The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (67 page)

FROM HIS PLACE ON THE STEPS, GALING, TOO, HAD A good view of the square. He saw the crowds parting, parting like grass in the wind to let the man pass through them. Some people jeered and laughed; others shouted warnings. A few people were ignoring the man altogether, holding on to themselves as if they were afraid they’d shiver into pieces, their faces shocked or streaked with tears. By this, Nicholas knew that what he had just felt, others had felt as well.

The man, of course, was Theron Campion. Not off in the country after all. Just where he was, he did not seem aware himself. He strode through the crowd now as if it really were a field of grass, wearing nothing but a pair of rough breeches, his decorated chest bared for the world to see. Nicholas smiled with grim fascination.

Lord Theron’s chest flashed in and out; he had been running. But now he approached the steps with a gliding, measured pace, his head held high, his eyes fixed on his lover, Basil St Cloud.

A year ago, Nicholas would have been anticipating a scene out of a bad melodrama: a lover’s quarrel grown into a public scandal, with one or both of the participants driven mad by love. But Nicholas had lost the comfortable certainty that he knew how the world worked. A moment ago, St Cloud had produced a wizard’s book and read from it, and something had happened. Nicholas hadn’t known about the book. But the rest of it—that St Cloud fancied himself a wizard and Theron his sacred king—he had deduced from the evidence he’d collected for Arlen. Arlen, who was not present at the debate. Lord Arlen, the Serpent Chancellor. Other Council posts passed from man to man, but the Serpent was always Arlen.

Over by the statue of Imagination, the Northerners had set up some kind of chant. He couldn’t catch the words, but he would bet anything it had to do with kings. Crabbe’s followers were shouting, “Foul!”; a fight had broken out in a corner of the plaza. He heard a woman’s voice cry, “Theron!” and saw the ranks of Doctors shift as Lady Sophia struggled through them toward her son.

Ignoring it all, Theron saw the man who waited for him on the steps. His lover was the man in his dreams, the man in the wood, the man with the knife and the pelt of a bear. His lover was his teacher and his magister, who had filled him all winter with his magic, and waited for him now to achieve his trial and take up his new responsibility. Theron climbed the steps and knelt before him and looked up into his face.

Basil smiled, intimate and loving, as if they two were alone in the world. “It is well that you kneel, my king. For it is the time of Sowing. The time of testing is done, and now the Land may rejoice in you.”

From inside his robe he drew forth a chain, the gold chain that Theron had given him in love. He lifted the chain in both hands so that the sun ran like fire through its heavy links. “And now,” he said, “be bound to the Land: blood and bone, beast and man, until the day of your death and ever afterward.”

The tableau held for a moment, still and bright as the painted glass window in the Great Hall above them, gesture for gesture and pose for pose: the black-robed wizard holding aloft the blinding gold chain, the young king kneeling before him to receive its weight.

The picture was not lost on the crowd in the plaza. “Look!” Nicholas heard the cries from the crowd, and saw what he had feared: a legend being brought out of the shadows and into the world.

He had no more time, now. This is what he had been sent for. Arlen’s last words to him rang clearly and precisely in his head: “Have you come across anything in your investigation to convince you that magic exists?”

Arlen had not said, “I do not believe in magic.” He had asked a question, and Nicholas had answered it with a diplomatic lie. Now was the moment for him to return a true answer. If he was wrong, he would face disgrace, banishment, death. But if he was right, he would be as great a liberator as the great Duke David—even if only one man ever knew the truth.

His knife in his hand, Nicholas Galing leapt forward to kill the king.

HE’D HAD TRAINING WITH A KNIFE, OF COURSE— anyone who carried a knife without knowing how to use it was a danger chiefly to himself. But he’d never really used it on a man before. Galing had time to be amazed at how easy he found it to stab into living flesh again and again before he was caught and held fast by two horrified magisters. His hands were sticky with blood, his face and coatsleeves spattered with it. He was sweating and panting as if he’d been running. He heard people sobbing and wailing, and shouting for order or for help. Roger Crabbe was yelling, “What is it? What happened? We must finish the debate! Where is St Cloud?”

Basil St Cloud could not answer him. He lay on the steps unhearing, surrounded by Doctors of Physic. But even the immense bounty of their knowledge was helpless against the wounds he had taken. It had happened too quickly. There was no breath left in him now, no thought, no life. His heart and mind had stopped together.

And Theron Campion lay bloody across his mother’s lap. She was muttering, very softly and quickly, a stream of words in a language no one understood, and twisting the cloth of her robes and petticoats around the gashes in his body, as the blood kept welling through. Nicholas Galing had managed to do a lot of damage with his dagger between the time that Basil had flung himself in front of Theron and the nearest scholars had realized what was happening and pulled him off them both.

“Sophia.”

She did not look up. “Jessica. More bandages.”

Jessica leaned down, handed her a sash. “Sophia. They are taking Galing away. Say the word, and I’ll do for him now.”

Sophia shook her head, twisting the sash. “Put your hand here—right here, and press hard.”

Jessica was used to blood. “I know.”

Leonard Rugg stood by Basil’s body, spinning like a top, looking for something, someone who could do something. He didn’t know who, and he didn’t know what, but there must be something. Cassius and Elton were holding his shoulders, saying his name and Basil’s, and then he saw what he was looking for: the men, the young men, the flowers of scholarship, the fruit of Basil’s garden, they were here, fighting toward him through the swirling crowd, and he called to them, “Men! Men! Don’t let this be for nothing!”

Lord Edmond Godwin saw his son, Peter, all childhood gone from his face. He seized the boy’s arm, saying, “We must go; this is going to get worse.”

