A King in Cobwebs

by David Keck

  “She died? Is that what you intend by this poetry, brother?”

  “Indeed, and she must have lain undisturbed for all those sad years before a gang of hardy louts from Errest the Old made their way into the empty forest, intent on robbing land from the silence and the spirits. They found a likely place for their forest stronghold: a glade in a grove of lindens. Axes rang as they broke the soil, and they built up a fortress of timber set high upon a mound of earth.”

  “Showing commendable prudence and industry, I’m sure, but what has this to do with our Godelind, pray tell, brother?”

  Durand hunched his shoulders as the whispers scurried around his skull like spiders or wasps or Heaven knew what. He put a hand to his head.

  “I am just coming to it, brother. For, you see, it was while our stout-hearted exiles made a stockade of the lindens atop their forest mud heap that they turned up poor Godelind.”

  “How improbable.”

  “A prodigy, then, surely, brother. And they knew her by the love token twinkling upon the delicate bones of her tiny hand.”

  “The ring!”

  “There in a shovel of muck was Calamund’s ring, the better part of four centuries since the Lost Princes.”

  “Or Heraric’s ring, four centuries and so on.”

  “Godelind’s, anyway. The fat carbuncle like a drop of heart’s blood. A sign of love, undimmed by ages. They reckon she must’ve swooned among the lindens, her eyes upon the southern sky with hope and life having died with her Lost Prince.”

  “Or she was dragged there by beasts. Wolves are a dogged breed, brother. Was the body entire?”

  “Uncannily so, by all accounts.”

  “And the story brought men south.”

  “Men and women and boys and girls into the Fellwood, where the ring remains enshrined in this Lindenhall, and the pennies of pilgrims have built walls of stone for the halls of linden.”

  “Most enterprising. A happy end to a sad tale. But why do I feel that I know this sad history? I am sure I have not heard it, though I can almost see that poor girl. And the ring. The band is serpentine. Two twining creatures clutching the fat stone.”

  “Serpents and a bloody stone! We have dreamt it, brother. Now why should that be?”

  “Here is the interesting part, I think, for—”

  Durand glanced up just as a stone smashed the half-rotten bird. He turned and saw Ailric’s face: wide-eyed but closed-mouthed. The man’s well-aimed rock had scattered fragments of one Rook down the trail. The other hopped into the air, with its hoarse laughing call.

  “I didn’t like the look of the things,” said Ailric carefully.

  “No,” said Durand, as the scuttling syllables began to file from his head. “It’s a devilish place.”

  He tried a deep breath. But, in another step or two, Brand overtook the surviving Rook. The thing had landed among its brother’s remains and was greedily jabbing its beak deep in the breast of its brother’s carcass. The thing seemed to notice Ailric and Durand staring down.

  “Flesh is flesh. To act otherwise is to deny the immortality of the soul. A sacrilege of sorts. And we were priests once, before curiosity became our master.”

  Even Ailric could not throw a stone.

  11

  The Marches of Fellwood

  Too soon, they lost the light—and with it, any hope of reaching the Lindenhall before nightfall. By Durand’s reckoning, the tourney began on the next day. They had ridden hard.

  They chose a campsite on the barren floor between the giant trees. A few blankets were all they had, but they bedded down. Durand thought of the Rooks’ Godelind and the Lost Princes. He thought of the Herald of Errest who’d watched the poor brothers die. And he wondered where the Rooks had gone.

  “Sir Euric came for the hunting,” Ailric said, in an undertone. “There is a brute like a bullock, sudden as a stag. Boar in droves. Bear. Wolf. He’d heard there might be lion.”

  Somewhere, a pinecone or acorn detached itself from a high limb. It struck the ground like a stone a few paces from the tent, the thud galloping off through leagues of silence. The horses shifted uneasily.

  “But he did not care for the place when he saw it,” Ailric said. “We lost four huntsmen before he made up his mind.”

  Another acorn struck the earth like a stone from a catapult.

  “It is no hunting park,” said Durand.

