King's Blood (29 page)

There was no track that Edith could see, but Etaine walked unerringly, as straight as she had since she entered this country. She seemed utterly at ease. This might have been her own garden for all the wariness Edith could sense in her.

The wood thinned to a long roll of downs and a green marshy country. Light glowed on the horizon. A sea, Edith thought, or a broad lake.

Her nostrils twitched. She smelled no salt, but of wet and richness there was enough.

Lake, then. And beyond it the steep loom of a tor. A tower rose there, high over the lake.

Edith sucked in a breath. She had heard legends of such a place. “Is this . . . ?” she asked, too faintly maybe to be heard.

Etaine's ears were keen. She smiled over her shoulder. “Yes,” she said.

“Then you are—”

“Yes,” she said again. “And you are, too, if you will.”

Edith stopped. They were moving too fast; the wood had retreated with unnatural speed, and the lake was drawing closer as if of its own accord. She could see green along the shore: trees.

Apple trees. Orchards. It was after Martinmas; the branches should be bare and the trees asleep. And yet they were in full leaf, and a whole rank of them were laden with blossom. Others bore green fruit, and yet others, closest to her, were heavy with ripe apples, red and gold.

This was mortal earth and not the Otherworld—and yet it was steeped in magic.

“This is the oldest of Old Britain,” Etaine said. “Here it has always been as it was in the dawn time. The rest has faded and too much of it has died. Here, the land is still whole.”

Edith stood still, closed her eyes and breathed deep. This must be what it was like to be a tree in the spring, drawing up strength from the deep roots. “I never knew,” she said, “that it could be like this. Even the Giants' Dance is sick and faded—and I thought it was so strong.”

“That is the strength of stones,” said Etaine: “deeper and colder and less clearly evident to the living. Here is the strength of green and growing things. It calls to you.”

“I feel . . .” Edith said. “I feel healed.”

She could feel Etaine's smile, too, warm as sunlight on her face. “It's a good beginning. Yet again, come. We're almost home.”

Home,
Edith thought.

When she was small it had been wherever her nurses took her, following her mother and sometimes her father. Wilton Abbey had never borne that name in her heart, though she lived half her life within its walls. When she came back to Scotland, the earth had known her, but the dun at Edinburgh had not been home. It was old stone and creeping greyness, and grief that grew sharper until at last, with her father's death and then her mother's, it had cut her to the bone.

This place was a legend, a tapestry of old stories: Avalon, Ynys Witrin—Isle of Apples, Isle of Glass. On another side of its coin it was Glastonbury, a town and an abbey and a quite mortal existence, but the Isle lived somewhat out of the world.

It was a lake and an orchard and an island to which the elder ladies went by boat at times of need or festival. They all—ladies of all ages, from postulants or novices or whatever one wanted to reckon them, of whom Edith was one, to the great Lady herself, who Edith was only mildly startled to discover was Etaine—lived on the eastern shore of the lake, in a circle of round houses of a style so ancient that the rest of Britain had utterly forgotten it. The center of the circle was a larger house, almost as large as the bailey of a castle, where the Lady and some of the elders lived.

There were dozens of ladies—more than a hundred, and certainly more than there had been in the abbey. Two dozen of these were not yet initiate. Edith made two dozen and one. They shared a house beside the lake, which though round and peak-roofed and redolent of smoke and thatch rather than stone, reminded Edith of the novices' dormitory.

That first day, Etaine led Edith to the acolytes' house and left her there with a blessing and a smile. “You'll know where to go next,” she said before Edith could ask.

Edith knew nothing better than to walk through the low door—she had to stoop beneath the lintel—and find herself in a circle of faces. They were all curious. None was surprised. A few were smiling.

“We've been expecting you,” one of those said.

“We were waiting,” another said helpfully. She was very young, no older than Edith had been when she went to Wilton.

Some of the others were nearly as young as that, but Edith was rather relieved to see that one or two were older than she was: almost grown to womanhood. The oldest, who was one of the smallest—truly of the old blood, bright-eyed, black-haired, and quick to move and speak—took Edith's hand in warm firm fingers and drew her into the center of the room. The roof was open there over the round hearth, where a fire burned, warming the heart as well as the body.

They took Edith's clothes away and bathed her in a copper basin that looked as old as Rome, and dressed her as they were dressed, in a plain linen shift and an equally plain grey gown, with soft shoes on her feet and no veil for her hair. They all went bareheaded here, with their hair plaited and either left down or coiled around their heads.

Clearly they were not nuns. Some of them had Saxon blood: fair hair, blue eyes, slender height. None was as tall as Edith. Most were of older lineage, dark and small. They all had magic, every one.

They were nothing like the quenched children in Wilton. Edith looked from face to face and sighed inside. These were her own kind. Was she home? That, she did not know yet. But she thought, at least for a while, she might be.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 32

Henry had been patient—in his fashion. He had taken the treasure his father left him, and parlayed it, one way and another, into the title of count and a shifting pattern of power that sometimes left him empty-handed, but more often than not put him ahead of where he had been before. His brothers played their game around him and occasionally over him: a grand tug-of-war that had gone rather strange when Robert took it into his head to go on Crusade, and mortgaged his duchy to William while he was gone. Robert got money to pay his troops, and William got Normandy—for three years. Then he had to give it back.

