by Judith Tarr
“Nor would any of us,” said Malcolm’s son Edward, entering the fray somewhat late but with welcome good sense. “If I’m to be listened to, we’ll ride out tomorrow, and trust in God and our wits. If anything is following us, I’d rather meet it under the sky, in a clean fight.”
Of the dozen of them, less than half even troubled to nod. The rest were frowning or shaking their heads. The men in the hall, who could see and hear them on the dais, grumbled in response.
They were getting out of hand—and they were all blinded by comfort to Edward’s eminent logic. Malcolm slammed his cup down on the rough planks that passed for a table, spraying bad ale over half the captains. “Damn your eyes! If it’s death in bed you’re wanting, don’t you think we can find beds with a smaller stock of vermin? There’s bigger castles upriver, and downriver, too—with more loot and better beds, and by God, women to warm them.”
That raised a shout. This castle had presented one vast disappointment: not a female to be found, except for the mangy cow in the stable—and she was dry. But for the rain and the wind, Malcolm had no doubt that a good portion of his army would have crept off to the town in search of consolation.
Tonight they were all here. He felt the strain in them, the resistance that came to armies when they had lost the fire and begun to think too much of home.
He was not ready yet. His rage against the English king was still hot. These raids had drawn out a few defenders, but nothing notable yet. He wanted William’s notice—and William’s fear.
But a king was only as strong as the people who followed him, and these were losing heart. They had fought a winter campaign last year and lost. None of them was eager to do it again.
Bad luck to them, then, he thought. He was king, and he had suffered enough insults. This war he was going to win.
He bent his head to his son. “We’re riding in the morning,” he said. “And now I’m for bed. Sleep while you can. I’ll draw Red William out, and then we’ll have a battle that will get our blood running.”
“Inside our skins rather than out on the ground, one would hope,” someone muttered. Malcolm’s glance darted, but whoever it was had hidden himself well.
No matter. These men were still his. They would obey. And he would give them a battle, if he had to take them all the way to Winchester and break down the gate.
Temper was a fire to keep him warm. He needed it that night. The air was colder than it had a right to be, even on the threshold of winter. He would never give Connall the satisfaction, but lying in his conquered bed, with no conquered woman to bear him company, he knew that Connall had told the truth. There was a haunting on them.
Tonight it was quiet, like watchful eyes. He could not help but think of a cat stalking prey, crouched outside its door, waiting for it to come out.
A mouse did not boast an army. Malcolm took that thought to sleep with him, dropping off like the soldier he was. No fighting man worth his weapons let himself lie awake fretting when there was a battle to be won.
There was bright sun come morning, with clouds blowing away toward the sea. The roads were muddy but passable, and Malcolm’s men were in much the same condition. They were still his, in spite of their evening’s lapse.
The fine weather roused them somewhat. Malcolm had in mind to take the next market town as he had the last, and hope the loot was better and the accommodations less drafty. If that did not draw out the king’s men, he would have to gamble for higher stakes: attack a castle and hope the siege was not too long. Not too likely a prospect at this time of year, with the harvest just in, but if the gods of luck were with him, who knew? He might carry it off.
He was in a surprisingly cheerful mood, all things considered. Whatever had been haunting him had drawn back, if it had ever been there at all. He shook off the brief suspicion that it was hovering, watching and waiting for something that he, idiot mortal that he was, could not foresee.
He grinned at the sky. If there was a battle ahead of him, so much the better.
To be prudent, because after all he meant to win, he sent scouts down the river. The day passed and the army advanced, but the scouts did not come back.
He was not alarmed, not yet, but he gave the order to ready weapons. The line had drawn out somewhat; it came together in something more like battle ranks.
There was no warning. Crows had been cawing, and were suddenly still. That was all.
Edward was riding beside Malcolm, having just come up from the rear, where nothing had been happening or seemed likely to. “River’s high,” he said, nodding toward the flood that nearly lapped the road. “Let’s hope the bridge isn’t out, or we won’t be getting across this week.”
