King's Blood (23 page)

The maid was asleep, snoring softly. Edith would have to learn her name.

There was someone else in the room. She shivered inside her skin. The folk of air were all gone; there was only greyness, thick as mist, and a dark figure in the center of it.

She sat up. The mist scattered. There was no one there but the maid on her pallet. The only memory of what she had seen was a faint scent, like old stone and cold incense.

Abbess Christina?

She shivered. Even that power for nothingness could not reach across the whole length of the isle. It must have been her mother. Maybe she had been praying for Edith, and the prayer had come to watch over her.

Edith slipped out of bed and dressed with trembling fingers, taking great care not to wake the maid. If she had been wise, or even sane, she would not have contemplated what she was doing, but she had had enough of waiting and cowering and being helpless. If she destroyed herself, so be it.

Which was a rather overwrought way to look at it, but she was worn out. She needed to be free of this—one way or another.

 
This early in the morning, Edith would expect to find the queen in the chapel, having heard early Mass and then lost herself in prayer until the Mass at midmorning. But there was no one in the chapel. It was cold, and dark except for the vigil lamp over the altar.

Queen Margaret was here in Edinburgh. Edith knew that as she knew where her own body was. She followed the queen's presence like a scent out of the chapel and down a maze of passages and through the hall. People were awake there, beginning the day's duties and pleasures. She slipped through them unseen.

The puca was waiting for her beyond the hall and up the stair, in front of the door that led to her mother's rooms. He sat with his tail stretched out behind him, flicking it lightly, restlessly.

She had to stop and breathe for a while before she set her hand to the door. She had never gone to her mother. She had always been summoned.

She was older now, and bolder. She gathered up her courage.

The door opened to her touch. The air within was thick with the mingled smells of smoke and incense. A fire burned strongly on the hearth; a maid, dressed as somberly as a nun, fed it with twists of dried herbs.

Beneath the pungent sweetness, Edith caught a quite different reek. Sickness: old, cold, and set deep.

Her mother lay on her bed that was as narrow and hard as a nun's. The thin blanket was drawn up over a breast that had shrunk terribly since Edith last saw her.

She was still beautiful. She could still swallow any magic that was in the air. Even the puca came no nearer than the door.

The wards that had been with Edith for so long were straining. They were made to protect against this, but the strength of it left her gasping. It wanted to suck the life and breath out of her; to drain her magic away and transform her into a shadow, like the shadows of priests and bishops, monks and nuns who hovered near the bed.

It was a kind of hunger, not of the body but of the spirit. To be holy for holiness' sake. To take life and beauty out of the world, because no world mattered but the next one.

Edith stood by the bed. Her mother was awake, but her spirit was far away.

Edith waited for it to come back. She would not have called it patience. She emptied herself; she drew the wards closer about her and went still within them.

It did not matter how long she stood there. The light changed little, but the clouds were thick; the rain had closed in again. The air in the room grew chill as well as dark.

The queen's attendants were praying, some silently, some in a murmur that rose and fell. Its cadences were Saxon, not Latin. The strongest prayers, her mother had always insisted, were in the language of her birth.

“Rome is far away,” she used to say. “England is close and alive. When the Normans are gone, we will raise it up, stronger than ever.”

Edith could hear her voice, low but clear. She spoke in Saxon. It was so near and so distinct that she started a little.

But the queen had not moved. Her lips were still. Her breast barely rose with her breathing.

Her eyes were open. Edith had forgotten how blue they were. In her memory they had been grey, like the shadow of the queen's presence.

They had come to rest on Edith's face. She tried to read their expression, but they were as blank as stones set in a reliquary. What they saw in her own face, she could not tell. Sin, probably. Rebellion. And white fear.

The fear did not last long. It was old habit. Edith looked into those eyes and asked, softly and respectfully but without flinching, “Does Father know?”

The queen sighed faintly. Her head shook just visibly.

Edith could well see her father letting himself be convinced that his queen was engrossed in one of her sieges of prayer. Whatever their differences, he still loved her with all his heart. And love, the poets said, was blind.

“So that's why you let him bring me back,” Edith said. “I'm more use to you here.”

“You are what you are,” the queen said, “wherever your body finds itself.”

“And what is that?” Edith wanted to know.

“God knows,” said the queen.

She meant it quite literally. Edith bit her tongue. When she spoke, she did it with care. “I have no call to the veil. That I am sure of.”

“Your abbess assured me otherwise.”

“My late abbess has dreams on my behalf,” Edith said.

The queen sat up with an effort. Several of her shadows leaped to assist her. When she was banked in pillows, paler than ever but upright, she said somewhat breathlessly still, “It is for the best. As blessed as that life would have been, you were bred to wear a crown. For as much time as I have left to me, I will teach you what you need to know. Then when I am gone—”

“Don't talk like that,” Edith said. “You'll get well again. I'll pray for it.”

“God is calling me,” the queen said. “I will stay for you—for a while. But my soul is yearning to go.”

Edith astonished herself with grief. She had been afraid of her mother for as long as she could remember. She hated the greyness that surrounded the queen; the death of magic wherever she was. And yet this was her mother. There was love there after all.

“Come now,” the queen said. “Remember your training. When a nun dies, the convent never mourns—it celebrates. The bride has gone to the Bridegroom at last. So too shall I.”

Edith countered that fiercely with one of her father's sayings: “Grief is for the living. Grant us a little, who have to stay in the world when you're free of it.”

“That is an indulgence,” her mother said.

She was making it all too easy to remember why Edith had been so glad to escape her. Abbess Christina had ignored Edith for the most part, and given her a tutor who had proved to be as little suited to the cloister as Edith herself was. Queen Margaret was unlikely to make the same mistake.

