The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(2)

The child stared at him with a still, emotionless face. Behind his blank eyes and white lashes he thought numbly, That is true—they are too small to envy or fear. He had never felt strongly enough about anything to hate it or love it.

But when he thought of the little boy, his father’s youngest and most important child, some strange emotion burned through him, unrecognizable, alien. He did not know if it was hate or love or both, or something utterly different from either. It was true that the boy was barely three weeks old and smaller than any human being he had ever seen; but set in that small face were eyes so dark and radiant that they frightened him. He felt he had never seen anything more beautiful than the eyes of his small half brother, but he could not tell whether that beauty was something repulsive or attractive, hideous or wonderful.

Thinking about this, he was startled by a fleet but brightly vivid vision of how one of his fingers had been suddenly grasped in his little brother’s unthinkably small ones, blindly trusting and certain. He looked up at his father and said in a low voice, “I will try to love them. You saw me take your son’s hand.”

“Be accurate, my young marksman,” his father said. “He took yours.”





I


The Marksman




WHEN I LEFT THE Islands I had a vague image of myself fleeing from you with the speed and surety of a hart, straight to my father’s estate at Camlan. The morning I left I was certain, Godmother, certain beyond anything you could have suggested to make me doubt it, that I could return to Camlan as though returning home: though it was fourteen years since the twins were born, six since I left Camlan and two since I came to you. When my father asked me to go to Brittany six years ago he had expected me back in a matter of months, and after that when I was traveling in Africa and Byzantium his letters always anticipated my return. He was not happy that I chose to remain with you over those next two summers—you, his sister; you, his enemy, treacherous and faulted as the ceiling of a mine shaft.

The morning I left you I was so desperate to be away, and free, that the very direction of the wind seemed a portent to guide me. The first fisherman I spoke to was leaving that day for the mainland, and I already carried with me all I intended to take: my hunting knife, the three bows I had crafted that summer, and a satchel containing the precious and delicate physician’s instruments I had bought the year before from the Eastern sea merchants. Except these, all the possessions that I cared for I had either left in Camlan six years ago or had sent there directly as I acquired them. There was nothing to hold me to the Islands, nothing except love or fear of you. And I would not submit to either of these.

The journey’s start, after the long summer of pain and illness, seemed so clean and true and swift that it did not seem possible I might be rash to travel so late in the year. The wind was perfect; we sped past the barren cliffs of Hoy, and the day was clear enough that we could see Cape Wrath looming in the distance. I have never made such a rapid journey to the mainland. I felt I had some god’s own special benediction: such luck: away so quickly and secretly. Once on the soil of the mainland it occurred to me that my legs were still not very strong, that I hada p hundreds of miles of empty moorland to cross, and that winter was coming on. But I would not go back.

That was in October. It was well past New Year’s when I arrived in Deva, the city and port closest to Camlan. There was a heavy snowfall that same day. I had not encountered snow even when I was crossing the Caledonian highlands, but now that it was steadily cold there came snow with a vengeance. I stayed in Deva several days, just to watch the harbor freeze over completely, locking its ships into my father’s city: Artos the high king’s city. Deva is beautiful, full of Roman ghosts. The harbor is smaller than it once was, because the river is silting up. But the streets are paved, and there is a ruined theater that they use as a marketplace. There is even a bathhouse where they still use the old hypocaust for heat. Artos probably had a hand in the last; Gofan, the master smith at Camlan, calls him “our engineer king.” While I was in Deva, Artos himself arrived to inspect the harbor and make sure the old city walls were able to endure the ice. It was the first I had seen my father in six years. After the months of trudging through a wilderness of black peat mud and chill rain, alone, the pure dry cold and my father’s heavy hand on my shoulder seemed more intoxicating than wine, the snowbound streets more holy than the clustering wind-scoured cells of Iona.

It is about sixty miles from Deva to Camlan, and Artos sent me on ahead of him. I went as his emissary and as his son; I went because he could not in good conscience send anyone else into that weather, and because I wanted to go. He planned a route for me, making certain I would have food and a bed each night, so the last few days of my long journey were made in relative comfort. And the countryside was achingly familiar. After Caledonia’s bleak mountains even the high moors to the east seemed gentled by the snow, not shadowing but cradling the Mercian plain—beautiful. The country around Camlan is all field and forest, riddled with old Roman salt and lead mines, except in the village just two or three miles west of Camlan, where there are copper mines that Artos has set working again. The mines and the village existed long before the high king. When he rebuilt the Roman villa nearby and made it his home, the local people named the new estate Camlan, the champion’s village. The original cluster of farms and householdings they now speak of simply as the village of the “elder field.” The jutting cliff and scarp where the copper mines are they call the Edge over Elder Field, and it dominates the horizon even more than the distant high peaks. Camlan nestles securely between the Edge and the peaks, protected from all but the worst of weather; the forest is usually abundant with deer, the fields bountiful. It was all snow-blanketed when I arrived, uniform in whiteness.