Bound into the Blood Page 8

  They both worked for him as hunt staff, Brynach as a whipper-in, like Benitoe, and Rhian as a junior huntsman, but they also outranked him outside of his own area of responsibility and he was grateful that they had the self-discipline not to try and override him. Rhian and her brother Rhys were the grandchildren of Edern ap Nudd, Gwyn’s brother, and Gwyn stood as their foster-father. Brynach was the great-nephew of Gwyn’s longtime friend and vassal, Eurig ap Gruffydd, and the families looked with discreet approval on the growing bond between their two members. He didn’t think they’d stay with him as hunt staff for very much longer, but he was going to be sorry to see them move on.

  “I couldn’t help trying, huntsman,” Rhian said apologetically as she pushed back her chair, prepared to follow Brynach out of the office.

  He smiled at her and waved his hand dismissively. “You’re not the first to ask and I’m sure you won’t be the last.”

  He sat behind his desk alone for a few moments and chided himself. I need to find out where the Korrigans’ way exits. I meant to do that already. Too distracted by my own quest.

  He’d checked with his mother’s parents, but they couldn’t add anything to the information he already had. They confirmed there was no body in the grave next to his mother, that it had been lost and never found in Wales, but they had no more answers then he did, and he forebore from alarming them with his own speculations.

  He turned his attention back to the breeding journals on his desk. He’d been working out some of the bloodlines for the active hounds, but his mind just wasn’t on it.

  There was a knock on the open door frame and he lifted his head. His foster-son, Maelgwn, had come in through the outer door and down the paved corridor without making a sound.

  “You startled me,” he said, smiling. “Pretty stealthy.”

  Maelgwn looked his age at twelve, when he relaxed, but that didn’t happen often. Too hard a childhood, George thought, brutally orphaned with only a rock-wight child for companionship. And all these months ranging the woods with Thomas Kethin have given him a stillness and maturity that belie his real age.

  “What’s up?” George asked.

  “Thomas has released me to Rhodri for a while,” Maelgwn said. “I’ve come to find out if you or Mother have any errands for me first.”

  “Join us for lunch? Between them, Rhodri and Thomas keep you busy and we don’t see much of you.”

  “Can’t. I’m supposed to meet Rhodri in the village so we can use the Travelers’ Way for practice.”

  “Too bad.”

  His foster-son lingered in the doorway for a moment.

  “I’ve been talking to Cloudie…” he said.

  “And you want to come, too,” George supplied.

  The boy nodded.

  “Can’t do it, son. Not this time.”

  Maelgwn did his best to stifle his disappointment, and George was proud of him.

  “But I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Unlike the others, you can follow along, if you want. I mean, if Cloudie can track her mother while she’s in the human world, then she can tell you about it, right?”

  His foster-son gave him a half-smile. “She’s so young, she won’t understand what Mag’s looking at. And I don’t think her mother would like being pestered with questions.”

  “There is that.” He pursed his lips. “Still, this is only the first of what I expect to be several visits. There’ll be another time.” He winced inside—he couldn’t believe he’d said that, a line he’d always hated from his own childhood.

  They heard the outer door open, and Maelgwn moved further into the office to make room for a servant from the hall.

  “A package for you, huntsman. My lord Gwyn told me to bring it to you.” He bowed, handed a box to Maelgwn, and took his leave.

  The cardboard box was about a foot long and a few inches high. George rose from behind his desk to take it from Maelgwn and put it down on his desk. It came from Mariah Catlett, he saw. It looked like any other mundane shipping box. No stamps, of course. He drew his knife and slit it open.

  Documents. He picked up the cover letter that had been clipped to the topmost manila folder. Yes! The research he’d requested, forwarded to him from the lawyer.

  He sank down in his chair clutching the letter, and started to read.

  He’s forgotten I’m here, Maelgwn thought, and he held himself quiet, as if not to startle some animal in the woods.