Henry had not done badly out of that: he expanded his lands and therefore his resources, and fed his patience on a rich diet of power. It was satisfying in its way, and amusing, too, to wonder how much of this his father had foreseen.

For himself he had occupations enough: war, politics, and the deepening and strengthening of his magic. Robert had never had even a glimmer of it, and William was as obdurate in refusing to face it as he had ever been. The interlude of his sickness had passed soon enough, and William's spate of repentance had gone with it.

Britain had found ways to preserve itself. But the patches and the mended places were wearing thin. Even in Normandy, Henry felt the powers shifting.

 
William had been invading France—chiefly for the game of it—but just before Easter, a dozen years after old William died, he came back to England to be king for a while in his own kingdom.

Henry came with him. He was no stranger to England; he had been there often enough in this long game of princes. But this was different. England was calling him for the gods knew what purpose—though what he could do, being prince and count and most assuredly not king, he did not know.

He felt it from the sea: a deep ringing like a bell beneath the waves. When he set foot on the chalky earth of Dover, he staggered. The world was shaking itself to pieces, and he was caught in the middle of it. He had felt the same when he set foot on
Mora
's deck after his father died: the same deep summons, the same power.

No one around him seemed perturbed, least of all William. The one who was always so close to the king, whose face said
lord
and
courtier
and whose spirit was pure power, never missed a step.

Maybe he was used to it. This land was so often broken and so haphazardly mended; it would be torture to have magic and live in it without strong defenses. Henry was used to land that was whole, that was not being eaten alive.

It had never been so bad before. People who saw him thought he had lost his land legs; then they decided he was either sick or drunk. Their rough sympathy carried him through the day. Night had its own compensation: a warm-hearted woman who brought the world back into balance.

 
And so it stayed, through the feast of Easter and onward into a wet and storm-tossed spring. Toward the beginning of May, William had brought the pick of his court to one of his manors, a hunting lodge under the eaves of the forest that his father had made by law and seizure. The New Forest, people called it; it was a work of men's hands as much of the gods' will, and all of it belonged particularly to the king.

It was a great monument to Norman arrogance, but it was also a great sanctuary for the Old Things. Henry wondered if William knew how welcome they had found it, or how thoroughly they had taken it for their own. William held to a steadfast disregard for matters magical—and the more so, the older he grew.

Henry had his own protections, some of which relied on closing his eyes to what did not directly concern him. Here in Brampton, where the manor was, a blind yeoman lived with his three daughters, each more beautiful than the last; and they had all cast their eye on the king's brother. They were a thorough and pleasurable distraction.

The forest's powers did not trespass within the borders of village or manor. Henry was safe enough even in the dark before dawn, making his way from the yeoman's house to the postern gate of the manor. The starlight was fitful, clouds scudding across it; wind whispered in the leaves of the trees that nearly overhung the manor's walls. The air smelled of damp and leafmould and of spring.

Someone was leaning against the postern when Henry came round to it: a man somewhat taller than he, with a too-familiar glimmer on him. Henry set his teeth. “FitzHaimo,” he said. If there was a snarl in it, then so be it.

He did not need to see the man's face to feel the smile. “Count Henry. Out sowing the royal oats again?”

Henry flushed. He did not doubt that the grinning bastard wanted him to whirl to the attack. But he had more self-control than that. He mustered a smile, with a great number of teeth, and said sweetly, “Someone has to do it.”

The other's smile vanished. “We are not enemies,” he said.

“Are we not?” said Henry.

“For my part,” said Robin FitzHaimo, “no. I was Britain's long before I was your brother's.”

“I'm no threat to either of them,” Henry said.

“Did I say you were?”

“You don't approve of me.”

Robin grinned: a white gleam in the starlight. “When did we exchange sides in the game? I should have said that to you.”

“It's not my place to approve or disapprove,” Henry said.

“Nor mine, either, I suppose,” Robin said. He straightened, stretching like a cat. “Whereas it is my place to invite you to a dance.”

Henry stood flat-footed. He had been prepared for any number of oddities, but this was not one of them. “A—”

“Tonight,” said Robin, “at sunset, be ready.”

“What—” Henry began.

Robin was gone—vanished, as if he had been one of the Old Things. The postern was open, the light of a torch shining out, dazzling Henry's dark-accustomed eyes.

Henry shook his head. The man was mad if he thought Henry would trust him, even if he was incontestably loyal to both Britain and William. He owed nothing to Henry—and God knew, he might have decided that Henry's existence boded ill for one or the other of the powers he served.

Henry was not that kind of fool. He went to bed for what remained of the night, and slept well enough, all things considered. His dreams had no meaning; nor should they have. He was warded.

He rose with the sun, reasonably fresh and clear of mind. The day was mapped out for him: morning Mass, king's court, brisk if brief hunt through coverts nearby the manor—and a lady or three who cast eyes at him. Ladies were as fond of Henry as he was of them.

Maybe he smiled at one or more of them. Maybe he was circumspect. Those who had husbands, he knew better than to encourage. Those with troublesome fathers or brothers were no safer to touch, but there was something to be said for his ancestry. It gave pause to all but the most blindly outraged; and those usually ran headlong into the wall of their saner kin.

There was one lady here who might reward closer inspection. She was a widow, young but no child, deep-breasted and wide-hipped, with hair so fair it was nearly white, and wide dark eyes. Henry took note of her, aware that she was doing the same for him.