The Winter Prince

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  “She taught me all I know of cruelty, that’s true,” I said. “But Lleu, you brought on the fury that drove me to attempt such a thing. When you’re unwilling to do as your father tells you, does he invoke his power as high king and say that it is not within your riwitove me ght to disobey him?”

  “Do I do that?”

  “You have told me I have not so much as the right to object if you choose to insult me! Even the queen of the Orcades grants me that!”

  “That was childish of me. I tried to apologize.”

  I sighed. “I know you did. But I had my mother’s hatred to strengthen my own. Now she has made me hate myself more than I ever hated you. I will be free.”

  Lleu sighed and closed his eyes. “Maybe you will. But she still triumphs. I’ll die anyway; I have no strength to make the journey home.”

  Anguished to hear him speak so, I said gently, “We’re barely five miles from Camlan. Did you really not know that?”

  He bit his lip. He had seen without fear that he might be dying, and it must be hard now to learn how close he was to home. “You’ll have to leave me,” he said. “I can’t walk any farther.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “Not since I know you won’t slay me.”

  I whispered, “If you die now, I will have slain you.” I wrapped my cloak around his shoulders. “I’ll carry you.”

  “Sir, how can you?” Lleu also whispered. “I am almost as tall as you.”

  “I will,” I said. “Damn her! I won’t be used any longer!” The emotions I had fought so long to deny fired my vehemence. “You’ve driven yourself almost to madness in defiance of my cruelty, and I’ll find the strength to carry you home if it leaves me broken forever.”

  Without a further word I gathered Lleu in my arms and staggered to my feet. “Five miles?” Lleu whispered. “Oh, sir… your hand, and the fever…”

  “What are they measured against your life?” I cried. “The fever has passed. The hand’s already ruined.” I shifted his weight more comfortably in my arms and slowly began to walk westward beneath the trees. “Try to sleep now,” I added. Lleu leaned his head against my shoulder and slept.

  After only a little way I had to stop and rest in exhaustion. I cannot do this, I thought despairingly, it is like trying to carry a young buck in my arms. Idiot, I cursed myself then; you who call yourself a huntsman, would you carry a buck in your arms? After that I slung him over my shoulders. He hardly noticed. He slept as deeply as if he had been drugged.

  Not long before dark I was arrested by the sound of a horse behind us, out of sight among the trees but coming closer at a gallop. I had no time to prepare myself against this unknown rider, no time to wake Lleu enough that he could be set on his feet. I turned to face whatever was coming, standing with straight defiance, for all that I bore Lleu on my back. I would not let myself consider how spent I was. I stood waiting, watching the rider arrive in a storm of flying hooves and snow.

  It was Goewin. She must have known she was coming upon me even before she had seen me; she sat her horse with a spear balanced under one arm, as if she were leading an army into battle. She pulled her horse to a sudden and startling halt, sending up another burst of flying snow. Clumps of it settled in my hair, and in the folds of the cloak wrapped about Lleu.

  “We saw your smoke,” she said. “The blankets youe b and left smoldering there made a cloud black as a tunnel. Did you think no one would notice? What a place to light a fire, if you were trying to go unseen! Another half mile and you’d have been at the summit of Shining Ridge, where the beacons are lit.” She spoke in hard, clean anger, controlled.

  “What makes you sure I meant to go unseen?” I said faintly.

  “Agravain said you planned to kill the prince yourself,” Goewin said, with no trace of fear in her voice, though Lleu hung still and pale over my shoulders. “I do not trust Agravain so far as I can push him, but you have betrayed my trust as well. You could—you could have at any time—arranged Lleu’s death so that it looked like accident, or someone else’s fault.” Still she covered her fear. “Have you?”

  “No,” I said. “He sleeps only.” I said then, “Agravain? Agravain returned to Camlan?”

  “He arrived early this morning,” Goewin answered. “He feared his mother’s wrath more than the king’s. And he told us all.” Her hard, clear voice never faltered or changed pitch. She gazed down at me with imperious cold dark eyes. “We went out searching when he arrived, I and my father and Caius. We were going to make Agravain take us back to the place where he left you, but we saw your smoke and found your camp. You tell me, my lord brother, what we were to think: shreds of Lleu’s cloak crumbling to ashes in that stinking, smoking pile of debris, blood in the snow, our satchels and bags abandoned there.”

