Whitemantle Page 32
Lord Dudlea put out a placating hand. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have gone so far as to cut out your tongue. But you must understand that I could hardly lodge you in comfort. I needed to cover myself should news of your arrest reach important ears.’
‘Maskull’s, you mean?’ Will said.
‘Among others. I needed to make sure that things were explicable if he found out about you. As it was, he didn’t find out, and he didn’t pay that visit to your cell.’
Lotan said, ‘If he had, he would have congratulated you on your diligence.’
‘Old habits die hard, it seems.’ Will rubbed again at his wrists. ‘I thought you’d foresworn double dealing. What are you after?’
Dudlea became intense. ‘I promised I would do the right thing, and that’s what I’ve been doing. But I don’t see how jeopardizing myself would have helped our side.’
‘Our side?’ Will said, rolling his eyes, but Dudlea seemed to be in complete earnest.
‘Yes. Those of us who are working for peace now. The sorcerer had you marked. Your name was on the list of those who were to die after the battle. “The Crowmaster and his helper.” That’s what it said. I saw it with my own eyes, and then I saw you. I could hardly believe it. I wondered how one so cunning could be so stupid as to come to Ebor and show himself just as Mells was bringing in the heads!’
Will gritted his teeth. ‘I didn’t realize I was so well known around the queen’s court.’
Dudlea’s scorn was undisguised. ‘Oh, they know about you, all right! Enough to put quite a sum of gold on your head. That’s why we have to be so careful.’
Before Will unlatched the door, he looked up and saw the full moon riding high in the south. His deepest feelings had led him to Ebor, but so far nothing had gone right. They could not have been wholly in error, could they?
It’s Morann, he told himself silently, thinking back to the time when the loremaster had vouched for him in front of the Duke of Mells. Who else could it be?
He steeled himself, knowing that he had come to an important crossroads. But when he entered the empty hall there was but one figure sitting in shadow in the tall-backed chair. It was not the man he expected.
The other did not get up or make any move, but lounged there, negligently drumming his fingers on the arm-rest of the High Chair of the city.
‘Thrones are ten-a-penny these days,’ he said as Will approached. ‘It seems like everybody wants to be king.’
‘All except the real one.’
The figure leaned forward into the light and smiled. ‘That’s the truth. How goes it, Maceugh?’
That was a welcome Will recognized, an echo from the past. Between the sack of Ludford and the battle at Delamprey he had been obliged to adopt the identity of an emissary of the Blessed Isle and had lodged dangerously with the queen’s court. That emissary’s name had been Maceugh.
As Will shook the proffered hand he breathed in sharply at so unexpected a turn. ‘Jasper of Pendrake…Prince of Cambray. Well, well, well. Now it all makes sense.’
‘None other.’ The red-haired swordsman had once been sent to investigate the truth or otherwise of the Maceugh’s identity, but he had found himself liking Will better than his paymaster. He now made an open-handed gesture. ‘Who else did you think would have troubled to save your foolish neck?’
‘Not you.’ Will smiled, though a serious question was on his mind. ‘When last we met I was clothed in the flesh of another. How did you know me?’
Jasper laughed. ‘Think again. Last year we met another time. It was in the aftermath of the battle at Delamprey. You may not have noticed me for, as I recall, you and Lord Warrewyk were having something of an argument at the time.’
‘That’s right. I was accusing him of murder.’
‘The reason I remember it all so well is that I was in some slight difficulty with the said lord. As it happened, your arrival saved my neck. And “One good turn deserveth another”, as I think one of your redes says.’
Will thought back to the beheadings after Delamprey. There had been a row of miserable men waiting, naked and bound, for Lord Warrewyk’s axe. Jasper had been one of them, and so too had Lord Dudlea.
Jasper said, ‘A man can’t really let a favour like that go unrecognized. I asked high and low after you, but I was given no satisfactory answer. Until I met our mutual friend here.’
