King's Blood (13 page)

The darkness came roaring in. The things in the trees shrieked and gibbered. His horse stumbled and went down.

William went off rolling, coiling his body around Robin, protecting him as best he could. Hooves flailed past his head. The red stallion's body crashed through trees.

The horse was already dead. In the whirling dimness, William saw a black dart in the red throat, and blood springing hot and bright.

Fear was far away, but William could hear it wailing to itself. He had landed easier than he expected: the mould of years was thick underfoot. He found he could stand, and drag Robin up with him, and heave him up over a shoulder and keep on walking.

Straight ahead. For he had noticed something while he rode. However thick the throngs in the wood, not one of them ventured the track. He was safe as long as he stayed on it.

God's mercy alone had kept him there. The horse had fallen astray, and the black dart had taken him.

There was no telling how far it was to any hope of safety. The best William could do was keep hold of Robin and keep walking.

Dark was closing in. Maybe it was night. Maybe it was not. The cold of it cut to the bone.

He was alone but for a dead but breathing weight, a coat of mail that made his shoulders ache, and the glimmer of the track ahead of him. With contemptuous ease, this perversion of old Britain had stripped him of everything that he had in the world, except this essence of what he was.

He stopped in the middle of the track. The darkness was nearly complete. He could still see the swarm of twisted fey; they were full of a sickly light.

“Enough,” he said. “Kill me now and have done with it.”

It was not the fey who answered. The voice came from behind, deep and cold and slow. “You will die,” it said, “as all men do. But not tonight.”

Gently William lowered Robin to the ground, circling as he moved, standing astride the slack body with sword drawn. He came to a halt facing the way he had come.

The Hunt was there: the great riding of the dead. The one who led it bore a stag's skull atop broad and bony shoulders, with a spread of antlers so high and wide that they mingled with the branches of the trees.

Deep in the hollow sockets of the eyes, a corpse-light gleamed. William met it full on with a glare as hot as the Huntsman was cold. He almost fancied that the creature rocked back a fraction; but that might only be his own exhaustion making his vision waver.

“We are not here for your life,” said the Huntsman, “or yet for your soul.”

“What then?” William demanded. He did not care if he was insolent. He would be just as dead whether he spoke softly or no.

The Huntsman did not seem to mind how William said it. “We owe you this,” the apparition said. “What we are here, what Britain is becoming—those are your doing.”

“Oh no,” said William. “I'm not taking the blame for that. Saxons killed the magic, then my father brought it back—and dropped it flat the day my mother died.”

“The blame is in the blood,” the Huntsman said. “Only continue as you are, and all of Britain will belong to us. Then we will have your soul.”

“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.