The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (30 page)

He began the slow removal of Theron’s clothes. They were so wet, it was like peeling the skin from fruit. He uncovered the vine etched into Theron’s chest. In the starlit darkness, it was like the shadow of leaves on his pale skin. Theron was trembling with cold, but Basil laid him down on the floor. In giving his lover ease, Basil took the boy’s seed back into himself and never lost a precious drop.

Basil rose, intending to light a candle, to stir up the fire, but the power that had burned in his body was not yet done with him. The circle was not yet closed.
Bindings run in
threes,
he thought, not knowing where the thought came from. It was as if he and Theron had just made some new thing between them, something that neither man could contain alone. It belonged to both of them, and must be passed back and forth between them as long as they both should live, growing in strength, always too much for either one to hold for long, always desiring outlet and renewal in the other.

Basil felt himself about to burst with it. He put his hands under Theron’s arms, murmured, “Come, my lord, my dear . . .” and on the bed he sank himself deep, deep into his lover’s body and filled it with the thing he could not name, that he had taken from him and now gave back, renewed and potent.

Theron cried out then, a loud keening wail that Basil thought must surely wake the city. He was deaf to his own shout of triumph, but he found himself lying across the other man. His lust was spent, but words rose in his mind, words that must be said.

“Now,” Basil whispered hoarsely; “now the old year is surely undone, and the fires are burnt out. Bind up your hair, my princeling, and fast for the white days passing between the old year and the new. Live on my love, as I shall live on yours.”

Theron twisted under him, looking up at him mutely. “Why do you not answer me? Answer me! The circle is complete, and bound in completion,” Basil heard himself say, and knew that it was true. “I charge you, Theron— No, wait.” Formally, he said: “Son of Tremontaine: Alexander Theron Tielman Campion, I charge you, speak!”

Theron gave a great gasp, filling his lungs as though coming up from deep water. “The hunt!” he cried.

Basil cradled him in his arms. “Hush,” he said. “The hunt is over, you’re with me. You did well.”

“You know? How did you know?” Theron asked fiercely. “They were your men, those students; did you set them on?”

Basil’s bonfire cooled to embers, his certainty fogged. “What do my students have to do with this?” he asked, bewildered. “What are you talking about? How did I know what?”

“About the hunt—those fucking barbarians—I was hunted, Basil, hunted like an animal—and they were your men, your men!”

“The King’s Hunt.” Basil leaned up on one elbow and looked at him. “I don’t know; I was just being poetical, I suppose. Are you saying my students chased you tonight?”

“They were there—all of them—and those Northerners besides!”

“Yes . . .” It was hard to rouse himself, but Theron seemed genuinely upset, and history was all he had to offer. Basil considered the precedent. “I’ve heard that the village lads up around Hartsholt still bear the brand deep into the woods, and choose one of their own to run out before them. You should be flattered: it’s always the bravest and handsomest they choose.”

“Let them choose one of their own, then, and leave me alone!”

Basil stroked his lover’s arm. “Shh. Don’t you know, you are their own? In another age, you would have been their king—as you are mine.”

Theron gripped his hand, stilling it, forcing Basil’s attention to his words. “Tell me now. And tell me true. Did you put them up to this?”

Basil looked at him in real confusion. “I? How could I? Why would I?”

“I don’t know; to see how it worked!”

Basil recoiled, offended. “I’m not teaching in a village school. We don’t act out scenes from history as part of my lectures.”

But Theron gripped harder. “What scene, Basil? What history were we all acting out for you?”

Basil twisted in his grasp. “Don’t blame
me
. It’s a tradition, I didn’t invent it. The king is hunted—was hunted— for the good of the land. I wish I knew exactly how, and why. Maybe the Book of the King’s W—” He caught himself just in time. “Maybe there are books I haven’t read yet, that tell us more than Northern folk tales do. I do know that a few generations after the Union, in Laurent’s day, they kept a young deer on the palace grounds. It was brought up by the royal children; the king’s daughters would put garlands on its head. When the king’s son came of age, they’d let it loose. He and his Companions would hunt it down on Last Night, and he always killed it with his own hands.”

“That’s in Vespas,” Theron said. Distracted at last, he curled into Basil’s arms. “I always thought that was a terrible thing to have to do, to hunt down an animal you’d cared for.”

“That may have been the point. I think the deer was a substitute for the man himself. There’s an ancient epic all about how the king
was
the deer, quite literally. Which could just be poetic license—unless you believe that the wizards somehow transformed him into an animal. Since that’s impossible, it must have been a man they used to hunt—maybe a man clad in deerskin, or crowned with horns.”

“Did they kill him when they caught him?”

“No. They made him king.” Theron’s head was heavy on his breast. “
He that was the deer has killed the deer,
it says in one poem, a fragment, probably a praise-song for a king. You love poetry; untangle me that one, and I’ll make you an honorary historian.”

“Your students hate me,” Theron said sleepily. “They blame me for taking you away from them.”

“You’re mine,” Basil murmured into his hair. “I will not let anyone harm you. You are my heart’s delight, and the source of all my joy.” He felt Theron’s breathing grow regular. He tucked a corner of blanket up around his bare shoulder. Theron twitched, and coughed, and coughed again. Basil reached across him for the cup of water he kept by the bed, and raised him up and offered it, saying, “Will you drink, my lord?”

Theron whimpered, more asleep than awake. Poor child, god knows how much wine he’d taken tonight, or worse. Basil put the cup to Theron’s lips himself, and watched him drink, and laid him down again.

chapter
III

SAVE FOR LAST NIGHT AND FIRST NIGHT, THE White Days had no names, no designations. They flowed together like the long nights, blurred by excess and its consequences. It was dark or it was light; one was more or less drunk or hungover; one was looking for a lover or enjoying one or, occasionally, sleeping.

