A sound broke from the crowd then, a long low murmur that rose and swelled and filled the arena like wind filling a sail. It was not a cheer and it was not a cry of fear. It was the sound of a thousand people all speaking at once and none of them knowing what to say. Tam was shouting now, real words at last, and the boy beside him was shouting too, and the old woman had lowered her hands from her face and was staring with her mouth open. The soldier in the front row sank back onto his seat and let go of his sword. On the platform Bram lifted his gold staff high, and his voice came out at last, cracked and old and shaking, and he cried out words that the whole arena heard, words about a sign and a wonder, and the crowd murmured louder still.
King Aldous did not speak. The king sat in his chair with his crown crooked and his robe slipped from his shoulder, and he stared down at the boy and the lion in the sand, and his face, which had smiled so easily when the gate opened, had gone still and pale and empty of all expression. He had ordered this trial. He had sent this boy to die before the crowd, and the crowd had seen the lion refuse him. The king looked at Osric, and Osric would not meet his eyes, and the king looked back at the sand, and his hands loosened their grip on the arms of his chair, and he sat back slowly, as if the strength had gone out of him all at once.
Corin sat in the sand with the black lion beside him, and he laid his hand on the lion's great head, and he felt the warmth of it and the slow rumble of its breath, and he thought of his mother Isolde, and he thought of the hills, and he thought of the cub in the snare with its leg caught and its eyes wide. He was nine, and he was small, and he was a goatherd's son in a rough tunic, and he sat in the middle of the arena with a beast that could have killed him with one blow, and the beast lay beside him like a dog beside its master. The sun beat down on the sand, and the crowd murmured, and the priest held his staff high, and the king could not speak, and Corin knew, though he did not yet know how, that nothing in his life would ever be the same again.
Two years before the arena, Corin was seven, and the hills were his whole world. He knew every path through the tall grass, and every stone where the lizards sunned themselves, and every hollow where the wild thyme grew thick and sweet. His father had died the winter before, and his mother Isolde kept the house with her loom and her goats, and Corin was the one who took the goats out each morning and brought them home each evening, with a stick in his hand and a piece of bread in his pocket and the sun on his back. He was small for seven, and quick, and he had learned to move quietly through the hills, because the goats startled easily, and a good goatherd learned to walk as softly as the wind.
It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was low and gold over the ridge, when Corin heard the crying. It was not the cry of a goat, and it was not the cry of a bird. It was a thin wild sound, half snarl and half wail, and it came from the thicket below the old oak, where the brambles grew so thick that even the goats would not push through them. Corin stopped and listened, and the sound came again, and then again, and each time it sounded weaker and more afraid. He left the goats where they stood and he went down through the grass toward the thicket, his stick in his hand, his heart beating fast, because he did not know what was caught down there, and a hurt beast was the most dangerous thing in the hills.
He pushed the brambles aside with his stick and he saw it. A black lion cub, no bigger than a large dog, lay tangled in a rope snare, and the rope had closed tight around its hind leg. The cub thrashed and twisted, and its claws raked the earth, and its teeth were bared, and its eyes were wide and golden and full of terror. The snare was a hunter's snare, a loop of stout rope tied to the trunk of the old oak, and it had been set for deer, but the cub had walked into it instead, and now the more it struggled the tighter the rope pulled. Corin could see where the rope had cut into the cub's leg, and the fur there was dark with blood, and the cub cried out again, a sound that went through Corin like a knife.
Corin crouched down at the edge of the thicket and stayed very still. He had seen his father free a goat from a snare once, and he remembered how his father had spoken, low and slow, and how he had moved, slow and steady, and how he had never once looked the beast in the eye, because a frightened beast took a straight look for a threat. So Corin spoke low and slow, in the soft voice his mother used when she sang the goats home, and he told the cub that he would not hurt it, and that he was only there to help, and that it must lie still. The cub watched him with its golden eyes, and its ears were flat against its head, and its body trembled, but it stopped thrashing, and it lay in the grass and watched him, and its breath came in short quick gasps.
Very slowly, Corin reached out toward the snare. The rope was rough and tight, and the knot was hard and small, and his small fingers worked at it while the cub lay still and watched him. The cub growled once, low in its throat, and Corin froze, and then he spoke again, low and slow, and the cub quieted, and Corin worked on. The knot was wet with the cub's blood and with the dew of the grass, and it took him a long while, and the sun sank lower, and the shadows in the thicket grew long, but at last the knot loosened, and the loop fell slack around the cub's leg, and the cub was free.
