Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

I hope you enjoyed the sight of Falvo, Benedict and Philip coming down the hill towards your gates. Ludmilla sends her love to all of you.

Be well. Ambrose.

Ambrose's comments on Owain of the Caves troubled me almost as much as his tidings of Ironhair and Carthac, and the fact that I should be troubled by such a seemingly insignificant thing increased my uneasiness. So to rid myself of the ridiculous sense of wrongness where no wrongness ought to be, I took great pains to think the entire thing through logically, seeking the non sequitur that must be there. I found the answer in what was perhaps the most innocuous line of the text: "I ... made sure to betray nothing, even though he is an old friend of yours ... "

The inconsistency was one of allusion rather than fact. Owain was one of a group of Uther's Celtic captains who had eventually made their way to Camulod after deciding they could no longer stay in Cambria with Uther dead. They had all been Uther's friends as well as followers, utterly loyal to him, and upon their return from the wars against Lot of Cornwall, mere weeks after Uther's death, they had found themselves, collectively, unable or unwilling to cast their lot so soon in favour of one or any of the contenders for Uther's vacant kingship. Unfortunately, each of the contending warlords had construed such neutrality to entail hostility, and the group had become personae non gratae in their own homeland.

After four of their number had been murdered individually by stealth, leaving only fourteen of them alive, they decided to come down out of the mountains and offer their allegiance to me, and I was glad to accept both it and them. They had been my companions and comrades in arms for years by that time, and that association breeds strong ties. But there was only one of them, Huw Strongarm, son of the bowyer Cymric who made the first longbow of yew, whom I would think of calling a real friend. Though Owain and I had marched and camped together, and had fought in several engagements together, and I knew that Uther trusted him as he did all the others, he had been one of Uther's men and no more than that to me. And yet, I thought, he might have harboured more friendly feelings for me, in the most casual way, just as I had held amity for bam without conscious volition.

I would tune dismissed the question then and thought no more of it, save that one matter had been plaguing me for years: someone had betrayed young Arthur's security to Peter Ironhair and smoothed the way for Ironhair's assassins to steal into Camulod and attempt the life of the boy. In that attack, which was undone only by Shelagh's quick thinking and her mastery of her deadly throwing- knives, Hector's wife had been violated and murdered and Arthur and the other children had barely escaped with their lives. Someone we knew, some trusted person within Camulod, had betrayed our trust and remained concealed. That knowledge had sown fear and suspicion among us, who had never known distrust prior to then, and had resulted in my flight—for it was nothing less—with the boy in tow, from Camulod to Mediobogdum.

And now Owain of the Caves, who had been in Cambria when Ironhair was fighting there to install Carthac as the region's king, and who had been in Camulod at the time of the invidious attempt on Arthur's life, was asking questions of our whereabouts and calling me an old and valued friend. I knew that I was probably inferring too much from what Ambrose had written, but the fact remained that someone in Camulod was steeped in treachery and in the pay of Ironhair. Owain had mentioned nothing of the boy. Nor had he need to. In finding me, he would have found Arthur. And now, with Ambrose's acknowledgment that our presence here in Ravenglass was no secret today in Camulod, I was forced to accept the inevitable corollary: the traitor might or might not be Owain of the Caves, but if the betrayer was still in Camulod, and I must assume he or she was, then the boy was no longer absolutely safe here, and there was nothing I could do to change that, short of fleeing again, this time to the Caledonian Isles.

Unsure of precisely how to proceed, since my suspicions were purely personal and very probably unfounded, I yet sat down and wrote to Ambrose at length, telling him of my reactions to his letter and asking him to keep an eye and an ear open and attentive to Owain of the Caves from that time on, taking note of how inquisitive he might appear to be about me. When I had written it, I read it over and again, then sealed it and dispatched it back to Camulod with the returning troops whose tour here in the north-west was over.

That done, I led the newly arrived officers to Ravenglass within the week and presented than to Derek, inviting him to visit the fort, where we would introduce him formally to the new garrison. He welcomed our three friends and their junior officers magnificently, mounting a banquet in their honour the night we arrived and arranging for them to tour the entire area around the town—inspecting it from a military, defensive perspective—the following morning.

On returning from the tour, while the others were sampling the best brews of the town's hostelries, I took Derek aside and told him about Ambrose's letter, my suspicions about Owain and my consequent fears for Arthur's safety here in Ravenglass and for the security of Camulod itself. He made no attempt to make light of my concerns; he listened gravely to all I had to say and then attempted to put my mind at ease.

There had been few strangers in Ravenglass for several years, he pointed out, since the death of Liam Condranson and the expulsion of his followers. Most of the traffic passing through the port nowadays was local, made up mainly of fishermen, with the only heavy ships and galleys being those of our Eirish friends and other peaceful clans trading from further north along the coast. Barely one visitor in any score was a stranger nowadays, and he promised to make sure from this day on that every unknown person coming through was watched by his people at all times.

Greatly reassured by his level-headed reaction to my worries, I thanked him and sat back, aware that he was staring at me and plainly had more to say.

"What?" I asked him. "You have a question? Spit it out."

"When will you be leaving?"

"What?" His question was simple and straightforward, but it surprised me so much that its immediate meaning was beyond me.

"When will you be leaving, you and your people? Don't tell me you haven't been thinking about it. You've been here now for more than six years. That's how long you said you'd stay, when first you came: five or six years, until the boy was grown. He's grown."

"I haven't been thinking about it. And the boy's not grown—not quite."

"Horseshit. For all intents and purposes your boy's a man. He's almost fifteen. If he hasn't started tupping the wenches already, it's only because Shelagh keeps him on a tight leash and an early curfew. But curfews are for evading and leashes were made to be slipped. Short of iron bars across the doors and windows, nothing's going to keep the boy inside at night if he wants to be outside, baying at the moon. Personally, I'd wager he's had more than a few of my young women spread-eagled ere now. God knows there's few around here that would fight him off. He's too good-looking by half."

I simply sat and stared at him, hearing the truth in his words. Arthur, I knew, was almost through his transition from boyhood to manhood, but I had never really thought of him until now as being sexually awakened. As soon as Derek spoke the words I saw the extent of my own blindness, and I asked myself how I could think of myself as being attuned to Arthur's needs and yet remain completely unaware of this. Tress, I knew, must be aware of it, but she had said nothing of it to me. I resolved to ask her about it that very night, then made shift to empty my mind of that and to focus my thoughts upon Derek's surprising question.