Chapter 13
“So what does it entail?” Alys asked. “This—what do you call it?”
“A glamour,” I said. “An enchanted image worn about your person, so what others see is different from your true appearance. I will cast the illusion and maintain it as necessary.”
It was mid-morning on a stuffy grey day and we had been riding since dawn, after staying the night in the priory of which Alys’s former study sister was the Reverend Mother. We had been given a warm welcome and godly hospitality, and had confessed to not a thing about what we were doing.
Inevitably, we were on our way to Camelot. Where I had persuaded Sir Manassen I would not attend Guinevere’s trial, Alys had not been so easily convinced.
“You won’t fool me, Morgan of Cornwall” were her exact words, before insisting I must not go alone.
Tressa agreed to manage Belle Garde in our absence, and the decision was made.
Now, I was glad for Alys’s company, but I didn’t know what trouble we were riding into.
Magical intervention seemed the only way.
“How long can we wear this ‘glamour’?” she said.
“For as long as it’s comfortable. It’s not a garment, but if worn too much it can chafe, and fidgeting weakens the effect.”
“Isn’t it tiring for you to maintain?”
I shrugged. “It’s more important I stay composed. To keep our false image strong, I need to hold myself with complete calm, and not get distracted.”
“At Camelot?” she exclaimed. “Iesu mawr, we will never manage it.”
I laughed. “Such lack of faith! I’ve been practising, you know. Hours on end.”
“So that’s what you’ve been doing,” she said. “Shut away by yourself.”
I ignored the shiver that skittered across my skin.
The time I had spent immersed in Merlin’s favourite magic haunted me, reading his writings, following techniques he had once used for purposes that still made me nauseous.
To revisit his deceptive arts meant inviting his voice back into my head, making me wish I had resisted, found another way.
You will never be free of me was his refrain.
“It was necessary to keep us safe,” I said to Alys, half to assure myself.
At the curve of the road, the trees suddenly receded, revealing a wildflower meadow stretching into the distance, to the foot of a steep-sided hill.
On the summit stood a sprawling golden edifice, turrets and spires breaching the heavens, its gleam undimmed even under cloudy skies.
The seat of the realm’s power, great and terrible; the kingdom’s own sun.
Eleven years, almost, since I had seen it last: the place I had once escaped to, then run away from. More than a decade since I turned my back on its gilded walls and knew it was rotten to the core.
Four thousand empty nights since I had walked away from Accolon’s slain body with his heart in my hands, changed from what I had once been into whatever I was now.
My body turned cold, then hot as flame.
“There it is,” I said. “Camelot.”
*
I cast the glamour upon us in a clearing not far from the city walls.
I kept Alys’s general physicality the same, but made her hair a strawberry blonde and scattered freckles beneath her newly blue eyes. For myself, I would go much further, choosing a stout, greying woman, rosy-faced and benign, advancing upon her twilight years.
“It feels like a heavy sort of shroud, but I can see through it.” Alys toyed with the end of her obscured brown plait. “How can I touch my own hair?”
“The effect is only for the eyes of others.” I batted her fussing hand away. “Just believe in it, and be natural.”
How much I sounded like him, the sorcerer in his lessons. The key to any glamour skill is belief. Believe you want to disappear. Intend to exist out of mortal sight.
My hands shuddered as I concealed my own image, bringing a blood-deep chill.
No, I told myself; you are not Merlin.
Knowledge was about intention, and the way I used my skills was nothing like the way the sorcerer had wielded magic. Invoking this spell was self-protection in a world that scorned and hunted me; using his arts did not make me like him.
We entered the city through the western gate.
Camelot was busy: clusters of people crowding the squares; street traders offering refreshments; latecomers finding no luck with lodgings.
Determined not to miss this spectacle, I had sent a fast messenger to secure rooms in a comfortable inn before the trial news became widespread.
May Day flowers garlanded buildings and posts, incongruous against the serious mood and street criers announcing the Queen’s inauspicious return.
There was vexingly little about the actual charges against Guinevere, Arthur’s influence writ large across the city’s information.
The trial would take place at noon in the large arena just outside the castle walls.
The same pavilions and jousting field where Accolon and I had sparred and challenged one another through Camelot’s first tournament, on our way back into each other’s arms.
