‘I’ve drunk nothing else for a week. Only two things cure colds: death or time.’ He picked up the hammer and gave the cooling lump of iron a ringing blow, then pumped the leather-jacketed bellows that fed air into the furnace. The winter had ended, but despite Arthur’s insistence that the weather was ever kind in Isca, it was a freezing day. ‘What’s your mouse lord up to?’ he asked me as he pumped the furnace into a shimmering heat.

‘He isn’t my mouse lord,’ I said of Sansum.

‘But he’s scheming, isn’t he? Wants his own candidate on the throne.’

‘But Meurig has no right to the throne!’ Galahad protested.

‘None at all,’ Arthur agreed, ‘but he has a lot of spears. And he’d have half a claim if he married a widowed Argante.’

‘He can’t marry her,’ Galahad said, ‘he’s married already.’

‘A toadstool will get rid of an inconvenient queen,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s how Uther got rid of his first wife. A toadstool in a mushroom stew.’ He thought for a few seconds, then tossed the shoe-plate into the fire. ‘Fetch Gwydre for me,’ he asked Galahad.

Arthur tortured the red-hot iron while we waited. A horse’s shoe-plate was a simple enough object, merely a sheet of iron that protected the vulnerable hoof from stones, and all it needed was an arch of iron that slipped over the front of the hoof and a pair of lugs at the back where the leather laces were attached, but Arthur could not seem to get the thing right. His arch was too narrow and high, the plate was kinked and the lugs too big. ‘Almost right,’ he said after hammering the thing for another frantic minute.

‘Right for what?’ I asked.

He chucked the shoe-plate back into the furnace then pulled off his fire-scarred apron as Galahad returned with Gwydre. Arthur told Gwydre the news of Mordred’s expected death, then of Meurig’s treachery, and finished with a simple question. ‘Do you want to be King of Dumnonia, Gwydre?’

Gwydre looked startled. He was a fine man, but young, very young. Nor, I think, was he particularly ambitious, though his mother was ambitious for him. He had Arthur’s face, long and bony, though it was marked with an expression of watchfulness as if he always expected fate to deal him a foul blow. He was thin, but I had practised swords with him often enough to know that there was a sinewy strength in his deceptively frail body. ‘I have a claim to the throne,’ he answered guardedly.

‘Because your grandfather bedded my mother,’ Arthur said irritably, ‘that’s your claim, Gwydre, nothing else. What I want to know is whether you truly wish to be King.’

Gwydre glanced at me for help, found none, and looked back to his father. ‘I think so, yes.’

‘Why?’

Again Gwydre hesitated, and I suppose a host of reasons whirled in his head, but he finally looked defiant. ‘Because I was born to it. I’m as much Uther’s heir as Mordred is.’