Hounds of God (4 page)

oOo

“Was that a sin?” Alun wondered as they drank
hot ale in a tavern beyond the cathedral.

Nikki shrugged. It had not felt like one. And the man was
happy, and would sleep warm tonight and eat well; maybe he would not drink away
all his money at once.

“Someone will tell him what happened,” said
Alun. “Someone should have told him before he came here. But he had quick
hands. I wonder if I could do what he did?”

It only took practice. Like swordplay, or writing.

Alun nodded. He was adept at both. “Or like power
itself.” He wrapped his hands around the mug, warming them, taking in the
tavern with quicksilver eyes. Most of the people knew who he was, but out of
courtesy they let him be.

It pricked him a little, for he was proud, and yet it
pleased him. He lounged on his stool like a man of the world, or at least like
a squire on holiday. “And soon I shall be one,” he said.

In a year or two, maybe.

“That’s not long.”

Only half an eon.

Alun made as if to throw his mug at Nikki’s head. “Will
you never learn respect?”

Nikki grinned, thoroughly unrepentant.

“Insolent Greek.” The Prince sighed with great
feeling. “It’s the women, surely. They spoil you, drooping after
you and pleading for a glance from your black eyes. How many conquests now, Nikephoros?”

Nikki’s grin began to hurt, but he kept it staunchly.

“Myriads,” Alun answered himself. “More
loves than stars in the sky; more kisses than—”

The inn-girl, hastening past with a fistful of emptied
tankards, stumbled and fell full into Alun’s lap. Without a thought, with
the instinct of her calling, she kissed him soundly and rolled to her feet
again as if she had never paused.

Nikki applauded, shaping words in his mind as he seldom
troubled to do.
Bravo, cousin! At today’s
pace, you’ll be passing me yet.

“Heaven forbid!”

Nikki laughed his soundless laughter and drained his
tankard. The ale sat well and comfortably in his stomach; the inn was clean and
only a little crowded, no tax upon his senses. And the company...

The King’s sole and much beloved son had gone back to
his exploration of faces. Minds, no; that was the courtesy of the Kindred,
strict as any written law. But they all loved to study their shortlived
cousins, the other-folk who filled the world and boasted that they ruled it.

They
, and
they
. Nikki inspected his own hand on
the table. Narrow wiry young man’s hand, brown even in winter, with a
white crisscross of scratches—he had had an argument with a cat a little
while ago. The cat had repented almost at once. Quick in their tempers, cats
were.

He was none so slow himself, although people called him
gentle. That was his damnable calf-eyed face, and his silence. The former he
could not help, short of acquiring some frightful and impressive scar. The
latter was more troublesome.

His sister raged at him. Anna was visibly and publicly
volatile, and voluble too. It did little good to shut eyes and mind against
her. She would pummel him until he opened them, or pursue him until he yielded.
“Idiot!” she cried. “Lazy slouching fool! Open your mouth and
talk
!”

The half of it that he could do, he would not, setting his
lips together with stubbornness to match her own.

Her eyes snapped with fury. “You could if you would
try. You know how. Alf taught you. Years he spent, while you sat like a block
of wood, stubborn as a mule and twice as lazy. It’s
work
to make words, even in your head. Make them aloud? Who needs
them?” His glance echoed her speech. She struck out at him, almost
shouting. “
You
need them,
Nikephoros Akestas. Look at you! Grown already and playing kiss-in-corners with
every girl in Caer Gwent, and mute as a fish. The Kindred don’t need to
talk, either, but they do. Every one of them. And they’re not even human.”

Am I?
It was a
gift of sorts although its tone was bitter, words spoken into her mind.

“You are!” She seized him. She was very small, a
little brown bird, all bones and temper. “You are human, Nikephoros.
Flesh and blood and bone—human. You eat and you sleep and you run after
women. If you keep running, one of them will bring you up short with a bouncing
black-eyed bastard as human as yourself. And when your time comes, you’ll
stop running altogether; you’ll stiffen and you’ll age and you’ll
die.”

Does that make me
human?

“You can’t deny your blood.”

