King's Blood (42 page)

The abbess rose as no human creature could: straight up like a cross raised against a storm-wracked sky. Her face was terrible, thin skin stretched tight over the living skull. She had fasted and mortified her flesh until it was nearly gone. All that was left was the implacable will.

She smiled as if in welcome—not a sight for the fainthearted. “Edith! Sister-daughter. At last. We have been waiting for you.”

Indeed. The web was spun, the trap baited. And there was Edith in her youth and strength and her trained magic, blood of the abbess' blood, with the abbess' hooks sunk deep into her and her mother's before them.

All her life she had imagined that she was free; that she had chosen the other way. And all the while, they had been waiting as the spider waits, in poisonous patience. Every moment she had spent in her mother's presence or in the abbess' had come to this: to frozen stillness and soul-deep shock, and the spirit draining out of her like blood from a wound.

She had been so proud; so full of her strength. She had brought the whole power of the Isle to this place, and given it as a gift to the one who above all would destroy it.

 
Henry had paused in Salisbury on an errand for his brother, conveying the royal will to a pack of quarreling barons. The barons' quarrel was settled without excessive bloodshed, and Henry was riding back slowly, reckoning the state of the kingdom as he went.

Salisbury suffered less than most, but sickness had come to it, felling the old and the very young. That particular morning, he had gone out early after a night full of strange and troubled dreams. In one of them, he had seemed to be exhorting the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury to take up his magical duties. That should have been preposterous, but he woke with the conviction that he had actually done such a thing—and Anselm had been as intransigent as the king who had exiled him.

As the sun came up, he walked the streets of the town. Even the dogs took cover after dark, in terror of the things that rode in it, hunting blood and souls. With the rising of the light, they came creeping out, with the beggars close behind them. Then came the mourners with the night's dead, to bear them to the charnel house.

There were too many dead—and not a pleasant death, either: coughing their lungs out, choking up blood. He could hear those still living who were sick, racked with coughing, and the voices of their nurses, soothing or exhorting or gone raw with grief and fear.

The earth itself was sick. Henry dared not let down his protections: he would drain himself dry trying to heal it. Even shielded as he was, the temptation was all but irresistible.

As he approached the market square, people began to emerge from their houses. They walked warily, many with cloths over their faces to guard against the pestilence. There was little conversation; eyes met and flicked aside, then they hastened past one another. No one laughed.

There were no children. No urchins playing at mock war or pretending to hunt one another through the streets. No infants in arms; no schoolboys trooping to the cathedral for lessons. All the children were dead.

A knight learned to harden his heart. A prince was a master of it—especially if he was William Bastard's son. But to look at those faces and see no beardless boys or unbudded maidens, and to know by the twisting of his gut that the plague had taken them all, was more than even he could easily bear.

He stopped a man who would have hurried past: harried and worn, dressed in clothes that looked as if he had been in them for days. A pale and haunted-eyed younger man trotted behind him, carrying a physician's bag.

Neither of them was delighted to find his way barred by a man in mail armed with a sword. The physician might not even have paused for the sword, if Henry had not gripped his arm too tightly for escape. “Messire,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Are all the children dead?”

The eyes that rested on him were weary beyond exhaustion. “Why? What difference does it make to you?”

“A great deal,” Henry said, “as well it should. Without our children, what hope does any of us have?”

“Good, then,” the man said sourly. “A knight with the gift of compassion. They're handing out crowns for sainthood in the cathedral, I'm sure. Why don't you go and see, and let me get back to my work. There's still a child or two left alive, whom I might be able to save.”

That was insolence so breathtaking that Henry almost laughed at it. He let the man go. He received no thanks for it, but he had not been expecting any.

“Why the children of Salisbury?” he called after the retreating back. “Why not the old and the weak, too, the way it is elsewhere? What is in the earth here, or in the air?”

The physician stopped and turned, somewhat to Henry's surprise. “Believe me, messire, if I knew, I would tell you.”

Henry bowed to him. “Go. Do what you can. Keep them alive.”

The man looked hard at him. “Christ's bones. You do care. God will reward you, I'm sure.”

“What use is heaven,” Henry demanded, “if the earth is a wasteland behind me?”

The physician bowed low, and only half in mockery. Then he was gone. Henry sent a prayer after him, wrapped in a working: for strength, for skill, and for the healing of the sick.

For that he had to lower his wards—which he did without stopping to think. He was not sorry, either, though as soon as he had done it, he knew it had not been wise at all.

He reeled against the wall. Power—terror—desperation.
She
was—he saw—

Brick was rough against his cheek, still cool from the night. It was old: Roman brick, salvaged and built into this house in Salisbury. He could see through it. And there
she
was, the lady to whom he had given his mother's name.

It was not the sort of battle he was used to fighting, with men and weapons, but a battle it most certainly was—and she was losing. His eye that had been trained in combat saw quickly how it was and what he faced. All too well he remembered that dread abbess. She had found a most delectable prey, long awaited and much desired; and she was savoring it slowly.

He reached through the wall into that other place and caught hold of Mathilda's hand—for that was all he knew to call her. There was something wound in her fingers. As his own locked about it, he felt the lightning fall.

CHAPTER 47

Edith was dying. Her body did not know it yet, was still standing upright, but the soul was being sucked out of her.

There was nothing she could do. The bonds had been laid on her with the water of baptism. Her mother's teaching and the abbess' tutelage had only bound her the tighter.

She was the vessel, the chosen one. She would contain all that they had wrought. Through her, the rest would fall.

Abbess Christina had given up all hope of restoring a mortal kingship. Her whole desire now was for death and destruction, and for an end to this travesty that the invaders had made of England.

