framed in the black veil. The rest of her was wrapped in darkness.

  Her eyes were lowered as Edith’s should be, her lips pressed together as tightly as her hands. Everything about her was locked shut.

  Edith’s heart felt small and cold. Her stomach had drawn into a knot. She kept thinking of the ruined wood and the strangling web. Here were the hands that would guide her into them—make her part of them.

  She could run. But where? She was too small. The world was too big. The time when she could have escaped, when she was on the long road from Scotland to this place, was gone.

  It did not matter what Cecilia had said. She did not have a choice. No child did.

  She bowed her head. She could feel that the abbess was pleased. Sister Gunnhild glided forward. Edith did reverence as was proper.

  “You will begin now,” Abbess Christina said. “Apply yourself well. Take heed of what you are taught.”

  “Yes, lady,” Edith said. It was all she could say.

  CHAPTER 10

  There was no angel with a flaming sword at the gates of Winchester, barring William from the city or the treasury. He rode in as one who had every right, and found the chancellor waiting, with clerks in attendance.

  They were expecting him. The keys to the treasury were ready for him to take, the guards bowing him in.

  His shoulder blades prickled. This could be a trap. But he had not come this far to tuck his tail between his legs and run. His own picked men were with him. He left half of them with the guards and told the rest to follow him.