by Harper Fox
Lance sat still and quiet. In some ways, as his mother’s son, he was worldly enough. “Well, was the child… all right?” Art nodded again, his eyes still downcast, his handsome face strained in the dappled light. “You were lucky, then. Listen, Art, don’t let the Christian priests tell you you did anything worse than take a risk. My people—my mother’s, anyway—took consorts from amongst their brothers, time out of mind. The bloodlines are sometimes too close when the children come, that’s all.”
Arthur looked up. His brow had cleared a little. “Is that true? Father Marcus berated me so, I thought I’d be blown off to hell on the next high wind.”
“I don’t think so.” Lance smiled. “Not for that, anyway. How old’s the boy now?”
“Two this coming winter.” He shuddered. “Priests aside, Lance, it doesn’t feel right.”
“Will you acknowledge him? When you become king?”
“I’m… under pressure to do so, yes. No-one can deny his blood is royal. His name is Medraut. I wish Modron would let me see him, but she’s taken him off to Cell Dara—Kildare, I think they call it here. The sanctuary of Bride.”
“Oh. Is she a priestess?”
“Yes, although nobody talks to Marcus about it.”
“Then… did you ever consider that it might have been arranged?” Lance leaned forward, reaching for his discarded shirt, and gave Arthur a look of sympathy and mischief mixed. “After all, how dead-out-of-luck would you have to be—to pick the one girl in a Beltane crowd who turned out to be a relation?”
Arthur snorted with laughter. “If only there’d been any picking involved,” he said. “They gave me a draught of poppy wine, and I woke up flat on my back in the greenwood, with Modron sitting over me, and...”
Lance blushed from the marrow of his bones, diving into his shirt to hide the reaction. “All right. I get the idea. But in that case, it does sound deliberate.” He emerged, fringe in his eyes. “My mother said that a priestess can take whomever she chooses for her consort—her brother, and after that, if she so wishes, even the son of their union.”
“She told you that?”
“No. It was one of the moon rites, and I was eavesdropping. But it sounds as though the women of your family might have their own ideas about who should be king after you.”
“Wonderful. I haven’t been king yet myself. You do know, I hope, that all of this depends on my getting horribly slain in battle, poisoned, struck down by disease or...” He paused, eyebrows rising. “Wait. What on earth have the women got to do with it?”
Lance was briefly too surprised to reply. Art had grown up among men, he supposed—Roman men and soldiers at that. “Well—nothing, maybe. Not if the priests of Christ have their way. You sneaked off to a Beltane, though, Art. You call on the old gods when you’re upset, not Christ. And you wear...” He reached for the sun sign again. Picked out in silver on its reverse was a gleaming crescent moon. “You don’t wear that for nothing. In my home, before the raid, my mother made decisions about everything.”
“And your father allowed this?”
“Of course. They were comrades and friends.”
He thought he had managed to swallow down the tremor in his throat. Lights of comprehension filled Art’s eyes, however, and he put an arm around Lance’s shoulders. “I can’t imagine how that must have been,” he said. “I’m fond enough of women, and you don’t have to dose me with poppy to get me into bed with one. If I have a choice, though...”
His voice scraped to silence. Lance became aware, as if he’d climbed a steep hill and his ears had popped, of the breeze-washed stillness all around. If I have a choice... If Lance missed this, let these words with their load of longing and hope blow away on the wind, his loss would be greater than the northern earth’s when the summer had failed to come.
He would miss out on the springtime of his own life. “If you have a choice,” he whispered, sinking his fingers into the moss for purchase on one side, letting his weight ease against Art on the other. “What would you choose?”
For answer, Art put a hand beneath his chin and gently raised his face. Lance closed his eyes. A moment later, a warm mouth descended upon them: left, right, swiftest moth-wing touches. Then the prince of Cerniw was holding him most fiercely and tenderly still for a kiss.
