by Judith Tarr
There was clear air beyond, green of grass, and the sun hanging low. The stag, out in the open, leaped and darted. Walter Tirel kept the straight path—the most wizardly thing William had ever known him to do. He had a fresh arrow in his hand, as black as the other.
It was an odd clearing, a nearly perfect circle, and the trees that ringed it were all very, very old; yet they seemed planted: oak and ash and thorn. At each quarter of the wind, William saw a standing stone. It almost looked like a hooded figure, erect and still, raising a vast edifice of magic over what must be an old holy place. It certainly had the look.
William felt strangely at ease here. His horse slowed; he let it. Magic that had been the bane of his life seemed right and proper in this place. It belonged here. And so, God knew how, did he.
Men and stag burst into the clearing together. They were blind to what was in and about it: Henry saw how they looked over Cecilia’s head as if she had not been there, and stared straight through Henry where he stood in the center.
The stag veered past him, so close he felt the puff of its breath on his cheek. Walter Tirel was hot on its heels. Henry roused almost too late and hauled his horse back. Walter Tirel’s light-boned chestnut skittered and shied and careened into him.
Henry’s larger, heavier horse kept its feet, but the chestnut went down. Walter Tirel flew from the saddle, tucked and rolled like a tumbler.
His bow took flight, too, but with evident will and intent: straight for Henry’s hand. Henry had it before he knew what he had done, and in his other hand a black arrow, stinging as it slapped into his palm.
William had drawn rein just within the walls of air. The stag stood motionless between. Henry had clearly seen it bolt past him, but there it was, halfway back the way it had come. It was real; he would have known an illusion, and that was true and mortal hide and hair and bone, heaving sides and staring eyes and moistly quivering nostrils.
Henry met William’s eyes over the stag’s back. William had a bow and it was strung, but he had not nocked an arrow to the string. He was waiting for Henry to shoot.
Not Henry—no. William would have been surprised to find his brother here, who had last been seen in Salisbury. Henry looked for the reflection in those eyes, and saw Walter Tirel’s face.
Magic and delusion. Henry willed the king to see who faced him and why. The power in this place dragged at that will; strove to distort and twist it into more illusion. Henry set his teeth and ripped at it.
He could shoot the stag. Or any of the Guardians. Or the Huntsman himself. This arrow in his hand had such power. It was a working of the Otherworld, but its tip was mortal steel—coldest of cold iron, death to Old Things.
Death to mortals, too; it was wickedly sharp, a hunting point, meant to pierce muscle and bone of beasts heavier, thicker-skinned, and stronger than men. Henry nocked it to the string. William sat still on his red horse as if enspelled—or as if, at the last, he understood.
Once more Henry met those bright blue eyes. There was recognition in them. Acceptance? Maybe William had not come to that yet.
The earth of Britain was healing. The folk of air were stronger. But plague still ran rampant, and there was the Hunt, riddled with corruption, waiting for Henry to fail.
He could not fail. His chest was tight; his breath came hard. He raised the bow, aimed and sighted. Straight for the heart.
If the stag moved, if it came between, then so be it. Maybe Henry waited a second beyond the necessary, hoping for it. But the world had gone still.
The arrow flew. William could still escape—still throw himself aside. But he stood as stiff as a target. Did he shift, even, to lie more surely open to the shot? Did he know—understand? At the last, was he the willing, the royal sacrifice?
God knew. Henry’s powers were spent. All of them had left him with that black arrow, plunging into his brother’s heart.
William reeled out of the saddle. The stag was gone. He fell headlong. The arrow twisted and snapped, tearing flesh. Heart’s blood sprang.
The earth sighed. The Guardians moved. Tears were streaming down FitzHaimo’s face.
The Hunt left the concealment of the trees. William’s blood fed the thirsty land, but the Hunt was still dark—still stained with the blight. Henry watched it in despair. Even murder—fratricide, regicide—had not been enough. Dear gods, must it be suicide, too?
