When First I Met My King (Book One in the Arthur Trilogy)

By Harper Fox

Once upon a time, there was a winter that wouldn’t end. And all that’s standing between the people of White Meadows and starvation is a young man called Lance.

He’s sixteen years old, and for all his courage and hunting skills, he’s running out of fight. His family has been wiped out in a border raid, and he’s drowning in loneliness. When strangers arrive at White Meadows, all Lance can think of is using his last strength to drive them away.

But these men have come in peace, not to burn and destroy. Among them is a hot-headed, utterly charming prince-in-training named Arthur.

For Lance, Arthur’s arrival is like the return of the sun. The prince has everything – learning, battle skills, a splendid destiny. But as the days unfold in the remote northern settlement in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, it soon becomes clear that Arthur needs Lance, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper Fox
• Release date: Sep 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781910224793

Harper Fox

Harper Fox is the author of many critically acclaimed M/M Romance novels, including Stonewall Book Award-nominated Scrap Metal and Brothers Of The Wild North Sea, Publishers Weekly Best Book 2013. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future – after an appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to show the romance implicit in everyday life, and she writes a sharp action scene too.

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When First I Met My King

(Book One in the Arthur Trilogy)

Copyright September 2017 by Harper Fox

Cover art by Harper Fox

Cover photo licensed through Shutterstock

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

When First I Met My King

(Book One in the Arthur Trilogy)

Harper Fox

Dedication:

For Moses –

my companion for all those early-morning writing hours.

Goddess rest you, little friend.

Chapter One

Once upon a time there was a king.

Once upon a time there was a king, and his kingdom was an abandoned fort and twenty bare acres of moorland, far and away in the north of Britannia, shadowed by Hadrian’s great Wall. Vindolanda, the Romans had called it. The fair meadows.

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king’s name was Tertius, which means third. His mother, who believed in the ancient magic of threes, had rejoiced at his birth. Three fine sons!

The year before, the king had been a prince, just like Primus and Secundus, his brothers. Their father—a tribal chieftain named Ban, who’d served with the army, learned Latin, earned honours and been let keep his land—had named his boys with numbers in this dispassionate Roman way, but he hadn’t loved them any the less for that.

Tertius had inherited his kingdom one wild spring night, when a gale had blown back from Ban’s fair meadows the sounds and scents of a raiding party of Picts, ferocious hunters no longer held in check by Roman swords. Tertius had been away, hunting on the ridge beyond the Wall. He’d become so adept with his father’s army spear that he’d earned the nickname Lance.

He was fifteen summers old when he’d come down from the hills at dawn to the charred remains of the village. He ought to have been sixteen, but that year summer hadn’t come, and everyone left alive had stopped counting.

***

The boy and the priest sat in the firelight. The boy, rapidly outgrowing his food supply, pulled skinny knees to his chest. His eyes were wide and dark. That was an interesting story, he said, with the politeness his mother had instilled into him even towards such strange new holy men as Father Tomas. But I can’t believe this endless cold has come because my people used to worship dragons.

Tomas poked the fire. His fleas were biting, his bones aching and old beneath an older, hand-me-down cassock. "Used to? he snarled. Did I not see the baker’s wife and daughter traipsing off to your damned mother’s thrice-accursed cave this very sunset?"

Lance uncurled and stood up. Curse the cave all you like. Be very careful, though, how you speak of my mother.

He was nothing but a long strip of sinew in ragged deerskin jerkin and leggings. His cloak had more substance than he did, but that had been his mother’s, the murdered Queen Elena’s. He wore it on his back like a shielding wing. Fear entered Tomas’s heart. Forgive me, he rasped. God knows she alone showed me kindness when I came here, stopped the brats in the street from pelting me with eggs and rotten fruit. It was long ago, years before your birth. I came from the shrine at Brocolitia, you know, after Emperor Theodosius ordered the temple of Mithras there destroyed.

Another tale. The boy had heard this one before, but still he leaned on his father’s spear and swayed with longing. Words—even the meanderings of this worn-out old man—could lift his mind away from his broken, icebound world and into undreamed freedoms. He and his brothers and sisters had sat around Ban, Elena and Tomas, like baby birds in a circle, eyes and ears stretched open wide for story.

But this night was even colder than the last. You’re hungry, he observed. And cold. You and I are like those crabs you told me about, the ones who climb into the shells of creatures larger than themselves and try to make their home there—in this great house, I mean. Now that the others are gone.

A praetor’s house, Tomas declared. Your father did well to take it when the soldiers left. A proper place for a king, child—authority must be preserved. And it stood, good Roman brick as it is, when the wretched thatched huts burned down.

Lance shivered. Yes. I think it best we bring the villagers in here tonight. If we gather all the fuel we have, we can fire up the old heating channels under the floor.

Villagers? And lay my head down beside that of the tanner and the butcher, I suppose? Don’t be absurd. I forbid it.

The boy straightened up. He banged the haft of the spear on the floor. That’s unfortunate, he said, because I command it. Have the beasts brought inside, too, and pen them by the doors to keep out the wind. See to it, priest, and I will put food in your belly before the set of the moon. I’m going to hunt.

