King's Blood

by Judith Tarr

  “What, are you a Saracen?” She was laughing at him. “That is their profession of faith, as near as makes no difference.”

  “I am a man of God,” he said, “and I will not—”

  “Duty binds you,” William said.

  “You cannot force this on me,” Anselm said—struggling against his captors and doing his best to wriggle out of the cope. But even the miter refused to shift. They were bound to him.

  By sorcery, he told himself. Not by his will. “Only Rome can give this honor. Only Rome has the power to—”

  “I am the king,” William said, very quiet—and that was alarming in that hot-tempered blustering man. “The Church in my kingdom is in my power and its offices are in my gift. I give you Canterbury. Lanfranc left it to you, more or less, and I was enormously remiss in leaving it vacant for so long.”

  Anselm went still, with a quiet that in its way was as ominous as William’s. “Why? Why inflict this on me?”

  “Because Lanfranc thought you were the best man for it,” William said. “So do these ladies here, and this friend of mine. It’s your fate, my lord. Live with it.”

  “As you are?”

  William grinned. If Anselm had been a timid man or a superstitious one, he would have recoiled. The king’s face, just then, looked like a death’s-head wreathed in flames.

  “I don’t know if I’m living with it or not,” William said, “and in any case, unlike a priest, I’m not necessarily bound to practice what I preach.”

  Anselm had known William since he was a boy. There had never been much in common between them. William was no scholar, and Anselm had little care for men of the world or men of war. Now, as he stood weighed down by the miter and cope of the primate of all England, he realized that he did not like William at all. Hate was too strong a word for it, and too unChristian in any case. But there was no love there, and as for liking, however deep he delved inside himself, he could find none.

  William laughed. Anselm had never taken him for a perceptive man, but it seemed he could read his new archbishop as easily as Anselm could read words written on a page. “Buck up, man,” the king said. “You’ll be good at it—and it doesn’t take love to make a marriage work. Rather the contrary, your fellow priests might tell you. Love and lust are incompatible with the sacred institution and bondage between two well-propertied people.”

  “Bond,” said Anselm with gritted teeth. “Not bondage. Bond.”

  “I know what I meant,” William said sweetly. “You leave for Canterbury tomorrow. Your new see is waiting anxiously for you. Today, I’m sure, you’ll want to do all you can to make yourself familiar with it.”

  “You will regret this,” Anselm said. It was not a threat. It was a plain fact.

  “Probably,” said William with no sign of dismay. “Welcome to the Island of the Mighty, my lord. May your tenure here be long, prosperous, and full of the gods’ blessings.”

  Anselm bowed, stiff-backed. His guardian monks were still beside him, watching him with steady, implacable stares. So too were the silent ladies and the king’s catamite. The lines of those stares shaped the dimensions of a cage.

  There was no hope of flight. He crossed himself and laid aside, with grim effort, the anger that threatened to blind him. “Thy will be done,” he said—but not to the ferociously grinning king, and certainly not to any pagan god.

  CHAPTER 16

  Edith’s knees were aching. She had been kneeling in chapel, it seemed, forever. All the novices were there, doing penance for a terrible sin: Aldith and Ethelfleda had escaped to the town, left their veils behind, and—most appalling on a fast day—indulged mightily in sweets and meat pasties. The sinners had been flogged as well as condemned to kneel on the stone floor between matins and vespers; the rest were held at fault for having failed to prevent the escape.

  Edith would have been tempted to run away herself if she had not already been sinning—but no one had ever caught her. She slipped between shadows into the Otherworld, where only Sister Cecilia could follow. In fact she had been there for much of yesterday, while the sisters all thought her elsewhere being dutiful. She had come back to a great outcry and the capture of the culprits, and Mother Abbess’ wrath upon their heads.