Will looked to Dudlea. ‘Him?’
Dudlea pursed his lips. ‘We had something in common, you might say. He asked me and I put the pieces together for him. In the end the conclusion I came to was inescapable. The Crowmaster’s apprentice and the Maceugh must have been one and the same person.’
Will nodded. ‘A spell of transformation.’
‘I’d heard of such things.’ Jasper grinned. ‘I hope you didn’t mind my locking you up. Like all newly persuaded men, my lord of Dudlea can be a little overzealous in the cause at times.’
Will’s gaze was unwavering. ‘So, what now?’
‘Like I said, my lord Dudlea and I found we had views in common. We’d both rather the war stopped.’
‘You’re not the only one.’
‘It’s dangerous work, but someone’s got to do it, eh?’
‘So says Queen Mag’s Lord Commander of the Army of the West.’ Will said, puncturing Jasper’s flippancy. ‘How do you square that appointment with your views?’
‘You think I should have rejected the honour? I had no choice. And I’ll say this to you: what better position could there be to work from? My father, Owain, is in Cambray, raising an army. We’ll take it to Ludford and try to flush Edward out.’
‘Bring him to battle while the queen takes her hammer and knocks on the gates of Trinovant,’ Lotan said, nodding at the soundness of the plan.
‘Oh, your friend here thinks like a strategist,’ said Jasper. ‘There’s only Lord Warrewyk who can put armed men between Mag and the White Hall now. And with those halfmen in her army she’ll sweep him aside like autumn leaves.’
‘Edward’s almost certainly at Ludford, raising an army of Marchermen,’ Will said.
‘We know where he is.’ Jasper shrugged. ‘We need to catch him and bring him to terms. That’s why I must ride at first light.’
Will put his face in his hands for a moment, then he looked up and said wearily. ‘So – let me get this straight – you’re going to draw your armies up and face one another. And then what?’
‘We won’t sue for peace, but nor will we demand he surrenders to us. If we come to him in sufficient strength…’ Jasper saw that he was failing to dispel Will’s incredulity and was angered. ‘What else can we do? I’ll offer him a settlement in good faith! He’ll understand that now his father’s dead the greatest obstacle to peace has been removed.’
Will groaned inside. He wanted to seize Jasper by the shoulders and explain to him that there were mighty doomstones hidden in the earth, monsters drawing power against the most well-meaning plan. Even as they spoke, the lorc would be undermining every one of Jasper’s good intentions, and whatever else was true, things would certainly not go as he hoped.
He stared back at the Cambrayman, and whispered, ‘You’re a good man. You really are. But you’re out of your mind.’
Jasper stood up, outraged. ‘What?’
‘You cannot ride faster than bad news. And you should keep away from Edward if you value your life.’
‘Someone has to try to offer him a way out!’
‘What makes you think he wants one? To him you’re just one of the bastards who hung his father’s head from Ebor’s walls and set a paper crown upon it. He’ll never forgive you now, Jasper. Not even when your own head has been cut off and trampled in the dirt.’
Before Will left Ebor he asked Lord Dudlea for three horses, a tent and a token of safe passage, and they were granted him. The great city had not been as badly treated as Awakenfield, but it had suffered ransack and ruin. They led the horses gingerly down into the town, and as they went Will began to feel for
the ligns. He considered the possibility that he had imagined them among the other spectres that his mind had made from the darkness and pain, but they were real enough. The trace was faint, but his scrying sense had not wholly deserted him and now it confirmed his suspicions – the ligns were the birch and the hazel. It looked as if they crossed like arrows piercing the white heart of the city.
‘They cross near the chapter house?’ Lotan asked, following the line of sight where Will pointed.
‘Right underneath it.’
The news seemed to trouble the big man, though he tried to make small of it. ‘Do you really think that’s so?’
