“Lance.”
“All right. I’m sorry. Yes, I did.”
“Thank you. Tell me the truth always, no matter how bad. Do you see the darkening of the lough?”
Arthur was stock-still in the shallow water, attention now fixed on the glittering horizon. “No,” Lance said, and watching him go paler still, he put a hand to his shoulder, bony and warm beneath his jerkin and shirt. “I see only bright day.”
“Then this is the vision. I wonder why he showed himself to you, even for an instant? I regret it, Lance. I would not have you caught up in these terrors.” Then, to Lance’s dismay, the proud prince hid his face in his hands and shivered like a child.
Chapter Eleven
“Once upon a time, the skin of the earth was so thin that it barely hid the fires below.”
Arthur raised his head. He was sitting curled up on the bank of the lough, Lance’s cloak wrapped around him. His brow had been pressed to his knees, but Lance had caught his attention. Lance recognised his look, remembered it from the faces of his brothers and sisters around the fire on long cold nights. He was sure his own had been the same.Tell me a story...“The skin of the earth was so thin that a dragon could sink through it, when she came home tired from hunting among the stars.”
One quirk of the handsome mouth. “A dragon?”
“Don’t tell meyoudon’t believe in them, Uther’s son. Anyway, it’s only a tale.”
“Yes, of course. Go on.”
Lance looked around. The horses were peaceably cropping the turf a few yards away. Gaius was nowhere to be seen. “The dragon fell asleep in the warm, soft rock. They sleep for hundreds of our lifetimes, her kind, but they live forever, too. She was a very fine dragon, very big, as long as...” Lance pointed off towards the west, then swept a gesture round across the moorlands to the east. “As long as the space from horizon to horizon. All along her spine she bore a crest of upright scales. Many summers and winters passed, and when at last she shifted in her sleep, her scales slipped sideways, all unseen beneath the earth.”
“What happened then?”
Lance got up and extended a hand, just as he had on the first day of their meeting. “Stand up and you’ll see.”
This time the grip on his was confiding and friendly. Art surged upright. He looked in the direction Lance was indicating. “Oh,” he said. “The hills that look like breaking waves.”
“Yes. Ice came, then rain, my story says. Great walls of ice, and a flood big enough to carve out the whole river valley. The dragon’s scales had turned to stone, the black, hard rock the Roman army quarried to build their roads. Then the softer rocks underneath them, the mudstones and clays, all wore away...”
“And so we can see them. The dragon’s spine.”
“It was a story of my mother’s.”
Arthur turned to Lance. His whole focus settled upon him, unsettling as a hawk’s. “You’ve never spoken to me about her.”
“Nor to anyone.”
“How did she know, do you think—about the dragon?”
“It was only a story. But her beliefs were old ones, Art. Every month when the moon was full, she and some of the other women of the village would go up to a cave in the cliffs, to meet and talk to something they called the dragon there.”
“I want to ask you things. What your mother was like, what it was like to have one. But the time isn’t right, is it?”
“No. Not yet.”
The grey eyes remained, steady and kind, on his. “Do you follow in her ways, then? Or those of Father Tomas’s new god?”
Lance swallowed. “There was never any... punishment, in my mother’s ways. She would leave that to our consciences, and help us out with the back of her hand if we did wrong.”
Art sighed. “Blasphemous, our priest at home would say.”
“And what do you say?”
“That to me, it makes perfect sense. This beautiful lough of yours—is it sacred, or can ordinary mortals wash away their visions and dark thoughts in it?”
“Both. At least... one thing doesn’t mean that the other can’t happen. My mother would say.”
