King's Blood (39 page)

The Hunt retreated with the dawn. But it had not gone out of the world as it should have done. It was still in it, gone to ground but present in the back of his awareness: raising the hackles on his neck.

 
Richard was up with the sun, shaking Henry out of an uneasy doze. “Come! Up! Let's roust out the lads and get up a hunt.”

Henry peered at him. Maybe it was that he stood with his back to the opened shutters and the sun streaming in, but he looked like a shadow without substance. His voice, as bright and clear as it was, sounded oddly distant.

Henry was foggy-headed from lying awake and quaking all night. That was all it was. He let his nephew haul him to his feet and pitch clothes at him, some of which he put on.

He was more awake by the time he came down to the hall. There were others up and dressed for the hunt, drinking sops of yesterday's bread in wine and yelling for the huntsmen and the hounds. The doors, like the shutters in Henry's room, were open wide to let the sun in. It was a glorious morning, a fine May Day, and although the flowers were few and feeble, the sun's warmth could hardly be faulted.

Henry thought William might come down and join them, but both he and his sweet friend Walter were still abed. There were hunters enough without those two, and Richard ahead of them all, giddy with freedom after three days of coughing and sniffling in his bed.

Henry could not seem to let go of the night. The baying of the Hunt lingered in the back of his skull. As they rode down the forest track, flickering in and out of dappled sunlight, he kept thinking he saw skeletal shapes in the shadows of branches, and corpse-lights dancing just on the edge of vision.

Delusion, that was all. There was no creature of the Otherworld in the wood this morning, no spirit of air or hob of the wood. The branches were empty of anything but birds; the flash of movement in the undergrowth was a coney or a squirrel, and once the black mask and white-tipped tail of a fox.

They were hoping for bigger game: deer, or if they were lucky, boar. The huntsmen found sign of both, but nothing fresh. One or two knights who had brought falcons were fool enough to fly them in the wood; one darted off through the trees and was gone, and the other tangled its jesses in the woven boughs.

Henry was the quickest thinker, and still an agile climber though it had been a good many years since he clambered up every tree he could get his hands and feet on. He tossed his horse's reins to the nearest rider, who happened to be Richard, pulled off his boots and thrust them into his saddlebag, and tackled the tree in which the falcon was caught.

It was an oak, and old, as old as Britain. It should have been alive with spirits, but the only living things in it were a squirrel that scolded him fiercely, and the hawk struggling in its bonds.

It was too mortal, the sunlight too ordinary. It was trying too hard.

Henry shook himself. The Hunt had hooks in his soul. He slithered out along a branch, moving more carefully the thinner it became. He might be agile, but he had a man's weight now and not a boy's.

Even as cautious as he was, the branch creaked ominously before he could come within reach of the falcon. He drew in a breath and considered giving up. But it was only a little way, and it only needed a little Word, a simple bit of working. The branch steadied.

Something else, deep in the oak's heart, came awake. Henry slipped and almost fell. The rush of terror focused him admirably. He slid one last arm-length and grasped the tangle of the jesses. Carefully but quickly, he worked them free.

The falcon had stopped its struggling when he came near. It came into his hand, warm feathers and beating heart. Its beak and talons could have torn him to shreds, but it took station peaceably on his fist.

He descended one-handed, much more slowly than he had come up. When he was low enough, he handed the falcon down to the waiting falconer and paused, resting on the lowest branch.

While he was moving, nothing had seemed strange, but now that he was still, he could feel the tingling in his body wherever it touched the tree. It was not an unpleasant sensation at all, but it was odd, like the prickle in an arm or a leg after it had gone numb and begun to wake up again.

He laid both palms against the trunk. The tingling grew stronger, almost enough to make him draw back, but he stayed where he was. Somehow, whatever it was—life, magic, awareness—was flowing both ways. The oak was becoming a part of him and he was becoming a part of it.

