In all this time she had never looked at him. Now she raised her eyes. “What do you want of me? It’s true as Mabon tells you. What he didn’t say was that the King had been fooling with a servant-girl and was drunk. But it was an accident, and he’s dead . . . And you with all your friends were a good twelve miles away. So you’re King now, Camlach, and there is no man can point a finger at you and say, ‘He wanted his father dead’.”

“No woman can say that to me either, Niniane.”

“I have not said it. I’m just telling you that the quarrels here are over. The kingdom’s yours—and now it’s as Alun says, you had better go and speak to the people.”

“To you first. Why do you stand like that, as if you didn’t care either way? As if you were scarcely with us here?”

“Perhaps because it’s true. What you are, brother, and what you want, does not concern me, except to ask you one thing.”

“And that is?”

“That you let me go now. He never would, but I think you will.”

“To St. Peter’s?”

She bent her head. “I told you nothing here concerned me any more. It has not concerned me for some time, and less than ever now, with all this talk about invasion, and war in the spring, and the rumours about shifts of power and the death of kings . . . Oh, don’t look at me like that; I’m not a fool, and my father talked to me. But you need not be afraid of me; nothing I know or can do can ever harm your plans for yourself, brother. I tell you, there is nothing I want out of life now except to be allowed to go in peace, and live in peace, and my son too.”

“You said ‘one thing’. That makes two.”

For the first time something came to life in her eyes; it might have been fear. She said swiftly: “It was always the plan for him, your plan, even before it was my father’s. Surely, after the day Gorlan went, you knew that even if Merlin’s father could come riding in, sword in hand and with three thousand men at his back, I would not go to him? Merlin can do you no harm, Camlach. He will never be anything but a nameless bastard, and you know he is no warrior. The gods know he can do you no harm at all.”

“And even less shut up as a clerk?” Camlach’s voice was silky.

“Even less, shut up as a clerk. Camlach, are you playing with me? What’s in your mind?”

“This slave who spilt the oil,” he said. “Who was he?”

That flicker in her eyes again. Then the lids dropped. “The Saxon. Cerdic.”