  “The blood was mine,” I said, shifting Lleu’s weight. “You see.” I held my bandaged hand away from his body.

  The air rang with hoofbeats as Goewin’s companions caught up with her. “Hai!” she called to them, raising her spear as a standard. “They are here.” Artos and Caius rode into our company, with Agra vain between them. “Lleu!” Artos cried, swinging down from his horse, and Caius leveled a spear at me.

  “He’s alive,” Goewin said coldly. “Stand back.” Not one of them, not the high king himself, stepped forward to disobey her command.

  “Well, Medraut, there were two sets of footprints,” Goewin said. “We knew you had not killed him. We followed to where the snow was marked as though someone had lain there, and after that there were only your prints. I could not think what you had done to Lleu, though I knew you must be carrying him—there was no blood, no body.”

  She had led them here. She was still their leader.

  Her voice was calm, but she spoke through clenched teeth. “What have you done to him?”

  It was I who faltered. I opened my mouth to speak, hesitated, and managed at last to whisper hoarsely, “I won’t say. I can’t tell you.”

  She slid from her horse, her spear tilted at me. “You can’t tell me—can he? Will he? Dear God! I should—” Of a sudden she hit me furiously across my shins with the butt of her spear. I staggered abruptly to my knees.

  Artos stepped forward and put a cautionary hand on Goewin’s shoulder, but gave no word of reprimand. I clung to Lleu, who raised his head wearily, awakened by the sudden jolt.

  “Put him down,” Goewin said. Lleu stared at her and at his father, unbelieving, used to being tricked by what he saw. “Put him down!” Goewi&#xx201D; Gon cried again, her spear threatening. I gently set Lleu on his feet. He stood next to me a moment, balancing himself with one unsteady hand lightly resting on my shoulder; then he carefully crossed to stand beside his father. I faced Goewin, on my knees in the snow before her.

  “You—you don’t even obey your precious mother!” Goewin said. “Whom do you serve—yourself? Some forgotten god of darkness?” And then with the staff of her spear she struck a tremendous blow to the side of my head. I reeled, falling sideways into the snow with all my weight against my wounded hand, and could not stifle a sharp cry of real pain. I said nothing, only raised my head a little to watch for the next attack; neither defiant nor afraid, resigned, fully aware of what she meant to do. But when Goewin drew back for another blow Lleu said suddenly, “Don’t.”

  I turned my gaze on Lleu, wondering.

  “He hasn’t hurt me,” Lleu said.

  “He might yet,” Goewin said coldly.

  “He won’t,” Lleu said. “You will kill him if you go on. There will be nothing won, nothing gained. You’ll break yourself, you’ll break us all, just as Morgause would have it. Oh, don’t be an idiot, Goewin, he is no traitor.”

  “Oh, is he not!”

  Lleu said calmly, “I am safe, I am whole: Don’t destroy me now.”

  “Are you so bound to him?” Goewin sneered. “As he is to his mother?”

  “I am not bound to anyone,” Lleu said readily. “But he is, after all, our brother.”<
br />
  “Ai, Bright One,” Artos said. He took the boy by the shoulders so that they could see each other and then embraced him: they stood trembling in each other’s arms, both of them close to tears. Artos said, “He has changed you. He has done it.”

  “Oh, God, no,” I said passionately. “I only tried to hurt him. He changed himself. He changed me.”

  I sat in the snow, waiting. Lleu stood beneath his father’s heavy, loving hands, and said, “Ask again who it is that Medraut follows.”

  Goewin asked without speaking, with her eyes and a small, questioning shrug.

  I drew myself up onto one knee, my head held proudly, and whispered in honesty and pain: “I serve the prince of Britain.” And in a stronger voice I added, “The Bright One. Lleu son of Artos.

  “My lord, my brother, I have hated and envied you…” Then my voice broke, and I could no longer speak formally. “Ah, Goewin, finish me if you must, I am sick to death of being feared and mistrusted.”

