Chapter 67 : The Hawthorn Tree, The king's book is found by the king's man Options

[anguinea]

Chapter 67 – The Hawthorne Tree

Crossing a lonely moor, Childermass comes upon a man hanged in a lone tree. It is Vinculus. His body is covered is completely covered in blue writing. It occurs to Childermass that this is the King’s Letters, Robert Findhelm’s book and he ponders the many ways he might take possession of this inconveniently-packaged book. He concludes he should take the body, but while preparing to do so, he is joined by a black-haired man wears fashionable clothes, riding boots and a black cloak.

The stranger claims possession of Vinculus’s body and places a small ball of light into the corpse’s mouth.

Childermass attempts to shoot a warning shot at the stranger, but the lead hardly leaves the gun before it turns into a bird and flies off. Childermass enters a kind of daze while the man in black approaches him and marks him with symbols drawn on his eyelids, heart, palm and over his fresh facial scar. Afterwards, the stranger disappears into a swirl of snow.

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Thoughts:

Oh, I love the idea of a human/book, although, the idea of lugging around a dead human/book does make the Kindle™ seem like a bargain. But there is my gorgeous King, the Raven King, come to put a new battery in this Vinicu-kindle, as well as re-edit his own book! What was that about? Is this just putting the writing into the past tense, adding an epilogue or did he really change something about the magic that was written on Vinculus? He did bring him back to life, after all. Does Viniculus have a future part to play for the King?

And John Uskglass seems to put his blessing on Childermass, marking him as his man and healing his scar. Is this a reward, a promotion, like being knighted? Was he given powers we'll see in some future adventure? Is he his own man now or does he serve yet another master, his Raven King?

The windswept moor seems almost an abstract place between land and sky and a hawthorne tree...Any ideas of why this particular setting? I found this: "[Hawthorn] is considered a tree sacred to the faeries, and thus to be regarded with fear at the least, respect at most.. As such, it often stands at the threshold of the Otherworld."