“There’s no point. You can see how lame he is. He’ll have to be led. If I take him in front he can make the pace. The mare’ll stay behind him.—You all right up there?”

“Perfectly, thanks.”

The grey pony was indeed dead lame. He walked slowly beside Cadal with drooping head, moving in front of me like a smoke-beacon in the dusk. The mare followed quietly. It would take, I reckoned, a couple of hours to get home, even without what lay ahead.

Here again was a kind of solitude, no sounds but the soft plodding of the horses’ hoofs, the creak of leather, the occasional small noises of the forest round us. Cadal was invisible, nothing but a shadow beside the moving wraith of mist that was Aster. Perched on the big mare at a comfortable walk, I was alone with the darkness and the trees.

We had gone perhaps half a mile when, burning through the boughs of a huge oak to my right, I saw a white star, steady.

“Cadal, isn’t there a shorter way back? I remember a track off to the south just near that oak tree. The mist’s cleared right away, and the stars are out. Look, there’s the Bear.”

His voice came back from the darkness. “We’d best head for the road.” But in a pace or two he stopped the pony at the mouth of the southgoing track, and waited for the mare to come up.

“It looks good enough, doesn’t it?” I asked. “It’s straight, and a lot drier than this track we’re on. All we have to do is keep the Bear at our backs, and in a mile or two we should be able to smell the sea. Don’t you know your way about the forest?”

“Well enough. It’s true this would be shorter, if we can see our way. Well . . .” I heard him loosen his short stabbing sword in its sheath. “Not that there’s likely to be trouble, but best be prepared, so keep your voice down, will you, and have your knife ready. And let me tell you one thing, young Merlin, if anything should happen, then you’ll ride for home and leave me to it. Got that?”

“Ambrosius’ orders again?”

“You could say so.”

“All right, if it makes you feel better, I promise I’ll desert you at full speed. But there’ll be no trouble.”

He grunted. “Anyone would think you knew.”

I laughed. “Oh, I do.”

The starlight caught, momentarily, the whites of his eyes, and the quick gesture of his hand. Then he turned without speaking and led Aster into the track going south.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT

THOUGH the path was wide enough to take two riders abreast, we went in single file, the brown mare adapting her long, comfortable stride to the pony’s shorter and very lame step.