“I suppose so. But someone had to do him honour. He was mine.”

His brows went up. “Do you give that as a reason, or as an obligation?”

“Sir?” I puzzled it out, then said, slowly: “Both, I think.”

He looked down at his hands. He had moved them from the chair arms, and they were clasped on the table in front of him. “Your mother, the princess.” He said it as if the thought sprang straight from what we had been saying. “Did they harm her, too?”

“Of course not!”

He looked up at my tone. I explained quickly. “I’m sorry, my lord, I only meant, if they’d been going to harm her, how could I have left? No, Camlach would never harm her. I told you, she’d spoken for years of wanting to go into St. Peter’s nunnery. I can’t even remember a time when she didn’t receive any Christian priest who visited Maridunum, and the Bishop himself, when he came from Caerleon, used to lodge in the palace. But my grandfather would never let her go. He and the Bishop used to quarrel over her—and over me . . . The Bishop wanted me baptised, you see, and my grandfather wouldn’t hear of it. I—I think perhaps he kept it as a bribe to my mother, if she’d tell him who my father was, or perhaps if she’d consent to marry where he chose for her, but she never consented, or told him anything.” I paused, wondering if I were saying too much, but he was watching me steadily, and it seemed attentively. “My grandfather swore she should never go into the Church,” I added, “but as soon as he died she asked Camlach, and he allowed it. He would have shut me up, too, so I ran away.”

He nodded. “Where did you intend to go?”

“I didn’t know. It was true, what Marric said to me in the boat, that I’d have to go to someone. I’m only twelve, and because I can’t be my own master, I must find a master. I didn’t want Vortigern, or Vortimer, and I didn’t know where else to go.”

“So you persuaded Marric and Hanno to keep you alive and bring you to me?”

“Not really,” I said honestly. “I didn’t know at first where they were going, I just said anything I could think of to save myself. I had put myself into the god’s hand, and he had sent me into their path, and then the ship was there. So I made them bring me across.”

“To me?”

I nodded. The brazier flickered, and the shadows danced. A shadow moved on his cheek, as if he was smiling. “Then why not wait till they did so? Why jump ship and risk freezing to death in an icy field?”