“I want everyone to believe I’m safe outside of a madhouse, if it’s not too late for that.” He pushed the stable door open and came in, glancing behind him to check none of the grooms was within earshot. “Anyway, I’m far from sure I slew anything. Whatdidwe do out there tonight, Lance? How did you know the worm would go to the stone?”
They’d barely spoken on their ride back from Spindlestone Heughs. Partly their silence had been shock and exhaustion, partly the feeling that no words would be adequate. “I don’t know,” Lance said, in answer to both questions. “I… wonder if I remembered something Viviana told me. Sometimes I feel as if Ishouldknow, about many things, but something gets in my way. A dream speaks, and then it’s gone.”
“Well, your dream spoke timely out there, or we’d be dead.” He went to lean on the wall by Balana’s feedbox, idly pulling at her mane. “Look at this horse! I know you love her, but you have to let me get you something better now.”
“Younger, maybe.” Lance grinned. “You’ll never do better. Though I think I knocked some stuffing out of her tonight.”
“Let me retire her honourably. I’ll send her back to Vindolanda if you like.”
Lance shuddered. “No, please. She’ll end up pulling a plough.”
“Or on the table?”
“I don’t think so. We still had hard winters, but things were never as bad with us again after you brought the spring back to the moors.”
Art’s expression softened. “All right. I’ll dispatch her down to Cerniw with my next messenger, and she can eat her head off in Britannia’s greenest fields for the rest of her life.” He paused, rubbing the mare’s soft nose as it came up to quest around his hands for food. “What do you think it all means, Lance? The worm, or the dragon, and the sword? Shedidobey it—Excalibur, not me.”
Lance had no answers for him. For an instant, out on the windswept plain, he had seen with a dragon’s green eyes, felt a presence as ancient and as female as the earth, felt waiting fire in his own gut. Now he was only a man. When he tried to recapture his brief, effortless grasp of the worm’s universe, it hurt his head and filled him with a sense of baulked frustration, like a dream that faded even as he reached to grasp it.I don’t have the means, he thought incoherently.The women and the stones and the dragons are all dead…
“Lance, are you all right?”
“Yes. Just tired.” He sought to turn the subject. “You missed a conference today, didn’t you?”
“Two of them, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t suppose they cancelled them.”
“Oh, no. Put them off till tomorrow.” Art sighed. “I’d rather face the worm again, you know.”
“I know. Is it any comfort to you, that you’re good at this diplomacy you hate so much?”
“Am I? It comforts me a little, ifyouthink so.” He made a bitter face. “I wasn’t much good this morning, was I, riding out of here damning every foreigner ever born.”
“Oh, you were much worse later, when you were demanding their heads on a spike.” Lance carried on grooming while Art registered outrage then reluctant amusement. “On the whole, though…”
“Thank you. You’re saying it’s no good my preaching peace to Coel and the Hen Ogledd kings while I can’t keep my temper with my own neighbours. It’s fair enough. As for Garbonian and his plans for a joint Anglian defence force, I… just hated the idea, which wasn’t a good reason for rejecting it. It didn’t work in the south, but Garb’s right—the peoplearemore settled here. I could hardly tell the villages apart, riding around out there today.”
Lance listened with affection while he reasoned between his instincts and his conscience. He had no political answers either, but was starting to understand that Art needed someone he could ask, someone who wouldn’t perceive uncertainty as weakness. He brushed the last of the dried sweat out of Balana’s coat. “Well, sleep on it,” he said. He looked beyond Art’s shoulder, to the starry half-circle of sky framed in the stable’s arched door. “You’d better start soon, or it’ll hardly be worth it.”
“Will you attend the debates? I know you want to work, but there’ll be time for that, I promise.”
“I’ll be there.”
“And… will you come with me now?”
Lance shivered. He’d made no assumptions. One night didn’t mean a shared bedchamber. “Yes,” he said longingly. “Of course.”
There was no-one in the stableyard or the cobbled lane beyond. Art slung an arm around Lance’s waist. He smelled of leather and sweat and horse, a combined fragrance that made Lance’s head spin with desire. He returned the embrace, and they entered the stronghold together, matching step for step and pulse for pulse.
A tang of ozone sharpened the air in the hall. Lance looked around, expecting to see lightning over the dark sea horizon behind them, a winter storm on the way. His ears popped. His vision flickered as if he’d blinked too hard, and suddenly instead of the empty staircase ahead, there was an old man standing upright and stark-faced on the seventh step. Reflexively Lance grabbed for his sword. “Where did he come from?”
Art dropped a warm, restraining hand onto his. “Easy. Don’t kill my Merlin.”
“Is that… Are you sure that’s who this is? He doesn’t look the same.”
“Of course he is.” To Lance’s dismay, Art bowed deeply before the old man—and then, as if that wasn’t enough, went down on one knee. “Greetings, Lord Merlin. I hope this cold night finds you well.”
The Merlin pushed back the hood of his robe. Lance was certain that the narrow skull with its few strands of white hair was different to the one he’d seen in the debating hall, but he’d been a long way off. “Greetings, Lord Merlin,” he echoed for Arthur’s sake. He’d never knelt to anyone in his life, but he made a courteous bow of his own. “May I ask how you got here, sir? I didn’t see you arrive.”
