Free Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

and long shadows streamed away ahead of him. The night's dew shivered and steamed on the fine grasses, on the rushes smoothed by the light wind, till the whole landscape thrilled and shimmered with light, a softer repetition of the endless, achingly bright shimmer of the sea. Overhead, the clouds wisped back, and the air filled with singing as the larks launched themselves from their nests in the heather. The air rippled with song as the land with light. Soon he reached the summit of the moor, and before him stretched the long, gentle slope towards the cliffs, and beyond them again the endless, shining sea.
    From this point he could see, clear across the sea in the early light, the hills of the High Island. Beyond them lay the mainland — the real mainland, the great and wonderful land that the islanders called, half in jest, half in ignorance, "the next island." Many times, from his father's boat, he had seen its northern cliffs, and had tried to imagine the rest; its vastness, its forests, its roads and ports and cities. Today, though hidden from view, it had ceased to be a dream. It was the High Kingdom, to which he would one day travel, and where he would one day matter. If his new status was to mean anything, it would mean that.
    He would see to it.
    He laughed aloud with joy, and ran on.
    He came to the turf cutting. He paused, deliberately lingering by the ditch he had dug only yesterday.
    How long ago, already, it seemed. Brude would have to finish it now — alone, too, though lately he had been complaining about pains in his back. Perhaps, thought the boy, since they were apparently going to leave him free to come and go from the palace, he could come down early each day for an hour before the other boys were up, and finish the digging. And if he were given real princely status, with servants, he could maybe set them to the task, or to the collecting of the lichens for his mother's dyestuffs. The basket was still standing there by the diggings, where he had left it yesterday, forgotten. He snatched it up, and ran on down the track.

    The gulls were up, and screaming. The sound met him, raw on the wind from the sea. Something else was on that wind, a strange smell, and in the gulls' screaming a high shiver of panic that touched him like the edge of a knife. Smoke? There was usually smoke from the cottage, but this was a different smoke, a sour, chilled and sullen emanation, carrying with it a smell that mocked the good scent of roasting meat on the rare days when Sula had meat in the pot. This was not a good smell; it was sickening, an ugly mockery, making the morning foul.
    Mordred's breeding, perverse though it was, had made him the child of one fighting king, and the grandson, twice over, of another. This combined with his hard peasant upbringing to make fear, for him, something to be faced immediately, and found out. He flung the basket of lichens down and ran full tilt along the cliff path, to where he could see down into the bay that had been his home.
    Had been. The familiar cottage, with its clay oven, its lines of pegged fish, the hanging festoons of drying nets — all had vanished. Only the four walls of his home still stood, blackened and smoking with the sluggish, stinking smoke that befouled the sea-wind. Most of the outer roof slabs still lay in place, held as they were by stone supports built into the walls, but those in the center were thinner, and here and there had been pegged into place by driftwood. The thatch of the roof, dry with summer, had burned fiercely, and, with the pegs destroyed, the slabs had sagged, tilted, and then cracked, sliding down with their blazing load of thatch into the room below, making a pyre of what had been his home.
    It must be, in very truth, a pyre. For now, retchingly, he recognized the smell that had reminded him of Sula's cooking pots. Sula herself, with Brude, must be inside — underneath that pile of burned rubble.
    The roof had fallen directly over their