The cub leaped up at once, and in its leap it twisted, and one hind claw, long and curved and sharp, caught Corin across the forearm as the cub pulled away. It was not an attack. The cub was only trying to run, and its leg was stiff from the snare, and the claw raked down his arm from his wrist almost to his elbow in one long gash before the cub was gone into the grass. Corin cried out and clutched his arm, and blood welled up along the gash and ran down over his wrist and dripped into the grass. The cub was already gone, a black flash among the brambles, and Corin stood alone in the thicket with his arm bleeding and the goats calling from the hill above him.
He pressed his sleeve against the wound and he walked home, and the walk seemed very long, and his arm throbbed with every step, and by the time he reached the village the blood had soaked through his sleeve and his hand was sticky with it. His mother Isolde was at her loom when he came in, and she took one look at his arm and set her shuttle down and rose without a word. She brought clean water and a needle and thread, and she sat him down by the lamp, and she washed the wound gently, and she stitched it closed, stitch by stitch, her hands steady and her face calm, while Corin sat very still and bit his lip and did not cry. She had stitched many wounds in her life, goat bites and thorn cuts and once a gash on his father's leg from a falling stone, and her stitches were small and neat and even, and when she was done she bound the arm in clean cloth and told him to keep it dry and to rest it for a week.
That evening Isolde set a bowl of soup before him and told him that a kind act was its own reward, and that he must never go near a snare again, and Corin nodded and ate with his good hand, and his arm ached, but the ache was a small price, and he thought of the cub all through the meal. That night he lay awake long after the lamp was out, and he listened to the wind in the thatch, and he pictured the cub limping through the grass, and he hoped its leg would heal clean, and he fell asleep at last with his wounded arm held close against his chest.
Corin kept the arm dry and he rested it as well as a boy of seven could rest anything, and the wound closed slowly, and the stitches came out one by one, and what was left was a long pale line running from his wrist almost to his elbow, with a row of small marks along it where the stitches had been. He looked at it every day, and he showed it to Tam, who whistled and said it was the finest scar in the village, and he showed it to the old men at the well, who shook their heads and said he was lucky the cub had not taken his hand. Corin did not think himself lucky or unlucky. He thought only of the cub, and he wondered where it had gone, and whether its leg had healed, and whether it remembered him.
He went back to the hills many times after that, and he looked for the black cub in the thicket and along the ridge and by the stream where the deer came to drink. He left pieces of bread on a flat stone near the old oak, and he called softly into the grass, and he waited, but the cub never came back. He learned the hills better than any boy in the village in those months, because he walked them every day with his eyes open for a black shape among the green, and he knew the fox dens and the badger sets and the hollow tree where the owls nested, and he could tell the goats one from another by the sound of their bells alone, and still the cub stayed hidden, and the hills kept their secret. The bread was gone by morning, but it might have been the birds or the foxes, and Corin could never be sure. The seasons turned, and the grass grew tall and then dry, and the goats grew fat, and Corin grew taller, and the scar on his arm faded from red to pink to pale, and the cub became a story he told Tam on cold evenings, a story that grew a little grander each time he told it, though the heart of it never changed: a small black cub, a rope snare, a kind boy, and a claw that had marked him forever.
Then, in the spring of his ninth year, the king's hunters came through the village with a great cage on a wagon, and inside the cage was a giant black lion with glowing eyes, caught in the hills, and bound for the arena. The whole village came out to look, and Tam pointed and shouted, and the old men shook their heads, and Corin stood at the back of the crowd and stared at the black lion in its cage. The lion was huge, far bigger than the cub he remembered, and its fur was black as night, and its eyes glowed in the shadows of the cage. It looked out at the crowd with no fear in its eyes, only a cold wild stillness, and when its gaze passed over Corin, the boy felt a strange catch in his chest, as if something inside him had recognized something, though he could not have said what it was. The wagon creaked as the oxen strained against their yokes, and the cage rocked with each step, and the lion stood steady inside it, swaying with the motion, and the children of the village ran alongside shouting, and their mothers called them back, and the old men at the well spat into the dust and said the king would feed the beast a thief before the week was out, and Corin heard them and said nothing, and he watched until the wagon was only a dark shape on the long road, and then he turned back to his goats with the image of those glowing eyes still bright in his mind.
