by Judith Tarr
That pause had an air of quiet shock in it. “It’s eating itself alive, for what? To give itself back to Alfred and his descendants?”
“To be something new. Something neither Saxon nor Norman. Something stronger than it ever was before.”
“You’ve had a vision.”
“Not a vision,” Etaine said. “A feeling in my bones. What I see is a black time, and the Hunt running wild over the earth. Scouring, maybe. Cleansing.”
“Burning the field to make the grass grow green.” Edith heard the shudder in Cecilia’s voice. “I can’t believe that. I’ll try to get Anselm back—if I have to abduct him again, I will. We need our Guardians at full strength, to protect against what’s coming.”
“Be careful,” said Etaine. “Promise me that.”
“Of course,” Cecilia said. “But what—”
She never finished her question, nor did Edith know if she got an answer. One of the acolytes was calling, and Edith realized that she was cold to the bone. She hurried away from the byre, mincing on frozen feet.
“Why do you need a Guardian who doesn’t want to be one?” Edith asked.
It was warm by the fire in the Lady’s house. Cecilia was sitting close to it, stitching a linen chemise such as they all wore under their robes. She paid little attention to her work, sewing by feel: tiny, even stitches that to Edith’s mind were rather remarkable.
She took her time answering, but Edith had the whole night to listen. She sat on the bench beside Cecilia and spread her hands to the blaze.
After a while Cecilia said, “It’s not that we need him. It’s that Britain chose him, and will not un-choose him. We can’t simply depose him and set up another in his place. He’s bound to his Guardianship.”
“One can depose a king,” Edith mused.
Cecilia did not move and showed no sign of temper, but Edith flinched from the force of her glance. “One can,” she said mildly, “if one is prepared to pay the price.”
“Wouldn’t you be, if it would save this island?”
“What if it destroyed us all instead?”
Edith felt her temper rising. That was rare enough to surprise her a little, but not enough to make her stop it. “My father gave his life and blood and soul to keep the dark at bay. Thanks to him, your brother could go on in his merry arrogance, calling himself the blessed of heaven. That arrogance has provoked the gods. It’s time he paid the price.”
“And then?” said Cecilia. “Suppose he goes to the sacrifice. What then? Who will come after him?”
“That’s for the gods to decree, isn’t it?”
Cecilia looked her in the face. “Would you do it? Would you perform the sacrifice, if it were laid on you?”
The heat of Edith’s temper turned suddenly cold. This was not a light or a casual question. Whatever she answered would have consequences. Potent ones—perhaps terrible.
“If I were given that task to perform,” she said steadily, “and if I were certain that it was the only way, yes, I would do it. I would ask the gods and the great Goddess to guide my hand.”
“And if it was not William whom you must sacrifice? If it was another Scots king? Or a new king, a king crowned with oak-leaves, a year-king? Would you do it then?”
Edith’s belly clenched. She was dizzy and sick. But she had to say what was in her to say. “Even then,” she said, “in the gods’ name, I would obey.”
Cecilia sat for a long moment, searching her face line by line. At last Cecilia nodded, sighing faintly as if she had been as knotted inside as Edith was. “So would I. We may have to do it—you should be prepared for that.”
“Better the sacrifice than the Hunt,” Edith said. “Do you think . . . ?”
Cecilia arched a brow, waiting.
Edith almost let it go, but this was a night for asking hard questions. “Do you think my father can be saved? Can his soul be freed from the Hunt?”
“It’s said that once the Hunt takes a soul, it’s lost forever,” Cecilia said. “But it’s also said that once, long and long ago, love and magic freed one of those souls from its damnation. I’ve not seen proof of either.”
“I’ll dare to hope, then,” Edith said. “After all, what can it hurt?”
There were many answers to that, but Cecilia ventured none of them. The shift that she had been sewing was done. She turned it right side out and shook the wrinkles from it, and folded it carefully, tucking the needle back into her purse. She was as tidy as a housewife, and as quietly practical, too.
