Page 33 of When First I Met My King

“Put your trust in time, as old Ector would say. And get your priest—ashesays, in that lovely epistola you carry with you everywhere, and sleep with under your pillow—to teach you how to write.”

“How do youknowall this? About Ector, and Art, and me, and—”

“And your mother, too.”

“What?”

“You’d better turn away, boy. It’s rude to watch an old woman while she’s changing.”

Sharply he obeyed. All around him the air was thickening, pressing on his skin and the depths of his ears like the shift before a storm. “Please, Viviana. My mother?”

When her voice resumed, it was wild, weirdly low to the ground, words from a throat not designed for them. “Don’t fear death, Lance. Dying can be bad, but death... We come from the earth on the spine of the dragon, and she takes us home again, that’s all. Tell this to the king. Let him not sunder the contract, the ancient, loving kinship between men and the land. It’s not too late. That’s what your mother says. Oh, and the usual—what a fine boy you are, and how proud of you she is, and all the rest of it. Yes, yes, my dear priestess. We know all that. He knows.”

Lance knew, but still he wanted to beg the old woman to go on. He was breathing a scent he’d thought had passed forever from the world: warm fur and meadowsweet, the fragrance of Elena’s winter cloak. Still there was something he wanted more. “I will learn to write,” he said, his throat hot and painful with yearning. “But it’s weeks since Art sent me my letter, and will be many more before he’ll receive my reply. Is he... Can you...”

“Oh, you think I can just lift the roof off his Great Hall at Camelet and peer inside, to see him feasting with all his hard-won allies at his round table—trying to stop the brothers from the Out Isles from killing one another to gain that empty place at his right hand?”

Lance shivered in pleasure. Now he could smell crushed moss on the lough-side rocks, and taste, as if Art’s mouth was pressed to his once more, the promises and salt of his farewell. “Yes,” he said to Viviana, or the creature she’d become. “I think you can.”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it? There he is. He’s well, never fear, only tired of carousing in the name of diplomacy, and wishing more than anything else under heaven that...” She paused, then gave a sudden shout of laughter. “Ah, the poor bearcub! A girl in each arm, the world at his feet—and nothing in his head but thoughts of you.”