The Skeleth (19 page)

Harry opened his mouth in angry shock, then looked down at his boots. Katherine struggled for something to say, even something that might get her into deeper trouble herself, if it could save Harry from what she feared was coming.

“A pity, truly.” Wulfric lowered his thick brows. “The spurs of a knight are the mark of his manhood. It shames us all when they are ill given.”

Harry found his voice. “I am my lord Aelfric's faithful vassal, as well as his son. I obey his wishes.”

“And he wishes to preserve you to carry on his line.” Lord Wolland seemed full of kindly good humor. “But he should consider not only whether you survive to inherit, but what sort of man you will be when you do.”

Harry looked about him, surrounded by men who seemed to be weighing him in the balance and finding him wanting. He held the goblet in close at his chest, but did not drink. “Just . . . just what do you mean by that, my lord?”

“My boy, my boy.” Lord Wolland put a hand to Harry's shoulder. “I told your father many times not to raise you by the hearthside. He should have sent you off south to squire—you might have learned something of the world. More to the point, the world might have learned something of you.”

Harry spluttered. His features darkened, but he made no reply.

“It is for a knight to make war.” Wulfric crossed his tree-trunk arms. “It is his right and proper craft. A girl may make sport of it, if she so chooses, but for a man of noble blood it is duty. To spurn it is to spurn his honor, to spurn his manhood and his high birth.”

He nodded to Katherine. “Your pardon for my saying so.”

Desperation led Katherine in amongst the men. “We are proud of our lords here in Elverain. They have ruled long in wisdom, making war when war was needed, but seeking always for a fair and gentle peace.” She did not quite dare look straight at Harry. “We love them for it.”

Wolland waved a hand. “Our world has no room for such fine sentiment.” He turned full on Harry. “The lord who is content with his lot stands to lose it. We are wolves, Harry, the
captains of wolves. The fate of thousands can shift at a glance between men at the high table, the world turns on the whim of he who dares all. That which you stand to inherit was carved from the flesh of other men in ages past. What will you do with it? That is the first question I ask all young men of substance, for their answer will either make their dynasty, or break it.”

The contents of Wolland's letter to Aelfric flashed through Katherine's mind. She glanced at him—and found him watching her in return, his deep-set eyes glittering dark.

Harry wavered. “I can ride, my lord.” His voice lost its firmness. “I can fight. I do not need to prove it to a crowd.”

“I see,” said Lord Wolland. “Perhaps then you should choose a champion to carry your honor where it is needed.” He smiled at Katherine. “This young maiden, perhaps, could lift a lance in your stead.”

Harry went red to the ears. Katherine tried to catch his eye, to shake her head, beg him no.

“I need no one to fight my battles for me!” Harry drew himself to his full height. “I will joust in the tourney, my lord, against any man you choose.”

As soon as he said it, his color drained—but the error had been made with too many to hear it. A silence fell. The lords and knights around him nodded to one another.

Lord Wolland's smile widened to his ears. He turned to his son.

Sir Wulfric bowed to Harry, stooping down to let his shadow cross him. “It will be an honor, good squire. We shall meet upon the field tomorrow.”

T
he thrice-opened eye went blind with the heart's blindness. The thrice-beloved king cast his love upon the pyre with his honor and his truth. In his anger, in his fear, in betrayal of his kin, King Childeric called upon the Skeleth, They Who Crawl Below, they who shape as one with men, but are not men. In his lust for lordship without limit, Childeric asked for that which could be halted not by sword, nor by axe, nor by spear. He had asked for that which could kill without end and, screaming to the last, he received his gift.

Edmund balanced a pebble on the rat-eared corner of the page to weigh it down. He drew up his cloak against the wind that blew in sudden gusts across the village green of Moorvale. It was a warm wind for autumn, southerly and kind, but even so its pulsing breath did not please him in the least, or anyone out on the green behind him, from the sudden shouts of disappointment it evoked:

“Oh, a pox on it! Did you see that? That was a bull's-eye, dead to the middle, and then that accursed breeze—”

“You always blame the breeze, Nicky Bird. You're not fooling anyone.”

Edmund followed the scrawling text onto the facing page:
The land where the Skeleth walk is now waste. It is ruin, given up to death, a land under the sway of That Which Waits Within the Mountain. We have tasted the bitter fruits of King Childeric's greed. Upon the banks of the river we have made our redoubt, and there we fight an enemy that knows neither mercy nor fear.

The hairs on Edmund's arms went up and stayed raised. He looked behind him, up and west to Wishing Hill, then over through the square, past the mill to the turn of the broad river Tamber. The statue of the old stone knight that stood in the center of the square faced eastward, toward the bridge over the river and the empty moors beyond. No one in the village knew who the knight was or what he had done to deserve a statue in his honor. His head and right arm had broken off long ago, so that no one even knew if he was meant to be raising a hand in welcome or shaking a sword in defiance.