  * * *

  DARKNESS SWALLOWED THEM up as they lay on the floor of the ancient forest like sea-buried sailors on the bottom of a black and teeming ocean. Columns of insects whined in the fathoms and leagues of clammy darkness. A moth fluttered like eyelashes against Durand’s face. And there were bats and scuttling things as well, all crowding the darkness. But these creatures were only the mundane denizens of Fellwood, and there were other beings among the trees: thralls abandoned in the Heshtarians’ flight, Banished spirits of the wastelands, and the Lost of ages. Any fool could see it was no place for men. Durand could not imagine dragging plowmen here.

  Twigs snapped; he could not say how near. But nothing came.

  And Durand turned his back on the denizens of the dark, groping his blankets tighter.

  * * *

  “IT CAME UPON us with the whispers, do you recall? And now, among these devilish old trees, does it not plague you? The ring? A girl like a ghost among the lindens. A dream. A dream. A dream.”

  Durand woke.

  “You lie if you claim to know linden from lilac, brother dear.”

  “True, brother, true. But why should we dream of this Godelind and her jewelry? What has it to do with our Whisperer?”

  “But it could be any ring in the dream. Any girl. What makes you think it is this Godelind?”

  As Durand lay in the gloom, he realized that he’d been hearing a household sound: a baby squalling in some distant room. It took a heartbeat for him to recall that he was on his back in Fellwood.

  “Well, first, mad Ragnal sends our friend to the Lindenhall, of all places. And, second— Ah, wait, he’s awake!”

  A fog had flooded the forest, thick as new milk. Around Durand, the boles of mighty trees stood like a ring of stones—but between the trees were shadows: a second ring of human shapes.

  Durand rolled up, fumbling the chained flail from his belt. The shadows could have been Leovere’s raiders or devils from the Fellwood, but Durand found that he knew them. The hitches and crooks of their posture told him enough: one silhouette could only be Euric with his bloody head cocked and, there, the beggar king with hardly a head at all. Durand might have taken a strange comfort in knowing the congregation for what it was, but the child was still wailing, and there could be no live child in this company. What infant had he killed and when?

  He searched the fog and shadows for the source of the cry.

  A woman stood nearer than the rest of the crowd. Young, she seemed, and pale. Her hair was long and black. Her gown was soaked with water. The smell of rushes and thick streams of algae reached him. And in the woman’s arms was a struggling bundle. Very small. The woman’s face was tilted toward the tiny shape. And the cry sent Durand back. He remembered those days just after he left his father’s hall when he’d stumbled in with Radomor’s men. He remembered long hours standing guard over Duke Radomor’s poor wife: Alwen, Abravanal’s daughter. This was the same child. No one knew what Radomor had done with the child, but Alwen ended in the river. They said she’d made a cuckold of Radomor. He remembered Radomor sitting in his hall at Ferangore. The diabolical fury. He remembered standing at Alwen’s door: the swelling dread, the shame. In that tower at Ferangore, Durand had caught hold of her arm when she’d made to leave. She’d looked up into his face, with eyes desperate and black as ink. Ten years later in that forest clearing, here she was, and her child with her. Dead. He recalled the infant quailing at the heart of Radomor’s monstrous Champion, part of the Rooks’ sorceries: that thing wrought of Radomor’s dead kin. Of the man’s poor father. Of the man’s son.
r />   Such horror. Durand had been blind. A mad child. He thought back on himself as a young shield-bearer leaving the Col, bidding farewell to Ailric, running off to join the first knights to pass. What a dangerous thing he’d been.

  Alwen and her crying infant were three steps from him. He could see her shoulder, the sodden wing of hair over the infant’s face. The rest of the congregation pressed closer, from the fog—bloody, maimed—drifting nearer. Each one looking on.

  Guilt and shame crushed him to the earth. Alwen was turning toward him; he could not yet see her face. What could he ever do that might outweigh that moment when he’d caught the woman’s arm? He had endured women, children, warriors, and blameless common men, all dead. Now, though, it was more than he could endure.

  At the last instant, something twitched through the dead crowd and every eye among them suddenly darted to the same spot, fixing on something: Something beyond Durand, something in the trees. For heartbeat after heartbeat, every dead soul froze where it stood. Could it be terror he saw in their white faces? Durand was afraid to look.

