Bound into the Blood Read online

  Here was her old US passport. He didn’t see any others—perhaps she hadn’t traveled after he was born and hadn’t needed a Welsh one. He opened it up and examined the picture. She was so young. He was older now than she was when she died, and in this photo she was only nineteen. She looked like a strong girl. He could see his grandfather in her sturdy shoulders, and his grandmother’s sweetness in her soft smile. Her light brown hair was straight and short.

  He flipped to the end and saw stamps for travel in the Caribbean, perhaps with her parents, but not much else. This was probably her first trip to Europe. As he thumbed through the thick pages, an old Polaroid tumbled out, face down. He recognized the milky back and the stiff, slick surface. Was it a tourist snapshot? Her parents?

  He turned the photograph over. It was his father, a candid shot as he bridled a horse. The colors had faded to pinks and greens.

  All his vague childhood memories of his father’s face suddenly solidified. This was the man he knew, the one who took him for adventures in the woods, the one who taught him how to ride. He seemed tall in truth, not just to a child’s eyes, and his hair was black and thick, like George’s. I have his hair, he thought. My bulk comes from my grandfather, Gilbert Talbot, but it looks like my height comes from both sides. What else do I have that’s his?

  He felt a stirring inside, as if Cernunnos were looking on. Well, he thought to him, what can you tell me? I’ve asked you often enough.

  There was no response.

  Angharad walked back in and saw the picture over his shoulder. “Is that your father?”

  “Yes, and my mother, too.” He handed her the passport along with the Polaroid.

  “She’s lovely. She looks like Georgia.”

  “I see my grandfather in her,” he said.

  “I can see her in you,” she countered. “But I thought you didn’t have any pictures of your father.”

  “I’ve never seen one before, but I remember him. This is him.” He couldn’t keep the wonder out of his voice as he took the picture back from her and examined the little image for details. His father must not have known the photographer was watching, for he had none of the self-consciousness of a knowing camera subject. All his attention was on the horse, and it seemed to George that there was a melancholy cast to his face. I’m probably just reading it into the photo, he thought. It really isn’t clear enough to see that.

  Angharad sat next to him as he finished going through the documents. Here was a record from the cemetery where his mother’s remains had been laid, in Rowanton, after they’d been brought back to Virginia. George remembered the headstone with his parents’ names and dates on it from the family visits on Memorial Day.

  He reached for the last piece of paper which, appropriately enough, was her death certificate. He blinked, and Angharad laid her hand on his as they looked at it together. There was only hers, not his father’s. The cause of death was “misadventure.”

  “I wonder where my father’s is,” he said to her. He picked up the cemetery record again and looked at it more carefully. It listed the receipt of his mother’s remains. That was all it listed.

  But the headstone has both their names, he thought. Where is my father buried? Why would there be a separate record somewhere?

  Where is his death certificate?

  He turned to Angharad to voice the inescapable question. “Where’s my father’s body, then? What happened to it? Didn’t he die, too?”

  Cernunnos erupted as the deer-headed man and the sudden change of form sent Angharad stumbling out of her chair to get out of the way. George was shunted aside as Cernunnos took over their body and stood up to sweep the documents off the table and onto the floor in a rage.

  Stay away, he warned George. He is dead, dead and gone. Dead to me, and dead to you.

  But this is my father, George protested in silent surprise. Why?

  Stay away, the thunderous voice in his head rumbled.

  Is my father alive? He had to know. He’d never suspected it.

  Not to you, Cernunnos said, and withdrew forcefully. George collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  CHAPTER 2

  George woke to the wet rasp of a tongue on his cheek and the rumble of a purr. Imp, he thought, after a moment of confusion. “Enough,” he mumbled and raised his hand to brush away the half-grown cat. He pushed himself up to sit cross-legged and leaned his back against the leg of the table.

  Angharad bent over him, concern clear on her face. “Sit down,” George said. “I’m fine.”

