King's Blood (18 page)

CHAPTER 20

Edith almost failed to come back from the Otherworld once she had read all her father's letters. She left them there, safe in a place she knew, with words of guarding on them and folk of air to watch over them. It took all the will she had to pass through the worlds again, and go back to the cloister that had been set to trap her.

Knowledge is power.
Her father had taught her that. So had Sister Cecilia. The abbess did not know what Edith knew. Nor would she, if Edith could help it.

Always since she first began, she had taken great care to reappear in hidden places: a dark corner of the cloister, a forsaken bit of garden, the far end of the orchard. On that day of revelation and confusion, she was not as careful as she should have been. She sent no scouts ahead, and did not look first to see where she was going.

She fell out of air onto the paving stones of the cloister, far enough and hard enough to drop her bruisingly to her knees. The cloister, mercifully, was deserted—until she heard the gasp of breath behind her.

She scrambled up and spun. A nun in black had been sitting on a bench in that distant corner. Her face at first was a pale blur; then Edith's sight cleared enough for recognition.

Sister Gunnhild stared at her as if she had done exactly what she had: appeared quite suddenly out of thin air.

Edith's whole mind and body went still. A babble of excuses ran through her head, but none of them reached her tongue. Some of the nuns might have chosen to believe whatever story Edith could think of to tell. But not Sister Gunnhild. Her sight was too clear and her mind too logical.

Even so, Edith had to do something. “Sister—” she began.

Sister Gunnhild closed her eyes. “You are not here,” she said. “You were never here. I saw nothing and heard nothing.”

Edith opened her mouth, but closed it again. Sister Gunnhild's fingers were in her ears. She was setting Edith free—though with what perturbation of mind, Edith could too easily imagine.

She took the gift. She fled away down the cloister.

 
Edith kept her head down and her magic to herself for the rest of that day. Every time someone coughed, she jumped like a cat. But no summons came from the abbess.

The next day after morning office, she had her daily hour with Sister Gunnhild. She almost refused to go—but she still had not been ordered into the abbess' presence. If there was a trap waiting for her, then so be it. And if there was not . . .

Sister Gunnhild was sitting in the library as always, walled in books. Her face was no more or less easy to read than it ever was. She said nothing of what she had seen, and showed no sign of having remembered it.

Edith bit her tongue and sat where she always sat. It was hard to focus on the page in front of her, but somehow she managed.

And that was how it was. No summons from the abbess. No word from Sister Gunnhild. After a week she began to believe that she was safe.

Then the summons came.

 
That had been a strange day. When Edith went for her usual lesson, Sister Gunnhild was not there. Sister Librarian did not know where she was. Edith spent the hour reading, despite the temptation to slip away elsewhere.

After her hour in the library, she went to the kitchens for her morning duties. It was never quiet there; not only the nuns and novices and the abbey servants had to be fed, but there were the pensioners and the not infrequent guests as well. But this morning the kitchens were more than usually frantic.

Edith caught one of the undercooks as she flew past. “What—”

The girl spun them both full around. “The king! The king's coming here!”

For a wild instant Edith thought she meant Malcolm of Scots.

But this was England. England's king was William—Red William, whom Edith had seen in a vision in the Otherworld.

“What does he want with us?” she asked.

The undercook shrugged free. “Does it matter?” she flung over her shoulder.

Probably not, Edith thought. Except that nothing a king did lacked consequence. For him to come here to this house of holy women, full of Saxons who had been raised in secret rebellion against all that was Norman—it was not a casual visit. There was no way it could be.

She rolled up her sleeves and set to work kneading bread. She always had loved that part of her duties: digging deep into the yielding dough, rolling and folding it, beating it into submission. There was more of it than usual today: enough for the royal party, and made with the finest flour, too, and not the coarse brown meal that the nuns were given.

She was deep in it, well and truly floured, when Sister Gunnhild came to fetch her. She brought the summons Edith had been dreading for a week and more: “Mother Abbess would see you.”

There was nothing about her that warned of betrayal. Edith searched hard for it, too; but Sister Gunnhild was the same as she had always been. She was bringing a message, no more.

Edith set herself in such order as she could, brushed off as much flour as she might, and followed Sister Gunnhild. She was somewhat surprised not to be taken to the abbess' study. Instead they went where the novices were not to go, out through the cloister toward the guesthouses.

There was a great crowd there of men and horses, hawks and hounds and all the appurtenances of a hunting party. Most of them had found places to settle and were dicing or talking or tending the animals. They all had eyes that tended to wander, and not many of them seemed to care that the women they stared at wore nuns' habits.

They had a distinctly pagan air, though they were no worse than Edith's father's men had been prone to be. Men were men, unless they were clergy—and even there, Edith had heard enough to know that not every priest or monk was devoted to his vows.

Edith knew better than to meet those bold stares, but she could see quite well sidelong; she had had enough practice in it. Normans, she already knew, were human enough when they were not raping and pillaging. They were big men in the main, red or brown or fair; not many of them were small or dark. Their ancestors had been Vikings, ruthless raiders from the north. Normans—Norsemen. She could see it in them, a hint of wildness beneath the silk and linen and the finely woven mail.

As many as they had seemed to be, there were no more than two dozen altogether. That was a small escort for a king. Edith wondered if the rest were in the town, or if this William really had come to the abbey with hardly more attendance than a minor baron.

 
The king was in the hall where noble guests were used to dine. It was open now to what air there was on this breathless summer day, the trestles laid away and the benches lined against the walls. There were chairs by the hearth, which was clean and swept of ashes, but no one was sitting in them.

