King's Blood

by Judith Tarr

  Ah well, William thought on this Whitsun morning, while a bishop of his own choosing—and a much better choice, too—sang the Mass in Westminster. Anselm was in Italy, or maybe France. It little mattered to William, as long as he was not in England.

  William could hardly stretch and yawn loudly and shout his pleasure in the world, not in front of the whole court, but he could smile as he bowed before the altar. William was a happy man.

  After Mass came the feast, the first in his new hall that was grander than anything that had ever been in Britain or Normandy or France. He had had it built higher and broader and longer, and made sure it would stand for a thousand years.

  People were suitably in awe. “So high,” they said. “So big. We never saw the like.”

  William laughed for the pleasure of it. “It’s not half big enough for me,” he said. “You wait—I’ll build another twice as high. It will be a wonder of the world.”

  “Aren’t you getting a bit above yourself?”

  Henry had been alternately sunk in gloom and drifting in distraction since he got off the boat from France. He had a place of honor here, but William had half expected him not to appear, or else to go wandering off halfway through the first course.

  But there he was, surveying William’s splendid new achievement with a jaundiced eye. William cuffed him not quite hard enough to knock him down, and laughed. “There, puppy. You’re jealous, that’s all. If you’re ever a king, you’ll raise yourself higher than I could imagine.”

  “I doubt that,” Henry said sourly. “You know what they say. The higher you fly, the farther you fall.”

  “My wings won’t give out,” William said. “I’ve paid a price or two. Now God loves me. He favors everything I do.”

  “When He drops you,” said Henry, “He’ll drop you hard.”

  “He’s not going to drop me,” William said. He reached for the pitcher, snatching it from the hands of the page who stood vacant-eyed and useless, and filled Henry’s cup brimful with wine. “Drink up. This is a feast, not a funeral. Put off your gloomy face. You used to know how to laugh. Didn’t you?”

  Henry glowered at him, but drank the wine. William decided to be satisfied with that. He turned to the royal guest on his other side, the young king of Scots, who at least remembered what a smile felt like.

  Henry drank his cupful, then had another, because the first might have been water for all the forgetfulness it gave him. He had been trying, night after night, to forget the lady on the Isle. Night after night, when his only thought should have been pleasure, he could only see her. He had not taken a bed-mate since Beltane, because none of the women who cast eyes at him was she.

  And he had never learned her name.

  His brother was trading banter with young Edgar of Scots, who was not too dour as his people went—surprising, since half of him was Saxon, which should have soured his disposition even more. But Edgar was lighthearted enough, all things considered.

  It was a calculated lightheartedness, Henry could see. Soon enough he came to it. “My sister,” he said, “is of age now. An alliance—our two kingdoms—”

  That brought William up short, Henry was pleased to see. But not for long. “What, that again? They trotted her out in front of me years ago. She agreed with me, it wasn’t a match.”

  “She was a child,” Edgar said. “She’s a woman now. She’s been in the abbey all this time, but I remember when she came back to Scotland, before our father died, she declared that she had no calling to the veil. She was meant to be a queen.”

  “I don’t think—” William began.

  “Do consider it,” Edgar said. “You’ve heard the rumors, surely. Your brother the duke is contemplating marriage. He has a prospect or two; he’ll be considering them once he finishes his Crusade. He’s what, fifty?”

  William grunted.

  Edgar’s fist struck the table, clattering plates and bowls, and sending a cup or two flying—lucky for him, none flew into William’s lap. “Exactly! He’s ripe for it—and so are you. Would you have him making heirs when you have none? What if one of them decides to make a move on England?”

  “If any of them has a brain in his head, I’ll make him my heir, and he’ll get it honestly,” William said.

  Did he glance at Henry? It was hard to tell. Henry found he did not particularly care. Whatever happened—if Henry even survived to see it—William would go on for years. He would take no queen, either. Of that, Henry was as sure as if he had cast a spell of foreseeing. There would never be a child of William’s body.

