Kingdom by Robyn Young Page A

lanterns for the light to shine through, but it hadn’t diminished the dread he still saw in the eyes of men when they were levelled with his displeasure. The elderly Dean of St Paul’s had been so affected by it he had wilted and died right in front of him during a disagreement over Church taxes.
    Crossing to the stool, Edward sat, hands on his knees, his body erect. A gust of wind rippled through the curtains that separated the bedchamber from the rest of the royal pavilion. Its cool breath whispered across Edward’s sallow skin, which puckered in the bowl of his sunken stomach, his hip bones protruding over the waist of his braies. Coarse white hairs bristled on his chest, gleaming like spider threads in the candlelight. Scars riddled his arms and torso telling a long story of violence: faded tracks from his youth on the tournament grounds of Gascony, knotted ridges from his conquest of Wales, a depression in one shoulder where an arrow had pierced him at the siege of Stirling Castle and a whorl of scar tissue, close to his heart, from an Assassin’s dagger in the Holy Land. But none of these scars was as livid as the wounds in his side – a series of neat red lesions, only just starting to scab.
    Nicholas crouched beside the king, his eyes on the wounds. His face was intent as he set down the glass bowl with its slender stem of a neck. Placing two fingers to either side of one of the blood-crusted cuts, he opened up the skin with a decisive slash of the lancet. Edward grunted and gripped his knees, feeling the pressure as the physician pushed the cold lip of the bowl into his side, just below the cut. Nicholas muttered something, watching the line of blood trickling into the bowl.
    ‘What is it?’ Edward demanded, glancing down.
    ‘The blood is dark and thick today, my lord. I will have to drain it well, until it comes red and thin.’
    As the blood flowed, helped by Nicholas’s fingers, which kept the wound prised apart, Edward focused on the folded book of parchment that hung from the physician’s belt on a cord. The pages were covered in words, numbers, tables of astrological signs and phases of the moon. There were intricate diagrams of his body with its network of veins and descriptions of the look, taste and smell of his urine. The book charted the course of his disease, mapped out across its pages. On each of those stained sheets, Nicholas had painstakingly compiled detailed information on every facet of the enemy. But it was becoming clear that the sickness was hidden deep in the recesses of Edward’s body and all the physician’s strategies to draw it out and destroy it had so far yielded nothing but blood and pain.
    Edward closed his eyes, feeling light-headed. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. After a time, Nicholas made a satisfied noise and the pressure of the bowl disappeared from Edward’s side. It was replaced with a wad of linen soaked in laurel oil, which the king pressed to the wound, knowing the procedure well by now. The physician was conveying the glass bowl, half full of blood, to his table when the curtains opened.
    Edward frowned as his son-in-law entered. Humphrey de Bohun’s face, browned by the summer sun on the march north, was unusually animated. A new energy had sharpened the earl’s green eyes, making him look younger than his thirty-one years. In him, Edward saw a fleeting memory of himself, so different to the shrunken ghost of a man he glimpsed now in mirrors and water. ‘I said no interruptions, Humphrey.’
    ‘I thought you would want to hear this, my lord. Word has come from Scotland – Sir Aymer’s men.’
    Edward felt the fog of pain dissolve. ‘My robe.’
    At the command, the physician brought the garment. The cut in Edward’s side hadn’t yet closed, but Nicholas knew better than to protest and stepped aside as the king pulled on the robe.
    Edward strode through the pavilion, ignoring the expectant looks from his officials and servants. Humphrey de