“Then we’ll raid on this side till there’s a ford we can use,” Malcolm said.
Edward opened his mouth to answer. For a blank instant Malcolm wondered why the boy suddenly had a mouthful of feathers. Then the wide eyes and the sudden passage of life from the body brought the world back into focus: sharp as the arrow’s point, fiercely bright as the sunlight on a thousand spears.
Malcolm had done it. He had brought out the king’s men. A whole army of them lay in ambush at the river’s bend, where a copse of trees and the steep hillside had hidden them. They had the heads of Malcolm’s scouts on spears, and banners of great lords of the north: Mowbray and Bamburgh, earl and baron, come to drive the Scots back across the border.
Malcolm snatched at his son as he fell, but their horses shied away from one another, and Edward’s body tumbled under the hooves of the men behind. There was no grief yet. No time for it. Malcolm’s heart had gone cold as it always did in a fight.
The arrows were as thick as rain. The enemy had archers on the hilltops, admirably placed.
Malcolm took an instant to admire them. Normans always had known how to use a good troop of archers. It had won England for them, and might win this battle, too.
Or it might not. Malcolm was old and wily and he had a fire in his belly. He wanted Red William’s head on his spear. He felt the rage building, rising up to fill his body, until it burst out in a great bull-bellow.
His ranks drew in, weapons flashing to the defense. The Normans had chosen a fine place for an archers’ ambush, but a wretched one for that other and most potent weapon of theirs: the charge of armored knights. With steep slope on one side and river’s flood on the other, the heavy horses had no room to maneuver.
Malcolm’s smaller, lighter, faster cavalry, even here, could dart from the line in twos and threes and dozens, hack their way through the line of attackers, then draw back to charge again. His knights, such of them as there were, made a wall around him, while his foot resorted to the shieldwall that they had learned, not from the late-come Saxons, but from old Rome itself.
The enemy kept coming, and kept coming—ahead and behind. It was a trap, and beautifully laid. There was no escape to either side—only forward or back, against two armies.
Flights of arrows were not limitless. Quivers emptied; archers gave way to spearmen and swordsmen fighting in close. The shieldwall bristled with spent arrows as it pressed forward step by step. When a man fell, his mates closed in, and the ranks behind stepped over him, steady and relentless.
The Normans had no need to drive from behind. The Scots advanced of their own will. They would break through the ranks ahead—or they would not. That was in God’s hands.
Malcolm had no more use for despair than he had for grief. He should have been more wary, chosen another road, given himself more room to maneuver. He had not done those things. And the Hunt, swirling above him, laughed the wild laughter of the Old Things gone mad.
He howled back at them. They might be great powers of air, but he was a king of the Gael, and long before his ancestors had been kings, they had been gods. He swept out his sword and spurred his horse through a gap in the wall that defended him, and set to work slaughtering Normans.
CHAPTER 30
Edith stumbled and fell.
She ha
d been walking down the passage to the stillroom with instructions to fetch a potion for her mother, when the vision smote her. Such a thing had never happened before. It was like one of her magical dreams, vivid and immediate, but much stronger: so strong it brought her to her knees.
It was a soft day in Edinburgh, with a mist from the sea, but the sun was shining brightly in the vision. There was a river, swollen into flood, and a steep hillside, and a road running between hill and river.
Armies were fighting on the road and up the hill and falling into the river. She had never learned to make sense of a battle—an important skill, the men always said—and to her eye it was a confusion of men and horses, banners and weapons. Still, even she could see that some of the men were trying to push forward, and many more were before and behind and on the hill, either trying to kill them or trying to drive them into the river.
There were more than men in that place. The spectral Hunt was there, in the mortal world and under the mortal sun, well outside of its proper time and place. It circled in the air above the battle, poised to catch souls as they fled. The skeletal hounds rent them; the fleshless hunters devoured what little was left.
