King's Blood (32 page)

“She was a child,” Edgar said. “She's a woman now. She's been in the abbey all this time, but I remember when she came back to Scotland, before our father died, she declared that she had no calling to the veil. She was meant to be a queen.”

“I don't think—” William began.

“Do consider it,” Edgar said. “You've heard the rumors, surely. Your brother the duke is contemplating marriage. He has a prospect or two; he'll be considering them once he finishes his Crusade. He's what, fifty?”

William grunted.

Edgar's fist struck the table, clattering plates and bowls, and sending a cup or two flying—lucky for him, none flew into William's lap. “Exactly! He's ripe for it—and so are you. Would you have him making heirs when you have none? What if one of them decides to make a move on England?”

“If any of them has a brain in his head, I'll make him my heir, and he'll get it honestly,” William said.

Did he glance at Henry? It was hard to tell. Henry found he did not particularly care. Whatever happened—if Henry even survived to see it—William would go on for years. He would take no queen, either. Of that, Henry was as sure as if he had cast a spell of foreseeing. There would never be a child of William's body.

He thought of enlightening the young pup from Scotland, but Edgar should have known it already. Maybe he simply could not imagine a man who could not bring himself to bed a woman. God knew Henry had trouble with it, and he had seen it all his life.

Pity the poor princess, wherever she was. Some abbey in the Midlands, was it? She must sincerely hate it, if she had told her father she had no vocation. But Malcolm had died in an ambush, and his queen had died the next day. The girl must have been shipped back where she came from, whether she would or no.

There was a reason to be glad Henry had not gone that way himself. Youngest sons often did. In Byzantium they were even gelded, to keep them there. But Henry's mother had refused to send him into a life he was not fit for. “You have too much magic,” she had said, “and too much spirit. You'd die there, in soul if not in body.”

Maybe it was easier for a woman. Their arms were weaker, and they did not fight as well—but they had more endurance. They could suffer more, and stand it longer.

And
she,
the nameless one—did she even remember him? Had he been any more to her than a convenient partner in the rite?

He brought himself sharply to order. He was supposed to be thinking about the Scots princess, not the lady on the Isle. She was everywhere, in every thought that came to his mind.

He was possessed. He must be. But who could exorcise a memory?

William had sidestepped Edgar's eagerness at last. But the boy was not about to let it go. When the king went down into the hall to join the dance, Edgar leaned toward Henry. “Can you talk him into it?”

Henry was hard put not to burst out laughing. “No one talks William into anything,” he said. “Marriage least of all.”

“You could do it,” Edgar said. He was a very Saxon-looking creature, tall and blue-eyed and fair-haired. The milk-and-water coloring gave him a look of guilelessness that might after all be deceptive. “Or maybe, if he saw her now, he'd be more inclined to consider her. She was a gangly thing when she was younger. She must have grown up decently—our mother always said she would.”

“Your mother the saint?” Henry asked.

“Well,” said Edgar, “she did deplore it. ‘Cursed with beauty,' she said.”

“Beauty to my brother,” Henry said, “is not exactly—”

“It doesn't have to be, does it? This is for heirs, not for love.”

“So they say,” Henry said.

Edgar leaped up. He staggered but kept his feet. He had been into the wine, and deeply, too. “Come with me! Let's go to—wherever she is. Walham, Wilham—Wilton! That's it. Wilton. It's not too far. We can be there in a day. Or two.”

More like three, Henry thought, or four or five if the roads were bad. But he held his tongue. Edgar was tugging at him. “Up! Let's ride. If we start now, we'll be there all the sooner.”

What was it with royal familiars dragging Henry hither and yon? He should most probably have dug in his heels, but there was nothing of interest happening in London, except a great deal of intrigue and gossip. It was getting into summer, and the roads would be decent, and maybe there would be hunting.

And who knew? He might meet another mysterious and wonderful lady, but this time she would tell him her name.

Henry was not known as a creature of impulse. England was doing it to him, changing him, making him do things that he would never have thought of before. One of them no doubt would kill him, but he had no premonition here. This was a harmless adventure, with no worse cost than miles and time.

 
On the morning of the fourth day after their drunken sally forth from London, they came in sight of Wilton Abbey. Edgar had rallied his Scots guard and a pack of wild souls from the king's court, and Henry had his own handful of knights who had followed him since his father died. It was a small army, and it could have ridden faster, but with the sun shining and summer burgeoning, they had made a holiday of it.

But Edgar had not lost sight of what this ride was for. “I barely know the girl,” he said to Henry as they approached the abbey's walls. “We hardly had a word to say to each other when she was in Scotland. Either she was too young to be worth noticing, or later, when she came back, I was out campaigning and she was tending our mother on her deathbed. Then she went away again. But blood calls to blood. We'll know each other when we meet.”

Henry murmured noncommittally. In his experience, strangers of the same blood were strangers nonetheless. Some of his sisters he knew well—notably Cecilia. Others he hardly knew at all: they had been nuns or wives for years before he was born.

Edgar was still young enough to know everything there was to know. He was not notably younger than Henry, but he made Henry feel ancient.

He approached the abbey as innocently as he seemed to do everything else. For Henry it was no pleasant place to be. It was thick with the kind of miasma that beset other places of old Saxon power: a sucking emptiness that ate away magic.

Edgar had no magic to miss. Henry, who had too much, mustered his protections, strengthening them until the emptiness retreated. It was still there, but endurable—just.

It even distracted him from that other thing which had been tormenting him as much as ever. In a house of holy women, however brief his time there, surely he would be able to forget the Beltane fires.

 
This abbey had been wealthy in its day—somewhere about the time of Ethelred. It was still well founded, but the guesthouse was showing its age. The hall to which the heavily veiled portress had taken the Scots king and half a dozen of his escort was dark and low, the beams gone black with years of smoke from the hearth.

