Wyrm IX

                                            The Merciless Parliament

They rode into London under Mowbray lions and the banner of the Court of Chivalry, a set of balanced scales embroidered red on white. Robert de Vere walked barefoot, shirtless, and in irons behind lord Thomas’s black and white mallard, a rope running from his wrists to the saddle’s pommel, a penitent’s pointed hood stitched shut over his head. Will’s face hurt so terribly he thought that he might topple from his ostri’s saddle. Every step she took sent waves of sickly, throbbing pain through his cheek and jaw. He’d had nothing but honeyed, milk-thinned porridge for two days now. His stomach roiled. He kept thinking of Lady looking up at him.

I wish I’d died, he thought, staring at the back of sir Ralph’s head. The knight rode not far from the duke, poor dead Tom Molineux’s banner draped over Lightning’s hindquarters like barding. The tricorne’s horn had torn Will’s face open from nose to temple and again from the corner of his mouth up to the channel of the first erratic gash. All stitched together with catgut, swollen and bruised. A miracle he’d kept the eye.

“You were a good lad to me,” sir Ralph had said to him a few nights after Radcot, not unkindly. He touched Will’s unmaimed cheek, his calloused fingers gentle. “A good squire, and all the rest.”

“I’m still alive,” Will said, but it came out all mushy and nasal, as though he were a dullard. Ah’m thtill ayive.

A gentle smile, a little sad. “Let’s have no blubbering.”

Will wished sir Ralph had screamed and raged instead. He wished the other man had struck him for losing his beauty so carelessly. The only thing of value with which he had ever been entrusted. He wished sir Ralph would climb onto the pallet and drag a knife through the gristle and meat of his throat, that he’d seen Will’s ugly thoughts in the moment before the tricorne had charged out of the smoke.

But he had only smiled sadly, spoken softly, and left.

There was no resistance as they made their way across the city. A guard at the Tower came too close to Hotspur’s shrike and for his trouble had his arm ripped off and his face slashed to ribbons, but that was all the blood that London gave. As they crossed London Bridge Will saw between the buildings the great tarnished mass of the Ark, its golden petals blackened by smoke, its vast mouth dark as night, filled in slowly with sand over the centuries. The raft that had borne the Old Blood from their sunken home, that had birthed the great lines of the wyrms and lifted England to the height of its power. Just a hulk, now.

In the great hall of Westminster where dusty sunlight slanted down through small, high windows to pierce the smoky torchlit gloom, the king sat weeping on his throne, his crown set in his lap, his sobs echoing from the rafters. de la Pole stood at his side in a scarlet robe trimmed in bearskin and belted at the hips with gold medallions, like a woman’s. His hand rested on the king’s shoulder. His pale eyes burned with a venomous rage. The tiered stonework overshadowing the throne and its dais seemed to Will like a great wave about to break.

Lord Thomas approached them. His footsteps boomed in the silence. He looked very martial in his leathers and mail, smelling of sweat from their ride through the winter city. “Your majesty,” he said, and sank gracefully to one knee, bowing his head. “The realm is safe. The evil counsel that has so misled you has been checked, and will not return.”

“Thomas,” sobbed the king. “Thomas, can’t we talk as friends? I understand now. Y-your concerns, Thomas. The concerns of the barons, I’ve… I’ve come to see how right you were, how noble your intentions—”

“His majesty is overwrought,” lord Thomas said, his stare cold and remote. His voice cut like a knife through the king’s babbling. “Sir Edmund, sir Roger, take charge of the royal person and convey him to his bedchamber to rest. The realm depends upon his safety, and his steadiness.”

Pole drew his sword with a hiss of steel on leather. “Try it,” he said softly. “Go on. Try it.”

Sir Edmund stepped forward, baring steel. “C-c-come, Pole,” he snarled. “It’s long overd-d-d-due.”

“Enough.” Lord Thomas’s command stilled the two knights at once. Will saw that the king had seized hold of Pole’s sword arm as well.

“It is as you say,” said Richard, rising from the throne. His crown tumbled to the floor and rolled across the flagstones, clinking brightly, before falling in the shadows of the stands where courtiers and barons sat. The king held his head high, though beneath the stonework framing his high seat he looked then very small and fragile. “I have your word no harm will come to Michael here today?”

“You have it, your majesty.”