  Aldith was weeping and shaking; she had always been a delicate thing. Edith was rather astonished that she had run away; she had never seemed rebellious. Ethelfleda on the other hand had been a difficulty ever since she came to the abbey the year before—dragged behind her father’s horse, screaming and cursing every step of the way. She had no calling whatever to this life, and she openly hated every moment of it.

  She was courting expulsion: she made no secret of that. Edith reckoned she would succeed—if not this time, then soon enough. She was stiff and erect now, far more proud than ashamed. Even Mother Abbess’ rod had not been able to bow those shoulders.

  It was a long day for thinking. Edith had been counting the years in days and weeks: six years within these walls, with a letter from her mother now and then, and from her father never. She was not as young a child as she had been. Under the grey sack of the novice’s habit, her body was changing: growing tall and long-legged like a yearling foal, and finding shape in places that had never had it before.

  Other things were happening, too. Her magic was changing. It was rooting deeper inside her. Her body was waking as if from a winter’s sleep.

  If she had been a simple novice of the abbey, she would never have known what was becoming of her. But in the Otherworld, people were different. Those who were human or nearly were given to smiling when they saw her, and observing that she would be a woman soon. “Then you’ll dance in the Beltane fires,” they said.

  Those were a thing that the Christians had forbidden with a great thunder of denunciation. They were most well versed in that. But the fires would burn in spite of them. The Old Things and the humans who knew them would dance the dances and sing the songs, and those who were minded would leap the fires and run away together into the welcoming dark, two by two.

  Edith knew fairly sensibly what they did there. She had seen animals mating, and heard servants talking when she was small. She had heard them doing other things, too, up in haylofts or hidden away in corners.

  Then she had been merely curious. Now, when she thought of it—even here in the stifling holiness of the chapel—her body felt strange. The place where breasts barely were was warm, and there was a most peculiar sensation between her thighs, as if she were melting from inside.

  Her hands pressed together in the enforced attitude of prayer. They wanted to touch the warm places, to understand them better. It was a great struggle to pretend that she was praying.

  Under cover of bowed head and lowered eyelids, she slid her glance from side to side. Everyone was kneeling in the same way, though some were swaying slightly. It was a terrible discipline to kneel all day without moving.

  Mother Abbess was kneeling with them. Sister Cecilia was gone again on one of her supposed retreats. Mother Abbess had taken the fault on herself for losing two of her own to the lure of depravity. Edith could feel the anger in her, and the deep resentment of human failure—in herself as much as in others.

  Edith squeezed her eyes shut and wished she could block her mind as she could her ears. She had been reading people too well lately—and she could not stop. She kept knowing to the last word how they felt, what they wanted, what they were thinking.

  She wished Sister Cecilia would come back. No one here could help her. The people in the Otherworld laughed as they did at everything. They saw nothing to fret over. Magic was not simply in them; it was what they were. Nothing about it was strange or troubling to them.

  “Not necessarily.”

  The part of her that was mortal substance was still kneeling in the chapel. The rest of her, all that was not needed to keep her body upright, had slipped right out of the world and come to rest in a place of leaves and green silences.

  That had never happened before.
She looked down rather desperately at herself, and she was there, or seemed to be: still in her fusty habit with the ragged hem and the stitches where the crooked-horned cow had caught it during a discussion as to the future of her calf.

  There was a person in front of her. He was neither as tall as the fair ones who crossed the land in their ridings nor as small as the fey and lesser folk who populated both this world and the other. He looked quite human actually, if one disregarded the sharply pointed tips of his ears and the sharply pointed teeth, or the eyes as green and slit-pupiled as a cat’s. His hair was as brown as oak-bark, and he was dressed in green and brown.

  “Puca,” she acknowledged him by name and kind.

  He grinned and bowed. “At your service, lady,” he said.

  She was very careful not to twitch. No word spoken in this world was heedless, and service promised was service given. “Indeed?” she asked. “Have I earned it?”

  “Your destiny has,” said the puca, “and your magic. You’re blossoming into it, lady.”

