THE KING BEHIND THE KING

CHAPTER I

Fulk of the Forest had taken the way towards Witch’s Cross, with the full moon shining like a silver buckler behind him, to find himself standing at gaze among the yews of the Black Gill.

Straight before him stretched a black aisle pillared and arched with huge yews. The aisle ended, like the choir of a church, in a great woodland window where the full moon hung, one yellow rim touching a flurry of clouds. Fulk had drawn aside against the trunk of a tree, lean, alert, shadowy, conscious of something stirring away yonder in the glooms.

As he stood there watching, and straining his ears in the windless silence of the April night, he saw a figure move suddenly into the opening of this woodland window and remain there, outlined against the moon. The figure was wrapped in a loose cloak, and the peak and jagged edge of a hood showed up sharply. Moreover, a curved black line beside it betrayed the line of a strung bow.

Fulk’s sinews were as taut as lute cords. Here was a blessed chance sent after many nights of grim watching and waiting for certain elusive rascals who had been slaying my Lord of Lancaster’s deer. He began to move like a cat, slowly, sinuously, with a queer trailing action of the legs, slipping from tree to tree. The yews had dropped no dead wood; the turf was soft and sleek, and Fulk moved as silently as an owl flitting down a hedgerow.