The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III
Read The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III Online
Authors: Freda Warrington
OF THE MIDNIGHT KING
Copyright © 2003, 2014 Freda Warrington
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
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Cover art by Ruby © 2013 Ruby
Cover design by Freda Warrington
Bloodwine Books 2014
is dedicated to the memory of my father
Stanley Cecil Warrington
1916 – 2000
“Richard is gone from us, yet his name fascinates every tongue.” –Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Some reviews of Freda Warrington’s work
“Superb fusion of dazzling alternative history and smouldering romance... Tell all the romance fans and the fantasy fans you know about it.” –Justina Robson
“Beautifully written – but not for the cynical!” –Anne Lyle
“One of my very favourite historical fantasy novels, this is a lushly written alternate version of Richard III’s history, with magic and romance and a rich sense of period. Gorgeously written, a wonderful book to sink into.” –Stephanie Burgis
“A glittering treasure trove and a stunning read.” –Tanith Lee
“Storytelling that takes you where you don’t expect to go, and that exquisite sense of wonder that makes the heart of this old reader sing.” –Charles de Lint
“Freda Warrington’s prose is simply stunning, sumptuous, graceful and seductive.” –Starburst
“The writing is gorgeous, by turns haunting, lucid, and all-round beautiful… eminently readable, absorbing, and all-round brilliant, a lovely piece of work.” –Alex Bardy, British Fantasy Society
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Bosworth, 1485.
“The truth that none dares utter.”
Above Redemore Plain the sky darkened. It glowed violet, bluest violet, smudged with bars of cloud. On the humped back of Ambion Hill the encampment slept, waiting; the wind dropped and banners hung as ragged and as blue as the night. Silence rolled in.
So complete was the stillness that Raphael could hear the chirrup of frogs down in the marsh. He heard the rasp of horned toads and an owl’s fluting cry. Around him the land felt deserted. Even the slow spirits of the stones and the mercurial beings of the hedgerows were absent. Had they deserted in terror of the battle to come? Men feared the denizens of twilight, not realising that those spirits were more afraid of humans by far.
In the great, hushed darkness, he thought he could hear the voices of the enemy; snapping fragments of sound, far away. The usurper, flaunting his rose-red dragon and claiming to be sent by heaven to destroy the Adversary. Raphael spat a quiet curse in his direction, and slipped back into the king’s pavilion.
A lamp burned inside, glimmering on the cloth-of-gold walls, its flame as pallid as the gaunt face that reflected it. The king could not sleep. He had tried, only to wake with a shuddering gasp, complaining of dreadful nightmares, wraiths with pale fingers and yellow eyes waiting for him just below the surface of sleep. Recovering himself, he’d sent his concerned lieutenants away to their rest. Only Raphael remained, wide awake and glad to keep the vigil with him.
“Does anything stir out there?” asked the king. He was as Raphael had left him; sitting with his arms folded upon the table, gazing at the lamp.
“The sentries report that all is quiet.”
“Then it must be my own ghosts I can hear.”
“Sire, won’t you have an hour or two’s rest, at least?” Raphael spoke quietly, trying not to disturb the pages asleep in the outer chamber of the tent.
“It’s too late,” the king answered. “I’ll not sleep again tonight. I can only wait for the dawn. Fate tells me that I need a time of reflection.”
His face was a shell with light shining through; frail and pearly like that of a heavenly messenger, but more eerie than saintly. Raphael could imagine the same luminous face belonging to the most beautiful of angels, the morning star, Lucifer. The king’s hair was feathery shadow around his shoulders. His eyes were grey and shrouded, like twilight.
“Do you think that I am wicked, my friend?” he asked.
Raphael sat down on a canvas stool, facing him across the table. “No, sire, of course not.”
“I have been accused of poisoning, infanticide and incest, among other crimes. You know this full well.”
“Lies.”
“Have I been so bad a king?” His voice sounded thin and distant, as if it already came from beyond the veil of death. “The tales they tell of me run like fire from mouth to mouth, so that I must deny them even to my friends. I’m sick to the stomach with denial. After all, how in honesty can I say there’s no truth to the stories?
“They are only words, rumours…” Raphael trailed off, helpless.
“On the strength of rumours, a non-entity named Henry Tudor fashions himself as the revolving sword of God, come to slay the Devil. And look! My kingdom is sinking into the marsh.”