Edmund raised the pebble and turned the page—parchment flaked in his hand, and a whiff of wind nearly sheared the page clean off.
They are seen and yet unseen, they are form without substance, they are man and monster both. They serve only their master, only That Which Waits Within the Mountain
—

“It's your turn.”

Edmund startled. A thin, curved shadow hung suspended over the pages of the book—a horn-handled bow of springy
yew. Geoffrey held it out, the quiver of arrows in his other hand.

“Come on, Edmund!” Martin Upfield called from the other side of the walnut tree Edmund had been using to block the wind. Martin stood with a crowd of peasant folk at one end of the common green, a place used for grazing livestock most days, but on that morning the sheep and cattle had been moved across the road and replaced with a line of ragged old archery butts. Almost every man Edmund knew stood in clumps at the near end of the green, and a goodly handful of women, besides. Even as he looked across, Missa Dyer loosed and struck firm into her target, bringing a cheer from her brother Jordan and half the Twintree clan.

“I've been looking for you all morning.” Geoffrey dropped the quiver in his lap. “The practice is half over already.”

Edmund grabbed the feathered flights of the arrows before they could spill forth from the quiver. “I don't want to take a turn.”

“You've got to shoot, Edmund.” Geoffrey held forth the bow. “You're over thirteen; it's the law. Every able-bodied man in the village is here, and there's a clerk walking about with the tax rolls making sure we all showed up.”

“I'm busy!” Edmund struck the open page before him. “Do you think that figuring this stuff out is easy? I'm trying to find a way to defend us from the Skeleth!”

Geoffrey shook his head. “I don't see those Skeleth things anywhere. Why are you so sure they're coming back, anyway? Just because that wizard girl told you?”

Edmund closed the
Paelandabok
and slid it into the sack at his feet. “What do you think we were doing in that tomb?”

“Stomping around like fools and nearly getting ourselves killed, so that you could pull up some dusty old spell, and—let me guess—you showed it to the wizard girl, didn't you?” Geoffrey shot Edmund a sour smirk on their way over to the targets. “You think you know everything, but you're really stupid, sometimes.”

One of the villagers stood aside from his place at the mark to let Edmund step up. “So, then, Edmund, tell us another story from your books, there.” Short, shaggy-bearded Nicky Bird flipped an arrow end over end, catching it in one hand, then the other. “Come on, a good one with some great fancy wizard throwing his spells about.”

“I told you before, spells don't work the way you think they do.” Edmund set his left foot at the mark. “True magic is a way to see the laws that rule the world, to find the balance of things, the opposite natures of which all is made, and then—”

Geoffrey snorted. “What did I tell you? He doesn't make a lick of sense anymore.”

Edmund sighed. “All right, then, a great fancy wizard.” He sighted down to the target. “There's Mad Mull of Millthwart—it's said he worked out a spell that could scythe a whole field of wheat with a wave of his hand.”

“Now, that one can't be true—aim up a bit, Edmund. Here.” Martin Upfield loomed in—head and shoulders taller than Edmund and more than twice his weight. He shifted Edmund's arms and turned his shoulders. “There, try like that.”

“Seems to me that any man who could do a spell like that could just give out all the bread he likes—set himself up for a king, somewhere.” Nicky drank deep from a cowhide waterskin. “That's just an old wives' tale, it has to be.”

“No, it's true.” Edmund held the shaft of his arrow with his thumb, just as he had been taught. “I've read about it in too many different places.”

“Hunh.” Nicky Bird scratched at his curling beard. “So what happened to him?”

Edmund released—the arrow skipped off the top of the target. “There's more than one version of the story.”

“Let's hear 'em all, then! The one I like best will be the true one.”

Edmund plucked up another arrow. “Well, the first is that one day he stood on the wrong side of the field.”

“Ha!” Nicky nudged Martin. “Hear that? What's the other?”

“It's a bit more complicated.” Edmund did not like the look of the arrow in his hands, an old broadhead with a crooked shaft. He drew up another. “So the story goes, the spell worked perfectly, made him as much wheat as he wanted, any time of the year. He was able to balance the cost on the Wheel of Substance by—well, never mind that part. He started bundling up bushel after bushel and bringing it in to the cities by the wagonload.”

Nicky shrugged. “And?”

“The bottom fell right out of the grain market. Not a farmer in the land could sell his crop for so much as a brass farthing. Riots in the streets—death by pitchfork.”

“Ha!” Nicky turned to Martin and nearly stabbed him with the arrow in his hands. “Ha! You hear that?”

Martin swatted the arrow away. “I heard it. Stop poking me.”

Edmund drew back another arrow. He considered trying to explain the third version of the story, the one that sounded as though it might be true. He gave it up for too tangled to tell—how could he explain what magic really cost if the wizard abused its power? He would rather not be cut in half by an invisible scythe, but by the same token he would not like to die by inches inside, consumed from within by bread that was no longer really food.

