King's Blood (38 page)

They were already out of sight of Salisbury, advancing toward the Giants' Dance. In the vicinity of so much power, straight tracks could turn strange. This one pierced the Otherworld itself rather than skimming its edges, and passed through a place of ash and burned stumps of trees.

That was so much like Edith's vision of Henry in Salisbury that she looked for the ember in the ashes, but there was none. It was all grey and lifeless: dead to the heart of things.

“Half a thousand years of Saxons,” Cecilia said, still riding beside Edith, “then kings who were meant to restore Britain but squandered their inheritance instead, all in a fog of Christian holiness. Now the Christians' reckoning of years comes to a crux. A thousand years and a hundred, they calculate, since their god-man was born. To the Old Things that means nothing, but men believe in it—and men's belief has immeasurable power.”

“‘God created men, but men create their gods,'” Edith said. “That was in a book I read when I was in the abbey.”

“The gods existed long before men,” said Cecilia, “but men's faith made them strong. When that faith faded, so did they. Now even their bright country is dying.”

“Do you think one man, even if he is a king, can turn the tide?” Edith asked her. “My father gave his blood to the earth, and that won seven years. Now it's worse than ever. What will we have to do, go back to the year-king? Then the season-king, the month-king, the day-king? Will there be any end to it?”

“If my brother takes the kingship in the old way, the deep way, in heart and soul, there is hope,” Cecilia said. “We can help, we Guardians. So can and will every other person of power in Britain. But we must have a king to complete us. Otherwise we remain a mere mob of discrete magics.”

“I'm afraid that won't be Red William,” Edith said. “He doesn't believe, even when he's seen—even when it's come near to killing him. He blinds himself to the truth.”

“And yet my father chose him to be king,” Cecilia said. “I never knew the old man hated Britain so much.”

“Maybe he didn't,” said Edith. “Maybe he knew something we don't know.”

“I would hope for that,” Cecilia said, “but I don't know if I can believe in it.”

“Faith has power,” Edith said. “Remember that.”

Cecilia shot her a glance, warning her against insolence, but she could hardly deny her own word, turned back on her though it might be.

 
It was a hard road back to the Isle, and a harder winter waiting. The Otherworld could not warm the bitter cold, for it was slowly freezing over itself. The undying grass was fading; the flowers were withered and dead.

Edith wondered if the rose was still alive somewhere near Henry—if he had even kept it. She felt in her heart that he had. So much was breaking and dying in this terrible winter, but she still dreamed of him. As often as not, the dreams could have been true: he was sleeping or feasting or sitting over wine with this lord or that.

The Isle clung to its strength. More and more of that was coming from the Ladies: the earth had little to give, and the Otherworld was in worsening straits.

By the shifting of the sun's path and the turning of the stars, winter should have been giving way to spring. The snow was still deep, rivers locked in ice. Even the lake of the Isle was frozen far out from its banks, although the island in its center rose from a ring of clear water.

One morning on her way to teach the youngest acolytes certain rites that they would need to know if winter ever broke, Edith slowed as she passed one of the cow-byres. The warm smell of cattle wafted out. There were two people inside, working and talking.

Everyone on the Isle did fair duty, from the least to the greatest. Even so, it gave Edith pause to hear Etaine and Cecilia carrying on their long debate while they scrubbed out the byre.

“We need Anselm,” Etaine said. “Three of us are not enough.”

“He won't come,” said Cecilia. “He prayed for the king to exile him and free him from his burden—and the king gladly obliged. He'll only come back if William summons him. Then he'll come, groaning and whining and making sure the world knows what a great sacrifice he's made.”

“William is not likely to call him back,” said Etaine.

Cecilia sighed gustily—even Edith, outside in the snow, could hear her. “No, he is not. And we do need him. Unless . . .”

“There's no time to raise another Guardian, even if one were ready,” Etaine said. “In our way we were as feckless as the king. We let one of the four pillars of Britain be sent into exile, instead of fighting to keep him where he belonged.”

