The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters #1)

The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters #1) Page 10

Blind anger coursed through me for a moment. We were both suddenly frustrated—I had lost my prey, Lleu had his path blocked. He knelt frozen on one knee, ragged, unaccountably barefoot, filthy and torn; I sat my dancing, snorting horse with bow in hand. Lleu’s eyes had the mute and desperate look of a hunted creature in flight. Of course: I remembered the game. And so I shaped my vengeance for the loss of a deer, and for Lleu’s wooden sword held at my throat. I said hoarsely, "You’re quarry still?"

He nodded, speechless.

"Then I’ve lost none," I said, and let fly an arrow to tear through a dangling shred of his sleeve. It caught there, and hung.

He stared at it in astonishment, then reached one hand to pull it free and put the other hand down to push himself upright. And straight I set another arrow quivering in the ground in the inch of space between his fingers and his bare foot.

This was an even better challenge than the stag, and more dangerous. I concentrated my entire being on my hands, aware that I must strike with perfect and absolute precision.

"Don’t move," I said.

Lleu did not move. He crouched there, almost under the hooves of my horse, and I sent another arrow skimming over his hair. Wild-eyed, he cried in a whisper, "If you should miss!"

"I don’t!" I cried back at him, and shot another arrow past his head that went so close the f So custletching grazed his ear. "I never miss!"

"Stop shooting at me!" Lleu screamed. He watched me fit another arrow to my bow and sobbed, "You’re wasting arrows!"

I shot into the arch his forefinger and thumb made where they rested against the ground. "It’s worth it," I said fervently, and pulled another arrow from my quiver. Still and white as a statue of alabaster, Lleu hissed wordlessly at me through clenched teeth, like a cat.

It made me drop the arrow with a shout of laughter. "Hunter turns quarry," I gasped, unable to stop laughing, "man turns beast. Get up, you idiot."

Lleu rose slowly. Two arrows stood in the earth between his bare, dusty, scratched feet, and a third hung from his torn sleeve. "I won’t run from you," he said in a low voice. "I don’t care if they do catch me. But I won’t let you think you frighten me."

"If you could see how white you are," I said weakly, wiping my eyes with the back of one hand.

"It’s not so funny," he said through his teeth. "It’s not funny at all."

"I apologize for laughing then," I said. "I haven’t laughed as much in years."

"If ever," Lleu said stonily. His color was returning, and anger replacing fear.

"Why did you leave Glass Island?" I asked.

"I was bored, and it seemed like cheating—no one had any idea where I was." He stared at me. "You tracked me there? Then you have been—" He stopped, and repeated fiercely, "I won’t run from you."

I said, "Little lord, I won’t make you run from me. You can run from your cousins." Then I raised my hunting horn and sounded a long call. "Are you fit enough to outrun them all the way to Camlan?"

"Damn you!" Lleu cried. "Damn you, Medraut! I’ve been running all afternoon!" He pushed past my horse, but after going several paces turned back to look at me. I laughed and blew another horn call. He tore down the slope away from me.

I followed in his wake at a leisurely pace, triumphant and exhausted by the terrible hairline precision of those five wasted arrows. What did it matter to me if Lleu managed to reach the Queen’s Garden ahead of his cousins? He did outrun them, after all: he must. He was fully aware that he had lost to me and was determined not to lose to them.

The game should have ended there.

But during the course of the day Lleu had left his youngest cousin bound hand and foot somewhere on the Edge, and, thoughtless idiot that he was, he had forgotten. Gareth is best natured of any of your boys, and when we found him he considered himself to have been fairly beaten; this despite having been trussed up all afternoon with Lleu’s sandal straps.

You were not so forgiving.

That evening at supper all four of your boys were still talking of the day’s game, and you listened to them with amused and indulgent laughter. But as we were rising to leave the meal you drew Lleu aside and said to him softly, "But, my prince, you won’t be so neglectful of my youngest child again, will you?"

"Of course not, my lady," Lleu said readily. "Gareth wasn’t ever in any danger, th Sny And you to him: "Perhaps you ought to be punished."

"That is for my father to decide," Lleu answered, purposefully regal, "not you, Aunt."

"I will suggest it to your father," you said directly to Lleu, though Artos himself sat by, watching your performance with silent contempt.

"I will consider it when you do," Artos said, rising slowly and standing poised with one hand on the table, like a wary forest creature gauging a potential enemy. "Punishment and revenge are two different things." You held Lleu with one hand on his shoulder and he stood still, waiting for you to release him.

I do not trust your nails so close to anyone’s eyes, and with a sudden, abrupt movement I freed Lleu from your hold. Ginevra spoke curtly, voicing my thought: "Don’t touch him."

You turned to me and laid a hand against my own cheek in Lleu’s stead. A gentle, tender touch, and I thought it to be mocking. "Or me," I said, turning your hand aside. You smiled at Lleu mildly and said, "An apology is not always enough. But never mind, this time."

