Authors: Judith Tarr
King's Blood (3 page)
The only light came from high narrow windows. At night there must be lamps, but Edith did not see any now, while it was still midday.
What she did see was a flock of the folk of air peering through the windows. They tumbled together into the room, a whole babbling stream of them, scattering through the barren space and casting light in corners that had not seen such a thing since the abbey was built. They brought more than light: they brought beauty, and a memory of the world's splendor.
Edith sat on a cot that did not feel as if anyone was using it, and tucked up her feet and folded her hands. The folk of air explored every crack and cranny of the room. That did not take them very long. When they were done, they gathered in a flock, clustering along the beams and hanging head down, bat-like, from the windowframes.
They made her smile. She wondered if anyone had ever smiled in this place. How she was going to live here, she did not know. She was tired, hungry, thirsty. She was terribly alone.
Someone was watching her. There was no danger in it that she could feel. She waited quietly.
After a while the watcher came round in front of her. She looked up along a length of black-robed body to a face that made her start.
The lady smiled. Even Edith's fierce glare did not make her stop.
“You went away,” Edith accused her. “You left me alone.”
“Some things are necessary,” the lady said. As soft as her voice was, it had the ring of steel. “Come now. The rest of the novices are waiting to meet you.”
Edith narrowed her eyes. “It's you. You're the mistress of novices.”
“Here,” said the lady, “I am Sister Cecilia, and you owe me obedience.”
“You're not always here. Are you?”
“I am here while you need me,” Sister Cecilia said. “For many reasons, you need this place. You'll learn those reasons as time passes. For now, study what you see; and remember. And cultivate obedience.”
“That is my weakest virtue,” Edith said.
Sister Cecilia looked as if she would have laughed, but even she did not dare do that here. “It's a virtue to know oneself so well,” she said. She held out her hand. “Come.”
Edith decided to be obedient. She was still angry, but it was hard to keep a grip on her temper with the lady smiling at her.
She had one question left to ask, even while she let herself be led out of the dormitory. “Who are you really? Besides whatever you told me?”
“In time you'll learn,” Sister Cecilia said. And that was all she would say. She was like the folk of air: mysterious and rather wicked.
Â
It was that wickedness which kept Edith from running away: that and the folk of air who followed her everywhere, even to chapel. It was not an unfamiliar life, in the end, with its daily round of offices and its constant duties and the long hours in the schoolroom learning to read Latin and write in a fair hand.
It was that wickedness which kept Edith from running away: that and the folk of air who followed her everywhere, even to chapel. It was not an unfamiliar life, in the end, with its daily round of offices and its constant duties and the long hours in the schoolroom learning to read Latin and write in a fair hand.
What was least familiarâand least bearableâwas that the gates never opened for the novices. The walls were always there, the gates shut, the bonds of obedience compelling them all to live imprisoned.
Most of them did not seem to mind. They were quiet, milk-faced girls with a clear calling to this life, or else they knew no better. The few who did mind had learned to keep quiet about it. Edith could see it in their eyes, how they were trapped. But none of them had found a way to escape.
A few could see the folk of air. Some of the nuns could, too; and there was Sister Cecilia, who Edith was convinced did not belong there at all. She walked and talked like the others, prayed as they did, and her Latin was beautifully learnedâand yet she made Edith think of a falcon shut in with a flock of ringdoves.
This was a Saxon abbey. Edith was half Saxon. In Scotland it was nothing terribly remarkable; people cared more that her ancestors had been kings.
In England it mattered a great deal. England meant AnglalandâAngle-land, land of the Angles and the Saxons. But years ago, before Edith was born, the Saxons had been defeated in a great battle. Foreigners ruled England now, invaders from Normandy, and the king was a Norman.
Edith had known all that before she left Scotland. She had known how much hate there was, and how much the Saxons yearned to be kings again. What she had not known was that the Normans let their worst enemies live together, shut in an abbey, too firmly locked in duty and sanctity to mount a rebellion.