  He became conscious of the horses’ snorts.

  Then, just as he found the will to move, the Lost scattered, flashing into the fog high and low like a vast shoal of minnows.

  He had seen only the merest glimpse of Alwen’s black eyes, of her child’s blue face. And he was left on his belly with Ailric crouched alongside.

  “How many?” said Ailric. His voice was scarcely audible.

  Durand turned on the young man, not sure what he had seen beyond a grown man thrashing against the earth like a madman. “What?”

  “How many are they?”

  “How many what? What do you mean?” Ailric could not have seen. Even Deorwen could not see them.

  “The horses. When the dead come round, they pin their ears.”

  “The horses…”

  “But this fog,” said Ailric. “They were all around. Shapes in the air.” It was hard to imagine that so many Lost souls made no mark. “We nearly lost Brand. Your Shriker half tore up the stump where I’d lashed him. And there was something else, I think.”

  This time, Durand nodded. “Aye. There was.”

  Ailric got to his feet, watching the fog. He found the place where the dead had fixed their collective gaze and he scoured the ground, staring for a space of many heartbeats. “There was a tree here. All night. I thought it was a tree.” The pair both looked up into the shifting billows overhead where the Lost had vanished. They could see three fathoms before the fog smothered the sky. Durand could just imagine some devil of the Fellwood standing, still as death, under that ceiling. “It was here. The Lost had not seen it either.” Even Durand could see fresh, greasy tears in the carpet of brown leaves. “It stood like a man. Hours, I think. Then it turned from the clearing. Its footprints vanish in that direction. It watched over us all night. It was brooding there while we lay in the dark.” Durand had never seen Ailric rattled.

  “But it is gone now, and there is nothing we can—”

  Durand heard birds flapping nearby. Landing on the branches of a tree a few paces distant.

  “Brother, you were speaking of Godelind and how you came to understand that the ring was hers.”

  Now Durand heard a brittle crack-crack somewhere ahead, sounding very near. He twisted.

  “Meat,” Ailric said, abruptly.

  Durand twisted again, cornered. “What?”

  The man was scenting the air. “Sir Durand, I think that is meat I smell. Flesh and fire.”

  “How did you know the ring was Godelind’s?”

  It was time to move. “We will get clear of this place,” Durand said. “I can still see the road. Saddle the horses.” In a few moments, he spurred his red cob into a canter, and within a bowshot, rode into a space where the trees were pockmarked with the white ellipses of freshly hacked branches, some thick as a man’s wrist.

  He realized that he stood on the verge of a substantial clearing, surrounded on all sides by stockades of mighty trees. Beyond it all stood a castle like a diadem of alabaster on a tall hill.

  Ailric’s rouncy plodded close, with Shriker in tow.

  First, Durand spotted a line of bondmen swinging brown billhooks in the brush along the perimeter of the cleared area. A hundred paces across the green, below a reviewing stand, a great square of tables had been laid out. Diners crowded around. Durand saw the wink of silver over white cloths. A whiff of roast venison and boar passed on a smoky breeze.

  Above it all stood a squat shell-keep, white as new ivory, on a twenty-fathom hill.

  Ailric was shaking his head, his face pale.

  “And this will be the Lindenhall,” said Durand, “and here we are, just in time.”

  “There was a rather homely skald singing the ballad of Godelind not far from here,” said a Rook, and the pair flew off above the misty green.

  * * *

  AS DURAND AND Ailric skirted the clearing to approach the tables, they blundered into what looked like a stand of dead trees and brown leaves, but turned out to be a multitude of starlings. The things exploded in every direction, giving both men a job to keep control of the animals. Still, the commotion got the attention of the diners, and a small man bustled out to meet them. The little fellow blinked up, narrowly avoiding Brand’s hooves.

  “Sir Durand, let me see if I cannot find you a place at the board. It is all a bit rustic here, I’m afraid, but we are doing our best.” Durand heard the sound of minstrels plucking courtly ballads.