All but the Huntsman. He sat motionless on his bony mount, with his long stag’s skull bent on the scene below, and the pale ghost-fire of his eyes followed one mortal out of them all. That was his prey, and he was waiting with terrible patience for it to fall into his hands.
Edith hovered in the air above both mortal men and Old Things. As she bent her focus on the battle, she seemed to swoop down toward it, until she drifted directly above it. Then she saw whose soul the Huntsman waited for.
Her father was fighting hard, his sword a blur of steel. He never seemed to tire. He was making headway—driving the enemy back, and rallying his own men to charge after charge. She could see that, once she focused on him: how some men fought with him, and a great number of others fought against him.
So that was how men saw a battle. She did not like it any better now she understood it. Because once she did, she could see that the Scots were terribly outnumbered, and the enemy—Normans, she presumed—could send men in waves, so that a good number rested while the others did the fighting.
This was her fault. She had shown the Hunt where to go. Now men were losing their souls because of her, and her father was like to lose his.
Somehow, far away from all this, her body staggered into the stillroom and collapsed onto the bench by the door. No one was there to stare or ask questions.
It was almost too strange, being in two places at once. Tempting, too, to leave the vision behind and try to forget it—but guilt and anger were too strong.
She pressed her hands to her face, squeezing her eyes shut. The stillroom vanished. There was only the battle, and her father fighting for his life and—though maybe he did not know it—his soul.
She saw the spear that struck for his heart. It was an ordinary spear in an ordinary man’s hand, but it came from beside and below while Malcolm fought off a knight on a giant of a horse. He never knew it was there.
The Huntsman’s face was a skull, and therefore lipless. Yet he smiled.
She cried out. She tried to muster magic—anything, spell or cantrip or sheer force of will—to turn that spear aside. But her power would not reach so far, not with the Huntsman to bar the way.
With appalling inevitability, the spear thrust through mail and padded gambeson, upward beneath the ribs to the heart. Malcolm continued the stroke that killed the knight—struck the head clean off his shoulders—and turned to find another man to kill. He stopped, eyes widening, surprised that he could not finish the turn.
Then he knew that he was dead. It did not seem to trouble him. He shrugged; laughed. Clove another Norman in two. And fell to the bloodied earth.
The spear wrenched loose as he toppled. Heart’s blood sprang from the wound.
A sound like a long sigh ran through the Hunt. The Huntsman stooped out of the sky, reaching with a bony hand.
Edith had done nothing but grieve or rage—she could not even tell which. And yet abruptly she was there, between her father’s body and the Horned King.
The soul was rising out of the broken flesh. The Hunt bayed. “No,” Edith said.
Her voice was much clearer than she had expected. It drew power from the earth below and the sky overhead. Her father’s blood was in her, and her mother’s that went back to Alfred: blood of kings twice over.
She looked into the hollow sockets of the Huntsman’s skull, where a corpse-light gleamed. She was not afraid. The soul behind her was still struggling, like a snake slipping its skin. It was taking a terribly long time about it, while the earth fed on the blood that drained from the body.
“Britain has his blood,” Edith said to the Huntsman, who loomed over her, threatening her with sheer size. “You’ve no right to his soul.”
“Nonetheless,” the Huntsman said, “we will take it.”
“No,” Edith said as she had before. “You have what you came for. Now go.”
The horned head lifted. It was so close that she had to tilt her own head back to see it. “You dare command us?”
“In the name of Alfred,” she said, “and Arthur, and Bran the Blessed, I bid you begone. Blood of a king has fed you. Blood of a king will banish you. Turn away from the sunlight and return from whence you came.”
The Hunt had gone still. Souls drifted up past it, for once forgotten.
The Huntsman laughed, a deep bay. That sound beat Edith down. Somehow she fell across her father, as the last of him slipped free. But as she looked up, she saw the Hunt waiting, spread out across the sky.