Too much. Lance’s world had been too narrow to hold the idea of such rushing joy. He knew about hunger, winters, ice, not young sun gods come to earth to plant honeyed fruit-flesh blessings on his lips. He jerked away, shuddering. “No.”
“No?!”
Lance would have laughed if he hadn’t wanted to weep. What a face! How many times had anyone been fool enough to turn him down? His astounded disappointment cut Lance to the quick. “How can I?” he asked roughly. “You’ve bedded Goddess knows how many girls—priestesses, at that. Boys, too, I should think.”
“Of course. I’m not one of Father Marcus’s slack-cocked saints. What difference does that make?”
“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.”
Lance’s hand fastened in his hair. He drew him back, close to Balana’s warm flank, and Art, who had manfully faced as much for one day as he could, turned and rested his brow against Lance’s thigh.
Still he saw the boat approaching. It didn’t come naturally through the water, but formed itself out of black cloud and floated just over the surface. Art knew the shape of it. In Ector’s Christian world, the dead were buried safely out of sight, but Art’s Kernowek ancestors had given them back to the waves. He knew this, just as he knew so much more about Pendragon and the wild Cerniw shores than he’d ever been taught. He knew he was looking at a black-sailed funeral barge.
Cold terror seized him. The ship was no vessel of timbers and pitch, but a hole cut out of the universe. He would not die peacefully. He would disappear into that hole and be dissolved into its nothingness. On the prow, straight and still, a hooded figure stood, long robes unruffled by the gale. The old man, Arthur knew. The shadow that had dogged his life, come now in his last minutes to ensure that not even his spirit would escape the howling dark, come to bear him forever away from the sun. “No,” he said wearily. “No.”
Lance’s grip tightened. “No,” he agreed, drawing him closer. “This is some illness, surely. You’ve had too much weight laid upon you too soon.”
“Do you think so?” Art raised his head. “Perhaps you’re right. Why should it be this way?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe it’s only a warning, or... or a dream. I wish we could ask Viviana.”
“Oh, damn Viviana!” Art yelled suddenly back, making Lance and the horses jump. “Damn her, and damn the Merlin. Father Ector and his prophecies, too.” He seized Hengroen’s reins and leapt effortlessly into the saddle. He grinned at Lance like a well-favoured demon. “Blast all whispering in corners, all flapping robes and Celtic mysteries. I’m a Roman and a Briton, and so are you. Neither of us believes in this nonsense. I can see Guy right up on the crest, beside the old Wall. Come on, Lance o’lough—I’ll race you!”
For an instant, Lance wondered where they were going. As far away, he guessed, from the dark visions as Arthur could possibly get. Then he lost all thought in the excitement of the chase.
They tore along the shore of the lough in a rainbow of hoof-shattered spray, Art always a few yards ahead. Lance had never dared ride his borrowed mount hard, but now that caution was hurled to the winds, how sweetly she responded! When Hengroen got some distance on her, she snorted and lengthened her stride without urging, seeming to take joy in their bounding dash across the moor.
Lance laughed aloud between deep gasps for air. The turf and the heather were deadly, pitted all over with badger holes, scattered with grassed-over rocks, but he felt immortal. Arthur had loved him, had said give me your skin and your bone, your seed, and when Lance had given and done all that, had surged up on top of him and given him all those things too.
Far up ahead on the crag by the Wall he saw Guy gesturing frantically, his voice reaching them in tatters on the wind. Probably wants us to slow down, Lance thought distantly. Poor fellow. He felt sorry for everyone not privileged to be as he was now, for everyone earthbound, everyone not flying into the sun on the heels of the future king.