“Where he never wanted to be.” Cecilia paused. They worked in unison for a while: pitching hay, from the sound of it. Then she said, “A king who refuses to be the true king. A Guardian who loathes his own powers and does his best to deny them, though the land itself has chosen him. Is it an omen? Is Britain telling us that it wants to die?”

“Not die, maybe,” Etaine said slowly. “But change, yes. It's an ill fit, this Norman invasion, though it came to save Britain from the destruction of its old powers. Saxons still live here, still work their spells in the guise of prayer. I think . . . Britain meant them to be part of it, too. If they knew; if they knew how.”

That pause had an air of quiet shock in it. “It's eating itself alive, for what? To give itself back to Alfred and his descendants?”

“To be something new. Something neither Saxon nor Norman. Something stronger than it ever was before.”

“You've had a vision.”

“Not a vision,” Etaine said. “A feeling in my bones. What I see is a black time, and the Hunt running wild over the earth. Scouring, maybe. Cleansing.”

“Burning the field to make the grass grow green.” Edith heard the shudder in Cecilia's voice. “I can't believe that. I'll try to get Anselm back—if I have to abduct him again, I will. We need our Guardians at full strength, to protect against what's coming.”

“Be careful,” said Etaine. “Promise me that.”

“Of course,” Cecilia said. “But what—”

She never finished her question, nor did Edith know if she got an answer. One of the acolytes was calling, and Edith realized that she was cold to the bone. She hurried away from the byre, mincing on frozen feet.

 
“Why do you need a Guardian who doesn't want to be one?” Edith asked.

It was warm by the fire in the Lady's house. Cecilia was sitting close to it, stitching a linen chemise such as they all wore under their robes. She paid little attention to her work, sewing by feel: tiny, even stitches that to Edith's mind were rather remarkable.

She took her time answering, but Edith had the whole night to listen. She sat on the bench beside Cecilia and spread her hands to the blaze.

After a while Cecilia said, “It's not that we need him. It's that Britain chose him, and will not un-choose him. We can't simply depose him and set up another in his place. He's bound to his Guardianship.”

“One can depose a king,” Edith mused.

Cecilia did not move and showed no sign of temper, but Edith flinched from the force of her glance. “One can,” she said mildly, “if one is prepared to pay the price.”

“Wouldn't you be, if it would save this island?”

“What if it destroyed us all instead?”

Edith felt her temper rising. That was rare enough to surprise her a little, but not enough to make her stop it. “My father gave his life and blood and soul to keep the dark at bay. Thanks to him, your brother could go on in his merry arrogance, calling himself the blessed of heaven. That arrogance has provoked the gods. It's time he paid the price.”

“And then?” said Cecilia. “Suppose he goes to the sacrifice. What then? Who will come after him?”

“That's for the gods to decree, isn't it?”

Cecilia looked her in the face. “Would you do it? Would you perform the sacrifice, if it were laid on you?”

The heat of Edith's temper turned suddenly cold. This was not a light or a casual question. Whatever she answered would have consequences. Potent ones—perhaps terrible.

“If I were given that task to perform,” she said steadily, “and if I were certain that it was the only way, yes, I would do it. I would ask the gods and the great Goddess to guide my hand.”

“And if it was not William whom you must sacrifice? If it was another Scots king? Or a new king, a king crowned with oak-leaves, a year-king? Would you do it then?”

Edith's belly clenched. She was dizzy and sick. But she had to say what was in her to say. “Even then,” she said, “in the gods' name, I would obey.”

Cecilia sat for a long moment, searching her face line by line. At last Cecilia nodded, sighing faintly as if she had been as knotted inside as Edith was. “So would I. We may have to do it—you should be prepared for that.”

“Better the sacrifice than the Hunt,” Edith said. “Do you think . . . ?”

Cecilia arched a brow, waiting.