Richard released Pole’s arm and dismounted the dais, suffering Roger Mortimer and Edmund Greene to take him by the arms and guide him down the long and echoing stillness of the hall. For so vast a space to stand empty seemed frightening to Will. Their footsteps echoed and re-echoed as they dwindled toward the far-away light of the doors.

“Pole,” lord Thomas said, his voice calm as still water. “Shall we make a mess of his majesty’s hall, or will you submit to my custody and do your duty to the realm?”

“Don’t speak to me of duty,” hissed Pole, and he flung his sword down with a clatter of steel on stone. “You’re traitors, first to last, and the devil take you all.”  He cleared his throat and spat with fiendish accuracy on the toe of lord Thomas’s left boot.

“Take him outside, Lackland,” said the duke to sir Ralph. “Wait an hour, then bring him to Lud’s Gate and throw him in the stocks. Forty lashes, I think.” Lord Thomas’s eyebrow twitched, the only sign he gave of temper. “As a boy.”

Pole simply held his empty hands out, palms raised, wrists together, and smiled as they shackled him.

The city had begun to come apart by the time they reached the market square at Lud’s Gate where the Fleet ran into the Thames and bargemen took on clarks and knights and barristers and offloaded fresh oysters. Not in riot or calamity, but rumor. The king was dead. The king had fled the city. The king held Westminster with two hundred men against the French, or the godless Danes, or heathens from the wilderness. The Ark had disgorged an army of monstrous wyrms who would drive Tom Mowbray and his rebels to the sea, or a nun of the Poor Clares had inhaled the fumes that rose from its mouth and prophesied that Prester John would ride out of the Kingswood and put the rebels to the sword, or else the king.

Every street and tavern held a different London. Will wondered which would be remembered in the end. Perhaps Lancaster’s get, the Bloody Duchess, was already en route from Exeter to put paid to the Appellants, or Lancaster himself, old John of Gaunt, had broken his long siege of Castile and struck sails for home. Perhaps the men, still shaken by the hellish battle at Radcot, would mutiny and kill their masters. Will glanced down at the man at arms marching at his right, a red-haired fellow with a notched ear and a short, bristly beard. He imagined the man dragging him from the saddle and crushing his skull with a stone. His wounds sang with a hot, dark pain. With luck they’d fester and save them all the bother.

“Where’s your cunt sister, then?” sir Ralph asked Pole.

The barefoot knight, walking manacled and collared between sir Ralph and Dick Preston, smiled a little. “Gone,” he said. “Gone far away. I don’t know why. I’m glad, though. Perhaps she knew Robert was doomed.”

In the square they threw Pole in the stocks and Dick beat him with a switch until the blood ran down the backs of his legs and his arse was a horror of open cuts. People gathered, watching. Pullets pecked and hunted among their milling feet, scratching at the dirt between the cobblestones. Ravens and splitmouths gathered in raucous, shitting mobs on the eaves of bakeries and inns and public houses, hoping perhaps that what was left of Pole would be abandoned to their ministrations.

A thin, dark line of blood struck Dick’s face at the last stroke of the switch, cutting from his lip up to his ear. He sniffed and wiped his face on the sleeve of his arming jacket, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he panted, shining with sweat. He looked to sir Ralph for instruction. Pole had gone slack in the stocks, his pale hair plastered to his face, his naked buttocks bleeding freely.

“Throw him in the tower,” said sir Ralph. He heeled Lightning forward, drawing his sword, and his voice boomed out. “Any man who bars your way will face the hangman with him!”

The crowd seemed unsure how to respond. There was scattered applause. A few raised fists and shouted curses. “Where’s the king?” one woman shrieked, and sir Edmund Greene turned toward a pair of men at arms and jerked his bearded chin in her direction. They plucked her bodily from the crowd as the column resumed its march, other men dragging Pole from the stocks and lifting him between them like Christ crucified, his blood running over their leathers and mail and reddening their hands as they joined the others.

“Will, you’ll sit the watch on him tonight,” sir Ralph said shortly, making an armored fist of his right hand and fussing with the cuff. “See he doesn’t hang himself.”

