The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(3)

They had had a hard summer, even as we did in the Northern Islands, in the Orcades. Everyone I met on the way seemed thin and worn: grim, haggard, hungry. They were cold, too; their winters are usually milder. It was dusk when I finally came to Elder Field, and I might have stopped for the night with Gofan at the smithy; but by now the road was so familiar that I could have walked it with my eyes shut, and I was overcome with a childish wave of homesickness for Camlan. I could not possibly wait until morning to walk the last few miles. I shared the evening meal with Gofan and Marcus, his new apprentice, and they lent me a lantern to guide me through the dark to the high king’s estate.

The old Roman villa at Camlan was drab; it was cold and decaying. The echoes of its former splendor only exaggerated its cheerlessness. The tiled floor still held between its cracks the dust and pollen that had settled there during the dry summer; mildewed grain littered the corners of the central atrium, whichdertrium, had been used as an emergency storeroom during the haphazard harvest that was gathered in the threatening shadow of a sudden storm. Part of the hypocaust had collapsed, and someone had tried to block off the drafty hole in the atrium floor with disused masonry and rubble left over from the villa’s original restoration. The old leaded glass windows, so perfect and unusual, had not been cleaned for many months. Even the braziers gave little heat. The Great Hall was warmer, with its roaring fire and close company, but after months of solitary silence and open space I found it crowded and airless almost beyond my endurance. I felt at home in the villa, ruined as it was; I knew those corridors, where each lamp bracket fits, the artist’s little flaws in the tiled border of the atrium mosaic, the staring glass eyes of the Christian portraits there.

No real welcome awaited me. Of course, they did not expect me, and those of the household who were still awake were preoccupied with some present crisis. It did not seem the right moment to inquire if I could still use my old room. When my father’s queen hurriedly received me I told her I would stay in the Great Hall where most of the household slept. Ginevra agreed, apologetically; they had been using my room for storage, and it would have to be cleared out before I could use it. “You’ll be more comfortable in the Hall,” she added. “It’s warmer there. Artos is the only one who knows how the hypocaust works; we can’t mend it till he returns. And”—she paused; and I could see her setting her jaw so that she would not falter—“and I think Lleu is dying. He has been ill all winter, and today he is scarcely able to breathe. Otherwise we should have given you more of a welcome, Medraut.”

Lleu, the Bright One: the high king’s youngest child, his heir, and my half brother. I had forgotten how sickly he was. His sister Goewin had always been healthy, and fiercely protective of her small twin brother. They were eight when I left. Lleu’s letters had stopped more than three years ago, before I came to the Orcades. He would be almost fifteen now, almost adult. Still so frail, racked by asthma, torn through and through by even the slightest chill wind or damp day? And Artos counted on him to be the next high king.

“Is Aquila still your physician?” I asked.

“Yes. But he’s hardly slept for three days,” Ginevra told me, still unfaltering.

I said cautiously, “I might help him.”

“We have all been helping,” she answered.

“I meant as a physician,” I said.

“Truly?” She was surprised, perhaps pleased. “Well, you had to learn something in six years away from us! You do seem wiser than you did. You look the same, but there is more to your silence than there used to be.”

Ginevra has the smooth, open face of a child, and she is too short and stocky to be beautiful. But she is skilled as a mapmaker, speaks three different British dialects, and knows most of the villagers by name; she manages the household with undisputed authority. Her quick appraisal made me suddenly and unexpectedly shy, though it was for a moment only. She could not have noticed. I do not color, or blanch, when I am ill at ease. I glanced down briefly at the cracked, tiled floor beneath our feet, and asked if I might see Lleu.

The corridors were dark, for Ginevra could not afford to keep lamps burning in the halls. Since Lleu had been ill he was sleeping in the antechamber to his mother’s rooms, the only rooms in the house that were being steadily heated. He seemed to be asleep,m" o be as or senseless, when we came in, struggling for breath with eyes clenched tightly shut; but when I sat on the cot next to him and spoke his name he tried to answer, though he could do no more than gasp and choke, lying wretchedly trapped in his ridiculous frail body. Even so I was momentarily astonished by his beauty. It struck at me as it had when I first saw him, when he was an infant. I think it is the single characteristic in him that I have always envied, will always envy. He is graceful and slightly built, like an acrobat or a cat, with black hair and brilliant dark eyes; but the eyes were closed now, the fair skin dry and fiercely hot to touch, and he did not know me.