The Orphan King (2 page)

A
s bells rang for
none
, the church service three hours past midday, Thomas should have been toiling in the gardens of the abbey and knew that he risked a flogging if he were caught. But compared to the actions he was considering, abandoning the garden was a minor crime not worth giving a second thought.

Conscious, though, that it would be much better for his absence not to be noticed, Thomas moved quickly. He glanced back to see if he’d been followed and saw only the cold stone walls of the abbey hall blurred by trees. The valley that contained the abbey was narrow and compressed, more rock and stunted trees on the slopes than sweet grass and sheep—probably the reason it had been donated to the mother abbey long ago by an earl determined to buy his way into heaven.

The mother abbey at Rievaulx, just outside of Helmsley, was part of the large order of Cistercian monks and had always accepted such gifts. With this one, Rievaulx had quickly established an outpost designed to earn more money for the church. Time had proven the land too poor, however, and barely worth the investment of abbey hall, library, and living quarters made from stone quarried directly from the nearby hills.

Thomas moved quickly through an exposed patch of hillside into the trees near the tiny river that wound past the abbey. Years of avoiding the harsh monks had taught him secret ways through the old abbey, hidden paths on the abbey grounds, and every deer trail in
the surrounding hills. He had been forced to learn how to move quietly. At times he would approach a seemingly solid stand of brush, then slip sideways into an invisible opening among the jagged branches and later reappear farther down the hill.

His familiarity with the terrain, however, did not make him less cautious. He shuddered at the consequences of allowing the monks to discover what he had hidden from them all these years.

Several bends upstream from the abbey hall, comfortably shaded by large oaks, stood a jumble of rocks and boulders, some as large as a peasant’s hut. Among them, a freak of nature had created a dry, cool cave, its narrow entrance concealed by jutting slabs of granite and bushes rising from softer ground below.

Thomas circled it once. Then he slipped into a crevice and surveyed the area.

“Count to one thousand,”
echoed the instructions that had been given to him time and again.
“Watch carefully for movement and count to one thousand. Let no person ever discover this place.”

Thomas settled into the comforting hum of forest noises, alert for any sign of intruders, and pondered the day.

First, he would need the power of knowledge hidden within the cave. Then time to assemble that power. Thomas half smiled.
So much waiting inside among the books …

Enough time had passed. He circled slowly once more, remembering, as he did every time, the love Sarah had given him along with the instructions.

“Never, never speak of the existence of the books. Always, always, be sure beyond doubt no person sees you slip into the cave. The books have the power of knowledge beyond price. Take from them, and never, never speak of their existence.”

When Thomas stepped in the coolness of the cave, sadness overwhelmed him with the darkness. It never failed to remind him of his mother and how badly he missed her and the secrets she’d made him keep, secrets for keeping both of them safe.

He knew it was his imagination, but as always, he believed he could hear, somewhere in the darkness, how she’d whispered on her deathbed the startling revelations that he’d had to hold deep inside.

“Thomas, there is so much I wanted to tell you when you were older. I believed this was just another fever, but now I cannot deny that I will be gone before the hour. Thomas, I am your mother and love you as much as any mother has loved any son. I took you and fled from evil men to hide from them here, men who pretend one thing during the light of day and another at night, men who believe in human sacrifices. My greatest fear is that someday they would find us and make of us a sacrifice beneath a full moon, burning us alive in baskets hanging from an oak tree in the same manner that they killed your father and your older brother and older sister, when they took the kingdom from our family. Thomas, pretend, always, that I was your nursemaid, as I pretended to you all these years. My prayer was to watch you grow into a man and become one of us, one of the Immortals. You will help us destroy the circle of evil.”

In her final minutes he wept in her arms, trying to comprehend her words, begging her to sit up and sing to him again. She’d clutched his wrists with a supernatural strength, as if she were clinging to life itself. Then came a single moment of fierceness and clarity as she’d found the energy, just before collapsing with a final breath, to make him swear that he would someday understand and destroy the evil that had sent them fleeing.

Thomas knelt as he always did when entering the cave. Not in prayer, but in honor of her memory. And he spoke into the emptiness,
as he always did upon kneeling. “I will never forget you. I will never forget the sacrifices you made for me. I will never forget my vow to you upon your deathbed. I will protect with my life what you have given me, and I will use it as you have directed.”

Saying it, however, he felt a shiver of fear. And hated himself for it.

Thomas felt like a knight in a legend who proudly told the king he would slay a dragon. Easy to promise far, far from a fire-breathing monster. But nearing the dragon’s lair, as the smell of sulphur grew stronger and the sound of shifting scales came from the gloom ahead, few were the men whose bowels wouldn’t loosen in fear. Few were the men who would lift a sword and plunge forward.

For Thomas, his time was nearly upon him, and he was discovering that he wasn’t among the few whose bravery could overcome the roar of the dragon. He wanted to be a boy again, when a simple caress of Sarah’s fingers across his cheek and a gentle song were all that was needed to ease the tremblings of nightmares.

He stood motionless, steadying his breathing until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He waited another fifteen minutes. Then he moved forward to the shaft of sunlight that fell through a large crack where one slab leaned crookedly against another.

With little hesitation, he pulled aside a rotting piece of tree that looked as if it had grown into the rock. Thomas dragged out a chest as high as his knees and as wide as a cart. He opened the lid, reached inside, and gently lifted out a leather-bound book the size of a small tabletop.