  Durand did not answer the country steward, so intent was he on getting hold of something solid to eat. It had been far too long.

  “Ailric,” said Durand, “picket the horses, then get back here as quick as you can. There is food left.” The assembled company was already eating.

  Ailric nodded sharply, with no sign of complaint or resentment.

  The little steward was bowing. “This way, Sir Durand, unless you would prefer to spend a moment recuperating from your—”

  “I do not think so.”

  “I will have a page attend you with a basin and towels.”

  Perhaps Durand betrayed some surprise. Perhaps the Marcher steward was alert for slights. “You will find us quite civilized, Sir Durand.”

  The tables in that forest clearing might have stood in some noble’s hall, with crisp linen and silver all gleaming under the Eye of Heaven. Each knight wore the blazons of his lineage as clear as a banner. And there were ladies in the forest, each flashing in silk and jewels. Durand might have laughed at the whole thing, but he saw young Almora at the head of the table. Her eyes were dark and her hair as black as her drowned sister’s. They were very much alike. It could have been the same girl.

  Durand faltered. But it had been many hours since food had passed his lips, and there were pages already gathering up the wreckage of the feast, so he forced himself to take a place and pick some cold flesh from the bones of a young pig—congealed and badly picked over. Some dregs remained in a jug of claret. Ailric would likely starve if he didn’t hurry.

  Durand had placed himself beside a gray-haired man, and as Durand picked at the leftovers, the man started. “Durand?”

  White hair curled from the man’s nostrils, with matching bristles in his ears. And a patch of black leather nestled among the wrinkles where one eye ought to have been.

  Abruptly, Durand knew who had spoken. “Berchard!”

  The good eye squinted close and the wrinkled face split into a grin. “It has been ten winters since I turned my back on Gireth.”

  He had not seen Berchard since Radomor’s war. In the aftermath, the man had been given lands in Yrlac, but there had been trouble. Berchard had been very angry.

  “I am surprised to see you at Abravanal’s table,” said Durand. “What was it? You called His Grace an ungrateful bastard?”

  “Injudicious words, I admit.”

  “I nearly had to meet you in the lists, I recall.”

  “The vacant lands Abravanal grant
ed me in Yrlac after the war were not vacant, as you recall, their ‘deceased’ previous owner being alive and well and in full possession of the lands and titles and fifty armed men.”

  “And now you’re in the Marches?”

  “I did well enough—or I thought I had.”

  “Durand Col?” said a second voice.

  Now, Durand found a pockmarked face and a nose as flat as a saddle. This was Heremund Skald, but there was no smile on the man’s face. His mouth hung in hollow circle; his mandora was silent.

  “By Heaven,” said Berchard, “we are all here once again. Heremund Skald, is that you?”

  “We are like a leaves on the wind in this life,” said the skald.

  “It’s an odd chance to find us all in the same place once more, I suppose.”

  “Chance, Berchard? There is Leovere of Yrlac and Abravanal of Gireth,” said Heremund. “There is the Herald of Errest.” The tall, pale Herald sat at the head table by Abravanal’s side. “Here are we.”

  “Aye, but—”

  “I’m in Fellwood because of what I’ve heard. Strange things. And I’ve been sniffing round. But now here you all come trooping down. Our Herald there, he hasn’t crossed the passes of the Blackroots since the Sons of Heshtar reigned in all the lands to the Pennons Gate. Since the battle of Lost Princes. And here is Leovere. He’s taken the Horn of Uluric down from the wall and carried it back to Fellwood where it has not been since his people wrested it from the thralls of Heshtar. No. The trees are full of starlings—thousands of thousands, all suddenly. We’ve not come here to meet old friends.”

  “Well, I’m not here for horns and gates and signs,” said Berchard, blinking hard. “I’ve had enough of doom. I am working for a quiet life.”

  “Will you fight?” asked Durand.

  “Fight? No. Though I’d give these young dandies a run for their money, old as I am. But no, I’m here to ask a boon of my liege lord, and time is short. I’m hoping His Grace can manage to— Oh, now. Who’s this? Yet another friend of yours?”