“I know that,” Lance returned quietly. He waited, meeting Art’s eyes without challenge, until Art gave a shamefaced nod and looked away.
The high-pitched chatter faded off into the sound of the wind. Guy shrugged. “We’re all imagining things, if you ask me.”
Lance reached out a hand to still him. “Wait. Look!”
Two small ragged children had darted out of the granary’s far door. They were filthy and skeletally thin. They froze for an instant in the sunshine, staring directly at Art, Lance and Guy, and then before any of them could move or draw breath, melted like fish into shadowy water and disappeared.
Despite seeing them, Lance wondered if he was chasing ghosts. By the time he and the others had found the gap in the parapet wall, there was no sign of them, only a trace in the air—a fading whisper, the patter of bare soles on stone. There was barely space for a grown man to fit into the moss-lined hole. Art managed it, at the cost of some grazing. Lance, stripped down by illness, followed more easily, but burly Guy, who had never liked tight spaces, shook his head. “You must be joking.”
“All right.” Arthur grinned up at him. “We’d never get you out, and then there’d be another ghost in Din Guardi’s walls. Go and fetch Coel. He might know where this passage leads.”
Lance made his way a few yards down into the dark. “Come on,” he called. “We’ll lose them if we don’t go now. They looked like they were starving.”
“You should stay here. You’re still not well.”
“Oh, you want to go down there alone?”
“I’d rather stick pins under my nails.” His pupils were wide with fear. You’re made for the sun, Lance thought fervently. Sun and air. “All right, come with me, but I’m sending you back if you get tired. We’ll need torches. Guy, run and grab us a couple from the granary.”
Glad to do anything that didn’t involve squeezing into that dark hole, Guy ducked under the granary’s arch and took two cressets from the basket. He struck them into flaring light with a flint and passed them down into Art’s hands. “I could get some of my lads to do this, you know. You don’t have to pull the brats out with your own royal hands.”
“There’s no time.”
“Well, they’re only that traitor Anglian’s brood. Is this because you had the mother killed?”
Arthur winced and looked back over his shoulder at Lance. “No. Well, maybe. Go and fetch some men just in case, and some ropes and more cressets. I’ll see you soon—I hope.”
Lance was waiting at the first turn of the passage. “They went this way,” he said, taking the torch Arthur passed him. “I can still hear them. We have to move quietly, or we’ll scare them deeper still.”
By the flaring light, they began to scramble downwards into Din Guardi’s foundations. The hard rock had been roughly carved into steps at some distant time, and not used often since, to judge from the lichen and mosses growing where the last light filtered down. Between brief pauses to listen, Lance set a rapid pace, trying to ignore the ache of unused muscle in his legs, the breathless tugging in his chest. The children’s sounds were changing: there was no laughter now, only ragged panting, the odd high-pitched rasp like sobbing or bitten-back fear. “Here,” he called out, unconsciously dropping back into Elena’s tongue, the language of the mother, summoning her brood home from the dark. “Wait. We’re not going to hurt you.”
“That heathen babble won’t help,” Art said, a smile in his voice, slithering to a halt behind him. “They might know some Latin from Oesa, but that exhausts your shared languages.”
Lance shook his head at the lapse and tried again. “Manete, parvuli. Non vos nocebimus.” There was a listening silence, but then the receding slither of small feet came again. “We could get lost down here, you know,” he said, glancing back. Art’s face was composed, but Lance by now knew him well. “Why don’t you go and fetch someone who knows this place? It might make more sense.”
Art grimaced at the kindly offered get-out. “Thanks,” he said, “but I don’t think I’m to be allowed easy escapes in this life. Let’s go.”
Deeper and deeper, into the roots of the rock. How had the passages here been carved? Their glistening black walls felt the same as the rock of the breaking-wave crests to the north of Vindolanda, the whin-stone the Romans had used to pave their roads. It was backbreakingly hard to quarry or shape… Maybe they were following a natural fault, a split in Din Guardi’s foundation, but Lance thought he could still see remnants of steps, and the jagged arcs above his head had a regularity that suggested the work of men. “Watch out,” he said, grabbing Art’s wrist. “It’s getting steeper.”
“I know. I’m less worried now about getting lost than getting back up. I’m torn between telling you to turn round and begging you not to leave me alone down here.”
“I’m not going anywhere. You try calling them.” He smiled. “You might sound more commanding.”
Art shuddered. “Wonderful,” he said. “Kindly Lance has failed, so let’s make the bullying king have a try. I’m not an absolute savage, you know, no matter what you might...”
But whatever his defence might have been, the truth caught up with him, a hungry wolf. Cowering in the crevice a few feet below them, a tiny boy, so filthy and ragged he had blended into the rockface, suddenly scrambled upright, pointed a finger straight at him and whimpered, “Him! The king who killed my mother!”
“Lance,” Art said faintly, putting a hand to the wall. “What is that—some kind of hobgoblin?”
“Of course not. Just a little boy.” Lance scrambled down the rockface far enough to grab the child and haul it into his arms. He carried it into the torchlight, rat’s tails of dirty fair hair swinging into its eyes. “Poor thing. He’s skin and bone. Did he see the woman slain?”
“I don’t know what came over me. I’d just seen you carried off the battlefield, and... I thought you were dying. I only remember my rage. It was so pure and bright... The woman was with the other prisoners. She was laughing. She broke away from Guy and ran at me.”
“You did it with your own hand?”
“Yes. I didn’t even think.”
Lance glanced up at him quietly. “Where did it happen?”
“In the storage rooms to the north of the keep.”
Lance put a hand to the back of the child’s bowed head. “Is that where you were hiding, after the fight? With your sister?” He waited until the little skull moved in a nod. “Did you see it happen?”
Another nod. Arthur drew a ragged breath. “I wouldn’t have… I didn’t know they were there.”