  “No doubt. That must be why you’re down there instead of up here,” she said, but she turned his chair upright and sat down again carefully in hers. “What happened?”

  He probed but there was no inner response. “Apparently Cernunnos wasn’t pleased with this particular line of inquiry.”

  She rolled her eyes at the sarcasm. “Why not?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? He’s never told me anything about my father and clearly doesn’t want me to look into it.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Harsh treatment.”

  But he can do whatever he wants to me, George thought, including just snuffing me out. Cernunnos had healed him of mortal injuries a few months ago, but it took persuasion and George had little confidence that Cernunnos was sentimental about keeping him around. He didn’t want to alarm Angharad with that idea, but a quick glance up at her face convinced him her thoughts were running the same way.

  Imp tapped his knee and he turned his attention to the black tom-kit. “Trying to tell me something, my lady?” he asked. The cat carried a passenger, an avatar of the goddess Senua, protector of hidden things. Since he’d brought the kitten back from Gaul, it had attached itself to Angharad and followed her around diligently, to the consternation of her two other cats and all their dogs. Watching this small beastie rule the household animals had provided much amusement, but he was still waiting to find out why Senua had taken an interest in them.

  Imp leapt up to Angharad’s lap and began kneading it, purring, to make itself comfortable.

  Angharad smiled down at her husband as her hand stroked the kitten. “Not much room here anymore.”

  Two more months, he thought, and then a daughter, Mag says, if a rock-wight that only knows one gender can tell the difference properly. Family to come.

  But what of the family past, he thought. My father is dead to me, is it? I suspect maybe not. I wonder what Senua could tell me. My father’s history is certainly hidden enough to be in her purview.

  The speculation made him uneasy. I belong to Cernunnos now, and I’ve seen his jealousy before when Senua or Taranis took an interest. Appealing to Senua for help would be like setting up a rival. It feels… disloyal. This is between Cernunnos and me.

  He looked around him and his mouth quirked. And here I am sitting on the ground, having just thought of looking into my father’s life a few minutes ago. What will his reaction be if I continue?

  He leaned down to push off from the floor and rose to his feet. “Don’t worry,” he told his wife, as he dusted himself off. “I’ll have to give this some thought before going any further.”

  Later that afternoon, George opened his back door and whistled up his dogs to keep him company.

  Angharad’s terriers were accustomed to being excluded from these tours of the pack in the kennels, but George had fallen into the habit of letting his own dogs, the ones he’d brought with him from his old life in the human world, mix with the pack for hound walking. It gave them more exercise and helped accustom them to occasional overnight stays in the kennels when he was away.

  They walked together through the small walled garden behind the huntsman’s house, the dogs lingering to investigate interesting smells and then catching up. The garden was now in the midst of its summer blooming, brilliant in the hot sunshine. The riot of spring was over, but the long-lasting perennials provided notes of red bee-balm and deep-blue spiderwort, highlighted by tall yell
ow black-eyed Susans and the broad white blossoms of rose mallow. A clump of lupines, rising in a variety of soft pastels from their leafy bases, filled one sunny corner.

  He knew most of these flowers and Alun had identified the rest for him as each had come up, but it was hard to accustom himself to the absence of so many garden mainstays. Where were the roses, for example? It seemed to him the beds had been designed on one occasion from flowers available in the new world, and then left unchanged for centuries but for maintenance and renewal.

  He remembered the tales of human pioneers in America bringing along precious seedlings and slips so that their new gardens and orchards in the wilderness would contain their favorites from their homes, even from across the sea. The fae had brought orchard trees, apple and pear, but not peach. Vines from Gaul, but no rhubarb from further east. And yet, they imported spices like cinnamon as part of their normal trade. Unpredictable choices, he thought.