He was befuddled as souls were when the body let them go, unless they were powerful mages. Like any newborn thing, he was weak and helpless: easy prey for their hounds and their masters.
She flung her arms about him. He felt like a memory of his old sturdy self. “Take me,” she said to the Huntsman. “Let him go.”
The Huntsman stooped over her, peering into her face. “You are a great power still to come,” he said. “Would you sacrifice it all for an old man whose time is past?”
“He is my father,” she said.
The Huntsman bent lower. But the soul in her arms said, “Wait.”
Edith was startled almost into letting him go. The Huntsman paused with his hand half-outstretched.
Edith did not recognize the being she clung to. He had been grey and old when she was born; she had never known him when he was young.
He was a fine young thing, upright and strong, with thick ruddy hair and a bright blue eye. The grimness that had been so much a part of him in age was barely beginning; the lines of care were not yet there at all.
He was still her father, and he stood up straight and set her gently but firmly aside. “So, old horror,” he said to the Huntsman with boldness that made Edith’s breath catch, “what’s this you’re up to now? Shouldn’t you have a scrap or two of flesh on those bones?”
“We are what fate has made us,” the Huntsman said.
Malcolm’s eyes gleamed with the same cold light as the Huntsman’s. “William has made you. So I’m the sacrifice that saves him. Was it you who drove me to this? And now you’ll eat my soul?”
The bony shoulder lifted: half of a shrug. “We do what we must.”
“I would think,” said Malcolm, “that you would be glad of this. You’re riding in daylight, taking souls when it should never be your time. Your power is greater than ever.”
“We are Britain’s own,” the Huntsman said. “We do what we are destined to do. But if Britain dies, in the end, after we have devoured it all, we ourselves shall die, last and most terrible of all.”
Malcolm tilted his head. “You are complicated,” he said. “I’ll make a bargain with you. Let my daughter go. I’ll ride with you—and I’ll help you hunt down Red William.”
Edith opened her mouth to protest—because that was a terrible thing he was doing, a ghastly thing, sealing h
is own damnation. But neither he nor the Horned King had any care for her.
“What help can you give us?” the Huntsman asked. “A mortal soul is of little use except to feed the Hunt. Why should we make you one of us?”
“Because,” said Malcolm with a death’s-head grin, “I’m a king of this land and now my blood is in it. Who better to hunt a king?”
“And if we choose not to hunt him? If we pursue other quarry forever, and let him be? What then?”
“I’ll risk it,” Malcolm said.
“You can’t do that!” Edith burst out.
Malcolm brushed his hand over her hair, light as a breath of wind. “Go back now. Live well, and remember me.”
Edith could feel the magic tugging at her, the bonds of mortal flesh drawing her back. She fought, but they were too strong for her.
Everyone was too strong for her. She was sick to death of it.
“Not death,” her father said. “Not yet. Go.”
She whirled away like a leaf in a strong wind, straining and twisting to break free. Her father was mounted already on a beast like a horse, clothed in pallid flesh over the stark bone.
All the hunt had lost somewhat of its skeletal quality: it seemed lighter somehow, and less hideous. They had fed well, and regained a measure of their old substance.
Her father had done that. It was a great sacrifice, and a great damnation. Her heart wailed in sorrow, even as she opened her eyes on daylight.
Tears were running down her face. Her throat was raw as if she had been keening aloud as well as in spirit.
For a long moment she gave herself up to it. But cold sanity was creeping in. No one here could know what had passed far away in England. They still believed their king alive, well, and raiding Red William’s towns and castles.
She wiped the tears away as best she could. There was still no one in the stillroom. The potion for her mother was made; she knew where it was, on the third shelf on the back wall, in the jar with the blue lid.
As thick as her head was with crying, she could barely smell anything, but this was pungent enough to make her sneeze. It cleared her head, too, inside and out. She measured it into the vial she had brought with her, lidded the jar and stoppered the vial.
