The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(55)

“You question like an old woman!”

He frowned and tossed his head, and said, “Don’t tell me, then.”

“She was ‘very dark, but comely,’” I told him softly, thinking too of the evenings over the old books, hymns chanted, stories told. “‘Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.’”

We both sat silent, gazing at the fire, while the sweet words of the Song of Songs echoed on the cold and quiet air. Lleu whispered then, “How would she admire you if she learned of this week’s hunting?”

I whispered in return, “She would not admire it.”

“Did you love her? Have you ever loved anything?”

Yes. Yes. All the wrong things. The hunt, and darkness, and winter, and you, Godmother.

“Oh, be careful, little brother,” I breathed. “You are hurling your slight weight against a very thin scale of ice.”

“I am chancing for my freedom in any way I can,” he answered.

He sat awake and watched all through that night.

The morning came gray and changeless. We traveled on foot through still more bare, deserted forest; Lleu walked in a private haze of exhaustion. Snow covered the trees and forest floor as far as could be seen, and drifted across our vision. There was only soft light, the ft u walkedlight one dreams by, gray clouds, or snow, or blue shadows, but never the true light of the sun. In the afternoon we left the dale and struck out over another stretch of empty moorland. Lleu rode behind me as he had the first day, but now I gave him no support or help. He kept himself upright in the saddle through sheer strength of will, riding doggedly, dazed with weariness.

Before dark we came upon a small, round hill, wider and lower than the mounds we had passed earlier. Here we dismounted. Lleu did not resist when I laid my hands on his shoulders to rub gently at the tense muscles across the back of his neck. “Will we stop here?” Agravain asked. At the bottom of the slope the rise of land cut off some of the wind, though it was still cold and could not compare to the protection the forest had offered us.

“Climb,” I said. “There’s better shelter back of this ridge.”

Agravain led the horses, and I guided Lleu the little way to the top. The mound was not a hill but an earthen rampart around a bowl-shaped trough. The outer ridge formed a wall about the hollow of the hill, and sheltered there an ancient ring of stones. Those that were fallen now squatted balefully, but a few still stood upright or pointed at drunken angles to the sky. Lleu stood shivering beneath my hands at the top of the ridge, staring at this old and forgotten shrine. He murmured, with something like despair in his voice, “We are to shelter here?”

“The earthworks cut off the wind,” I said.

“I think I would rather freeze.”

Agravain gazed at Lleu with amused derision. “They’re only stones,” he said. “You’re not going to be sacrificed.”

“No.” Lleu shook himself free of my light hold and said, “How far are we from the road?”

The road was less than a mile south of the circle, but I would not let him know this. “Close by,” I answered. “We will reach it tomorrow.”

“How close?” he pressed.

“I will not tell you,” I answered directly. “You have won this much, this far; but I will give you neither bearing nor hope.”

We set camp beneath one of the angled stones. The air was very still. There was no wood for a fire and only the lanterns for light. Lleu took charge of these, appropriating all our steel and flint. He put out the lights but for one, which he set close by him. He kept a hand on the grated lid of a dark lantern, lightly drumming his fingers against it. I could not imagine how he would drive himself through the night.

“He must try to sleep a little,” I said quietly to Agravain. “If you and I rest in turns, one of us should be able to take him at last.”

But that night was almost as hard for me as it was for Lleu. My cough had grown deep and harsh; it hurt me to swallow, and sometimes even to breathe. Once, when Agravain woke me from a fitful sleep to take my turn at watching Lleu, I struck his hand aside storming, “Don’t touch me!”

Agravain muttered with distaste, “I wouldn’t. I’m not your mother.”

That brought me full awake. I said maliciously, “How you envy me!”

Agravain answered with the fierce devotion that had driven him to serve you at the start. “I do. And I envy the Bright One, for I know how she’ll use him once he is under her sway.”