  What a strange wrapping. From here he could see the edge of the box, some sort of stiff tan paper with a structure inside its thickness, like holes or tubes, much sturdier than paper had any right to be. He couldn’t tell what held it together, what his foster-father had cut through so easily with his knife. It was clear and shiny, but it had held the edges of the wrapping together somehow. The boxes in the library at home were like this, the ones where his foster-father’s family papers had been stored.

  The contents were ordinary enough—documents and folders from the human world, like the papers his foster-father had sorted through a couple of weeks ago. There was something wrong there, he knew. Angharad wouldn’t discuss it and no one else seemed to know anything.

  He liked his foster-father’s grandparents, Gwyn’s daughter and her husband, the only other humans he knew. No, there was Mariah Catlett, but she wasn’t family. So odd to see such apparent age in people so young, but that was the fate of humans, wasn’t it.

  His foster-father gave a little gasp as he read the paper on top. Maelgwn’s scalp twitched as he suddenly tensed, trying to identify the threat. He watched George hurriedly lift the pile of papers from the box without bothering to clear a space for them, just piling them on top of his open breeding journals. He poked intently through them looking for something, and then he froze. He selected one sheet of paper and held it up in a trembling hand.

  He stared at it. Maelgwn was uneasy about watching him so openly and unnoticed, and he moved slightly, as if by accident, to catch his foster-father’s eye.

  George didn’t register Maelgwn’s presence for a moment. He couldn’t seem to focus on it. His mind kept turning back to the paper in his hand.

  It was an arrest record, and it included a booking photograph. His father stared back at him from the poorly reproduced photo on the corner of the page. His father. He was unmistakable. Remotely, he could feel a strange chill on his skin. This was impossible.

  Like probing for a sore tooth, he felt carefully for Cernunnos. No sign of his presence.

  Maelgwn. He saw concern on the boy’s face. Such an adult expression, he thought. He shouldn’t be worried because of me.

  “It’s alright,” he said. “Just some unexpected news from Mrs. Catlett.”

  The boy ignored his words. “Tell me what’s wrong, foster-father.” He held George’s gaze steadily and showed no signs of backing down.

  George hesitated a long moment. The fae considered boys to have come of age at thirteen, and Maelgwn was almost there. Was there already, considering his past, George thought. This wasn’t his blood, but it was his family, now. He deserved to know, same as Angharad, and George made his decision.

  “Come over here, son. Pull up a chair.”

  With Maelgwn at his side he went through the story of his parents’ meeting and his own childhood, until their deaths. Or their apparent deaths.

  “What was your father?” Maelgwn asked.

  “I don’t know,” George said, slowly. “I just saw him as all boys see their father, as someone who knows everything and protects his family. I didn’t think of him as strange—what would I have compared him to?”

  He caught himself, remembering the death of Maelgwn’s own father, trying to save his family against the orders of Madog, and glanced apologetically at his foster-son for the unintentional reminder. Clearly he needn’t have worried—Maelgwn’s face was focused on the mystery of Conrad Traherne, not on his own past.

  “So, since I couldn’t find a death certificate, a record of his death, in my mother’s pape
rs, I did some looking while I was visiting Mrs. Catlett, but I didn’t get very far. I hired a specialist to do the research for me, and this is his report.” He waved his hand at the papers on the desk.

  “He found the record of his death?” Maelgwn asked.

  “No, something much stranger.”

  He laid down the piece of paper he’d been staring at, to let Maelgwn see. “That’s him. This is just a few years ago.”

  He paused, then said, half to himself, “He’s alive.”

  “That’s good news,” Maelgwn said, eagerly. When George made no response, he asked, more hesitantly, “Isn’t it?”

  George bestirred himself. “Yeah, sure, but… Where’s he been all this time? It’s been almost twenty-five years. I wasn’t hard to find.”

  “Maybe he was hiding.”

  That struck a chord in George. It felt right, and he straightened up. Then it hit him—why would he need to hide? Was he worried about whatever killed his wife getting him, too?

  Or, he though darkly, did he have something to do with the death of my mother?