“No!” Raphael was fierce with denial. “That is utterly untrue. I can’t bear to see you disheartened.”
The king shook his head, his hair moving softly, like crow’s wings. “No, I’m not disheartened, don’t think that. I’m thinking aloud to unearth the truth. You’ve always helped me in that. You know more of my secrets than any other being, and this could be the last chance I have.”
Shuddering fear went through Raphael, from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair. His mouth was thick. He tried to go on breathing.
“It seems every weapon I ever used has been turned back upon me,” King Richard went on. “Myths are more enduring than truth, you have told me so yourself.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything. Ever.”
“No.” Richard spoke gently. “What, endured that on your own? You were right to tell me all. If you’d kept such matters to yourself, you would have failed me indeed. As it is, I’m prepared for the worst.”
Raphael had run out of answers. He wished himself anywhere but sitting in the midst of this quiet nightmare. “Dearest lord, don’t. You should rest, not think about…”
“My death?” Richard said calmly.
“I was going to say, my dream. It was only…”
“Perhaps real, and perhaps not. I know that. Well, in the morning this humour will be gone from me and I’ll go into battle roaring, a black dragon to affright the red. But now, Raphael, tell me…”
The merest slide of light changed Richard’s face from pearl to chiselled marble. He looked straight at Raphael and his expression was terrible, like that of a demon who’d passed through storms of madness to chilling serenity on the far side. “Is the Tudor right? Is his pious Beaufort mother right, everyone right? Have I been used as an instrument of Satan to bring the downfall of a rotten dynasty – while God has chosen to press his holy sword of vengeance into the paw of one Welsh-French nobody?”
“I’m surprised Tudor didn’t style himself with the name of an archangel,” said Raphael, so venomously that Richard laughed.
“Gabriel, or Michael… or Raphael. So, even the Devil’s chosen has an angel to comfort him through the longest night.”
Raphael poured wine for the king. His hand shook as he passed the cup. Receiving it, Richard kept his hand on Raphael’s for a moment. The king’s flesh felt as cold and steady as a dolmen.
“I don’t seem to be comforting you very well,” Raphael said.
“But you are.” Richard glanced behind him, where a small altar was set up near his bed. Candles fluttered around a small figure of the Virgin. “Given a choice between spending this night praying to a Creator who turned his back on me in childhood, and talking to a flesh and blood friend, I know which is more likely to save my soul.”
The wine was heavily watered, and tasted flat and ghostly. “I don’t care what you say, sire. There are souls in Tudor’s camp in far worse danger than yours.”
Richard grimaced. “I have done wrong, but what could I have done otherwise?” he said quietly. “Nothing. Thus I am condemned not only for my choices, but for what I am. Thus is the Devil condemned for being what his Creator made him.”
“Your Grace, don’t listen to their rumours and slanders. You can’t let yourself believe their lies.”
“I am not talking about the views of others,” Richard answered. “I’m talking about what I know of myself. There is a shadow in me, a great and dreadful shadow that would blot out the entire world if it were left unchecked. And this has not been stamped on me by enemies. They’ve glimpsed it, and that’s why they fear me. But the shadow was born with me, and awoke when I was a child. We were at Ludlow…”
His voice was soft and calm. The lamp burned blue. So intense was the hush outside that Raphael feared they had slipped into the hidden world. “Sire, you are low in spirits. This is nothing, a waking nightmare…”
“And you are an experienced walker in nightmares,” Richard retaliated. Suddenly he was disturbingly cheerful. “Asleep or awake, I can’t escape hideous visitations tonight, but at least I have you at my side. I have never told anyone this before. Let me tell you about the waking of the shadow.”
###
Richard ran through the wildwood, deeper and deeper. Vibrant images haunted him, of his father and brothers fighting a battle far away. It would be days before he knew whether they had lived or died. No one even cared to tell a boy of seven; he would be the last to know. Distraught with frustration, he had evaded tutors and guardians to escape the castle walls, and now he ran and ran.
At first he was bold, striking out at bushes and shadows with a twig sword. One day his weapons would be true metal and the shadows would be enemies of flesh and armour. He would fight alongside his brothers, turning the red rose crimson with blood.
He dreamed of survival, more than glory. His family’s survival.
But for now he was only a child, suddenly lost and cold. The shadows began to move and whisper. Looking back the way he’d come, he saw no path, only the gnarled gloom of woods enclosing him. The moss-green eyes of elementals followed him from heavy, wet canopies of leaves. He saw their thin long limbs, like folded brambles. They stared at him, pointing, whispering.