  He thought of enlightening the young pup from Scotland, but Edgar should have known it already. Maybe he simply could not imagine a man who could not bring himself to bed a woman. God knew Henry had trouble with it, and he had seen it all his life.

  Pity the poor princess, wherever she was. Some abbey in the Midlands, was it? She must sincerely hate it, if she had told her father she had no vocation. But Malcolm had died in an ambush, and his queen had died the next day. The girl must have been shipped back where she came from, whether she would or no.

  There was a reason to be glad Henry had not gone that way himself. Youngest sons often did. In Byzantium they were even gelded, to keep them there. But Henry’s mother had refused to send him into a life he was not fit for. “You have too much magic,” she had said, “and too much spirit. You’d die there, in soul if not in body.”

  Maybe it was easier for a woman. Their arms were weaker, and they did not fight as well—but they had more endurance. They could suffer more, and stand it longer.

  And she, the nameless one—did she even remember him? Had he been any more to her than a convenient partner in the rite?

  He brought himself sharply to order. He was supposed to be thinking about the Scots princess, not the lady on the Isle. She was everywhere, in every thought that came to his mind.

  He was possessed. He must be. But who could exorcise a memory?

  William had sidestepped Edgar’s eagerness at last. But the boy was not about to let it go. When the king went down into the hall to join the dance, Edgar leaned toward Henry. “Can you talk him into it?”

  Henry was hard put not to burst out laughing. “No one talks William into anything,” he said. “Marriage least of all.”

  “You could do it,” Edgar said. He was a very Saxon-looking creature, tall and blue-eyed and fair-haired. The milk-and-water coloring gave him a look of guilelessness that might after all be deceptive. “Or maybe, if he saw her now, he’d be more inclined to consider her. She was a gangly thing when she was younger. She must have grown up decently—our mother always said she would.”

  “Your mother the saint?” Henry asked.

  “Well,” said Edgar, “she did deplore it. ‘Cursed with beauty,’ she said.”

  “Beauty to my brother,” Henry said, “is not exactly—”

  “It doesn’t have to be, does it? This is for heirs, not for love.”

  “So they say,” Henry said.

  Edgar leaped up. He staggered but kept his feet. He had been into the wine, and deeply, too. “Come with me! Let’s go to—wherever she is. Walham, Wilham—Wilton! That’s it. Wilton. It’s not too far. We can be there in a day. Or two.”

  More like three, Henry thought, or four or five if the roads were bad. But he held his tongue. Edgar was tugging at him. “Up! Let’s ride. If we start now, we’ll be there all the sooner.”

  What was it with royal familiars dragging Henry hither and yon? He should most probably have dug in his heels, but there was nothing of interest happening in London, except a great deal of intrigue and gossip. It was getting into summer, and the roads would be decent, and maybe there would be hunting.

  And who knew? He might meet another mysterious and wonderful lady, but this time she would tell him her name.

  Henry was not known as a creature of impulse. England was doing it to him, changing him, making him do things that he would never have thought of before. One of them no doubt would
kill him, but he had no premonition here. This was a harmless adventure, with no worse cost than miles and time.

  On the morning of the fourth day after their drunken sally forth from London, they came in sight of Wilton Abbey. Edgar had rallied his Scots guard and a pack of wild souls from the king’s court, and Henry had his own handful of knights who had followed him since his father died. It was a small army, and it could have ridden faster, but with the sun shining and summer burgeoning, they had made a holiday of it.

  But Edgar had not lost sight of what this ride was for. “I barely know the girl,” he said to Henry as they approached the abbey’s walls. “We hardly had a word to say to each other when she was in Scotland. Either she was too young to be worth noticing, or later, when she came back, I was out campaigning and she was tending our mother on her deathbed. Then she went away again. But blood calls to blood. We’ll know each other when we meet.”

