Chapter 31
I rode with only the magpies for company, and left the flock and my horse in a rowan grove just outside the Welsh Gate. Though I was without disguise and unchanged, no one stopped me from walking into the city, or striding up to the castle’s main door.
Camelot had forgotten who I was.
There were no signs of congregation near the larger halls, so I took the route Sir Kay had led me last time, past the King’s official chambers, to the doors bearing crowned red dragons. A murmur of voices emanated from within. I drew a deep breath and stepped inside.
The private throne room was less austere than when I had last seen it—cushioned benches had been brought in, and large window alcoves had been built out from the wall.
A group of people gathered in the farthest embrasure, silhouetted by sun.
On the dais, a pair of figures stood talking, apart from the rest.
I saw him first, shining like moonlight in the dark: Sir Lancelot du Lac, his towering presence filling the space between the thrones. He wore riding garb over silver-white mail, and the sight of him after so long shot through my bones like a comet.
Blue eyes locked with mine, icy as the very first time. Our stare held long enough for me to read the tension in his shoulders, the phantom of torment written on his face. The reason, I assumed, was the figure who stood beside him, regarding me with far less calm.
“By the saints! What is that witch doing here? In our city—in our home?”
Guinevere: still golden and beautiful, dressed in white. I had not expected her.
At her exclamation, the room shifted, seeking the cause of alarm. Lancelot leapt in front of her, his instinct to protect her well-honed yet unthinking, primal. However, she swerved his attempt to be her shield, brushing him aside to glare me down in disdain.
I ignored her and advanced farther into the room. I was not here to answer to Camelot’s duplicitous Queen, but to address the kingdom’s true source of power. I looked to the gathering at the window, seeking a crowned head.
Instead, a figure stepped tentatively out of the group of people. His leg juddered as he approached—the injury he had not let me heal.
“Yvain,” I gasped. Given his grief for his father and unsanctioned visit to my valley, I hadn’t considered he would return directly to the court. “How are you?”
“I am well,” he replied warily. “Why have you—?”
“That’s enough,” came a cold, strident voice.
All along he had been there, not ten feet away. He emerged from the sun’s slanted shadow and strode forth, Yvain fading into retreat in his wake. His presence as he halted before me seemed to occupy every ounce of space.
My brother, the High King, tall and proud. Furious.
Arthur regarded me with eyes of molten steel, jaw set hard and body poised, as if ready to run towards an opposing army.
“What are you doing, Morgan?” he said.
The confrontation was upon us, exactly what I had wanted, but as I stood before my brother, I hadn’t the slightest idea what to say.
“Yes, do tell us,” the Queen piped up. “I, for one, would like an explanation.”
Her interruption unchained my tongue at once. “Stay out of this, Guinevere,” I snapped. “It’s a situation far beyond your understanding.”
She recoiled as if I were a venomous snake. I turned again to my brother. “I need to speak to you, Arthur. Just the two of us.”
“Don’t do it,” Guinevere said. “She cannot be trusted.”
Lancelot stepped forwards, close at her side. “I agree with my lady Queen,” he said unsurprisingly. “No good can come of this.”
Arthur looked at his wife and best knight for a long moment, a shaft of sun drawing a line of connection between them. As a trio, they were incandescent.
“A curse on all three of you,” I muttered under my breath.
My brother’s attention snapped back to me. “If you want to speak, then speak,” he said. “Why are you here?”
“I have come to tell the truth,” I declared.
“Every last word, under terms that are favourable to Camelot. This is not surrender—I will not yield to your notions of justice, nor am I asking for mercy. But I will admit every misdeed I have ever committed, then vanish back into my valley and never trouble the Royal Court again. In exchange, I request exoneration from the treasons and betrayal I am not guilty of.”
Unease shimmered through the room. Arthur raised a sceptical eyebrow. “That seems a great risk, given all you have done. You cannot think you will save your reputation?”
“Indeed not,” I replied. “It is not for the world’s good opinion that I seek this absolution, but for my son.”
Yvain’s head flew up on hearing himself mentioned, his expression wide-eyed, confused. In our precarity, I hadn’t wanted him to witness this, but I had to go on.