At least that was how it seemed to Justis Blake, stunned by his first city experience of the turning of the year. The mad hunt through the city, the fire in the oak grove and what he had seen there, had shaken him. He remembered waking up at dawn almost lying in the warm embers of the fire, twisted up against the back of a man whose face was so black with smoke he couldn’t even identify him. His clothes were tucked between his knees. With pounding head and frozen fingers he’d scrambled into them, found a stream to wash the taste from his mouth and assuage his raging thirst, and stumbled back to the city through the frosty morning, shivering in his bones.

He’d spent the afternoon in bed, swearing he’d never drink again. He should have known better, he told himself. Men did things when moved by whiskey and crowds they’d never do sober and alone. He’d allowed himself to be caught up in the heat of the moment, and was paying for it with a head filled with hammering dwarves and the uncomfortable knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to write his mother all that he had done on Last Night.

“You were pissed,” Benedict Vandeleur said when Justis tried to explain all this to him. “You went out with the boys in the woods and did some things you don’t remember very well and saw boogie men and now you feel like the bottom third of the Sixth Hell. Serves you right. You should have come to Mother Ginger’s with me. The girls don’t charge on Last Night, and it’s a lot warmer than an oak grove.”

“It would have to be,” said Justis gloomily. “You’re probably right, Benedict, about all of it. I was certainly drunk.”

“Of course I’m right,” Vandeleur said. “Now, get out of bed and put your head under the pump and I’ll show you how a real city man spends the White Days. And not a word about ancient history or oak groves or any of the rest of it until the term starts again, or I swear by all that’s holy you can look for a new roommate.”

Justis laughed, wincing when the dwarves picked up the pace of their hammering. But he got out of bed and dunked his head and the headache went away, just as Vandeleur had said it would. They went together to Mother Ginger’s, and Justis kept his mouth shut on the subject of ancient history and oak groves. He thought about them, though, and his thoughts were not altogether comfortable.

JUSTIS BLAKE WAS NOT THE ONLY MAN IN THE CITY TO FEEL the effects of the Last Night hunt. The Northerners who called themselves the Companions of the King staggered into The Green Man to warm up and heal their heads with toasting the dawn of the Hunt. Robert Coppice, Third Companion, climbed onto a table with the help of Burl, his Fourth, and proposed a solemn toast to the shivering, hungover crowd: “Here’s to our Hunt, boys, and a royal Deer to bring the Sun to the North Country!”

As they knocked back beakers of cider they pieced together their memories of the night. “Theron Campion.” Coppice carefully shook his head. “Who would have thought it? Still, he gave us a good run, a mighty good run . . .”

“He did that,” Burl agreed. “I thought I was going to bust a gut with running. Almost as good as the chase Finlay gave them in my grandfather’s time, to hear the old ones talk.”

“Did you see the horns on him?” a boy named Farwell said softly. “I did, I swear I did.”

Greenleaf and Smith, First and Second Companions, had been oddly silent since their return from the woods. But at Farwell’s words, Greenleaf nodded and asked eagerly, “You saw that, did you? What else did you see?”

“What didn’t we see?” Hob chuckled. He was a natural scientist, but had thoroughly enjoyed himself nonetheless. “The Hunt was good, but the mead was even better!”

The First Companion quelled him with a glance. “Let Farwell answer.”

“Just the horns,” Farwell whispered. “But it might have been the trees . . . the branches, you know.”

Greenleaf nodded. “I, too, saw the horns on him. And when I kissed him . . . Oh, lads—” His voice cracked; his companions saw that he was struggling not to weep. “Oh, my brothers, the time is truly upon us. We have been faithful servants of the Living Land, and it has not been in vain. The king will come again.”

Someone snorted. “In Lord Theron Campion?”

“Hush,” said Coppice, mindful of his rank. “The First Companion is speaking. He’s Master of the Hunt and Keeper of the Mysteries. He knows.”

“There are signs,” Greenleaf went on. “I saw them, and Smith saw them, too.”

Will Smith finally raised his head. His cheeks were scratched, his hair was full of twigs. He looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backward, which was close to the truth. But his eyes were clear blue flame. “It was a great mystery,” Smith said hoarsely. “Around the fire, I saw the ancient tales live again. There was the Deer, the king that will be, and from the woods there came a man, dark and fell, with power lying like a mantle on his shoulders.” He glared at Hob. “Other years I have drunk deep of the mead, and seen nothing like this. This was true seeing.”

“We will watch, and we will wait,” Greenleaf said. “If the signs hold true, the king will reveal himself with the year’s turning, springing from amongst us as the new grass springs from the earth. A wizard will bind him, as the kings of old were bound, and the Companions will honor him and call him brother. The old order will be restored, and the Land will rejoice and we will rejoice with it—” He choked on the words, tears running openly down his face.

Coppice put his hand on Greenleaf’s shoulder and kissed him, as was his right. “Rest,” he told his friend. “It was a long night. And the days are long until spring. There will be time to speak of this.”

His arm around his lover Lindley, Alaric Finn glowed with pleasure and returning warmth. “You saw the Deer,” he crooned in Lindley’s ear. “You saw him first, and you knew him. You are truly one of us.”

OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY, THE LAST NIGHT HUNT HAD other consequences. The City Council was besieged with complaints from property owners who had lost shutters and wagons and sheds to the rioters. And Lord Nicholas Galing’s man brought him a letter from Henry Fremont.