Edith almost let it go, but this was a night for asking hard questions. “Do you think my father can be saved? Can his soul be freed from the Hunt?”

“It's said that once the Hunt takes a soul, it's lost forever,” Cecilia said. “But it's also said that once, long and long ago, love and magic freed one of those souls from its damnation. I've not seen proof of either.”

“I'll dare to hope, then,” Edith said. “After all, what can it hurt?”

There were many answers to that, but Cecilia ventured none of them. The shift that she had been sewing was done. She turned it right side out and shook the wrinkles from it, and folded it carefully, tucking the needle back into her purse. She was as tidy as a housewife, and as quietly practical, too.

Edith knew better than to be deceived. Here was great power and high purpose. How cold it could be, she had just learned—as she had learned that she could share that coldness. She was royal, too, and bound to the land. For that blood and the earth that bore it, she could do whatever she must, at whatever cost.

CHAPTER 43

It snowed at Easter, that first year of the new century. The fields were still too frozen to plow, and what little greenery did creep through the snow was late and shy.

Then after Easter, at long last, the winter broke. It burst in torrents of warm rain, flooding the rivers and the lowlands and turning every road and field to mire. After the rain came sun, as hot almost as summer.

God alone knew what the harvest would be like, with such a late and bedeviled planting. There seemed to be no order or measure in the world: too cold, too wet, too hot, too dry.

At Beltane, Henry waited, hardly breathing, for a summons that never came. When the gates of the Otherworld opened, he was in bed alone, glaring at the ceiling.

He had sworn to himself that he would not do what he did then. He slid out of bed in the dark, groped his way to the chest that held his clothes, and found his purse. The faint odor of roses and rue teased his nostrils.

The rose was still alive, still blooming. He breathed in its sweet scent. Maybe it meant nothing, but he could not help but tell himself that while the rose lived, she remembered him. There was a reason why she had not sent for him—maybe to save his life, if he really had been the year-king, and there still was a sacrifice.

It was cold comfort while the spectral hounds bayed in the sky. God help any man who died tonight, or any soul who wandered out of doors.

They were still drinking in the hall here at Brampton, celebrating the new shipment of Rhenish wine. William had been even more full of himself than usual. He stopped short of taking credit for the fact that spring had come at last—with summer hot on its heels—but he was clearly pleased with himself and his world.

Henry had begun to wonder if his brother was subject to a sort of divine madness. He seemed unable to see what the world was coming to, or to remember the warnings he had been given at Salisbury. He had turned his back on what gift he had, which was to see magic. Everything about him was defiantly, blindly mortal.

Rather unfortunately for his peace of mind, Henry had no such affliction. On this night, with the sounds of song and laughter coming faintly from without and the cries of the Hunt overhead, he knew deep in his bones that they were all coming to the end of things.

“And to think,” he said aloud to the darkness and the rose, “people said the world would end a hundred years ago. It seems they were somewhat off their reckoning.”

Over by the wall, under the shuttered window, his room-companion stirred and mumbled. “Henry? What—”

“Nothing,” Henry said. “Go back to sleep.”

His nephew Richard muttered a little more, incomprehensibly, then a soft snore gave proof that he had done as he was told. He was a good lad, one of Duke Robert's bastards, who must take after his mother: he was bright-eyed and quick-witted, and he was always in the thick of things. He would have been in hall tonight, carousing with the liveliest of them, if he had not been confined to bed with the last gasp of a winter rheum.

From the sound of his snore, that had nearly run its course. Henry sniffed experimentally. No sign of it in himself. He never had been ill; it was a gift, not uncommon if one had magic.

The Hunt was rampaging through the New Forest tonight, coming back again and again to the king's hunting lodge. Henry heard the snuffling of hounds at the windows, and the trampling of hooves on the roof.

Richard never budged. He was like his father, completely without magic. Even so, Henry would have thought he could hear the tumult. His own head ached with it.