Berric—he’s the one that gave you the torch—he told me. He told me they’d all been set to cut your throat, those dirty old priests, and it seems if the King hadn’t been at his wits’ end, and impressed by your mother and the way the pair of you didn’t seem frightened of them, he never would have waited. Oh, I heard all about it, don’t worry. Berric said he’d not have given two pennies for your life back there in the hall when your mother told her story.” He shot me a look. “All that rigmarole about the devil in the dark. Letting you in for this. What possessed her?”

“She thought it would help. I suppose she thought that the King had found out who my father was, and had had us dragged here to see if we had news of his plans. That’s what I thought myself.” I spoke thoughtfully. “And there was something else . . . When a place is full of superstition and fear, you get to feel it. I tell you, it was breathing goose-pimples all over me. She must have felt it, too. You might almost say she took the same line as I did, trying to face magic with magic. So she told the old tale about my being got by an incubus, with a few extra flourishes to carry it across.” I grinned at him. “She did it well. I could have believed it myself if I hadn’t known otherwise. But never mind, go on. I want to know what happened in the cavern. Do you mean I talked some kind of sense?”

“Well now, I didn’t mean that, exactly. Couldn’t make head or tail of what Berric told me. He swore he had it nearly word for word—it seems he has ambitions to be a singer or something . . . Well, what he said, you just stood there staring at the water running down the walls and then you started to talk, quite ordinary to start with, to the King, as if you were explaining how the shaft had been driven into the hill and the veins mined, but then the old priest—Maugan, isn’t it?—started to shout ‘This is fools’ talk’, or something, when suddenly you lets out a yell that fair froze the balls on them—Berric’s expression, not mine, he’s not used to gentlemen’s service—and your eyes turned up white and you put your hands up as if you was pulling the stars out of their sockets—Berric again, he ought to be a poet—and started to prophesy.”

“Yes?”