Jack Whyte - Uther

"Uh, the King is looking for you, and no one knew where you were. Master Lestrun sent people to search for you. One of them saw me and sent me here to see if you were at home. Lestrun says you are to come immediately."

Lagan sighed and bent to pick up his rags and a pot of linseed oil, placing them on the small, roofed shelf against the back wall of the solid log-and-clay house that was his home. "Well, when the King commands, we must obey." He cocked his head at his son. "I don't suppose you could have any idea what this is about?"

The boy shook his head, wide-eyed and mute, and his father nodded and began to walk around to the front of the house, the boy trailing behind him.

Lydda was waiting by the open door, Lagan's long travelling cloak folded over her arm.

"You might need this."

Lagan eyed It distastefully, shrugging his shoulders beneath the thick, warm tunic of fleece that already encased him from neck to mid-thigh. "I doubt it. If I do, I'll come back for it. Lot may be the King and his affairs important, but I am not leaving on any journey in mid-morning without bidding a proper farewell to my family simply to keep him in a pleasant good humour at having his own way immediately."

Lydda smiled at her husband. "So you say, old Gruffy, but you know you do everything he asks you to, exactly when he wishes ii to be done."

Lydda was a tall and stately woman, but her husband placed his arm about her shoulders and drew her easily beneath his own. She fitted against his side with the ease and compliance of long custom, and he dipped his face to kiss the top of her head. "I had better see what he wants. It might be urgent. But let's hope it doesn't involve a journey. If it does, I'll come back home before I leave." He squeezed her against him and she raised her mouth to his kiss. Then she leaned in the doorway, still clutching the spurned cloak, to watch him until he disappeared from sight.

Cardoc sat on the doorstep, watching his father and saying nothing.

Lydda reached down and tousled his hair. "What are you up to today?"

The boy turned to look up at her, teeth flashing in his shy smile. "Oh, nothing much. I was playing with Tomas and Ewan. I think I'll go back."

"Away you go, then." She watched him vanish, too, then moved back into the house, leaving the door ajar, wondering as she went what it was that had Gulrhys Lot so excited this time. She liked the King well enough, she supposed, having known him for many years, and his friendship with her husband had broadened to include her, too, but she would not have been prepared to take a blood oath that she trusted him entirely. Lagan, on the other hand, was utterly loyal to him. "The King's true man," she had heard others call him on several occasions, and the tone in which the words were said invariably left her wondering whether or not she had imagined resentment or sarcasm or even sneering condescension in the utterance.

The two men had been bosom companions since early boyhood, and their friendship had grown and strengthened. Since Cardoc's birth, however, Lot's visits had become far less frequent.

Lagan would hear no ill of "Gully," though the gods knew well that there was enough ill being spoken of the King to deafen all the underworld. The tales of atrocities committed by Gulrhys Lot and in his name by others—most particularly by those loathsome Outland creatures of his, Caspar and Memnon—were harrowing and plentiful. Lydda suppressed a shudder, remembering the King's hideous Egyptian sorcerers, long since vanished from Cornwall and unmourned by any. Rumour—violently and vehemently denied by Lot himself—had it that they had died in Camulod among the godless savages up there. If so, Lydda, thought, the world was a better place.

As for the tales and rumours of the horrors that went on in the King's name, Lagan had never seen the slightest evidence to support their truth, and so he gave them no credence. Lydda knew how much of Lagan's value to the King lay in his innocence and integrity. She suspected that Gully would go to great, even extreme lengths to hide his less pleasant doings from her husband's eyes and ears. And that suspicion troubled her deeply, for it suggested that her fine and noble husband could be gulled and thought a fool, and she knew he was no such thing. Innocent, honest, trusting, loyal and open-minded, yes, he was all of those, and prepared at all times to extend the benefit of doubt until faced with irrefutable evidence of fault or guilt. Once faced with such proof, however, her husband was implacable. That same sense of perfect probity which led him to expect the best and the finest, noblest behaviour also enabled him, when necessary, to be the harshest in securing justice and prosecuting the guilty.

She stopped by the window, arrested by that thought, and stood staring out into the bright morning light, seeing nothing.

Did Gully see Lagan as a fool—gullible, trusting and capable of being swayed? Could Gully be that evil, that manipulative? Lydda blinked and shook her head, thrusting the thought aside, assuring herself that she was being silly. She looked about her, trying to remember what she had been doing before, and then went back to her household work.

As Lagan crossed from the shade between the houses fronting the King's residence and stepped into the bright, morning sunlight, he sensed, rather than saw, the King's guards stiffening to attention at his approach. Lagan Longhead had never liked the guards, even before the death of old Duke Emrys, whose fear of being murdered had led to their posting. Emrys was long since dead, murdered by time and ill health, and his guards had been helpless to forestall either of those stealthy marauders. But the guards remained, their presence now surrounding and supposedly sustaining Emrys's son and heir, Gulrhys Lot, self-appointed King of Cornwall.

As he strode through the main portals into the elaborate compound, Lagan felt the eyes of the guards still upon him, and he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. Three men stood on either side of the main gate, and he knew they had a superior nearby within the walls. They would not stop Lagan, for they knew him as the King's closest friend—some malicious whisperers said his only friend—and knew that Lagan Longhead's access to the King was unlimited, a fact that set him above and apart from all others.

Inside the portal lay a narrow yard, a catchment area some fifteen paces long and six wide, with a guard hut for the duly sergeant directly to the right of the entrance. At the far end, facing Lagan and bristling protectively at his approach, two more guards watched him, unsmiling, their eyes scanning him from head to toe until he had passed between them through a massive pair of hand-hewn, iron- studded doors and into the coolness of the large hall beyond.

Eight men, Lagan was thinking as he blinked in the sudden darkness of the hall. Eight armed Outlander mercenaries to guard the King in his own hall from the advances of his own people. There was something fundamentally wrong in that.

Pausing just inside the door. Lagan allowed his eyes to adjust. A heavy, sour stink of old woodsmoke hung in the air, and thin, eddying wisps of it drifted from the ashes in the massive fireplace in the single stone wall opposite the door. The King's hounds, eight huge, rough-haired beasts the size of small ponies, lay sprawled in the rushes that covered the earthen floor, and only one of them lifted its head to gaze, tongue lolling, at the newcomer. Apart from two more armed guards flanking another doorway in the wall to Lagan's left, the animals were the enormous room's only occupants.

Lagan coughed, his lungs protesting against the reek of the foul, smoky air, and made his way towards the guards as soon as he could see his way between the heavy tables and benches that strewed the floor. When he was within two paces, one of the guards swept his sword from its sheath with a slither and brought the point up threateningly, its tip angled at Lagan's throat. Lagan stopped dead, tilting his chin downward to stare at the sword's tip, then looked into the guard's eyes.