Court of Wolves

by Robyn Young

  His eyes drifted to the bed where he had sat, hands burned, heart broken, while Amaury asked him to retrieve it, his rasping voice strengthening with the promise that if he succeeded he would take him personally to the leader of the Academy. That there was much the man might choose to reveal to him. Lorenzo de’ Medici: de facto ruler of the Republic of Florence and head of the Academy. The man known as the Needle of the Compass. The man his father had told him to seek in his last words, penned on the morning of his execution.

  I pray you have found the answers I could not give you.

  That the Needle has pointed the way.

  Jack turned back, feeling a tug on his cloak. Amelot was holding a crumpled sheet of paper. As she passed it to him, he saw her fingers were black with ink. On the page was a crude drawing. He stared at it in the gloom. It looked like a large teardrop with two barbs coming off the bottom and two lines scored diagonally through the middle.

  ‘What is it? Something to do with Amaury? With those who took him?’

  Amelot nodded. As Jack frowned at it, she reached out impatiently and turned the paper in his hands. The symbol changed – became a pointed animal head with pricked ears and fierce slanting eyes.

  He realised she had drawn a wolf.

  3

  In the vastness of Westminster Hall hundreds of candles were burning, casting a shimmering halo around the assembly of nobles, officials and foreign dignitaries who had gathered here in the royal heart of England. Beyond the sphere of light and warmth, January pressed its darkness against the hall’s high windows. Outside, the Thames chopped at the harbour wall, where the barges of the guests were moored, flags and banners stiff with ice.

  The revelry of Christmas was over. The Lord of Misrule had been dethroned for another year and Plough Monday had come and gone. Out in fields and pastures the work of carthorse and seed had begun, and what better way to celebrate new life beginning than with a royal wedding?

  Earlier, within the hallowed magnificence of Westminster Abbey, King Henry VII had been joined with his betrothed in holy matrimony, the ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and witnessed by the peers of the realm. It was a union that had been promised many moons ago, across the sea in Brittany, when the king was a prince in exile – last scion of a bastard line of the fallen House of Lancaster – with war lying like a lion before him. He had come on the winds of summer, borne on French galleys, sword and banner raised against that beast, and with his victory the fragile hope of that marriage pledge had crystallised into victorious fact.

  The long war that had ravaged England was over. He, Henry Tudor, was three months’ crowned and his bride – a princess of York – now sat beside him, her mighty house tamed after all these bitter years. It was the end of civil strife, the ceremony declared. Two royal families, once torn asunder, now united in bands of gold and bonds of blood.

  Peace, men said. Prosperity.

  Yet even amid the celebrations, there lingered a sense of trepidation – that what had gone before might not be so easily forgotten. All around the hall this winter night could be glimpsed spaces where men should be seated. Fallen kings and princes cut down in their pomp, rebel lords who’d drenched the block with their blood, knights who had roared their last on fields of war: all of them were still here somehow, noticeable by their absence.

  Harry Vaughan, however, had no eyes for ghosts. His gaze was reserved for the king, whom he caught in brief glimpses between the criss-crossing of kitchen servants bearing platters of eel flesh in wobbling jelly and stacks of crabs like giant pink spiders, hairy-legged and curled. When he’d first been led into the cavernous hall by the ushers, among the chattering multitude filing in from the abbey, Harry thought there had been some mistake. Flush-faced, he had turned on the page who had shown him to his seat, demanding to know who placed him here – down in the draught coming through the hall’s doors, so far below the salt he could not even see it.

  Why, the king, Master Harry, had come the wounding reply.

  The anticipation Harry had felt for the evening’s festivities had withered and died among his dinner companions: minor gentry and boorish officials, foreign merchants, London traders and their wives, drunk too quick on sweet Greek wine. He had dreamed of such a day as this all through the months in exile with Henry, all through the danger and uncertainty of that time: a day when he would sit in high honour and office in the favour of the king, just as his father, Sir Thomas Vaughan, once had. Tonight, that dream had turned to ash.