“Sir Yvain is held to his association with a mother whose character is only half drawn,” I said. “My admissions may make my reputation at Camelot worse—I don’t care. But it should be the whole truth, if only in the name of fairness.”
It gave my brother pause. “Sister, I am no fool,” he said, his voice less flinty.
“I know, and this is no trick,” I said. “I swear on our mother’s good grace.”
Again he stilled, but I could read him; he too was recalling that upon our mother’s death, he had reached out to me without rancour. More than that, he knew I would never stoop to invoke her for a lie.
“Let’s finish this, Arthur,” I said. “Once and for all.”
He put his hands on his hips, his grey eyes keen, calculating every possibility. After an age, he said. “Very well. We will have this over with.”
Abruptly, he spun away and ascended the dais steps, heading towards the door on the back wall. I followed, passing Guinevere, who huffed and stalked off. Lancelot looked after her, hurt shadowing his extraordinary face, then went to his King.
“Sire, I will stand beside you for this,” he said, but Arthur shook his head. He placed a reassuring hand on his knight’s shoulder.
“It’s all right, my friend,” he replied. “Dismiss the rest, would you? Then I give you leave to start on your travels, if you are in a hurry.”
Lancelot covered my brother’s hand with his own. “No, I will be here and directly outside. If you need me.”
Arthur smiled affectionately at his knight, then drew away and opened the door, gesturing me inside.
Beyond, I was surprised to meet the sight of his Great Chamber from a new entrance.
Little had changed—most of the furniture remained, the blue-and-gold ceilings, walls still tapestried with Jason and his Argonauts, the dark presence of Medea lending him her skills.
When I lived at court, my brother and I had sat talking in this room every evening, until we knew one another so well we could finish the other’s sentences.
Of all places, I never expected him to bring me to the centre of our past closeness, and it hit like a hawk strike.
Arthur too was looking around the room and could not choose where to settle, so he turned to me with his sternest regal demeanour.
“Before we begin, I should warn you,” he said. “I can make no promises where justice is concerned. Depending on what you tell me, I may still have to act. With severity.”
“Spare us both your posturing,” I said scornfully. “You won’t kill me.”
His eyes flashed at my disrespect. “Don’t presume to know me, Morgan. It’s been a long time since you have.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “I understand how you think. Perhaps I did not know you the longest but I knew you best. I will always know you, Arthur.”
He stared at me in challenge, but I held his gaze.
I had never been afraid to face him, but there was a time I had deferred to him, believed in his ways, because we loved and respected one another.
He would put his hand upon my shoulder and cast down those assuring grey eyes, and I would be convinced, because to be high in his regard felt like being anointed.
We were brother and sister, part of one another, two edges of one blade.
It was not just to save face that Arthur would never kill me.
Yet now he looked away, as if reading my thoughts and finding them unbearable.
“There is a far easier life available to you, Morgan,” he said. “I hope you realize that. There are better ways out of the cage you’ve put yourself in.”
“I’m not in a cage,” I snarled. “I don’t surround myself with crenellated walls and steel-clad men, nor do I live every moment in fear of my own death. Who between us is the most trapped?”
The accusation cut short his sanctimony, at least. He arched to full height like a rising dragon.
“I fear nothing,” he said. “Least of all death. Do you know how many battles I have fought? How many warlike kings I have faced down? I have walked with the shadow of my own demise since I drew the sword from the stone. Powerful as you are, I do not even fear death from your hands—you learned as much that day beneath your own storm.”
“So you’ve not forgotten it,” I said.
“No, sister. Not that moment, or any other since the day we first met. I never will.” His voice held more heaviness than ire, but before I could wonder why, he glanced to the rafters and sighed. “Let’s not waste time. What do you want from this, Morgan?”
His dismissal stung, the sudden shift to mere transaction.
I want my life back, I wanted to shout. I want my valley to be a home again, not an empty shell where love once lived.
I want you not to have killed Accolon, nor laid him on a bier and sent his lifeless, carved-up body to me.
I want never to have seen him dead on the altar in your cathedral, as if you cared about what you did to us.
I want the child I never met not to have been taken and hidden from me, and the son I know not to be a stranger, or be tainted by his association with my name.
I want to go back in time and change the moments where everything went wrong.