The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(29)

I said sharply, “Indeed, why did you hurt him?”

“He neglected my child cruelly. I am only trying to punish him a little.”

“It was a game. He has asked forgiveness and been forgiven. Why must you go on and on?”

“You thwart me, Medraut,” you said quietly. The caged birds chattered and fluted over our heads. “You turn my threats aside.”

I said through my teeth, “Godmother, I am struggling to keep peace in this house, and I hope you do feel thwarted.”

You laughed again, and did not answer.

I found Lleu later, asleep on one of the wide windowsills in the still sunshine of the atrium, curled with c, c width="2e his head cushioned on his hand and one of the cats dozing in the bend of his knee. Lleu asleep: and we had not been in the fields a full day. I bent to wake him, asking, “Nothing’s wrong?”

He sat up stiffly, and the cat leaped away. “There couldn’t be,” he said. “I haven’t eaten our own food in four days.”

“But you’re still so tired.” I sat next to him on the stone sill.

“I think it is Morgause. I think her very touch must be poisonous,” Lleu said, angry and weary, rubbing his wrist. “Could one do that?”

I smiled. “In hunting some people do use poisoned darts or spears. But a touch will not suffice; the skin must be broken.”

My words caught in my throat, and for a still moment Lleu and I looked at each other in a kind of mute horror. Then Lleu slowly turned his wrist over and held it before me. Shadows cast by the dull lead traceries of the window and light from the stippled, glinting glass panes mottled and slashed his bare arm. The narrow scrape there was barely deep enough to have bled, but the skin around it was red and hot to touch. I took Lleu’s hand and held the scratch to my lips. “It smells of lavender,” he said. “That wouldn’t put me to sleep.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” It smelled of aconite. The lavender did not hide it.

Lleu rubbed his eyes, and murmured, “I am very tired of this.”

“I too.” I snorted a little, wanting to sneer. Poisoned nails! You are exquisite, Godmother.

It was too late to go back to the fields, and there was no way for us to avoid eating supper with the rest of the family. We had scarcely been seated before you turned your slate-cold gaze on Lleu as he lifted his cup to drink. I leaped forward to knock his hand aside, and sent his cup flying across the atrium to smash against the windowsill in a storm of earthenware and cider.

Artos started up and struck the table with a blow that rattled the dishes. He thundered, “What the devil is the matter with you, Medraut?”

No answer came to mind. I stood before Artos without any excuse for my conduct.

“Medraut must think the cider’s bad,” Goewin said suddenly, breaking the awkward silence. “One of the bottles was off this morning.”

“That’s not true,” I protested weakly.

“I tried it myself,” Goewin insisted with careful and precise deliberation, looking directly at me as she spoke. “Though I may have been mistaken. Why take the chance?”

I clenched my hands to keep them from shaking. It was as close as I had ever come to lying. Ginevra said gently, “You’d better clear away the mess, Medraut.”

Naked to the waist after a day at the gleaning, I climbed among the red stones of the Edge far above field, village, and estate. I came upon Lleu drinking and washing his hands in the Holy Well, the shadowed stone trough high among the trees and rocks. The water was so dark I could not see his hands in it. “Need you come this far to drink?” I asked, and he answered me, “I think our well is poisoned.” He drew his hands out of the spring, but the water that dripped from them was deep red, not clear. “You’re bleeding!” I said, but he did not seem to hear. I made him turn around to face me, and his skin was white: not pale, but a dead, c bu1D;unreal white, like quartz or the moon. When I reached to take his hands his touch was cold and lifeless as stone. “You’re dying,” I whispered, and as I spoke he crumpled slowly to the ground.

Someone spoke my name in a low and urgent voice. I did not turn around, though I knew you stood behind me. “Medraut,” I heard again, and a touch on my bare shoulder. I shook you off. “Godmother, no,” I whimpered. My name again. Your touch.

Then a streak of pain fierce across my shoulder, as though I had burst into flame.

I cried out, “Curse you, lady!” and found myself in bed in my own room in the villa, risen on an elbow with one hand pressed to my shoulder. A dream. Only a dream. But the burning pain—