  The servants parted and Harry craned his neck to watch as the king gestured to a page. The dark curtain of Henry’s shoulder-length hair shifted to show his profile, the thin nose and mouth, the small chin that seemed to end too soon, cutting off his face abruptly. The king’s gaze, cool and watchful, followed closely as the page leaned in to pour more wine into the goblet of the royal bride.

  Elizabeth of York sat poised beside her husband, her abundance of hair, red-gold like her mother’s, pulled back beneath an ornate headdress, which swept up in wings of silk from her head. Her skin was flushed, the stain spreading down her pale neck to disappear in the swell of her wedding gown, the indigo satin embroidered with hundreds of white roses. She wore no crown, for she was not yet his queen, but what she lacked in jewels on her head she made up for on fingers and throat, where rubies and star-bright diamonds glistered.

  Despite his distance from the king, Harry hadn’t failed to hear the eager gossip: that Henry had been courting his betrothed in secret at Coldharbour, his mother’s Thameside mansion, and that his bride was already with child. Harry, along with the rest of the court, had studied Elizabeth during the vows, but had seen no sure sign of it.

  Henry’s mother, Lady Margaret, was seated left of her son, dressed in similar fashion to her new daughter-in-law in a mantle of regal purple. The small, sharp-eyed countess, aged just thirteen when she had borne Henry, her only child, did not now stray far from the son who’d been taken from her as an infant by Yorkist enemies and raised in foreign courts. Indeed, Margaret had walked into the abbey not two paces behind the royal couple, just ahead of her husband, Lord Stanley, whose treachery had turned the tide on Redemore Plain and who, in the bloody aftermath, had placed King Richard’s fallen crown upon the head of his triumphant, battle-born stepson.

  Further down the table sat Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the bride. Once a famed beauty – a commoner who had ensnared a king – she was now a pale echo of her handsome daughter. The recent years had not been kind to the queen-dowager, carving their grief in lines through her face. Her son by her first marriage and her brother, Sir Anthony Woodville, had been the first of Richard’s victims, executed in a northern castle on false charges of treason, alongside Harry’s own father. Next her son, Prince Edward – who, for a brief candle’s flicker, had been king – locked up in the Tower with his brother. Richard, having concocted a story that their father, King Edward IV, had been married previously, declared her sons bastards, unsuited to the crown, which he had then taken for his own.

  Most believed the tale that Richard had the two boys – his own nephews – quietly put to death. It was a rumour that had raised a rebellion against him, plotted in part by Lady Margaret and Elizabeth Woodville, but Harry was one of the handful of men who knew different. Looking at the queen-dowager, he wondered what she would do were she told the truth. That, perhaps, the man she had married her daughter to, irrevocably joining the houses of York and Lancaster, might not be quite who she imagined?

  The thought took him back to Henry’s coronation, just over three months ago, where he’d feasted in this hall with the king and all those who’d ridden through the wild summer of war alongside him; there to rejoice his crowning and be rewarded for their service. Among them had been another of the queen-dowager’s brothers and uncle to her children, Sir Edward Woodville, who, for his part in the battle against King Richard, had been reinstated as Constable of Porchester and Governor of Portsmouth.

  That night, amid th
e revelry, Harry had been startled to find himself cornered by the knight and probed about the fate of Woodville’s young nephews. Unprepared, he had stumbled his way through the unexpected interrogation, hoping wine and candlelight would excuse the hot flush of guilt that had leapt into his cheeks. In the end, the knight released him, but the encounter had left Harry jangled and he’d been relieved when, arriving at the abbey that morning, he’d overheard one of the king’s men say that Edward Woodville would be absent for the ceremony, gone abroad on a pilgrimage.

  As servants crossed in front of him, breaking his view of the royal table, Harry turned his attention to the steaming piles of food now being deposited at his end of the hall, men and women welcoming them with loud appreciation and a rude clatter of knives. The heads of dead beasts lolled on platters as the bodies were cut into and soon the air was filled with the cracking of crab shells and the snap of bones.

