“We can’t wait for him,” said Cadal. “We want a horse. Go and tell him we’re here, and my lord Merlin’s hurt, and the pony’s lame, and we’ve got to get home quickly . . . Well? Why don’t you go? For pity’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”

“I can’t. He said I must not. He forbade me to move from here.”

“As he forbade us to leave the road, in case we came this way?” I said. “Yes. Now, your name’s Ulfin, is it? Well, Ulfin, never mind the horse. I want to know where Belasius is.”

“I—I don’t know.”

“You must at least have seen which way he went?”

“N-no, my lord.”

“By the dog,” exclaimed Cadal, “who cares where he is, as long as we get the horse? Look, boy, have some sense, we can’t wait half the night for your master, we’ve got to get home. If you tell him the horse was for my lord Merlin, he won’t eat you alive this time, will he?” Then, as the boy stammered something: “Well, all right, do you want us to go and find him ourselves, and get his leave?”

The boy moved then, jamming a fist to his mouth, like an idiot. “No . . . You must not . . . You must not . . .!”

“By Mithras,” I said—it was an oath I cultivated at the time, having heard Ambrosius use it—“what’s he doing? Murder?”

On the word, the shriek came.

Not a shriek of pain, but worse, the sound of a man in mortal fear. I thought the cry contained a word, as if the terror was shaped, but it was no word that I knew. The scream rose unbearably, as if it would burst him, then was chopped off sharply as if by a blow on the throat. In the dreadful silence that followed a faint echo came, in a breath from the boy Ulfin.

Cadal stood frozen as he had turned, one hand holding his sword, the other grasping Aster’s bridle. I wrenched the mare’s head round and lashed the reins down on her neck. She bounded forward, almost unseating me. She plunged under the pines towards the track. I lay flat on her neck as the boughs swept past us, hooked a hand in her neck-strap, and hung on like a tick. Neither Cadal nor the boy had moved or made a sound.

The mare went down the bank with a scramble and a slither, and as we reached the path I saw, so inevitably that I felt no surprise—nor indeed any thought at all—another path, narrow and overgrown, leading out of the track to the other side, just opposite the grove of pines.