‘I’m sure. The Fellowship must have built their chapter house on the site of an ancient temple, just as they did at Verlamion and a hundred other places. Now you see the reason why your erstwhile brothers are so interested in the lorc.’
Lotan nodded silently.
It was a worrying thought because it meant that the lorc was not yet finished with Ebor. Will looked back along the street. City walls and the castle footings mirrored the earth power, shattering the image and confusing his mind, but as he tuned his talent to it he felt the unmistakable rumblings of power rolling beneath his feet. There was a surprise there too, for it was not flowing into the city, but out of it.
That could only mean that although Ebor itself must one day play host to a battle, that battle would not be the next one.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked Lotan who had hung back. ‘It’s always the next battle that has to interest us, and that’s not going to be here.’
Lotan shrugged. ‘If you say so.’
‘It’s going to be somewhere along the birch lign. That’s where the power’s flowing. And do you know what lies on the birch lign?’
‘What?’
‘Ludford. It’s where the lign of the birch crosses the lign of the rowan.’
‘But did you not tell me you already found a battlestone at Ludford? That you pulled it out like a village Sister pulls out a rotten tooth?’
Will grunted. ‘We called it the Blood Stone for good reason…’
He recalled the terrible time at Ludford as the town burned and the abandoned castle lay under siege with them still inside it. Gort had made him chew on a piece of heath-pea root, and afterwards his mind had taken leave of his body and floated high into a moon-washed sky. And he had seen the ligns crossing below – straight green channels, glowing across the night. He had seen the power flowing in waves along those channels, being drawn towards a point beyond the southern horizon. Then, if he had but seen it, he had had the triple-triangle pattern of the lorc laid out before his very eyes.
‘That was the Doomstone of the West,’ he muttered.
‘What?’
‘Another doomstone. It has to be. We thought there must be one in the Cambray Marches, one that made a trio of stones with the Blood Stone and a lesser stone, a guide stone, sited a couple of leagues to the west of Ludford. Do you remember what happened to me when we came through Baronet Hadlea?’ Will began to relive the horror of the vision the Hadlea stone had evoked, a feeling that his mind had separated from his body, a feeling so strange and so strong that he had fainted and vomited on awakening. Now he shook his head to dispel it, saying, ‘Three ligns go through the Doomstone at Verlamion. Three go through another at Baronet Hadlea…’
‘…and three go through some place in the Marches.’ Lotan finished, his mind calculating, ‘And that’s where the Doomstone of the West lies.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that what makes them doomstones? Because they sit upon three ligns instead of just one or two?’
‘I think that’s so.’
Lotan nodded thoughtfully. ‘And the one that’s out in the west? What ligns does that sit on?’
‘Heligan, Bethe and Eburos – that is to say: willow, birch and yew.’
‘Willow, Bethe and you?’ Lotan muttered, meeting Will’s gaze. ‘It could not be calling to you more personally if it was shouting your name.’
Will felt leaden. Dread crept along his spine, for Lotan had made it sound as if the lorc was making some ghastly joke at his expense. Thoughts of his wife made his stomach clench. He had spent much silent hope on her having gone with Gwydion. It was likely she had, but the uncertainty still undermined him.
As they rode out through the Muckle Gate Will looked up to see the three impaled heads. Throughout the day the crows had been at them, but the ragged faces were abandoned now and frozen by the pale light of the moon. They gazed open-mouthed and vacant-eyed towards the south and west as if pointing the way.
Will headed off against the grain of the country, going westward by Acorne and Weatherbury-upon-Worffe, and only later turning south through the land of Elmet. They passed several homesteads that had escaped the worst of the devastation. Near Barrick, Will called a halt, saying, ‘We must rest, but at daybreak we shall have to go on all the faster.’
It was not only for himself that he sought to break their dark journey. He had seen the way Lotan was swaying in his saddle, but he knew that if he had offered him rest the big man would have refused. There was another reason. They had, so far as Will could tell, recrossed the holly lign and had come to a place of extraordinarily good aspect. It was an opportunity for him to draw sustenance.
