“It frightens me, too, Cadal.” I had let the green tunic slide from my body to the floor. He was holding out the grey wool robe I wore for a bedgown. I reached absently for it, and sat down on the bed’s edge, with it trailing over my knees. I was talking to myself rather than Cadal. “It frightens me, too. You’re right, that’s how it feels, as if I were an empty shell with something working through me. I say things, see things, think things, till that moment I never knew of. But you’re wrong in thinking I don’t feel. It hurts me. I think this may be because I can’t command whatever speaks through me . . . I mean, I can’t command it yet. But I shall. I know this, too. Some day I shall command this part of me that knows and sees, this god, and that really will be power. I shall know when what I foretell is human instinct, and when it is God’s shadow.”

“And when you spoke of my end, what was that?”

I looked up. Oddly enough it was less easy to lie to Cadal than it had been to Uther. “But I haven’t seen your death, Cadal, no one’s but my own. I was being tactless. I was going to say ‘As you will come to a foreign grave somewhere . . .’” I smiled. “I know this is worse than hell to a Breton. But I think it will happen to you . . . That is, if you stay as my servant.”

His look lightened, and he grinned. This was power, I thought, when a word of mine could frighten men like this. He said: “Oh, I’ll do that all right. Even if he hadn’t asked me to, I’d stay. You’ve an easy way with you that makes it a pleasure to look after you.”

“Have I? I thought you found me a high-handed little fool, and a nuisance besides?”

“There you are, you see. I’d never have dared say that to anyone else your class, and all you do is laugh, and you twice royal.”

“Twice royal? You can hardly count my grandfather as well as my—” I stopped. What stopped me was his face. He had spoken without thought, then, on a quick gasp, had tried to catch the words back into his mouth and unspeak them.