VII

The Queen of the Orcades

THE FOLLOWING DAY IT rained, but a few of us still sat on the colonnade after supper rather than in the atrium. The evening was warm and light, the stone and tile porch a pleasant place to sit and breathe the rich, fresh smell of the wet gardens rising around. Artos and I played draughts, and between us Goewin concentrated on the moves we made. It should have been a quiet interim of rest. But you came out to the colonnade to join us; you stopped behind me to examine the game, and as you stood there you brushed the tips of your fingers against the back of my neck. Such a curious thrill of mixed delight and repulsion ran through my body that my arms broke out in gooseflesh. Instinctively I tried to cringe beyond your reach. Artos said to you mildly, "You’re interrupting."

"Oh, I can find better sport than this," you said lightly, and sat behind Artos on a chair by the edge of the porch. When Lleu came out a few minutes later you called to him, "Stay with me. Speak to me," and he was too polite and not enough in awe of you to think to do otherwise. "You’re cold," you said to him in a normal voice. "Talk to me, and I will chafe your hands." Lleu sat on the tiles at your feet, and let you breathe on his hands and rub them gently as the two of you spoke together. I bent scowling over the patterned board as though I could not see you.

But your idle chatter ceased after a time, and at last Goewin attracted my attention with a scant, quiet gesture of one finger. Lleu was asleep: sleeping just as he had been sitting, on the floor at your feet, leaning with his head propped against your knee and one hand still resting in your lap. As I watched, you moved a thin hand to wander over his hair. When you noticed my slow glance you clasped Lleu’s hand firmly between your own, mocking, challenging, tempting. The playing piece I was holding suddenly snapped between my fingers.

Steadily I set the broken pieces on the board before me and rose from my seat, while Artos swung around on his stool to see what it was that so intrigued me. I bent to you and whispered past your ear, "What can you possibly want of Lleu?"

You smiled, unruffled. "What do you mean?" I whispered in anger: "You are unusually affectionate." You laughed outright. When you spoke your words were directed at me, but your voice was pitched to include Artos and Goewin. "Here and now you scorn my affection, though when you were small you too crept to me for comfort after I had you whipped."

I snapped, "What has that to do with Lleu?" and then tried hard to check my anger. I stood looking down at you with my hands resting unclenched on my hips. "You have not had the prince whipped, and he has not crept to you for comfort."

"Has he not?" you said, ruffling Lleu’s hair. "My company must be uninteresting; I seem to have put him to sleep." You looked toward Goewin and Artos, and said, "Medraut has not changed. Even as a child he found me suspect, always contradicting me, stubbornly at odds with me. He seemed to dare me to be strict with him. I sometimes had to have him punished for things Gwalchmei had done."

"I only regret you were burdened with such a child for so long," Artos said coldly. "I would have sent for him sooner if I had known."

"Once he was beaten so severely that he was burning with fever when he came to me," you continued relentlessly. "It was because he had accused me of lying. Do you remember, Medraut? You were only ten."

"I was seven," I said through my teeth, quietly.

You shrugged. "No matter. Young enough. But even then you would not admit afterward that you were wrong."

I rapped out in exasperation, "Who cares what I did? It was almost twenty years ago."

"Two years ago you were even more abject before me," you said, gently stroking my damaged hand. "And still are, I think." You took hold of the scarred fingers and kissed them.

I pulled myself free and choked, "You will not—"; but I broke away without finishing and turned to walk heavily down the stone steps into the rain and the dripping gardens.

I will never go back again, I thought, I will never again go creeping back to beg for your forgiving hands on my hair. I walked blindly away from the house and stopped at the stone wall on the edge of the estate, facing away and toward the hills. There I stood shaking with anguished, angry sobs, hardly aware that I was driving my knuckles so fiercely against the wet stone that I was tearing the skin.

Goewin followed me. She stood next to me for a long time, leaning against the wall without speaking, waiting for me to grow calmer. Finally she laid her own hand over my blighted fingers, and said, "She can’t control you now."

"She can," I gasped, "she can. Oh, God, I wish she’d never come. Why doesn’t she leave?"

"Why should she?" Goewin said reasonably. "She may never see her boys again. She talks idly, and stirs evil memories, but she is powerless here."

I turned to look at her, measuring her with my eyes. She watched me, worried, wondering. Even then I was afraid to tell her, to tell anyone, but I must confide in someone or go mad. I said at last, "It was she who ruined my hand. The fingers were broken in a hunt, as I told you, and she was called in to set the bones. She twisted and broke them beyond repair, on purpose. Later they had to be broken [ to a hunt again. I reset them myself."

"Why?" Goewin breathed in soft disbelief. "Why would anyone do such a thing?"

"To teach me a lesson, just as she said," I spat. "To teach me not to break all my bones hunting. God help me, she was so angry—they carried me in torn and broken, flesh bled white, filthy with dust and stinking with stag’s blood. She was so angry. She cursed me for an idiot under her breath all the while she was mending the splintered bones in my legs and wrist."