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XXVI. The King’s House

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To Thomas’s eye, the complex of the King’s Houses looked like an elaborate manor with two halls, a tower, a chapel, multiple kitchens, terraced gardens, and assorted other small buildings, and all of it surrounded by a shallow defensive ditch. Where a tributary of the River Maun called the Vicar Water ran past along its eastern perimeter, the stream had been dammed up, creating an enormous pond. Thomas, accompanied by the Keepers and two of the Waits—Geoffrey and the boy, Calum—rode along it and up to the Clipstone village street. The scattering of town buildings, mostly houses, lined the opposite side of the street. He guessed that some of those who maintained the halls lived there. Sir Richard atte Lee had mentioned both Clipstone and a “royal hunting palace.” This surely must be the same. He marveled that for all the time he’d dwelled in and around Sherwood he’d missed so large a site.

Off the Clipstone street, they rode through the archway of a two-story main gate and across a wide yard to a long set of stables that could have housed twenty times their horses. A fenced paddock branched off the stables to the west and already had a few horses in it. A skinny, bearded old fellow in a drab gray cotehardie and brown leggings came forward to take their horses. Isabella identified him as Edrick and he greeted her as “milady.”

Everything was built around the two large stone halls. The largest, in the center of it all, was an immense structure that she named “the Great Hall.” It overlooked sloping gardens, fruit trees, and the pond. It included covered passageways beneath pentice roofs and windows all around.

The second, smaller stone building fit the description of “hunting palace” given by Sir Richard, and stood to the southwest of it. This was two stories tall and displayed large windows sectioned by bar tracery and topped with quatrefoil circles in the arches. A tower abutted the left rear corner of it and poked up another story higher than the hall, affording a view over the small chapel off the rear corner. Isabella referred to the second, smaller building as “the Palace.” Its narrow lancet windows looked out upon a broad section of demesne land, no doubt offering a view of the denizens of the king’s deer park when they passed by. At one corner a buttressed wall projected out from it, perhaps a repaired and reinforced section, which reminded Thomas of the many abbeys and cloisters he’d worked on over the years.

While the paddock and ditch provided a modest defensive barrier, these houses would hardly have withstood any serious direct assault. The two-floor main gate itself even contained a glazed window—hardly a protective feature. Clearly, this complex existed for the leisure of a monarch.

Will explained that the King’s Houses were kept in perpetual readiness for a king’s visit, although the likelihood of such a visit was almost nil. King Henry II, who’d had the initial buildings erected, had only traveled here a few times. King John, who had added the chantry to the complex, had visited but five times during his reign. Henry III and his wife, Eleanor, had initially spent more time here, and Henry had added chambers for his queen that overlooked the terraced gardens sloping down to the Great Pond.

The last official keeper of the houses, Robert le Vavassur, had died in 1247, and since then, as no one had been named to replace him, the Keepers of Sherwood had added his duties to theirs and made the household retinue’s chambers in the Great Hall their own when they stayed here. Eventually, Will supposed, King Henry III would name a new overseer, or order the sheriff of Nottingham to do it. Thomas hoped that meant Orrels.

He listened to Will’s history lesson while marveling how much the main buildings reminded him of the Château of Chinon, and all the more queer: He’d been working stone in France for Henry II at the very same time the king was having his hunting complex erected.

History seemed to be nothing but a map of crisscrossing lines.

* * *

In the Great Hall, Isabella assigned them individual chambers. They would all lodge in retainers’ rooms on the second floor, placed around the great hall chamber.

Of the Waits, only two had traveled with them: Geoffrey, who felt that he was in the thick of whatever plot this was and wanted to punish someone for Osbert’s death; and Calum, a slight and freckled youth of sixteen who’d witnessed the flight of the false Passelewe. For him this seemed like something of an adventure. Curious about the “demons,” he’d asked a lot of questions of everyone on the ride here.

Isabella assigned the Keepers and Waits rooms side by side, Adam, Maurin, and Will together. Shown his room, Geoffrey recited from some memorized text as though he were a priest advising her: “A maiden should separate from all male guests remain.”

Isabella laughed. “No one is concerned with impropriety where I am concerned, Master Geoffrey. Least of all my profligate husband.”

The Waits all knew him and the many stories of his dissolute behavior.

“To place your minds at ease, Geoffrey, I shall occupy a chamber on the first floor. The king and queen’s chambers, of course, are to remain inviolate.”

Little John snorted. He’d no care as to where she slept. His concerns were personal. “I’ll ne’er be able to close both eyes in ’ere. Too comfortable a bed for one used to brambles, reeds, an’ straw. An’ for you, Woodwose, not much like your hut, neither.” Then he told Isabella, “Wager you’ll find us both bedded on the floor come morning, mistress.” At the threshold of his chamber, he removed the bycocket hat he’d purloined from Passelewe and offered it to Thomas. “Doesn’t fit me head,” he explained, then entered his chamber.

Thomas took the hat. He brushed his fingers over the feather. Looking up, he found Isabella studying him again, and quickly went into his own chamber beside John’s and shut the door.


