He was there. His tall, stooping figure detached itself from the darkness outside, and he came forward into the cave. His feet, half-bare in his old sandals, looked blue with cold.

I came to a halt a yard from him, but it was as if I had run straight into his arms, and been folded against his cloak.

“Galapas, they’ve killed Cerdic.”

He said nothing, but his silence was like words or hands of comfort.

I swallowed to shift the ache in my throat. “If I hadn’t come up here this afternoon . . . I gave him the slip, along with the others. But I could have trusted him, even about you. Galapas, if I’d stayed—if I’d been there—perhaps I could have done something.”

“No. You counted for nothing. You know that.”

“I’ll count for less than nothing now.” I put a hand to my head: it was aching fiercely, and my eyes swam, still half-blind. He took me gently by the arm and made me sit down near the fire.

“Why do you say that? A moment, Merlin, tell me what has happened.”

“Don’t you know?” I said, surprised. “He was filling the lamps in the colonnade, and some oil spilled on the steps, and the King slipped in it and fell and broke his neck. It wasn’t Cerdic’s fault, Galapas. He spilt the oil, that’s all, and he was going back, he was actually going back to clean it up when it happened. So they took him and killed him.”

“And now Camlach is King.”

I think I stared at him for some time, unseeing with those dream-blinded eyes, my brain for the moment incapable of holding more than the single fact.

He persisted, gently: “And your mother? What of her?”

“What? What did you say?”

The warm shape of a goblet was put into my hand. I could smell the same drink that he had given me before when I dreamed in the cave. “Drink that. You should have slept till I wakened you, then it wouldn’t have come like this. Drink it all.”

As I drank, the sharp ache in my temples dulled to a throb, and the swimming shapes round me drew back into focus. And with them, thought.

“I’m sorry. It’s all right now, I can think again, I’ve come back . . . I’ll tell you the rest. My mother’s to go into St. Peter’s. She tried to make Camlach promise to let me go too, but he wouldn’t. I think . . .”

“Yes?”