There was a little more light now. I saw him slant a look at me. “I have spoken to you tonight as I have spoken to no man before. Do you hold the past against me, Merlin the bastard?”

“I hold nothing against you, my lord.”

“Nothing?”

“A girl in Caerleon. You could call her nothing.”

I saw him stare, then smile. “Which time?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll have forgotten, anyway.”

“By the dog, I misjudged you.” He spoke with the nearest to warmth I had yet heard from him. If he knew, I thought, he would have laughed.

I said: “I tell you, it doesn’t matter. It didn’t then, and less than that now.”

“You still haven’t told me why you dragged me here at this time. Look at the sky; it’s getting on for dawn—and not a moment too soon, the horses will be getting cold.” He raised his head towards the east. “It should be a fine day. It will be interesting to see what sort of job you’ve made of this. I can tell you now, Tremorinus was insisting, right up to the time I got your message, that it couldn’t be done. Prophet or no prophet, you have your uses, Merlin.”

The light was growing, the dark slackening to let it through. I could see him more clearly now, standing with head up, his hand once more stroking his chin. I said: “It’s as well you came by night, so that I knew your voice. I shouldn’t have known you in daylight. You’ve grown a full beard.”

“More kingly, eh? There was no time to do anything else on campaign. By the time we got to the Humber . . .” He started to tell me about it, talking, for the first time since I had known him, quite easily and naturally. It may have been that now I was, of all his subjects, the only one kin to him, and blood speaks to blood, they say. He talked about the campaign in the north, the fighting, the smoking destruction the Saxons had left behind them. “And now we spend Christmas at Winchester. I shall be crowned in London in the spring, and already—”

“Wait.” I had not meant to interrupt him quite so peremptorily, but things were pressing on me, the weight of the sky, the shooting light. There was no time to search for the words that one could use to a king. I said quickly: “It’s coming now. Stand with me at the foot of the stone.”

I moved a pace from him and stood at the foot of the long king-stone, facing the bursting east. I had no eyes for Uther. I heard him draw breath as if in anger, then he checked himself and turned with a glitter of jewels and flash of mail to stand beside me. At our feet stretched the stone.