He said nothing, just stood there with the soiled tunic in his hand. I stood up slowly, the forgotten bedgown falling to the floor. There was no need for him to speak. I knew. I could not imagine how I had not known before, the moment I stood before Ambrosius in the frosty field and he stared down in the torchlight. He had known. And a hundred others must have guessed. I remembered now the sidelong looks of the men, the mutterings of the officers, the deference of servants which I had taken for respect for Ambrosius’ commands, but which I saw now was deference to Ambrosius’ son.

The room was still as a cave. The brazier flickered and its light broke and scattered in the bronze mirror against the wall. I looked that way. In the firelit bronze my naked body showed slight and shadowy, an unreal thing of firelight and darkness shifting as the flames moved. But the face was lit, and in its heavily defined planes of fire and shadow I saw his face as I had seen it in his room, when he sat over the brazier waiting for me to be brought to him. Waiting for me to come so that he could ask me about Niniane.

And here again the Sight had not helped me. Men that have god’s-sight, I have found, are often human-blind.

I said to Cadal: “Everybody knows?”

He nodded. He didn’t ask what I meant. “It’s rumoured. You’re very like him sometimes.”

“I think Uther may have guessed. He didn’t know before?”

“No. He left before the talk started to go round. That wasn’t why he took against you.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “What was it, then? Just because I got across him over that business of the standing stone?”

“Oh, that, and other things.”

“Such as?”

Cadal said, bluntly: “He thought you were the Count’s catamite. Ambrosius doesn’t go for women much. He doesn’t go for boys either, come to that, but one thing Uther can’t understand is a man who isn’t in and out of bed with someone seven nights a week. When his brother bothered such a lot with you, had you in his house and set me to look after you and all that, Uther thought that’s what must be going on, and he didn’t half like it.”

“I see. He did say something like that tonight, but I thought it was only because he’d lost his temper.”

“If he’d bothered to look at you, or listen to what folks were saying, he’d have known fast enough.”