He did not know then that the lion was his cub. He knew only that the lion was black, and that it had come from the hills, and that its eyes were the same golden color as the cub's eyes had been. He watched the wagon roll away down the long road toward the king's hall, and he felt the scar on his arm itch, as scars sometimes did when the weather changed, and he rubbed it through his sleeve and went back to his goats. He did not think of the lion again for many weeks, until the day Osric came to the village with soldiers and accused him of stealing the king's gold cup, and took him away to the arena, and the gate opened, and the black lion came rushing out of the dark, and Corin fell face down in the sand, and the lion lowered its great head to his arm, and sniffed the scar, and licked it gently, and Corin knew at last, with a certainty that flooded through him like sunlight, that the beast in the sand was the cub he had freed, and that it had remembered him all along.
For a long moment after the black lion lowered its great head to the boy's arm, no one in the whole arena made a sound. The sun stood high above the stone seats, and the light fell white and hard upon the sand, and the only movement in all that vast round bowl was the slow rise and fall of the lion's dark shoulders as it breathed. Corin lay face down where the charge had thrown him, his cheek pressed to the warm sand, his small hands flat upon the ground, and he did not dare to lift his head. The lion's breath came warm against his forearm, and the great pink tongue passed once more across the long stitched scar, slow and gentle, as if the beast were reading words written upon the boy's skin. Sand clung to Corin's hair and to his rough tunic, and his heart beat so hard against the ground that he could feel the sand tremble beneath his chest.
High in the stone seats, Tam sat with his knees drawn up and his hands gripping the edge of the bench, and he had watched every heartbeat of it with his eyes so wide that they hurt. He had known Corin since they were both small enough to chase goats through the same narrow lanes of the village, and he had seen his friend dragged away by the king's guards only three days before, and he had not slept since. Now he saw the black lion lower its head to Corin's arm, and he saw the tongue move across the scar, and something rose in his chest so fast that it came out of his mouth before he could stop it. His arm shot up, his finger pointed down at the sand, and his voice cracked across the silence of the arena like a stone striking a wall.
"Look!" he cried. "Look at the lion! It knows him!"
The cry broke the spell. A gasp rolled around the stone seats in a wave, rising from the lowest benches to the highest, and women pressed their hands to their mouths, and men rose half out of their seats, and children hid their faces against their mothers' shoulders. The sound of it was like wind moving through dry grass, and then it was gone, and silence fell again, heavier than before, because every soul in the arena was now watching the same small patch of sand and waiting to see what the beast would do next. No one moved. No one spoke. Even the guards upon the platform stood frozen with their hands upon their spears, afraid that any sudden movement might wake the lion to anger.
Upon the raised platform, Bram rose slowly to his feet. The old priest was seventy one years old, and his white beard fell to his chest, and his white robe hung loose upon his thin frame, and for a long moment he leaned upon his gold staff as if the weight of what he saw had made his legs weak. Then he straightened, and he lifted the staff a little from the ground, and he looked down at the sand with eyes that had watched the rites of the gods for more than fifty years. He had seen men die in that arena, and he had seen the black lion tear its prey, and he had never once in all his long life seen a beast lower its head in gentleness to a child. His mouth opened, and no words came, and he closed it again, and his hand tightened upon the staff until the knuckles showed white through the old skin.
Beside him, King Aldous sat upon his seat of carved wood, and his smile was dying upon his face. It had been there a moment before, bright and cruel, the smile of a king who had given his people a spectacle and expected them to cheer for it. Now it faded by slow degrees, and what remained beneath it was something the crowd had seldom seen upon their king: doubt, and then a cold and rising fear. His hand gripped the arm of his seat, and his purple robe shifted as he leaned forward, and his eyes went from the lion to the boy and back again, as if he could not believe what they showed him. He had ordered this trial himself, and he had sat in judgment, and he had expected a swift and terrible end. Instead the beast he had sent to kill was licking a scar upon a child's arm, and the whole arena was watching, and the king could feel their eyes turning toward him, waiting for him to speak, and he found that he had no words.
Osric sat a little behind the king, and his face had gone the color of old ash. The counselor in brown robes had been the one who brought the accusation, and he had spoken smooth words in the king's hall, and he had smiled when the sentence was pronounced. Now his hands were clasped tight together in his lap, and his lips moved without sound, and his eyes darted from the platform to the crowd and back to the sand, as if he were searching for some way out of the trap that was closing around him. Sweat stood upon his forehead, though the morning was not yet hot, and when a guard glanced at him, Osric looked away quickly, down at his own hands, as if he could hide from what was happening by refusing to see it.