But Peter shook his head. “You go,” he said through tear-swollen lips. “Tell them what happened here. You saw. Tell them, Father. Tell them.”

Lord Edmond looked out over the square. “The Guard is coming, not a moment too soon. Peter—”

And then he shouted, because one of Peter’s friends, a scrawny scarecrow of a fellow, had hurled himself in the direction of Lord Nicholas Galing. “You fools!” Lord Edmond bellowed to Galing’s captors. “Get him out of here
now!
Can’t you see what will happen?
Now,
I say!”

A big student wrestled down the scrawny one with Peter’s help, and all Edmond’s attention fell to clearing a path and giving commands to move and secure Galing inside the Great Hall, where they could wait while order was restored to the riot brewing outside.

But save for the main participants in the drama, the witnesses to the debate had little stomach for riot. As the City Guard marched into the square, the people dispersed, leaving a clear path to the steps. And the Guard themselves parted to admit a sweating horseman in Council livery, who delivered his message to Lord Edmond as the man in charge: Lord Nicholas Galing was to be transported directly to Arlen House, there to answer to the Serpent himself.

The great Doctor Tortua, Horn Chair Doctor of History, author of
Hubris and the Fall of the Kings
, looked down on the milling, muttering Doctors and Governors, on the Guards and nobles, students and shopkeepers, the dead man and the dying. Of all of them there, only he had come close to knowing what Basil St Cloud had known. He no longer remembered who St Cloud was, but he recognized what he had just witnessed as a page of his beloved ancient history, torn from the Archives and enacted on the bright courtyard steps like some schoolboy pageant.

He waited a long time, until he realized that there was to be no more ceremony, no more speeches, no more challenge or sacrifice, and that the beautiful lady who had held his arm was not coming back either. Doctor Tortua turned away in dismay.

“They got it wrong,” the old scholar said, disappointed. “They got it all wrong.”

chapter
VIII

THE GREEN MAN WAS TOO PUBLIC, COPPICE’S room too small, so the Northerners went to earth in the oak grove. Tamed and threatened by the city though it was, the grove still felt more like home than any other place in this uncaring South. They might rage there, and huddle among the roots of ancient trees and mourn the death of all their hopes.

Lindley was with them, weeping convulsively in the arms of a man whose name he did not know. Basil St Cloud was dead, and Lindley had seen him die, watched him leap into the path of the assassin’s knife and receive it in his breast, his neck. He’d seen the blood and the pain in his magister’s face, and it hadn’t been beautiful or noble or romantic. It had been horrible. And now it was over—Basil St Cloud was over—and Anthony Lindley was feeling such pain as he had never felt before, not when Finn had died, not even in the Chop.

“Steady, steady,” the man murmured. “Remember you’re a warrior, a King’s Companion. The battle goes on, though the king is dead.”

Lindley sat up at that, wet-faced. “I don’t care about Campion,” he gasped. “He never understood any of it. Kings come and go, or they would if there were any. It’s wizards that are important, and the last one is dead, and I loved him.”

The Northerner shrugged himself away from Lindley and got up. “Suit yourself, Southron,” he said.

Forlorn, Lindley hugged his knees and watched as the Northerners drifted in ones and twos to the center of the clearing. This was where he’d found Finn, and where they’d built the fire and danced at MidWinter. He had understood then, or thought he did. His blood had certainly understood, igniting his flesh so that he had felt himself a lantern, a torch flaming with wisdom and joy and love. It was what Lindley had loved in Alaric, the burning intensity of his belief in the old ways; in possessing him, Lindley possessed the secrets, the history, the magic of the ancient North, his true heritage.

The Northmen had linked arms, and were circling slowly, heads bowed so that their braids fell down over their faces. After a time, they stopped, and drew the knives from their belts. Coppice stepped inward and held the edge of his knife over his outstretched arm.

“It is the time of Sowing,” he said formally. “If we are to have a merry Harvest, the Land must have its mede of blood to quicken it. Lacking a king, the ritual has fallen on the Companions as it has for these many years. This Spring, we had hoped for a true king to lead us, but he was killed before we might even greet him.

“Perhaps this is not an age for kings. But as long as there are Companions to perform the ritual, we will perform it, and the Land will prosper.”

He brought the edge of the knife down on his forearm and sliced open a shallow cut that bled freely.

“We give our life’s blood to you,” he said. “Drink well. Bear well. Love us as we love you.”

One by one, the Northerners cut their arms and spoke their prayers and let their blood fall on the bright new grass. At some point, Lindley went to the circle and drew his knife and touched the shoulder of Burl, who was Second Companion and had the right to refuse or accept him. Burl hesitated a long moment, then moved aside to give Lindley a place. And when the time came, Lindley cut his arm and said the ritual in a steady voice, and lay with Burl afterward, as the custom was, and kissed each man on the mouth. For all the magic that was left in the Southland was here, and he wanted to be a part of it, as it had become a part of him.

But when the ritual was done and the Northerners began to talk of practical matters—whether the guard would arrest Coppice and his second, what to do about Greenleaf and Smith—Anthony Lindley left the grove and returned to the city and university that were his home.

THREE WOMEN STOOD WATCH OVER THERON CAMPION as his fragile flesh swung his soul between the worlds of life and death. His breathing was shallow but even, punctuated by little moans of pain he did not know that he was making. His mother sat beside him, taking his pulse and feeling his brow, feeding him liquid when he would take it. If there was infection, she might not save him, but she had cleaned the wounds and bandaged him with fresh linen.