  He’d asked Ceridwen about roses during one of her history lessons, and she’d told him that some of Gwyn ap Nudd’s settlers had included them after all, but there were none to be seen in Greenway Court—they were the favorite flower of Gwyn’s much-disliked father Lludd, King of Britain, and no one had the temerity to display them in Gwyn’s own court.

  Whenever he thought about the absence of roses, George marveled. It was so emblematic of the differences between the fae world and the human one, that a distaste could endure for fifteen hundred years unchanged because it was within the lifetime of a single fae, like Gwyn. His great-grandfather.

  He opened the back gate in the wall and led his dogs across the lane to the gate opposite. The entrance to the huntsman’s alley was his personal shortcut into the kennels. The shaded walkway provided some welcome relief from the sun.

  Where were the innovators, he wondered, gardeners experimenting with new species? He knew there were wizards who specialized in plants, in drugs and toxins, but where were the ordinary folk, the ones who just wanted to see if they could grow a better color or a different form?

  It was like the animals, he thought, the new world species that the settlers found. They did some breeding of domesticates, the native horses for example, but mostly they left them alone, to thrive or not, hunted or not. Some of the native plants became popular, but from an indirect source. The fae grew their own potatoes and corn, but the original seed stock was imported from their hidden trade with the human world, which was where the plants had been domesticated, not here. Tobacco and sugar were much admired, but they were bought in bulk from the human world, being crops too labor-intensive to be easily cultivated by the sparse population of fae. If there were no human world to draw upon, how much more impoverished the choices would be here, he thought. But, then, would they miss what they didn’t know?

  When he and his dogs reached the end of the alley and the door into the kennels, he paused, his hand on the latch. The smell of fresh whitewash had faded away as the newness of the rebuilt structure began to wear off.

  He opened the door and stepped into the back corridor, and then across into the huntsman’s office. When he walked in, he sneezed. Plenty of new scents lingering here, he thought. Dust from the books, paint, and especially the sharpness of the polish on his new walnut desk, glowing in the bright sunlight that was reflected in from his window into the main courtyard. The smell of the ancient journals and scrolls overlaid everything else. It was good to see them back on their replacement shelves, the hunt logs and breeding books going back to the days before Gwyn brought the hounds of Annwn to the new world and moved the whole domain with them.

  The wild hunt, George thought. The hounds of hell. That’s how they’re known to human legend. My pack, my charge. No different in most ways from any pack of foxhounds, like those he’d grown up with, hunting in Virginia. But once each year, on Nos Galan Gaeaf, All Hallows’ Eve, they changed. Then Cernunnos, the master of beasts, turned them to the cause of justice, and it was Gwyn’s responsibility to carry out the sentence, with George as huntsman for the pack. He’d done it once before, and in a few months, he’d be doing it again.

  He walked over to the new cupboard, sturdier than the last, that housed the oliphant, the ceremonial horn carved from the end of a tusk and enspelled to preserve it from decay. It was reputedly as old as the pack itself, used only during the great hunt once each year. He peeked in and ran his fingers along it gently, the ancient ivory smooth to his touch, then locked it away again.

  He turned on his heel and surveyed the room. Everything occupied the same places as before the fire, as though the kennels had not been completely destroyed. His only complaint was the new sofa. It looked fine, the cushions a dull dark green, but he was sure it couldn’t be as comfortable as the old one where he’d taken many a brief nap. Too bad it was solid-padded instead of sprung, but the cushions were certainly thick. The new one was longer than the one he’d inherited, he’d noticed. A subtle nod to his height?

  He sat down for a moment to update his hunt log with a few notes about the hound walking this morning and Eurig’s comments about the puppies. Hugo took the opportunity to hop up onto the new sofa to try out its suitability as a dog bed and stretched out the full length of it on his side, his long legs dangling over the edge.

  “What do you think?” George asked him. “Comfy?” Hugo’s tail thumping at the sound of his voice answered him.

  The smaller yellow Sargeant claimed the space remaining at the far end of the cushions and curled up tidily.