  “Like a nettle,” she said.

  He laughed. He was not mocking her, she did not think. But then he sobered. “We’re not at ease with all of magic, either. Some of what’s been breeding and growing in Britain is frightening. Even the great ones walk wary of it.”

  “The black places?” Edith asked. Even out of the body, the thought made her cold. “The places where it’s all rotted and dead?”

  The puca nodded. “It scares us. It’s all wrong—and whatever it touches, it twists. It’s caught the Hunt; they’re even turning on their own, and feeding on magic.”

  “Won’t the rites of Beltane and Midsummer help?” said Edith. “Aren’t they supposed to feed the magic?”

  “They do,” said the puca.

  “You want me to do something,” Edith said.

  The puca grinned. “Everyone said you had clear sight. Yes, we want something. We’re not sure what, yet. Just . . . something. Because you have so much magic, and your blood is what it is.”

  “You want my blood,” Edith said. She was very calm. “Do you think it will help?”

  “Maybe not that kind of blood,” said the puca. “We don’t know. Fate swirls around you—time comes to a center in you. But we can’t see how. Not yet.”

  Well, Edith thought. She was born to matter: king’s daughter and descendant of kings. That she mattered to England came as no surprise.

  “Britain,” said the puca. “You matter to Britain.”

  “But England is—”

  “England is a shadow. Britain was there before it and will be there long after it is gone.”

  “I was born to England,” Edith said a little stiffly.

  “Your mother was born to England. You are half a Gael, and all the magic is in you.”

  Edith set her lips together. She did not know that she was angry. He was saying things she had thought for herself. But part of her was still her mother’s child, however little she loved the life her mother had meant for her. She had to defend it somehow.

  “I won’t destroy England,” she said. “I’ll never agree to that.”

  “We won’t ask it,” said the puca. Still smiling at her, he shrank and dwindled and shifted, until a sleek striped cat stood where he had been. His eyes were still the same, and his teeth not so different. He was purring loudly; his whole body shook with it.

  Edith blinked. She had not expected that, even knowing he was a puca and therefore a shapeshifter. He crouched; she was prepared, somewhat, when he sprang to her shoulder.

  His claws dug in, but gently. His purr was raucous. She caught herself smiling and stroking his fur. He was seducing her; but she did not mind.

  She felt the tugging at her center. At first she resisted it, but it was stronger than she was. The mortal world was calling her back.

  Greenwood and Otherworld and puca melted away. She was surprised, somewhat, to find her body still kneeling where she had left it, but the light had shifted considerably to the westward. The bells were ringing for vespers.

  Aldith had fainted. One or two others were swaying dangerously. Edith felt a little weak herself, but her spirit had rested; she had strength left.

  The nuns trod softly into the chapel, gliding in their dark habits. Their voices were ineffably sweet as they chanted the first verse of the evening’s office. Edith heard it as pure sound without words.

  The Otherworld was still in her. It shaped the sound, and opened it like a curtain. The grey pall that had always lain on the chapel was turned to mist and silver.

  She forgot herself so far as to gape in astonishment. This, she had never expected. Something had happened to the nuns’ prayer; suddenly it had stopped killing magic and started nourishing it.

  It could not be her doing, surely. Sister Cecilia was nowhere to be seen. And yet there it was. The place that had stifled and horrified her for so long was suddenly—not comfortable, no. But far less wretched than it had been.

  Only the abbess was the same. She seemed all the darker for the light that was around her. When her voice joined the antiphon, the clear sweet chant went dim and strange.

  Edith was growing dizzy. She must not faint—which was pride, and that was a sin, but she did not care. When this was over, all the novices would be allowed to stand up. Then they could stagger together, empty and echoing and full of penitence, to their beds.

  Music poured out of her, all without her willing it. It was in the air; it sang through her. It was a part of the nuns’ chant, and yet it soared above it, weaving through it, lifting it up against all that Mother Abbess could do.