Lizzie watched from Chauntecleer’s saddle as the duke’s men marched down Thames Street and Vintry, trailed by a restless crowd of onlookers from as far away as Cheapside. The whole city was caught between flight and riot. The duke had tasked his three surviving pennons with keeping watch over London’s unruly sprawl. Sally Claire was circling Tower Hill and the Bridge on her Tristram while Chauntecleer rested on the roof of a friary, the monks in the courtyard below shouting up at them as the kite preened, running his beak through the red quills on his chest. She didn’t want him airborne any longer than he had to be. Swordbills had caught him a handful of times over the battle at Radcot, leaving little rents and slashes in the membranes of his giant wings. He needed time for his stitches to heal before he undertook another flight. For now he seemed content among the spires and sloping roofs.

She kept hearing the sound of Annie Potter’s head striking that iron strut. Gong. Like the bells in the friary’s belfry. How old had Annie been? Fourteen? Fifteen? Gong. The iron shivering. Her kite Anaximander had been downed by swordbills, wings picked to pieces and throat laid open. Magda striking the planks just ahead of them, arrows jutting from her throat and belly. Annie Potter’s head striking the strut. Tolling the hour. Gong, gong, gong.

When she closed her eyes she saw the smoke take Sarah Sweet. Her kite Guinevere shrieking as she crashed, stricken and dying, into the howdah below. She wished she could have gone with Will. He needed her. He would pick at his wounds without her to slap his hand away. He would sink into a black despair without her firm grip on the back of his neck. It hurt to know that he was out there in this seething, restive city. Her baby. Her girl. She clutched Chauntecleer’s reins to her chest, watching the marchers vanish into the city’s clamoring filth.

Gong.

She’d gotten them killed. She’d gotten all of them killed. She kept thinking of the Skeleton sitting slumped in that cage, her skinny legs dangling between the bars. Carolina looking out over the platform’s edge in the moment before the arrow punched up through her mouth and out the back of her skull like a mushroom pushing through the loam after a heavy rain. Take a look. The smoke closing around Sarah.

Gong.

The friary’s bell began to toll. Deep and clear and slow.

Gong.

They were dead, and she had done it.

The Tower loomed on its low hill, spires visible above its plain but cunningly worked walls of stone. A kite stood perched atop one tower, claws wrapped around the iron peak, the pennon on its back shrunk antlike in the distance. It wasn’t Lizzie. Her hair was the wrong color, and too long. Ravens circled in a widening gyre around the hill. The duke’s men had already taken the gatehouse and guard posts. They opened the iron portcullis for sir Ralph and his soldiers.

In the tower’s dark and narrow halls they found FitzAlan and Bolingbroke and two of their clerks consulting the prisoner lists and letting allies out of cells to replace them with the king’s lickspittles. A haggard man in roughspun rubbing his manacle-scarred wrists and calling for a barber to get the damned lice out of his beard. A giant of the Old Blood sitting placid in his little cell, his face like a child’s wooden carving. Huge nose. Beady black eyes. A small, lifeless slit for a mouth. Beside him the lord chamberlain curled on his pallet facing the wall. Men in golden chains, fingers flashing with jewels. Will watched a soldier shuck the rings from a big, bearded lord’s hands like a boy shelling clams on the pier. Up another floor and they passed Robert Neville and his sons escorting the trembling, teary-eyed queen to her room. She was plain and rather fat and clung like a child to her handmaiden’s arm as she wept.

On the fifth floor sir Ralph’s men manhandled Pole into a vacant cell no bigger than a cupboard set behind an empty armory apart from the other cells. Outside the barred window splitbeaks roosted in a nest of hair and twigs. The knight looked half-dead, his long hair tangled and matted with blood, his hose stuck to his buttocks by dried gore. They pushed him down onto the pallet and locked the door. “Watch him,” said the red-bearded soldier to Will. “We’ll send a lad with stew and bread tonight.”

Will nodded, still breathless and shaking from the climb. The injured side of his face throbbed with white-hot agony as he sank onto the single rough-hewn stool set against the wall in the cell’s antechamber. The other men left. He leaned against the cool stone wall, watching the splitbeaks squabble and snap. Below the window, Pole dragged himself the rest of the way onto his pallet, arms shaking and legs limp. Each breath he took sounded as though it pained him. He flopped limply down, regarding Will with one pale eye through the tangle of his hair. The thunder of footsteps ran above and all around them. A voice shouted, indistinct and echoing. The crash of iron doors swung shut.

