The Skeleth (28 page)

You will be mine. Not hers. Mine.

“No.”

LET ME IN.

“No! I won't let you!”

LET ME IN.

LET ME IN.

“Edmund. Edmund, please wake up. It's me.”

Edmund took a breath, and when he did, it felt as though he had not breathed in years. He smelled something—spice and apples, mingled with a hint of horse sweat.

He opened his eyes and found that he could see.

There was light—torchlight. Long, dark hair hung down over him—a face, two eyes deep brown, endlessly deep, lit up with care for him.

“Oh, Edmund.” Katherine raised him by the shoulders. “Edmund, I am sorry. I've been such a fool.”

E
dmund braced himself against the wall of the tomb. He blinked in the light. “How did you find me?”

Katherine had never looked so perfectly lovely. “When I saw you lying there, you had your eyes closed, and I thought . . .” She could not finish.

Geoffrey held the torch on the stairs behind her. He glared at Edmund, his freckles bunched in a frown. “You really are stupid sometimes, you know that?”

“Geoffrey, don't say such a thing.” Katherine propped Edmund up. “He's suffered.”

“Suffered how?” Geoffrey ducked into the tomb. “By getting stuck here in the dark?”

“Can't you feel it?”

Geoffrey came near. His look of reproach faded away. He stared down at the fissure in the floor.

Edmund found himself unharmed in body, save for the
scratches on his hands. “Geoffrey's right—I have been stupid. We have much to do.”

“We caught that wizard girl sneaking back through the village.” Geoffrey drew away from the fissure. “She told us where you were and what she did to you—after a bit of prodding, of course.”

Edmund blinked in surprise. “You found her?”

“We did, but she got away again, right up into the clouds,” said Geoffrey. “I don't want to be the one to tell old Robert Windlee that all his chickens are dead.”

“The sentries were too busy packing for the march to spot us sneaking in.” Katherine pulled back her hair and jammed it under her collar. She drew up her hood over her head. “There—do I look like a boy?”

Edmund smiled. “No.” He took in the tomb around him, seeing it in the light for the very first time. It had the same shape as the tomb under the old keep on Wishing Hill, but blank and unfinished, as though the work of preparation for the royal burials had never been completed.

“Let's go,” said Katherine. “We've got to get back to the village and warn everyone that there's an army on the way.”

Edmund stepped over to the corner of the tomb. “Just a moment.” He knelt beside a pile of stony slabs. “There might be something to learn here.”

“I can't believe it,” said Geoffrey. “He's been trapped in here all this time, and now he wants to learn about the place.”

“I couldn't tell what these were in the dark.” Edmund blew the dust from the slabs. “Tablets, made of clay.” They were
covered in close, angular writing, the letters looking odd because of the surface on which they had been written, but they were still ones he knew.

Katherine slipped over to the open door. “Edmund, there's an army outside, and they're getting ready to march.”

“I'll be quick.” Edmund beckoned to his brother. “Bring the light over here.”

Geoffrey came in again, though with an air of great reluctance. He held the torch above the tablet.

“This is written in Dhanic.” Edmund traced a finger on the words. “It reads: Sisters, O my sisters, forgive me. My heart is broken, for I have broken faith with you. My king, my love, my husband is gone, taken, one of them. Sisters, O my sisters, forgive me, for I loved him. He rode with his army to join the Skeleth, and the Skeleth consumed them all.”

The trumpet call, far away upstairs, seemed somehow mournful to Edmund's ears, almost as though it sounded in answer to the words he read.

“I think that's a call to arms,” said Katherine. “Edmund, hurry.”

Edmund shoved the first tablet aside and glanced at the one beneath. “The Skeleth are man and monster both.” He squinted; Geoffrey had moved the light away. “To kill it by sword kills only the man, leaving the monster free to enslave the victor instead. O my sisters, to defeat these creatures, you must not fight them. To kill them is to die. To fight them is to fail.”

“Come on, Edmund!” Geoffrey hissed from the doorway. “I hear voices up there!”

Edmund moved the tablet. The one beneath was blank.

“Edmund!”

Edmund stooped to pick up his sack and packed the
Paelandabok
inside. He took one look back at the fissure in the floor, then followed his brother up the stairs.

