King's Blood

by Judith Tarr

  CHAPTER 13

  William left Carlisle in high good humor. The north was secured, the fighting done for a while. He would spend Lent in the south, where it was already spring, then at Easter consider the next campaign. Scotland again, maybe. Or Normandy. Or God would send him another battle to fight.

  The road was open before him. His army marched in good order, with a fine store of baggage, the wealth of the north riding on the backs of strong mules. The wind was cold and edged with sleet, but he did not mind that. It would be warm soon enough.

  This riding was more haunted than usual—and worse, the farther south they rode. William always had an insubstantial escort, a pack of magical camp-followers, but this one outnumbered the mortal army. Companies of skeletal warriors rode on bony horses, with packs of fleshless hounds. Dim shapes skittered underfoot; dark wings spread overhead. Far away on the edges moved a shadow and a shimmer.

  The old Romans did not venture this road. These were older things by far, nor had most of them ever been mortal.

  The memory of Lanfranc’s warning niggled at William’s mind, but he pushed it away. He was resolutely, stubbornly a part of the living world. He rode on mortal stones over mortal earth. The mortal sky wept or smiled overhead. Mortal wind cut through his armor with the last blast of winter’s cold, or wafted past his face with the first faint promise of spring.

  He shut his eyes to the uncanny and made himself see only what was real to human eyes. It was harder than he had expected; it made his head ache. But it was worth the pain.

  They had come safely out of the north and ridden down through the marches of Wales. The country for once was quiet, with no threat of war, and no raids across the border. William began to think he would reach Winchester without any more trouble than an occasional bout of rain and mud.

  He paused for a day or two in Gloucester, resting men and horses and warming his bones in the midst of a sudden blast of winter. On the third day, though the weather was still chancy, he found himself too restless to sit in walls any longer. It was still a fair way to Winchester.

  He set off rather later than he had intended. His bed was warm and Robin was in it, and his men were reluctant to leave comfort behind. It was halfway to noon before they passed the city gate.

  The sun had been threatening to come out, but before they had been on the road an hour, the clouds closed in again. There were things in the air, shrill voices, and strange shapes that overcame even William’s determination not to see them. A thin and bitter rain began to fall.

  He set his jaw and picked up the pace. After a while, that cost him the baggage train and its heavily armed escort, along with the flock of priests and clerks who followed with the exchequer.

  The horses would have to rest soon enough; then the slowest riders would catch him. For now he was glad to be moving—running away, it might be, but it was better than sitting still.

  The road wound through fields as yet neither plowed nor planted, over and around low rounded hills, and past thickets of alder and hazel. Winter’s grip tightened. The sleet turned to a squall of snow.

  Darkness loomed ahead: the eaves of a wood. William had seen that wood before. It sat athwart every path, if that path was tainted with magic.

  He muttered a curse. While he was priding himself on having kept the world real, the world beneath had lured him away from the bulk of his army and sucked him into itself.

  This wood was not as dead as the one he had stumbled into years ago, before he was crowned. Its branches were bare and its undergrowth withered, but he heard sounds of life: whispers, chitters, brief eruptions of eerie laughter. Things moved in the shadows, flitting from branch to branch or creeping along the ground.

  He had turned back from the dead wood. This one stretched as far as he could see. There was no way around it, only through it.

  This time he refused to retreat. He was going to Winchester, and be damned to whatever tried to get in his way.

  He hardly needed to look to know where Robin was: his presence was as distinct as a warm hand on bare skin. He knew that when he spoke to that presence, it would hear. “Give me wards. Get me through this.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Robin said. He was riding beside William, where a moment before he had been well back toward the rear.

  In this light he looked less human than William had ever seen him. The old blood showed through the mortal flesh, narrowing his face and fining his bones. There was a light in him, growing brighter the farther they rode into the wood.

  “Be well advised,” William said, “that I am riding through this place. I am not submitting myself to any test or judgment or any other magical nonsense. If anything in this place tries to do such a thing, you will dispose of it. Is that understood?”

  Robin bent his head. His eyes were veiled beneath long lids. “Understood, sire,” he said.

  William eyed him narrowly. Robin kept his head down.

  William decided to trust him. If that was a mistake, so be it.

  They rode as straight as they could. The trees closed in until they had to ride in single file, bent over their horses’ necks. Some of the men wanted to dismount, but William ordered them to stay in the saddle.

  Now and then the trees drew back. There was even, once or twice, a clearing. The light was not much brighter there; snow was still falling, softer now but steady, covering the dead bracken and the withered grass.

  The sun was hidden, the light so dim that there was no telling what time of day it was. Robin was leading them—rightly, William hoped, and not in endless circles.

  God help them if they had to spend the night in this place. It was bad enough in what passed for daylight. He would wager it was infinitely worse after dark.

  The hauntings that had followed the army out of Carlisle were back in force. They must have been herding William’s escort—because surely they were not guarding it. As the day grew old, they seemed more solid; pallid flesh began to cover the naked bones.

  Robin’s face was white, his eyes shut as he rode. His lips moved. Faintly, almost inaudibly, William heard him chanting.

