King's Blood (6 page)

 
She did not tell him her name, nor did she ask his. The heat of her body, the scent and shape of her, would stay with him. If he saw her again, he would know her, though she might long since have forgotten him.

For a little while she took away memory. There was only the moment, stretching as long as human flesh could bear.

But it was human and mortal, and the day was rising. The tumult in the city was beating on the shutters, piercing through it with darts of sound and light. A bellow from below brought her to her feet, slipping deftly out of his arms.

He made no effort to stop her. He could have stayed where he was; she had not ordered him out. But the world was calling. He made himself rise and find his clothes and put them on, taking more care than they strictly needed.

He was delaying the inevitable. She had asked for nothing, but he left a handful of coins on the table by the bed. It was her due; and however poor he might be in lands or titles, of money, thanks to his father, he had enough.

He drew a deep breath. Now, he thought. Face it; get it over. He made his way down and out of the tavern, into the glare of the day.

 
The king's body was gone. The bed on which it had lain was stripped, the curtains taken down, and the room scoured. Henry's eyes watered with the fierce stink of lye.

It was a far cleaner stink than had been there before. He found a monk at last, after too long a search, who would admit to knowing anything at all.

He was a novice, and somewhat simple. He babbled of angels and devils, and scourgings of sacred fire. Somewhere amid the nonsense, Henry gathered that embalmers had come, and a knight had overseen them. They had taken the body out of Rouen.

Henry was nigh as fuddled as the novice. He had been fighting his way through the city, with bruises and a cut or two to show for it; his mind was full of fog, as if he and not his father had wandered out of the world of the living.

The last of the ale had purged itself from him some while since. This was something else. Something . . .

For the second time in that endless day, he stumbled through the abbey's gate. Outside the walls, he was little less confused than he had been before.

There was no duke in Normandy, no king in England. Henry, who had been deprived of either, stopped short in the road.

The earth's spirit was in him. Its emptiness had crept into him; its confusion had swallowed him. He had been a fool not to strengthen the wards of his magic when he saw death standing close above his father.

His blood was king's blood, although he was not to claim the power that went with it. He was the youngest. He had no rights but what his father and his elder brothers gave him.

That way was bitterness. He must not indulge in it. He was perilously close to losing himself now, because he had given way to the shock of his father's sickness and all of its consequences.

He gathered the disparate parts of himself, the wits that were so terribly scattered, the magic that he had been in danger of forgetting how to wield. The cold of death seeped slowly away. He drew in the sun's warmth, feeding the power that was in him, as his mother had taught him to do when he was a child.

As his strength grew, his senses sharpened. He saw and felt and heard the confusion that reigned in this part of the world, now that his father's iron grip was loosed. Of his father there was nothing left.

And yet the body was still in the world, and powers gathered about it. They drifted on the winds of the spirit, knotting and tangling like threads of spider-silk. They laid a track for him to follow.

He poised on the edge of it. There was power to take, if he had the courage—if his strength was enough. If he had the right.

If he turned back, he could try to take one kind of power: earthly power, the rule of men and lands, maybe even the duchy, if he moved quickly enough. If he set foot on this path, his way would be longer and his victory less certain. But the prize would be greater by far—if he lived to win it.

Either way, he could lose it all. He was the youngest son. Nothing was his unless he fought for it.

He turned his back on Rouen and his face toward the old gods knew what. It was a road, but it touched only slightly on the earthly track. Men were in great disarray there: the last of the king's vassals escaping the city, riding hard for their own demesnes, to fortify them against a war they reckoned inevitable.

None of them spared a thought for the king who was dead. He was powerless now to help or harm them. They had to live in the world; and the world was turning cold.

Either they were fools, or Henry was. He entrusted himself to the straight track. The king was on it ahead of him, borne away by more than mortal hands.

CHAPTER 7

The ship floated by the quay, down the river from the city. It was an old ship, its paint worn, the gilding faded from its high prow. Yet there was no concealing the lines of it, the swift deadly shape of a dragon ship.

A lantern hung on the tip of its mast, dim to invisible in daylight. Yet at night it would blaze like a beacon, a great power of the Otherworld.

Henry's breath caught. He knew what ship this had to be.
Mora,
the ship made of Druid oak, shaped and fashioned for the conquest of Britain. His mother had given her as a love-gift to his father; when Mathilda died, the king had ordered her sunk in the sea.

She had risen again, somewhat worse for wear, but with all her magic still intact. A great flock of spirits crowded about her. They cared at least that the king of all Britain had passed to the Otherworld.

“For a while,” said a person perched just behind the dragon of the prow. He had the appearance of a bearded dwarf, thickset and massive for all his lack of height. But he was neither human nor mortal.

“Messire Turold,” Henry said, bowing.

The boggart, who had been the king's friend and ally, grinned from ear to ear: a very literal and disconcerting thing. His teeth were numerous and sharp. “Prince,” he said. “Will you sail with us?”

“That depends on where you go,” Henry said. “I'm not ready to leave the world.”

“Not yet,” said Turold. “We're taking the rivers and the sea to Caen.”

“Not Falaise where he was born?”

“Not by sea,” said Turold. “It's what he wanted. We're bound to give it to him.”

Henry bent his head. As light as the boggart's tone was, he could sense a grief so deep that it caught at his own heart.

No human thing had grieved for that terrible old man. These creatures of airy magic mourned with honest sorrow. He had belonged to them as much as to the children of Adam; although he had turned his back on them after his queen died, they had never forsaken him.

Henry understood a very great thing just then, standing on the quay in the plain daylight. Exactly what use he could make of it, he did not know yet. But he had seen a way through this riddle that his father had set him, and allies whom his brothers had neither the power nor the skill to call on.