Katherine stood by the fallen tower doors, peering out and down the hill. “We'll need to get home well before the army if we're going to give a swift-enough warning. Let's steal some horses and slip out in the muddle. Follow my lead—Geoffrey, douse that torch.”

Edmund slipped up beside her and looked out. The stars had spun. The cold had come down almost to a frost, colder still with the wind. “At least it's still night.”

“You mean it's night again,” said Katherine. “You were missing for a whole day.”

They waited, knelt in the shadow of the doorway, for some clear break in the swarming mass of the army. In the hanging gloom, though, they found no way to tell whether anyone in the camps that ringed the tower hill happened to be looking their way. All they could be sure about was that none of the men around them were sleeping. Edmund had nearly come to the point of suggesting that they wait for the army to march away when a light and a shout drew everyone's attention to the place where the camp joined the road.

“Now.” Katherine ducked out, stepping with balanced grace over the remains of the door. Edmund followed with Geoffrey at his heels, and before he even had time to fear an alarm, he found himself amongst a milling crowd of eager men who paid him no mind at all, for they all craned their necks to watch the small clump of riders on the road. They crowded up from the
dark, trampling down the moorspike around the sentry fires. Someone barked an order, and a rough ring of torches formed to light a council of war.

“My lords, say that we wait no longer!” Hunwald of the Hundreds stepped into the light. “Say that soon we ride!”

Sir Wulfric of Olingham raised a hand for silence. “Men of Wolland, men of Tand and Overstoke, men of the Uxingham Hundreds. I ask you do not shout, do not clash your shields, but bid your squires set out tack and saddle and put oiled edges to your swords. Look you all to horse and armor, and to the days to come as the days that will bring you glory to last you lifelong.” It would have been too much to ask for the army not to raise a shout at this, but they held it as low as they could.

“Prepare to march.” Lord Wolland rode in amongst the crowd. “By the solstice we will be masters of the north.”

As soon as Edmund saw the horse Sir Wulfric rode, he looked at Katherine. All she did was hide her face.

Indigo snorted and stamped under Wulfric's saddle. His ears shot up, and he looked about him as though straining to find something he could not see or hear. Katherine mouthed his name in silence and turned away.

“Knights.” Geoffrey's eyes went wide in fear. “Knights in armor. Look at them all! No one can stop an army of charging knights! What are we going to do?”

Edmund found himself the least stunned and frightened of the three. “Let's start fretting once we're out of here.” He listened for where the sounds of neighs and whinnies were loudest, and started off across the road, through the very heart of the enemy camp.

“Cold one, hey?” Someone slapped his shoulder in passing. “Don't worry, lad, we're on our way soon.”

“Mm.” Edmund quickened his pace, leading Katherine and Geoffrey on a wide circle through the tents, avoiding torch and firelight. They passed in between stacked bundles of supplies and a pair of grooms doing their best to get all the tack straightened out in the dark. The sentry fires stank of peat—smoke loomed everywhere.

A young knight in chain armor shouldered Edmund aside without seeming to see him, deep in argument with a horse-groom more than twice his age. “It doesn't seem a proper war to me.” The knight reached for the reins of the very horse Edmund was about to steal. Edmund ducked back around the tent, his heart in his mouth.

“It never does, once you're in 'em, sir knight, saving your pardon.” The groom heaved up a saddle onto the back of the horse. “War's all tricks, don't let no one tell you different. Nothing in this world worse than a stand-up fight. You could die that way!”

The young knight stood waiting, hand to the hilt of his sword. “But what glory is there in what we are about to do? What honor?”

The groom buckled the girth beneath the saddle. “Your pardon, sir knight, but is that why you came on this little trip? Glory and honor?”

The dark swallowed the long pause that followed. “I'm a third son. I want land.”

“And you'll get it.” The groom led the horse out of the paddock and handed the reins to the knight. “So will I, in my more
humble way. Now, there's a bit of trouble there, which I hope you'll see. You seek to have a manor, sir knight, but all the manors on the west side of the Tamber already have knights to hold them. Your common servant might look for a good plot of land for his reward, but of course all the good farmland's already under another man's plow. Me, I've always wanted to be a baker, but I reckon all the villages over there already have bakers. You understand?”