“I don't know, Edmund.” Gilbert Wainwright stepped in above the end-nock of his bow to fit a new string at the next mark over—nearer to thirty than Martin and Nicky, but by all accounts the follower of the three, ever since they had been boys together. “I hear your tales about these wizards working marvel after marvel, and yet here we are, still plowing our fields by muscle and sweat. Our king's no wizard, our lord's no wizard—don't see how those stories can be true and the world still be the way it is.”

“That's because you don't know how magic works.” Edmund waited for a lull in the wind. “You don't know what it costs, and you don't know what the world is really like.”

“Hey, now, Edmund, no harm meant.” On a face like Gilbert's even a look of reproach seemed mild. “Not trying to tell you your business.” He turned to aim his shot, seeming to take but an instant to gauge arc and wind before he loosed and struck square in the middle of his target.

“No one's going to argue with you about what wizards can do, Edmund—not anymore.” Nicky turned to watch Edmund's following shot. He tutted and shook his head. “You shanked it a bit. Are you keeping your fingers wide on the string?”

“Of course I am!” Edmund grabbed another arrow. He nocked it, taking care to space his fingers around the flights. He drew to the ear, sized up the target, and let fly.

A familiar sinking feeling followed. Geoffrey started snickering behind his back well before the arrow landed—in the grass beside the target.

“Well, the wind took that one. Nothing you could do.” Martin Upfield raised his hand, looking up and down the row. Gilbert did the same, then Aydon Smith, Jarvis Miller and old Robert Windlee, who must have been five times Edmund's age but could still hit the target without fail. The shooting stopped, and then Gilbert walked out with a few others to gather up the arrows.

“Never mind it, Edmund.” Martin gave Edmund an encouraging smile. “We all know you've got other things you do well.”

“The Wizard of Moorvale. Hey? There's our lad.” Nicky prodded Edmund's side. “Why don't you work on that scything spell? Be a big help at harvest next year. It'll be our secret!”

A voice piped up shrill from along the row. “You there, with the hat. What's your name? Speak up—Hugh Jocelyn, Jocelyn, yes—let's see your arrows.”

Edmund looked up to see a small and well-dressed party passing crossways behind the archers. He felt a thrill of sudden fright and stuffed the
Paelandabok
into his sack. Lord Aelfric rode his horse beside a black-haired young clerk who
recorded the name of every man at the practice. Lord Wolland followed with Wulfric and Richard Redhands, who were both armed as though they were about to ride to war.

“Ah, the fabled archers of Moorvale.” Lord Wolland signaled for his knights to dismount with him, then walked along behind the row of men lined up at the marks. “Let us see if the legend bears any truth.”

“You shall indeed, my lord.” Aelfric stepped to the ground and put his reins in the hands of the page. He walked right up behind Edmund, coming so near that he nearly trod on the sack that held the book Edmund had stolen from his private chambers.

Edmund felt a bead of sweat roll down from the line of his hair. He kept his gaze away from the nobles behind him, waiting to fire on the signal. He tried to think only about the wind, and not about what Lord Aelfric did to thieves.

“You there, churl!”

Edmund jumped. He whirled around, wild excuses at his lips, but Sir Wulfric was talking to Martin Upfield.

Wulfric clapped Martin on his broad shoulder. “You are made for war. There is need of such men as you.”

“Sir knight.” Martin turned and bowed. “I have no love for war.”

Wulfric let out a short, hard laugh. “Come and seek me, or remain forever a fool.” He stepped back from the line of archers and stood in a tight clump with the other knights and lords.

Henry Twintree called out from down the line. “Ready, all? Draw and aim!”

Edmund nocked an arrow to his string, drew it back and waited for the signal to fire. Of all the torments of archery drills, the massed volleys were the least painful to him, since no one could ever quite be sure if the arrow that missed the target was his.

Henry Twintree bellowed. “Fire!”

Edmund loosed his arrow with the volley. Dozens of arrows whipped in an arc through the sky, shuddering into their targets in a deadly swarm.

“Ha!” Lord Wolland clapped his pudgy hands together. “Well done!”

Edmund stared about him at the green. Not one of the arrows had missed the target. Not even one—and that meant that he had hit. He had actually hit!

“Very good indeed.” Lord Wolland nodded to Lord Aelfric. “I have always taken an interest in archery. It is of great use on the battlefield, if properly deployed. I seem to recall that your grandfather used a company of archers to good effect in a battle not far from here, when my great-uncle Adalbert thought to invade.”

“You remember rightly, my lord.” Lord Aelfric faced south and pointed out with all the fingers of his gloved hand. “The battle took place in that direction, in a field just east of Longsettle. My grandfather concealed a troop of archers from Moorvale in a copse of trees by the road. They passed unnoticed by Adalbert's scouts as they took the field, then fired on the flank of his army once the battle was joined, causing great damage.”