  Harry speared a slice of meat for his plate, but left the other guests to the rest of the feast. His appetite had died along with his hope of finding his way back into the king’s good graces tonight.

  ‘Have at it!’ The man next to him, a fleshy, stinking fellow with a tumour of a nose, elbowed him. ‘We common men feast like lords tonight!’ He talked through a mouthful of meat. Feeling something wet land on his hand, Harry wiped it on his napkin. The man raised his goblet and bellowed, ‘Long live the king!’

  The cheer was taken up by others, echoing down the tables towards the distant royals.

  As those around them struck up conversations, the lilt of foreign voices mingling with blunt local dialects, Harry reached for his goblet and drained it. The malmsey wine silked his tongue with sweetness and he wondered for a queasy moment whether it could have come from the same barrel the bride’s uncle had reputedly been drowned in – another one taken by treason, the black imp that had carried off so many through the long season of war, including his own father, strung up on Richard’s orders.

  ‘Enjoy it while we can, I say.’ The man leaned in again, nodding at the yeomen of the guard lining the walls in their green and white livery. ‘Three hundred soldiers for the king’s household? A man who makes himself an army expects trouble down the way.’

  ‘Or prevents it by doing just that,’ responded Harry tautly, lifting his goblet for a page to refill.

  The brusqueness of his response didn’t deter the man, who gestured with a crab leg towards the king. ‘He’ll need to get his seed in her quick. Make himself an heir with good Yorkist blood. Though some say he’s already planted it, no?’

  As the man chuckled and nudged him again, wine sloshed over the rim of Harry’s goblet. Dark stains bloomed on the linen. He shook wine from his hand, cursing his lot. As if this placement wasn’t insult enough, the king had sat him next to this fool? His eyes strayed down the tables again to where those men most in Henry’s favour sat. Men able to catch the king’s eye, raise a goblet, seek his approval. Men who had toiled alongside him all through those months in Brittany and France. Men like him.

  Harry’s fist tightened around his goblet. If not for him Henry Tudor might now be languishing in the Tower at Richard’s pleasure, for it was his hand that delivered the information warning him Brittany was no longer safe, his word that had sent Henry fleeing into France where he’d found a king willing and able to finance and equip an invasion of England. An invasion that had won him the crown. Was the esteem in which his master had held him so fragile as to be tarnished by one God-damn failure?

  Yet again, Wynter, that bastard, was getting in the way of his future. He should have stuck him with his blade and buried him deep, where the only thing he would have stunk up was the mud, but he’d left him to that fickle fire and the son of a bitch had survived. Now, Wynter had vanished and Harry had been unable to find any trace of him, much to Henry’s evident displeasure.

  The fleshy man was at his ear again. He opened his mouth to speak, but before any more words, or food, could bubble forth, Harry snatched up his knife and brought it stabbing down. The tip embedded itself in the table, a whisker from the man’s hand. After a pause, the man laughed nervously and swigged at his wine in an attempt to recover some of his bluster, but he kept his hand off the table and his mouth shut for the rest of the meal, leaving Harry to nurse his drink in silence.

  ‘Master Harry.’ A page leaned in. ‘The king requests your presence.’

  Harry’s heart leapt. He rose from the bench, but as he looked down the hall to the king’s table, he realised Henry was no longer there.

  ‘In his private chambers,’ came the explanation.

  Leaving his food untouched and his dinner companions to their drunken clamour, Harry followed the page, skirting groups of men and women who had risen to dance, the stamp of feet punctuated by raucous laughter.

  Once through the doors, the din faded. The frozen air stung Harry’s lungs, sweat drying cold on his cheeks. Frost crunched under his boots as the servant led him past the dark bulk of St Stephen’s Chapel and the Queen’s Chamber to the king’s private apartments.

  At the doors, two yeomen of the guard stood sentry. Harry halted at their command and waited while they checked him for weapons, hands reaching inside his cloak to briskly pat his velvet jacket. His nerves began to build. This was what he had wanted – an audience with Henry. But what kind of audience was this? The king had not begun his reign with acts of mercy towards those who had done him wrong. The skin of Harry’s neck prickled in the cold. When the yeomen finally stepped aside, the page ushered him in.

