Chapter 24 You
You
The hunt is unsuccessful, if success is to be measured in face-to-face encounters with vicious predators.
You ride all day, and catch no glimpse of the wolf.
The tracks in the forest are muddled, bewildering even the best of your huntsmen, and only the mangled remains of the deer confirm that there was ever a wolf at all.
By the time you return to the castle, your whole party is cold and dispirited.
Food has been prepared, but you’ve no appetite.
You take a hunk of bread, leave instructions that you’re to be left alone, and retreat to your chamber.
You don’t remember falling asleep, but you’re woken the next morning by the sound of the door opening. ‘I gave orders that I wasn’t to be disturbed,’ you say, propping yourself up on your elbows; your chamber is meant to be inviolable, closed even to your seneschal should you wish it.
‘Those instructions don’t usually include me,’ says a familiar voice.
You let yourself fall back onto the bed. ‘One day you’ll pass a whole day with no other concern but your books and I’ll be so astonished to see you at your scribing that I’ll faint dead away. Why are you here?’
Unusual as it is to see him this early in the day, your scrivener looks far more awake than you feel. ‘To see if you are well,’ he says. ‘You went so early to bed and are so late to rise. The knights tell me you didn’t train with them this morning.’
What time is it? You’d assumed it was morning, but as you become more alert, you see that the daylight is streaming in. ‘How long have I slept?’
‘Long enough for people to worry for your health,’ he says, then adds, ‘They’ve rung Sext. They’ll be long done with the psalms by now.’
Some way past noon, then. You run your hands over your face and sit upright. ‘I am quite well,’ you say, swallowing the profanity that comes more easily to your lips. ‘Only fatigued by yesterday’s hunt.’
‘Ah, yes. The hunt. No luck, I suppose?’
‘No wolves, if that can be called poor luck.’ You narrow your eyes at him: ‘You didn’t come here merely to wake me.’
‘No,’ he agrees. ‘I came to give you this.’ He hands you a slim volume, newly bound between wooden boards. The binding is simple, little ornamented but for the corner pieces and the bronze clasp that fastens the codex.
You glance up at him, but his expression gives nothing away. Uncertainly, you open the book, and see his familiar clear script in crisp black ink, initials marked out in red.
‘It’s the lais,’ he says, unnecessarily, for you can see that clearly enough. ‘It was always intended as a gift. I’d meant to include another of the romances with it, but in the end I didn’t have the time.’
Time. But there should have been no deadline for this collection of stories, this frivolous, precious book. No patron commissioned it and no business rests on its completion.
You hold the small codex in your hands and you say, ‘You’re leaving.’ He cannot leave. Not when you are so alone, and need him more than ever.
He offers a small smile. ‘I should have known you’d guess. Yes, I’m leaving.’
Your vision blurs. You close the book hastily. ‘Where are you going?’
‘A pilgrimage of sorts. It’s past time I saw my homeland again. I was travelling overmany years before we met, longer than I’d planned, and I cannot stay away forever. It was kind of you to grant me a place here, but my home is calling me.’
Home. Across the sea, to the land that taught him his storyteller’s tongue and gave his precise, pointed script those quirks that so irritate your seneschal. Back to the lies that shroud his past. ‘Forever?’ you say, sounding like a child. ‘That is, do you plan, at all, to return?’
‘That depends what I find on my arrival,’ he says. His smile is sad. ‘I’m sorry. I mislike to leave you, and after only a handful of months at your court. I have greatly valued your friendship and confidences, as I have done since we met. But I must attend to a higher duty.’
You don’t want him to go. Impulsively, you reach out, snatch at him, clinging to his wrist. ‘When?’ you demand. ‘When are you leaving?’
‘As soon as my effects are in order. I have made arrangements with your seneschal. He, at least, didn’t seem sorry to see the back of me.’
For once, you cannot laugh at his joke. ‘But I could – I could forbid you to go. I am your king.’
‘You could try,’ he says. ‘But you may find that I am not so tractable. I’ve never truly been sworn to your service, sire, and there are greater loyalties imposed on me. I must obey those calls as much as yours.’
They are all slipping away from you, water through your fingers. Soon you will have nothing left. Your voice cracks: ‘Please don’t leave me.’
He frees his wrist from your grasp, but doesn’t let go of your hands.
‘You’ll have your pick of scribes,’ he says, ‘if you continue to feast with storytellers and praise the tongues of poets, but there is one among the chaplain’s clerks with a mind for stories and a heart for secrets.
You would do well to call on him, and he’s local enough that his hand will cause the seneschal fewer headaches than mine.
He hasn’t my experience with binding, but—’
‘Forget the books,’ you say. ‘Forget the records. It’s you I’ll miss.’
‘For a little while,’ he says. ‘And then you’ll move on.
’ He kisses the inside of your wrist, trailing his lips up towards the soft crease of your elbow.
‘You have friends at this court, my lord, though difficult it may be for you to see them. They will be faithful to you if you give them the chance to show it.’
But their unflinching service and wholehearted fealty is nothing compared to his wry smile, his irreverent wit, his commentary on all the absurdities of the court.
Their memories of your youth cannot compete with shared exile and the fragile thread of continuity that helps you understand your place in this world.
They were not there for you when you were half-formed and abandoned, seeking friends in a hostile land.
‘Please,’ you say again, but like a priest he kisses your forehead in benediction and offers only an uncomforting promise: ‘You won’t be lonely forever.’
But you’re lonelier now than you thought possible.
You allow him to say his farewell, but his fingers against your skin sting with the thorns of parting, and it robs his kisses of their sweetness.
