“Think what you are saying, you fool. Why would they drug him when they could as easily kill him? What sense does this make?”
Despite my heightened sense of excitement, I realized he had not denied the possibility that all was not right with Aleksey’s death. I knew then that Johan had not believed the story of the short illness any more than I.
I fastened onto this little chink and pushed through. “They may notknowthat he is still alive, Johan. There have beenmanycases”—this was an exaggeration, but I was desperate—“where men have been given the opiate and lain like death. They have beenburied!Buried alive!” I saw him wavering. “Think of the old king! What did I do when all thought he was dead?”
“You brought him back with breath. I heard that, yes.” He looked up at me, and I could have wept for the hope I saw in his eyes. “You can bring Aleksey back from death?”
If faith was what he needed, then faith I would give him. I nodded. “Yes, with your help, I can.” He swung up onto his horse but still he held out his arm to stop me riding off.
“We must plan, Niko. We accomplish nothing rushing in with accusations. If he is alive, then this has been a plot which must involve many powerful—”
“It’s his sodding uncles, Harold and John! You know it is. He took Harold’s toys away, and he’s putting him down like a rabid dog.”
He frowned and shook his head. “You are—”
“Yes, you’re damn right I am! I’m going in there, and I’m going to—”
“Tonight, Niko. He will be lying with his father tonight in the great crypt. We will take him then. If he is alive…. If he is dead, then we will take him anyway and bury him somewhere he would like.”
He kicked his horse then to ride in front of me, and I knew his grief had overpowered him once again. I didn’t care. I could feel no grief now, only burning anger and a desperate desire to go to him. I could actually feel him in my arms again. I was all fire and energy and power, and my muscles, which had been so badly torn and abused in prison, were screaming at me to move, run, ride, fight—kill. I shouted to Johan that I would catch him up.
I returned to the palace and found my box. I had lost some of my sharp babies but not all of them. I strapped them around me, and they returned to my skin with hisses of evil expectation. Once I put away my rational side, I became entirely savage once again. I heard inanimate objects speaking with me as clear as I had heard the wolf. Knives in place and with plans for every one of them, I left our palace for good.
JOHANHADno trouble getting into the royal crypt, for all the guards were familiar to him and he to them. We had all fought in the war together, and they had volunteered to stand this vigil with their commanding officer, to give him fitting escort as he journeyed from his final battlefield. Johan had brought them some beer and meat to cheer their sad duty and said he wanted to pay his respects to the general and lay his medals upon the crypt. He had brought a priest with him. I was the priest in my cloak and deep, shadowing hood. The guards were not bothered one way or the other. This was General Johan, and they obeyed his orders without question.
I had been in the crypt once before, accompanying Aleksey at the interment of the old king. It was not a place I wished to return to, for no man would feel entirely easy in the presence of so much evidence of mortality, especially not one as I was then, a man newly filled by superstition and belief in the unnatural. If wolves and knives spoke to me, why could not these lifelike statues of the old kings? Perhaps Canute would crack his stone jaw and tell me that man could hold back neither tide nor death and that I was wasting my time. I would reply to him that one man had come back from the dead, I now believed, and if he could, then so could Aleksey.
We assumed Aleksey would be next to his father so made our way down the rows of tombs, only one flickering torch lighting our way. We needn’t have worried; Faelan led us with unerring accuracy to the place we wanted. My heart quailed. Could any spark of life exist in this place of stone and death? It was not like a churchyard in England: a sweet place of repose and birdsong and sunlight filtered through yews. This was a place of deep, bone-chilling cold and unforgiving stone. But for all that, I had enough vitality to fill that whole damn mausoleum. I would resurrect all the dead if that was what it took.
We hefted the metal stakes we had smuggled in beneath my cloak. The lid was not even mortared in and lifted easily enough to our combined strength.
My faith wavered. I could not bear to look down upon the body, in case I saw corruption upon his perfect features.
Again, I need not have worried, for we had one with us not awed by stone vaults or the likenesses of dead kings or impressed by two men who quailed in their uncertainty and fear of death. Faelan leaped up into the stone tomb as boldly as a boy had once leaped off stone battlements and into the sea for him. He landed on Aleksey’s belly, all one hundred and some pounds of heavy wolf, and Aleksey rose with ahumphof shock and opened his eyes.
Epilogue
IHADto break off my narrative.
I had come to the very point I had begun this whole long journey for when I was interrupted. It is some days later now, for I had to put this to one side and be busy with other things, which I will relate.
It has been very cold the last few days, and now I sit cross-legged beside the fire to finish. I had been about to relate my reaction to seeing Aleksey woken from his long, drugged sleep. Trying to recall in my mind what I had been thinking, a hand had suddenly landed hard upon my shoulder.
“What are you doing all this time? You have been here for hours. Are you crying?”
I did not turn but covered slightly the page I’d been working on. “Don’t be ridiculous. My eyes are watering from the cold. I have been writing.”
“Well, yes, I can see that. I’m not blind. What is it? A story? Is it about me?”
“It’s about a prince I once knew who became a king.”
“Huh, well I am not a king, so it cannot be about me. How boring. What happened to him?”
“I thought that he had died, but he had not. And that is why I wanted to write about him.”
“Because he didn’t die? You are very strange sometimes.”
“Because his death is still with me, and it colors every day that I live here. I return to this house and think it will be empty and that I am alone—that Ideserveto be alone. I cannot breathe sometimes for fear. There, are you happy now? Leave me alone, please, and let me finish, and then maybe I can put this horror behind me for good.”
