Wicked Day by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

I see that promise. It is time you left your foster home, and took your place here with the other princes. Well, what do you say?"
    "I — I will do as you wish, madam," stammered the boy. It was all he could say, above the words that went on and on in his brain, like the music of the harp. The other princes. It is time you took your place here with the other princes.… Later, perhaps, he would think of his foster parents with affection and with regret, but now all he had room for was the vague but dazzling vision of such a future as he had barely dared even to dream of. And this woman, this lovely royal lady, would in her graciousness offer him, her husband's bastard, a place beside her own true-born sons. Mordred, moved by an impulse he had never felt before, slipped from the window-seat and knelt at Morgause's feet. With a gesture at once graceful and touchingly unpracticed, he lifted a fold of the copper-coloured velvet and kissed it. He sent a look of worship up at her and whispered: "I will serve you with my life, madam. Only ask me. It is yours."
    His mother smiled down at him, well satisfied with the conquest she had made. She touched his hair, a gesture that brought the blood up under his skin, then sat back against the cushions, a pretty, fragile queen looking for strong arms and ready swords to protect her. "It may be a hard service, Mordred. A lonely queen needs all the love and protection that her fighting men can give her. For that you will be trained alongside your brothers, and live with them here in my palace. Now you will go down to Seals'
    Bay to take leave of your parents, then bring your things back here."
    "Today? Now?"
    "Why not? When decisions are taken they should be acted upon. Gabran will go with you, and a slave to carry your goods. Go now."
    Mordred, still too awed and confused to point out that he could carry all his worldly goods himself, and in one hand, got to his feet, then stooped to kiss the hand she held out to him. It was noticeable that this time the courtly move came almost naturally. Then the queen turned away, dismissing him, and Gabran was at his elbow, hurrying him from the room, along the corridor, and out into the courtyard where the coloured sky of sunset was already fading into dusk, and the air smelled of the smoke of fires where suppers were being cooked.
    A man, a groom by his dress, came up with a horse ready bridled. It was one of the sturdy island ponies, cream-coloured and as shaggy as a sheep.
    "Come," said Gabran, "we'll be late for supper as it is. You don't ride, I suppose? No? Well, get up behind me. The man can follow."
    Mordred hung back. "There's no need, I've nothing to carry, really. And you don't need to come either, sir. If you stay and get your supper now, I can run home and—"
    "You'll soon learn that when the queen says I have to go with you, then I have to go." Gabran did not trouble to explain that his orders had been even more explicit. "He is not to have speech alone with Sula,"
    Morgause had said. "Whatever she has guessed, she has told him nothing yet, it seems. But now that she is going to lose him, who knows what she may come out with? The man does not matter: He is too stupid to guess at the truth, but even he may give the boy the true tale of how he was brought, by arrangement, from Dunpeldyr. So take him, and stay with them, and bring him back quickly. I shall see to it that he does not go back there again."
    So Gabran said, crisply: "Come, your hand," and with Mordred behind him on the cob, and clinging to him like a young peregrine to its ball of fleece, he cantered off along the track that led to Seals' Bay.

4
    SULA HAD BEEN SITTING OUTSIDE the cottage door in the last of the daylight, gutting and splitting a catch of fish ready for drying. When the horse appeared at the head of the cliff path she had just carried the bucket of offal down to throw it onto the shingle, where the hens wrangled with the seabirds for their share of the stinking