  “Alright,” George said. “You two clearly approve, anyway.”

  Before he put his journal aside, he thought about Eurig’s complaints again. He’d wanted to get this season’s whelps out from underfoot as the kennels were rebuilt, and puppy walking was a traditional method of tying the interests of the landowners and the hunters together. The puppy show at the end of the season would provide a public way to thank them, and the puppies would return improved for the experience.

  He’d considered letting his grandparents in Rowanton take a couple but he was reluctant to bring the hounds to the human world where questions would be raised and anyway it was more important to strengthen the local ties here. Thinking of his grandparents reminded him of his parents. His grandfather knew little about his own son-in-law, but George was going to have to ask him for anything he might remember.

  Why was Cernunnos so upset? He probed again, but encountered only silence within. Still not talking to me, he thought.

  He shook off his worry and headed out the door, slapping his leg to summon his dogs to follow.

  When George emerged into the kennel courtyard, the hounds hopped off their benches in their pens on the far side and lifted their heads to cry a greeting. He was glad they hadn’t changed the layout or materials much in the reconstruction but then the stone had burned as well as the wood in the magically-augmented fire so there was little reason to eliminate all the wooden elements.

  Ives, the kennel-master, had taken the opportunity to redo the plumbing and the foundations and to plow and replant the attached hound runs, so a general sense of renewal everywhere was overlaid on the resurrected complex.

  Tanguy stuck his head out of the building, across the courtyard from the huntsman’s office. “Master Ives asks if you’ll step in for a moment, huntsman.”

  George nodded and followed him in, leaving his two dogs out in the courtyard to sniff noses with the hounds through the fences of their pens.

  It was relatively quiet in the workroom just off the corridor on this side. In the heat of the summer they tried to prepare the food for the hounds early in the day, and they needed cold spells to keep the knacker’s meat from spoiling. Game wouldn’t be hunted again until the beginning of fall, so the full bustle and steam of preparing food for the hounds was much reduced.

  Still, there was always tack to be repaired, and both of the kennel-men sat at the worktable with leather in their hands, busy with awls and waxed thread. George noticed that the scent of the leather was stronger t
han usual, or perhaps it was that the competing odors hadn’t yet settled in to the rebuilt rooms. Give it a year, he thought, and it’ll smell just the same as before—a mix of steamed grain, boiled meat, leather, and hard work, with the sparkling tang of polish and liniments overlaying it all.

  He nodded at Tanguy and Huon. Both of the short lutins in their usual red vests and breeches nodded back. “How do you like your new digs?” he asked. At their puzzled expressions, he emended, “I mean, the new sleeping chambers.”

  One improvement Ives had requested was a couple of rooms where the kennel-men could sleep over, if there were an emergency of any kind. They had houses and families of their own, but it was useful to have a place onsite, and George had commented on how there was usually a room or two like that over a large stable, for the same reason.

  “They’re handy, huntsman,” Tanguy said, “though Armelle would rather see me home at night.” He blushed as he said it. He’d been married just a few months, like George.

  Bachelor Huon laughed at his workmate as George passed, walking through to the kennel-master’s office in the next room.

  Ives rose from his short desk to greet him, and walked around and closed the door behind him. George’s eyebrow raised—it was uncommon for that door to be shut.

  “What’s up, kennel-master?” he asked. The older lutin made his way back to his desk chair and waved him to a larger seat in front, one of a pair that he kept around that were better suited to the size of a fae, or a human like George.

  Ives didn’t respond directly. “We’re all done,” he said. “The books going up in the huntsman’s office, that was the very last of it.”

  George let him set his own pace for the conversation. “So, everything’s back to normal, is it? You happy with the results?”

  Ives nodded. “We’re ready for the puppies to return anytime.”

  “A good thing,” George said. “The walkers are getting… restive. I just had an earful from Eurig this morning. Not sure if I can make him keep them a few more weeks.”