It rained through the afternoon. The servants built up a fire in the main hearth and laid out a small supper feast on the massive table in the hall itself of roach fish from the pond accompanied by a parsley sauce, a cabbage pottage, barley bread and mugs of ale. It was the best meal Thomas could remember having eaten in decades, marred only by the conversation.

Isabella, Will, her son Adam, and Maurin each expressed their sympathies to the two members of the Waits. Isabella seemed unprepared to include Thomas and John in that company. Little John at the very least was still an outlaw in her eyes.

It was a grim conversation overall, as it might have been any of them who’d followed callow Ernald up those steps. Probably Osbert hadn’t even considered that the two of them were leading a demon to a dungeon. Certainly, Osbert didn’t know what it could do. But Thomas had known. Even witnessing Passelewe’s death, and seeing the creature called Kunastur, these good people simply lacked any experience with the diabolical made manifest.

Back at the gaol, Elias and Orrels had described how the Norman soldiers went up and down the stairs and into every one of the side tunnels to search for that demon. They found the mummified corpse of Passelewe in the cell, of course, but despite the Waits’ assurances as to its identity, they refused to accept it was their sheriff. It was some trick, a body pulled from a crypt and dressed up.

Geoffrey added, “The only one they found among all the cul de sacs was some cutpurse escaped from the other oubliette. Likely saw his chance and took it. Or possibly your demon helped him escape.” This last was addressed to Thomas.

My demon. Yes, that was right. Of them all, he alone had known what Kunastur was capable of, but he’d let them overwhelm his concern and foolishly let himself be convinced that with two men guarding the Yvag, everything would be all right. He should have taken that poleaxe away from Osbert and cut the damned creature’s head off right then. But he nodded noncommittally, saying nothing.

Geoffrey said, “Might have persuaded the remaining guards to accept that Sheriff Passelewe was dead and his corpse the withered thing in that cell if he hadn’t emerged from the keep above and strode the yard in full view of them all. Everyone recognized him. Only thing odd about it, other than we know he was dead, is Passelewe picked out a horse wasn’t his own. And then Calum saw him.” He nudged the young member of the Waits.

Almost owl-eyed at this point, Calum said, “Was stationed at Carter Gate, me, didn’t know nothing of those goings-on in the castle. I saw the sheriff on that horse, no mistake. And there was a small bird, maybe a sparrow hawk, keeping pace with him.”

Thomas and John exchanged a glance.

“We should ne’er have left Osbert alone with that devil,” said Geoffrey. “Ernald . . . what did that boy know of such things?”

“As much as the rest of us,” Isabella’s son, Adam, remarked sourly.


After the meal, Thomas borrowed a hooded brown ganache, took up his bow, and went for a stroll by himself around the grounds. The rain had let up for a bit, becoming more of a mist, but no one else was about. Still, he kept the hood up to disguise his identity.

He circled the palace, then wandered between the tower and the chantry as if randomly roaming the grounds. The chapel entrance faced the tower. Nothing small was flitting through the air, and no one was watching as he pushed open the door and went in.

It was dim inside, made darker by the wood paneling that lined the lower half of the walls. Three rows of pews faced a small semi-enclosed space containing an altar covered in an elaborate embroidery and bearing two candlesticks and a small cross in the center between them. No doubt it had been erected by one or another of the Angevins for private masses in their honor—but no, Isabella had said something about Henry III having visited in December of the previous year and the chapel being prepared in advance for him, the oak wainscoting added, and a glazier hired to seal the windows, hermetic and silent because the King attended three masses a day. As it was neither lit nor currently in use, it suited his own needs perfectly.

He crouched down, and lifted the embroidered altar cloth. A dark empty space greeted him. From beneath the ganache he drew his hidden mason’s bag and reached into its depths until his fingers closed on the point of a dight.


The rains returned in the early evening followed by a drifting fog. As darkness set in, the forest lit up with strange fires. Geoffrey remarked this was exactly like the night the Waits had spent on the road from York. None of it was near enough the King’s Houses to be directly visible, but enough that weird colors lit trees and mist alike. Through the rectangular panes of the second-floor windows of the hunting palace, Thomas and the others watched distant flickerings of green fire appear and just as quickly vanish, to be replaced by others, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther away, igniting and winking out.

A herd of deer swept across the park like ghosts, fleeing the strange fires. Odd sounds—howls and distant shouts or cries—echoed through the landscape. It was as if Sherwood had become haunted. Young Calum gaped at it all.

No one of them was foolish enough to go out and investigate the noises and fires in the pitch black of night, and anyway the fires like an ignis fatuus came and went too quickly. Run at one, the glow would light up elsewhere. Will Scathelock commented, “Who knows what we would meet in haunted Sherwood tonight?”

Eventually the sounds and fires diminished. The Yvags were not focused upon them at all—from here the opening gates appeared entirely random. If anything, the brief fires were moving away, not coming closer.

While they all sat together in the Great Hall near the fire and discussed it, Thomas sat off to one side. Little John, beside him, whispered, “This all is like what I saw the night the Queen come out.”

