“I haven’t had anyone at all.”
“Oh!” The red-gold eyebrows flew up. “How... How on earth have you managed that?”
“I just haven’t wanted to. Nobody made me feel that way—like the bull covering the cows in May, like my brother with the dairy maid up in the hayloft, both of them yelling their heads off.”
“Forgive me, dear Lance, but you’re still only wearing your shirt. Is there any chance at all that you feel that way now?”
Helplessly Lance glanced down at himself. Oh, he’d been what his mother had smilingly described as a late-blooming sprig—but the time had come for him, this beautiful prince bringing it on like thunder in a summer storm. “Arthur,” he choked out. “Yes. But I don’t know what to do.”
Chapter Twelve
“I would choose you.” The words fell from Art like stones, a weight of truth he couldn’t have known he was carrying inside him. He couldn’t have known that this skinny boy, with his handful of acres and a kingdom’s worth of pride, would bring down his walls. “I would choose you. Oh, Lance.”
They lay together in the wind-shaken shadows of the birch. Lance, whose uncertainty had lasted only until they’d wrestled each other flat onto the rocks, pushed onto one elbow to look at him. “Arthur, my king. You look like a golden-eyed wildcat. Am I enough for you?”
“Enough for ten thousand wildcats. I’m not king yet, remember. I may never be.”
“You’ll always be so to me. What can I give you?”
Your allegiance. Your promise that, when I leave this place tomorrow, you’ll be riding at my side.Art bit back the words. Lance had already said—indicated, anyway—that he’d consider it. Ector had warned him time and again not to push, to try and close his grasp on a privilege on its way to him anyway. “Give me your skin and bone,” he said roughly, pulling Lance on top of him and clasping his chilly backside. “Give me your seed.”
Lance drew a shuddering breath. He pressed his face to Art’s shoulder, and Art felt the impassioned opening of his mouth, the graze of his teeth. The narrow hips bucked between his hands. Art, who had come erect from the first moment of subsiding with him onto the stone, cried out at the joy of it. He surrendered his grip and buried both hands in Lance’s hair instead.
***
“I’d be a poorly-made knight, you know.”
Art looked up and smiled. He’d just given Lance a leg-up onto Balana’s broad back. “What makes you think that?”
“I can handle a weapon, as you’re kind enough to say.” Lance ran a hand over the pommel of the sword from the lake, making both of them grin at the hopeless suggestiveness of the caress. “But you’ll need experienced soldiers, and much more than that—educated men, who can help you with strategy. You won’t be the king of a hilltop, like my father was. You’ll have a proper court.”
“Much you know. Guy and Ector are going to help me take over a hillfort once held by the Durotriges, as soon as we return to the south. It’s enormous, overlooking a big sweep of the River Cam.”
“Defensible?”
“Oh, yes. Own spring-fed water source, ready-made embankments. I shan’t be living like a tribal chieftain there—we’ll build with stone, like the Romans—but without my ill-made knight, I’d still just be king of the hill.”
“Come on, then. Gaius will be eating all our lunch.”
Arthur gathered up Hengroen’s reins and made ready to spring into the saddle. Then he went still, his attention once more captured by the waters of the lough. “Oh, no,” he said faintly. “That’s what I get for ignoring him.”
“Ignoring who?”
“The vision. The old man.”
Lance brought Balana round in a sweeping movement to shield him. “Never mind him. Just come with me. Come away.”
“Avoiding him makes it worse.”
“In that case...” Lance stilled the mare, who was capering and snorting as if she too would have preferred to run. “In that case, I think you should face it like a man, and tell me what you see.”
Like a man?!Arthur wanted to turn on him in rage.What would you know of it, farm boy? Prince of sheep?But running through the matrix of his visions was always a sense of utter solitude, as if he had lost or driven from him everyone he cared for. Oh, if he couldn’t avoid his fate, at least he need not hurry it on...
“All right,” he rasped, taking a firmer grip of Hengroen, stepping a little way out of the shelter Lance had created for him, untaught and unprompted, a natural battlefield manoeuvre. “All right. I see the waters darken. I can smell blood, and I hear the cries of dying men. My flesh too is pierced, from my gut to my backbone. I am still young, and there’s so much more I need to do. But my death has been decreed, so that my people can live. So that... So that I can return.”
“What does it mean, Art?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried and tried to understand, but he—the Merlin—says it doesn’t matter whether I understand or not. So long as I make the sacrifice.”