He saw their destination just as Art changed course and set a full-pelt dash towards it. The very crest of the dragon’s spine. All his life, it had been Lance’s landmark, that heartlifting shape on the sky. It had risen above the mists in the valley when he was making his way back from a day-long hunt, telling him that he was nearly home. It had haunted his sleep, a shape he had never recognised until Viviana had shown his dreaming mind the dragon. He had gone there often, to escape the scuffling chaos of his family, seeking refuge in its bareness, its bleak calm. It was like a mighty scale projecting from the earth, a ragged upthrust of rock where even the gorse struggled to find a niche for growth. The highest point for miles around. Lance smiled, wheeling the mare to follow in Art’s wake. Of course.
The way to the crest from beneath the crags was up a steep and twisting path. Lance thought Art must have seen it, perhaps on their way down: it was invisible from here.
Then he realised that the prince had no intention of following any path at all. He had set his horse’s head direct at the cliff face. At this point, before the walls of black rock leapt up sheer, the route was impossible.
“Art!” he yelled. “Not here!” But if Arthur heard him, he gave no sign. He set Hengroen’s head at the last few yards of level ground, covered them at a flat-out dash.
Lance understood. Thoughts that should have unfolded slowly flashed at him in lightning blades. You are outrunning your fate. Riding for your life, and you don’t care how short that life might be, if only you can choose its ending yourself.
Then, as certainly as he’d grasped that truth, he knew that his own fate was inextricably tangled with Art’s. The distance between them increased, and he felt a physical tugging inside him. Where Art went, he had to follow. On the heels of his fright came a wild exultation. There were certainly worse ways to die. Throwing aside everything he’d ever learned about the care of himself and his horse, the brute common sense of survival, he turned the mare’s head and rode her straight after Hengroen.
They made the climb somehow, in terrible wrenching leaps and bounds. If Lance slackened momentum for a second, the earth would pull him down. Under the thud of his heart, the percussive breathing of the horse, he could hear poor Gaius, shouting in what sounded like despair.
They broached the crest together, in a clatter of hooves on rock. Sparks flew as they reined in, both doing their best to pull up the snorting, wheeling horses before they shot off the crevasse on the far side. They came to a halt at the same instant, and faced one another, eyes wide with questions.
Lance got his breath back first. “What was that supposed to be?”
“What did it look like? A race!”
Lance hesitated. If he denied it—accused the prince of trying to destroy himself in a fit of half-insane terror—many things would be
over. Was it his duty anyway? Surely Arthur needed friends who were too wise to accompany him into his madness… But, Lance knew, that was what he had just done. “A race,” he repeated unsteadily. “Well, who won it?”
“We were equal,” Art said, then added with absurd solemnity, “which means that I must fight you for it.”
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“It’s a challenge. You must. To show me your allegiance!”
“That makes no sense at all. Anyway, haven’t I...” He paused, trying to make him smile. “Haven’t I shown you more or less everything today already?”
A broad, loving grin rewarded him. But wild forces were whirling about the crag still, a storm with Art at its eye. “Nonetheless.”
The wildness was catching. Lance didn’t want to be Art’s conscience, his counterpoise. He had Gaius and Ector for that. And if Art could only purge this strange mood through combat, better it be with a friend. “Very well, then. Foot or horse?”
“Horse, I think. They’re all right. We just gave them a bit of a scare.”
“Gave them a scare?” Lance said it for form’s sake: at no point in the chase had he been afraid. There was no reason, he thought, unsheathing Excalibur. Harm couldn’t reach him in Arthur’s wake until Arthur’s time had come. “Have at you, then, if you must. On your guard!”
Chapter Thirteen
They were too evenly matched. Such a fight could go on forever. At first Lance was afraid that Art was going easy on him, allowing for the difference between a boy raised as a warrior king and one who’d had to tend sheep between his father’s infrequent lessons in swordsmanship.
But Art’s eyes were too brightly intent for that, and anyway Lance didn’t think it lay in his nature: he’d refuse to fight him at all rather than insult him by lowering his game. The horses circled like dancers on the rock. As if from a great distance, Lance heard Gaius clatter up onto the crest. Guy was shouting, but after a moment his voice faded out to the thump of blood in Lance’s ears.