  She looked at me and then at Lleu. Lleu’s face was impassive but set; his look was one of authority and fairness, adult and certain. “All right!” she said quietly, and threw down her spear. “All right.”

  “Come, my marksman,” Artos said, my father also, forbidding and forgiving. He stepped forward to take my hands and raised me to my feet. “I told you once that you could always come back to me.”

  That is why I cannot come back to you, Godmother.

  Lleu sighed, shuddering with exhaustion and relief. Then he suddenly and softly laughed aloud, quietly but with elation. He covered his eyes with one hand, as though he asLleu sithought his laughter inappropriate; the joy in his half-hidden smile struck me like oblique sunlight.

  “Lleu—,” Goewin began in concern.

  “I am so glad,” he said clearly, unmasking his radiant face as he turned to look at her, “that this is finished.”

  That is why I will never come back to you.

  Artos helped Lleu to Goewin’s horse, then mounted his own. Goewin and I went on foot, one of us on either side of Lleu, taking care that he did not fall. We turned westward toward the fading light. In the gathering dusk the sky still glowed rose on the horizon; soon we left the wood and could see at last the trees of the Edge, black and perfect against the sky. Below, the lights of Camlan flickered and beckoned in the near distance. We finished the journey home across that broad, bright country.

  So the new year began.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Lion Hunters Novels

  Prologue

  THE EMPEROR’S COUNSELOR stopped reading. He looked up and spoke the next lines off by heart. “‘Love is strong as death,’” Kidane said. “‘Jealousy is cruel as the grave.’” He had been reading aloud from the Song of Songs. “‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.’”

  Kidane rolled the scrolls shut. Turunesh had set a pot of water to boil over the ceremonial brazier, and she and her father were about to drink one last ritual cup of coffee with their young British guest. Tomorrow Medraut’s embassy in African Aksum would end, and he would begin his long journey, four thousand miles across the world, back to his father’s kingdom in Britain.

  “We will miss you deeply, Medraut,” Kidane said. “Our home has become your home. You are not the inexperienced boy you were when you arrived. You have earned your Aksumite name, Ras Meder, Prince Meder, lord of the land. We will miss you more than I can say.”

  The garden court was dark but for the hanging lamps. Turunesh’s doves and parrots were asleep. The white, alcoved walls of the enclosure were full of shadows; lamplight rippled in the black waters of the granite fish pool. Kidane’s face was difficult for Medraut to see, for the light fell over his shoulder, but the counselor’s voice was warm and filled with sadness as he spoke.

  Medraut knelt and lifted his host’s hands from the book to kiss them lightly. “And I will miss you,” he replied in Ethiopic, the language he had spoken for nearly three years and which he took pride in being able to read and write. “You are right: Aksum has made me. I am forever in your debt. I leave you with nothing of myself, and you and your daughter have given of your gifts and affection generously and generously.”

  He turned toward Turunesh, but she sat with her head bent, her attention fixed on the roasting coffee. Medraut quickly looked away from her. Lizards leaped and murdered moths in the thatched awning over their heads. The night air was full of the bitter fragrance of coffee, but also smelled faintly of frankincense, as the scent blew down from the plantation on the neighboring hillside.

  Medraut did not easily speak of himself, and he had never heard any Aksumite make painful confessions about his or her e>

  “I had no sense of my own worth when I arrived in Aksum,” Medraut said in a low voice. “Since their birth I have lived in envy of my small half-brother, Lleu, and Goewin, his twin sister. But Aksum has made me. I have become myself here. Why should I envy anyone? If Hector and Priamos can serve their uncle the emperor so selflessly, after a childhood of exile and imprisonment, then so may I serve my own king.”

  Turunesh spoke chidingly as she laid out the earthen cups. “You let a deal of nonsense pass your lips, Medraut son of Artos. You know the sequestering of lesser princes is traditional, and Caleb never planned to keep his nephews at Debra Damo forever. You can be sure your father has a plan for you, as well. Will you follow him as high king?”

  “Not while Lleu lives. Lleu is the queen’s son, I am not. I will serve as Britain’s regent, perhaps, or its steward.”

