The Prince in Waiting by John Christopher

racing through the trees. Perhaps my horse saw more, or more clearly. At any rate he reared in fright. In controlling him I let my lance tip hit the ground. With bucking horse and the shock from the lance I could not keep my seat. I hit the ground, rolling to break my fall. I was cursing my misfortune and the fact that there was now another gap for the boar to break through our lines a second time. I looked for it and saw it. It was not going for the gap. It had changed its course and was bearing down on me. I could see it well enough now, see red-rimmed eyes and the savage white gleam of tusks. I tried to get to my feet and realized, as pain shot down my leg, that I was injured. Voices shouted, but a long way off. The boar smashed a bush aside like straw. The sight of it, almost on me, and its stink dried my throat with fear. Then from my left there were hammering hoofs. I saw a horse and rider and a lance which raked the boar along its ribs, forcing it away with a huge squeal of pain. The horse cleared me as I lay there. The rider was Peter, who had stayed close by me throughout the hunt.
    He had not killed the boar but the wound helped the rest to run it down within an hour and dispatch it. It was a fearsome beast, I was told, seven feet in length from snout to tail. The size alone branded it polymuf, but apart from that it was double-tusked and its head was bigger in relation to its body than was usual. A polymuf strain was sometimes thought to be an indication of greater intelligence, as with the building rats that tales were told of, and this one seemed to have behaved with more than mere cunning, in doubling back to attack its enemies and in going for me when it saw me unhorsed. I gather it led them a fine dance before they finished it off.
    My father said he would have dearly liked its head to hang on the palace wall: Bannock, in more than thirty years of hunting, had never seen anything that could come near matching it for magnificence. But the law held. They built a pyre and left the carcass burning. I did not see anything of this, having been helped back to the camp after Bannock had set my leg, broken in the fall.
    I was taken back on a litter strapped between quiet horses. For two more weeks I had to lie on my bed, my leg splinted. After that for long enough I hobbled with a crutch. My friends came to see me to help me pass the time, Martin every day but Edmund less frequently. I knew why: it was still an ordeal for him to come to the palace, and I guessed he had to steel himself afresh on each occasion.
    Autumn closed into winter. The good weather had broken even before the hunt was over and we paid for past beneficence with freezing fogs and, in early October, with blizzards that sent snow whirling round the city walls, piling high against houses, blocking the streets and drifting up against the windows of the palace to obscure my view out over the town. In other years I had loved the coming of the first snow, when gangs of boys were formed in snowball fights that raged all day (apart from the break for dinner at midday) through the grazing meadows and even up into the streets of the town until our elders put a stop to it. I was past the age for that, and for skating: my enforced inaction only emphasized my inability to take part, but it emphasized my boredom, too. I played games with Martin—chess and checkers and liars’ dice—but he beat me too easily at the first two and I won too easily at the third: he had no guile.
    In November my father went to Romsey, to visit the Prince of that city. Prince Stephen’s refusal to send his army into the field, his reliance on walls built higher every year, had been part of a more general isolation. There had been no state visits, made or received, for some time. My father’s accession, followed by his victory over Alton, had changed that. It was not only Romsey that wished to see the new Prince of Winchester.
    My father took his bodyguard with him, of