Pole closed his eyes. Will wondered if the rebel lords would kill him. He remembered seeing Pole outside the keep at Framlingham, pale face and ashen hair, lips red in the chill. Lady Pole. A beauty even women envied. It was rumored he was quicker with a sword than any knight in England. One of the splitbeaks took flight with an outraged hiss. The other hunkered down, turning to stare at Will with a wild yellow eye.

I wish I’d died at Radcot.

It was some time later by the fading sunlight on the anteroom’s floor when Will woke dry-mouthed and stiff from troubled dreams to see the nest empty and Pole standing at the bars of the cell, watching him. Will licked his lips, blinking the dream away. Something about Hugh, the boy that old tricorne had killed the summer before last.

“I saw you at Framlingham,” said Pole. His fingers curled around the bars. “It came to me just now, watching you sleep. You’re Ralph Lackland’s squire. The pretty one.”

Will flushed. The throbbing in his wounds had receded to a dull, warm itch. “Not anymore,” he said. He cleared his throat, head swimming, and cast about for something else to say, anything to push his ruined face away. “Why did you try to make them call you de la Pole? Didn’t you know they’d think you vain and foolish?”

The knight smiled bitterly. “Of course.”

“Then why?”

“It was my father’s name.”

The hatred in it was enough to make Will understand. “I’m sorry,” he said. He wondered where his father was, if he had other sons, if he still lived. It’s better that I never knew him.

Pole shrugged. Someone laughed in the adjoining hall, the sound ringing strangely from the stones. A woman sobbing. The creak of leather. The Tower was alive with uncertainty, pregnant with all the new Londons that might spill out onto the streets. A coup. A bloodbath. Fighting house to house. The king’s children smothered in their beds, his wife’s head smashed against the wall. From the Tower’s grounds Will heard the grunts and bellows of uneasy tricornes, the yells of their handlers. Cities confused the bulky wyrms, boxing them in, baffling their poor eyesight and driving them to circle. Someone else’s problem now. He was a squire. Hugh’s guts spilling from his ruined belly.

“You seem well-composed, sir,” said Will. “For a defeated man. Sir Ralph says a man’s measure lies in his defeat.”

He thought of sir Ralph’s tongue against the Norman’s gashed and bleeding cheek. Pole grinned. He leaned against the bars of his cell, resting his forehead on the rough iron. “It might please me for a moment to curse and spit and tear my clothes, but it will vex your duke all his life if I go to the noose with a smile.”

Will laughed in spite of himself, then winced as it pulled at his sutures. He raised a hand to his cheek; his bandages had soaked through again.

“Come here,” said Pole.

Will looked up, wiping his bloody fingers on the front of his tunic. “What?”

“Come here, pretty thing.” The knight put his fingers through the bars and beckoned. “That wound needs washing. There’s mulled wine by the door. A guard came, while you slept. Bring it here.”

Will did as he was asked. He knew he was a fool for coming so close to the bars, that if Pole had a needle or a little knife on his person he could kill him in a moment, but there was a softness to the other man’s voice that told him it would not be so. He passed the wineskin to Pole. The knight’s long, slender fingers brushed his. Pole peeled the bandages from Will’s cheek. With his free hand he gripped Will’s tunic and pulled him gently closer to the bars. “Turn,” he said, and guided Will until his wounded cheek was angled toward the flickering torchlight. He gasped as hot wine filled the puckered gash and overflowed it. Pole’s face was very close to his. The other man dabbed at his cheek with something soft. A square of embroidered cloth.

“There,” said Pole. “You’ll want a new dressing, but it hasn’t festered yet, and likely won’t.”

“Thank you,” Will whispered.

They stayed like that for a moment. The remaining splitbeak launched itself from its perch with a mournful cry. Pole let the cloth fall, but his fingertips remained against Will’s wounded cheek. He slid his hand a little farther through the bars, cupping the sutured gash. “Tomorrow I’ll be in the ground, where there are no beautiful boys,” he said. “Will you kiss me?”

“I’m not beautiful,” said Will. His face felt hot where the other man’s hand lay against it.

“You are,” said Pole, and he kissed Will through the bars. It was a last kiss, Will felt that in the heat of it, in the other man’s surrender. A last kiss, perhaps, for both of them, for who would love him now? The iron bars were cold and rough. Pole’s mouth tasted of blood and cloves and jasmine. An invert’s kiss. A woman’s. Will began to cry. Perhaps it was for Lady, or for Peter, or for sir Ralph, who would never look at him again with love or take him by the arm along the dark canals of Brandenburg. He no longer knew.

