A court is always changing, as men come and go again to their own places after some little service there, but Owen and I were of those to whom the court was home altogether.  Owen was the king’s marshal now, and I was in command of the house-carles, and had been so for a year or more.  It was no very heavy post, nor responsible after all, for Ina’s guard was the love of his people, and beyond these warriors from the freemen who served as palace guard and watch, were the athelings of the household, from whose number I had been chosen for this post by right of longest service more than for any other reason, as I think.  I knew all the ins and outs of every house where Ina went, and had nothing fresh to learn in the matter.  Still, if the men under me were few, the post had its own privileges, and was always held to lead to somewhat higher, and I was more than content therewith, for it kept me near Owen and the king, whom I loved next to my foster father.

I do not think that by this time any one knew, save the king, that I was not Owen’s own son.  I was wont to call him father always, and I cannot be blamed, for he was foster father and godfather to me, and well did he take the father’s place to the orphan whom he had saved.  And I had forgotten Eastdean, save as one keeps a memory of the home where one was a child.  I never thought of it as a place that should have been mine, for neither the king nor Owen ever spoke to me concerning it.  Sometimes, in remembrances of my father, I would wonder into whose hands the manors had passed, but rather in hopes that some day those who owned them now would suffer me to see that the grave where he lay was honoured, rather than as a matter which at all concerned me in any closer way.

For, since I was but a child, the court had been my home, with Owen as my father, and Ina the king as the loved guardian for whom I would gladly give my life in need.  All my training and thoughts were centred here, not as what one calls a courtier at all, but as one of the household who feared the king and queen no more than Owen himself, and yet reverenced all three as those to whom all homage was due since he could remember.

Thus things were with us at the end of the tenth year after we left Aldhelm at Malmesbury, and now the court was at Glastonbury in fair Somerset, keeping the Christmastide there in the place that is the holiest in all England by reason of the coming thither of Joseph of Arimathea, and the first preaching of the Gospel in our land by him.  It was not by any means the first time I had been in the place, and here I had some good friends indeed; for Ina loved the vale of Avalon well, and often came hither with a few of us, or with the whole court, to the house which he had made that he might watch the building of the wondrous church which he was raising over the very spot where the little chapel of the saint had been in the old days.