King of the May

by Myers, Karen

  Eurig harrumphed, but he wasn’t able to keep a smile from breaking out. “So we’re halfway through, you say.”

  George nodded.

  “Well, I suppose we can support the little demons a while longer,” Eurig said. He looked sternly at George. “But I don’t believe for a moment we’re the only ones having problems.”

  George choked at the accurate assessment.

  “I should have been more suspicious when you suggested the whole notion,” Eurig said, ruefully.

  “You’ll enjoy spotting them in the pack later and boasting about how well they’re doing,” George told him.

  “You mean, once they’re your problem instead of mine, eh?”

  After Eurig stamped off, mollified, George returned to his interrupted morning task. The library in the huntsman’s house that he’d inherited from his predecessor Iolo ap Huw had been filled until recently with the full records of the Cwn Annwn, the pack he thought of as the Wild Hunt. The records went back before there were books in codex form, back to scrolls, and were as much a part of the hunt as the hounds themselves.

  They’d been stashed there in an emergency when the kennels were destroyed a couple of months ago, and the new huntsman’s office in the rebuilt kennels had only just gotten to the point where it could house them again. The last of the boxes had been shifted yesterday, and he was impatient to get at the layer underneath that was now accessible—six boxes, still on the floor, that he’d brought back from his human grandparents almost half a year ago when he’d told them he would be making his home in the fae otherworld.

  These boxes contained all that he had that had once belonged to his parents, except for a few pictures of his mother, the best of which had been enlarged and now hung in a gallery along the upstairs hall of his home with the other family pictures. He had no pictures of his father at all and had never seen one. Only his fading memory still painted him—tall (but all adults were tall to a child), spare, dark-haired.

  He sat himself down cross-legged on the floor before a random box and paused before opening it. I need to know, he thought. In two months, Angharad will have our first child. I want to be able to tell my daughter about her family, my family. It’s time for me to grapple with it myself—how could I have let it sit for so long? I was nine years old when they died, and I’m thirty-four now. That’s twenty-five years of averting my eyes, of not trying to find out. How is that possible?

  He remembered the day he’d gotten the news. His parents had gone for a walk together in the woods near the gamekeeper’s cottage in Wales, and they hadn’t returned. He didn’t sleep all that night. In the morning, he was in the midst of saddling his pony to ride to a neighboring farm, when a policeman had found him in the stable and stopped him. “There’s been an accident,” he said. George remembered his exact words. He wouldn’t give him any details.

  While the policeman was washing up inside, George had snuck a peek at his notebook. There was something about wild animals, and he saw his father’s true name for the first time—Corniad Traherne, not Conrad, the name he used every day.

  They’d found his mother’s father’s contact information in her address book, and his grandfather came and whisked him away to Virginia the next day. His grandparents never discussed his parents’ death with him. Not that they avoided it, it was just that George didn’t ask.

  Why not, he wondered. It had left a hole in his life, certainly, but his grandparents had done a fine job of raising him, the only child of their only child. He’d loved his parents, his bright mother, distracted by her writing, but fond of showing him how to do things. And he’d idolized his father, a gamekeeper for one of the large estates. He was wonderful with animals. George had followed him around whenever he could, to see the animals undisturbed by his presence, to listen to his stories—he was full of stories.

  So what had happened? The records should be here, he thought. Once I start, my childhood memories will be irrecoverably altered. Do I want that?

  Of course I do, he decided. Better the truth than a comforting fable.

  Two hours later, George stood up stiffly and stretched the kinks out of his back. He looked down at the results, separate messy piles on the floor of the library, and six empty boxes, stacked clumsily off to the side.

  His feist Sargent barked and then he heard voices outside, and the front door opened. She’s back, he thought, and his heart pounded. He walked quickly out to the front hall to greet her, brushing eager dogs out of the way as he went.

  Angharad was seven months pregnant with their first child and she… glowed, down to the tip of her auburn braid. He’d been nervous about this trip she’d taken to see Tegwen at Taironnen, Eurig’s estate. The only concession she’d been willing to make to her pregnancy was to travel by carriage instead of on horseback, and her new apprentice Bedo had promised to look after her carefully the whole time.

  George had been worried it would exhaust her, but clearly he’d been wrong. He gathered her into a hug, careful of her belly. “Everything alright?” he asked as he looked down into her smiling face. Her terriers danced at her feet.

