Chapter 35
To return to the house was the strangest thing I had ever done, in a life full of outlandish experiences.
When I reached the end of the path and took in the main building and front green, the turret looking exactly as it did when I left it, everything felt absurd, eternally changed.
If Accolon was truly at the lake, keeping a secret of this magnitude would not be easy, and I had no desire to return to subterfuge, but for now I could not do otherwise.
As expected, Alys and Tressa were in my study, preparing for the day’s work on our latest manuscript, and did not question where I had been.
To see them smiling, unknowing, looking over pages on women’s life stages with their heads bent close, jolted me with a hundred warring feelings.
Without realizing it, I had split my life in two.
Luckily, Sir Lancelot brought us enough distraction. According to Tressa, when she went in to check on him and bring his food, he was awake but not at all angered by the fact he was in captivity.
“All he said was—I’m a prisoner here, aren’t I? As if it didn’t matter in the slightest. I was so taken aback I answered that it was true. I didn’t see the point in claiming otherwise—he opened the courtyard shutters and saw the bars.”
“Iron bars are rather definitive,” I replied. “So I expect he is throwing himself against the doors now, is he? Climbing walls, breaking everything he can get his hands on.”
“That’s just it,” she replied. “I expected his reaction to be dramatic, but he merely thanked me and sat back on the bed. I stood outside his door for a while, but he didn’t make a sound.
The strangest thing is, he hasn’t asked a single question—where he is, who I am, who is holding him.
Not a word, bar thanking me for his food. ”
“How very odd,” Alys said.
I nodded thoughtfully. Before he woke, I had lightly charmed Lancelot’s memory so he would not recall our clash in Camelot or immediately suspect me, but assumed his imprisonment would still be met with outrage.
In all my dealings with du Lac, I had only known him to react to his feelings outwardly, often in the extreme.
Passive and reserved had not so far been within his capabilities.
“It could be a ruse to flush out his captor,” I mused. “He is a good chess player.”
Alys and Tressa glanced at one another.
“I’m not going to fall for it,” I insisted. “Sir Lancelot might be acting the lamb of peace for now, but he’ll be tearing down the bed drapes and demanding to face his jailer in a duel any moment. Regardless, I’m staying away.”
*
Instead, I returned to the lake.
By the time I climbed the path the next morning, I half believed I had imagined it all, and would find nothing but the leaning willow and still blue water, same as it ever was.
But before fear could take hold, Accolon came, appearing from beneath the tree exactly as he had the day before—smiling and beautiful. The sight was overwhelming.
I ran to him, tracing my hands along his edges. “I’m so happy you’re here.”
“So am I,” he said. “To look upon you again, to be able to share all we have missed and our memories…it is everything.”
I smiled. “It’s all I have been thinking about. I want to relive our every moment, everything we have experienced, together and apart. To see and feel it all.”
He leaned forwards, reaching out for the embrace I craved like the most terrible hunger. Suddenly, I could feel him within his irresistible warmth, how his body used to fuse with mine with such exquisite ease.
“Where should we begin?” he asked.
I did not have to pause to think. “At the glen near Tintagel, the enchanted pool we found. Can we go back to that day?”
The look he gave me was stormy, insoluble, and I felt it as thunder along my spine. “Oui, if that is what you want.”
“It’s all I want,” I said, closing my eyes as his heat swept away my senses. “Take us there.”
*
I spent a month going to Llyn Glas without too much scrutiny. The autumn was still ablaze, with unseasonably clear skies and lingering warmth, so no one looked askance at my wandering abroad.
In this shining, unfathomable time, Accolon and I did what we had always done when finding one another again—we rushed together as if the hours were against us, galloping through our past in its full glory.
We revisited the glen near Tintagel several times, delving into a memory that had always been too brief.
I discovered I could choose to feel our moments as they had happened, or observe on the periphery, but always he and I stayed together.
Mostly, I picked where and when we revisited, but Accolon occasionally found his insistence. “Today, I decide,” he said firmly, one burnished morning. “You forget the most important thing that happened in Tintagel. Before the glen or our nights together.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Which is?”