Richard let the sword fall to his side and backed away.
Dark blue twilight dripped through the trees. There was only one way to go, a thread of a path taking him even farther from safety. Ahead shone a gap in the trees, a patch of slate sky in which a single bright star hung like a white rose. He fled towards it, feet and heart pounding.
Where the trees ended there lay a marsh, stretching away into a blue mist. Two herons started up at his approach and flapped away, luminous in the dusk, their long legs stirring layers of vapour. The boy swallowed a cry of shock. He stood trapped between the wildwood and the marsh. Water gleamed in the saturated sapphire light. Tussocks crouched in the turbid water. Like ghosts the herons were gone and nothing moved, yet everything watched him, breathing.
Richard knew he’d made a dreadful mistake. He’d strayed out of the real world and into the netherworld, the dread place that came to life only while God-fearing men slept. He breathed hard, clutching his twig sword. Damp, rank air filled his lungs. Away to his left he saw a natural rock arch at the wood’s edge, and beyond, a great rock containing the slit of a cave mouth. If only he could reach the cave, he could shelter there, and set up his sword at the entrance like a cross to ward off the famished shadows. God the Creator would protect him until morning. So his mother always told him.
His feet slid on the tussocks. The cave was further away and bigger than it seemed. The entrance looked threatening, not a refuge but a mouth to the demon-realm. An eerie tongue of light lapped within. There was something alive in there, moving, chanting…
The fog thickened. He could see barely an arm-span ahead. He stopped, shivering, tasting blood. He’d bite his tongue to ribbons before he would let himself cry.
A woman took shape out of the mist like the prow of a ship.
He stood rooted and helpless as she sailed towards him. He glimpsed dangling sleeves of charcoal velvet, a tissue of black silk stiffly framing her head, a terrible, stern white face with gold eyes boring into his.
A sorceress.
“Child, how did you come here?” she said.
Richard couldn’t speak. Petrified, he watched her long pale hands coming towards him. Her fingers touched him, moving over his shoulders, his cheeks, into his hair. The touch felt light and waxen, faerie-like.
“It is late for you to be out alone. You strayed too far from the path. You trespass where you do not belong.”
He nodded, trying to say, Your pardon, my lady, I meant no harm. At last he managed a whisper. “The path brought me here.”
“And so it did. Therefore you have been called. No one comes among us without a reason. Would you walk the spiral chambers with us to the innermost heart of the shell?”
Her eyes frightened him. She looked mad, or in a trance. He tried to back away but her hands closed tight on his skull. The pressure made his bones ache, brought red fire behind his eyes – and then a grotesque vision.
His mouth fell open. He was looking at a severed head. The head of a robust man with greying hair and the plain weathered face of a foot-soldier, stuck on a spike beneath a market cross. The parchment skin was yellow and the lips hung slack. The eyes looked sideways at Richard, as if in deadly warning.
The face was dead and yet alive, animated by the leaping light of a hundred candles. An old woman was in the act of lighting them. She rose and lifted the head off its spike, cradled it for a moment then set it down amid the candles. She began to comb the grey hair and wash the blood-daubed cheeks, all the while sobbing and murmuring to the head.
“Your sons will avenge you,” she lamented. “Your grandson will avenge you.”
It was not only the head that horrified Richard, but the old woman’s despair.
He cried out. The vision vanished. The witch removed her hands from his hair and now gazed at him with her un-human eyes.
“With every step the path divides,” she said.
“The path divides,” echoed a higher voice.
The voice came not from the sorceress but from somewhere near her hip. Richard saw she had a small companion, a familiar that lurked behind her, peering around her skirts. It had wild black hair and eyes like marsh-fire. An elf-child. The words issuing from the childish mouth made the creature more terrifying than its mistress.
“What did you see?” asked the sorceress.
“What does it mean?” asked her familiar.
Richard shook his head mutely. Their faces shone with witch-light, mocking, demanding. He was sure he’d wandered into hell.
“I don’t know. A man beheaded. Is it…” He struggled for the right word. “Is it a prophecy?”
The elf-child’s eyes rolled back in its head, showing two moon-white crescents. Imp and witch spoke in unison.
“There is no such thing as prophecy. No such thing as destiny. This is the truth that none dares utter.”