Chapter 34
Calling out would waste time: I immediately began to swim for the shore.
When my feet touched the lake bed, I picked up my streaming skirts and ran to him.
It didn’t matter that my breath was fire in my lungs, that my limbs were trembling with fatigue against the drag of my wet clothing.
There could have been a riptide to overcome, a ravine to scale between us, and I still would have reached him.
At my dramatic exit from the water, Accolon turned, brow rising in surprise, then recognition. So he could see me, and respond. He knew who I was.
The unlikelihood of it all arrested me and I stopped, suddenly doubtful, shivering from my wet clothes and skin. Closing my eyes, I asked the air to make me dry again, the sun’s fire to warm my lake-chilled body and return my courage.
Once restored, I looked again, half fearing he would be gone, a creation of my desperate hope.
Still he stood there, entire and perfect, exactly as he had been on the last day I had seen him alive, striding along Belle Garde’s riverbank.
He wore the same rich-blue tunic belted over a white linen shirt and breeches, a darker mantle and long brown boots, gold spurs at his heels, his demeanour at ease, as though he had just come to meet me from the tilt field or riding out with the huntsman. Everything of him was as it had been.
I moved closer, braver now. Accolon’s top lip rose, face opening into a smile—his smile. My God, he was beautiful, so very beautiful. I had forgotten how just looking at him made me ache.
“Morgan,” he said, like an answered prayer.
Morr-ganne, just as he had since the very first time. No one had ever spoken my name the way he did.
My formula, the long years of study, the Shroud of Tithonus, had worked. Accolon was whole, incredible, returned to life.
Returned to me.
“Accolon,” I said. “You’re…here.”
I wanted to say that I’d missed him, but I had no idea if he even knew he had died, or how alarming it might be for a person to hear they had been brought back from eternity.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
He regarded me with a calm amusement. “Extremely well,” he said. “Quite a feat, when you consider I was recently dead.”
It was so casually expressed I thought I’d misheard. “Y-you know of that?”
“Bien s?r. It’s not something one forgets.”
Strangely, it made me laugh, but the sound came out choked with tears. “Where were you…before this?”
“I couldn’t say. I was not here, then suddenly I am again.” He shrugged in his characteristic way. “If there was an ‘elsewhere,’ then I cannot express it further than that. But I know who I am, where I am, and the places I’ve been. I have my memories, the same knowledge. My feelings.”
“And is that…good?” I asked.
His storm-blue eyes held mine, another smile rising on his face, quieter, adoring. “I’m here, at our lake, looking at you, Morgan. There is nothing better.”
Another sob rose in my throat, but I resisted it.
I had to touch him, urgently, wanting only to sink into the warm strength of his arms, to feel his lips on mine before I let myself melt into the wonder of whatever this was.
I ran to him, arms outstretched, and he came forth to meet me, the falling sun casting its glow in his wake.
Suddenly, he was gone.
“Accolon?” I stopped, squinting into the lake’s rippling light.
“I’m here,” he said in a puzzled voice.
His outline reappeared, but I could barely see him, his image opaque, reforming but incomplete. Accolon was there, but so were the lake and valley beyond—through him. Sunset glittered within his body, marking out his hazy figure with pricks of silver and gold.
Something was wrong.
It was my eyes, it had to be, extreme fatigue from such powerful magic and my plunge in the lake. I reached out for his hands and he did the same. My fingers passed right through his, leaving a trail of stars.
“I can’t touch you,” I said. “You’re…you’re… ”
For the first time, Accolon regarded me with confusion. I tried to take his hands again, more carefully this time, but the same thing happened. My touch drifted through him, his form shimmering with disruption.
“Oh God, no. Please no,” I said. “You’re supposed to be whole. I thought you were whole.” I waved my hands frantically over his arms, his chest, his edges that weren’t there, finding only stardust. “Why can’t I touch you? What have I done? I…”
I recoiled, air catching in my chest. It was then I realized that Accolon’s hair was long, the way he preferred and always wore it at Belle Garde, but not as I cut it before he left for the Royal Court.
His attire was similar, but not quite identical to his riding garb of that day.
He was not as I last saw him, but as I most often thought of him, his ideal image.
“Morgan, it’s all right.” His voice sounded through my rising panic—surely I could not be imagining a sound so real? “Mon coeur, regarde-moi.”