  He looked more carefully at the arrest report. He didn’t recognize the name on it—Charles Tremont. Something about “disturbing the peace.”

  His eyes traveled back to the photo. It was him, all right, he thought. But, wait a minute—I know that face, that’s why I’m so sure—but that’s the face I knew when I was nine years old. It’s the same face. It hasn’t aged.

  The image quality was so poor that he couldn’t be certain of anything, but that wasn’t a man who was twenty-five years older than George’s last glimpse of him. Maybe it wasn’t him, after all. He’d have to read the whole report. Maybe it was some relative, another son.

  But what if it really was him, and he hadn’t aged significantly. What did that make him? Not human?

  He leaned back in his chair and thought. Was there anything about his father that could support such a suspicion? He didn’t like photos, George remembered that. His mother used to argue with him about not having the right documents for driving cars, or a passport to visit her family with her in the States. That Polaroid stuck in her own passport was the only photo he’d ever seen, and clearly his father had never known it existed. He’d have to compare it to this photo from the police report.

  Still, that didn’t mean much. Lots of people were camera-shy.

  What else? What about the animals?

  He remembered the walks he’d taken in the woods with his father. They glowed with the nostalgia of childhood, but they were all blurred together, not distinct. His father could stand still and animals would come to him gradually, he remembered that. He had to be as quiet as a ghost himself, or he’d scare them away. He’d asked his father more than once to teach him how to do it, but he’d always demurred. When you’re older, he’d said.

  That was the beast-sense, he realized now. That’s where he got it from.

  He glanced at Maelgwn, waiting for him to respond. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he was hiding. I don’t know why.”

  The police report showed an address in Port Matilda, Pennsylvania. He’d never heard of that town. He pawed briefly through the papers and found a list of addresses, with a helpful map. Port Matilda was in the middle of the state, in the valley that divided the Alleghenies from the Appalachian mountains, not all that far from where he was now, in a different world.

  Now all he had to do was get there. He put the paper down.

  “You’re going to go find him, aren’t you?”

  Maelgwn’s question startled him. I guess I was pretty transparent, he thought.

  “I have to find out for myself, son,” George said.

  “Take me with you.”

  George had expected the eagerness of a child, not the adult demeanor his foster-son presented.

  Maelgwn continued, “What if he doesn’t want to be found? What if he has a good reason to hide?”

  George opened his mouth to automatically sweep his objections aside, but stopped before he said anything, and took a deep breath.

  “I would rather see your foster-mother protected, and your unborn sister. Can you do that for me?”

  “Why do you think they need help? You’re the one going into danger,” Maelgwn said.

  “The human world’s no danger to me,” George said. “Besides, I’ll have Mag and Benitoe with me. And Cernunnos. What more do I need?”

  “I thought Cernunnos was mad at you for doing this.” Maelgwn waved his hand at the pile of papers on the huntsman’s desk. “What’s he going to do?”

  What indeed, George thought. He probed, but there was no reaction. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll be fine.”

  Angharad would have the same reaction—he could almost hear her. They don’t know Cernunnos like I do. He’ll come around.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rhodri waited for Maelgwn at the entrance to the Travelers’ Way, across the road from the stone bridge at Greenhollow and down a bit. He’d picked up some bread, cheese, and sliced beef from the Horned Man inn just the other side of the road and beyond the bridge, and finished his with a mug of the inn’s ale, sitting in the shade while he waited. They weren’t planning to be there long, so he’d tethered his horse under the tree and brought him a bucket of water, also from the inn.

  The sun sizzled on the white cobblestones that marked the way-entrance for the benefit of those who couldn’t see the way itself. Benches on either side provided a waiting place for parties wishing to assemble before transiting, since for a long time this way was the only connection between Annwn and Britain, the only crossing of the ocean once Madog’s hidden way had been destroyed. Just a few months ago, Seething Magma had built another way from Daear Llosg to Gwastadedd Mawr in Britain, where this year’s Nos Galan Mai contest had been held. Held for the last time, Rhodri reminded himself—no more need for Gwyn ap Nudd to prove his worth, now that he was king in his own right.