The ship was waiting with a strong taste of patience about it. Henry swung over the side.

As he struck the deck, he staggered. He was light on his feet, trained and strong, as a knight should be; but the power in these timbers—the sheer force of magic that was in them—nearly flung him flat.

The crew were already casting off, lowering oars, dipping them in unison into the swift water. The ship leaped like a bird into flight.

Some of those who sailed the ship were human. Most were not. The captain seemed remarkably ordinary among them: a man of middle years and middle size, with a blunt plain face. But the eyes that rested on Henry were keen, and there was power enough in him to raise Henry's hackles.

While Henry found his balance and his wits, he saw Turold at the captain's back, watching him with a steady dark stare. He was being weighed and measured, and in a fashion tested.

He offered the captain the respect of a landsman toward a lord of the sea. That was well received. So were the words he spoke. “Messire. May I see my father?”

The captain stepped aside without a word.

The king lay on a bier under the deck's canopy. A heavy pall was drawn up over him, concealing the ruin of face and body. Nevertheless there was no mistaking that bulk.

Wards were laid on the body, suppressing the charnel reek. They guarded it against further decay, and protected it from evil both mortal and magical. There was great beauty in the shaping of them, and something very like tenderness.

Men had never loved this man, but the Old Things were not subject to human foibles. Henry found that his throat was tight. He did grieve after all, though a large part of it was anger.

He sat beside the bier as he had sat for so long beside his father's deathbed. There was a certain familiarity in it, and a certain finality.

The rest of those on the ship had drawn away, not in fear or revulsion but in respect. The ship was at midstream, the oars shipped, the sail raised to catch a wind that blew strong and steady down the river's length.

It was not a river he knew, exactly. Sometimes he saw familiar juts of crag, green clouds of woodland, or the stony bravado of a castle. But then the land would change, a mist close in, or the light dazzle so brightly that he could hardly see at all. Then the not-quite-human faces of the crew would change, and lose all their humanity; and flocks of otherworldly beings would crowd about the ship, singing a long, eerie dirge.

They passed from river to sea, then from sea to river again. Suns rose and set. Henry knew no hunger or thirst, nor reckoned the passage of time. He was outside of it, he and the body on its bier.

Somewhere in the dreamlike distance of that voyage, he knew that the calm sea and quiet sky were the work of great magic. Things moved without, coiling just beyond vision, surging beneath with the rise of the waves. Powers that had been held at bay through William's reign were stirring, growing restless.

The smell of death had roused them. Their hunger was sharp and their hate was strong. They would strike while they could.

Young William was still in Normandy, riding the straight track to the sea, but never as swiftly as
Mora
had. Britain was empty of a king.

With that thought, Henry half-rose. Britain was close, straight across this stretch of sea. He rode in the ship that had borne his father to the conquest. If he raised his powers, called on allies both old and new, bade them serve the blood of the last king—

“No.”

Turold was standing beside him, balancing easily as the ship rocked and swayed. Henry had not noticed that the seas had grown so heavy. The sky was still clear, but the wind was wuthering, tugging sharply at the sail.

“It's not for you,” the boggart said. “No matter how tempting it is—let it go. Or no good will ever come of it.”

“Will any good come of William's taking the throne?” Henry demanded.

“That will be as it will be,” said Turold. “It's his time. His fate.”

“To destroy everything our father made?”

“What will be will be,” Turold said. “Let it go.”

The hot temper rose in Henry. Who did this creature think he was, to command the king's son?

But cold reason rose soon enough to stop the words before he spoke them. He was not in mortal realms now.

Turold nodded. “Good,” he said. “You can be taught.”

“What—” Henry began. But the boggart's glance stilled his tongue.

His father had bequeathed him patience. He was expending a great deal of it already. There would be far more, he knew in his bones, before this dance had ended.

 
They sailed by the straight way and the warded way, down to the river Orne and then, with the wind steady at their backs, upriver to Caen. Within the bounds of Normandy the sense of powers rising was less; this was a quieter land, less fraught with magic.

Yet there was magic here, deep beneath, and in Caen that both the king and his queen had loved, it bubbled up like a spring. The ship came to harbor in a windy morning, with a scud of clouds fitfully veiling the sun.

The crowd that waited was large enough: the whole city had come out, it seemed, with a company of monks and prelates in the lead. And yet there were startling gaps and absences. No lords of the realm were there. No workers of magic either greater or lesser, no embassies of kings either mortal or otherwise, had come to see the king to his rest.

Henry turned on Turold, to ask he hardly knew what—if this was a jest or a curse, or a simple oversight—but the boggart had vanished. Only the mortal crew were left, heaving the bier over the side and into the monks' waiting hands. Those were sturdy men, evidently chosen for their strength, but even they struggled to bear up that massive weight.

It seemed that no one recognized Henry. He disembarked unnoticed behind the bier.

As he set foot on land, once again he staggered—but this time not with the shock of power gathered in that place. Rather, it was the opposite: a sucking void, a perfect absence.

He stood at the heart of a maelstrom, in a zone of empty air. He gasped for breath, whirling in panic, tensed to leap back to the safety of the ship.

But
Mora
had already drawn away from the shore, receding far too swiftly for the natural force of wind or current. Even as he reached for her with hand and power, he knew that she was slipping out of the world. He could see her still, but her magic was closed against him.

He was all alone in the empty land, surrounded by people whose souls he could not sense at all. He was in hell, with no hope of earthly salvation.

He lashed out, still in a fit of panic—even knowing it was folly; knowing he hovered in delusion. Fire surged up out of the earth and poured down from the sky.