The Winter Prince - Page 26/27

I turned toward him when he halted. The fury and tension of the night still hung between us like a thunderhead. I knew that he had reached the end of his strength and that only a little resistance on my part would make him mine. I broke an icicle from a frozen branch to use as a weapon and dragged it across his cheek.

He stood still and closed his eyes, but did not attempt to reach for the knives at his waist. I ran the ice over his throat, sharp as a hunting knife and even colder, held the crystalline blade beneath his chin and watched the reflected sunlight dancing there. "Even now you seem undefeated," I whispered, "and though I might take you easily I do not really want your inheritance. It is your self, your soul, that I envy. More than anything I want your birthright without shame, your clean lineage."

"You can never have that," Lleu said, with his eyes closed and his head held still; though one of his hands had flown to his ashen face, almost accidentally, guarding his eyes. "How can anyone change that?"

I trailed the ice across his gloved palm, then took him by the wrist and eased his arm back down. Lleu opened his eyes cautiously, dazzled by sunlight and the sparkling ice so close to his face. "I cannot change it," I admitted, "but with you at my mercy I can make my father acknowledge that the fault was his. That I am no more a creature of my mother’s making than he is."

"Not her creature!" Lleu burst out. "Why else would you ransom my life to solace your own bruised pride? No one cares who your parents were! People admire you or despise you for yourself, for what you have made yourself. What have I to do with it? You do not envy my parentage, you envy me."

I stood gazing at him without any answer to give, feeling myself to be so base, so wrong, so ruined. My fingers were locked around his wrist as surely as steel. He said half wondering, "Ai, my brother, you are so strong and light in form, so wise and deft in mind, so gentle and true in semblance…"

"So ruthlessly cruel in truth," I finished, whispering.

Now tears began to glitter cold and hopeless across his face.

I turned his hand over and broke the brittle ice easily across his palm. There was hardly anything for him to feel: a touch of chill through his glove, then shattered crystals melting to nothing on his open hand. "It’s only water, Lleu," I said quietly. "If I held such a thing to your sunlit face for much longer than two moments it would dissolve into air." I brushed my fingertips across his cheek and smeared the tears there. He sank to his knees in the snow. The sunlsnoomeight was cold through the bare trees, and the ground was frozen and desolate. "Lleu," I said softly, and reached for his hands to help him back to his feet.

"I can’t," he whispered. "I can’t, I can’t."

I knelt beside him. "Lleu, get up. You’ve no cloak. You’ll freeze."

"You’re going to kill me, anyway," he whispered, too tired to raise his voice.

I shook my head, speechless, desperate with remorse and self-hatred. He did not notice. Holding him steady with one hand, I undid the clasp at my shoulder and took off my cloak, spreading its soft folds over my knees and the bright snow around us. I drew him close; and too frozen and exhausted to object, Lleu collapsed onto the warm wool and leaned against my chest, folded in my arms. He began to cry in earnest, sobbing with his face buried in my jacket, then crying uncontrollably in breathless, shrieking gasps that tore through his entire body. "Don’t," I whispered. "Don’t."

When his sobs began to sound less like screams I rested one cheek against his hair and bent over him, cradling him like a child. He clutched at my jacket with cold, clenched, tear-wet fingers. I laughed a little. "You cling to me so—do you still trust me, after all this?"

He said in a low, broken voice, "I have always trusted you."

Then of a sudden he stopped crying. He twisted around in my arms so that he could see me. "If you would kill me," he said, "kill me now."

Having said that, his voice grew stronger. "Do it. Do it! Stab me and leave my body to whatever creatures roam this wood, and no one will ever know. No one will ever blame you."

I whispered, "I could not butcher you."

He was guessing, daring, with his life forfeit if he were wrong. But he knew he was right. "Then leave me here," he said. "I can’t walk. I don’t know where I am. I would be dead of cold by evening, and again you could escape blame." He choked, half weeping still, and burst forth, "I am your brother! You are my friend! You are the single person I have most admired and imitated and envied my entire life! If you hate me so for my heritage, then I do not want it, I cannot bear your hatred. So leave me here! Kill me!"

"I can’t," I gasped. "I can’t. I can’t kill you. I love you."

You see what it took to make me know this.

I held Lleu fiercely, shaking, my face turned away, and lashed myself with degrading epithets: serpent, seducer, defiling deceiver, corrupted outcast, traitor and toad. But to revile myself did nothing to help Lleu. He sobbed a while longer, frustrated in his exhaustion, though he had triumphed over me in a way he could never have planned. His unconditional trust and love were prizes I never knew I coveted, infinitely more powerful and more healing than the fear I had tried to exact from him. He whispered at last, yawning, "You are not evil, but you are so torn! What drives you? If I became high king you’d have more power than any man in Britain, but you choose to follow Morgause."

"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."