He searched page after page, carefully turning and setting down each leaf of ancient paper before scanning the words.

Nearly an hour later, he grunted with satisfaction. His plans were sound. If he had the courage, it was possible to succeed in a seemingly impossible task.

Magnus could be his. An orphan boy could claim the power and authority of a near king. And with that power, he could begin the hunt that he’d vowed to his mother.

But only if he had the courage. Nothing in his life had tested him, proven to him that he was capable of slaying a dragon. He fought his shiver of fear and fought the impulse of self-hatred and, kneeling again, repeated his vows.

“I will never forget you. I will never forget the sacrifices you made for me. I will never forget my vow to you upon your deathbed. I will protect with my life what you have given me, and I will use it as you have directed.”

Even so, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a lie.

Without hurry, he returned the book to the chest, then the chest into its spot in the stone, then the lumber in front of the chest. There were other bundles, the contents very familiar to him, that he scooped into his arms. Finally, he was ready to take them and hide them outside the cave.

To be absolutely certain it was safe, he silently counted to one thousand at the entrance of the ruins before edging back into the forest with the intent to move the bundles to a safe place well away from the abbey. Only then would he return to his menial labor in the garden.

And, as always when leaving the cave, he wondered about his mother’s last words.

Who were the Immortals?

The monks—only four of them because the abbey was so small and insignificant—finished their evening meal, and Thomas began to clear
away the pots and greasy plates. The monks were in no hurry to push back from the table. Their goblets of mead—a wine of fermented honey and water—were only half-empty, and there was another full jug in front of them to finish at their leisure.

If it remained a typical night, they would sit at the table for at least another hour, drinking and belching and picking their teeth. If it remained a typical night, as Thomas had been planning, he’d take advantage of this and flee the abbey.

If he could find the courage.

Now well past the age of an apprentice, Thomas had been raised in this abbey since a boy. He’d known no other life except one that forced work upon him from before the rise of the sun to long after the first candles had been lit. Until he discovered a letter from the mother abbey a few months earlier, it had never occurred to him to resent the tasks put upon him. Repeatedly the monks had told him that if it weren’t for their generosity in allowing him to stay at the abbey, he’d be homeless and wandering the countryside like any other orphan. He’d believed it. Until finding the letter in an obscure part of the abbey’s archives.

Yet during the years of believing he must depend on the charity of these men—long, long before finding the letter—he’d come to loathe their gluttony. Each meal he watched them gorge themselves to the point of illness, enjoying fattened geese and grain-fed ducks and chicken. In the mornings, when women came to the gate to beg for alms for the dirty and rail-thin children clinging to their hands, the monks would send them away, quoting biblical verses from Proverbs about the need for industry and self-sufficiency, casting blame on the mothers for their apparent laziness. This, even though the abbey had been founded with permission from the king on the agreement that a percentage of the abbey’s income be dedicated to the poor.

Everything in his mind told Thomas this was the night he must flee and never return.

He needed courage, because as Thomas was reluctant to admit to himself, a man is more often driven by the heart than the mind.

Over the past week, he’d used his mind and all his other resources to make the plans that, in the cool silence of the cave where he often hid from the monks, seemed to have no flaw. In the world of his dreams, he could picture himself as the hero, overcoming every obstacle set in his path. In those dreams, fear did not exist. In those dreams, matters of the mind triumphed over matters of the heart. In those dreams, intellect conquered emotion.

Outside the cave, however, was the real world of cold and hunger, of sheriffs and soldiers armed with crossbows and swords, of dark forests and narrow roads where every corner might hide roaming bandits eager to prey upon the weak. Of a castle with impregnable defenses.

Beneath the trees and the rustling leaves just outside the sanctuary of the cave, Thomas would feel the fear that did not exist inside the cave, knowing those all-too-real dangers should force him to reconsider the boldness of the plans. Even so, it was more than a lack of courage that gave him doubts.

He was an orphan. When Sarah had died, he had lost the last of his family. He had only memories of her, and questions about the father and the older brother and sister who had been taken from him before there could be memories. Pitiful as the children were who clung to their mothers outside the gates, they had something Thomas did not. A true sense of belonging.

Thomas had a shadow of this feeling, enough to identify the source of what made him ache during his loneliest moments. Inside the abbey, despite the abuse heaped upon him, Thomas was still part of a group,
with rituals and the familiarity of what to expect each day. He had a bed, miserable as the straw ticking was, and a room of his own.

This was a comfort of sorts, enough to hint at what it might feel like to be part of a real family, loved and secure. As it was, he did belong to this group, even if the men in this group were arrogant and unkind and treated him with more disdain than they did the livestock. It was one thing to be lonely—he could endure this because he had no choice. It was another thing to be alone.

Could he find the courage to make the choice to become alone?

To flee the abbey would not only force him to risk his life on a plan that seemed to contain too many obstacles to succeed, but it would also cast him into the unknown, out into the world where he would not have even the certainty of knowing where he would rest each night. Compared to that, the occasional beating from Prior Jack did not seem like such a poor bargain.

The truth was simple. He was more afraid of being alone than of failing. The combination of the two fears was almost overwhelming.

Thomas wasn’t certain he could find the courage to flee the abbey, even after he’d learned through that letter about the injustice of his imprisonment among the monks.