In her vision, Edith had seen this man as a creature of fire. Certainly he was as restless as that.

Even in Abbess Christina's presence, clouds of the folk of air surrounded him. They shrank and shuddered near the abbess, but they could not stay away from the king.

And yet he had no magic. That was perfectly clear. It was because he was the king, and because he was old William's son, and Mathilda's.

William was very much out of place here in this stronghold of holy women. Women were not to his taste at all, Edith thought. She was not sure what she meant by that—it came into her head, whole and complete. William and women were not comfortable together.

The abbess was not making anything easier for him. She had to suffer his presence—however much she hated him—because he was the king. She would give him all that duty demanded, and be sure he knew why she did it.

William prowled the room. Half a dozen of his men stood by: guards, most of them. One was brimming over with magic, carefully damped now and walled against the abbess.

That one watched Edith from the moment she passed the door. She could feel that scrutiny like the heat of a fire on her skin. She raised wards against it—quite like those that he had raised against the abbess.

His eyebrows had gone up. Bemusement? Respect? Both, she thought.

He was like her: half of the old blood. The rest of him had to be Norman. He was dressed like one, and carried himself like one, too. No one else was that arrogant.

Except, of course, for descendants of Saxon kings.

Sister Gunnhild bowed in front of the abbess. So did Edith. The king was across the room just then, scowling at the tapestry that hung on the far wall. One of the pensioners had brought it as part of her offering to the abbey. It was meant to depict the Last Supper, but the ladies who embroidered it had transformed the Lord Christ into a Saxon king and his apostles into earls and thanes, and behind them were scenes of hawking and hunting and even a battle against Vikings in longships.

“So Harold's still king here,” William said.

Edith understood Norman. She even spoke it. Her father had made sure of that, as little as her mother had approved of it.

It had been a long while since she needed it, but it came back easily enough. She knew what William was saying. She could even answer, “That's the Lord Christ, my lord.”

William turned. Behind the scowl his face was not bad to look at.

He seemed to find her even less to his liking than the tapestry. “That's Harold, fighting Normans.”

She shook her head. “No, really. It's the Last Supper. See. There's the chalice. And twelve Apostles.”

His scowl sharpened to a glare, then drained away. For the first time he seemed to see her. “You're Malcolm's daughter,” he said.

“Yes,” said Edith.

“You can go now, Mother,” William said to the abbess. And to Sister Gunnhild: “You, too.”

“That would not be proper,” Mother Abbess said, “lord king.”

“She'll stay,” William said, tilting his head at Sister Gunnhild. “You, Mother, have many duties crowding on you, I'm sure. I won't take any more of your time.”

Edith had been thinking that this king had no grace. Now it was clear he did—when it suited him to use it.

Abbess Christina knew herself dismissed. Edith waited for her to fight it, but for whatever reason, she chose not to. She nodded coldly to the king, and said to Sister Gunnhild, “Remember what we are.”

Sister Gunnhild bowed. Her face was expressionless within the veil. Edith thought she seemed a little pale—but maybe that was only the way the light struck her, with her fair skin that looked so ill in black.

Mother Abbess took her leave with stiff dignity. William watched her go. He did not like her at all, Edith thought.

When she was well gone, the king turned back to Edith. Much of his bad temper had vanished, along with most of the shadow that had lain on the hall. He looked her up and down. “So you're my brother's godchild. You've grown up well.”

“Thank you, sire,” Edith said. “How is my godfather? Is he well?”

“He was the last time I saw him,” William said. “I'll remember you to him when we meet again.”

“That's kind of you,” she said.

There was a silence. Edith could not find anything to say, and neither, it seemed, could William.

She took the time to consider whether she liked him. She did not think she did. Whether she hated him . . . no. Nothing as strong as that. Aside from a mutual dislike of the abbess, they had nothing in common. They were quite literally worlds apart—she with her magic and her learning, he with whatever he did without either. Hunt, she supposed. Fight. Preside over banquets.

When William spoke, he startled her. She had been content with the silence. “There are those,” he said, “who think I should be making a royal match, and royal sons. What do you think of that?”

“I think you don't want that at all,” she said.

The words had come out on their own. If she had had anything to do with it, they would have stayed buried where they belonged.

His glare was back, more sulfurous than before. “What makes you say that?”

“It's true,” she said.

“Does it matter what I want?”

He was amazingly angry, and yet she was not afraid. This man was no danger to her. “You're the king,” she said. “No one can make you do anything unless you allow it.”

“Duty can,” he said. “The Church may.”

“It can try,” she said.

“Do
you
want to marry?” he demanded.

She blinked. That was so close to what she had been thinking that she had to wonder . . .

Her father might have considered such a match, but he would have made it clearer that that was what he meant.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Would you want to marry me?”

“No.” That was altogether unpremeditated and completely honest. “We're not meant for one another.”

“There are those who say we are. Your bloodlines, mine—we match like blooded horses.”

“You can't just breed blood to blood,” Edith said. “Any breeder knows that. You have to consider the animals, too. We wouldn't match well. We'd hate each other—and nothing would come of it.”

“Even the worst marriage can produce sons,” William said.

“This one wouldn't.” Edith met his bright blue stare. “I do want to marry. I think I'm meant to. But you, no. God made you as you are. When you see my father, will you tell him something for me? Tell him I'm to be bound with final vows on the feast of the Virgin.”

William might be no scholar, but his wits were quick enough. He followed all of that, and barely blinked at it. “I'll make sure he knows,” he said. His eyes narrowed. Then, astonishingly, he smiled. “I see why they made me come here. You're not for me, no—and that's a pity, taking all in all. You'll make someone a remarkable queen.”