They broke apart. For an instant he thought Pole was crying too, but it was hard to tell by torchlight. Their hands parted. Will returned to his stool, Pole to his pallet, and they spoke no more that night.

The tramp of boots in the hall outside jerked Will from strange, unsettled dreams. He’d been chewing glass in lord Thomas’s empty hall while something rubbed against the walls outside. Sir Ralph, Dick Preston, and a few men at arms pushed into the room. One fumbled with a ring of keys until he found the one that opened Pole’s cell door. The knight sat watching them. There were deep crimson stains on his pallet where the wounds from his whipping had soaked through his hose and tunic.

“Good morrow, lady Pole,” sir Ralph said, smiling. “Are you rested? Will you break your fast at table, or abed?”

The cell door swung open. Pole lunged so quickly that for a moment Will didn’t understand what had happened, but then sir Ralph, his nose bloodied, had the smaller man pinned under his arm and together the newcomers forced him back onto the pallet. Dick Preston had a pail of soapy water and a pair of barber’s shears. A razor hung from his belt. They pinned Pole down, a man to each limb, and sir Ralph straddled the small of his back and took the shears from Dick. Will felt an awful, hollow terror in the pit of his stomach. He rose, shaking, and edged toward the hall.

“You’ll wish you hadn’t,” Pole said, and his voice was cold steel. “By God and Christ and all the damned, you’ll wish you hadn’t. I’ll have the liver out of you.”

For a moment sir Ralph looked almost cowed, like a child caught filching honey, but then his face hardened and he twisted Pole’s hair tight around his fist. “Shut it,” he said, and he began to saw at the other knight’s long, ashen locks. “You’ll have nothing of no-one anymore, leech.”

Pole fought them, twisting and biting, the lean muscles of his back and neck standing out like cords. Will slipped through the door and out into the hall, but he could hear the shears cutting hair, a thick and grainy sort of sound, and after that the scrape of the razor, and then other noises, which went on for a time. Will fought to keep his breathing even. He schooled his face to stillness, wiping the corners of his stinging eyes on his sleeve. A short while later sir Ralph emerged, doing up the laces of his hose, and offered Will a wolfish grin.

“Worth a penny and then some, her ladyship’s cunny,” said the knight. “Go on and try it for yourself before she’s hanged.”

Every nobleman in the city had been dragged from his bolthole and shoved into his seat in parliament. All along the water barges had come sweeping through the brittle ice to moor at the hall’s little piers as the duke’s soldiers frog-marched their charges to the Painted Chamber. Sirens watched the men go by from the deep water, their little heads swaying at the ends of their serpentine necks. From time to time one fluted or whistled, but by noon they had all dived beneath the choppy surface of the river and swum out to sea.

Will had never seen anything so magnificent as the Chamber. Along two walls it faced the water, cold light spilling through mullioned windows nested deeply in stone arches. In the third a dark archway led down a long and unlit hall back into Westminster proper, and along the fourth ran a single great painting made of cunningly joined canvases stretched over wooden frames. It must have taken an army of illuminators months to fill in all that emptiness with knights and priests and cardinals, squires and ladies, fruit trees with gnarled limbs framing the sun, the moon, the spill of stars, and everywhere among the hillocks and canals and fields and forests were the wyrms. Titans grazing at the edge of a great wood. Mallards bearing riders into battle. Kites hunting in the reeds and soaring in the skies as shrikes tore at one another and duckies nested on the shores of tranquil ponds. Behind it all the black mouth of the Ark gaped wide, its petals spread, and the mariners of the Old Blood knelt supplicant to Athelstan, eggs raised in offering.

“Quite a sight,” said lord Thomas. He stood not far away, ignoring the crowds streaming in under guard all around him. He was dressed all in black from his boots to his soft cap, and he wore a heavy steel chain fastened at one shoulder with a roaring lion’s head and set with rubies. He was hardly taller than Will, and his face gave its age only in the bags beneath his pale, shrewd eyes, and in the lines at their corners. “Are you lettered, Darcy?”

“Y-yes, my lord,” Will stammered. “Lizzie — pennon Pierce taught me to read and write.”

The duke smiled faintly. “I shall have to find something for

you,” he said. “We’re rebuilding the kingdom — there’ll be no shortage of hard work.”