There was Abbess Christina. There was Sister Gunnhild, whose father had been the last Saxon king; he had died in the battle at Santlache, and lost the kingdom for all of them. There had been another Edith, Edith the queen, who was the last king's sister; but she lay in a tomb in the cloister.
Edith was not entirely sure that her namesake was dead. A few days after she came to the abbey, when she was ready to fling herself over the walls and into the river, Sister Cecilia sent her on an errand to the infirmary. She was to fetch a jar of salve for Aldith's eyes.
Aldith was one of the younger novices, even younger than Edith, and she could almost see through the world. Maybe, once her eyes were better, she would be able to do it.
Edith had not been to the infirmary before, but she knew where it was. She had been studying as the lady advised her, and watching and listening. She found her way out of the schoolroom and through the whispering stillness of the chapel.
Beyond the chapel were the cloister and the tomb. There were others buried there, holy nuns sleeping under unmarked stones. Only the queen had the flat grey bulk of a tomb.
There was no effigy on it. That was somewhere else, the folk of air sang in Edith's ear. Mortals thought her body lay in another place far away from here.
It was here. This was not Edith's blood kin, not one of Alfred's line, but she had married Edith's great-great-uncle Edward. Her brother had been the last king before the Normans came. She had been royal twice over, and she had been something more.
The folk of air stayed well away from the tomb. It was as deadly to them as cold iron. Edith felt in it the same thing she had felt in her aunt and her mother. Where they were, the brightness in the heart of the worldâthe thing that her nurses called magicâshriveled and died.
It was very much stronger here, as if the body in the tomb had drawn great quantities of nothingness to itself. Edith could feel the bitterness in it, the long rankling of defeat. In her mother it was a fierce determination to rule again; in Christina it was a stone-cold sanctity. This was simpler as well as stronger. The name Edith found for it was hate.
She backed away, shuddering. She had to leave this place. She had to.
The sun beat down in the courtyard. The grass in it was fiercely green, flecked with yellow flowers, each as bright as a sun. The folk of air danced above it. The air sang with their glee.
The tomb was still there, heavy and dull. It tried to swallow the light, but it was not strong enough for that. It muddied the brightness directly above it, and no more.
Edith had slid through the veils of the world. She was in the Otherworld, the world that most humans were too blind to see.
And it was strongâstronger than it had ever been in Scotland. The power of the stone circle was here, spreading in waves through the earth and singing in the air. Edith had only been able to see this world sometimes. She had never walked in it before. And yet here she was, in both worlds at once.
She was almost afraidâbut only almost. It was beautiful here. The sun was as sweet and strong as wine. She drank it when she breathed. It made her dizzy.
The folk of air were dancing around her, wild with excitement. There were greater beings nearby, but they did not make themselves visible to her. She could feel them as she felt the ring of stones, deep inside her.
They wanted her here. They had something for her to doânot right away, maybe not soon at all, but someday. Meanwhile she was to wait and study, and learn all she could. Then when the day came, she would be ready.
Slowly the brightness faded. The sun was ordinary, the grass plain mortal green again. Edith blinked, trying to make herself see the Otherworld, but it was gone.
It would come back. For now she had an errand, and Sister Cecilia was waiting. That was part of what she had come to learn: obedience, and patience.
She sighed, because after all she was very young, but she drew herself up and stiffened her back, and went where she was bidden.
CHAPTER 3
The old bastard was dying.
He lay like a bloated spider, half crushed and stinking, while his scattered realms shook themselves apart. No one pretended to grieve. He hated pretense, and he had never indulged in illusions, even when they would have made his life easier.
Ease had never been old William's vice. He had been sacking a city when the hand of God struck him: hurdling one of the earthworks thrown up against him, overbalancing his war-horse with his burgeoning bulk and catching himself against the high pommel of his saddle. His belly was crushed; the pain, for all that he would not speak of it, was brutal. He was rotting from the inside out.