Edith knew better than to be deceived. Here was great power and high purpose. How cold it could be, she had just learned—as she had learned that she could share that coldness. She was royal, too, and bound to the land. For that blood and the earth that bore it, she could do whatever she must, at whatever cost.
CHAPTER 43
It snowed at Easter, that first year of the new century. The fields were still too frozen to plow, and what little greenery did creep through the snow was late and shy.
Then after Easter, at long last, the winter broke. It burst in torrents of warm rain, flooding the rivers and the lowlands and turning every road and field to mire. After the rain came sun, as hot almost as summer.
God alone knew what the harvest would be like, with such a late and bedeviled planting. There seemed to be no order or measure in the world: too cold, too wet, too hot, too dry.
At Beltane, Henry waited, hardly breathing, for a summons that never came. When the gates of the Otherworld opened, he was in bed alone, glaring at the ceiling.
He had sworn to himself that he would not do what he did then. He slid out of bed in the dark, groped his way to the chest that held his clothes, and found his purse. The faint odor of roses and rue teased his nostrils.
The rose was still alive, still blooming. He breathed in its sweet scent. Maybe it meant nothing, but he could not help but tell himself that while the rose lived, she remembered him. There was a reason why she had not sent for him—maybe to save his life, if he really had been the year-king, and there still was a sacrifice.
It was cold comfort while the spectral hounds bayed in the sky. God help any man who died tonight, or any soul who wandered out of doors.
They were still drinking in the hall here at Brampton, celebrating the new shipment of Rhenish wine. William had been even more full of himself than usual. He stopped short of taking credit for the fact that spring had come at last—with summer hot on its heels—but he was clearly pleased with himself and his world.
Henry had begun to wonder if his brother was subject to a sort of divine madness. He seemed unable to see what the world was coming to, or to remember the warnings he had been given at Salisbury. He had turned his back on what gift he had, which was to see magic. Everything about him was defiantly, blindly mortal.
Rather unfortunately for his peace of mind, Henry had no such affliction. On this night, with the sounds of song and laughter coming faintly from without and the cries of the Hunt overhead, he knew deep in his bones that they were all coming to the end of things.
“And to think,” he said aloud to the darkness and the rose, “people said the world would end a hundred years ago. It seems they were somewhat off their reckoning.”
Over by the wall, under the shuttered window, his room-companion stirred and mumbled. “Henry? What—”
“Nothing,” Henry said. “Go back to sleep.”
His nephew Richard muttered a little more, incomprehensibly, then a soft snore gave proof that he had done as he was told. He was a good lad, one of Duke Robert’s bastards, who must take after his mother: he was bright-eyed and quick-witted, and he was always in the thick of things. He would have been in hall tonight, carousing with the liveliest of them, if he had not been confined to bed with the last gasp of a winter rheum.
From the sound of his snore, that had nearly run its course. Henry sniffed experimentally. No sign of it in himself. He never had been ill; it was a gift, not uncommon if one had magic.
&nbs
p; The Hunt was rampaging through the New Forest tonight, coming back again and again to the king’s hunting lodge. Henry heard the snuffling of hounds at the windows, and the trampling of hooves on the roof.
Richard never budged. He was like his father, completely without magic. Even so, Henry would have thought he could hear the tumult. His own head ached with it.
The Hunt retreated with the dawn. But it had not gone out of the world as it should have done. It was still in it, gone to ground but present in the back of his awareness: raising the hackles on his neck.
Richard was up with the sun, shaking Henry out of an uneasy doze. “Come! Up! Let’s roust out the lads and get up a hunt.”
Henry peered at him. Maybe it was that he stood with his back to the opened shutters and the sun streaming in, but he looked like a shadow without substance. His voice, as bright and clear as it was, sounded oddly distant.
Henry was foggy-headed from lying awake and quaking all night. That was all it was. He let his nephew haul him to his feet and pitch clothes at him, some of which he put on.
