Uther would never forget the day that it happened, because he had been hunting alone with his father for the first time ever, accompanied only by an escort of Pendragon bowmen. Uther was revelling in the unaccustomed pleasure of sharing practically unlimited time and close intimacy with his father, and he knew that he owed thanks for this privilege to his grandfather. Ullic had been talking with him about Uric, about the amount of time the two of them spent together, father and son. And it had been less than three days later that Uric had called the boy to him and told him to be ready to ride out hunting with him the following morning.
Uther loved his father deeply and enjoyed his company greatly, but he had always known, because it was a fact of life, that his father was his own father's son, and therefore a Chief in training. The King's rank and title lay in the gift of the seven ruling Chiefs of the Pendragon Federation, but the Chief's rank and title were hereditary, so Uric would inherit the Pendragon Chief's chair one day in the future when his father Ullic died, and by the same token, Uther would one day inherit the Chief's chair from his own father. Uric might never be King Uric, but so long as he outlived his father, he would most certainly become Chief Uric. Ullic was more than happy for his son to begin taking on some of his responsibilities, but that left Uric little time to enjoy his own son's companionship.
It was late afternoon, and they were returning, father and son and a few bowmen, to the camp they had set up the day before in a grassy meadow where two shallow but respectably wide rivers met and joined together. The hunting had not been good that day, but they were far from discouraged, and they were talking about trying to catch some trout for dinner as they rode their mountain ponies through the belly-deep grass of the meadow surrounding the low knoll on which they had built their camp. Only moments after reaching the height of the knoll, however, they saw a runner coming directly towards them, moving at great speed, and something about the way the man held himself alerted them, long before he reached them, that he bore important tidings. Neither of them, however, could have anticipated the news that he brought. The King had fallen from his Thinking Stone, the fellow said, injuring himself gravely, and the Lord Uric was summoned home immediately.
Uther could see his father's frustration begin to build from the moment they first heard the news, because they were many miles and hours of travel away from Tir Manha, and the runner could tell them nothing more. He himself had not been anywhere near the scene of the "accident." He was merely the last link in one of the four teams of runners that stood ready at all times to carry important tidings at high speed from one end of the Federation territories to the other, radiating north, south, east and west from Tir Manha. The information given to such men was always as short and simple as possible, as a guard against both forgetfulness and confusion. But Uric's concern and fears for his father's welfare demanded more information, and so within moments. Uric had begun the tasks of breaking camp and setting out immediately for home. He and Uther were the only two mounted members in the party. All the others were on foot—some thirty men in total—since this was a genuine meat-hunting party and not merely a sporting foray. Unless the two riders struck off immediately on their own to make their best speed homeward to Tir Manha, leaving everyone else to follow at their own pace, they would be tied to the pace of the slowest members of the party, the butchers, whose responsibility it was to dress, cut and transport the meat killed by the hunters.
As Uther expected, his father wasted no time in deciding to abandon the rest of the party and strike out for Tir Manha, but he was genuinely concerned that Uric might decide to go without him, thinking him too young for such a rugged and dangerous ride. There were at least four hours of daylight remaining, Uther knew, and mounted as well as they were on their sturdy, mountain-bred garrons, the two of them should easily be able to ride upwards of sixteen miles in that time, which would take them halfway home. But Uric would not allow mere darkness to stop his progress. He would keep riding into the night until he could go no farther, and if the night was clear and no accidents befell him, he would be close to home by dawn. It was that thought, that consideration, that made Uther fear his father's decision, for it seemed highly likely to the boy that Uric would not wish to endanger his only son on a long, perilous journey in the darkness through unknown territory.
He need not have worried, for if Uric had even thought of the journey from that viewpoint, he must have dismissed the thought immediately as irrelevant. He had far more important matters on his mind. His only words to Uther were instructions to go at once to the head cook and ask him to fill Uther's saddlebags with enough provisions to keep the two of them, father and son, well fed for the next forty-eight hours. And as soon as he had the supplies, including a plentiful quantity of drinking water in skin bags that they could hang about their ponies' necks, Uther was to arm himself with a full quiver of arrows for his bow—a boy-sized version of the huge Pendragon longbow made especially for him by his grandfather's own bow-maker—and rejoin Uric at his tent as quickly as he could. Uric wanted to be away and headed for home within the quarter hour, he said, and Uther needed no further urging.
Once on the way, they rode hard, pushing their mounts for maximum speed but taking great care at the same time not to overtax the beasts, as they had but one animal each. Since the actual hunting was done on foot, they had taken one horse each along with them purely as a measure of luxury and self-indulgence. Now they rode in a way calculated to cover distance most economically without exhausting their ponies, riding at a walking pace for a mile or two, then increasing their gait to a canter for a similar distance and then to a loping run for an equal space, avoiding any flat-out gallop that would tire the animals unduly. And for one quarter of every hour, they would dismount and allow the animals to graze and refresh themselves.
Uther had hoped to be able to talk to his father at greater length and more intimately once they were on their own, away from the others, but he could see that his father's attention and concerns were focused elsewhere. Most of the questions he asked Uric in the first hour of their journey were met with grunts or with utter silence, and the few responses that he did receive were distracted and practically incoherent. Uther soon accepted his father's preoccupation and fell silent, riding thereafter with his own thoughts for company.
It was plain to him that his father was very deeply troubled by the tidings that had come from Tir Manha, although Uther himself could see nothing dire in the message he had heard. Grandfather Ullic had fallen from his Thinking Stone and injured himself, but there seemed to Uther to be no reason for great concern in that. Uther had seen the Thinking Stone a thousand times and had clambered all over it when he was no more than an infant, and the thought of anyone, and most particularly his Grandfather Ullic, hurting himself badly through a fall from its edge to the ground seemed ludicrous to the boy. No more than five days earlier, Ullic himself had sat on the very edge of the Thinking Stone with his buttocks on the stone itself and his feet on the ground, resting his hands on his bent knees while he talked with Uther. At its centre the stone was probably the height of one tall man sitting on the shoulders of another, but its top surface was enormous, easily ten long strides across and almost twice that in length, and gently rounded like a huge, smooth egg. It would be impossible, Uther knew, to fall directly to the ground from the boulder's highest point. And yet, Ullic's advisers would not have sent the runners looking for his father without good cause. Ullic himself would have chewed holes in their hides if they had.