Was it all a coordinated effort by Nicnevin, this systematic terrorizing of denizens of the forest, gates opening in different places each night . . . ? Or maybe not entirely different. He urged himself again to have John take him to the spot where he’d seen his Queen of Fairies. If it turned out that she came through that same gate each time, Thomas might end the assault on the people of Sherwood with one single well-directed arrow.

Then John said, “Robyn,” which he’d never yet called him. “If tha wanted ta, you know, investigate those fires, I’d go with.” He paused, then thought to add, “I wouldn’t like it, mind, but I’m yer man if ye go.”

One thing the random fires made clear to Thomas: The Yvags obviously still had no idea where their dights were. He took a little satisfaction in that, though not enough to absolve his guilt.


They all continued talking, covering details they already knew, but Thomas withdrew into his own thoughts. He already blamed himself for the deaths—blundering about, missing things that his former self would never have. There had been one or more of those little monsters lurking in the shadows of the stairs and tunnels, and he should have known. His descent into the mad Woodwose had allowed a lifetime of neglect to blunt honed instincts. He might not look a century old, but his readiness had lain dormant almost that long. True Thomas had indeed become the Woodwose. He had to clear his thoughts, become again the warrior that Alpin Waldroup had trained him to be. How he wished to hear his teacher’s ghost at his side again, taunting and provoking him, pushing him to risk everything. So, what now? The little bastard hobs were everywhere, and he’d already been assaulted by one in John’s company. Kunastur, of course, was the resurrected Passelewe. By now that Yvag and its hob might be anywhere.

But, having failed, would Kunastur have fled to Ailfion? It would have to admit to playing a part in the deaths of Passelewe and Simforax. Nicnevin would not look favorably upon the messenger bringing that news, much less on a knight who’d stood by while the deaths happened.

And if he were Kunastur? What he would do was capture the dights himself. Prove his worth.

“Calum,” he said. “This horse that wasn’t Passelewe’s and rode past you—what did it look like?”

The lad described a piebald gelding. Geoffrey interjected that it belonged to one of the castle guards, who was quite upset about it.

Calum asked, “Is it important?”

He looked at the group around him. “Imagine for the moment the creature knows where we’ve come. Passelewe had a pet hobgoblin hidden in the tunnels. The flitting thing that bit Warin on the road the night before I met you, Geoffrey? The sparrow hawk Calum saw? I think they are one and the same. If so, then the whole time we were inside the castle rock, that fae hob was lurking in the shadows with us, and I imagine it heard everything we said. Even when we moved off to keep Kunastur from hearing us, the little monster was listening, probably on the ceiling. Our demon might ride away and never return, but I think he will try again for those dights. He’ll come after us. They’ve only lost compeers in the fight thus far and not retrieved a single one. I know the queen who rules over them. She does not make allowances for failure.”

“But both sides have lost,” said the previously quiet Maurin.

“Was never a fight we wanted,” Geoffrey added.

“That’s true enough,” Thomas replied, “but it’s not how they’ll see it. We are supposed to go about, bovinely ignorant of their machinations, their very existence, allowing them to swap changelings, place skinwalkers, and select sacrificial tithes as they’ve been doing for centuries.”

Isabella remarked, “Once again, you display a knowledge of these creatures as if you’d lived amongst them. I should like to understand how that is.”

Yes, how was he going to explain all he knew? It had been three days here since Little John had slain that bishop. In their world—he’d called it Ailfion to Janet for so long that he’d almost forgotten the name Yvagddu—that would be, what, a few hours? Kunastur might return there to gather reinforcements. But in Thomas’s experience, which admittedly was limited to the Yvag knight Ađalbrandr, such a knight might consider that an admission of failure, whereas, armed with the knowledge of where they were, why not come at them alone? Great honor no doubt awaited whichever knight returned with the devices. The Yvag race were not used to failure, and from what Nicnevin had said to him, there had been none before he stood up.

He answered Isabella: “Yours is a fair request, milady, but there is no time for the full story just now. We are here, but I believe Kunastur has arrived here before us. Must have, in fact. He’ll have traded Passelewe’s form for a new shape that allows him to move about here freely and approach us closely. I will wager my purse that he’s in our midst even now.”

Little John scratched his head. “But then there’ll be two’a the same man.”

“Or woman.”

They looked at one another, and then around the immense hall, suddenly suspicious and uncertain. The retainers who’d stoked the fire, the ones who’d brought their food . . . 

“What should we do? How do we make certain . . . ?” asked Scathelock.

“To begin with, we go nowhere alone. We haven’t been poisoned or we would know it by now. And anyway poisoning us doesn’t get him the dights. If he’s here, Kunastur will adopt the shape of someone who attends to the houses, or the man who fishes the pond or tends the horses—somebody whose voice we don’t know well or at all, probably someone not expected to speak or remain in close quarters. Glamouring will change his appearance, but not the sound of his voice, nor will it teach him how to bake bannock.”

Scathelock brightened, understanding. “The horse,” he said.

Thomas stood. “Get some torches. Let us go see who’s grazing in the paddock.”


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