Down in the sand, Corin lay still and listened to the lion breathe. The beast's breath was warm and slow, and it smelled of meat and dust, and the great head rested now so close to his arm that he could feel the heat of it through his skin. He had been afraid when the gate opened and the black shape came rushing toward him, and he had been afraid when the ground rose up and struck him, and he was still afraid now, but beneath the fear there was something else, something quiet and strange and steady. He knew that scar. He knew the long stitched line that ran along his forearm, and he knew the day he had earned it, and he knew the small black cub that had given it to him in the hills two years before. His mother had stitched the wound with her own hands, and she had told him to remember it, and now the lion was remembering it too, and Corin felt the tears come to his eyes, though he did not weep, and he did not move, because he knew that stillness was the only safe thing he could offer.
The lion licked the scar once more, and then it lifted its great head, and it looked down at the boy with its glowing eyes, and for a moment the two of them were alone in the arena, the crowd and the platform and the king all forgotten, as if the world had narrowed to the patch of sand where they lay. The lion's eyes were not the eyes of a mindless beast. They were deep and old and knowing, and they held the boy's gaze, and Corin felt his fear ebb a little, the way water ebbs from sand when the tide turns. Then the lion lowered its head again, and it rested its chin upon the sand beside the boy's shoulder, and its great body settled, and it lay down in the dust as calmly as a dog lies down beside its master at the end of a long day.
A murmur began to move through the crowd, low at first, like water finding its way between stones, and then louder, as one voice joined another, and another, until the whole arena hummed with it. Some said the gods had spoken. Some said the beast had been tamed by a spell. Some said the boy must be holy, or blessed, or touched by a power no man could name. An old woman in the highest seats wept openly, and a young man beside her took her hand, and a merchant in a fine cloak shook his head and said it could not be, and said it again, as if saying it would make it so. The murmur rose and fell, and no one could agree, and yet every voice in that crowd was asking the same question, though none could put it into words: how did the lion know the boy?
Tam could bear the waiting no longer. He pushed his way along the bench, stepping over feet and knees, and he reached the stone stair, and he ran down it, calling Corin's name, and a guard caught him by the arm at the bottom of the steps and held him back. Tam struggled, and he shouted, and the guard held him gently but firmly, and Tam's voice rose above the murmur of the crowd, thin and fierce and full of love for his friend.
"He is my friend!" Tam cried. "He did not steal anything! The lion knows him! Let me go to him!"
The guard did not let go, but he did not drag the boy away either, and he looked up at the platform as if he were waiting for an order that did not come. Tam's face was red with shouting, and tears stood in his eyes, and he pointed down at the sand where Corin lay beside the lion, and his small hand shook with the force of his belief. The crowd turned to look at him, and some of them nodded, and some of them murmured his name, because many of them knew the two boys from the village, and they had seen them drive the goats home together at dusk, and they knew that Tam would not lie for a thief.
Bram began to walk down the steps from the platform, and the sound of his gold staff tapping upon the stone cut through the murmur, and the crowd fell quiet to hear it. The old priest moved slowly, for his legs were old and the steps were steep, and yet there was a steadiness in him that no one could mistake, and the people parted before him as he passed, and they bowed their heads, and they whispered his name. He reached the edge of the sand, and he stopped, and he looked at the boy and the lion lying together in the dust, and he raised one hand, and his voice, when it came, was low and clear and carried to every seat in the arena.
"Be still," Bram said. "No man shall move. No man shall speak until the gods have finished their work."
The words settled over the crowd like a heavy cloth, and the murmur died, and the arena fell silent once more, and every eye turned back to the sand. The sun stood high, and the light was bright upon the white stone, and the black lion lay beside the small boy, and the boy lay still beneath the lion's gaze, and the whole of the arena held its breath, waiting for what would come next. Upon the platform, King Aldous rose at last to his feet, and his purple robe fell in heavy folds about him, and his gold crown caught the light, and he looked down at the sand with a face that no man in that crowd could read, and he said nothing at all. And in the sand below, Corin lay still, and felt the lion breathe beside him, and waited for the king to find his voice at last.