You would hold him, tangled with you, unable to free himself without permission; you would keep him beneath you for as long as it might take to persuade him to stay.
You cannot lose him now, when you are so alone, when you have no one else to confide in.
You find yourself crying. He kisses the tears from the corners of your eyes and when his mouth meets yours again his lips are salt with them. ‘Don’t weep,’ he tells you, but it’s a useless command, one you can’t obey. ‘You don’t need me.’
But you do.
‘I could forbid you to go,’ you say again. ‘I could have you bound in irons. I could have every ship in every harbour turn you away. I could have you dragged back over the borders every time you tried to cross them.’
‘You could,’ he agrees.
‘I could have you kept here for the rest of your life,’ you say, pretending not to notice that you’re weeping again.
‘You could try,’ he says. ‘But you won’t.’
No, you won’t. You hold him, and allow him to hold you, and the day is already fading to evening by the time he clasps your hand one final time and walks away, a small sorrowful smile on his face as he glances back.
And then you are entirely alone.
The remainder of the winter passes in a haze.
Sometimes Bisclavret is there; sometimes he’s not.
He’s often a little pale, eyes bruised with sleeplessness, but when you spar he wears his old smile and fights with his usual strength, so you don’t pry.
You treat him as any other knight and he behaves with due deference, and neither of you acknowledges that it was ever otherwise.
But it is impossible to ignore that he has argued with his cousin and the two are at odds, for the man is no longer his steward.
He has sworn himself into service again, his lord’s knight once more, though he brings his own fine horse and good armour, which must ease the sting of the interruption.
He trains with you briefly, but only for a matter of days; his lord is returning to his estate, and he will go with him.
Bisclavret seems relieved rather than saddened by the separation.
He will not, however, acknowledge that anything is wrong.
Deprived of distractions, you throw yourself into kingship.
The grey fog isn’t gone, but the sharp blades of loss have punctured it, cutting away the veil, and through those rents in your mind you glimpse a sort of clarity.
You listen attentively to your seneschal’s reports and engage with your barons’ counsel as you have not done since those first weeks after your coronation.
You leave every meeting with an aching head, but at least it is time spent not thinking about anything else.
The promised clerk presents himself to you and he is, of course, a perfectly adequate scribe; even your seneschal finds no fault with his record-keeping.
You rarely speak, and that’s fine. Occasionally, you call by his chambers to consult some charter or volume, but you don’t linger.
There’s no longer anything for you there.
You’re lonely, but what man isn’t?
Half a dozen more hunts are mustered, but the wolf is nowhere to be seen, evading all the traps set by the huntsmen.
There are few reports of further damage, although occasionally a deer is found, or there will be some other mark of its passing.
It leaves too few traces to be living only in your forest, and you wonder where it spends the rest of its time, and what causes it to stray.
You’re sparring with Bisclavret one morning when you recall that his own lands must be in as much danger from the wolf as yours. You ask him about it – has he strong enough fences? Are his livestock and people safe?
‘Yes, my lord,’ he says carefully. ‘We’ve had no trouble from the wolf, and I don’t anticipate any.
In any case, I have had the cottages secured and the fences strengthened.
’ His mouth twists with something that might be amusement.
‘I imagine the foxes are wondering what cruelty drives us to deny them any hope of access to our chickens, though they cannot be more dismayed than the hens by their enclosure. Renard with all his wiles could not slip through.’
Despite his joke, his manner is stiff, uncertain, and his divided attention allows you to disarm him.
‘But you never ride with us on the hunts,’ you say.
It’s not that you mean to press him, but you’re curious.
‘You’re recovered now, are you not?’ He still looks too thin, but he’s lost the unhealthy pallor that followed his earlier bout of sickness, and he doesn’t fight like a man who should be confined to his sickbed.
‘You’re such a skilled hunter; we miss you on the
chase.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ His smile is more of a grimace. ‘But I have no taste for hunting wolves, sire.’
Is it fear, or a softness for them? You had thought the former, but for the first time you wonder about the latter. ‘In the north, they let them roam untouched.’
‘So I’ve heard,’ he says.
‘They speak of garwolves. You’ve heard the stories?’
He stiffens. ‘Garwolves?’
‘Men who walk and hunt as wolves, but return to their own skin when the moon is right, or when their bloodlust fades, or by some other mechanism, I know not what.’
You’ve always suspected a certain heterodoxy from Bisclavret, but you have no sense of how he might react to such blatant superstition, better suited to a peasant than a king. You watch him carefully, but his expression is still and controlled.
‘If such men exist,’ he says at last, choosing his words with care, ‘then they must bear some frightful curse, and I pity them. And it seems to me as good a reason as any to let the wolves alone. This one seems to run with no pack, and certainly does not appear to mean harm to you or your people.’
‘You speak as though it’s rational,’ you say with a small laugh. ‘What does it mean, for an animal to mean harm? Are they not incapable of such reasoning?’
At that, he laughs. It does little to diffuse the tension in his shoulders, but you welcome it anyway; it is a long time since you heard his laugh.
‘If I did not already know you for a king, that would be the statement that marked you as never having worked the land. Animals know malice as well as any man, sire, as you would be aware if you’d ever earned the enmity of a watch-goose. ’
The idea makes you smile. ‘I will grant that geese seem fierce in their likes and dislikes.’
‘And fierce in acting upon them,’ he agrees. ‘My lord, my land overlaps with the forest, and I have seen little sign that the wolf is a menace to you – if it’s there at all. Perhaps it’s time to abandon these hunts.’
‘Perhaps,’ you say, but you find yourself eyeing him thoughtfully as the bout resumes, wondering why he speaks for the wolf when your other knights are calling for its blood.