The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(20)

“Oh, well done!” Gareth breathed.

“Well done,” you echoed.

Lleu let fall his sword. He offered me his hand to help me rise;





I took it and got slowly to my feet. Such a performance, both of us so calm and polite! But his hands trembled, the black hair he pushed back from his forehead was damp, and his face was wan. It had been something more than a game.





VI


The Running of the Deer




I DO NOT LIKE the sword. It is clumsy and imprecise, designed for haphazard damage, for total and purposeless destruction. With bow and arrow the kill is clean and swift: That is the weapon of the hunter, not the warrior, the one who kills beast, not man, who kills for survival, not power. Try bringing down a hart, or a hare, or a swan, with a sword.

I tell this over to myself as a litany, so to excuse the delight I draw from the chase, the exhilaration and abandon that Lleu calls bloodthirst. After you came to Camlan, to hunt was all my solace or pleasure. I most often went alone, at my ease in the deep, green forest south of Camlan, not even expected to return at night those times I was not needed in the mines. On days when I must work I could at least stalk rabbit and partridge through the twisted trees clinging to the red sandstone of the Edge. I carried a bow with me always, those days.

So it was one morning when Goewin came to my room early and asked, “Will you be hunting on the Edge today?” She knew, as all Camlan knew, how I passed my spare hours.

“I had not meant to,” I answered briefly, my hands busy with knife and horn and bowstring. “Why?”

“Lleu and the cousins are planning to play some kind of game there,” she said, sitting at my desk and watching me stock my quiver. “They’ll be all over chasing and hiding from each other. I think they’re a lot of idiots, but I wouldn’t want you to mistake one of them for a wild pig and stick an arrow through somebody’s throat.”

That made me laugh. “What are they doing that you aren’t with them?”

“They’re playing out a hunt. Not a real one. They’ll take some hounds, but no bows or spears.”

She was still frowning. I asked, “What are they hunting, then, that you so fiercely disapprove?”

With the tip of a finger the gentle princess crushed a small and shining insect that was moving across my desk, and flicked it through the open window. “Lleu.”

“I hope he proves a better quarry than he is a hunter,” I said.

She gave a short, explosive gasp of laughter. “Ih! Well, he knows the Edge better than the cousins do. He can hide from them even if he can’t outrun them. That’s why they need the hounds.” She stood up to leave, and finished, “I just wanted to warn you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

But she waited at the door and did not go. “If Lleu escapes them and returns to the Queen’s Garden by sunset without being caught, he wins. I won’t join in something so childish. The prince of Britain!” She paused. “ N be;Oh, well.”

“Childish, no,” I said. “Not the Wild Hunt.”

Goewin laughed. “Gwyn-ap-Nudd hounding the souls of the dead across the sky? Morgause’s children aren’t that bad.”

“No.” I laughed with her. “But in the south they used to play out the Wild Hunt in earnest, ending with the chosen victim ritually slaughtered on his own threshold. They still do it in some places, only now the killing is mimicked.”

“God help us,” Goewin said grimly. “I hope our fair cousins don’t know about that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s as well you’re not playing,” she said as she turned to go. I stood looking after her with bow in hand, thinking that to follow Lleu would be sport indeed. And then the thought, Why should I not? I would not interrupt his game; but I would watch.

I challenged myself to guess what Lleu would do. His cousins must let him start first, so that he might have an initial hope of eluding them; I thought he might head south on the track through the beech woods that leads to the fisheries. The forest there was heavy with the heat of August, sunlight filtering green and gold through the thick leaves. I tethered my horse well off the track where it was screened by half grown birch, and then I hid among the ferns to watch for Lleu. To lie there was pleasant, knowing that I waited only for my brother, and that I need not be alert for a chase. The loam forest floor was cool against my chest and palms, piebald with spots of sunlight that were hot on my back. And as I lay half dreaming so, a doe stepped from the tall undergrowth across the path, and presently another joined it. I lay breathing the warm scent of fern, my mind empty of anything but the grazing deer, for what seemed a measureless space of time.