Three days before the morning in the arena, the king's steward walked the length of the great hall with a lamp in his hand, and he stopped before the high table, and he stared at the empty place where the gold cup had always stood. The hall was still dark, and the torches had burned low, and the long tables were bare after the feast of the night before, and the steward's hands shook as he set the lamp down. The gold cup had been the king's own cup, a gift from his father, and it had stood upon the high table for as long as any man in the hall could remember, and now it was gone. The steward looked under the table, and behind the hangings, and in every corner of the hall, and then he ran to wake the king, and his voice shook when he told him what he had found.
King Aldous listened in silence, and his face grew dark, and he struck the table with his fist, and he ordered every guard and every servant in the hall to be brought before him before the sun rose. The guards came in their armor, and the servants came in their plain clothes, and they stood in rows upon the stone floor, and none of them would meet the king's eyes. The king asked who had taken his cup, and no one answered, and the silence in the hall was so deep that the king could hear the torches hissing in their brackets. Then Osric stepped forward from his place beside the king's seat, and he bowed low, and he spoke in his smooth and careful voice, the voice that had made him the king's counselor for many years.
"My king," Osric said, "I saw a boy near the hall at dusk yesterday, when the feast was being prepared. He was a goatherd's boy from the village, small and quick, and he had no business near the king's hall. I saw him slip away along the wall, and I saw something shining under his tunic as he went. I did not think of it at the time, for a boy may carry many things, but now that the cup is gone, I cannot keep silent."
The king turned his hard eyes upon Osric, and he asked the boy's name, and Osric said it without hesitation, as if he had been waiting all night for the question. Corin, he said, the son of Isolde the weaver, a boy who drove the goats upon the hills and knew every path in the dark. The king's face grew darker still, and he gave the order at once, and four guards rode out of the gates before the sun had risen, and their horses' hooves rang upon the long road that led down to the village.
The guards found Corin in the goat pens at the edge of the village, where he was feeding the animals before the sun came up. He was nine years old, and small for his age, and his tunic was rough and patched, and he looked up at the guards with wide eyes when they called his name. They seized him by the arms, and they did not listen when he said he had done nothing, and they dragged him out of the pen while the goats scattered and bleated in fear. Isolde ran from her loom when she heard the noise, and she threw herself between the guards and her son, and she begged them to tell her what he had done, and one of the guards told her, in a rough voice, that the boy was accused of stealing the king's gold cup.
Isolde went pale, and she clutched at her shawl, and she said it could not be true, for her son had been with her at dusk, mending the fence by their small house, and he had not left the village. The guards did not listen. They bound Corin's hands with a length of rope, and they set him upon a horse, and they rode back up the long road with Isolde running behind them until her legs gave out and she sank down in the dust of the road and watched them go. Tam stood behind a low wall and watched it all, and he was ten years old, and he had never felt so helpless in his life, and he ran to his own house and hid his face in his hands and wept for his friend.
The neighbors came out of their houses when they heard the horses, and they stood in their doorways with their hands pressed to their mouths, and an old woman who had known Corin since he was born called out that the boy was innocent, and that he had never taken anything that was not his. The guards did not answer her, and they did not slow their horses, and the dust rose behind them in a long cloud as they rode back up the long road toward the king's hall. When Isolde came back to the village with dust upon her dress and tears upon her face, the neighbors gathered around her, and they lifted her to her feet, and they walked her back to her small house, and they told her to be strong, and that the truth would come out in the end, and that no good boy was ever punished forever.
In the king's hall that evening, Corin stood before the king with his hands bound, and the torches burned in their brackets, and the shadows moved upon the stone walls. King Aldous sat upon his high seat in his purple robe, and his gold crown caught the light of the torches, and his face was hard as stone. Osric stood beside him in his brown robes, and his hands were folded, and his voice was smooth and low when he spoke, and he told the king the whole of it again, slowly, so that every man in the hall could hear. He said he had seen the boy near the hall at dusk, and he said the boy had slipped away along the wall, and he said something had shone under the boy's tunic, and he said the cup was gone, and only the boy had been near the hall. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Every word fell upon the hall like a stone falling into still water.
Corin denied it. His voice shook, but he spoke clearly, and he said he had not been near the hall, and he said he had not taken anything, and he said he had been with his mother at dusk, mending the fence by their house. The king looked at him for a long moment, and then he looked at Osric, and then he looked at the empty place upon the high table, and his anger rose in him like fire. He said a thief who stole from a king stole from the whole kingdom, and he said the law was plain, and he said the people must see justice done, or no man's goods would be safe.