  Henry murmured noncommittally. In his experience, strangers of the same blood were strangers nonetheless. Some of his sisters he knew well—notably Cecilia. Others he hardly knew at all: they had been nuns or wives for years before he was born.

  Edgar was still young enough to know everything there was to know. He was not notably younger than Henry, but he made Henry feel ancient.

  He approached the abbey as innocently as he seemed to do everything else. For Henry it was no pleasant place to be. It was thick with the kind of miasma that beset other places of old Saxon power: a sucking emptiness that ate away magic.

  Edgar had no magic to miss. Henry, who had too much, mustered his protections, strengthening them until the emptiness retreated. It was still there, but endurable—just.

  It even distracted him from that other thing which had been tormenting him as much as ever. In a house of holy women, however brief his time there, surely he would be able to forget the Beltane fires.

  This abbey had been wealthy in its day—somewhere about the time of Ethelred. It was still well founded, but the guesthouse was showing its age. The hall to which the heavily veiled portress had taken the Scots king and half a dozen of his escort was dark and low, the beams gone black with years of smoke from the hearth.

  It was clean, at least—almost painfully so—and the bread and ale that they were given was not of bad quality. They were waited on by a pair of elderly nuns, one half blind and the other half deaf, who were, one would suppose, immune to the temptations of young men.

  Somewhat after Henry had begun to wonder if they would be sent away without speaking to anyone of consequence, a slightly younger nun than the rest brought word from within. “Mother Abbess will speak to the king and to one other,” she said.

  Henry did not ask to be the other. He followed when the nun turned back the way she had come. Edgar, somewhat slower to react, trailed behind.

  The air of the cloister was stifling. Henry struggled as if up a long and grueling hill. But the floor was level and slightly worn, and when they ascended a stair, it was neither steep nor high.

  Edgar passed him there, eyeing him a bit oddly but keeping any questions to himself. Their guide had never once looked to see if they were with her. If they paused or slowed, they had no doubt that she would go on without them.

  The stair ended at last. Then was a door and a passage and a second door; and there the nun said, “You will wait,” and vanished within.

  Henry used the time to focus on simply breathing. Edgar leaned against the wall, humming to himself. It was a secular tune—very. Henry wondered if he was aware of it.

  The humming stopped. A moment later, the door opened. Their erstwhile guide peered out. She did not seem overjoyed to find them still there. “Come,” she said.

  CHAPTER 36

  The abbess was very tall and very thin—gaunt and grey, with eyes as pale as water under ice. Years of prayer and abstinence had worn away all softness, and leached the warmth from her.

  Edgar greeted her as if there had been nothing disconcerting about her. “Aunt!” he said with every evidence of pleasure. “Well met at last. Mother told me a great deal about you. Are you well? Is all well with your abbey?”

  The pale eyes blinked slowly. Maybe she was taken aback. Edgar was everything that she was not: bright, young, full of life and laughter.

  And yet there was a resemblance. The height; the long oval face. The narrow hands with long fingers—stiffened with age or supple with youth, they had the same shape and quality of movement.

  “Nephew,” the abbess said. “You are welcome here—but you have a purpose, surely, other than to pay your respects.”

  Directness could be a weapon. Henry knew it very well. Edgar should have: he had been in William’s court long enough. But he blinked, caught off balance. “What—I don’t—”

  “You have been in and out of England for a number of years, dancing attendance on a Norman king,” his aunt said. “This is your first visit to this abbey. What do you want of us?”

  “My sister,” Edgar said—blurted, rather.

  The abbess raised a brow. The air, which had been almost too warm, grew suddenly cold.

  When she did not answer, Edgar hastened to fill the silence. “My sister Edith—did she take another name in religion? She came here when she was small.”

  “She was here,” the abbess said. “Her father abducted her before he died.”

  “Then she went back,” Edgar said. “We’ve had letters—Bishop Osmund has assured us—”

  “Has he?” The abbess seemed to find that illuminating.

  So in his way did Edgar. “Are you telling me she isn’t here? That she never came back from Scotland?”

