Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For oddlings everywhere.

Prologue

Because he was the King, he could show no feeling about this. The wind blew cold off the sword-gray sea, and over his crowned head the crying gulls wheeled, and at his booted feet on the black sand lay forty naked babies crying louder than the gulls. And from behind the tangle of wrack at the tide line, his men-at-arms watched silently. Because he was the King, he would not ask them to do this thing. He was only a beardless youth, but his was the head that wore the crown and his was the evil deed that had led them to this chill shore and his was the fate spiraling out of the deed and his would be the shame.

Moored to the quay, riding on the ebbing tide, waited an unmanned coracle without tiller or sail, a bare, frail, wood-and-leather shell of a boat. There was no putting it off any longer; because he was the King, he had to do this thing. He stooped, lifted two of the wailing babies from the sand, one in each arm, and walked to the quay and placed the infants gently in the boat’s open wicker-floored hull.

Again he did this, and again, and again, until he lost count and the boat rode heavy with babies. Boy babies, all of them. His cloak fell back from his shoulders and he felt the cold wind cutting into him from the sea, but because of the crying of the babies and because he was the King he did not draw the cloak around himself. It was a strange, exalted, and terrible thing to be the King. Everything he did sent out echoes like a great bell. He had not understood soon enough what it was to be the King, he had thought more of being a man and no longer a boy, and he had made a serious mistake—all mortals make mistakes, but when the King made a mistake, then the sky clouded, the corn grew short, women wept, hundreds of men marched into battle. And forty babes were brought to the sea to die. Why did they all have to die? It would have been a wicked shame enough to slay the one. But Merlin had spoken: Let all male babies of the nobility born on May Day be brought to the shore. That was the sort of thing that happened when the King did wrong.

Two by two he carried the babies to the coracle. They howled, they squirmed in his arms, they squalled. The wind rose and whipped the King, the coracle, the sea; the sky clouded and wept long lashes of rain. The babes formed a pile in the belly of the coracle now, their flesh a cold pearly pink, like the insides of whelk shells. The King returned to the shore for the last two. They struggled and wailed in his arms—