He slid from his horse’s back. The bow was slack in his hand. He let it fall.
Walter Tirel was crouching there, wide-eyed and conscious and paralytic with terror. Henry had no time to spare for him.
William was not quite dead. His soul was no fool; it clung to its body in dread of the Hunt.
That was the last sacrifice. Loosing the arrow—that had been easy beside this. Henry had to pry the soul free and let the Hunt take it.
William had been an infamous sinner, arrogant, head-strong, and heedless. Many a priest and holy monk would sing hosannas to hear what damnation waited for him. So would one damned soul in the Hunt: old Malcolm grinning down, savoring the prospect. He had damned himself for this, to exact the perfect revenge.
Henry knelt beside his brother and touched his finger to the still-warm stream of blood from the wound. He raised it to his lips. It tasted of iron and sweetness and slow fire. That was life, though he would have expected a good deal more bitterness, and the salt of tears.
“If he goes willingly,” he said to the dead king and the immortal Huntsman, “no one here will stop him.”
“You mortals,” the Huntsman said, tossing his crown of antlers. “Always you bargain. We are not merchants.”
“No?” said Henry. “This isn’t a negotiation. This is what will be. He chooses this—or he goes free.”
“And his kingdom—the kingdom you have won—dies from the heart outward. Children first, young king. All the children, every one.”
Henry steeled himself against that. It was as difficult a thing as he had ever done. He would do what he must do. No matter the cost.
He dipped his finger in blood again and drew the posts and lintel of a gate on the cooling forehead. “Out,” he said. “Out and face yourself.”
William’s eyes opened. His voice was a breathless whisper. “Don’t know how. Don’t—”
“Think it,” Henry said. “Make it so. Choose.”
The lids fell shut. He was not going to—Henry knew it. He would resist to the last, and destroy them all.
His body shuddered. His soul sprang out of it, the very image of him to the life, straight up toward the Huntsman. He had a sword in his hand—though where he had got it, only he and the gods knew.
He grinned like a wild thing, taking them all aback—even the Huntsman; even as his incorporeal blade plunged between those bony ribs.
The world stopped. The walls of air wavered and threatened to fall.
William laughed. “Lord!” he cried. “What fools we mortals be!”
He wrenched his blade free. The Huntsman wailed like the wind through empty places. The hounds echoed him, and the army of Old Things and dead souls and spectral hunters.
Then the world changed.
The sun was all but touching the horizon—and yet darkness went away. The world was washed in a tide of light. Henry looked up into William’s face, the broad grin and the hot-blue eyes and the joyous arrogance that would never change, no matter whether he was alive or dead.
The Huntsman stood behind him, utterly transformed: the Horned King, tall and strange and beautiful. His mount wore flesh; his huntsmen rode in the semblance of Great Old Ones, high lords of the Otherworld, or of old kings and heroes, princes of renown, who had won this destiny for their bravery and their prowess in battle. Even the hounds were returned to the light again, great white hounds with red ears, and their eyes were full of stars.
Henry bowed to them. They bowed in return. William said, “Don’t worry. I understand.”
For the first time Henry felt the rush of grief, the realization that his bro
ther was dead. Truly dead, and not to be reborn.
“But not damned,” William said. “Not by my lights. Don’t wallow, little brother. You’ve got what you were always meant to have—won fair and true, in the oldest of the old ways. It takes a king to kill a king—and to make one.”
Henry bowed again, down to the ground. When he rose, the Hunt had vanished, melted into the gold-red light, taking with it William’s soul. The gates of the Otherworld were shut. The walls of air had grown, swelled, expanded to encompass the whole of the isle and a good part of the sea.
“There will be no other conquest,” said the Lady Etaine. “No more invaders. No such defeat, ever again.”
“Amen,” Henry said.
The Guardians had drawn in close. With the Hunt gone, the air was full of Old Things, so thick with them that they dimmed the sky.
