Epilogue #2
We were at Morois the next day. Two weeks after that, Isolde and I were sitting under a hazel tree while Tristan and Petitcrieu played fetch, and there was an expression of such poignant longing on her face that it pressed on my still-bruised heart until I couldn’t breathe for it hurting so much.
“We can stay, Isolde,” I said.
She looked at me with a kind of hope that I’d never seen on her face before, not once, not in all the fucked-up years I’d known her.
“We don’t have to leave?”
Birdsong was a trill above us, and the newly formed bluebells were a carpet below.
“No,” I told her. “We don’t have to leave.”
Her smile was the first kiss of sunrise over the horizon: life-giving and pure.
A few months after we decided to stay, I took a delivery.
Tristan and Isolde had gone for a walk, and so I was alone when I signed for Sedge’s ashes and then carried the package to the family graveyard afterward.
I knelt on the damp grass and opened the box to see a smaller cardboard container inside.
It depressed me: the flimsy container and the plastic bag around it.
The Priority Mail Express box hastily sealed with crooked strips of packing tape.
It sounded strange, even to me, that I felt like my almost-murderer deserved better, but I supposed that I did feel that way.
I didn’t want Sedge to sit on a shelf for a year because the city interred him anonymously with the other unclaimed ashes.
I didn’t want the version of the priest who’d come to Lyonesse and had wished he'd found it sooner to go forgotten.
I wanted to remember.
I transferred the container to a small wooden box, and then I spent the afternoon burying it in front of the headstone I’d had made—the only headstone in the graveyard from this century.
It was not at all the first body I’d buried. But I hoped it would be my last.
Nearly a year passed after that, and on a hot July day, a visitor came to the door.
It was Nimue, having stopped off at Morois before meeting Merlin and their child in Wales for a long summer stay. She wanted to go on a walk by the sea, and having expected a visit like this for some time, I agreed.
We drove the short distance to the village of Tintagel, parked, and walked northeast, striking for the cliffs facing Tintagel Castle.
Or rather the ruins of Tintagel Castle, a smattering of half-crumbled walls and isolated courtyards and green, windswept grass.
The waves crashed against the rocky walls of the headland, and a stiff breeze waved the coastal wildflowers around our feet—sheep’s bit and sea campion and thrift.
We sat next to a patch of nodding oxeye daisies and didn’t speak for a long time.
“It used to be more impressive,” I finally said, as if I’m apologizing to a guest for a messy house. “There were over a hundred buildings on the island alone.”
“Larger than London at one time,” Nimue agreed.
“There were always sails on the horizon.”
“Sheep and cattle on the hills,” she added. “Tin coming from the mines.”
My eyes strayed to the top of the headland, beyond most of the ruins.
It was impossible to see from where we were, but there was a low stone outline of a long-ago garden, now gone to grass.
The bones buried there would be gone now, taken by the acidic coastal soil, and there would be nothing left of the hazel tree that grew on top of one, or the honeysuckle vine that grew from the other.
“Do you remember?” asked Nimue. “The first time?”
The first time.
The life I’d led across the cove, the life I’d led with a sword in my hand.
It was unbelievable in the most literal sense…
as in it couldn’t be believed. That there had been a Mark in Tintagel, that he had been married to a woman named Isolde who fell in love with his best knight.
That the three of us had done this already, the jealousy and the lust and the lies, and it had ended with two petal-strewn graves and a broken king.
That somehow the three of us were here, again.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”
“You read the book?”
I had.
I hadn’t planned on reading it—hadn’t even planned on bringing it to Cornwall—but I found myself packing it anyway. It had sat on my grandfather’s desk for months, through our first summer and the long, sweet autumn that followed, until finally, on a dim winter day, I picked it up.
Something had moved through me then, a slow but urgent current, a sharp and translucent kind of clarity.
When I’d opened the book to the first page, I heard the sea.
“I still don’t understand.” I watched as the waves broke under a small cave set into the cliff. “But when I remember it, I don’t feel like I need to. It just is.”
“You’re so much like you were then,” she said. “Pragmatic to a fault. Uninterested in any fate that you didn’t make for yourself.”
