The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [27]
"How could I?" he said again, but his tone had changed. It was no longer angry and abrupt, but slow and thinking. As I, after Luguvallium, had felt myself ageing, then Arthur had, for good and all, left his boyhood. "You've seemed the same as always. Clear-headed, and so sure of yourself that it's like asking advice of an oracle."
I laughed. "They were not always so clear, by all accounts! Old women, or witless girls mumbling in the smoke. If I've been sure of myself during these past weeks, it's because the advice I have been asked for concerns my professional skills, no more."
" 'No more?' Enough, one would think, for any king to call on, if that were all he had known from you...But yes, I think I see. It's the same for you as for me; the dreams and visions have gone, and now we have a life to live by the rules of men. I should have understood. You did, when I went myself after Colgrim." He walked over to the table where Ygraine's letter lay, and rested a fist on the marble. He leaned on it, frowning downward, but seeing nothing. Then he looked up. "And what of the years that are to come? The fighting will be bitter, and it will not be over this year, or the next. Are you telling me that I shall have nothing from you now? I'm not talking about your engines of war, or your knowledge of medicine; I'm asking you if I am not to have the 'magic' that the soldiers tell me about, the help that you gave to Ambrosius and to my father?"
I smiled. "That, surely." He was thinking, I knew, of the effect my prophecies, and sometimes my presence, had had on the fighting troops. "What the armies think of me now, they will go on thinking. And where is the need for further prophecies concerning the wars you are embarked on? Neither you nor your troops will need reminding at every turn. They know what I have said. Out there in the field, the length and width of Britain, there is glory for you, and for them. You will have success, and success again, and in the end -- I do not know how far ahead -- you will have victory. That is what I said to you, and it is still true. It is the work you were trained for: go and do it, and leave me to find a way to do mine."
"Which is, now that you've flown your eagle chick, and yourself stay earthborne? To wait for victory, then help me build again?"
"In time." I indicated the crumpled letter. "But more immediately, to deal with such things as this. After Pentecost, with your leave, I shall go north to Lothian."
A moment of stillness, while I saw the flush of relief colour his face. He did not ask what I meant to do there, but said merely: "I shall be glad. You know that. I doubt if we need to discuss why this happened?"
"No."
"You were right before, of course. As ever. What she wanted was power, and it did not matter to her how she took it. Or, indeed, where she looked for it. I can see that now. I can only be glad to feel myself absolved of any claim she might make on me." A small movement of his hand brushed Morgause and her plots aside. "But two things remain. The most important is that I still need Lot as an ally. You were right -- again! -- in not telling me of your dream. I would certainly have quarrelled with him. As it is -- "
He paused, with a lift of the shoulders. I nodded.
"As it is you can accept Lot's marriage to your half-sister, and count it as sufficient affiance to hold him to your banner. Queen Ygraine, it seems, has acted wisely, and so has Morgan, your sister. This is, after all, the match that King Uther originally proposed. We may safely ignore the reasons for it now."
"All the more easily," he said, "because it seems that Morgan is