“Lady –” he said, desperately.

“And you would call yourself a loyal subject of the High King? Or would have done, a short few weeks ago?”

The only sounds in the clearing were the steady munching of the horses, and the sudden shrill song of a robin hidden somewhere in a holly-tree.

“Is that all?” he asked at length. His voice was rough.

She nodded, rather sadly. “That is all, except to thank you for listening to me. I don’t even ask you to believe me; you will find out for yourself once you are away and free from – once you are away. But I have one other request of you.”

“What is that?”

From under the grey robe she brought a flask, gilt-stoppered, and housed in a leathern bag. “This is wine brewed by the monks in the house beyond the river bridge, and sent to us each year as a gift. I beg that you will accept it for your journey.”

He took it, and began a little awkwardly to thank her, but she smiled and shook her head.

“That is only half the request. The rest is this – that you throw away the cordial that the queen gave you last night.”

This time the silence was intense. Even the horses, as if sensing something, stopped their grazing to raise their heads and stare.

He said tightly: “How do you know she gave me a cordial last night?”

“Did you not understand what I said before? That you have been drugged, enchanted, what you will, from the moment she saw you, and marked you as the next man to be sent on this ceaseless search of hers for the power and influence she once had, and lost through treachery?”

Alexander, in after years, was never to cease regretting what he did next. Luned’s gilt-stoppered flask went hurtling to the ground, he jerked the chestnut’s head up from the grass and swung himself to the saddle, struck the spurs home and sent the big horse plunging out of the clearing and down to the road, leaving her standing there.

29

It must not be thought that Alexander was quite so blind and foolish that he had imagined his mistress to be blameless, or himself to be irrevocably in love. Queen Morgan herself boasted of her witchcraft, and he respected and feared her powers, which, in fact, had made her interest in him the more flattering and exciting. She was, besides, very lovely, and he was young, so when she seemed bent to use her magic to entrap him to her bed for the kind of love-making that was new to his youthful and somewhat limited experience, why then he had gone to her whistle, as they say, and had enjoyed himself hugely, in spite of the recurring weakness brought about by the low fever that he had seemed unable to shake off.

It was this that now, as he rode north, occupied his mind. The fresh sweet air of morning, the steady cantering of his good horse, the sense (whether admitted or not) of freedom, all this gradually conspired to clear his mind of the anger that the Lady Luned’s words had roused in him, and to calm him sufficiently to allow him to think back and weigh up what had happened in the Dark Tower. And as he did so, a sort of pattern began to emerge.