He laughed without sound, with a twist that came close to
pain. Blood was one thing. There was also the brain, and what lay in it. Fine
handsome youth that he was, not an utter disgrace as a squire, making up
somewhat in quickness for what he lacked in size and strength; not too ill a scholar
though easily distracted by small things, a girl, a cat, a new bit of witchery.
Who would believe the truth? Youth and pride and black eyes and all, he
remained a pitiable thing, a half-made man, a cripple.

Anna slapped him hard. “You’re no more crippled
than I am. Less. I can only hear sounds. You hear minds. And sounds when it
suits you, whatever your ears may lack.”

He could never hit her back. It was not chivalry; it was
plain cowardice. In his mind where it mattered, she was still the tall,
terrible, omnipotent elder sister; and he was five years old, a roil of
nameless feelings, a pair of eyes in a world that had no words—a silence
that was a lack, but a lack he did not recognize.

Until that one came. Before names or words, he was only
he
, the stranger who came from the vast
world outside the gate, hair more white than gold around a frightful sun-flayed
face. But he beckoned; he fascinated. He was not like anything else. And when
Nikki ventured near him, the world reeled and cracked and opened. And there
were words and names, things, actions, ideas to smite him with their utter
abstraction, a whole world focused on an alien thing.

Sound
. Alf gave
him words, because it was Alf’s nature to heal and to teach, to open
minds and bodies to all that they could know. But he had not known the extent
of his own power, until Nikki—human, mortal, utterly earthbound—waking
to words, woke also to what had begotten them. Power; witchery. White magic.
The healing, in striving to mend what could not be mended, had wrought a new
sense in place of the lost one.

The small half-savage child had not even known what it was.
For a little while, in his innocence, he had even been glad, thinking that now
at last he was like everyone else.

The young man knew he was like no one at all. He could not
speak. He could not.

“You won’t,” Anna said. “It would
spoil your game.”

Sometimes, when he could bear it no longer, he would shout
at her. He had a voice, oh yes. A hideous strangled animal-howl of a voice. It
always drove her away—or himself, driven by her ears’ revolt.

But she always flung the last of it at him, whether it was
he who fled or she: “They’ll go away, all the Kindred you cling so
close to. And then where will you be?”

Alun was studying him steadily, without diffidence. Reading
him with ease, head tilted, frowning a very little. “You’re one of
us,” he said.

Nikki’s fingers knotted. Suddenly he leaped up;
grinned; pulled Alun after him. The innkeeper caught the coin he flung; bowed
and beamed, for it was silver. He whirled back into the festival.

The moon was high and white and cold, the wind wild,
shrilling on the stones. Far below thundered the sea, casting up great gleaming
gouts of spray.

Alf followed the long line of the battlements, circling
round to that corner which jutted like the prow of a white ship. The wind
whipped the breath from his lungs; he laughed into it, and stumbled a little.

Surprised, he looked down. His foot had caught on a small
crumpled shadow: cloth, a softness of fur, a heap of garments abandoned by the
parapet.

He smiled wryly and gathered them up, warming them under his
cloak. High above the castle soared a seabird, abroad most unnaturally in this
wind-wild midnight.

But then, in or about Caer Gwent, nothing was unnatural.

The bird spiraled downward. It flew well, strong on the
strong wind. Alf’s ears, unhuman-keen, caught a high exultant cry. His
smile warmed and widened.

Wings beat above his head. Gull’s shape, young gull’s
plumage, dark in the moon.

Whiteness blossomed out of it. Toes touched stone where
claws had been; Alun lowered his arms, breathless, tumble-haired, and naked as
a newborn child.

He dived into the shelter of Alf’s cloak, clasping him
tightly, grinning up at him. “Did you see, Alf? Did you see what I did?”

“I could hardly avoid it,” Alf said dryly. “So
it’s a shape-changer you are then. How long?”

“Ages.” Alf’s look was stern; Alun
laughed. “Well then,
Magister
.
Since just before my birthday. October the thirty-first: All Hallows’
Eve.”

“Of course.”

“Of course! It’s been a secret, though Mother
knows. She’s been teaching me. She was there when it happened, you see.
We were playing with the wolf cubs, and I thought,
How wonderful to be one!
and I was. I was very awkward—and
very surprised.”

“I can imagine.”

“I like to be a wolf. But a gull is more interesting.
I think I fly rather well.”