He was more awake by the time he came down to the hall. There were others up and dressed for the hunt, drinking sops of yesterday’s bread in wine and yelling for the huntsmen and the hounds. The doors, like the shutters in Henry’s room, were open wide to let the sun in. It was a glorious morning, a fine May Day, and although the flowers were few and feeble, the sun’s warmth could hardly be faulted.
Henry thought William might come down and join them, but both he and his sweet friend Walter were still abed. There were hunters enough without those two, and Richard ahead of them all, giddy with freedom after three days of coughing and sniffling in his bed.
Henry could not seem to let go of the night. The baying of the Hunt lingered in the back of his skull. As they rode down the forest track, flickering in and out of dappled sunlight, he kept thinking he saw skeletal shapes in the shadows of branches, and corpse-lights dancing just on the edge of vision.
Delusion, that was all. There was no creature of the Otherworld in the wood this morning, no spirit of air or hob of the wood. The branches were empty of anything but birds; the flash of movement in the undergrowth was a coney or a squirrel, and once the black mask and white-tipped tail of a fox.
They were hoping for bigger game: deer, or if they were lucky, boar. The huntsmen found sign of both, but nothing fresh. One or two knights who had brought falcons were fool enough to fly them in the wood; one darted off through the trees and was gone, and the other tangled its jesses in the woven boughs.
Henry was the quickest thinker, and still an agile climber though it had been a good many years since he clambered up every tree he could get his hands and feet on. He tossed his horse’s reins to the nearest rider, who happened to be Richard, pulled off his boots and thrust them into his saddlebag, and tackled the tree in which the falcon was caught.
It was an oak, and old, as old as Britain. It should have been alive with spirits, but the only living things in it were a squirrel that scolded him fiercely, and the hawk struggling in its bonds.
It was too mortal, the sunlight too ordinary. It was trying too hard.
Henry shook himself. The Hunt had hooks in his soul. He slithered out along a branch, moving more carefully the thinner it became. He might be agile, but he had a man’s weight now and not a boy’s.
Even as cautious as he was, the branch creaked ominously before he could come within reach of the falcon. He drew in a breath and considered giving up. But it was only a little way, and it only needed a little Word, a simple bit of working. The branch steadied.
Something else, deep in the oak’s heart, came awake. Henry slipped and almost fell. The rush of terror focused him admirably. He slid one last arm-length and grasped the tangle of the jesses. Carefully but quickly, he worked them free.
The falcon had stopped its struggling when he came near. It came into his hand, warm feathers and beating heart. Its beak and talons could have torn him to shreds, but it took station peaceably on his fist.
He descended one-handed, much more slowly than he had come up. When he was low enough, he handed the falcon down to the waiting falconer and paused, resting on the lowest branch.
While he was moving, nothing had seemed strange, but now that he was still, he could feel the tingling in his body wherever it touched the tree. It was not an unpleasant sensation at all, but it was odd, like the prickle in an arm or a leg after it had gone numb and begun to wake up again.
He laid both palms against the trunk. The tingling grew stronger, almost enough to make him draw back, but he stayed where he was. Somehow, whatever it was—life, magic, awareness—was flowing both ways. The oak was becoming a part of him and he was becoming a part of it.
Deep roots sank into the ground, drawing up the earth’s strength. Broad branches spread to the sky, drinking the sun. Memory flickered in the human part of him: the oak that had created itself in his mother’s tapestry, and the oak of Falaise in Normandy under which his father had been conceived.
This was a different earth, a different kingdom, but it was his earth. He had been born on this island—for this island. It knew him. It welcomed him.
This broken earth, this spreading blight, was like a sickness in his own body. The compulsion to heal it somehow, work magic on it, lay his will upon it, overwhelmed him. He clung to the branch, dizzy and half blind.