Etaine bent over the fallen king’s body. As Henry had done, she dipped her hand in blood. She painted Henry’s face with it, a war-mask of the old time. She painted his breast and hands, and last of all his lips, whispering as she did so, incantations so strong that words were too small to hold them.
He tasted blood, still warm with the heat of life. He felt the bindings as she made them: binding him to the earth, to air and sky, to the waters of Britain; weaving him into the land, and the land into him. There was no sin or atonement, no guilt or grief. He was the king, and king’s blood made it so.
She crowned him with oak and ash and the pricking of thorn. That small pain, those beads of blood, completed the sacrifice.
The rest of his consecration was waiting beyond her: hair like molten gold in the last of the light, magic clothing her in shadow and shimmer. She too was crowned with oak and ash and thorn, and her hands were reaching for his as he reached for hers.
There had been grief, pain, bitter choices—stern reminders of what it was to be a king. She was there to remind him of the rest: the strength he was to bring to his kingdom, the light he would shed upon it and the gifts of life and prosperity that he would give to it. And sons, he thought; sons and daughters to carry on the blood, so that neither the royal line nor the kingdom would wither and die.
All of that was in the meeting of hands and the smile that bloomed in both at once. Sorrow would be a long time fading; this day would haunt his dreams. But here was joy, that would always balance sorrow—and long after sorrow was forgotten, it would still be there. She would be there in all his empty places.
“You’re not getting the best bargain,” he said to her. “I’m too much my father’s son. There are women—children—”
“I know,” she said. “You can’t be sure what you’re getting with me, either. I haven’t been raised as a proper Christian queen. If we lie and say I’ve been at Wilton, the Church will accuse you of abducting a nun from a convent and violating her vows. If we—”
He stopped her lips with his. “Don’t think,” he said. “Or talk. Not tonight. Not until tomorrow.”
She drew breath to protest—he could see it in her eyes. But the pause gave her time to understand. She bowed to what she would, he hoped, see as his good sense.
The light was fading at last. They had shifted out of the world. Time had gone as fluid as water.
Somewhere in the endless stream of it, William lay newly dead. Walter Tirel whirled in a panic of grief, mind and memory all hopelessly confused. Maybe Cecilia moved to help him—or maybe to bind him to silence.
She moved too late. He scrambled up and away from all that impossible strangeness, caught a dangling rein, flung himself into the saddle of Henry’s horse. He hardly seemed to notice that his own was standing within reach.
His whole world was terror: that he had been caught in a cacophony of demons, and that—above all—no one would believe what he thought he had seen. His bow, his arrow had killed the king. Maybe he had. Maybe there had been a spell on him, or madness, or delusion. He had no magic and no learning in such things. He could not know.
He did the only thing he could do. He fled—all the way to the sea and back to Normandy, safe in his own castle where he could grieve in peace.
Henry could have stopped him. He made the choice: he let him go. Whether that was good or ill, time would tell. For the moment he was only sure that it was merciful.
Time would wait—would stand still for the completion of this rite. The powers would give him a night, then fold it away and open the world again to the hour before sunset, a king dead, the rest of his hunters finding him at last; then all the alarums and the pomp and the crushing urgency of a kingship that must be taken swiftly and made secure.
This night, of which the mortal world would never know, was the fulfillment of the rite. He took the kingdom in the old way, through the body of the living Goddess. It was hers to give, and she gladly gave it, she who was twice royal, Guardian and queen.
There was no pungency of hawthorn on them tonight. The scent that wreathed about them, dizzying and sweet, was the scent of roses. Her crown bloomed with them, white roses of the Otherworld, that would never fade or die.
He opened his mouth to speak, but she silenced him. No words tonight. Nothing at all but earth and air and sky, and the warmth of bodies joined together. Then he was truly king and she was queen; and Britain, at last, was whole.
