A mile or so from the castle, they met with the search party Guy had sent out for them. “You little sod,” Guy yelled across the timber bridge, as soon as Art came within earshot. “I’ve been pacing the ramparts in this ball-shrinking gale for hours. Not to mention that I’ve had the ghost of poor Ector breathing hellfire down my neck all night for leaving you behind.”
He met the party in the light of the torches down by the gates, and seized Art in a half-savage bearhug as soon as he was down off his horse. It was the first time Guy had dared speak his father’s name to him. Art smiled in acknowledgement, pulling back to look into his brother’s tired face. “Well, he shouldn’t have. You did your best—you always have done. I’m hard to look after. It’s not your job anymore.”
Guy nodded. Eyes too bright, he turned to Lance. “Well, did you find your raiders?’
Lance looked at Arthur. A fledgling king couldn’t afford to tell a story of a dragon-hunt. If Art wished him to invent a battle, Anglian heads knocked together or hewed off, he’d do it. He knew how badly Art had wanted such a simple answer for the woes of the land, how set he’d been on finding it.
But Arthur shook his head. “No, Guy,” he said, and when the soldiers of the search party turned to stare and listen, went on unflinchingly, “It wasn’t Saxons who did this. We found nothing. I was wrong.”
***
Lance dismissed the groom who tried to take Balana from him. It was so much his habit to bed the horse down himself that he couldn’t rest until the job was done.
Even more of an obligation, after the uses he’d put her to today. He checked her limbs while she ate her hot mash, smiling over the old scars on her knees. Ector had been so incandescently furious…
Movement from the stable’s torchlit doorway caught his eye. Art must have taken the time to splash his face in the horse-trough, but other than that was just as their wild ride had left him, mud-spattered and weary and, to Lance, more beautiful than the dancing flames. “Ah,” he said. “The prince of White Meadows, rubbing down his own mount with a handful of straw.”
“I’m sure you’ve just done the same.”
“Yes. For the first time in years.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Injuries. Battle-fatigue. More than anything, half-arsed advice from counsellors who told me a king couldn’t act like a stablehand. Ector liked me to do it, though.”
Lance straightened up, leaning on Balana’s shoulder. “You should name that horse, you know.”
“I came to the same conclusion myself. I’ve called him Calonek, a name from the Cerniw and Breton tongues. It means brave.”
“Ector would have liked that, too.”
They stood in the warm hush of the stables, letting the words, with their load of pain and love, settle in the air. Art didn’t flinch or turn away. “Well,” Lance said eventually, “I’m glad you didn’t tell Guy we’d been off fighting raiders. But didn’t you want everyone to know you slew the dragon?”
“I want everyone to believe I’m safe outside of a madhouse, if it’s not too late for that.” He pushed the stable door open and came in, glancing behind him to check none of the grooms was within earshot. “Anyway, I’m far from sure I slew anything. What did we do out there tonight, Lance? How did you know the worm would go to the stone?”
They’d barely spoken on their ride back from Spindlestone Heughs. Partly their silence had been shock and exhaustion, partly the feeling that no words would be adequate. “I don’t know,” Lance said, in answer to both questions. “I… wonder if I remembered something Viviana told me. Sometimes I feel as if I should know, about many things, but something gets in my way. A dream speaks, and then it’s gone.”
“Well, your dream spoke timely out there, or we’d be dead.” He went to lean on the wall by Balana’s feedbox, idly pulling at her mane. “Look at this horse! I know you love her, but you have to let me get you something better now.”
“Younger, maybe.” Lance grinned. “You’ll never do better. Though I think I knocked some stuffing out of her tonight.”
“Let me retire her honourably. I’ll send her back to Vindolanda if you like.”
Lance shuddered. “No, please. She’ll end up pulling a plough.”
“Or on the table?”
“I don’t think so. We still had hard winters, but things were never as bad with us again after you brought the spring back to the moors.”
Art’s expression softened. “All right. I’ll dispatch her down to Cerniw with my next messenger, and she can eat her head off in Britannia’s greenest fields for the rest of her life.” He paused, rubbing the mare’s soft nose as it came up to quest around his hands for food. “What do you think it all means, Lance? The worm, or the dragon, and the sword? She did obey it—Excalibur, not me.”
Lance had no answers for him. For an instant, out on the windswept plain, he had seen with a dragon’s green eyes, felt a presence as ancient and as female as the earth, felt waiting fire in his own gut. Now he was only a man. When he tried to recapture his brief, effortless grasp of the worm’s universe, it hurt his head and filled him with a sense of baulked frustration, like a dream that faded even as he reached to grasp it. I don’t have the means, he thought incoherently. The women and the stones and the dragons are all dead…
“Lance, are you all right?”
“Yes. Just tired.” He sought to turn the subject. “You missed a conference today, didn’t you?”
“Two of them, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t suppose they cancelled them.”
“Oh, no. Put them off till tomorrow.” Art sighed. “I’d rather face the worm again, you know.”
“I know. Is it any comfort to you, that you’re good at this diplomacy you hate so much?”
“Am I? It comforts me a little, if you think so.” He made a bitter face. “I wasn’t much good this morning, was I, riding out of here damning every foreigner ever born.”
“Oh, you were much worse later, when you were demanding their heads on a spike.” Lance carried on grooming while Art registered outrage then reluctant amusement. “On the whole, though…”