I said slowly, thinking hard now: “I didn’t understand it all. I was thinking about Cerdic. But I believe he’s going to kill me. I believe he will use my grandfather’s death for this; he’ll say that my slave did it . . . Oh, nobody will believe that I could take anything from Camlach, but if he does shut me up in a religious house, and then I die quietly, a little time after, then by that time the whispers will have worked, and nobody will raise a voice about it. And by that time, if my mother is just one of the holy women at St. Peter’s, and no longer the King’s daughter, she won’t have a voice to raise, either.” I cupped my hands round the goblet, looking across at him. “Why should anyone fear me so, Galapas?”

He did not answer that, but nodded to the goblet in my hands. “Finish it. Then, my dear, you must go.”

“Go? But if I go back, they’ll kill me, or shut me up . . . Won’t they?”

“If they find you, they will try.”

I said eagerly: “If I stayed here with you—nobody knows I come here—even if they found out and came after me, you’d be in no danger! We’d see them coming up the valley for miles, or we’d know they were coming, you and I . . . They’d never find me; I could go in the crystal cave.”

He shook his head. “The time for that isn’t come. One day, but not now. You can no more be hidden now, than your merlin could go back into its egg.”

I glanced back over my shoulder at the ledge where the merlin had sat brooding, still as Athene’s owl. There was no bird there. I wiped the back of a hand across my eyes, and blinked, not believing. But it was true. The firelit shadows were empty.

“Galapas, it’s gone!”

“Yes.”

“Did you see it go?”

“It went by when you called me back into the cave.”

“I—which way?”

“South.”

I drank the rest of the potion, then turned the goblet up to spill the last drops for the god. Then I set it down and reached for my cloak.

“I’ll see you again, won’t I?”

“Yes. I promise you that.”

“Then I shall come back?”

“I promised you that already. Some day, the cave will be yours, and all that is in it.”

Past him, in from the night, came a cold stray breath of air that stirred my cloak and lifted the hairs on my nape. My flesh prickled. I got up and swung the cloak round me and fastened the pin.

“You’re going, then?” He was smiling. “You trust me so much? Where do you plan to go?”