His deepest endearment landed like salve on a wound. My breaths slowed long enough to steady. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I’m here.”
“Are you?” I whispered. “Truly?”
“Yes. I am real and I’m here, because of you. All is well.”
“No, it’s not,” I protested. “It wasn’t meant to be this way. If you are real, why can’t I touch you? Are you alive, dead, between worlds? Some sort of shade? I don’t even know what I’ve done, or if this is pure madness.”
He held up peaceable hands. It was a relief to stop talking. “Perhaps I can prove it to you,” he said. “Alors, close your eyes.”
I shook my head. “I want to see.”
He smiled, as loving and exasperated at my contrariness as he had always been. Hope stretched like a bowstring in my chest; however he was made, this was my Gaul, the soul contained in his heart brought back to life. Maybe all was not lost.
Opening his arms, Accolon stepped forwards and enveloped me in an embrace.
The first surprise was that he was warm.
There was no ghostlike chill about him, but a soft, distinct heat, like the balmy cast of a summer sunset.
As his presence wrapped around mine, I remembered how in cold-weather times, he would lie on my side of our bed and move aside when I joined him, so I would slip between sheets already warmed by his body, into the love that awaited me there.
No, I more than remembered—I felt it. A specific night in a long-ago December, amidst the first snowfall we had ever experienced at Belle Garde: he and I standing at the window, watching the white flakes fall like silence; my fingers, threading through his to lead us to bed; the low roar of the fire and the scent of the wine he had poured.
I pushed deeper into the sensations, feeling the linen brush my feet as I slipped them beneath warmed sheets.
Accolon’s fine hand on my waist, drawing me closer.
A memory, undramatic, inconsequential, known only to us.
I stepped back with a gasp, pulling out of his phantom embrace. Being apart from him brought a bracing chill, as though I had emerged from the lake after a long swim. Accolon too looked startled, his appearance slightly dishevelled, his edges blurred, though the stars within him shone more clearly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to… ” He gestured vaguely, unable to find the words. He seemed as breathless as I was.
“Don’t apologize,” I said. “It was exhilarating. Powerful. How did you…?”
“I don’t know. I thought if I could hold you, recall a moment we shared, it would prove something. But it felt as though we were truly back there. Was it the same for you?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Every part of it, in all my senses. It was incredible. We—”
A yawn cut me off, my body swaying with all that had caught up with me: the spent magic, my lost blood, the lake; the conjured memories he and I had relived so vividly.
“You’re exhausted,” Accolon said. “I know how using your skills can tire you, and what you’ve done today is extraordinary. You should go, sleep, restore your strength. I’ll await you here.”
The idea of leaving him was unbearable. “I’m not going. You can’t make me.”
“As if I could make you do anything, Morgan,” he said archly. “In that case, come sit here at the foot of the willow, as we used to.”
Tiredness washed through me again, so I let him guide me to the willow roots.
Mysteriously, the hole I had dug for his heart had refilled itself, leaving just a square of soil.
The pile of folded clothes remained beside the trunk, but I decided not to think of what that—or the fact his heels bore the spurs I gave to Robin so many years ago—might mean.
Instead, I sank gratefully down on the soft ground with Accolon beside me, appearing to recline against the tree trunk, his long legs crossed.
I could not rest my body on his as I wanted, but I moved closer and his heat flowed into me, a comfort, an impossibility. I looked up at him and he met my gaze, his face half stars; a tragedy and joy all at once.
“Our memory,” I said. “Could you…do that at will?”
“I believe so.” He smiled and it held a certain mischief. “Why—how much further do you wish us to go?”
For the first time in so long, I felt happiness rise in my chest and laughed, and Accolon did the same.
I could have been imagining it all, I knew that.
Whether he was truly there, a shade, a resurrected soul, or I was dreaming myself into madness, I didn’t care. We were together again, and laughing.
I curled closer to his warmth and looked up at him before sleep overwhelmed me.
“I love you,” I said.
He smiled in the way I loved best, tender and beautiful.
“I love you too,” he murmured, then I did not know if he said anything more, because I had already drifted off on a sea of our memories, vivid and alive; so many, and never enough.
*
When I awoke, Accolon was gone.