Chapter Eleven
Eleven
They planned to depart from Camelot on the first Monday in October, and were confronted with a brief unexpected streak of warm weather in the fortnight that preceded it.
The last gasp of summer couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Being called to endless, back-to-back meetings and appointments to try on winter cloaks, hats, and boots as the sweat beaded on Gabriel’s brow and fat flies threw themselves haphazardly at the ceiling was the vilest of tortures.
After his last fitting, he had to have a lie-down just to recover from the feeling of thick winter velvet brushing against his clammy skin.
Everyone assured him that once this hot spell was over, autumn would truly begin.
They were right. As everybody gathered and mounted their horses in the courtyard on Monday morning, the weather was sunny but crisp, Gabriel’s breath clouding the air as he stood dressed in his finest, most regal scarlets.
All he remembered of the weather turning last year was Arthur.
That day, like so many of them, had been packed with emergency council meetings and long, awkward interludes with the new court physician and Master Buchanan, who had taken it upon himself to get involved with Gabriel’s recovery and rehabilitation.
He’d been experiencing excruciating pain at the site of his amputation, short episodes that were so intense he’d woken himself up shouting in the night, convinced he was being held down and carved into with a knife.
Nothing helped, but every day they tried something new.
There was always somebody he loved sitting in a nearby chair, grim-faced, as he winced through varied ministrations.
Arthur had been his companion on the day the mornings turned cold, which meant he’d been the one to watch the physician painstakingly insert many slender bone needles into Gabriel’s thickening scar tissue.
It was a remedy from Zhongguo that had apparently been used with great success to treat the lingering pain from injury.
Master Truman, eager as he was to help, was unfortunately far from an expert, and after Gabriel had sweated palely through the first twelve needles, his arm had jerked, pain lancing through him, and the remaining needles had ended up on the floor.
“Ha,” Arthur had exclaimed humorlessly, closing the book he’d been pretending to read and getting up from his chair. “Right. That’s enough stabbing for today, I reckon.”
Gabriel had shrugged, even as gray, squirmy light freckled across his vision. “It’s fine.”
“Counterpoint: It’s not helping and you look like gruel. We should wait until they can bring in the specialist.”
Then Gabriel had tried to pick up one of the scattered needles, and his body had decided this was about the right time to blink out of consciousness for a second.
When he was able to see, he’d found Arthur crouching by his chair, pushing Gabriel’s sweaty curls away from his forehead while Master Truman went to fetch cold water.
“Hello,” Arthur said, his voice quiet but strained. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this is horrible. I’m actually kind of annoyed that you fainted, because I was planning to faint. And now if I do, it’ll be … you know. Derivative.”
Gabriel accepted a cool, wet cloth for his brow from the physician, who then melted away out of sight. “Mmm.”
“Gabe? If you close your eyes, I’m going to assume the worst, and I’ll warn you now that I am not going to be very grown-up about it.”
“I’m here,” Gabriel said, blinking Arthur back into focus. “I’m just tired.”
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “True. But just in case, I think we should get some fresh air.”
Master Truman had concurred, so Gabriel had let Arthur drape a cloak over his shoulders and then accompany him very slowly down the stairs and out into the grounds.
The chill in the air had been unexpected and wonderful. The cobblestoned courtyards were soft around the edges with deep drifts of fallen leaves, and the sunlight had a different quality, like it was putting on a last show before it conceded to the dark of winter.
“It’s nice,” Gabriel said, watching a fat robin beak through the moss on a wall, chancing for lunch.
“Yeah, well. A sunny day in October is the best day of the year,” Arthur said. “Didn’t want you to miss it.”
They’d finished their short walk on a stone bench in the rose garden, and Gabriel had been surprised to find fluffy fuchsia flowers still in bloom, the air sweet. They sat for a while, and Arthur chatted away, made jokes, as he always did, but there was a tight undercurrent of worry in his tone.
Gabriel didn’t want to be the cause of that worry. So he stopped telling Arthur how bad the pain was, and Arthur had believed that it was better, that Gabriel was better, which had been easiest for everyone.
Now Arthur was sitting astride his horse in a patch of sun, his face turned toward the light, a half smile playing around his lips while he thought nobody was watching. A private moment of contentment on a sunny morning in October.
Gabriel imagined a reality in which he nudged his horse forward and went to Arthur’s side to share it. It was a nice little fantasy, and nothing more—he’d never been brave enough to do anything so bold before.
Arthur had almost always been the one to come to him, directly and with purpose; Gabriel had only ever discovered Arthur by wandering in his general direction.
Gabriel’s horse, Penelope, took a couple of ambling steps forward, like she’d read Gabriel’s mind (or perhaps just wanted to go and bother Arthur’s handsome horse)—but then Sir Florian came trotting up on a glossy black mare, and Arthur turned to smile at him and say something Gabriel couldn’t quite hear.
Florian didn’t smile back, but he was watching Arthur very closely, and when Arthur laughed, he nodded in time, like he was mirroring the steps of a dance.
“I’ve been trying to get you alone for days,” Gwen said, pulling up alongside Gabriel on her very grumpy speckled palfrey. “Do you actually do anything except have meetings?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Sometimes I lie in a darkened room for a few hours.”
“Sleeping?”
“Dreading the next meeting.”
“Ah.” Gwen looked him over. “How are you doing today? You look a bit cadaverous.”
“Thanks,” said Gabriel. “I could use a little…”
“Encouragement? Don’t fall off your horse, don’t talk too much. Try to smile. Oakley noticed that you always frown at people to demonstrate that you’re listening so it looks like you’re trying to kill them with dark brain magic.”
Gabriel attempted a smile, and Gwen held up a hand, as if she were trying to shield herself from a view of a roadside corpse.
“Never mind.”
Gabriel felt a lurch of nausea and clutched the reins tighter in his sweaty hand, causing Penelope to shuffle sideways again. “Oh, God.”
Gwen softened immediately. “I’m just jesting with you, Gabe. It’s going to be great. You’re mostly going to be asked to do the things you’re good at. That’s why we’re all here.”
“What am I good at?” Gabriel asked hopefully.
Gwen considered. “Charts,” she said. “You love to draw charts, and talk about charts. And also … statistical analysis of economic factors.”
“That’s just another way of saying ‘charts,’” Gabriel said glumly. Gwen leaned over to pat him on the shoulder, and then Lady Oakley came striding over to them, her expression somewhere between genuine excitement and professional dread.
“I didn’t think you’d want to speechify,” she said, “so we’re doing trumpets.”
“Wonderful,” Gabriel lied. Oakley was staying behind with Lord Das to keep Camelot running, two voices of sanity on the reduced council.
She had decided they ought to pair the more decorated knights with the recent additions, and so they all lined up in pairs, like children about to be checked for lice, and then once the vanguard had proceeded out of the gates, it was time to go.
The cheering was always a shock, if only because, based on some of the reports he was hearing, Gabriel expected thrown cabbages instead.
People had come to line the streets that led down the hill from Camelot castle, many of them waving flowers, which they began to toss enthusiastically at the party as they approached. The trumpeters were blasting away, giving it their all. The sun was very bright.
It felt to Gabriel like the entire world had been rendered in stained glass, the sky and the sun and the people and the trumpets, and that stained glass had fallen from its frame and was pressing down on him so that he was trapped beneath it, the colors much too vivid and the sounds too near, an intrusion so palpable he wanted to turn his face away so it didn’t cut off his breathing.
A white flower bounced off his leg, and he flinched, and next to him, Gwen paused her regal waving to say, through gritted teeth, “Remember what I said about smiling.”