My bones hollowed at the memory. It all felt like yesterday.
“Are you sure about this?” Alys asked, as we reached our inn and dismounted.
“As much as I can be,” I replied. What I didn’t say was that I was seeking not catharsis but a new game of vengeance, ways to disrupt Camelot from within.
We left our horses with the ostler and joined the band of visitors that snaked out of the city towards the jousting arena.
The stands were starkly undraped, the only colour Arthur’s red-and-white dragon banners hanging from the Royal Pavilion.
A single golden throne stood in the middle of the platform, casting its long shadow.
Realization hit like a wave on the shore: I was about to see my brother again, a decade since we last laid eyes on one another. It was the longest we had ever been apart.
Alys and I found a spot in the public stands nearest the empty court pavilions, as the crowd filled up around us.
I wondered where Guinevere was, and it occurred that I had never heard of any protocol for the trial of a queen.
The thought struck with unease; would this too be my fate if justice caught up with my chaos? Who, then, would fight for me?
I tore my eyes from the field. “Stay here,” I told Alys. “I’m going for a walk. The glamour will hold.”
I was out of earshot before she could argue, squeezing through the crowds and drawn behind the raised court stands. The Royal Pavilion beckoned me inexorably closer, where I once held a seat of my own. Without knowing why, I put my foot on the first step.
A pair of shadows loomed around the corner, so I slipped off the steps and under the pavilion, behind the thick canvas that concealed the supporting struts.
“I must speak with you,” said a woman’s voice. “Now, quickly.”
Dislike prickled up the back of my neck in recognition.
The first shadow travelled across the drapes and along the pavilion’s inner side.
I followed the dark outline until it stopped, then peered through a break in the fabric to a narrow grassy lane that ran between the stands.
Several feet away, facing me, stood Guinevere.
“There’s no time,” a man replied. “The herald will make his call soon.”
His voice was deep and clear, exquisitely court-trained and compelling, but the Queen merely waited with an insistent look on her face. She was uncrowned but still swathed in exquisite ivory samite, not looking much like a woman on trial.
A weary sigh followed, then the man hove into view before her.
He was a knight of tremendous stature, shoulders broad and carved across a muscular triangle of back, narrowing into a sleek, sword-belted waist and long legs.
I could not see his face, but he wore his dark hair jaw-length and shining, tucked behind his ears, and was clad in highly polished mail under a pristine white tunic.
Without a doubt, this was Guinevere’s much-lauded champion, and the tension between them was thick as pollen in summer air.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said to him. “Three knights—it’s madness.”
“Three, six, a dozen, send them all,” he replied. “The King wants you exonerated, and I will fell them for this cause. Given it is what you want too.”
Guinevere glanced away, a gleam of tears on her lashes. “The trial only requires one duel. Sometimes, I wonder if you are trying to… ”
“What? Die? With a sword in my hand?” His tone was firm but not harsh. “You know I cannot come to harm if you do not wish it so. All I want is for your happiness.”
Such candour was outlandish, even for a close Queen’s Knight, but to her it didn’t come as a surprise. She made no reply but fixed him again with her pale-green gaze.
“What I have done is for you,” the knight insisted. “Do you not believe in me?”
“You know I do,” she said fiercely. “That doesn’t mean I understand this.”
The feeling in her voice seemed to cow him. His shoulders dropped, and they were silent for so long it felt as though time held its breath. Suddenly, he stepped towards her, so they were barely a hand’s width apart.
“Listen to me, then,” he said, with a fraught gentleness. “When I go out there and defeat one man in your honour, you will be vindicated. When I defeat the second, it will prove once again that in God’s eyes, you have done no wrong.”
He swept her hands into his, as if about to take a holy vow. My breath caught with the quick intimacy of it, how he presumed to touch a queen; another man’s wife.
“When the third man falls to my sword,” he continued, “I will have completed the most astonishing feat ever seen in a trial by combat. And that greedy, questioning crowd—they will only remember my victories, how well I cut and parry. Every ounce of unfair shame and doubt put upon your name this past year will be silenced. They will no longer speak of you with carelessness, or recall why this trial was held. You will only be High Queen again, in honour and glory. Exactly as you should.”