THE CHRISTMAS FOLD! IT HAS BEEN BREACHED.
For four days everything my father has told me has buzzed inside my head and my heart. It has followed me everywhere—the hall, my writing-room, the stables, the church, up and down the stream. The only way I can escape is into my other world: my obsidian.
But what kind of escape is that? Arthur-in-the-stone is no more Sir Ector’s son than I am Sir John’s son. But I never knew that until I pulled the sword from the stone, and Sir Ector told me King Uther was my father and Ygerna my mother. When I saw myself in the stone, begging Sir Pellinore to knight me, and dreaming butterflies into the fists of Sir Lamorak and Sir Owain, and riding to London, I never realized I was also the baby the hooded man delivered to Sir Ector and his wife. So now at last I understand why the stone showed me King Uther and Ygerna. They’re the beginning of my own stone-story.
In the stone, Sir William tried to kill me when he ambushed me up in the tree. But I killed him. And then, when he came here before Christmas, he wounded me. Sometimes what happens in my life echoes what happens in the stone, sometimes it’s the other way round. But my stone also shows me people and places I’ve never seen before—the fortress of Tintagel, King Uther, Ygerna, the hooded man.
The archbishop is standing beside the sword in the stone. Around him stand all the great men of Britain, and around them, packing the whole churchyard and the highway beyond it, jostle the people of London.
One by one the earls and lords and knights step up onto the plinth. They grunt and strain and yell and spit on their palms, they growl and crack their bones and curse: but not one of them can shift the sword in the stone.
“Sir Ector tells us his squire Arthur can do it,” the archbishop says.
“I swear it,” says my father.
“Prove it!” shout one hundred knights, and they’re none too friendly.
“Show us, Arthur,” the archbishop says to me.
So I step up onto the plinth for the third time. I know what I have to do. I gaze at the sword until the stamping earls and the hooting lords and the whistling knights and all the people of London seem to fall away from me, and there is a great space around me. I stare until there’s nothing else in the world except for the sword and me…
First they gasp, the earls and lords and knights, like a hundred swords cutting the cold air; then for a moment they’re silent, and then they all begin to shout. They’re angry, they argue.
But look! The hooded man is stepping out of the crowd of townspeople. I didn’t even know he was here.
He works his way through the throng and steps up onto the plinth beside the archbishop and me.
“A boy!” he calls out, and his grand, dark voice rings around the crowd. “A boy who can pull this sword from the stone, when all you grown men, you great men cannot. This seems like a miracle!” The hooded man paused. “And that’s what Christians call it. A miracle!”
The tide of voices rises; it swells and rolls around the churchyard; then it ebbs again.
The hooded man raises his right hand. “I have helped four kings of Britain,” he calls out. “Listen carefully!
“As soon as King Uther saw Ygerna, he burned with passion for her, and he followed her and Duke Gorlois into Cornwall. On the same night Gorlois was killed, I changed Uther’s appearance, so that he looked exactly like Ygerna’s husband. In every part of his body. Then Uther went to Ygerna in her chamber—in the fortress at Tintagel. And that night Ygerna conceived a child.”
“Impossible!” one knight shouts.
“Rubbish!”
“Prove it!”
“Do you disbelieve your own king?” the hooded man asks. “Many men here heard Uther’s dying words. ‘I have a son who was and will be.’ That’s what your king told you. ‘I give my son God’s blessing. Let him claim my crown.’”
The hooded man glares at all the earls, lords and knights. “You’re blinded by your own ambition,” he shouts. “Your jealousy! Listen to me! Ygerna gave birth to a son and, as he promised, King Uther entrusted that boy to me. He gave him to me, wrapped in gold cloth, on the day he was born.
“I know what you do not and see what you cannot,” the hooded man calls out. “Nothing in the world is impossible, but there’s always a price. I gave King Uther his heart’s desire, but he never saw his son again. Ygerna has never seen her son again. I found him foster parents, a knight and his wife who were loyal to the king, strict and kind. They had a young son of their own who was almost three, and his mother weaned him and fed Ygerna’s baby with her own milk. But I never told them whose child they were fostering.
“This foster father, this good knight, stands here before you,” the hooded man calls out. “So does his firstborn son. Sir Ector! Sir Kay!”
Now the hooded man turns toward me, and inclines his head. He opens the palm of his right hand. “King Uther’s son! Ygerna’s son!” he declares, and his voice is as powerful and thunder. “Arthur! The trueborn king of all Britain.”
Many of the townsfolk begin to clap and cheer, but most of the knights are shaking their heads.
“What if he is?” one man yells.
“A boy king?”
“Never!”
“Against the Saxons?”
The hooded man’s voice rises again over the restless crowd. “I told King Uther I would come for his son. And I tell you all, you men of Britain, I tell you all: Arthur’s time has come!”