King's Blood (2 page)

Edith was small and quick and her ears were keen. When she went wandering, her nurses had long since given up trying to catch her. She might stay away for most of a day, but she always came back.

On the day the world changed, she had escaped to the top of the highest tower of her father's dun. The rain had stopped for the first time in days. The wind was fierce, but she was never cold. The people in the wind kept her warm: odd and insubstantial shapes and eerie voices, wrapping her about, singing her songs in their language and teaching her to see what their people saw. She was a blessed one, they said. She could see through the world.

Today she was feeling strange. It was not that she was hungry, although she had given her breakfast to a beggar at the gate. The wind was pressing on her, as if to push her down from the tower and out of the dun and away on the road.
South,
it sang.
South is your way
.

She clung to the wall, with the wind whipping tears from her cheeks, and glared defiantly northward. Beyond the roll of stony hills and winter-blasted heather, the firth was as grey as iron, flecked white with foam. The folk of the air swirled above her, shrilling their song.
You know the way. You know you must. It is fated
.

“I don't want to,” she said, not particularly loudly. They could hear even if she said it in her heart.

They said nothing to that. She wished they had. Then she would have had someone to scream at. But the wind knew what it knew.

She could run away. But where would she go? Even if she could see what no one else would admit to seeing, and hear what no one else could hear, and ride as well as a boy besides, she was still a child. There was nowhere she could go, that her father could not find her and bring her back to face something even more terrible than himself: her lady mother.

She drew herself up, there in the wind. They were looking for her; she could feel them. Her mother had remembered her. It was time.

 
The queen inspected her daughter with a hard eye. She was beautiful, was the Lady Margaret, tall and fair, and royal to the core of her. She waged war for the Lord Christ as her husband the king waged war for Scotland: with heart and soul and a fierce, deadly sense of honor.

Edith did not have the sense to keep her eyes lowered in proper submission. Staring at her mother was like staring at the sun; it could strike a person blind. But Edith was fascinated. Wherever Margaret was, the world was overwhelmingly solid. Edith could not see through it at all.

Margaret reached from her tall chair, taking Edith's chin in firm cool fingers and tipping it so that her face caught the light. The queen sighed faintly. “Well, child,” she said, “I see they did their best, but that you are a wild thing, no one could possibly mistake. It's time to make a Christian of you.”

Edith very carefully said nothing. There were no folk of the air in this cold, still room; no creatures at all but the queen and her ladies and the pair of little bright-eyed dogs that crouched watchfully at Margaret's feet.

The dogs might have had something to say, but they chose not to say it. Margaret, who reckoned them dumb animals, paid no attention. Having searched Edith's face, she let it go and folded her long white hands in her lap. “Tomorrow,” she said, “you will go. The letters have been sent. Your aunt the abbess will be expecting you.”

A shiver ran down Edith's spine. She could not help it then; she had to ask. “My aunt? You're giving me to an abbey? You're making me a nun?”

“We are offering you to God,” said the queen. It was like a door shutting.

“But I thought,” said Edith, not wisely at all, “that I was to be fostered, and when I was older, sent to be married. Not—”

“You are to be fostered.” That was a voice Edith had not heard before. There were always maids with the queen, and nuns in veils. Edith had not been paying attention, not with her mother taking up all the light and air in the room.

This was a nun, or seemed to be. Her voice was soft. She seemed gentle and humble as a bride of the Lord Christ should be, but the small hairs on Edith's neck were standing straight up.

“Princess,” the stranger said, “you will be tended and taught and shown the way to Our Lady's grace. Of that I can assure you.”

Edith's heart was pounding hard. Her breath was coming short. She did not know why she should be feeling this way; there was nothing frightening about the lady. She was like the folk of air—even here in front of the queen.

That was why she was so alarming. Because she could be here and alive and speaking with her own voice. Nothing from the Otherworld could do that where Margaret was.

Which meant that this lady was very, very strong indeed. And she came from the place where Margaret wanted to send Edith. Which meant—

There was too much to think about. Edith's head ached with trying.

“Don't try,” the strange lady said, so soft that only Edith could hear. “Just be.”

That was exactly the sort of thing one of the folk of air might have said. It took the pain away, a little, but Edith did not object when her mother ordered her nurses to feed her a posset and put her to bed. “In the morning,” the queen said, “if she is still vaporing, prepare a litter for her. She will go, whether it pleases her or no.”

Edith did not know whether it pleased her or not. But even while she was carried off to bed, she knew that she would go—not because her mother commanded it, but because the lady was there.

 
The king was not there to see Edith off. Edith wondered if he even knew that she was going away.

If she had been a little younger she might have cried, but she was too old for that now. She blinked hard against the cut of the wind, and let her mother kiss her coolly on both cheeks and lay a blessing on her. Then she mounted her pony and waited while the guards took their places around her.

They were a strong escort. It was a long way to her Aunt Christina's abbey, all the way down into England. None of her nurses was allowed to go with her, though Nieve clambered on one of the packmules and dared anyone to stop her. It took three men to do it, but they did it. The queen had commanded. They would obey.

Once Nieve was dragged off shrieking curses, Edith was alone in the midst of all those armored men, except for the lady whose name she did not even know. But the folk of air came and swirled about her and sang to her, and she forgot to be either lonely or afraid. They would never leave her alone. That was their promise. She knew they would keep it.

Once she had ridden out of the gate, she did not look back. For all her determination, her eyes were pricking with tears. She set her chin and kept her eyes fixed on the broad brown rump of the horse in front of her.

That was all she would see for much of that long ride: great tall horses around her and armored men on their backs, and the folk of air swarming so thick above her that they almost hid the sky. They told her stories as she rode, and sang songs in their eerie voices, and taught her to feel the land as she crossed it.