“I beat you at chess.”
I laughed. “I ‘forget’ because such a thing never happened.”
“Alors, prepare to be proved wrong.”
Immediately, we were in Tintagel’s Great Hall, sitting across a table from one another, the household so bare we were almost alone.
Relentless rain battered the windows; I remembered it had prevented us from riding out.
We were still in the days when our hours were spent together but we could not admit we had fallen back in love.
The chessboard he had given me years earlier sat between us, Accolon’s carriage so self-conscious and upright I was afraid it would give him muscle strain. But as we began, his shoulders loosened, and soon he was smiling: at the board, at me, at my every gambit.
Through the haze of years, I watched his elegant hands, one wavering over his pieces, the Gaulish coin shimmering back and forth across the other.
After four swift defeats, he pursued hard and beat me in the fifth, collapsing onto the table as if he had just won a lengthy footrace.
His laughter, deep and joyous, rang around the hall like music.
“Of all the competitive triumphs in my life,” he said as we returned to the present, “that was my greatest one.”
“You were a distraction,” I protested. “As well you knew.”
We continued that way, revisiting the old and exploring the new, until we were even closer, our love deathless, still growing; another miracle.
The only impediment was that the process would tire him; too much time conjuring our memories eventually dissolved his shade into silver-gold dust and scattered his essence across the lake.
He would always reform, though it took up to a week for him to return.
In the times I awaited him, I would sit at my desk and surreptitiously study for a way to make Accolon whole.
All was well until the weather turned, an abrupt chill driving in with frozen rain. Some days, I used my elemental skills to clear the skies, but Mother Nature fought against too much interference, and the dark and cold could not be escaped.
“These are no conditions for the woman I love,” Accolon scolded, as I arrived in a haze of sleet. “Come back when the skies and ground are kinder.”
“Will you not be bored?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“Time and weather do not affect me. I am only here when you are.”
As winter passed, the strangeness of my new existence faded, and I returned to my old rhythms—sitting at the worktable with Alys and Tressa, reading and writing, discussing plans for the valley; mealtimes with the household.
At Christmastide, they laid Accolon’s place at our feasts, and it did not hurt as it used to, knowing that on the next clear day, I could tell him of all that was done and said, the songs we sang and thanks we gave.
That soon enough, the space beside me might no longer be empty.
So our weeks and months went, my life divided between two planes: Llyn Glas and Belle Garde; Accolon or my household; the Morgan of truth and of secrets.
All the while, Sir Lancelot, my caged leopard, ate, slept and kept his claws and teeth to himself. It was several months, and almost spring, before he made a move to acknowledge his own existence.
*
“He has asked for paints and brushes.”
I looked up to see Tressa before my desk.
It was a bright afternoon in early March and I had retired to read in my study after spending the morning on Tintagel’s headland with Accolon until he faded.
He had grown stronger over the past few months, but the memory was potent and we had revelled in it, so it would still take days for him to reform.
“What?” I asked distractedly.
“Sir Lancelot,” Tressa said. “He’s been watching the painter in the courtyard outside his room—the man painting our new murals.
This morning he asked him if he could borrow some supplies, though he hasn’t asked for anything to paint on.
The muralist is happy to share, but thought he should ask first.”
I sat back, considering. Lancelot had no way of getting a message out of Belle Garde, and he had already refused parchment and ink in case he otherwise wanted to write.
There were more destructive ways to make a mess of his chamber, and he had so far kept the room in perfect order. He even made his own bed every day.
I glanced up at Alys, seeking scrolls on the gallery. “What do you think?”
“He will paint the walls,” she pointed out. “It would change the room.”
My pulse quickened, but I had promised not to let the chamber hold sway over me. It was why I had put du Lac there in the first place.
“If you have no objections, then I have none,” I told Tressa. “Tell the painter I will replace any supplies he uses. Let’s see what our eminent guest does.”