I thought of the garden above the rest of the castle, haunted by the wind. “I didn’t make a very good fate for myself, if that’s the case.”
“You chose differently this time. You chose mercy. You chose them even when it meant letting them choose each other.” She paused. “Will you tell them? Tristan and Isolde?”
“Do you think I should?”
Nimue’s eyes had narrowed—not in doubt, only in thought—and as I watched her stare at the sea, I remembered this too from another life. Asking for her counsel as the water roared below and the birds wheeled in a blue sky above us.
“Yes,” she said finally, “but when it makes the most sense to you. There won’t be graves in your garden again, Mark. You have time.”
At the end of the summer, we got a notice from the post office that they’d been holding a package for me for over a year.
Baffled, I went to the post office, signed for it, and then took the small box home, where I opened it on my grandfather’s desk while the dog snored nearby.
The package had been mailed from Rome, but my name had been filled in as the sender’s name, and the sending address was a Roman post office.
I opened the box to find a typed note. Finely milled paper, the kind that might dissolve in water.
I hope you have a chance to wear this again before the end. I’m sorry, sir.
- s
I lifted the note to see what was underneath, and abruptly there wasn’t enough air in the room.
A wristwatch was packed carefully in a nest of packing paper.
Its silver case winked in the sunlight, and the hands ticked with steady precision under its glass face.
There was no blood on it, there were no scratches—no evidence at all that it had been ripped off my injured body after I’d been kidnapped.
The posting date was the day before we’d killed Mortimer. Somehow Sedge had known that my watch had been taken and had arranged to have it sent to Morois, where no one had been available to receive the delivery until after the post office had stopped trying to deliver it at all.
A glitter of airless sparks filled my vision as I tried desperately to inhale past the ache in my throat.
I’d never thought I’d see this again, this small, beloved piece of Eliot when even our wedding rings had been taken by the fire, and it was Sedge who’d given it back to me. Sedge, who’d been ready to kill me but ready to kiss me too.
In a way, this watch had started everything.
It had been the flash in the dark on a wet night in Kraków, it had been the reason Tristan knew where to aim.
It had been my talisman ever since I’d pulled it from Eliot’s wrist with shaking hands, and it had been a reminder every time I looked down at it of what I had lost and what I had left to do.
I stared at the watch for a long time. Heart pounding; sick with relief and also an inescapable kind of regret. And then I walked out to the graveyard, to Sedge’s stone, as Petitcrieu followed happily, scampering off between the headstones to chase fuzzy summer bees.
I slipped the band of the watch over the wreath hook fitted over the headstone. It dangled in the middle of the bright green wreath, right above Sedge’s name.
Petitcrieu came over and licked my hand and then she flopped down in the grass at my feet. I stood there for a long time, too long, trying to understand what it was that I felt, and then I heard two lovely voices coming from the trees.
My dear ones returning from a walk.
The dog surged to her feet and was gone instantly—off in search of attention—and I finally understood what it was that I felt.
Joy. Peace. Like the rest of my life was currently walking toward the house with a basket of mushrooms and an overeager dog.
I glanced back at the headstone and the watch and took my first real breath since lifting up Sedge’s note.
“I’m sorry too,” I said to the watch and the headstone both.
And when I went to follow Tristan and Isolde into the house, I didn’t look back.
In the here and now, I turn with the lit candle in hand.
I see that Isolde has listened to me and with pleasing effect: she’s straddling Tristan with a knee on either side of his hips as she continues to abuse his stomach and chest with wax and he continues to twist and fret underneath her.
Between the hot splatters, she allows her silk-covered cunt to press against his erection.
She rubs herself back and forth on it, teasing him as he begs so, so sweetly.
I watch them a moment fondly, covetously, jealous of them individually and then jealous of them together—not in an envious way but like a jealous god. I want to hoard them to myself; I want the earth to shake when anyone dares to approach what’s mine.
If I thought time and a safer world would have blunted the edges of what I feel for them, then I was a fool, because time has only sharpened what I feel, and a safer world has only meant that I’m uninterrupted in my obsession, that I can feed it and tend to it and watch it grow like a fire, a funeral pyre for any other life I could have had without them.