  His horse stumbled. His voice faltered. The army of Old Things closed in.

  As softly as he could, William drew his sword. Cold iron was deadly to magic, or so it was said.

  None of the creatures that hemmed him in seemed perturbed by it. Still, he kept it across his saddlebow. It was something solid to hold on to; some hope of defense if herding turned to attack.

  He looked over his shoulder. A moment before, twenty knights and squires had been riding there. Now there was no one. He was alone but for Robin. Darkness and mist shrouded the track.

  There was a little light ahead. William pressed toward it. It might be a trap. He was not about to turn tail, not here—because for a certainty, what was behind was worse.

  The light was a clearing. In a better season it might have been a rolling meadow with a stream running through it. Now it was barren and covered in snow, and the stream had gone dry. Only the meander of rounded stones told where it had been.

  William paused on the wood’s edge. He had prayed for the trees to part, but now that they had, he found that he was reluctant to expose himself to the sky. Things were up there watching. The clouds hid them, but he knew they were there—just as they knew where he was.

  Robin was pale and shaking. He was out of his depth here. He had given up trying to control his horse; William reached across and took the rein, just as the beast made a break for it.

  It fetched up short. Robin swayed in the saddle but kept his seat. There was one thing to be said for a Norman, even a half-breed with Druid blood: he could stay on a horse’s back no matter what it did.

  “Your father was a half-breed with Druid blood,” Robin said. His voice was faint, but there was a hint of his old lightness in it. “Ride forward. Straight across the clearing. Don’t look left or right, and don’t turn, no matter what you see.”

  William swallowed. His mouth was dry. It
was foolish—there was nothing there.

  Straight across the clearing. He could do that. Robin’s usually sensible horse had decided to be an idiot, but William’s red stallion was as sane as ever. He kept a solid grip on the bay’s rein and touched spur to his stallion’s side.

  It was not as easy to ride straight as one might have thought. The ground was uneven; there were stones under the snow, slippery and treacherous, and the stream’s dry and rocky bed crossed and recrossed the line that William tried to follow. Robin’s horse became more unruly rather than less as they moved out into the open.

  After the idiot beast lunged sidewise, nearly pulling William out of the saddle and nearly casting Robin on the ground, William hissed in fury. He dropped his own reins on the chestnut’s neck, trusting the stallion’s sense and his own seat to keep to the track, and got hold of Robin’s arm and heaved.

  In mid-heave, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. He hung in the air between the two horses, with Robin’s weight dragging him down. His stallion began to veer. Robin’s bay, now completely mad, whipped about.

  By God’s good grace, it spun toward William rather than away—and William’s stallion checked and shifted and settled solidly under him. With a wrenching effort, he hauled Robin across the chestnut’s neck.

  The bay screamed and bolted. William should have known better than to look, but he could not help himself.

  The ground rose up, or the sky came down. He could not be certain which. Robin’s poor halfwit horse was swallowed, engulfed in nothingness.

  Robin lay limp and still. He was breathing: William heard the catch and rattle.

  Without him, William had no defenses. All he could do was keep to the straight track and pray.

  Even prayer was a dangerous thing in England. The Saxons had turned it into a kind of weapon against magic. Their praying had made this place, sucked the life out of it and twisted what was left.

  William did not want to understand why Lanfranc had so hounded him both alive and dead. He was ruling well. His kingdom was under control. He wanted Normandy, and intended to get it.

  And yet here he was, alone but for a half-conscious witch-man, trying to ride straight on a track he could not see, through a wood and a meadow that did not exist on any mortal map.

  It was always going to be like this. He could live a year, two years, six, and be free of it—but just when he thought he was safe, it would ambush him. Anywhere he went in England, he could stumble into a trap.

  Straight ahead. That was the best he could do. There were eyes on him—watching, judging. He fancied that they were hungry.

  So was he, but there was no stopping until he was out of this place. He did something he had promised himself never to do: he opened all his senses, especially those he least liked to admit to.

  That, like his rescue of Robin, was almost a fatal mistake. He had not done such a thing in all the years since he became a man. The power of it—the sheer force of what he could see and feel and hear, smell and taste and touch—nearly flung him from the saddle.

  The world was a far, far wider place than he had ever allowed it to be. The sky was deeper, the shadows darker, the earth stronger. And every part of it was full of magic.

  Except—

  Once he let himself see what was there, he also could see what was not. The dead places; the places that were worse than dead.

  Of which this was one. The Old Things here were warped and twisted. Not that they had ever been exactly safe for mortals to know, but these had turned poisonous.

  William did not think he was supposed to be this deep in, or this defenseless, either. The lesson was not supposed to kill him, only put the fear of the old gods in him.

  He was afraid, right enough. Any sane man would be. But he was not quite paralytic with terror—not yet.

  His stallion’s steps were slow but steady, even when the wind began to blow. It was only a breeze at first, though cold and smelling of graves. All too quickly it rose to a gale. It buffeted him, and rocked the chestnut on his feet.

