Lance tried to sound worldly. “Was it… political?”
“Hardly. She decided she wanted him, and he returned the favour, so they marched straight off to the Din Guardi priest and tied their knot. I didn’t mean to call her names. She’s strong as an oak, and she goes about with me whenever she can to save me appearing with a crutch.”
“That’s good of her. Yes, I… I heard you’d been hurt.”
Art shook his head. “You don’t have to play things down. They thought I was dying, and I cried your name so often in my fevers that they sent Drusus to fetch you. I doknow. And over the moors and dunes you came at the gallop, expecting no doubt to find me with one foot at least through death’s door.”
Lance couldn’t deny a word of this. “I’m just glad to find you still on this side. All of you.”
Art shifted on the cold stone step and winced. “It very nearlywasn’tall. The reason for the mystery surrounding my injury—apart from the fact that I’m meant to be immortal—is that I took a knife blade through the top of my thigh and into what Gaius likes to call the family jewels.”
“Oh, my God.” Now it was Lance’s turn to wince, in pure sympathy. “Ouch.”
“You’re not kidding.”
“How did that happen?”
“I slew the Saxon who’d killed Ector. I thought I had, anyway. I was… distracted, though, and the bastard knifed me with his last breath as I was stepping over what should have been his corpse.” Art laid a hand to Lance’s mouth. His fingers were chilly and smelled of witch-hazel salve. “It’s in your good and noble heart to tell me how sorry you are about my father, how you grieve with me. I take it as said, dear friend. I can’t bear to speak of him, though. I can’t.”
Was it wrong for Lance to kiss the fingers pressed against his lips? Right or wrong, it was done before he could stop himself, and Arthur’s gaze widened unfathomably. He caressed Lance’s cheek before lowering his hand. “I won’t breathe his name,” Lance said. “Not until you do, I swear. This wound of yours—it has healed?”
“My physicians are sworn under oath to say it has. A king must be potent as well as immortal.”
“And the truth of the matter?”
“I’ve been too sick to test the equipment. Too scared.”
“Oh, Art.”
“I’ll be fine, I’m certain.” He made an effort to brighten, painful for Lance to watch. “I’d better, hadn’t I? For the sake of my future bride.”
“There is such a creature, then?”
“The Merlin says so. He’s prophesied her arrival soon.”
Lance took this in, wide-eyed. “So… she isn’t real?”
“Until the battle of Elmet, I thoughthewasn’t. But he showed up large as life, exactly as I’d seen him in my vision. And everything else he’s foretold has come to pass, so…”
“Look, Art,” Lance said uneasily, reading the lines of illness and strain in his friend’s face. “I’ve no doubt he’s a prophet. But one very old man with a long white beard can look a lot like another, and… my mother used to say that these hermit-magicians, for all their gifts, are caught between the old world and the new. That they don’t really understand either, and would do anything to pull things back to a kind of dream of the way the kingdom used to be, or should have been, and maybe never was.”
Art reached up to grasp the rail. Before Lance could stop him, he’d pulled himself to his feet. “You don’t understand. He’s the Merlin, the very one who brought me from the forest. I need him, especially—especially now that Ector’s gone.”
I won’t breathe his name until you do.Lance hadn’t had to wait for long. Art had been close to a decision in the debating hall today, and the old man had deflected him. “Ector loved the bones of you,” he said firmly, getting up and taking Art by the shoulders. “He’d want you to heed any wisdom your Merlin has to give, but not to fear him. And he’d definitely not want you standing about on freezing staircases until your family jewels drop off anyway. Come inside.”
“All right. Let’s stay out of the corridors, though, then there’s less chance of old King Coel collaring me.”
“Does he do that a lot?”
“Every chance he gets. A merry old soul, my arse! Like it’s my fault his son’s a collaborator.”
“And is he?”
Lance put out an arm. It was no less than the Lady Ardana would have done, and Art took the offered support with as much grace as he could muster. “Garb? Just an idiot, I believe. Thinks he can succeed where Vortigern failed.”
“Can he?”
Night had fallen on Din Guardi, a wolf with icy breath. Slowly they made their way back down the track and past the wooden palisade that marked the castle’s inner ward. Even this pace was making Arthur limp and bite back sounds of pain, so Lance stopped with him under the archway to a squat tower, ignoring the edge of his temper. “Is that the keep?”