  Before summer’s end, Rhodri knew, there would be a way between Gaul and the southern part of Annwn that Gwyn was preparing to cede to Llefelys. Gwyn and Llefelys had been corresponding about terms and locations, readying the empty land for new settlement. What a school for Maelgwn to learn in, he thought. He doesn’t know how lucky he is, all this activity in what used to be a stagnant art. I can’t let him be wasted as a scout. Thomas Kethin is a fine fellow, but Maelgwn’s talent is unique, like his mother’s before him.

  The clop of hooves over the hollow wooden boards of the bridge surface drew his attention, and he stood up to welcome his pupil, brushing the crumbs off his clothes. Maelgwn trotted up on Brenin Du, his black pony, and walked him over to join Rhodri’s mount in the shade. He hopped off, tethered him, and checked the bucket to make sure there was enough water left for him to share before joining his master.

  Rhodri handed him his lunch.

  Maelgwn paused to make his excuses before beginning to eat. “Sorry to be late, sir. I was with my foster-father when he got some news from the human world, and we were talking.”

  Rhodri waved the apology aside. “Nothing bad, I hope?”

  “No…” Maelgwn’s voice trailed off uncertainly.

  “Don’t tell me if you shouldn’t,” Rhodri said.

  “It’s not that.” Maelgwn swallowed his mouthful. “You know he’s going to be taking Benitoe and Mag to the human world soon.”

  Rhodri nodded. “And we’ll be having something to do with that,” he said.

  Maelgwn looked up at him with a question on his face.

  “It’s not certain yet. I’ll fill you in when it becomes real.” Rhodri held firm. “Anyway, you were telling me about George.”

  “The news he got was about his own father,” Maelgwn said, “He was killed with his wife, when my foster-father was a boy.” He stopped.

  “About the age you were when you lost your family, wasn’t it?” Rhodri asked gently.

  “Yes, sir.”

  It pained Rhodri to see the careful lack of expression on his young student’s face
when he thought of his family’s destruction at the hands of Madog’s men, but the boy went ruthlessly on.

  “Only he’s not. Dead, I mean. His father. That’s the news.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rhodri said.

  “Well, I don’t either,” Maelgwn replied. “He told me that they never found his father’s body and he started to wonder about that, asked some human scholar for help. I guess he found something out, the scholar. I saw the picture.”

  He glanced up at Rhodri. “He wasn’t old enough in the picture. My foster-father said he didn’t seem any older than when he was a boy, twenty-five years ago.”

  A fae? Rhodri wondered at that. That would be news to George, indeed.

  “The scholar found out where he is, in the human world, and I think my foster-father’s going to try and find him while he’s there,” Maelgwn said.

  Rhodri looked down at the rigid shoulders of the boy on the bench.

  “And you want to go, too,” he suggested. “And he wouldn’t let you.”

  Maelgwn nodded, then burst out. “He didn’t understand. It’s dangerous, and you know what he’s like, sir. He needs someone to look after him.”

  Somehow that declaration didn’t sound the least bit ridiculous coming from the young man seated before him.

  Rhodri reflected, this is why he’s so drawn to Thomas Kethin, isn’t it. This need to protect. Was he always like that, this boy, or is it George’s influence? What we do together is exciting, but rather… abstract. It doesn’t tug at him like this need.

  He sat down next to him. “Listen to me, Maelgwn. Your foster-father values your work, all of it, both the apprenticeship you do with me and the scouting you do with Thomas Kethin. But you have a job to do right now, and that job is not keeping George out of trouble. That job is becoming strong and powerful so that you can protect others better later.”

  He paused as he tried to make his meaning clear. “The skills Thomas teaches you will always serve you well, and as you grow you will become better and better at them. You’re pretty good now.”

  Maelgwn shrugged, embarrassed.