“Do you hate me for this, very much, Merlin?”

I said slowly, looking down at my hands: “There is one thing about being a bastard and a no-man’s-child. You are free to imagine your father. You can picture for yourself the worst and the best; you can make your father for yourself, in the image of the moment. From the time I was big enough to understand what I was, I saw my father in every soldier and every prince and every priest. And I saw him, too, in every handsome slave in the kingdom of South Wales.”

He spoke very gently, above me. “And now you see him in truth, Merlin Emrys. I asked you, do you hate me for the kind of life I gave you?”

I didn’t look up. I answered, with my eyes on the flames: “Since I was a child I have had the world to choose from for a father. Out of them all, Aurelius Ambrosius, I would have chosen you.”

Silence. The flames leapt like a heartbeat.

I added, trying to make it light: “After all, what boy would not choose the King of all Britain for his father?”

His hand came hard under my chin again, turning my head aside from the brazier and my eyes from the flames. His voice was sharp. “What did you say?”

“What did I say?” I blinked up at him. “I said I would have chosen you.”

His fingers dug into my flesh. “You called me King of all Britain.”

“Did I?”

“But this is—” He stopped. His eyes seemed to be burning into me. Then he let his hand drop, and straightened. “Let it go. If it matters, the god will speak again.” He smiled down at me. “What matters now is what you said yourself. It isn’t given to every man to hear this from his grown son. Who knows, it may be better this way, to meet as men, when we each have something to give the other. To a man whose children have been underfoot since infancy, it is not given, suddenly, to see himself stamped on a boy’s face as I am stamped on yours.”

“Am I so like?”

“They say so. And I see enough of Uther in you to know why everyone said you were mine.”

“Apparently he didn’t see it,” I said. “Is he very angry about it, or is he only relieved to find I’m not your catamite after all?”

“You knew about that?” He looked amused. “If he’d think with his brains instead of his body sometimes he’d be the better for it. As it is, we deal together very well. He does one kind of work, as I another, and if I can make the way straight, he’ll make a king after me, if I have no—”

He bit off the word. In the queer little silence that followed I looked at the floor.