  The stallion lowered his head and pressed on against it, though a horse’s instinct was to turn tail and hold fast. William bent as low as he could, shielding Robin’s body as much as he might. He could not see where he was going. He had to trust that the horse could follow the track.

  There were voices in the wind, shrieks and cries, but worse than that, a shrilling hum that shook William’s bones. Snow swirled about him. Where it fell, it rattled like shards of glass. His horse twitched. Drops of blood sprang, scarlet on chestnut.

  William had no power to turn aside that edged assault. Cold iron could do nothing against it.

  He knew the way. It was the hardest direction and the most bitter: straight into the teeth of the wind.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Not all the howling he heard was wind. Some of it was the hunt that rode on his heels. The skeletal horses, the pale hounds, were all too familiar.

  Darkness waited ahead. It was full of eyes. What he had taken for trees were shadowy shapes. They crouched, waiting. The track ran straight toward them.

  There was no way around or over or back. There might be no hope, either. William steadied his horse and his heart, and settled Robin more firmly in his arms. “Go,” he said to the stallion, in hardly more than a whisper.

  The lean ear slanted back. The horse picked up his pace from a walk to a soft, smooth canter.

  Robin stirred and murmured. William tightened his grip and his legs. The canter stretched to a hard gallop.

  That was faster than William had intended, but he did not try to slow it down again. With Robin’s body for a shield and the Wild Hunt on his heels, he plunged into the forest of shadows.

  CHAPTER 14

  There were trees in here after all, but where those before had been stark and bare, these were thick with needles so dark that they seemed more black than green. Their branches hung down low, hunched like the wings of vultures. Things moved within them, rustling and skittering.

  William abandoned caution and began to pray. He knew better than to try fragments of childhood Saxon, though the temptation was overpowering. He held fast to Latin.

  The wood did not like the sound of that. The trees shuddered and groaned. He caught glimpses of the things that lived in them: weird, pallid creatures with faces too close to human for comfort. They reminded him of the feys that had loved to flock to his father, but as strange as feys were, these were stranger—and not in any wholesome way.

  Once he had seen them, they seemed to decide that there was no advantage in concealment. The trees were crawling with them.

  Thick as maggots on a carcass, he thought, and immediately regretted it. Thoughts had power. As strongly as he had resisted any knowledge of magic, he had learned that much from listening to his mother.

  Maybe, if he thought of the world he wanted to live in, envisioned it in every possible detail, willed it to take shape around him . . .

  It was almost enough. For an instant he saw plain daylight and an open road and the green hills of Somerset.

  The darkness came roaring in. The things in the trees shrieked and gibbered. His horse stumbled and went down.

  William went off rolling, coiling his body around Robin, protecting him as best he could. Hooves flailed past his head. The red stallion’s body crashed through trees.

  The horse was already dead. In the whirling dimness, William saw a black dart in the red throat, and blood springing hot and bright.

  Fear was far away, but William could hear it wailing to itself. He had landed easier than he expected: the mould of years was thick underfoot. He found he could stand, and drag Robin up with him, and heave him up over a shoulder and keep on walking.

  Straight ahead. For he had noticed something while he rode. However thick the throngs in the wood, not one of them ventured the track. He was safe as long as he stayed on it.

  God’s mercy alone had kept him there. The horse had fallen astray, and the black dart had taken him
.

  There was no telling how far it was to any hope of safety. The best William could do was keep hold of Robin and keep walking.

  Dark was closing in. Maybe it was night. Maybe it was not. The cold of it cut to the bone.

  He was alone but for a dead but breathing weight, a coat of mail that made his shoulders ache, and the glimmer of the track ahead of him. With contemptuous ease, this perversion of old Britain had stripped him of everything that he had in the world, except this essence of what he was.

  He stopped in the middle of the track. The darkness was nearly complete. He could still see the swarm of twisted fey; they were full of a sickly light.

  “Enough,” he said. “Kill me now and have done with it.”

  It was not the fey who answered. The voice came from behind, deep and cold and slow. “You will die,” it said, “as all men do. But not tonight.”

  Gently William lowered Robin to the ground, circling as he moved, standing astride the slack body with sword drawn. He came to a halt facing the way he had come.

  The Hunt was there: the great riding of the dead. The one who led it bore a stag’s skull atop broad and bony shoulders, with a spread of antlers so high and wide that they mingled with the branches of the trees.

  Deep in the hollow sockets of the eyes, a corpse-light gleamed. William met it full on with a glare as hot as the Huntsman was cold. He almost fancied that the creature rocked back a fraction; but that might only be his own exhaustion making his vision waver.

  “We are not here for your life,” said the Huntsman, “or yet for your soul.”

  “What then?” William demanded. He did not care if he was insolent. He would be just as dead whether he spoke softly or no.

  The Huntsman did not seem to mind how William said it. “We owe you this,” the apparition said. “What we are here, what Britain is becoming—those are your doing.”

  “Oh no,” said William. “I’m not taking the blame for that. Saxons killed the magic, then my father brought it back—and dropped it flat the day my mother died.”

  “The blame is in the blood,” the Huntsman said. “Only continue as you are, and all of Britain will belong to us. Then we will have your soul.”