He wandered away from Lotan and the horses and found a spot by a dew pond where the land was flat and there were long views all around. There he braced his feet and flung out his arms as the First Men had done a thousand generations before, and quietly and confidently he breathed in the draught that he had longed for.
With the breathing came the bliss. It coursed through his chest, pulling power in through his feet and out through his hands. While the power rumbled and shook under his feet, the flow lit him blue-green. A warmth began to radiate from him. It seemed like heat and light, but it was not. They were only the commonplaces that his mind employed to interpret the power of wellbeing that had entered him.
As soon as he accepted the power, the timeless moment dawned in which the boundaries of the self dissolved and he felt one with the world. When that state began to fade he glimpsed that he had understood once again the secret that lay at the heart of all things, but the understanding was elusive and always just beyond recall, like a book that could be read only in a given room and never removed.
He was soon himself again. Always afterwards there was a wonderful feeling of floating in which, if he were not careful, he could stagger and fall. It passed quickly, leaving behind a mighty sense of satisfaction. The stars stood out bright overhead now that the moon was sinking low. Their paths held a magical beauty all their own, and Will wondered at what Skymaster Braye was supposed to have said about them. Could it be that in the coming world there would be no influences from the wandering stars?
‘What were you doing out there?’ Lotan asked.
‘What did it look like?’
‘Were you casting a spell?’
‘No. But it felt as if a spell was being cast over me.’
They found a barn and Will slept with the skittering of hay-loft mice in his ears and the smell of mildew in his nostrils. When he awoke he laid a blessing on the barn, then he roused Lotan and they pressed on through the cold mists of morning, all the time looking out for the patrols that had been posted to secure the district and all the main routes.
‘What’s the plan to find the others?’ Lotan asked when they gave the horses their first breather.
‘I have none. Master Gwydion will find us if he needs to.’
‘You said that before.’
‘This time, if he thinks it’s necessary, he’ll use his magic.’
‘Can’t you call to him magically?’
‘Not without drawing Chlu also.’
An air of disappointment fell over the big man. ‘What about the ritual you did back there?’
‘Ritual? You mean the blessing?’
‘No, when you were by the pond. Didn’t that alert Chlu?’
‘So he’s lost us, you mean?’
Will put Lotan’s jitters down to his warrior’s training. ‘It could mean several things. He could be asleep.’
‘Or?’
‘Or he’s not active. Or maybe he’s too far away.’
‘And you won’t know where he is unless he gives himself away?’
Lotan’s questions about the nature of Will’s relationship with his twin began to feel intrusive. ‘I don’t care where he is. What concerns me is where he thinks I am. Don’t worry about him. He’s drawn to me and I to him, but I have a duty that I must put first.’
Lotan nodded slowly and looked away. The answers seemed not to satisfy the big man, as if he had thought up another strategy that was more to his liking. But if he had, he said nothing of it.
After a space of silence Lotan asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we tried to join up with the wizard before we looked for the battlestone?’
‘I told you: Master Gwydion will find us if he needs to.’
‘But surely—’
‘Lotan, we’re doing the right thing. Trust me.’
‘You begin to sound like Lord Dudlea.’
‘Trust me!’
‘I will, just as soon as I know where we’re going.’
Will looked to him in surprise. ‘You know where we’re going.’
‘No.’
‘To find Edward of course. Where did you think? We must reach him before Jasper does.’
‘But you can’t stop the battle!’
‘Maybe not. But I must bear the bad tidings.’ Will felt the mismatch of their understandings keenly. ‘Edward has to know.’
Disagreement simmered in Lotan’s stare, as if he could not understand why Will felt his duty towards Edward so strongly. ‘And all because you feel it in your bones? You ask a lot of your feelings.’
‘It’s funny you should say that. Master Gwydion tells me I don’t ask nearly enough. Come, we must push on.’