  Entering the Painted Chamber, he was assaulted by colour. It bled from everywhere at once – from the turquoise ceiling studded with gold bosses, to the vermilion and emerald of the stained-glass windows, and the garish murals of Old Testament scenes that covered the walls down the length of the room to where a huge, canopied bed stood. All of it was lit by a blaze of torchlight, the restless flutter of flame making the painted figures of angels and saints seem to shift and move. After all that malmsey wine on an empty stomach, Harry found the place unsettling. He breathed in the smoky air, trying to push down his rising queasiness. His eyes darted until they fixed on a figure, seated by a hearth.

  ‘Come, Harry.’

  He did as ordered. Removing his velvet cap, the best he owned, as he came before the figure, he bowed low. ‘My lord king.’

  Henry let him stay bent a pause longer than was comfortable, before gesturing to a stool opposite. ‘Sit.’

  Harry perched on the low seat, legs bunched awkwardly in front of him, cloak drooping on the floor. He licked his lips. His heart was thumping. Henry didn’t rush to fill the silence for him, but merely studied him with his ice-blue eyes, one of which roved of its own accord and gave Harry the discomforting sense that the man was studying him from too many angles at once. The jewels that adorned the king’s crown, cloak and fingers glittered madly in the firelight. Despite the heat coming from the hearth, Henry’s lean face was pale, framed by his dark hair. The king would celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday at the end of the month, but to Harry, six years his junior, he had always seemed far older – something ancient in those roving eyes.

  ‘God’s grace upon you, my lord,’ Harry blurted into the hush. ‘Upon you and your bride. It was a grand ceremony and a – a truly marvellous feast. Your subjects sang your praises.’

  Henry arched an eyebrow. ‘Food and wine will rouse most mannered men to applaud their host. But only time will tell if their loyalty runs deeper than their bellies.’ His voice was clipped, the inflections French not English. After twelve years in Brittany, the foreign tongue came more naturally to him than the language of his homeland. He took a sip from a goblet, his movements slow, measured. ‘Am I to presume, Master Harry, that you have found no trace of your brother since we last spoke?’

  Harry’s jaw twitched. He wanted to correct the king – to remind him that Wynter was no brother of his – just some bastard seed of his father’s spilled carelessly in a common whore. Instead, he shook his hea
d. ‘No, my lord. Despite my best efforts I have not.’

  ‘Your best efforts.’ Henry let the words hang there.

  ‘I searched everywhere I could think to look, my lord, in London and in Westminster. I went to Lewes, but even his mother’s house was gone. Burned down, I was told.’ Harry didn’t mention the foreign men he had sent to that little house in the woods two years earlier in exchange for a bag of gold – the men who had been searching for Wynter and who’d found his mother instead.

  ‘If you had dealt with him when you had the chance, your efforts – such as they are – would not now be needed.’

  An image flashed in Harry’s mind. He was lying on the debris-strewn floor of his father’s mansion, Wynter straddling his stomach, hands wrapped around his throat. Harry’s fingers flinched towards his neck as he remembered the awful choking sensation, the rage-filled face looming above him as his half-brother squeezed the life from him. The memory set a fire in his blood.

  Yes, he had failed in one task. But he had done everything else Henry had asked of him. He had brought him Prince Edward and had kept his silence after the boy was delivered in secret back into the Tower. He had said no word when Henry, on taking the crown, had publicly repeated the rumour that the two princes had been cruelly put to death by King Richard and he’d evaded those questions Sir Edward Woodville had had about his nephews as best he could. It wasn’t his fault Wynter knew this to be a lie and was why Henry wanted him in his custody.

  Sitting straighter on the stool, he met the king’s gaze. ‘I believe Wynter has left the kingdom, my lord. There is nothing here for him now, but a price on his head and the heads of his surviving companions. He is a nobody with nothing to his name. Even if he speaks about what he knows, who will listen? I doubt he will return to these shores, but should he ever do so, I will end him. You have my word on that.’