Edith had gone from trap to trap. And yet she could not make herself feel the panic that she should have felt. Her mother was dying—she grieved for that. But it meant that whatever trap she had been brought into, it was finite. It would end.

“You are young,” her mother said. “Life will teach you. Death, too, when it comes. Sit with me. Pray.”

Edith could sit. She had no intention of praying in the way her mother meant.

She sat on the edge of the bed. The queen's hands gripped hers, as thin and cold as if they already belonged to a corpse. “Pray,” said the queen.

Edith prayed. She prayed for a swift death, free of pain. She prayed for an end to the greyness that was trying to swallow the world. She prayed to be strong enough, wise enough, skilled enough to do what she must.

While she prayed, the puca crept into the room, flattened to the floor, as if the touch of the queen's glance would render him to nothingness as it had all else of magic that was in that place. He pressed against Edith's foot, warm and soft, trembling but steadfast.

He gave her strength. That was what he was for. He protected her against the powers that would have turned her against him and all his kind.

CHAPTER 26

King Malcolm might have returned to Scotland, and he was clearly glad to have his daughter back, but he could not stop chewing over his anger at the English king. It rankled more, the longer he was in his own country. He paced his hall in the evening after a long day of hunting, ruling, or occasionally fighting, and cursed Red William with mounting fury.

It was the temper of the Gael. It burned hot and long, and it never forgot a slight. “Am I not a king even as he is? Am I not his elder? Do I not deserve at least a moment of his notice? What right had he to shut his door to me? He summoned me! I came like a servant, I who am a king. And he treated me like a beggar at his gate.”

His people knew better than to get in his way when he had a fine rage going. But Edith was still too young to be sensible.

She had been in Scotland for a month now. Her mother was no better, but Edith's presence seemed to have given her strength: she was no worse.

Edith was holding on. Sometimes it was hard. Sometimes she woke in the night, strangling in greyness. But her wards were holding. The puca was feeding them, and the earth of Scotland, when she could escape from her mother, helped to keep them strong.

She had come down to the hall this evening to hear a singer of songs who had come across the sea from Ireland, and found her father in full cry. The singer, a nondescript little man with a sharp fox-face, was listening, enthralled. He was setting the rant to music, Edith thought.

She should have faded back toward her mother's rooms, but she was hungry and there was food on the tables, and wine that her father had already been into. She could smell venison pie; she had a passion for venison pie.

Like a fool, then, she sat at the high table. The king had paused for breath, and maybe for inspiration. Edith said, “Maybe by spring he'll have decided to listen to you.”

Malcolm rounded on her. “Oh, he will indeed,” he said. His smile showed a flash of teeth. “He'll be hearing me by Martinmas, I'll lay wagers on it.”

“War?” Edith asked. “Again?”

“If war is what it takes to get his attention,” Malcolm said, “then war I'll give him.”

“Can you fight him? Are you strong enough?”

She had not meant to bait him, but the words kept coming and she kept speaking them. She could not seem to stop herself.

“I'll harry him like a pack of hounds after a boar,” Malcolm said. “I'll eat away at his borders until his kingdom is the size of a farmstead—and then I'll teach him how to treat a king.”

“Then you are a fool,” said a voice Edith had not heard so sharp or so clear since she was a child.

Queen Margaret was standing in the door that led to the women's solar, slender and tall in a gown as blue as her eyes, and a mantle the color of the sky at dusk, and a great collar of gold and pearls, and the crown of a queen.

Edith found that her mouth was hanging open. The hall had fallen silent. Even the most boisterous revelers were struck dumb.

If Edith had not known that her mother was dying, she would have sworn that the queen was as strong as she ever had been. Her voice certainly was. “What possesses you, my lord? Your people are worn out with fighting. Surely you can give them a winter's rest.”

“It's not winter yet,” Malcolm said. He was smiling, but it was not a pleasant smile at all. “Come down, my lady. Drink a cup with me. Wish me well; I'm going to war in the morning.”

“If you go,” Margaret said, “you will die.”

The king's eyes gleamed as he looked up at her. “Will I then? Have you had a vision?”

“God speaks to me,” said the queen. “Your death is out there. Stay home; be sane. Let the Normans think you cowed. When they least fear you, then is the time to strike.”

“They don't fear me now,” Malcolm said. “They laugh at my name. I'll turn their laughter to pain.”

“The pain will be yours,” the queen said.

“On your head be it,” said Malcolm, “both you and your ill-wishing.”

Edith tasted blood. She had bitten her lip through. Her father was quite out of his mind, and her mother was no better.

“I forbid you to go,” the queen said.

“Do you, lady? Isn't this your dearest desire? Haven't you urged me to do exactly this?”

“Not in a fit of temper,” she said, “and not for simple spite. My desire is victory, not the shame of defeat.”

“I will give you victory,” Malcolm said.

The queen looked at him. She must have seen what Edith saw: that he would never yield for strength. Her face softened as much as it ever could, when softness was no part of what she was. “My heart, I go so far as to beg. Stay here with me.”

“My heart,” said the king, and there was a snarl in it, “I will not.”

The queen had to have expected that. She pressed harder—with softer weapons. “Not for me? Not for your sons and your daughter? Not for your very life?”

He wavered not at all. “For my soul and honor, and for the honor of my kingdom, I must go.”

“You will die,” she said. Her voice was flat.

“So you persist in saying,” said Malcolm. “And I say to you, my lady, that if I shrink from this, Scotland will rue it for a thousand years. The Normans will invade us, hound us and hunt us, and trample us into the ground.”

Edith shivered. There was power in what they both had said: truth so strong it made the stones of the hall shift subtly under her feet.

Neither seemed aware of it. This was the worst kind of war: war born of love. Pride fed it, and fear—not of death, but of things that were worse than death.