Heirs of the Demon King: Uprising (4 page)

A wild gleam came into Richard’s eyes, enough to send a shiver of dread down the necks of the lords surrounding him. ‘He will answer for his actions. The whole country will be made to understand the price of treachery and the danger of consorting with witches.’

The irony burned on his tongue and he fell into sullen silence.

T
HE HEAT OF
the early morning gave way to a scorching August day. By the time the troops were fully mustered, the soggy grass was visibly steaming, days of endless rain evaporating into thin mist. Sure enough, within the hour, there had been the expected petition brought to the camp of Richard from the camp of Tudor. A plea for discussion. A chance at peace.

‘“Lives could be spared if you will only meet with me,”’ Richard read aloud, scorn in his voice as the anxious messenger waited for his response. ‘“Do not throw away this chance to save the lives of our countrymen.”’

‘Your answer, my lord?’ Norfolk sat on his horse beside the King, now fully armoured and holding himself rigid in the saddle. The certainty and sense of confidence he radiated was completely infectious and the previously demoralised armies of the English King were now ready and willing to do battle.

‘We will deliver our answer to Tudor personally,’ said Richard, crumpling the hastily penned note. ‘Let him hear it from the blades of our swords and the points of our arrows.’ He glanced mockingly down at the runner. ‘You have the time it takes to return to your master’s side and warn him. We will be right behind you.’

The boy scampered down Ambion Hill, heading for the furrow between the two armies. To the side, Richard spied the forces of Lord Stanley and sneered. The fool still had not decided where his loyalties lay. The time had come to demonstrate to the doubting lord exactly who held power in England. ‘Execute Lord Stanley’s son immediately,’ Richard growled. One of his officers looked as though he was about to object, but a warning glance from the King silenced any protest before it could begin.

‘Loose arrows,’ he said, levelling a finger at the fleeing messenger. ‘Tudor will have our reply.’

A thousand arrows rose into the morning air, briefly darkening the sun and casting a grim shadow across the boy as he scrambled towards the camp of his master. He looked up, his expression filled with dread as the first of many arrows punched into his face. He screamed briefly, the shrill sound dissolving into a gurgle as his mouth filled with blood. Dozens more shafts sliced into his body, pinning him to the damp earth and hammering into the shields and men of Lord Stanley’s force. Henry Tudor had his answer.

With a rallying cry, the troops of King Richard the Third began their assault.

W
HEN DID
I lose control?

Henry stood at the head of discomfited men, who had once formed perfect ranks of valiant warriors but who now clustered together as though they could somehow find safety in one another’s proximity. Henry’s closest advisor and master of his magi stood with his head bowed. Communing, no doubt, with the powers that had fled in the night.

The man’s name was Hywel. He had promised victory through the application of magic both subtle and powerful, and Tudor did not doubt his ability. He had witnessed a taste of Hywel’s phenomenal gift when he had conjured a creature from what the mage evasively called ‘beyond.’ It had worn the face of a woman and was full of whispered promises, but Tudor had not been fooled. He had asked only for magic to fuel his mages’ spells and had given his little finger in tribute to seal the pact. With mastery over the weather and Richard’s dread of the arcane he was confident it would be enough to ensure victory.

For three days a handful of Tudor’s magi had ensured the rains fell. For three days and nights, working in shifts, they had murmured their eerie, arcane words and the skies had answered with rain and thunder. The plan had been to mire Richard’s great army and fill them with the same fear as their King. And it had been working. Then, shortly after midnight on the eve of battle, the rain stopped.

‘My lord. The spell will not answer us.’ Hywel stood just outside his tent, deferential in his plain robes. His gentle accent was filled with an uncertainty that Tudor had never once associated with him. Hywel usually carried himself with the ease of a man who knew he could not be directly challenged, a man who knew that his power would protect him. Now his face, with its silvery-grey beard, was troubled.

‘Hywel, you are not filling me with confidence.’ Henry tried to inject some calm into his voice, to counter the panic he sensed lying just beneath the surface. Tudor was a personable young man, and people had flocked gladly to his banner. He had little experience in war, however, and had gladly deferred leadership of the army to Lord Oxford. It was a decision he was beginning to regret. With the failure of the magi and the greater numbers Richard had brought to the field, Oxford was in full retreat.

‘The ritual was undisturbed and the words spoken, but the spell does nothing. The rains will not answer us.’ Hywel looked deeply unsettled as he spoke, and it was clear that this was completely outside his experience.

‘My lord,’ the mage replied, ‘we have tried again, and again. The spell no longer works, and I am at a loss to explain it.’

Further explanation was cut off by a scream from the hillside, as the hapless messenger was cut down by a storm of arrows. A huge wedge of knights bearing the King’s own colours thundered from the crest of the hill toward the forces of Lord Stanley, followed by marching blocks of spearmen. The King had obviously decided to force the indecisive lord’s hand or grind him into the mud.

One way or another, it would not be long before those knights and spearmen were bearing down on what remained of Tudor’s army.

‘To arms!’ Henry roared as the first sounds of combat echoed across the field. Welsh and French soldiers hurried into formation, shields to the fore followed by a bristling forest of spears. Tudor returned his attention to Hywel. ‘It would seem the time for subtlety is past. Use different spells, Hywel. Pull lightning from the heavens or fire from the winds and scour Richard’s army from the hillside. I will win this battle, but I need your magi to do it.’

Hywel bobbed his head in assent and turned to his brothers. Together they made their way into the front ranks and began to call upon their magic, while Henry mounted up beside his personal guard. The scrum of fighting around Stanley’s position was embarrassingly brief, and it was only a matter of minutes before Stanley’s colours fell in beside those of King Richard.

‘Hywel!’ Tudor snapped at the mage. The drone of arcane words filled the air as the magi summoned their power and prepared to unleash the fury of the elements on the approaching army.

There was a pause, like an intake of breath, and then one of the magi exploded. Meat, blood and splintered bone painted the horrified warriors on the front line, who began pushing and shoving to get away from the grisly sight. Another mage burst into flames, rainbow-hued fire burning his robes to ash and immolating his flesh like a human candle. He howled in agony and staggered back into the ranks, scattering soldiers as he went. Tudor could only look on in horror as awful, unnatural fates consumed more of the magi, and his army dissolved into chaos.

The order to retreat was drowned out by the roar of King Richard’s army and the growing thunder of hooves.

T
HE HISTORY BOOKS
would record the events of that day as the ‘Bosworth Massacre,’ and for good reason. The forces of King Richard destroyed those of Henry Tudor with no remorse and no mercy. The would-be usurper’s men were slaughtered where they stood and Richard’s army put them to rout.

The order was given for Henry Tudor to be taken alive, but it was not to be so. Neither was his death ever confirmed. The victory was complete less than three hours after King Richard’s archers had loosed their first arrows on the enemy and despite the best efforts, Tudor’s body could not be found amongst the dead.

Tudor had not been seen fleeing the field of battle, and his banner was found trampled and bloody among the bodies of his retainers. Scouts and huntsmen failed to find any trace of him in the lands beyond. It was decided, amidst much celebration, that Henry Tudor, usurper and traitor, had come to an unnatural end, and Richard’s heart lifted with the joy and knowledge that came from his victory.

Only four prisoners were taken from the field that day. Each was a mage, and all of them mad and raving about their magic betraying them. Richard decreed that each be tried publicly, their torture and executions to be held variously in York, Ipswich, Warwick and London: the four cornerstones of England. To a man—or in one case, to a woman—each of the magic users raved about a great evil abroad in the world and that it would wear the crown of England. Their tormented claims and screams of denial served only to confirm their guilt and further condemn them.

King Richard’s reign continued unbroken. By 1495, ten years after the Bosworth Massacre, he had fathered several strong, robust sons and a number of daughters and restored the name Plantagenet. In order to commemorate the House of York, he retained the symbolic rose, but he stained it forever black. He added four crimson drops of blood to the flag—
ad perpetuam memoriam
, so it is said, to the victory over the magi whose works had threatened to undo his great deeds upon the battlefield.

Richard remained hale and hearty, ruling a country that shrank back once more from the practice of magic and instead grew wise in the ways of strange, new sciences. A treaty of sorts was called with the French, and for five years, trade prospered between the two countries. It could not hope to last. Richard’s eldest son, Prince Edward, led the troops of England in a successful campaign, winning the hearts and support of the English people as he did so. When Richard died in 1500 and was buried amidst much pomp and ceremony as was a king’s due, his son was eagerly accepted as the nation’s new ruler.

Edward was a force to be reckoned with; a warrior king who truly deserved the name. Like so many of the Plantagenets past, his soul burned with the desire to conquer, and he sought to make France fall under the yoke of British rule. His greed and ambition proved costly, and he died on the field of battle, murdered by a French magus, barely fifteen years after he took the throne.

The mantle passed to his son and namesake, Edward the Seventh, but the family curse took hold once more. Never as healthy as might have been desired for a man destined to be king, Edward’s health failed within six months of his coronation. Despite the best efforts of the court healers and their alchemy, he died in his bed at the age of eighteen, giving rule of the country over to his younger brother, King Richard the Fourth.

From the moment he took the throne, the sixteen-year-old Richard made it quite clear that he was neither a weakling like his dead brother, nor the warrior king his father had been. Instead, he brought cunning and wisdom to the throne; a need to impose order on a country still crippled by disease and civil war. He took control of the great halls of power and nobility, including the influence of the Church itself.

Naturally, this drew the ire of Rome; the Pope demanded this upstart young king attend him immediately. Richard quite deliberately kept him waiting for five years. In 1530, following what are described best by other historians as ‘extremely painful’ negotiations, he dissolved the Crown’s connections with the Roman Catholic Church. He stated that his people were free to worship however they wished, but as head of state, he ruled that no money would be granted to the Church from his coffers. Churches became poor, surviving on the charity of the faithful. The King decreed the cathedrals be stripped of their wealth, and the money used to fund the creation and development of the Royal Halls of Science.

Some of the money, however, went to the creation of the King’s Inquisition. The men he recruited into its ranks were fervent enemies of magic in all its forms, and King Richard tasked them with rooting out those who dared to continue its vile practice. Farcical trials were held, which almost always ended in public executions not so different to the deaths of the Bosworth Four.

The King’s Inquisition drew the cruellest, hardest-souled men in England. Latterly, women were also embraced into its ranks, despite widespread protest. By the time the King died at his own son’s hands, the practice of magic had been recognised as a crime of treason. Trials became routine and then irrelevant, the word of the Inquisition becoming the word of the King, although a handful of Inquisitors clung to the tradition.

King Richard the Fifth ascended to his rightful place as heir to the throne of England in August of 1550, sixty-five years to the day after his ancestor slaughtered the armies of Henry Tudor.

April, 1565

Horsham

England

E
VERYONE AGREED AFTERWARDS
that the execution had been one of the most entertaining in years. The perpetrator’s head had needed six powerful blows of the deliberately blunted axe before it parted from the body, and the King’s Own Executioner had played to the caterwauling, hungry crowd with every stroke. Each blow was more theatrical and exaggerated than the last, and the gathered townsfolk had howled and jeered in adulation.

The headless corpse finally lay still, blood pulsing from its ragged stump and pooling on the wooden stage. In due course, two dulleyed women arrived to clean the worst of the mess, but the old boards soaked up far more than the crones could ever hope to scrub away. The platform was worn and smooth, and the block itself stained ruddy from use and the countless lives that had ended upon it.

There were many memories in the wood of that stage. If only it could speak, people used to say, what tales it could tell. Whispers of things best left unsaid; of things that should never have been permitted.

After the execution was over, after the King’s Own had hung up his crescent-bladed axe to await the next poor fool to violate King Richard’s sacred law, everyone approved. A painful death was the only thing for heretics and traitors.

Arrest to execution had taken less than four days, one of the fastest the town of Horsham could remember, perhaps because of the nature of the man’s crime. There had been no case for appeal. The prisoner had freely acknowledged that the accusations were true. He had denied nothing and admitted everything.

William Eynon had once been a greatly respected citizen of the town. A talented alchemist and physic, his knowledge of the human body was unsurpassed for miles around. Whether treating simple coughs and sneezes, or healing a young boy with strangulation sickness, Will Eynon’s medicinal skill was a precious gift to the people he treated. He had been a quiet, introverted man with a wife and young son to whom he was devoted. His generosity was well known and his compassion a rare gift in a time of hardship.

William Eynon, now cruelly beheaded before a baying mob. Public executions were intended to remind the people that Richard had ultimate power over every life in his kingdom. William Eynon may have been beloved in his community, but his grisly death served to remind people that nobody could commit treason and escape the law.

Treason
.

The word held such terrible connotations. It seemed unlikely that a young physic the likes of Eynon could ever be found guilty of treachery against the King. But an Inquisitor had deemed his medical knowledge more than simple herb-craft and learning. More than the medicine practised by village midwives and wise women, with their salves and poultices. The accusation was that his talent had been bolstered by something greater. Empowered by that which King Richard feared above all else: the gift of magic. Or the curse, as was more commonly believed.

For one young woman, the execution represented much more than a man being brought to the King’s justice. As she stood in the town square, long after the crowd had dispersed, Elizabeth Eynon could do nothing but stare with blank eyes at the spot where her husband’s life had ended. He had sought her out in his last moments, his eyes fixing on hers before the executioner had pushed his head down to expose his neck. He had looked for her in the thronging crowd and he had found her. There had been nothing but love in her husband’s final glance. Love, and an apology.

Forgive me, Bess
.

He had spoken to her without words, just as he had done so many times throughout their courtship, and later, their marriage. She had never even truly noticed it. She had just—naively, it transpired— believed that their bond was that strong. Her initial reaction to the discovery that Will had been a practitioner of forbidden magic had been revulsion. But her deep-rooted love for the kindest man she had ever known, the memory of how many lives he had saved and how much pain he had relieved over the years...

I forgive you
.

She mouthed the words silently as clouds gathered overhead, as if to mirror her sorrow. Will was no longer here to listen to the absolution, but she knew that somehow he would understand. His head had been taken by the Inquisitor to return to the court of King Richard. There it would remain, mounted on the walls of the Tower, until nothing of her handsome husband remained but a featureless skull. Such was the fate of the magi.

A breeze whipped the rough fabric of her skirts around her legs, and she paid it no heed. She stood staring at the stage with her hands clenched so tightly that her nails drew blood, but the pain was a welcome distraction. It balanced the grief that transfixed her and reminded her that life went on. She was beyond tears, the pain having already passed beyond that simple expression of grief and into an aching, iron band around her heart.

So she stood. Even when the rain began to fall, she stood, not knowing what to do or even where she could go that would be an escape from her loss. Had it not been for her young son, presently in the care of her sister, Elizabeth would have thrown herself on the mercy of the Inquisitor as well. But he had had no interest in her beyond interrogation. He had simply asked her questions— embarrassing, indecent and horrifying in equal measure—over and over again, while consulting with a little copper medallion. It had been enough to establish that William had been alone in his crime. She and Mathias would still suffer for it, however.

Mathias
.

Thinking of her boy forced some kind of sensibility back into Elizabeth’s numbed senses. She had to hold body and mind together, for his sake. He was barely a year old and already his life was marked with tragedy. The family home and assets had been seized by the King’s Treasury, and other than the clothes on her back and a paltry sum of William’s modest wealth that had been granted back to her, she had nothing. Her son, once poised to inherit the family holding, was now little more than a homeless pauper.

Her tears began to fall again, mingling with the rain that pooled at her feet in a mockery of the blood that had spilled on the stage only a few short hours earlier. Elizabeth took a shuddering breath and turned away from the only life she had ever known.

S
EVERAL MILES AWAY
from the now-deserted square of the small Sussex town, a group of men were returning to London. A broad, heavyset man in a dark, hooded cloak led the group, his body swathed in leather armour and looped with belts. Numerous pouches, pockets and purses jounced around his frame, filled with trinkets and esoteric devices of his trade, and he openly wore a heavy sword and pistols at his waist. He rode with his head down against the driving rain, while behind him trailed his small retinue, six thugs who muttered and bickered amongst themselves. Despite the sturdy cobbles of the King’s roads, the weather had forced them to slow from a gallop to a walk, and their crude banter was becoming a distraction to Charles Weaver’s thoughts.

One of only eight people in the entire kingdom to hold the position of King’s Inquisitor, Weaver was a snarling brute of a man. He had joined the Inquisition, fiery and ambitious, at the age of sixteen, and in the five years he had served his masters had ripped his way through the ranks with unsurpassed ferocity. Still young, he was formidable and unequalled: nobody had delivered as many heads to the feet of Richard the Unyielding as Charles Weaver.

They called him humourless, but never to his face. Weaver thought nothing of disposing of those he considered weak or ineffective. The trail of the dead in his wake consisted of more than just those he hunted. Those who dared speak against him, against the King or just out of turn met a swift end.

‘Yer honour?’ The voice belonged to one of the mercenaries who were so often an unwelcome necessity in his pursuits. Weaver preferred to travel alone and despised the casual blasphemy and petty vice of others, but sometimes his prey would try to run, and every huntsman needed his hounds, however odious they might be.

‘Excuse me? Yer honour?’ The wheedling voice spoke again and Weaver turned to regard the approaching rider. An errant breeze whipped the hood from the Inquisitor’s face, revealing green eyes glittering behind a featureless iron mask. He said nothing, but the movement was enough to acknowledge the speaker’s presence. The scraggly-bearded man who had spoken scratched at his thin, pointed nose. The mercenary clearly didn’t want to speak to him, but had been bullied into the task by his comrades. It was in the stance, the way he shuffled uncomfortably in the saddle. In the way the narrow eyes squinted at him with such anxiety. Charles Weaver had devices at his disposal for drawing out the truth and revealing the unseen, but he was also very good at reading people. It was part of what made him so very good at his job.

‘Yer honour, me and the lads was just hoping that we could maybe... find an inn or something? It’s a bit... well, it’s miserable, an’ we’re soaked through.’ He indicated his soggy clothing.

Weaver’s head moved a fraction more, turning to fix the sodden group whose notably less expensive mounts were plodding along the road behind him. Then he turned back to the speaker, who persisted gamely.

‘We’re all a bit, well, cold, yer honour. And hungry, tell the truth. Ain’t eaten since before the execution.’ The speaker twisted his damp tunic in his hands. ‘Something hot inside us wouldn’t go amiss.’

The King’s Inquisitor blinked slowly. There was something unsettling in the gesture, briefly closing off the link to the human beneath the mask. The spokesman suppressed a shiver not entirely brought on by the cold. He never knew a blink could convey such contempt.

‘Inns are a cesspool of corruption and heresy,’ Weaver said eventually. His voice was slow and ponderous; a deep, bass rumble that could be heard even across a crowded room. The iron mask added a hollow, sepulchral tone that chilled the blood. Charles Weaver had not once been heard to shout. He did not need to. ‘If I find reason to suspect any of you are involved in vice or villainy, then I will scourge the wickedness from you personally. Am I understood?’

‘Yes, yer honour.’ The spokesman’s eyes lingered on the tools of Weaver’s trade, hanging from the richly-tooled leather belt at his waist. More were stored in the saddlebags, but Weaver knew the importance of first impressions. Few things created such a good first impression as a serrated-edged torture knife. ‘Perfectly clear.’

‘Then ride ahead and find an inn. And be sure that it is a clean one. Inform the innkeep precisely who it is that you travel with and that we are not pilgrims to be fleeced by moneysnatchers. I am certain that will make them more accommodating. Stables for the horses, food and a bed for the night. We will depart at dawn.’ Weaver pulled the hood back up over his head, reached within the folds of his cloak and tossed a bag of coins at the man.

‘Why do you tarry? Go.’

‘At once, yer honour.’ The snivelling toady bowed and galloped away. Weaver turned his attentions back to the road ahead and ignored the excited whispering from behind him. They would no doubt end up in the kind of establishment that the men thought suitable for a man the calibre of Charles Weaver. Lice-ridden mattresses, rats in the kitchen...

It didn’t matter. Not really. The task had been completed. He had rooted out another heretic and the execution had been satisfactory enough. The mage’s head was packed in a sack tied to his saddlebags, and by this time the next day, he would kneel before his liege-lord and present it. Richard would reward him handsomely and send him out on the hunt again. It was what Weaver lived for. Not the money or the vast estate in Kent where he never spent any time. The reward he hungered for came with the blood of magi and the praise of his King.

The rain continued to pour, washing the countryside in shades of grey and slicking the cobbles so that they shone in the failing light. A pall of darkness hung in the sky to the north.

London.

Whitehall Palace

England

‘C
OME BACK TO
bed, Richard.’

King Richard the Fifth of England, Richard the Unyielding, stood at the open window of his bedchamber. Dirty rain sluiced from the palace roof, streaking the walls with ash and soot, the refuse from the many chimneys and fire stacks that pierced the London skyline. Even at this hour, the ring of metal and the hue and cry of chain-gangs echoed in the streets, keeping the foundries burning. Pools of pale light dotted the palace grounds, crystal globes of lambent gas fastened to iron spars casting an eerie glow in the evening gloom. Richard dreamed of a day when such wonders lined the streets of every English town and village, the light of science casting out the shade of magic once and for all.

The King wore only a loose shirt to cover his nudity, and even then only barely. Behind him, his queen was stretched out languidly on the soft feather pillow, unashamedly naked. He glanced at her appreciatively. Her full figure, admired by so many, had softened over the years. The birth of their five children had given her a pearly network of marks on her belly, and had forced her girlish curves into those of a woman. Her meticulous attention to her appearance caused sensations at court; any number of young noblewomen sought to emulate her style, but none succeeded.

Tresses of a striking shade of burnished copper fell to the middle of her back when she wore her hair loose. Right now, her hair lay over her naked breasts, sending a new wave of desire through the King. He adored her.

For a fleeting moment, Richard took the rare opportunity to forget his troubles and simply enjoyed looking at her, the smooth, alabaster flesh of her body laid bare for him to do with as he pleased. Their lovemaking had been more gentle than usual this evening. Richard was a harried, frenetic lover, servicing his wife with the focused energy that he applied to most things. But he had needed some comfort this night. Anna had given him that.

Strange how it had turned out. It had been a marriage of convenience rather than of desire; she was the eldest daughter of the present High Lord of Scotland, and his father, King Richard the Fourth, had arranged the marriage as a part of the treaty. Richard had been disgusted at the thought of marrying into the barbarous apes of the northlands. He had raged against his father’s decree for months, whilst around him, his younger siblings married whomever they desired.