  The abbess inclined her head.

  Edgar’s brow wrinkled. “But I’ve had letters from the bishop. They talk about how she studies, how she devotes herself to her calling. How can she not be here?”

  “She is not here,” the abbess said. “She was taken from us. We prayed for her return, and called down God’s vengeance on those who took her. He granted us the latter but refused the former. Surely He knows what has become of her, for most assuredly we do not.”

  “But the bishop—”

  “Perhaps,” the abbess said with formidable gentleness, “you should seek audience with the bishop.”

  Edgar blinked, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course. Please forgive us for troubling you.”

  “You have done nothing that requires forgiveness,” the abbess said. “Come, kneel. Accept my blessing.”

  Edgar knelt all too willingly. Henry was much more wary. This terrible old woman had had news that pleased her not at all. What she would do with it, he could not tell—and he did not trust her.

  She laid her hand on Edgar’s head. Henry, standing behind him, felt the drawing of power, whirling away into a grey void. He almost fancied that the walls of the room crumbled ever so slightly, wearing away as if with the passage of years.

  His wards were barely enough. As Edgar accepted his aunt’s blessing with becoming devotion, she raised her eyes to Henry. She had taken little notice of him before; he was a guard, that was all. He had hoped that she would continue to see him as nothing and no one.

  But her eyes sharpened. Surely she did not recognize him. He did not look Saxon, no, but there were Normans enough with his height and coloring.

  He did his best to seem harmless: lowered his eyes, folded his hands, shrank as much as he could. There was no hiding the bulk and trained strength of a knight, but there were half a hundred of those waiting outside the abbey. Henry prayed she would see no more than that, if manifestly no less.

  It seemed he succeeded. She turned away from him to finish the blessing. Edgar had no magic to lose, and so much youthful strength that he did not seem to notice the life that had been drained out of him.

  The abbess seemed less gaunt, her face less pale. Henry suppressed a shudder. He had heard of creatures like this, but never seen one. He was more than glad to escape from her.

  They were not invited to stay the night in the
abbey, nor would Henry have agreed to it if Edgar had tried. But Edgar seemed as eager to get away from there as Henry.

  One or two of the men would have been happy to turn the abbey inside out in hopes of finding the missing princess, but Edgar shook his head. “If my aunt says she’s not here, then she’s not here. Maybe she’s in Salisbury. Now I think of it, the bishop never did say she was in Wilton. He’ll know where she is. We’ll ask him.”

  Henry wondered if he had ever been that young or that impervious to the darker side of the world. Edgar was a little pale, that was all, and a little less lively than usual. It was Henry who felt as if he had had the soul sucked out of him.

  The bishop was not in Salisbury. None of his clerks was particularly helpful about either his whereabouts or that of Edgar’s sister, although the bishop’s palace was pleased to offer hospitality to King William’s royal vassal.

  Henry barely noticed what he was fed. He fell into the bed he was given and slept hard and long—with dreams that fled before his eyes were fully open, leaving him with a sense half of foreboding and half of incongruous joy.

  He had slept through Mass, but Edgar was not about to leave Salisbury until he had spoken to the bishop. Henry could rise at his leisure, foray to the kitchens for a sop of bread in wine, and work through the dregs of the dream.

  He had been a child in this house. Some of the servants were still there, greyer and older but delighted to see him. They plied him with dainties and insisted that he tell them all the news—which for them meant all the gossip from the courts of England and France.

  He owed them a great debt. They made him forget the abbess of Wilton, and the trap he had fallen into without any hint of warning. He was smiling when he left the kitchens, full of bread and wine and sweet cakes and honeyed fruit, and he had a napkinful of cakes and tartlets that they insisted he must save for later.

  He took the long way back to the alcove he had been given to sleep in, by way of a cloister far brighter and more pleasant than he had seen the day before. The apple trees were in bloom in the cloister garth, and the apricot in the shelter of the wall was already setting fruit.