Edmund felt the blood rush inward from his skin, chilling him sick. He took a wild guess at another place where he might find ready horses, and led Katherine and Geoffrey away from the two men. He felt thankful that Katherine had not brought her sword. From the look on her face, she might have been tempted to use it.

“We have to stop them.” Geoffrey's skin had gone pallid white between his freckles. “We have to stop them! They're going to—”

Katherine silenced him with a hard grip on the shoulder. She mouthed two words: “We will.”

A ring of tents lay struck next to the post-and-rope corral, far to the eastern edge of the camp. Edmund took a careful look around him as he approached and found much less activity on that side. The men had started bunching toward the west, eager for the signal to march, but leaving the trailing eastern side poorly guarded.

Katherine drew her hood down over her face, then crept to the edge of one of the two rope corrals. She leaned against a post and looked about her. Edmund did the same—no one seemed to be paying them any notice. They leapt the rope together.

“Here, girl.” Katherine got a cart horse in hand without trouble, then found another for Edmund and Geoffrey to share. She slipped the rope on the far side of the corral and led them east, aiming for a gap in the sentry fires. Prickles ran up Edmund's neck, one after the next.

“Once we're free of the camp, we'll loop around cross-country and head for the bridge.” Katherine held the leads of both horses. “It will be a dangerous run, but if we can get ahead of the army, we'll have time to prepare.”

“You there—you three!” A voice shouted. “Get over here. We want some help with these tents!”

Katherine glanced at Edmund, who nearly panicked before he found a reply: “Er . . . got to help with grooming. Lord Overstoke wants us.”

The man peered at them—Edmund felt Katherine tensing up at his side—but then he pointed. “Lord Overstoke's tent's over that way.”

“Is it? Thanks. Lost my bearings in all the excitement.” Edmund swung around, leading Katherine and Geoffrey off in the direction the man had shown, but then ducked behind a half-struck tent and resumed his original course. The hollow rose and roughened ahead; the shadowed horses thinned out around them as they walked, and so did the voices of men making their preparations. They held their breaths as they passed the remains of a sentry fire, but nothing happened. They walked on into the utter dark of the moors without a challenge.

“You must wake the village, when we reach it.” Katherine helped Edmund onto one of the horses, and then raised
Geoffrey up to sit behind him. “Wake everyone, get them armed and ready, but whatever you do, don't let anyone ring the village bell.”

“What are we going to do?” Geoffrey looked ready to cry. “They're an army, hundreds of knights—what are we going to do?”

Katherine grabbed her horse's mane and leapt astride. “We are going to war.”

I
'm glad you're back.” Harry still looked pale, but stronger than he had the last time Katherine had seen him. “I'd heard you'd left the castle, and I feared for you.” The chamber bore reminders of his dead father everywhere Katherine looked: Lord Aelfric's store of books on the shelf; Aelfric's carved and cushioned chair at the round oak table; Aelfric's furred robe on the peg and his slippers by the hearth.

“Your people call for your aid.” Katherine shut the door behind her. “My lord—Harry, I beg you please to help us.”

The fire lit along the curve of Harry's chin and found gold in his sandy hair. “You must not leave the castle again, not until I tell you that it's safe.”

“Is it safe for my neighbors?” said Katherine. “Is it safe for Edmund, for Geoffrey and all the folk of Moorvale? I know what armies on the march do to the villages they pass. I know what they do when they are hungry, when they are bitter from the cold and lusting after the spoils of war.”

Harry threw up his hands and let them drop. “We are overmatched, Katherine. The one thing I can do is to resist Wolland no further, and trust him to keep his promised word.”

Katherine crossed the room, ignoring Harry's offer of a chair. “He will not keep his word. He killed your father and he will betray you.” She knelt at his side. “Harry, listen to me. We must fight, and we can win.”

Harry ran a fingertip down the polished surfaces of the rings that had once adorned his father's hands. “I am not strong enough. I cannot be the man my father was.”

“You can be better,” said Katherine. “Stand with us, my lord. Save us. It can be done.”

Harry sat up in his father's chair—then grabbed his side where the lance had wounded him. He bit his lip. “What is it that you ask of me?”