  “It went splendidly,” she said. “I got all the studies of the elms and the building in summer that I wanted, and I can work on it now in the studio.”

  “I meant you,” he growled, and she laughed at him.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m fine. I told you I would be. It’s not my first time, after all.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s mine. I conjured up all sorts of possible disasters.”

  She cupped his face with a hand, fondly. “Don’t worry. I won’t travel again until after the birth.” She paused. “Probably,” she amended.

  “Bedo was a great help,” she said, waving him over from the door where he’d been standing discreetly, giving them some privacy.

  The brown-haired man retained his quiet background presence, the habits of the servant he’d been before Angharad selected him as her next trainee. He was just at the beginning of a multi-year apprenticeship and Angharad had housed him in the spare bedroom of the huntsman’s house, across the hall from George’s foster-son, Maelgwn.

  With the coming baby, the house would soon be full, George thought. He remembered what it had felt like a few months ago, just him and Iolo’s servant Alun rattling around in it. He had Alun looking for a maid-servant to serve as a nurse for the child.

  He saw Alun now coming out of the kitchen to carry bags upstairs for Angharad and Bedo.

  George said, “Alun, when you’re done with that, come help me sort out the mess I’ve made in the library. I want to start going through it in an organized fashion.”

  He turned to Angharad and explained, “The boxes from my parents. I’ve just started on them.”

  “What’s it look like?” she asked, and walked with him back into the library to see for herself, while Bedo followed Alun upstairs.

  He reached down and picked up a small pile of documents from the floor and put it on the nearest table. “I went through everything quickly so I’d know where to start. These are the official records—marriages, deaths, and so forth. I put them aside as they turned up. I haven’t looked at them seriously yet.”

  “The rest of it,” he waved his hand at the piles on the ground, “well, I’ve got her writings for publication, her correspondence, some of his papers, information about them from the newspapers, and a few trinkets. That’s all there is.”

  “I’d like to help,” she said.

  “I’d be grateful for it. Go and change first, and I’ll start making a list of what’s here of the official records and what’s missing, so I can fill it in by requesting copies. That’ll provide the framework for everything else, facts instead of my childhood recollections.”

  He smiled at her. “I’ll introduce you to my parents as I learn about them myself. We’ll meet them together.”

  George sat down at the table and drew the small pile of miscellaneous documents over while waiting for Angharad to return. He pulled out
his pocket notebook and began to sort through them, making a grid as he went along.

  He had always wondered what his father’s relationship was to Cernunnos. His father’s true name, Corniad, meant “the horned one”—was it a coincidence that George carried the antlered master of beasts Cernunnos inside, as if he were some sort of avatar for the god? He remembered his father’s fondness for animals, his special way with them. When he was a child, it had just seemed part of his father’s skills but now, as an adult with a beast-sense of his own that came from his internal passenger, he thought it must have been something more, something similar to what he had. From Cernunnos, too?

  The god had resisted all his attempts to find out more. His mother’s parents knew almost nothing about their son-in-law, and the deaths put a stop to their curiosity as they chose to focus on their surviving grandchild instead. This pile of documents brought the bureaucratic resources of the human world to his aid to help him solve the puzzle. Fae gods and distant human grandparents notwithstanding, now he could look at the facts in black and white.

  He flipped through the documents quickly, looking for his father’s records, and quickly discovered they almost all belonged to his mother, Léonie. He must have overlooked most of his father’s in the initial sort.

  There was a copy of her birth certificate, not surprising considering she was visiting Wales as a US citizen before she married. Her expired visitor’s visa and her residence card had also turned up, and he noted the dates of each. The marriage certificate gave him pause, the pale green form filled out with the handwriting of both his parents, their signatures side by side. The year was the same as her residence card, but it was a month earlier. I suppose she became a citizen by virtue of marrying one, he thought. He didn’t know how the laws worked in Wales in the 1970s. He checked the date again—a comfortable 12 months before his own birth.

  How did she meet his father? She’d been doing a tour of Europe after college, starting with Ireland, but she didn’t get past Wales. He expected some of that story would be in her letters home which his grandparents had saved. Those should be somewhere in these piles.

  Here was her old US passport. He didn’t see any others—perhaps she hadn’t traveled after he was born and hadn’t needed a Welsh one. He opened it up and examined the picture. So young, she was. He was older now than she was when she died, and in this picture she was only 19. She looked like a strong girl. He could see his grandfather in her sturdy shoulders, and his grandmother’s sweetness in her soft smile. Her light brown hair was straight and short.