Will stood dumbstruck for a moment before remembering himself. His face hardly seemed to hurt. “Thank you, your grace. It’d be my honor.”

“Good,” lord Thomas said. “Good.”

He went to join the other judges at the head of the hall, spreading his arms in greeting. Gloucester was among them, and FitzAlan. Harry Percy had his feet up on the oaken table. The men clapped. Will thought that he should take the happy news to Peter, but then remembered that the other boy had died at Radcot, crushed beneath the titan’s bulk when it fell dead upon the field. He’d heard some forty men had died the same. What must it have felt like, to watch that living mountain pitch toward you and to realize that you would spend your last disordered moments coming apart under its impossible weight, the air squeezed out of you in silence, smelling its musk as its death obliterated yours?

“Order!” shouted Dick Preston, his battlefield roar carrying over the din of nervous whispers. The rebel lords took their seats at the long table. The nervous peers were chivvied to the stands framing the entryway where men at arms stood guard, spears crossed. Will fell back with the clarks and squires and other hangers-on to stand along the walls. He felt very small then, as though history were bearing down on him. The guards’ spears parted. More soldiers entered the chamber, leading Robert de Vere in chains to stand before the men who’d crushed his host and left him flat on his face in the mud at Radcot.

The chamber fell silent. de Vere looked terrible, red-eyed and greasy, his black hair a frightful tangle, his face unshaven. His wounds were healing badly and his left cheek was still swollen and red, a crusted fissure running from his lip up to his hairline. His captors forced him to his knees as, quietly, another set of guards led the pale, drawn king to a seat at the chamber’s far edge. Lord Thomas cleared his throat, shook back the sleeves of his black tunic, and unrolled a piece of parchment. “Robert de Vere, created Duke of Ireland by his majesty king Richard, second of his name, you stand accused of treason, of misleading and deceiving your lawful sovereign for your own base gains, of living in vice.” The duke’s cold stare flicked from the paper to de Vere with undisguised contempt before returning to the page. “Of giving yourself wholly to iniquity and to the Mammon of your lust for wealth and power. Your plea of guilt is taken as given by your defeat on the field of battle.

“This assembly, with the king’s blessing and for the restoration of the realm, sentences you to be drawn, hanged, and quartered, with your remains taken to the four corners of England to remind the people of the price of treason.”

Richard tried to rise to his feet, but the guard beside him placed a hand on his shoulder. The king clutched at the man’s hand with a desperate, unaffected terror that made Will blush and look away. de Vere said nothing as his captors dragged him back along the aisle between the stands, past the painted wall, his footsteps skimming through light and shadow, his bruised and battered face a mask of terror. As they conveyed him from the chamber, another pair of guards entered, escorting Michael de la Pole. Not even the sudden rush of whispers and muttering could hide the king’s gasp of horror, or the tears that sprang to the royal eyes at the sight of his favorite. Pole had been roughly shorn and shaven, his bald scalp crosshatched with cuts just beginning to scab over, loose hairs clinging to the dried blood that had sheeted down his neck and over his ears, where little tufts still grew from raw, scraped skin. Someone had smeared his lips with the red beeswax worn by whores, and his hose were torn and stained.

Lord Thomas leaned forward in his seat, a faint smile curling his lips. He rose. “Chain him,” he called to sir Ralph. “We’ll stand in recess, to reconvene in a half-hour’s time.”

Sir Ralph fixed Pole’s manacles to a pair of iron rings set in the floor. Suddenly the king was on his feet as well, fighting against the guards who sought to push him back. The crowd swiveled as one toward the disturbance. Men shuffled and pushed. Will found himself elbowed back through ranks of sweating courtiers. “I’ll do anything,” screamed Richard. “Anything, Thomas! Only let him go. I beg of you.”

Crowded near to the windows, Will heard a scream float over the water. He pressed his ear against the glass. The red-faced baron beside him was whispering loudly to his seatmate, the towering lord chancellor, Martin Pale. “His majesty wasn’t half so brokenhearted over de Vere.”

“Hush,” said Pale. He looked troubled.

“Hush,” hissed the raptor perched on his shoulder. “Hush.”

The scream again, or another like it. Will strained for a clear vantage down the river to the sea. The bay was empty, saving the masts of ships at anchor. The long  necks of titans rose among the chimneys there. They were looking at something. More shouts echoed out over the water.