That was a wonderful thing. This was all one island, and Scotland was only the edge of it. There was England, with all its old kingdoms, and Wales, and Cornwall where the magic was strong.

She was going to England, where her mother's ancestors had been kings. New kings ruled there now: gross men, bad men, whom her mother refused to name. She would only call them
those invaders
and cross herself fiercely as she said it, as if the blessing were a curse.

And yet she sent her daughter there, because it was her inheritance. The abbey was a safe and sacred place, where Edith would learn to be she hardly knew what. But maybe not a Christian.

The folk of air were wildly excited that she was going there. She would be so strong, they sang; so wise. There would be no one wiser than she.

“It's good to be wise,” the lady said.

Edith started so strongly that her pony almost shied. For days the lady had said nothing. The guards walked wary of her, and spoke softly when they thought she could hear, but she hardly seemed to see them. Edith she seemed not to notice at all.

As soon as she spoke, Edith knew that that was not true. The lady had noticed every tiny thing. She could see the folk of air, and hear them, too.

She was wise. Britain was in her, or she in it—Edith could not tell which it was. She was very, very strong.

“I am a Guardian of the Isle,” said the lady in her soft cool voice. “You will learn what that means—among many other things.”

“Does Mother know?” Edith asked her.

The lady's brows lifted, as if she had not expected that.

“Mother thinks I'm going to Aunt Christina,” Edith said, “to learn to be a nun.”

“And so you are,” said the lady, “but there is more to the world than some will admit.”

That went without saying. Edith closed her eyes. She had not been counting days, but there had been more than five and fewer than twenty. They were very close now to the abbey— and to somewhere else, somewhere strong. She could feel it inside, ringing on a deep note.

Deep in the heart of her, a hard knot loosened. Much of it escaped her in a gust of air. Here was where she was meant to be.

The guards had drawn away for once, so that she could see where she was. The broad plain stretched to the edge of the sky. Clouds tumbled above it, full of glimmering shapes.

A ring of stones rose ahead of them. It was very old. Powers gathered to it, and all the roads led there.

They rode past it. The guards barely glanced at it, but the lady bowed her head as they went by.

Something in the way she did it made Edith want to do the same. One paid respect to the Powers. Her nurses had taught her that, although her mother would have been very angry to hear of it. Her mother had no use for any powers but the Lord Christ and his Church.

 
They passed the ring of stones at midmorning. By noon they came in sight of the abbey: a stone wall and a low square tower, crouched on a hill beside a river. The water was high, the current swift, running down toward the walls and roofs of a town.

Edith had not expected that. She had thought the Lord Christ's house would be far away from anywhere, like the ring of stones; but it stood not far at all from the town's walls. People were coming and going on foot or on horseback or in wagons. Voices were singing and shouting. She even heard laughter.

Within the walls was silence. Sounds from without were muffled; as she left the guards and the horses in the courtyard, they faded to nothing.

Even more than the silence, she noticed the smell. It was familiar. Her mother's chapel was the same, a mingled scent of stone and cold and incense, and something that she could not put words to, that made her think of a rabbit in a trap.

She turned to the lady, to take comfort in a familiar face, but the lady was gone. Edith had not even felt her leave.

The nun who led her away from the horses was an old woman, gaunt and stiff, with a face that had long since forgotten how to smile. Not that the lady ever smiled, either, but there was a lightness on her that Edith could not see anywhere in this place.

Only one thing kept Edith from turning and running: the glimmer of an inhuman face perched on an arch of the cloister above her. The folk of air had kept their promise. They were with her even here, in a place that racked their insubstantial forms with pain.

Edith gave the creature a bit of herself, a flicker of strength to take the pain away. It sighed in relief and fluttered above her as her guide led her on down the cloister.

CHAPTER 2

The Abbess Christina surveyed her niece with a cold blue eye. She looked older than her sister Margaret, and taller, and much thinner. Years of prayer and devotion had made Margaret more beautiful, but Christina looked as if she had withered in the bud.

Edith did her best to seem harmless and humble. Maybe it worked. Christina sniffed audibly and said, “You look like your mother. I trust she has raised you properly.”

“She hopes that you will make a Christian of me,” Edith said, then added with care, “lady.”

“I will make a Christian of you,” the abbess said, “and a bride of God.”

Edith kept her lips tightly pressed together. She knew better than to say what she thought of that.

“Sister Rotrude will take you to the mistress of novices,” her aunt said, inclining her head toward the aged nun who had brought Edith from the gate. “Your mother, no doubt, has taught you the rudiments of obedience. You will be obedient always, and humble before the face of the Lord. Do you understand?”

“I will try,” Edith said, and again: “lady.”

“You will call me Mother Abbess,” her aunt said. “Now go.”

Edith could hardly have been happier to be dismissed. The air in the abbess' study had the same deadness that it did where her mother was. Even the cloister was easier to bear than that.

As her guide led her away, she found her wits somewhere. She remembered what her father had told her once, that a fighting man was wise to notice everything around him. He never knew when a small thing might save his life.

This was war in its way. She kept her head bent, but her eyes were alert, taking in as much as they could. She set herself to remember where they went: which turns, how many steps in each stair.

She did not know how well she did it, but she tried. It gave her something to think about, and it kept her from dissolving into tears. She was a long way from any home she had known, and from any human thing that she could call friend.

 
There was no one in the novices' dormitory when she came there—no novices, no dour nun to rule over them. Sister Rotrude left her without a word, all alone in the big bare room with its rows of hard narrow cots. Each had a thin blanket folded over a straw pallet, and nothing else to warm it or make it comfortable.