The Prince in Waiting Read Free Page A

or even walk without pain, and he had kept to his bed for two months. But it had been remarked that he walked well enough when the Autumn Feast came round, and rode to the Hunt afterward.
    And all this time the reputation which his father had gained, for himself and for the city, was dissipating. It did not happen at once: our warriors had made themselves feared and respected as far afield as Guildford and Newbury and Ringwood, and our neighbors were glad enough at first to be free of their attentions. But lately it was known that they had begun to mock him and us. Last year the men of Alton had ridden into our lands while Stephen lay on his bed, with blocks of wood tied to his feet to straighten out the kink he was supposed to have in his spine, and carried away more than four score head of cattle. It was important that this year we should go after them and teach them a lesson, but no one really believed that our Prince would move. Year after year he had built the city’s walls higher and deepened the ditch beyond them.
    Aunt Mary said: “There is no sense in fighting for the sake of fighting. They wound and kill each other and are no better for it.”
    Peter shook his head. “That is the way a woman thinks.”
    He smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. She impatiently shook herself free; she would not admit how much she welcomed the signs of his affection.
    â€œIt is not a question of men or women,” she said. “I am not against fighting—or killing—if it is for something worthwhile. But not for empty glories, paid for with real deaths.”
    Peter smiled past her at me. What she said meant nothing to him, nor would it have to any warrior. A man fought for the sake of fighting, for his own honor and the honor of his city. Accepting the complicity he offered me, proud of being spoken to as someone who would one day be a warrior and understood the way a warrior thought, I said:
    â€œI wonder how our Prince will get out of it this year. Maybe he will have them take him into Sincross!”
    Sincross was the big house in which the old men lived whose wits had failed through age. It was a feeble enough joke at best but as I saw Peter frown I remembered something. Younger people also were taken there when the Spirits had crazed their brains. This had been the case with Aunt Mary’s brother many years ago, even before Peter’s birth, and he had died in madness when not much more than twenty. And I remembered too that I had heard talk once, among servants who did not realize I was listening, that it had been thought the same might happen to Aunt Mary herself at the time my father divorced her, so strange she had been and so deeply sunk in melancholy.
    I was struck into confusion by my thoughtlessness and could not look at Aunt Mary. But she seemed anyway to pay no heed to my remark. She was concerned with Peter, with making sure that he put on his scarf and wound it tight around his body under his leather coat before going out into the cold. As a child, she reminded him, scolding gently, he had had a weakness in his chest and he must take care.
    I left with him and watched him unhitch his horse. Peter’s frown had gone. He offered to ride me up the hill on his saddlebow but I refused. I might not have been chosen for the Contest but I felt I was too old for that. Until I had a horse of my own, I would walk.
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    Before I could go skating I had to go home and get my skates and so I made my way up the High Street rather than along the river bank. It was a little less cold, or perhaps seemed so because my stomach was full. In a few places, missed by the polymuf street cleaners, snow lay in frozen, dirt-specked ridges. The last fall had been a week ago. The sky was hazy with a watery sun peering through. Winter’s grip seemed as firm as ever. Carts creaked past me, one of them piled high with fodder. I had heard my father say that supplies were very