Deep roots sank into the ground, drawing up the earth's strength. Broad branches spread to the sky, drinking the sun. Memory flickered in the human part of him: the oak that had created itself in his mother's tapestry, and the oak of Falaise in Normandy under which his father had been conceived.

This was a different earth, a different kingdom, but it was his earth. He had been born on this island—for this island. It knew him. It welcomed him.

This broken earth, this spreading blight, was like a sickness in his own body. The compulsion to heal it somehow, work magic on it, lay his will upon it, overwhelmed him. He clung to the branch, dizzy and half blind.

But not so blind that, lifting his eyes, he could not see through woven branches, piercing veils of mist and shadow. Spectral riders waited there, and spectral hounds, motionless, silent, hollow sockets fixed on the mortal hunt.

They were hunting souls. Humans had come into their domain, and they were hungry. The taste of blood was on Henry's tongue, so rich and sweet that he knew a moment's bliss before he gagged.

He slid off the branch and swung to the ground. His horse was waiting. As he swung into the saddle, Richard grinned at him. “Good view up there?”

Henry managed a sickly smile. “Trees, as far as the eye can see.”

“That's a forest for you,” his nephew said. “No deer? Or boar?”

“None that I could see,” said Henry.

Richard shrugged. “Let's go on, then. The wolves can't have eaten them all. Maybe we'll even find the white hart, the one who brings luck to the hunter who takes him down.”

Ah, thought Henry, but what kind of luck?

He was in a troublesome mood, to be sure. He fell into the middle of the pack—foolish cowardice, but he did not want the Wild Hunt picking him off from the front or the rear. Richard, oblivious as ever, had the lead; when the hounds found a fresh scent and began to bay, he whooped with glee.

Courage came belatedly. Henry tried to push through to Richard's side, but the track was too narrow and the trees too thick. A moment ago they had grown well apart.

He let himself fall back instead, and did what he could to ward the hunt: not easy at all in motion, distracted, with what was following them and flowing along beside them. The Hunt had not taken to the air—perhaps in daylight it could not? Though what advantage that gave him, he did not know.

They mounted a hill and emerged without warning in a long open meadow, a rolling expanse of fields that had just begun to grow up here and there with saplings. This would be one of the farmsteads that old William had seized in making this forest: a larger one than many, well cleared and still marked by stone fences and ragged lines of hedge. In the distance, beside a stream, Henry saw the ruins of a mill.

The hounds were in full cry, though Henry could not see what quarry they were after. The line spread out across the field, some of the knights running past Richard, whooping and singing.

Henry peered. Something was flickering ahead of them. It might have worn a stag's shape, or that of a fox. Or it might have been a shadow horse carrying a bone-thin man with the head and antlers of a stag.

Henry set spurs to his horse's sides. The beast was not accustomed to such treatment. It bucked and twisted. Henry rode it out, but the Hunt gained too much ground while he did it.

There were bows strung, arrows nocked. Richard dropped his horse's reins on its neck and stood up in the stirrups, aiming straight for the supposed stag's heart.

The horse veered around a tussock and stumbled. The arrow flew wide; the bow dropped. Richard caught at the saddle before he went tumbling after the arrow.

The apparition doubled and darted back, passing between Richard and the rest of the knights. One of them followed it with his arrow, then as it paused—directly in front of Richard—he loosed.

He must have seen a living stag. Henry saw air and delusion. The arrow passed through it without slowing or bending aside.

Richard had brought his horse to a halt and recovered himself, and was bending to peer at the foot on which the stallion had stumbled. The arrow pierced his throat and went on into the horse's shoulder.

The beast went mad with pain. Richard was dead before his body struck the ground. Between the arrow and the horse's panicked plunging, his throat was ripped asunder. The earth drank thirstily of his blood.

The shadowy Hunt moved in to take the rest of it. But Henry set himself between them and their prey. Every scrap of strength that he had, he poured into wards, protecting the body and its fragile, new-hatched soul. “No,” he said. “You don't get this one. Let his blood be enough.”