It was clean, at least—almost painfully so—and the bread and ale that they were given was not of bad quality. They were waited on by a pair of elderly nuns, one half blind and the other half deaf, who were, one would suppose, immune to the temptations of young men.

Somewhat after Henry had begun to wonder if they would be sent away without speaking to anyone of consequence, a slightly younger nun than the rest brought word from within. “Mother Abbess will speak to the king and to one other,” she said.

Henry did not ask to be the other. He followed when the nun turned back the way she had come. Edgar, somewhat slower to react, trailed behind.

 
The air of the cloister was stifling. Henry struggled as if up a long and grueling hill. But the floor was level and slightly worn, and when they ascended a stair, it was neither steep nor high.

Edgar passed him there, eyeing him a bit oddly but keeping any questions to himself. Their guide had never once looked to see if they were with her. If they paused or slowed, they had no doubt that she would go on without them.

The stair ended at last. Then was a door and a passage and a second door; and there the nun said, “You will wait,” and vanished within.

Henry used the time to focus on simply breathing. Edgar leaned against the wall, humming to himself. It was a secular tune—very. Henry wondered if he was aware of it.

The humming stopped. A moment later, the door opened. Their erstwhile guide peered out. She did not seem overjoyed to find them still there. “Come,” she said.

CHAPTER 36

The abbess was very tall and very thin—gaunt and grey, with eyes as pale as water under ice. Years of prayer and abstinence had worn away all softness, and leached the warmth from her.

Edgar greeted her as if there had been nothing disconcerting about her. “Aunt!” he said with every evidence of pleasure. “Well met at last. Mother told me a great deal about you. Are you well? Is all well with your abbey?”

The pale eyes blinked slowly. Maybe she was taken aback. Edgar was everything that she was not: bright, young, full of life and laughter.

And yet there was a resemblance. The height; the long oval face. The narrow hands with long fingers—stiffened with age or supple with youth, they had the same shape and quality of movement.

“Nephew,” the abbess said. “You are welcome here—but you have a purpose, surely, other than to pay your respects.”

Directness could be a weapon. Henry knew it very well. Edgar should have: he had been in William's court long enough. But he blinked, caught off balance. “What—I don't—”

“You have been in and out of England for a number of years, dancing attendance on a Norman king,” his aunt said. “This is your first visit to this abbey. What do you want of us?”

“My sister,” Edgar said—blurted, rather.

The abbess raised a brow. The air, which had been almost too warm, grew suddenly cold.

When she did not answer, Edgar hastened to fill the silence. “My sister Edith—did she take another name in religion? She came here when she was small.”

“She was here,” the abbess said. “Her father abducted her before he died.”

“Then she went back,” Edgar said. “We've had letters—Bishop Osmund has assured us—”

“Has he?” The abbess seemed to find that illuminating.

So in his way did Edgar. “Are you telling me she isn't here? That she never came back from Scotland?”

The abbess inclined her head.

Edgar's brow wrinkled. “But I've had letters from the bishop. They talk about how she studies, how she devotes herself to her calling. How can she not be here?”

“She is not here,” the abbess said. “She was taken from us. We prayed for her return, and called down God's vengeance on those who took her. He granted us the latter but refused the former. Surely He knows what has become of her, for most assuredly we do not.”

“But the bishop—”

“Perhaps,” the abbess said with formidable gentleness, “you should seek audience with the bishop.”

Edgar blinked, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course. Please forgive us for troubling you.”

“You have done nothing that requires forgiveness,” the abbess said. “Come, kneel. Accept my blessing.”

Edgar knelt all too willingly. Henry was much more wary. This terrible old woman had had news that pleased her not at all. What she would do with it, he could not tell—and he did not trust her.

She laid her hand on Edgar's head. Henry, standing behind him, felt the drawing of power, whirling away into a grey void. He almost fancied that the walls of the room crumbled ever so slightly, wearing away as if with the passage of years.

His wards were barely enough. As Edgar accepted his aunt's blessing with becoming devotion, she raised her eyes to Henry. She had taken little notice of him before; he was a guard, that was all. He had hoped that she would continue to see him as nothing and no one.

But her eyes sharpened. Surely she did not recognize him. He did not look Saxon, no, but there were Normans enough with his height and coloring.

He did his best to seem harmless: lowered his eyes, folded his hands, shrank as much as he could. There was no hiding the bulk and trained strength of a knight, but there were half a hundred of those waiting outside the abbey. Henry prayed she would see no more than that, if manifestly no less.

It seemed he succeeded. She turned away from him to finish the blessing. Edgar had no magic to lose, and so much youthful strength that he did not seem to notice the life that had been drained out of him.

The abbess seemed less gaunt, her face less pale. Henry suppressed a shudder. He had heard of creatures like this, but never seen one. He was more than glad to escape from her.

 
They were not invited to stay the night in the abbey, nor would Henry have agreed to it if Edgar had tried. But Edgar seemed as eager to get away from there as Henry.

One or two of the men would have been happy to turn the abbey inside out in hopes of finding the missing princess, but Edgar shook his head. “If my aunt says she's not here, then she's not here. Maybe she's in Salisbury. Now I think of it, the bishop never did say she was in Wilton. He'll know where she is. We'll ask him.”

Henry wondered if he had ever been that young or that impervious to the darker side of the world. Edgar was a little pale, that was all, and a little less lively than usual. It was Henry who felt as if he had had the soul sucked out of him.

 
The bishop was not in Salisbury. None of his clerks was particularly helpful about either his whereabouts or that of Edgar's sister, although the bishop's palace was pleased to offer hospitality to King William's royal vassal.