“I heard you coming. Been listening all evening. Where’ve you been, lover-boy? She must have been good tonight.”

“Oh, she was. Have they been asking for me? Have they missed me?”

“Not that I know of. They’ve got more to think about tonight than you. Give me the bridle, we’ll put him in the barn for now. There’s too much coming and going in the big yard.”

“Why, what’s going on? I heard the noise a mile off. Is it a war?”

“No, more’s the pity, though it may end up that way. There’s a message come this afternoon, the High King’s coming to Segontium, and he’ll lie there for a week or two. Your grandfather’s riding up tomorrow, so everything’s to be got ready mighty sharp.”

“I see.” I followed him into the barn, and stood watching him unsaddle, while half-absently I pulled straw from the pile and twisted a wisp for him. I handed this across the pony’s withers. “King Vortigern at Segontium? Why?”

“Counting heads, they say.” He gave a snort of laughter as he began to work the pony over.

“Calling in his allies, do you mean? Then there is talk of war?”

“There’ll always be talk of war, so long as yon Ambrosius sits there in Less Britain with King Budec at his back, and men remember things that’s better not spoken of.”

I nodded. I could not remember precisely when I had been told, since nobody said it aloud, but everyone knew the story of how the High King had claimed the throne. He had been regent for the young King Constantius who had died suddenly, and the King’s younger brothers had not waited to prove whether the rumours of murder were true or false; they had fled to their cousin Budec in Less Britain, leaving the kingdom to the Wolf and his sons. Every year or so the rumours sprang up again; that King Budec was arming the two young princes; that Ambrosius had gone to Rome; that Uther was a mercenary in the service of the Emperor of the East, or that he had married the King of Persia’s daughter; that the two brothers had an army of four hundred thousand strong and were going to invade and burn Greater Britain from end to end; or that they would come in peace, like archangels, and drive the Saxons out of the eastern shores without a blow. But more than twenty years had gone by, and the thing had not happened. The coming of Ambrosius was spoken of now as if it were accomplished, and already a legend, as men spoke of the coming of Brut and the Trojans four generations after the fall of Troy, or Joseph’s journey to Thorny Hill near Avalon. Or like the Second Coming of Christ—though when I had once repeated this to my mother she had been so angry that I had never tried the joke again.

“Oh, yes,” I said, “Ambrosius coming again, is he? Seriously, Cerdic, why is the High King coming to North Wales?”