“Please, Thomas!” the king cried. “Please!”

“His majesty is overwrought,” lord Thomas said coolly. “Sir Ralph, sir Richard, help him to his rooms.”

Another scream, plainly audible this time, silenced the chamber. A reverberation ran through the stones beneath their feet. Will’s pulse sang. His wounded face ached terribly. His attention, the attention of the men around him, was all for the yawning stone gullet of the hall. Another tremor. The sound of stone cracking reached them as dust sifted from the ceiling above. A breeze blew suddenly from the mouth of the entryway, a wave of hot, wet air that stank of meat and shit and marrow.

More dust, plumes of it squeezed out between shifting stones. The flags beneath their feet shivered and shook.  “What is this?” lord Thomas thundered. Gloucester and the other judges rose as well. Men were backing away from the hall. The king was weeping. Somewhere nearby, stone fell in a rumbling avalanche as though some part of Westminster had been demolished. More screaming, very close now.

“Are we under attack?” someone shouted. “Is it the French? My lord —”

The reeking breeze washed over them again, and this time Will understood it for what it was. Breath. Wood splintered. More masonry cracked and fell. The arch’s keystone shifted with a grating rumble.

“Spears!” lord Thomas shouted. Some rose. Men scrambled from the seats arrayed beside the entryway. A deeper shadow filled the darkness within. The breath again. A snorted gust of rotting meat. Will found himself crushed against the wall. His scarred cheek throbbed, bleeding through his bandages. He fought for space. For air. Unyielding flesh and thick brocade forced him back. He could hardly see through the forest of hats and swiveling heads. Not far away Martin Pale stood silent and erect among the others, a head and a half taller than the next man in height. His hand was on the king’s shoulder. He was saying something in a soft, low voice, and the king was weeping.

“Spears!” lord Thomas bellowed again. “Make a wall!”

The Painted Chamber shook. A crack ran through the plaster wall. Men at arms gripped the hafts of spears and pikes, forming a half-circle pointed inward at the entryway. There was a horrible crunching noise as of green wood splintering and then it was there. It ducked its head under the archway, spine and hip bones scraping against stone as it forced its bulk through into the chamber, bringing a rain of masonry with it. Broken masonry tumbled from its back. Strings of drool hung from its massive jaws and curved, serrated fangs, and its low, rumbling growl sent ripples through wine and beer standing abandoned in forgotten cups. It held its little arms folded up tight against its breast, meathook claws bent down at the wrist. Pale plumage, brownish at the arms, covered its bulk and its huge, slit-pupiled eyes were surrounded by long teardrop-shaped patches of pale gold. Its stare was black and dead and empty in the white mask of its skull. It was four times a shrike’s size. A giant. A monstrosity. A dragon, like the ones that lay dreaming beneath Uther’s castle in the story. The spearmen retreated. Some dropped their weapons.

It roared.

The sound was unlike anything Will had heard before, an ear-piercing bellow at once so low that he could feel it in his testicles and high enough to drive iron nails into his ears. The sound of the damned, screaming in Hell. Caught between two of its fangs he glimpsed a bloody hunk of Robert de Vere’s skull, wavy black tresses hanging from it over the dragon’s jaw. It lunged at the nearest man at arms. Spears jabbed harmlessly at its flanks, its massive thighs, its thick bull neck. It caught the man’s arm in its jaws and tore it off with a single twist, and then it was among the crowds. It swung its skull like a hammer into the oncoming men at arms. Bodies flew through the air. Someone struck the wall behind the high table and slid lifeless to the ground, a huge dark smear of blood left in their wake across the cracked stonework. Will could hear himself screaming. The beast caught Dick Preston by the foot and tossed him up, then snatched him from the air and crushed him in its jaws so that blood spurted from him like jelly from a pastry. In turning it stepped square on the fleeing Richard FitzAlan. His head burst beneath its weight.

Some panicked baron elbowed Will in the stomach in passing, leaving him gasping for air as the crowd knocked him right and left. The dragon’s tail scythed through the press. A man’s flying body shattered one of the high windows. It snapped men up and shook them like rats. A few slipped past it out into the hall, but moments later the keystone gave way and the arch toppled in upon itself in a thundering series of crashes. Dust exploded out into the Painted Chamber. Someone knocked Will to the floor. A man stepped on his hand. His back. He fought to breathe against the crush.

