‘You reckon you were born to it, eh?’ Arthur asked sarcastically. He stooped and pumped the bellows, making the furnace roar and spit sparks into its brick hood. ‘Every man in this room is the son of a King except you, Gwydre,’ Arthur said fiercely, ‘and you say you’re born to it?’

‘Then you be King, father,’ Gwydre said, ‘and then I shall be the son of a King too.’

‘Well said,’ I put in.

Arthur gave me an angry glance, then plucked a rag from a pile beside his anvil and blew his nose into it. He tossed the rag onto the furnace. The rest of us simply blew our noses by pinching the nostrils between finger and thumb, but he had ever been fastidious. ‘Let us accept, Gwydre,’ he said, ‘that you are of the lineage of kings. That you are Uther’s grandson and therefore have a claim on Dumnonia’s throne. I have a claim too, as it happens, but I choose not to exercise it. I’m too old. But why should men like Derfel and Galahad fight to put you on Dumnonia’s throne? Tell me that.’

‘Because I shall be a good King,’ Gwydre said, blushing, then he looked at me. ‘And Morwenna will make a good Queen,’ he added.

‘Every man who was ever a king said he wanted to be good,’ Arthur grumbled, ‘and most turned out to be bad. Why should you be any different?’

‘You tell me, father,’ Gwydre said.

‘I’m asking you!’

‘But if a father doesn’t know a son’s character,’ Gwydre riposted, ‘who does?’

Arthur went to the smithy door, pushed it open and stared into the stable yard. Nothing stirred there except the usual tribe of dogs, and so he turned back. ‘You’re a decent man, son,’ he said grudgingly, ‘a decent man. I’m proud of you, but you think too well of the world. There’s evil out there, true evil, and you don’t credit it.’

‘Did you,’ Gwydre asked, ‘when you were my age?’

Arthur acknowledged the acuity of the question with a half- smile. ‘When I was your age,’ he said, ‘I believed I could make the world anew. I believed that all this world needed was honesty and kindness. I believed that if you treated folk well, that if you gave them peace and offered them justice they would respond with gratitude. I thought I could dissolve evil with good.’ He paused. ‘I suppose I thought of people as dogs,’ he went on ruefully, ‘and that if you gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren’t dogs, Gwydre, they’re wolves. A king must rule a thousand ambitions, and all of them belong to deceivers. You will be flattered, and behind your back, mocked. Men will swear undying loyalty with one breath and plot your death with the next. And if you survive their plots, then one day you will be grey-bearded like me and you’ll look back on your life and realize that you achieved nothing. Nothing. The babies you admired in their mothers’ arms will have grown to be killers, the justice you enforced will be for sale, the people you protected will still be hungry and the enemy you defeated will still threaten your frontiers.’ He had grown increasingly angry as he spoke, but now softened the anger with a smile. ‘Is that what you want?’