  Edith had made a choice. She had not known she was doing it until it was done. It seemed perfectly natural and altogether inevitable.

  CHAPTER 17

  Mother Abbess surveyed Edith with a cold eye. Edith had not been summoned into the presence in a long while. A year? More? It had been a respite—but like all such things, it had had to end.

  All the novices, even Aldith, had recovered from their day’s penance. Aldith was pale and quenched and more attentive to her prayers and duties than ever, but Ethelfleda was brewing another rebellion—Edith could taste it.

  At the moment Edith would do better to consider her own position. Her rebellion was years long and much more insidious than Ethelfleda could have dreamed of. She stood in the abbess’ workroom with her hands folded and her eyes lowered, doing her best to seem humble and obedient.

  She was stronger than she used to be. She could breathe in this room, if with difficulty. She was less tempted to panic and run. But it was still not a pleasant place to stand in.

  At last Mother Abbess deigned to speak. “Sister Gunnhild tells me your studies progress well.”

  “Yes, Mother Abbess,” Edith said without lifting her eyes. She had left the rest of the novices’ lessons some years since; Sister Gunnhild was her only tutor. That was a happy enough arrangement, all things considered; they had been studying theology together of late, and were working through whatever the library had. Sister Gunnhild had even got hold of a new book on the nature of God, written by a very holy man named Anselm.

  Edith said none of that. She did not think Mother Abbess would approve. Theology was the highest of all the arts and the queen of sciences, but Edith was quite certain that Mother Abbess did not want any of her nuns to think. She wanted them to pray, and to be blindly devout.

  Mother Abbess let the silence stretch again. Edith continued her study of patience. Then the abbess said, “I have been taking thought for your future here. You are somewhat young for this decision, but your preceptors agree that you are well grown and unusually wise. If the lord bishop will agree to a dispensation, you may take your final vows.”

  Edith so far forgot herself as to raise her eyes and stare. Of all the things she would have expected, this was the last. Foolish, too; she should have known it would come. She was an oblate, an offering to the abbey. It was inevitable that she should be admitted to full orders.

  S
he had been refraining from thinking about it—avoiding it, for a fact. She had a calling, that much was true, but the longer she lived here, the more sure she was that it was not to the veil. Certainly not here, if she was to take orders anywhere. She could not be what the abbess wanted her to be.

  Someday she would have to say that. Maybe it was cowardice, but she told herself that it did not have to be today. She swallowed, because her throat was dry. “When?” she asked—trying not to choke on it. “When would that be?”

  “When the lord bishop has responded to our petition,” the abbess answered. “I would hope to welcome you among us on the feast of the Virgin’s assumption into heaven.”

  Edith shivered. Beltane had come and gone—and she had watched the fires from afar, but something had kept her from coming closer. The Virgin’s feast day was in August; that was hardly more than three months away.

  Three months to find an escape. Or maybe, she thought with sudden hope, there would be more time. Bishops were notoriously busy men.

  Maybe Sister Cecilia could help. The king was her brother. Or she could find a way to send the abbess’ message astray. Or Edith could do that herself. If she could think how to begin. If—

  She was panicking. Her mind was babbling, leaping from thought to thought like a bird dashing itself against the bars of a cage.

  She could run away. She could vanish into the Otherworld and never come back.

  She knotted her hands together in the full sleeves of the novice’s habit and did her best to still her wildly flailing thoughts. There was time—not much, but not too little, either. First, she had to get out of this room without betraying herself.

  “I don’t think I’m ready,” she said. She hoped it sounded humble and not desperate. “When I’m older—when I’ve studied more—”

  The abbess smiled. It was a chill, bloodless smile, but it was as genuine as she was capable of. “Your humility becomes you,” she said. “Trust your elders’ judgment, child. You are well suited to this calling, and it would please your mother greatly to see you consecrated so soon.”