“I ask you to hear me,” said Katherine. “Lord Wolland marches with three hundred knights, but no footsoldiers, no archers, no engines of siege. Once across the river, he can do just as he pleases, but if he is challenged at the bridge, he can be beaten. The power of knights lies in the massed charge, but over a bridge they will not be able to bring that power to bear. At Moorvale bridge we can stop them, but if we allow them to cross, we are all at their mercy. They will be masters of the north, my lord, to the woe of your people, and all your hopes for survival lie in a promise made by the man who had your father murdered.”

Harry threw up his hands. “But what can we do? Wolland's army is twice our size, and he's got half the lords of the north at his back. He is invincible!”

“He is exposed and endangered,” said Katherine. “He moves
in deception, without supplies, depending on your submission to allow him to make his move. All he ever wanted out of your father was safe passage on the Moorvale bridge—if we can hold the crossing, his plans will fall apart. He is vulnerable, Harry, but only for a moment. You can do this. You can save the north.”

Harry looked away, toward the fire. His eyes took its glow.

“Put yourself in Moorvale, in my village,” said Katherine. “Stand by the statue in the square. Face east, across the bridge.”

Harry let his eyes fall shut.

“They will come over the moors,” said Katherine. “Knights by the hundred upon their chargers.”

A grimace crossed Harry's face.

“Now think of where you are,” said Katherine. “You stand at the foot of a bridge over a wide, deep river, on the higher and steeper of the banks. Do not fear those knights, my lord—cavalry cannot charge on such a bridge; it's barely wide enough to let two carts pass each other. We have archers and the high ground. We can hold the bridge, and we will make them pay dearly for every step they take toward us. We will wear them down, grind at their numbers and break their will. It can be done, my lord. At the bridge it can be done.”

Harry stared at Katherine. “Are you sure about this?”

Katherine smiled. “Other families talk about the weather over dinner, or gossip about their neighbors. Me and Papa, we talked military tactics.”

Harry looked nowhere. He looked at Katherine, then put a hand to the table before him. His face contorted, he grabbed for his wound, but he gained his feet.

There came a knock at the door.

“Go away!” Harry brought Katherine's hand to his lips.

“Harry, I know it will be hard.” Katherine tried to keep down the rising thrill. “I know what we risk, but—”

He kissed her, long and deep. All was song.

The door opened. “Harold.”

Katherine felt her blood stand and curdle.

Harry let go. He turned. “Mother.”

The lady Isabeau stood at the threshold. The gray light did her face no favors, nor did the double-corned headpiece that tied beneath her chin. Her ladies-in-waiting peeked into the room behind her. They jabbed each other's sides and whispered loud.

Isabeau folded her hands into the sleeves of her gown. “My lord, I wish to speak with you.” She stepped beside the door, leaving a clear path out.

Harry twitched his fingers, but stopped short of taking Katherine's hand. “What you say to me, Mother, you may say in her hearing.”

His mother set her lips. “Your will be done, my lord.” She waved her ladies off down the hall, came to the table and stood waiting. Harry stepped around it to pull out her chair, then shut the door.

Isabeau drew up the hem of her gown and sat. “The light is poor.”

Katherine found herself curtsying and kneeling to the fire. She took a handful of kindling and laid it piece by piece over the embers. A flush ran up her neck—joy aborted.

“Mother.” Harry cleared his throat. “Mother, we should fight. We should stand and fight. We should avenge Father's
murder, we should honor him, choose honor and duty to his grace the king. Katherine is right, we can win!”

“Sit, my son. It is seemly for a lord.”

Harry paused. “Yes, Mother.” He crossed behind Katherine's back and took his place in his father's chair.

“Number your forces,” said Isabeau. “What strength have you?”

Harry's voice rose in pitch and dropped in age. “Mother, I am lord here!”

“Lord.” Isabeau echoed it flat. “Yes, my son, you are. You bear the weight of this land and the burden of a line that joins the centuries. Your father, your grandfather and all your sires before them strove and fought to keep Elverain one, to pass it on safe when all the world around them looked about to fail. Now they wait, all in a row in their barrows. They wait in their crypts, in their rotting shrouds, their rusting swords upon their breasts. They wait, your father waits, to hear whether it was all for nothing.”

“It can be done.” Katherine put her hands to the table. “It must be done. My lord, there comes a moment when the wise man knows that there is no safety in surrender.”