He strode through Ban’s empty hallways, cloak streaming from his shoulders. The snow had ceased, but that was because the cold had turned the skies to iron, unable to shed their burden. A ringing vacancy had opened up across the moors. A slow wind, its progress like a soundless moan, was pushing through every window and door of the praetor’s house.

In the chamber Ban had shared with Elena, three surviving deerhounds lay in a heap on the bed. Lance set the spear aside and clapped his hands, and they got down reluctantly, tucking their tails. He reached into the still-warm pile of clothes beneath them and extracted one of Ban’s woollen tunics. He unfastened his jerkin, shrugged out of it and quickly pulled the tunic over his head.

No, not Ban’s. This garment smelled of dogs and better days. Lance stared through the moonlit weave. Elena, happier with a spear than a spindle in her hand herself, had nevertheless made each of her three fine sons his own tartan to wear, and this one belonged to Secundus, who’d beaten Lance into the world by the barest half hour.

Secundus, his brother and twin. Like Romulus and Remus, Ban had declared, proudly showing them off in the temple of Mithras, whose destruction was not nearly as complete as poor Tomas thought. Like Holly and Oak, Elena had cried out in the depths of her sacred cave. Lance, who veered from boyhood to manhood and back six times at least in a day, sat down on the edge of the bed and wept.

He tried, anyway. But his heart was like a dead coal. His sobs tore at him like sickness. He should have given all the clothes away, if he’d really cared for the souls who lived on at Vindolanda. Ban’s Roman togas and cloaks could have been sold, and Elena’s fine robes, because she’d been a queen indeed, a Votadini noble from the tribe beyond the Wall. But he hadn’t. He’d left it all here to be slept on by dogs. He didn’t care, even if every breath he drew through tunic’s fabric put his brother back in his arms. On cold nights they too had slept tangled like deerhounds, unaware of where one of them stopped and the other began.

Lance fell silent and sat up. The dogs were watching him. When he got to his feet, they tried to follow him, but he stopped them at the door. He was the king of Vindolanda, after all. No, he said. Not you last ones. You stay here and mind my fort.

Chapter Two

The night wasn’t fit for a dog. Lance’s deerskin boots tracked firmly over the turf, but he understood that his body was obeying him from habit and willpower alone. The air was cold in a way he’d never experienced before. His chest made a hollow sound when he breathed in. He climbed the slope to the main street as quickly as his stiffening limbs would allow.

The road lay like a frozen moonbeam. Just within Lance’s earliest memories, chariots had bowled along it, and its stones had rung to the beat of gleaming horses. The beasts and the men astride them had been mythical heroes to the boy, from hooves to scarlet crests. Not all the soldiers had vanished, of course—many were locals, like Ban, or tough souls from Gaul, or Batavia over the northern sea, used to the climate and fond of their native-born wives. They had merged into the landscape like rain. Only now, ten winters later, were green cracks appearing in the finely laid stone.

Two women were running down the moonbeam. The elder was covering ground with long, efficient strides, but the girl beside her was stumbling, sobs breaking out of her in clouds of steam. The baker’s wife, Cerys—one of Elena’s cave-sisters, up to her elbows in dough by day, on nights like this a priestess—and her daughter, Lance recognised, raising a hand to hail them.

They came to a ragged halt in front of him. Lance, Cerys said. Ice had formed around her lips and in the pleats of her long braid. You can’t go up there tonight.

The cold had entered Lance’s skull. On some full-moon nights, his mother had allowed him, alone of all his brothers, to accompany her to the cave. On others, he’d been smilingly ordered to stay clear. Is it... Is it because of the dragon?

What? No. But the wild things are beginning to die out in the open. A deer without a mark on her, just lying by the lough. We’d have brought her down with us, but the girl began to choke on the very air.

They were both dressed for the rites, in long dark woollen robes. Sheepskin capes too, but none of it was doing Dara any good. She was doubled up, clutching her mother’s arm. Like most children of the settlement, she’d been hanging on by a thread, waiting for springtime, sunshine and good food. Lance took off his cloak. Why did you go up?

Why does Father Tomas drag us to his miserable hut of a church in all weathers and winds?

Because he thinks his god gets angry and sends punishments. Is that what the dragon does too?

Cerys looked disgusted. Of course not. But she misses your mother. And she sees so little of the rest of us these days, she’s beginning to fear we’re dead.

She’s very nearly right. Lance bundled Dara into the cloak. Take her down. Tomas is bringing everyone into the praetorium overnight—look, I can see their lights. Go there.

What about you? Take back your cloak, stupid boy!

Make her breathe through the wool. I’m only going far enough to fetch that deer. We need meat.

He watched them retreat down the hill. Then he turned to face north, where the Herdsman stretched out starry limbs across the sky. At the Herdsman’s foot, the star the Romans called Arcturus glowed like a tawny coal, comforting somehow amongst all the bitter diamonds. In his right hand the Herdsman bore an upturned crescent, hard to see against the