My task, if ordered, was to fetch Morgan and her helpers who waited in a pig-herder's mud hovel at the foot of Caer Cadarn's western slope. The Princess Norwenna might want Christ's mother as her midwife, but Uther was ready with the older Gods if that newer one failed.

And the Christian God did fail. Norwenna's screams became fewer, but her whimpering more desperate until at last Bishop Bedwin's wife came from the hall and knelt shivering beside the High King's chair. The baby, Ellin said, would not come and the mother, she feared, was dying. Uther waved that last comment aside. The mother was nothing, only the child mattered, and only then if it was a boy.

“High Lord…” Ellin began nervously, but Uther was no longer listening. He tapped my head. “Go, boy,” he said, and I twisted out of his shadow, leaped down to the fort's interior and raced across the moon-shadowed whiteness between the buildings. The guards on the western gate watched me run by, then I was sliding and falling on the ice-chute of the western road. I slithered through snow, tore my cloak on a tree stump and fell heavily into some ice-laden brambles, but I felt nothing, except the huge weight of a kingdom's fate on my young shoulders. “Lady Morgan!” I shouted as I neared the hovel. “Lady Morgan!”

She must have been waiting, for the hovel door was immediately flung open and her gold-masked face shone in the moonlight. “Go!” she screeched at me, 'go!“ and I turned and started back up the hill while around me a pack of Merlin's orphans scrambled through the snow. They were carrying kitchen pots which they clashed together as they ran, though when the slope grew too steep and treacherous they were forced to hurl the pots on ahead and scramble up behind. Morgan followed more slowly, attended by her slave Sebile who carried the necessary charms and herbs. ”Set the fires, Derfel!" Morgan called up to me.

“Fire!” I shouted breathlessly as I scrambled through the gateway.