“We should have had this talk long ago, my son.” Isabeau spoke across Katherine's words. “There are girls who form a hazard for men of your station. Beware such girls, Harold, for they have nothing to lose and all to gain. They will seek to trap you in their hair, to snare you in their willing arms and be granted in the madness of a moment what they could never have by right. Such a girl can afford to risk all, my son, for all that she seeks to risk is yours.”

Katherine kept her gaze averted. “My lady, I seek only the defense of our people.”

Isabeau looked at Katherine for the first time since she entered the room. “I see through you, Katherine Marshal. How long was it before you decided that your dear, missing father was never coming back? How long before you came aware of where your best chance in life truly lay, and what you need do to seize it?”

Her words knocked Katherine reeling. “That's not true.” She looked at Harry. “You know it's not.”

“See her, my son, for what she truly is.” Lady Isabeau held a hand palm up at Katherine. “Faithless. Adrift. A motherless, fatherless girl with no future in this world save this one great chance. She comes to you, Harold, because she wants to rise at your side.”

Katherine waited for Harry to say something—anything. He looked at Katherine, then his mother, his sandy brows drawn low.

“She is a fickle and inconstant girl, for all her strutting in the garb of a man—but she cannot help what she is.” Isabeau favored Katherine with a chilly smile. “What daughter needs a father when she has a lord within her grasp?”

Katherine put her hands to the table to keep them from curling into fists. “Who was it, my lady, that you loved as a girl, and how did you come to lose him?”

Isabeau gaped—then hissed. “You will be silent! I will not match words with a lowborn, common—”

“Mother, that is enough!” Harry rose from his chair and smacked the table. “I am lord!”

“You are a boy.” His mother glared him down into his seat. “You play at love and you play at war. There are consequences for the things that you do—I grieve that your father and I have failed to teach you this in time. Your father did all he could to keep the peace with Wolland, to give him a reason to spare this land.”

“And they killed him anyway.” Harry ground his teeth. “They killed my father because they asked for what he would not give, because he would not let Wolland use our lands to stage a massacre. And now you ask me to be a lesser man, to stoop and grovel before the men who killed him, to help them trample all the north just to preserve myself.”

“Will your anger put all to rights in this world? Will Wolland lay his head upon the block because he wronged you?” Isabeau let her hands fall together in her lap. “Son, you do not know him as I know him. He is not the ordinary sort of man, and he does not mean to wage the ordinary sort of war. If you stand against him, he will butcher every man in this barony and give over their widows into the hands of his followers. I know him, Harold, I know him as you cannot. I know what he will do to anyone who turns against him. Your legacy will be the end of Elverain—the last barrow by the hill, if indeed anyone takes thought to bury you.”

Harry put his head in his hands, boy and man, frightened and enraged by turns at every breath.

“My lord, forget me,” said Katherine. “Forget what you think of me, think only on what I have said. We can beat Wolland at the bridge. We can.”

“Then Lord Wolland will find another way,” said Isabeau.
“If you thwart him at Moorvale, you will do nothing but earn his hate—hate that will rebound on you, Harold, you and all your people. I ask you to heed your father's final lesson—turn against Wolland and die.”

Katherine raised her voice. “If we do not stop him—”

“—he will ride roughshod through your lands, he will put Umberslade and Quentara to the sword and he will crown himself king of the north.” Isabeau checked her again. “I am not blind, I know what is to come. What remains, Harold, all that remains, is to know what will become of our family.”

Katherine held Harry's gaze. “Wolland wants one thing from you, one thing only—safe passage across the Tamber. Give him that and you have nothing left to bargain. Once across, he can turn on you and deal with you whenever he likes, just like he dealt with your father.”

“She bluffs, my son. She guesses.” Isabeau pursed her lips. “She will have you risk your land, your birthright, just to keep you within her reach.”

“I'm not doing this for myself!” Katherine came just short of screaming.

“Enough!” Harry raised his hands. “Please. Enough.” He turned to the fire. Katherine watched him, rose and fell on every twitch. She felt Isabeau's glare but did not meet it.

Harry sat up. He breathed in long, then pushed back his father's chair. Katherine read the decision on his face and sank.

“Katherine.” He took her hands. He ran his thumbs on the backs of her fingers. “I wish I could have been what you wanted.”