Alf helped him to dress, swiftly, for he was already blue
with cold. When he was well wrapped in fur and linen and good thick wool,
warming from the skin inward, he returned to Alf’s cloak.

“You’re always warm,” he said. “How
do you do it?”

“How do you fly?”

Alun considered that and nodded. “I see. Only I can’t...
quite... see.”

“You only have to will it. Warmth like a fire always.
No cold; no discomfort.”

“Not even in summer?”

Alun’s gaze was wide, innocent. Alf cuffed him
lightly. “Imp! In summer you think coolness. Or you suffer like everyone
else.”

“
I
do. You
never seem to suffer at all.”

“It’s known as discipline. Which leads me to
ask, are you supposed to be out here at this hour?”

“Well...”

“Well?”

“No one told me not to.” Alun tilted his head, eyes
glinting. “Are you?”

Alf laughed. “In fact, no. I should be safe in bed.
But I couldn’t sleep, and for once Thea could.”

“It’s not easy to have a baby, is it? Especially
toward the end.”

“No. But she doesn’t complain.”

“She’s very proud of herself,” Alun said. “And
happy—sometimes I look at her and all I see is light.”

“I, too,” Alf said softly.

“Your children will be very beautiful and very strong
and very wise. Like your lady—like you. Can you see, Alf? He looks like
both of you together, but she has your face. She’s laughing; she has
flowers in her hair. I—” Alun laughed breathlessly. “I think
I’m in love with her. And she isn’t even born yet!”

Alf looked down at his rapt face, himself with wonder and a
touch of awe. Another seer, with clearer sight in this than he had ever had. He
smoothed the tousled hair, drawing his cloak tighter around the thin body. Alun
was warm now, growing drowsy as a child will, all at once, eyes full still of
prophecy.

It could be tantalizing, that gift they both had, drawing
the mind inward, laying bare all that would be. All the beauty; all the terror.

Alf caught his breath. It was dark. Black dark and bone-cold.
Thank God
, sighed a small soundless
voice,
that the beauty is his to see, and
not—

He could not see. Could only know as the blind know, in
darkness, the slight boy-shape, all bones and thin skin, gripping him with
sudden strength. “Alf. Alf, what’s wrong?”

Light grew slowly. Moonlight; cold starlight; Alun’s
face, thin and white and very young, brave against the onslaught of fear. His
cheeks were stiff with cold. “You’re seeing again,” he said. “All
the bad things. But they’ll pass—you’ll see.”

Alf shuddered from deep within. This was not like the rest
of his visions; they were brutally vivid, as dreams can be, or true Seeing.
When his inner eye went blind, then truly was it time for fear, for his mind
would not face what his power foresaw.

Yet Alun saw beyond, into sunlight.

He drew a slow breath. Was it his own death then that he
went to? He had never feared it; had longed for it, prayed for it, through all
his long years in the cloister. How like Heaven to offer it now, when at last
he had something to live for.

He smiled at Alun and warmed the frozen face with his hands.
“Yes,” he said. “The bad things will pass. Then there’ll
be only sunlight, and flowers in a girl’s hair.” His smile went
wicked. “I can guess who’ll put them there.”

Alun’s cheeks flamed hotter even than Alf’s
palms. But his eyes were steady, bright with moonlight and mirth. “Will
you object?”

“Only if she does.”

“She won’t,” said Alun with certainty.

“Check,” said Anna.

“Mate,” said the Bishop of Sarum.

She looked from his endangered king to her own truly
conquered one, and laughed aloud. “Father Jehan! I almost did it.”
Her mirth died; her brows met ominously. “Or did you—”

He spread his hands, the image of outraged innocence. “Anna
Chrysolora! Would I stoop so low as to let you win?”

“You have before.” But she did not credit it
herself. Not this time. She had fought a battle to tell tales of, and he had—almost—fallen.

She let her grin have its way. “I’ll have you
yet,” she promised him.

He laughed his deep infectious laugh and saluted her with
her own ivory bishop. “Here’s to courage! Another match, milady?”

As she paused, considering, lutestrings sang across the
hall, a melody like the washing of waves, three notes rising and falling over
and over, endlessly. A recorder wove into it, high and clear and lilting as
birdsong.