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By Root 559 0

to suspect that he might be the "lost" prince. The stares and whispers and the deference he received he had put down to recognition as my son. He accepted, as most men did, the fact that the High King's heir was abroad at a foreign court, and thought nothing more about it. And once he imagined he had found his place, why should he think again? He was mine, and he was royal, and through me he had a place at the center of the kingdom. Now all at once, cruelly enough, as he must see it, he found himself not only deprived of ambition and the place he had dreamed of, but even of a place as a man's acknowledged son. I, who had lived my youth as a bastard and a no-man's-child, knew how that canker can eat: Ector had tried to spare Arthur this by telling him that he would one day be acknowledged nobly; it had never struck me that he would count in love and confidence on the acknowledgment coming from me.

"Even my name, you see." The dull apology of his tone was worse than the cruelty that shock had brought from him before.

At least, if I could heal nothing else, I could heal his pride. The cost would be counted presently, but he had to know now. I had many times thought how, if it were left to me, I would tell him. Now I spoke straight, the simple truth. "We bear the same name because we are in fact kin to one another. You are not my son, but we are cousins. You, like me, are a grandson of Constantius and a descendant of Maxi-mus the Emperor. Your true name is Arthur, and you are the legitimate son of the High King and Ygraine his Queen."

I thought the silence this time would never break. At my first word his eyes had come up from watching the swirling wine, and fastened on me. His brows were knitted like those of a deaf man straining to hear. The red washed through his face like blood staining a white cloth, and his lips parted. Then he set the goblet down very carefully, and standing up, came to the window near me, and, just as I had done earlier, set his hands on the sill and leaned out into the air.

A bird flew into the bough beside him and began to sing. The sky faded to heron's-egg green, then slowly cooled to hyacinth where thin flakes of cloud floated. Still he stood there, and I waited, without movement or speech.

At length, without turning, he spoke to the bough with its singing bird. "Why this way? Fourteen years. Why not where I belonged?"

So at last I told him the whole story. I began with the vision Ambrosius had shared with me, of the kingdoms united under one king, Dumnonia to Lothian, Dyfed to Rutupiae; Romano-Briton and Celt and loyal foederatus fighting as one to keep Britain clear of the black flood that was drowning the rest of the Empire; a version, humbler and more workable, of Maximus' imperial dream, adapted and handed down by my grandfather to my father, and lodged in me by my master's teaching and by the god who had marked me for his service. I told him about Ambrosius' death without other issue, and the ravelled clue the god had thrust into my hand, bidding me follow it. About the sudden passion of the new King Uther for Ygraine, wife of Cornwall's Duke, and about my own connivance at their union, shown by the god that this was the union which would bring its next king to Britain. About Gorlois' death and Uther's remorse, mingled as it was with relief at a death he had more than half wished, but wanted publicly to disclaim and disown; then the consequent banishment of myself and Ralf, and Uther's own threats to disown the child so begotten. Then finally, how pride and common sense between them prevailed, and the child had been handed to me to look after through the dangerous first years of Uther's reign; and how since then the King's illness and the growing power of his enemies had forced him to leave his son in hiding. About some things I said nothing: I did not tell Arthur what I had seen waiting for him, of greatness or pain or glory; and I said no word about Uther's impotence. Nor did I speak of the King's desperate wish for another son to supplant the "bastard" of Tintagel; these were Uther's