CHAPTER 52
Anselm came out of morning Mass in a small church in Lyons that he had adopted for his own, still exalted with the beauty of the rite, to find a guest waiting for him in the sacristy. It was a stranger, a man of no particular age or distinction, dressed in anonymous traveling clothes. He bowed to Anselm and clearly looked for a ring to kiss; but that was shut away in a box in Canterbury.
Anselm blessed him, which he seemed to take in good part, and waited for him to provide a name and a purpose.
The name was not forthcoming. The purpose came mercifully quickly. The man drew from his purse a folded parchment with pendant seals, and a small bag, heavy for its size.
It was almost with a sense of relief that Anselm emptied the contents into his hand. It was the ring he had just been thinking of, the archbishop’s ring, with its carved amethyst and its weight of significance.
He weighed the letter in his hand, but elected to wait before he opened it. “You have a message, messire?” he asked.
The man bowed again. “I come from the king of the English,” he said. “He bids you return to your duties.”
Anselm drew a slow breath. His hands were not shaking: good. “Truly? William bids me return? How in the world—”
“William of England is dead,” the messenger said. “Henry of England summons you home.”
“Ah,” said Anselm. He felt nothing yet except a certain wry inevitability. “May I ask how William died?”
“By accident, holy father. An arrow in the hunt. They say his sweet friend did it, the count from Poix. He fled as the guilty might, but the king has not pursued him. There’s no blame to be laid, says the king, and no punishment to be exacted. He bids you know, holy father, that the same applies to you.”
Anselm’s brows rose. “Does it indeed?”
“Indeed,” said the messenger. His chin tilted toward the letter. “It’s all in there, holy father. I’m bidden to bring you to England. The escort is waiting. The servants will have finished packing by now. Have you any farewells to make? I can allow you an hour.”
That was clear enough. Anselm had begun to shake, but only a little—and after all he was old, and he was occasionally afflicted with a palsy. “I will take that hour, messire,” he said. “Will you wait for me with the escort?”
The messenger shook his head—regretfully, but that did not deter him. “I’m sorry, holy father. My orders are to stay with you until I bring you safe to the king.”
“Even into the garderobe?” Anselm inquired—but stopped the man before he could answer. “No, no. That was unworthy of any of us. I won’t vex your patience too far. Just give me time to get out of these vestments and offer thanks to my host for his hospit
ality. Will that be permitted?”
The king’s messenger bowed. Anselm sighed, but he was well and truly bound by his own oath and promise. He did as he was bidden.
Kingship became Henry. Anselm had to admit that. He had an air more of his mother than of his father: more grace, fewer rough edges. And, it had to be said, more magic in him than in both of them together.
It had been a long journey by mortal ways, and hard on old bones. Anselm’s escort had done its best for him within the scope of its orders. Nevertheless, Anselm was glad to see an end of it, in the hall of Westminster that Red William had built so vauntingly high.
William had filled it with arrogance and fire. Henry suited it better. He received Anselm with meticulous formality, he in the crown and on the throne, Anselm—not quite by main force—in miter and cope.
The court was there to witness it. Most of the faces were the same, along with the more deplorable excesses of fashion, but the dissolute lolling about of the previous reign had given way with edifying speed to a more becoming dignity. This court’s glitter seemed less hectic, its splendor more appropriately royal.
Anselm was beginning to have hopes of this king. He bowed with honest enough reverence. Henry returned the gesture without irony, as far as Anselm could see. “My lord archbishop,” he said. “Welcome home to England.”
“I thank you, Majesty,” Anselm said, “for your welcome and for your most attentive escort. Am I to consider myself further . . . escorted, or shall I now be free of the kingdom?”
“You are the primate of all England,” Henry said with diplomatic blandness. “Your freedom is commensurate with your rank.”
“Indeed,” said Anselm, “Majesty.”
Henry rose and came down from the throne. He took Anselm’s elbow, all gentle solicitude. “Ah, my lord archbishop: you’re worn out. Come, we’ll go somewhere more comfortable. I’ll have Cook send one of his tonics—he has a masterful way with herbs.”