The Hunt hovered as if astonished, staring at him with eyes sunk deep in skull-gaunt faces. Some of those faces, he almost fancied he knew. One . . . was that Malcolm of Scots?

He shook off the distraction before it cost him his wards, and therefore his kinsman's soul. “Begone,” he said. “Your hunt is done. Seek out other prey, and let us be.”

The force of their resistance nearly flung him from the saddle, but he held on. He kept on staring them down. Whatever they might do to his body, his spirit would not waver.

They drew back. He braced for a feint, but it seemed their retreat was honest. They melted away into the grass and the sunlight.

CHAPTER 44

William looked down at his nephew's body. Henry and the others had brought it in, pacing slowly into the hall. They had done nothing to clean or conceal the ruin of the throat. The arrow lay on Richard's breast.

The knight who had killed him flung himself at William's feet, bawling like a bullcalf. “Sire, sire! I never meant—I was aiming at the deer—oh, before God, my soul is doomed!”

William suppressed the urge to hook a toe under the fool and roll him out of the way. He was a pious creature at the best of times; now that he had got himself in trouble, he was in open and audible torment. William had to raise his voice to be heard above the wailing and breast-beating. “Get a grip on yourself, man. Even from here I can see it was an accident.”

He was not feeling anything yet. The boy had been a promising young thing. William had even had a thought, once or twice, that if he could have had a son, this would not have been a bad one. The fact he had no magic was as much in his favor as his wits or his parentage.

Now the boy was dead in a foolish accident. That was the Devil's humor. William knelt and set a sign of the cross on the cold and blood-spattered brow, and covered the blankly staring face with his own mantle. “Call the priests,” he said. “Tell them to give him a proper burial.”

People were staring. He was supposed to do something for them to marvel at—weep, howl, swear vengeance. He was not moved to do any of those things.

The idiot who had shot Richard was still blubbering. William hauled him up and shook him to make him stop. Priests were coming—not too many, here at the hunting lodge, but enough to take Richard away and see to him. William pulled one out of the line and said, “Take care of this man. Confess him, absolve him. Tell him it's not his fault.”

That took care of that. There were still the rest of them to face. The hunters had a white, shocked look to them. The rest, who had stayed behind, were itching to do something, anything.

Not a hunt. Not after this. William chased them out to the field below the manor and put them to work doing battle exercises, mounted and afoot.

That was useful work, and strenuous. With luck it would wear them out before any of them got into trouble.

It wore William out quite nicely. An afternoon of hacking at pells and practicing with lances left him aching in every bone. It was a quiet dinner, for his court, and an early night even for the most dedicated of his hellions.

 
When he went up to bed, it was not Walter Tirel sitting on the stool, frowning at the banked fire. Walter Tirel had fallen over at the table after a mere two cups of wine, and William had been too tired and sore to haul him up the stairs.

Henry did not acknowledge William's presence, but William could tell he knew. “You look like a ghost,” William said.

“God knows I've seen enough of them,” said Henry.

“Well,” said William, “that, too. But I meant, you look just like the old man.”

“That old? That gross?”

William cuffed him. He barely swayed. “He wasn't always a bloated bladder. He was a fine figure of a man when he was young. You're prettier—he had that rock of a jaw, and that nose. You take after Mother there. But in this light, the way you sit, you could be the old bastard all over again.”

“She used to say I was too much like him,” Henry said. “Usually she meant I was surly. And too much inclined to let my magic just be, instead of learning how to use it.”

“I'd say she cured you of that. Remember what they used to call you? Beauclerc—the good scholar. You always had your nose in a grimoire.”

Henry smiled thinly. “I was trying to make people think it was grammar.”

“Everybody knew. You'd walk through walls. Or you'd stand there staring at something no one else could see, and sparks would fly off you. Then you'd go and get a sword and hack a post to splinters.”