The wolf makes a low growling noise – outraged either on your behalf, or because you dared even think Bisclavret capable of such disloyalty. But it helps to have said it aloud. Until now, you hadn’t truly dared admit it to yourself:I fear I drove him away. That he chose to leave.
Having discussed Bisclavret once, it becomes natural to do so again, and again, until it’s a familiar part of your nightly routine.
‘I wish he were here,’ you say to the wolf one evening, both of you curled in front of the fire. ‘He would know what to do about the war.’ He’d have an answer that would cut through all the fussing of your advisors.
It is not your war. That much you’ve known from the beginning. It’s another kingdom’s dispute, allies betraying allies and succession crises raging, and it should have nothing to do with you, except that they hope to enrich themselves and their cause by annexing you and bidding your nobles to fight for them. You’ve watched the threat of it grow like a shadow, but you’ve no more sense now of how to avoid it than you did when word of the struggle first reached your ear.
The latest letter from one of your correspondents at another court was not encouraging.Better to live as a subject than die for a principle you have not the men and arms to defend. You’ll lose little – the name of king, perhaps, but what harm to rule a duchy instead, and know there’s a greater land to call upon should you need them in turn?
Is he right? Is it better to surrender and swear your fealty to a stronger king, that he might use you to vanquish his enemies? Perhaps – but the idea tastes bitter. Why should your people die for another man’s cause? Why should you send your noblesand their sons into battle for a struggle that means nothing to you?
You think of the count’s son, and wonder whose part he has taken, and whether he will survive to rue his choice. You imagine him dragged from his horse, trampled in the mud with his shy smile slaughtered, and it seems unconscionable to wish such a thing on any man. Your father was right: you don’t have the stomach for war, or the heart for it, and even exile couldn’t hammer it into you or give you a taste for blood.
‘Bisclavret would know what to do,’ you say, but you know it’s a lie. Bisclavret was a gifted hunter and a skilled swordsman, but he was no politician. You’ve latched onto the memory of an imagined man, put him on a pedestal no human could live up to, and you do your knight a disservice by not remembering him as he was. ‘I wish he were here,’ you say again, because that part, at least, is true.
The wolf doesn’t answer. He curls close to you, docile as a puppy tired out by play, and you rest your hand on his back and try to push the war from your mind. If you allow yourself to dwell on it, you’ll never sleep.
Your mind wanders instead to your once-scrivener, whose departure left as many questions as answers. There has been no news of him since he left. He promised to send word, didn’t he? You can’t remember. You can’t even be sure whether he said he’d ever return. But it strikes you now thatheis the kind of man who would know what to do about this war. He’d have stories to tell, tales that feel half-real and half-magic, flitting from the battlefield to the heavens in moments, and hidden amidst his stories would be the truth of what you should do. But when you accused him of playing advisor, he would only smile and say that he was nothing but a scribe, and refuse your attempts to contradict him.
You miss him. Not in the same aching, abstract way that you miss Bisclavret, but with similar intensity. You are lost without the softly sarcastic affection that permeated his advice.
‘Why does everybody have to leave?’ you ask the wolf. He will stay, at least. He has a hound’s loyalty, faithful and true, guarding you from loneliness. He is the only thing preventing you from retreating entirely and hiding in your chamber like a wraith, for you must move yourself to ensure he’s fed and exercised, tasks you hesitate to inflict on a nervous page boy.
If not for the wolf, perhaps you would have kept the count’s son here a little longer, allowing your fear of solitude to override your consideration for what is politic and polite. Instead you sent him home with gifts and gratitude, taking care that neither was too effusive, and hoped he’s been brought no disgrace by the whole affair.
If he has, well, war will give him a chance to clear his name, redeem himself through martial strength or die a martyr in his father’s eyes. But if it were up to you, you would not send him to war. Not if there were any other way.
I want to be a king of peace.
You tell your barons as much the next day: that you will not involve yourself in the squabbles of counts and kings of other lands, nor will you surrender and allow them to drag you into it that way. Your kingdom has endured for generations, insulated by its size and its refusal to leap into every war or skirmish that offers the potential for riches, and you will not have it become another piece in their territorial games. They dream, it seems, of rebuilding the empires of old until their names are known the world over, but you have no interest in that. Your crown has enough weight to it already.
‘We will not fight,’ you say. ‘Not unless they invade and it is our only choice. There is no value in courting trouble.’
‘But sire—’ Some of them are still young men, still desperate for glory and young enough to think they’ll find it in blood – of course they argue with you. In your weariness you feel abruptly aged.What good is glory to the dead?you want to ask them.What good is fame to a corpse?
You would never have made a very good hero.
‘Your father had an agreement—’ begins your seneschal.
You quell him with a look. ‘I am not my father,’ you say, ‘disappointing though that may be to all involved.’ They flinch. They did not, then, expect you to notice. As though you could ever have stopped noticing, when that disappointment has followed you all your life, when it is what drove you into exile in the first place. Here it is, the test of your father’s fears, and they have been proven: you are unwarlike and unmanly, and they resent you for it.
Your father, though, was wrong to see these things as your weakness. You will prove that to them, one way or another, just as you have been proving it to them with every road and every letter that has laid the foundations of your kingship so far.
‘There is a right part here,’ says the seneschal weakly.
‘Perhaps there is,’ you say. ‘In which case God will see fit to favour the man who should be king and grant him the crown, whether or not I send my men to help him, for that should be well within His power.’ You are letting impatience make acerbic your tongue; you should be mindful. ‘Joining this war will not end the dispute, only perpetuate it. There will be a second war, a third, a dozen – all to maintain the sovereignty of a man without the strength to take it in the first place. And these men do not see us as true allies, only a prize to be won. They’ve been looking for an excuse to invade, and our involvement would offer it, make us an enemy to be eliminated before we can further complicate things. I will not invite that end.’
Your barons seem taken aback by this pronouncement. Perhaps they thought you didn’t grasp the politics of the situation, as though your letter-writing has taught you nothing of foreign courts and powers.
‘You think they will leave us be if we remain neutral?’ asks your seneschal hesitantly.
‘I think we should pray for as much,’ you say, ‘and prepare in case those prayers are not answered in a way we would like.’
There are murmurs at this, but they see enough sense in your decision not to object aloud, though you know they mislike it. They’ve never had time for your peace-weaving, and the way you seek books and scholars and ideas in place of war, glory, more land. Sometimes you think the chaplain is the only one who respects you for it. But your kingdom thrives in peaceful hands, and why should you throw that away, to satisfy the cravings of greedy men? Your first duty is to protect those who depend on you, to repay the fealty your subjects have offered you. Any path other than peace would be a betrayal of their trust.
‘And by prepare,’ says the quavering voice of one of your oldest advisors, ‘you mean to ready a force? For if there is a need to defend ourselves we risk being unarmed and helpless.’
You purse your lips. To raise an army, equip them to fight, and expect them to be satisfied with the peace you pray for is a dangerous thing, for a hunger roused is a hunger that must be fed. Dangerous enough that your knights are restless and spoiling for a fight, that your wolf’s teeth are as sharp as ever and his hunter’s heart untamed by his time at your side.