But not so blind that, lifting his eyes, he could not see through woven branches, piercing veils of mist and shadow. Spectral riders waited there, and spectral hounds, motionless, silent, hollow sockets fixed on the mortal hunt.
They were hunting souls. Humans had come into their domain, and they were hungry. The taste of blood was on Henry’s tongue, so rich and sweet that he knew a moment’s bliss before he gagged.
He slid off the branch and swung to the ground. His horse was waiting. As he swung into the saddle, Richard grinned at him. “Good view up there?”
Henry managed a sickly smile. “Trees, as far as the eye can see.”
“That’s a forest for you,” his nephew said. “No deer? Or boar?”
“None that I could see,” said Henry.
Richard shrugged. “Let’s go on, then. The wolves can’t have eaten them all. Maybe we’ll even find the white hart, the one who brings luck to the hunter who takes him down.”
Ah, thought Henry, but what kind of luck?
He was in a troublesome mood, to be sure. He fell into the middle of the pack—foolish cowardice, but he did not want the Wild Hunt picking him off from the front or the rear. Richard, oblivious as ever, had the lead; when the hounds found a fresh scent and began to bay, he whooped with glee.
Courage came belatedly. Henry tried to push through to Richard’s side, but the track was too narrow and the trees too thick. A moment ago they had grown well apart.
He let himself fall back instead, and did what he could to ward the hunt: not easy at all in motion, distracted, with what was following them and flowing along beside them. The Hunt had not taken to the air—perhaps in daylight it could not? Though what advantage that gave him, he did not know.
They mounted a hill and emerged without warning in a long open meadow, a rolling expanse of fields that had just begun to grow up here and there with saplings. This would be one of the farmsteads that old William had seized in making this forest: a larger one than many, well cleared and still marked by stone fences and ragged lines of hedge. In the distance, beside a stream, Henry saw the ruins of a mill.
The hounds were in full cry, though Henry could not see what quarry they were after. The line spread out across the field, some of the knights running past Richard, whooping and singing.
Henry peered. Something was flickering ahead of them. It might have worn a stag’s shape, or that of a fox. Or it might have been a shadow horse carrying a bone-thin man with the head and antlers of a stag.
Henry set spurs to his horse’s sides. The beast was not accustomed to such treatment. It bucked and twisted.
Henry rode it out, but the Hunt gained too much ground while he did it.
There were bows strung, arrows nocked. Richard dropped his horse’s reins on its neck and stood up in the stirrups, aiming straight for the supposed stag’s heart.
The horse veered around a tussock and stumbled. The arrow flew wide; the bow dropped. Richard caught at the saddle before he went tumbling after the arrow.
The apparition doubled and darted back, passing between Richard and the rest of the knights. One of them followed it with his arrow, then as it paused—directly in front of Richard—he loosed.
He must have seen a living stag. Henry saw air and delusion. The arrow passed through it without slowing or bending aside.
Richard had brought his horse to a halt and recovered himself, and was bending to peer at the foot on which the stallion had stumbled. The arrow pierced his throat and went on into the horse’s shoulder.
The beast went mad with pain. Richard was dead before his body struck the ground. Between the arrow and the horse’s panicked plunging, his throat was ripped asunder. The earth drank thirstily of his blood.
The shadowy Hunt moved in to take the rest of it. But Henry set himself between them and their prey. Every scrap of strength that he had, he poured into wards, protecting the body and its fragile, new-hatched soul. “No,” he said. “You don’t get this one. Let his blood be enough.”
The Hunt hovered as if astonished, staring at him with eyes sunk deep in skull-gaunt faces. Some of those faces, he almost fancied he knew. One . . . was that Malcolm of Scots?
He shook off the distraction before it cost him his wards, and therefore his kinsman’s soul. “Begone,” he said. “Your hunt is done. Seek out other prey, and let us be.”
The force of their resistance nearly flung him from the saddle, but he held on. He kept on staring them down. Whatever they might do to his body, his spirit would not waver.