The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(38)

He tore away from me, riding blindly and furiously. I caught up with him among the trees, and we rode together in silence except for the horses’ hooves thundering hollow on damp turf. Ahead of us, the young buck was tiring visibly. “Now, Bright One,” I said. “Strike.”

Lleu bent his bow with reluctant hands. Despite his hesitation he took the creature with an arrow in its throat.

“Ha!” I drew my horse to a halt. “Beautiful!”

But he had not killed it. The lean, quick hounds leaped for it like gray flames. “No!” Lleu cried. He slid from his horse and threw himself among the dogs, snatching at the collar of his own. “Here, sir! Back!” Clinging to his strain kto . He sing hound, he shouted wrathfully, “Call off your horrible dogs!”

I called the dogs and dismounted. “Better that you finish than that they do,” I said, and gave Lleu my hunting knife.

“Oh, I can’t!” he gasped. He knelt next to the fallen deer with one hand lightly resting on a short, proud antler, and his hound and Goewin’s whining at his shoulders.

“Would you have it die slowly, then?” I said.

He held on to the antler and moved the heavy head to stretch out the animal’s throat; its steaming breath was strangled and uneven. I began to say, “If you don’t—”

But he drove the blade to cut deep across the stag’s throat. And just as he looked up at me, another deer came through the trees toward us: not chased and so not running, a dark doe, almost black. Goewin’s hound darted after it.

“Take her, Prince!”

Lleu stood up and shot, elegantly and miserably. I laughed. “It’s true; you could have hit every animal you’ve ever aimed at. What a strange little idiot you are.” I glanced at his gray, bleak face and said in a gentler voice, “Give me the knife, I’ll help you. If you are to be high king you will have to kill more than deer, eventually.”

“I know,” he said.

“There is some balance to all things, Lleu. The stag’s death gives us winter me





at; and the power to kill, or to heal or to judge, carries with it a great weight of responsibility.”

“I know.” Lleu pushed his hair back from his forehead wearily. “I know. You are teaching me. Only don’t expect me to thank you for this lesson.”

“You never do,” I said, thinking of another beautiful stag, and the huntsmen buried beneath the hill.





X


Revelation




TEGFAN’S LEGS HEALED SLOWLY. At the end of the year he still could not walk. Though by now I was no longer confined to the estate and could come and go as I pleased, I was still idle; I was desperate to be given even the smallest of tasks. Close to Christmas, Caius sent me to the smithy with a mare that was to be shod. While Gofan worked over the new shoes, Marcus said to me casually, “Will you be rhyming with us this year, lord?”

“How do you know I ever did?” I asked. It had been eight years since my last rhymers’ pageant, the ritual Midwinter’s mumming at Elder Field. There had been no revelry the year of the famine, and that sobriety had also tainted the following Christmas.

“Caius tells me that when you were a boy you took the part of the Old Year’s son, the Winter Prince.” Marcus grinned at me. “I, of course, have taken on that role in your absence, but you may try to wrest it from me if you like.”

“No fear of that,” I returned. “I think I am no longer suited to act the young hero. And I thought you’d stopped the play.”

“We haven’t done it since you’ve been back,” Gofan said. “But this year… for the most part this has been a golden year. It bears celebrating.”

“There is a conspiracy abroad to cast you as the Magician,” Marcus a nto . ars cdded.

Magician—I? The rhymers’ play is a pageant for midwinter, celebrating the return of the sun at the dark time of the year’s closing. The Magician is the bringer of light, the figure whose task it is to recall the murdered harvest lord to life. I thought it bitter irony they should see me fit for such a role. But Marcus tossed my objections aside, and even Gofan laughed. They said I was the most skilled healer the villagers had ever known, and that I was missed in the mines and the fields. I warmed to their friendship and flattery. So I came to join the informal and haphazard rehearsals for the play; I was once again made welcome by the high king’s friends and servants, at a time when I had a great need of laughter and companionship.