It was a hideous death, and slow. He had lain for a month now outside of Rouen, in the hushed stillness of St. Gervais' priory. He was still lucid more often than not, although his memory tended to wander. Sometimes he spoke to people who were not there: old friends, old enemies, and above all his queen, his Mathilda, who had gone into the dark before him.
But then, thought Henry, maybe they were thereâespecially Mathilda. If anyone would come back from the dead to help her husband over the threshold, it would be she.
In the nights, when even the monks were asleep, Henry almost could see them himself. He had the gift and the eye, but not, in the end, the will.
The grief of his mother's death was still sharp, even after the passage of years. Now that his father was dying, too, he found that he wanted to see the world as simple men saw it. It was more bearable somehow, although his heart persisted in calling it cowardice.
That night, a month and more after the king's fall, Henry sensed a change. It was subtle; he almost thought that he had imagined it. The shadows were darker. The light was brighter. And his father looked, not transparent, no, but somehow less solidly there than he had before.
He was letting go. That was a mercy.
“If he'd been a horse or a hound, we'd have put him out of his misery weeks ago.”
Henry had felt his brother come in. Young William, Red William, had no magic to speak of, but his presence sent a shiver along the edges of Henry's awareness.
William came to stand by the bed, breathing shallowly. His wonted high color had gone faintly green. “How long now? Can you tell?”
“He can hear you, you know,” Henry said.
William's jaw tightened under the curling copper-colored beard. The rest of his hair was more gold than red, but the hair of his face was almost defiantly bright. He bent as close as he could bear, eyes narrowed, peering at the distorted mass of the once familiar features.
Henry saw the gleam beneath the eyelid, but even with the warning, he did not expect his father's hand to rise as swiftly as it did. It caught hold of William's shirt and fisted in it.
“You,” the king said. His voice was thick, wheezing with effort. “Get out. Now. Get to England. Take the treasury. Get yourself crowned before the other can move.”
“But,” William began. “I'm notâyou're notâ”
“By the time you get there,” the king said, “I'll be dead. Go!”
As faint as the word was, it carried such a weight of command that Henry found himself on his feet. William reeled back as his father let him go. His face was the color of cheese. He turned abruptly, with none of his usual honed grace, and ran stumbling out the door.
The room seemed empty without him. But there was still a presence in it, awake and aware.
Henry met the cool grey eyes in the ruined face. People said Henry had the same eyes, if not the same face. In that, he tended to favor his mother.
“So,” he said. “William gets England. Robert gets Normandy. What's left for me?”
“Treasure,” the king said. “And patience.”
“No land? What's a lord without land?”
“Patience,” the old bastard said. “You've got the sight. You'll get more than either of them in the end.”
“Do you know,” Henry said, quite calmly when all was considered, “I think I hate you.”
There was no telling what expression that face wore, but Henry could feel the laughter behind it. “Yes,” his father said. The tide of pain was rising again, squeezing the life out of his voice. “Of all my get, you're the most like her.”
Like Mathilda, he meant. To the king there had never been any woman but that one. Henry had never understood, and maybe never would. So many flowers, so many fieldsâso sweet, each of them, in the plucking.
He was dizzy with lack of sleep and stink of death and sudden swirl of magic rising in the room. His father had used it seldom when Mathilda was alive, and never after she died. He found no comfort in it, and little enough profit, either, or so he always said.
Tonight it wreathed the king like smoke, pouring out of him with the life that, at long last, was freeing itself from the rotting flesh. Henry sat transfixed. If he had known what to do, he would not have been able to do it.
It was a spell. Even with his own gift of magic, which his mother had fostered and nourished and taught, Henry had never known how much was in his father. It had been buried so deep for so long, drowned in duty and in the mass of aging flesh.
William's spirit climbed out of it as if from the pit of a dungeon, crawling over the lifeless, all but faceless bulk and rising slowly to his full height. He was tall, as tall as Henryâmuch taller than either of his elder sonsâand broad, but there was neither bloat nor fat on this innermost self. He looked as young as Henry: nineteen summers, maybe, though hardened already and tempered by a life of war.
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