  “There is no greater service on this earth than stewardship,” said Kidane. “A true king is his people’s steward; their lives, and their faith, are in his hands.”

  Turunesh began to pour the coffee, still berating Medraut. “And that you would call the hermitage at Debra Damo a prison, after your visit there with the emperor Caleb himself as your guide! You were aglow with holiness and delight on your return.”

  “You speak perfect truth, as ever,” Medraut admitted, glowing again with the memory of that visit: the rare, clear air of the amba plateau, the fantastically carved and gilded church there, the reservoirs hewn from the living rock, the twisted strap of leather rope that was the only way up the cliff. He thought of the emperor Caleb’s companionship, of his trust and honor.

  “Now I have become—”

  He hesitated, and Turunesh murmured without looking up from her deft hands: “Warrior, statesman, huntsman. Lion killer.” She raised her head from the coffee at last, and smiled, though she did not meet his eyes. No Aksumite had ever met his eyes. They would have considered it a great insolence to do so; he was the eldest son of Britain’s high king.

  “And Christian,” Turunesh added, smiling still. “You were baptized here. What will Artos your father say to that?”

  “He’ll say, Africa is always producing something new.”

  They all three laughed together.

  Kidane held out his hand again to Medraut. “Get off your knees, you sentimental boy,” he said.

  Medraut took his seat, embarrassed. Turunesh handed him his coffee, bitter and black. He cupped the hot beaker between his hands, breathing in the strong steam.

  “I’ve put a great dose of honey in it,” Turunesh said, “to sweeten it for you. I know you don’t really like it.”

  “I like the smell.”

  “You have to share a cup with us, this last night before you go.”

  “I know.” Medraut sighed again. “If the kingship of Britain were offered to me tomorrow, I would throw it away for the promise that I will share another cup of coffee with you before I die.”

  “Don’t,” Turunesh said softly. “You will set me to weeping.”

  Medraut sipped gingerly at the steaming black liquor.

  “Sweet enough?” she inquired.

  ‘“Out of the strong came something sweet,’” he murmured, quoting Samson’s riddle of bees
and honey in the carcass of the slain lion.

  “Lion killer,” Turunesh murmured in answer, teasing. “What did you mean, you have left us with nothing of yourself? I shall never pass your lion skin hanging in the reception hall without thinking of you.”

  They drank the coffee. The lamps in the standards that stood about the garden court began to burn low. Turunesh lifted one down.

  “‘Return, return,’” she whispered to the lamp, as though she were weaving an incantation. The flame burned steadily, pale white-gold and smoky blue, the color of Medraut’s hair and eyes. “‘Return, return.’”

  Her father could not have heard her, but Medraut could. Turunesh whispered the words Kidane had read aloud earlier from the Song of Songs. “‘Return, return, that we may look upon you.’”

  She held the lamp high and turned to face the young British ambassador.

  “Come, Medraut,” she said aloud. “I’ll light you to your room.”

  PART I SANCTUARYCHAPTER ONE

  Naming the Animals

  SIX YEARS AFTER MEDRAUT returned to Britain, and a bare season after he and my twin brother Lleu nearly killed each other over which of them should be the high king’s heir, our father’s estate at Camlan was destroyed in a battle that began by accident.

  Camlan shattered Medraut. He began the battle: he drew his sword to kill an adder at my father’s heel, and the host mustered by Cynric of the West Saxons fell on our own soldiers at the flash of light on metal. When sickness attacked the nearby village of Elder Field in the battle’s wake, and my mother waited on the stricken without stint until she, too, was killed by the fever, Medraut blamed himself for not relieving her. Then Medraut killed our father. Artos asked it of him, rather than lie waiting to die of his battle wounds. Before that final damning act of courage and mercy, Medraut had spent a day and most of a night limping on a broken knee through the frozen, bloody fields around Camlan, searching for Lleu. It was not three months since Lleu had kissed and forgiven him his last winter’s betrayal. Medraut would have given his own life to spare our brother’s. All he found of my twin after Camlan was the golden circlet Lleu had worn.