Despair was potent, and seductive. Edith caught herself on the brink. She could not hold; she was not strong enough. With all her magic, all her training, all the power of the Isle that had poured into her, she still could not resist that headlong emptiness.

Something caught her hand, grinding the jewel into her palm. The pain was vivid, immediate, real. So was the warmth of human flesh, and the strength of a mortal grip.

It was a man's strength, with power behind it—magic at least the equal of hers. Even as she understood that, she knew whose magic it was. No one else fit so well into her empty places.

Henry.
His name invoked his face. He was with her, side by side, hand locked in hand.

She felt the power rising. Some remote part of her quailed. It was too much—too strong. Stronger even than the greyness that was swallowing Britain. So strong that it might destroy where it meant to heal.

There was no choice. She had to take the risk. She raised the power like a sword, and struck the greyness down.

It yielded like fog. Like mist, it slipped away, only to gather its formlessness together and stand before her again, as whole as before.

There was solidity at its heart. The abbess still had mortal substance, though the malice of two dead queens was in her. She was still bound to mortality.

Henry saw it even before Edith. While she flailed to find enough magic to do she hardly knew what, he drew his sword in a blur of steel.

The air between the worlds shrieked with the agony of cold iron. The greyness swirled. The living thing in its heart turned to run, but Henry was too swift. He stepped through and inabout, into the cold air of the abbey's chapel, and thrust the blade between the fleeing shoulders.

Through their linked hands, Edith felt the force of the blow: sharp steel piercing flesh, cracking bone, transfixing the shuddering heart. Henry's feet were braced. The strength of him went deep into the earth: even this earth that had been stripped of life and spirit.

Abbess Christina twisted as she fell, wrenching the sword out of Henry's hand. The cloud about her writhed and boiled.

It had drawn the Hunt. The chapel's roof was no impediment to Edith's sight. She could see through it to a sky as grey and tormented as the fog of nothingness below.

The Hunt hovered above the abbey, waiting as it had waited when her father died. A soul was a soul, however black or corrupted—and this gathering of souls was threefold, which was a great number in the Otherworld.

Edith looked up. Amid the skeletal hunters and the milling, baying hounds, she searched for her father, but they were all shadows, with no faces that she could see.

She never even stopped to think. Henry was bending to retrieve his sword. The nuns in the choir were still chanting, but the chorus had gone somewhat ragged. Edith stood astride her aunt's body.

She was still not quite in the world. The Hunt was clear to her sight, even through stone—but stone was solid enough underfoot and in walls around her. The body beneath her was more real than any of it.

The smell of blood wreathed her, and the reek of voided entrails. But the Hunt cared little for that.

“Let them take her,” Henry said.

Their hands were still linked as if bound. He had cleansed the sword somewhat on the abbess' skirts, but not yet sheathed it. His face was at once deeply familiar and profoundly strange. “This is justice,” he said. “Don't stand in its way.”

“You have a cold heart,” said Edith. “Is it also wise?”

The Hunt stooped even lower. For the flash of an instant Edith knew why her kinswomen had so hated all that was Norman.

This Norman was wise. And practical. And there was Britain, which had nearly fallen because of this thing beneath her feet—this creature who had spread its ruin through the whole of Britain. People were dying because of it—children were dying, their souls eaten away by the blight in the earth.

This thing had been her kin. Her enemy, yes; it would have destroyed her without a qualm. But blood was blood.

She looked up into the Huntsman's fleshless face. “Her own God will judge her,” she said.

“We are her judgment,” said the Huntsman.

“I think not,” said Edith.

“That is twice,” the Huntsman said, “that you have defied us. There is a price for it. In the end you will pay.”

“I'm willing,” she said steadily. “Let this one go. There's torment enough ahead for her, I'm thinking, even without your pagan damnation.”

“And you call my heart cold,” Henry said beside her.

That was admiration. Edith was not sure she welcomed it.

She must not let it distract her. She kept her eyes level on the Huntsman, just as she had done when she was much younger and even less wise.

He bowed to her. The fire of his eyes promised a reckoning, but she had won—again. The darkness at her feet dissipated into the earth that it had blighted, leaving the body cold.

The Hunt withdrew. The fog in the chapel melted away. Light shone through the high windows, slanting golden on the floor.

The nuns stirred and murmured. They had faces. Their eyes were alive. They stared at Edith, and at the man who stood at her back, sword drawn as if to guard her from an assault of holy women.

Edith set her hands together and bowed to them, even as she slipped sidewise out of the world.

 
Henry had never seen such casual power. His sister was strong, and so for that matter was he, but they were always aware of what they were. She simply was.

She was like the Old Things. She passed from world to world as he would walk from one room to the next of one of his castles—and somehow, by some magic, she had him doing it, too. She had brought him from an alley in Salisbury and herself from the gods knew where, then through her power he had taken them into Wilton Abbey where it seemed all the blight had begun—and when they were done there, she stepped with him onto a greensward under misty sunlight, beside the silver glimmer of a lake.

She had brought him to the Isle of Glass, where they had met at Beltane. There were people there, standing in a circle, staring—much as the nuns had. He recognized his sister, and the Lady of the Isle, and Robin FitzHaimo.

The Guardians of Britain were gathered here to defend the isle. He was standing with his nameless lady at the fourth corner, the pillar of the east: facing the lake. And that was right and proper, and as it should be.

She lifted her hand. The jewel was still in it, but the silver was blackened and crumpled, and the stone had gone grey and dead.

Its light was inside them both. They were the fourth pillar of Britain, both of them together.

She flung the spent jewel far out over the lake. It rose in an arc, then fell in a blur of swiftness. The water closed over it. There was not even a ripple to betray where it had been.