  He flipped to the back and saw stamps for travel in the Caribbean, perhaps with her parents, but not much else. This was probably her first trip to Europe. As he paged through the thick pages, an old Polaroid tumbled out, face down. He recognized the milky back and the stiff, slick surface. Was it a tourist snapshot? Her parents?

  He turned the photograph over. It was his father, a candid shot as he bridled a horse. The colors had faded to pinks and greens.

  All his vague childhood memories of his father’s face suddenly solidified. This was the man he knew, the one who took him for adventures in the woods, the one who taught him how to ride. He seemed tall in truth, not just to a child’s eyes, and his hair was black and thick, like George’s. I have his hair, he thought. My bulk comes from my grandfather, Gilbert Talbot, but it looks like my height comes from both sides. What else do I have that’s his?

  He felt a stirring inside, as if Cernunnos were looking on. Well, he thought to him, what can you tell me? I’ve asked you often enough.

  There was no response.

  Angharad walked in and saw the picture over his shoulder. “Is that your father?”

  “Yes, and my mother, too.” He handed her the passport along with the Polaroid.

  “She’s lovely. She looks like Georgia.”

  “I see my grandfather in her,” he said.

  “I can see her in you,” she countered. “But I thought you didn’t have any pictures of your father.”

  “I’ve never seen one before, but I remember him. This is him.” He couldn’t keep the wonder out of his voice as he took the picture back from her and examined the little image for details. His father must not have known the photographer was watching, for he had none of the self-consciousness of a knowing camera subject. All his attention was on the horse, and it seemed to George that there was a melancholy cast to his face. I’m probably just reading it into the photo, he thought. It really isn’t clear enough to see that.

  Angharad sat next to him as he finished going through the documents. Here was a record from the cemetery where his mother’s remains had been laid, in Rowanton, after they’d been brought back to Virginia. George remembered the headstone with his parents’ names and dates on it from the family visits on Memorial Day.

  He reached for the last piece of paper which, appropriately enough, was her death certificate. He blinked, and Angharad laid her hand on his as they looked at it together. There was only hers, not his father’s. The cause of death was “misadventure.”

  “I wonder where my father’s is,” he said to her. He picked up the cemetery record again and looked at it more carefully. It listed the receipt of his mother’s remains. That was all it listed.

  But the headstone has both their names, he thought. Where is my father buried? Why would there be a separate record somewhere?

  Where is his death certificate?

  He turned to Angharad to voice the inescapable question. “Where’s my father’s body, then? What happened to it? Didn’t he die, too?”

  Cernunnos erupted as the deer-headed man and the sudden change of form sent Angharad stumbling out of her chair to get out of the way. George was shunted aside as Cernunnos took over their body and stood up to sweep the documents off the table and onto the floor in a rage.

  Stay away, he warned George. He is dead, dead and gone. Dead to me, and dead to you.

  But this is my father, George protested in silent surprise. Why?

  Stay away, the thunderous voice in his head rumbled.

  Is my father alive? He had to know. He’d never suspected it.

  Not to you, Cernunnos said, and withdrew forcefully. George collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  To continue reading or find out more click here: www.perkunaspress.com/wp/link-bound-into-the-blood/.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Myers is the author of the best-selling novel To Carry the Horn, the first entry in the series The Hounds of Annwn, a contemporary Wild Hunt fantasy set in a fae otherworld version of the Virginia Piedmont. She is currently working on a new fantasy series, The Affinities of Magic, following a young wizard who launches an industrial revolution of magic. More information is available at Perkunas Press.

  A graduate of Yale University from Kansas City, Karen has lived with her husband, David Zincavage, in Connecticut, New York, Chicago, California, and more recently in the lovely foxhunting country of Virginia where they followed the activities of the Blue Ridge Hunt, the Old Dominion Hounds, the Ashland Bassets, and the Wolver Beagles.

  Karen writes, photographs, and fiddles from her log cabin in the Allegheny mountains of central Pennsylvania. She can be reached at KarenMyers@HollowLands.com.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ALSO BY KAREN MYERS

  SHORT TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24r />
  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  GUIDE TO NAMES AND PRONUNCIATIONS

  IF YOU LIKE THIS BOOK…

  ALSO BY KAREN MYERS

  EXCERPT FROM BOUND INTO THE BLOOD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR