The Skeleth (15 page)

Edmund turned to stand over the queen. The remnants of a red silk gown clung in tatters to her bones, covering what might once have been a linen shift or tunic. The gown had wide sleeves, and was bound with a golden, star-shaped brooch.

“The image of the sun.” Edmund answered Geoffrey's questioning look. “The return of hope and life.”

He ran his fingers over the words incised around the rim of the brooch, translating them in as simple a form as he could: “I am the weapon that wounds the wielder. I am the defense that is no defense at all. I am triumph in surrender. I am that which, by being given, is gained.”

“Another riddle,” said Geoffrey. “These folk seemed to love them.”

Edmund flipped the brooch over. “For my beloved sister.” He sidled along the wall of the tomb, passing by the corpse of the queen. Crossed strips of decayed leather held the remnants of long stockings to the bones of her legs, while on her head there remained the shreds of what would once have been a veil. A pair of heavy pendant earrings lay on either side of the skull, with no ears left to hold them.

Geoffrey held his torch over the queen, the flame too near the corpse for Edmund's liking. “I wonder if she was pretty.”

Edmund looked into the empty eye sockets of the queen, then reached down and took up the brooch. “I am the weapon that wounds the wielder . . .” He felt a twinge of guilt, but placed it into his sack.

“Here, help me.” He seized the head of the axe and waited for Geoffrey to get hold of the handle. He strained and hauled the axe up off the ground, and then, to Geoffrey's disappointment, maneuvered it back onto the breast of the king.

“Out.” Edmund nudged his brother through the door of the tomb. “Go on, outside. We're finished here.” He turned at the threshold of the door to the tomb.

Geoffrey's freckles scrunched inward in the torchlight. “What are you doing?”

Edmund went down on one knee before the corpses of the king and queen. “Thank you. Both of you.” He stood and left, closing the doors behind him.

W
hat songs there were to sing had been sung. What cheer there was to shout had been shouted. Another night's noisy feasting had come and gone, leaving silence the victor once more. Katherine kept one hand to the grand curtain walls, following the side in shadow from the moon. Gray-silver starlight touched the slanted roof of the long wooden stable, painted thick the blacks of gap and grain and hung night in shrouds beneath.

A stable boy slumbered at his post, curled in a sheepskin blanket on his bench by the door and hugging a half-eaten piece of Harvestide cake. Katherine felt a sudden urge to kneel down and tuck him in, but resisted it, slipping around him instead and down the straw-littered passage. The sounds of sleeping horses soothed her, as they always had, the chorus of their breathing making her feel that, somehow, all would be well.

“Oh, look at this.” She slipped into Indigo's stall and reached for the brushes by the door. “What have they done to you?”

Indigo stamped a hoof. The grooms had made a proper mess of his mane, braiding it in silly knots against the lay of the hair.

“I'll see to it, don't you worry.” Katherine picked at the knots of the braid, working them loose one by one. Indigo watched her as she groomed him, one dark eye roving to fix on her hands, then her face. From outside came the sound of the inner gates trundling up, then falling shut again.

Katherine reached up to free Indigo's forelock from its tangles. “When I close my eyes and lie down to sleep, sleep won't come.” She spoke into his long gray ear, telling him her troubles as she had done since he was a foal. No one but Tom would believe that he understood her, but he nudged her when she sighed, and nuzzled against her when she felt her fears rising up to smite her hopes.

“I know just enough to be afraid, but not enough to know what to do.” She brushed the knots from his tail. “Who can I trust?”

Indigo raised his head. For an instant it seemed to Katherine almost as though he had an answer, that if she could only read his movements well enough, she would know it, but then he blew out a snort and turned toward the door.

“Good squire!” The stable boy startled awake down the passage, let out a
whooph
and rolled onto the floor. “Ow. Good squire, you're back! I was just resting my eyes—not asleep, I swear it. Do you need—”

“Hush, now.” The answering voice sent a thrill through Katherine. “Go back to sleep. I'll see to my horse myself.”

“Yes, good squire. I'm glad you're home. Please don't tell on me.”

“I would never. Sleep well.”

Katherine felt a tingle at the sound of soft approaching steps. She tugged at and smoothed down her homespun dress, even though it was homespun, and even though she stood in darkness.

Indigo seemed taken by an entirely different mood. He twitched his ears again at the footsteps in the passage and stomped a heavy hoof in the straw. He made for the door with an air of irritation.

Harold of Elverain, Lord Aelfric's only son and heir, led his dun-colored stallion down the passage. “Katherine?” He stopped at Indigo's stall. “Is that you?” He leaned around Indigo's gray bulk, looking over the half-height door. Katherine's heart leapt at the sight of him, lit from behind by moonlight from the window. The sensation stunned her with its power—and frightened her with how helpless it made her feel.

“You've been gone so long.” Katherine pushed Indigo aside to let Harry in. “Where have you been for so long?”

“Away south, with the king.” Harry stood just her height, though he was two years the elder. “Learning to connive and deceive. Watching our kingdom shudder and shake itself apart.” He wore an ornate sword in a silver-chased scabbard at his belt and a shirt of mail under his surcoat. If there was a more perfect image of a handsome young squire, Katherine could not picture it.

“Papa's gone to Tristan, and that's made your father
suspicious of him though I don't know why. Your father says Papa's not marshal of the stables anymore—he's thrown me off the farm and set me to work here.” Once the words started, they poured forth from Katherine in a torrent, and the tears came with them. “Lord Wolland rode in off the moors with half the nobles of the north—he wants something from your father and he thinks he can get it. There's a letter, and some sort of weapon, and a wizard girl in Wolland's service who was talking to . . .”

She found herself shaking. “I'm afraid, Harry—for my papa, for you, for Elverain and all the north. I've been alone, all alone.” Edmund's face bubbled up into her thoughts, but she pushed it away.

“You are not alone anymore.” Harry drew near, though he had to dodge around Indigo's attempt to block him. “Don't you worry about any of that, now. Let me speak to my father on your behalf. Let me help you.” Even his whispers were somehow handsome, touched with grace in form and tone.

Katherine did something that she thought she would never dare to do. She collapsed onto his shoulder and threw her arms around him. “I don't understand what is happening.”

“You don't need to understand, anymore.” Harry put a finger under her chin, lifting her face to his. “For my part, I'm glad that I found you alone.”

“Why?”

He seized her. He kissed her. She fell and she flew.

After a while, Katherine began to worry that she was kissing too hard, or too soft, or drooling on him, or making a fool
of herself, somehow. She pulled away. “Am I doing it right?”

“How should I know?” Harry seized her close again.

“You've never kissed anyone?”

“Not really.” He paused for breaths at intervals. “Not like this.”

Indigo whickered and shook out his mane. He stepped away from them and bent down for some hay.

Katherine reeled. The bliss blinded her, seeming to blank out all the world. It took all her strength not to fall into it, to let the thrill of it drown all else. “Wait. Just a moment.”

Harry let go. “What's wrong?”

“Shouldn't you be telling me what's wrong?” Katherine drew back from him. “You said that the kingdom was shaking itself apart. What is happening in the south? Why is Wolland here? What does he want with your father?”

Harry sighed and leaned against the door. “Do you really want to talk about all that right now?”

Katherine wavered. She did want to talk, wanted desperately to know what was going on—but then Harry looked at her again, a flash of gold in the moonlight. It made her dizzy.

“You truly care for me?” She let him come near again. “Please don't say yes if you don't mean it.”

Harry took her hand. “While I was down at court, there were folk who tried to charm me.” He even smelled perfect, clean and pure. “I sat down to feast with ladies and lords of the highest blood. They talked their grand intrigues all around me, flirted and whispered behind one another's backs. Some of them seemed to care what I thought, asked my counsel on
matters I barely understood, started sounding me out for the sort of lord I would become one day. There were even a few offers of marriage, some of which might not have been jokes.”

“Of course they weren't jokes.” Katherine smiled, but her belly lurched. She had seen just enough of hall and castle to imagine the grand courts away south in the core of the kingdom. A thousand painted ladies in silk and brocade danced through her thoughts, each of them making eyes at Harry, all of them skilled in arts that she would never learn.

Harry laced her fingers into his. “But every single night, when I lay down to sleep, the same thoughts spun in my mind: ‘How is Katherine? Is she well? Is she thinking of me?' And so my single week at court seemed to last an age, and I fear the great lords and ladies of the realm found me something of a bore.”

What strength of will Katherine had ran to water. She touched his sleeve, then traced her fingers up his arm.

Harry shifted closer. “And then, on my way home, I learned that you had gone up into the Girth, gone to seek the Nethergrim.” He kissed her fingers, one after the next. “I heard that you had marched off into the deadliest danger, and that you had come home safe again, all at once. That one instant was enough for me to know what it would feel like to lose you, enough for me to know my own heart.”

“Why?” Katherine shook her head; it all seemed too good to believe. “Why, though? I'm not—”

“Everything is a thrill with you.” Harry pulled her in and placed her arm around his waist. “Every other girl is playing a game, sizing me up, weighing me against her other prospects.
You just . . . are. When you look at me, I look inside myself, and wonder how to make myself worthy of you.”

Katherine melted. Indigo got bored and turned away.

Harry broke the kiss after what felt like several lifetimes. “I brought you something, from a whitesmith down in Rushmeet.” He reached into his belt. “I hope you like it.”

He held out something that glittered in the moonlight. “I was going to buy something gold, but I really thought silver would look better.”

Katherine let him put the necklace on her. She leaned against him. “This cannot be real. This cannot possibly be happening.”

“Why not?” He put his hands on her hips, then his lips to hers again.

Katherine's world spun and reeled. Time both rushed and froze. Pigeons scattered from the rafters above.

“My lady!” The stable boy spluttered from his post down the passage. “May I—yes, of course, as you wish. I'll stay right here.”

Footsteps grew in volume, along with the swish of skirts. Katherine and Harry jumped apart just in time.

A figure stepped into view, blocking the light from the window. “Harold.”

Harry blanched. “Mother.”

Katherine retreated from the door, as though there was somewhere she could hide within the narrow confines of the stall. She willed the hay-strewn floor to rise and swallow her.

Lady Isabeau kept her hands folded in her embroidered sleeves. “The captain of the guard had orders to find me when
you arrived.” She kept the majestic calm of one who has the power to choose between mercy and justice. “It is fitting for a man of noble blood to let the servants attend to his steed, and more fitting still that a son should come without delay to greet his parents when he enters their home.”

Harry flicked a furtive glance at Katherine, then molded his face into a look of bland, empty charm. “Of course, Mother. I was merely looking in on Indigo, here. He is to be my horse, after all.” The speed of the change made Katherine even more dizzy than before, and a little sick.

“That might explain your presence here.” Lady Isabeau flicked a stinging look at Katherine. “Not hers.”

Katherine could feel the flush on her face. She stood helpless in her frumpy workdress, pinned in her lady's gaze.

Harry drew himself to his full height. “Mother, Katherine should not be made into some lowly serving girl.” He stepped out from the wall, and came face-to-face with Lady Isabeau. “She is a trainer of horses, and her talents should be respected and used.”

Lady Isabeau stood a full head shorter than her son, but did not back away a single inch from him. “And are you a lord who has need of such a servant?”

Harry deflated. “No, Mother. Father has not seen fit to grant me any land of my own.”

Lady Isabeau held out her arm for her son to take. “He will do so, when he thinks you have matured enough to deserve it. Come, we will awaken him together. We have much of importance to discuss.”

“Yes, Mother.” Harry stepped away from Katherine as though she were not there. He led his mother and his horse off down the passage, leaving Katherine alone again.

Indigo snuffled at Katherine's arm. She turned and buried her face in his mane—not alone, after all.