‘A king with good judgment would see the truth of me,’ he says finally. ‘And will know what to do with that truth.’
His cousin reaches out and tucks a strand of Bisclavret’s hair behind his ear. ‘He will see you as your father’s son,’ he says, and it is the kindest thing anybody has said to him in longer than he cares to acknowledge. ‘But first we must find you some better clothes, or he will see you as a peasant. Come. There’s no time to be wasted.’
2
You
The feast has hardly begun and already you are weary of it. It has been a long day of oaths and promises, the new weight of your father’s crown heavy on your brow. You suppose you’ll grow accustomed to it, just as you’ll grow used to being at the centre of festivities, the object of everybody’s eye. For now it remains strange, unfamiliar after three years as an unwanted prince at another’s table, and the castle feels less like the home of your childhood and more like a gaol of cold stone closing around you.
A month ago it was summer, and your father was alive. Then a fall from his horse, a festered wound, and he was gone; the messenger sent to fetch you said little more than that, and didn’t need to. You thought you had longer. But now the trees have dropped their leaves and the winter is fast approaching, the many hearths of the castle unable to chase the chill from the air or beat back the encroaching blackness.
And you are king, and this feast is in your honour. If only you wanted it.
Your mood is at odds with the festivities, your father’s knights and retainers deep in their cups, every loyal man from across the kingdom dressed in his finery and seeking joy and good company. You received their oaths today, and their kisses,and it should warm your heart to know that they love you, but they loved your father too, and do not know you, and only owe you their swords.
The noise of the hall drowns the senses. Half-shouted conversations obscure each other, a mess of sound by the time they reach you; voices compete with the minstrels for volume. You squash the futile urge to flee. They have scarcely let you outside the castle walls since your return, and you ache with the need to walk down to the lake and see if it still reflects the stars of the clear autumn night in its inky depths, the way it did before you were sent away. To let the darkness dance your feet to somewhere you hardly know; to follow the tracks of the deer deep into the forest; to remember the land you were kept from.
Instead you sit here, on this dais, away from the mass of faces you half recall. They have left space on either side of you for the wife you don’t have and the favoured ones you wouldn’t know to invite to your side. A little way down the table sit your barons and advisors, deep in conversation with each other and ignoring you; at the other end sit the ladies of the household. One is the daughter of your father’s most favoured knight, lately deceased; she will remain under your protection until she marries, halfway to a sister or a niece. She is accompanied by a kinswoman of hers, you think, and two maids, but while she offers you a fleeting smile when she catches your gaze, it cannot diminish the space between you and make this seat a less lonely one.
They might have thought to choose company for you, you think resentfully; they must have known you had nobody to summon to your side. You haven’t so much as a squire to serve you at table. Your only true friend in the castle is the scribe you brought back with you from your exile, and he would never be permitted to sit beside you, if he were invited to a feast like this at all. Even your knights are strangers these days, though yousee among them the faces of those you knew as a youth. It will take time to earn their companionship again, whatever oaths they’ve sworn.
‘Sire?’ Someone wants your attention. You thought you’d done your duty, the rituals of the day over; you’d resent the petition, except that it interrupts your loneliness. ‘Sire, I beg a moment of your time on behalf of my cousin.’
You look up. The voice belongs to a knight you recognise but don’t know well, though you could hardly be said to know any of them well, now. He’s a lesser knight, sworn to one of your men, arrayed in his livery; you can’t remember where he hails from, but you have a vague sense that it’s somewhere quaint and rustic, and that he has rather more brothers than any man hopes to have in the line of inheritance ahead of him.
He is also, to your surprise, spattered with mud, his once-bright clothes soiled by bad weather and a hard ride. It’s unlike him to appear dishevelled, nor were you aware that he had any cousins with whom you might concern yourself.
‘Your cousin?’ you say, half-engaged despite your exhaustion.
‘He would have been here this afternoon, sire, to swear to you as was proper, but the elements turned against us and our horses were lamed some thirty miles from here.’
And by the looks of him they’d been travelling some time before that happened. Most likely he’s one of these very minor nobles with scarcely enough land to raise his taxes – a coastal backwater, perhaps, or something out in the hills to the west. His absence this afternoon would have been noted by your seneschal and the record-keepers, but you hadn’t marked it.
‘I daresay I can find it in me not to see disloyalty in his absence,’ you say, dredging up a smile, and the knight returns it, nervously. ‘Bring him forward, then. A feast is as good a place as any to take a man’s oath.’
No doubt your seneschal would feel differently. But the knight looks relieved. He turns and gestures, and a man begins moving across the hall towards you. He has a loping stride, easy as a huntsman over rough ground and just as unsuited to a feasting-hall; he covers the distance in moments, and then he is standing before you.
He’s near enough your own age, give or take a year or two – slightly younger than his cousin, you’d guess, and even more rustic in his dress. He has no armour and no surcoat: he’s clad in red wool over a blue undertunic, his sleeves cropped and practical, and he wears no hood or cap, so that his damp hair falls unfashionably loose and long past his shoulders. But he has a rough-hewn beauty, unpolished, all cheekbones and sharp eyes and eyebrows like sword-slashes.
He bows his head. ‘Sire,’ he says, taking your hand and kissing it. ‘I must humbly beg your forbearance for my absence at the oath-taking. It was not disrespect that kept me, but poor weather and a difficult road.’ His voice is hoarse, low – strained, perhaps, by the ravages of his journey. The cold weather has flushed pink his cheeks and nose, and there is something unsophisticated yet lovely about it, juxtaposed as it is with the coal-black of his eyes and his dark hair.
‘Indeed, it’s clear you’ve had no easy journey,’ you remark, raking your eyes over his muddied clothes; whichever servant took his cloak did a poor job of brushing the dirt from his chausses and boots before they let him into the hall. ‘What is your name?’
The young man glances up and meets your eyes. ‘Bisclavret,’ he says.
Bisclavret.
You mouth the name to yourself, tasting it, trying to place it. You can’t; you don’t think you’ve ever heard it before. Nochance, then, that this man is a long-forgotten childhood playmate, here to rekindle an acquaintance. A relief, in truth, for after years away you have enough difficulty matching names to faces without attempting to recall the friendship of another age.
But you would know more of this man – understand him better before you take his oath. ‘Where is it you have travelled from, Bisclavret?’ you ask, taking no small thrill from the shape of the name on your tongue as you voice it.
He names a place you have never been, and adds, ‘Some way to the west, before the mountains proper, with woodland on one side.’ It is the description one gives when expecting no familiarity with an estate; it must be very small, for you never to have heard of it. ‘The land was my mother’s dower, and passed to me now four years ago.’
So his mother is dead. ‘And what befell your father?’
‘He was killed in your father’s service a little more than a quarter-century ago, a month before my birth.’ He hesitates, glancing sideways at his cousin for help, but the knight only nods encouragement. Bisclavret continues: ‘He was a baron of the old king, and when he died without issue, his lands reverted to the crown. I . . . I did not inherit. Sire,’ he adds, a little hastily.
For a wild moment, you’re struck by the absurd desire to ask him to call you by your name. Nobody has done so since you returned from your exile, as though the syllables have been forgotten in your absence and you are nothing to them now but your crown.