Then, suddenly, he was on his hands and knees beside the king, who lay prone upon the flags, bruised and disheveled. The dragon loomed out of the swirling brick dust. Pale, translucent eyelids slid over its black stare. It was streaked and dripping with dark blood, its feathers stained, its jaw leaking threads of gory red saliva. Will rose to retreat and stumbled. He fell. The dragon took a step toward them. It curled its great head down to preen with its little arms, raking gore from its plumage. It shook its massive bulk and emitted a low, rumbling growl. Will pushed himself back over the uneven flags, looking about for lord Thomas, for sir Ralph, for the far door near the judges’ table. Shadows fought and twisted in the eddying dust.

de la Pole stepped from the roil and put himself between the monster and his king. He held a broken sword, his knuckles white on the hilt. His shackles swung broken between his arms.

“Michael!” the king screamed.

Pole smiled, not looking back. “Run, your majesty,” he said. “Leave this to me.”

The dragon charged. Pole leapt aside and drew blood from its monstrous calf. It rounded on him, bellowing in anger, and he fell back toward the head of the hall. “Come on, you devil!” he shouted back at it, and in that moment, bareheaded and in shackles, lips cruelly painted, he was more a knight than any man that Will had ever known. He moved with perfect grace and speed, dodged and jabbed, thrust and feinted. His broken blade drew blood from the dragon’s snout. He scored a shallow cut beneath its eye. Another from its lip up to its nostril as it lunged to snap at him. It drew back with a thunderous snarl, nearly crushing Will beneath its taloned foot. Across the chamber several of the duke’s party were finding their courage, drawing swords and creeping up on the dragon’s rear.

The beast darted forward after Pole. For a moment Will thought that the knight was finished, but as the great head came down like a bolt of lightning Pole cleared it by the barest inch and rammed his sword home through its eye. The dragon screamed in agony, nearly wrenching the blade from Pole’s hands in its convulsion. It stomped, shaking dust from the ceiling and bringing part of the east wall down in a rain of masonry. Its tail smashed the tiered seats to flying splinters and caught an unlucky marquess in the chest, sending him hurtling to break against the painted wall. It clawed at its own head and neck with its tiny arms, froth and blood pouring from its jaws as it snapped blindly at nothing. Lord Thomas’s knights crept closer.

They’re going to do it, thought Will, his mouth dry, his ears ringing as he rose to a crouch, his whole body shaking with nerves. They’re going to slay it, like Saint George.

Then Pole’s heel found a broken flagstone. It shifted under him, just a little, and his leg slid out of stance. The dragon struck like a viper and Pole threw himself aside, but too slow. Too slow. It caught him in its jaws and whipped its head from side to side like a pullet with a rat. There was blood, and Pole’s legs and the stump of his torso fell with a wet smack to the stones below, guts spilling from the ragged emptiness of him. It gulped him down, tossing its head back. His sword clattered to the flags.

The beast wheeled just as the first knight raised his blade to strike. The hot gust of of its snorted breath blew his hair back, and then it had him in its jaws and he was rising from the floor, kicking, kicking, blood pouring out of him, and the other men broke and ran. A strong hand gripped Will by the arm and drew him away from the carnage. It was Pale, the king’s lord chancellor, blood on his tunic and his robes, a look of terrified exhilaration on his gaunt mask of a face. Across the chamber the king scrambled on his rear over the stones. The dragon stalked after him, head bobbing like a bird’s, and pinned him to the flags with one great foot. Richard screamed, a high and piteous wail, and Will knew at once his legs were ruined. Then it pecked at him, the way a chicken might, and snipped his head off with its great razor-edged fangs. Strings of gore hung from its maw as it raised its massive head and turned back toward the others. Its jaw tensed. Bone crunched.

“The king is dead,” the chancellor said as he and Will reached the ruins of the high table, smashed in half by a man’s thrown corpse, and the crowd forcing itself through the inner door into the gardens. His long, grave features split into a smile.

Long live the king, Will thought numbly, but the chancellor didn’t say it, only clasped his hands together and shook them over his head, still laughing, and began to dance like a peasant girl on Beltane, kicking up his heels and leaping, leaping, his white tunic stained with blood, his lank hair flying.

“The king is dead!” he cried.

“Dead,” his raptor shrieked from where it perched nearby atop a slain man’s split and bleeding skull. “Dead, dead, dead!”