Chapter 37
I entered the long chamber through the courtyard door, stepping softly inside.
The air held a particular quiet, as if Lancelot was resting easier for once, the only sound a steady drip-drip-drip of water, echoing throughout the darkness.
A faint thrill whispered up the back of my neck as I closed myself in.
Heart pounding, I paused to think, limbs taut, fire in my hand burning so hot it was blue.
Would I be most satisfied scorching the paintings black, or shaking the earth until the plaster came crashing down?
Should I ask the spring to rise up in violence, flooding the chamber until it was clean?
Was Lancelot to be saved, or carried off on the tide of my rage?
I rushed to the images I had not yet seen.
Here were more knightly adventures and lavish feasts, further adulterous trysts with his King’s wife; the constant golden castle on its hilltop.
I moved along the wall, seeking fuel for my flame, when a different set of images caught my attention, the brushstrokes swift, not as precise: a woman arriving at Camelot with an infant in her arms; Lancelot wandering long-bearded and ragged in the wilderness; the knight’s return to court, his figure dogged by shadows and set apart from the others.
In the last painting, Lancelot was kneeling at Guinevere’s feet, as he so often was, but his hands were clasped before him.
The Queen looked away, pointing over his head, her message clear.
Go away from me, she was saying. His face was streaked with tears.
Lancelot was begging for forgiveness, and Guinevere was sending him out of her sight.
From there, colour abruptly ceased, leaving only charcoal sketches, of himself ahorse on the road, bent with grief, and the chapel where I had found him. I halted, unable to tear myself away from his sorrow, the futility he wore as he tried to keep moving.
The fury in my body cooled, gaining in density until I was made of heaviness.
Limbs weighted, I leaned my shoulder against the wall, but for once I could find no bright anger to chase the leaden slowness away, the dark barricade before me too high and solid to surmount.
The truth I could never admit, grown so great it had become unignorable: that beyond the distractions of anger and revenge, what I felt most of all was sadness.
Beyond, one large, final sketch covered the wall. With effort, I pushed myself up and paced farther to see a man made only of thick black lines, lying prone on a bed—Lancelot in repose, one arm slung out to his side. From his mouth came a pair of words.
Forgive me, he was saying.
I gazed at the agonized regret on his face, the smudged black rendering him deathlike, haunted. Lancelot’s abandonment of hope, his inability to pull himself away from his own ruin, was a dark mirror, from which my own reflection looked back.
Suddenly, I would have done anything not to have entered that room and seen what he had done.
I did not want to be chained to the same stuck wheel as he was, spinning ever faster, but never progressing onwards.
What I wanted was to move on, to exist alongside both my fury and sadness with complete honesty, and keep seeking my future, however long and difficult the road. I wanted to be free.
I turned away from the paintings. There was nothing for me here.
As I did, a flash of colour burned in my light. I pivoted back to the charcoal sketch, and a trail of crimson paint pouring down the figure’s arm.
My heart and flame jolted: the man in the bed was not sleeping—he was dead.
In the room, the incongruous dripping grew louder, insistent, like raindrops in a metal bowl. Fear rising in my throat, I made myself turn towards the bed. The first thing it illuminated was an arm, pale and bleak, hanging off the edge of the mattress. The next thing I saw was the blood.
It pooled on the floor, dripping from Lancelot’s hand. A shiver glittered through my bones: the healing in his blood, calling out to me.
With a sweep of my arm, I lit the candles in the room and rushed to the edge of the bed. A deep cut ran along both of Lancelot’s wrists, performed with vicious precision. His pulse vibrated towards my senses, weak and stuttering, his skin drained of life. The next breath he drew could be his last.
I grabbed his hands and pulled his bleeding wrists to my chest. Torrents of light were already streaming through my body, and when his blood touched my skin it became a blaze, almost beyond my control.
I had to master myself. I pulled deeply on my breaths, mind mapping the damage beneath my fingertips: the slashed skin, torn veins and sliced tendons.
His injuries reminded me of when Merlin took a dagger to Ninianne’s arm, the method of repair the same: halt the bleeding, seal severed vessels, rebuild the flesh.
So rapidly was it done that I barely even felt the stages. Lancelot’s lungs took a great, noisy gasp, pulling in air so hard he reared up from the bed, his eyes still closed. I held him upright until his breaths steadied, then propped pillows behind him and eased him back.
Once he was comfortable, I refocused my senses to any hidden afflictions.
He was fighting now, but his blood loss would define this struggle.
Settling my hip against his, I drew his wrists into my lap, easing my light through him like a slow-running river.
I could not restore his blood without days of further healing, but I could ensure he survived the night.
An hour passed, and another, Lancelot’s blood replenishing inside him while all he had lost dried darkly across the sheets, my robe, his bare chest. As the candles burned down, I looked around the room, at the walls, his paintings flickering with shadow as if they had come to life.
A glint of silver caught my eye from the table at his bedside, surrounding a circle of gold and green—Guinevere’s emerald ring, returned to him and back on its chain, but left aside.
He had not wanted his holiest of relics to bear witness to his final sin.
I was half dozing when I felt a frisson of observation over my body. I opened my eyes to see Lancelot gazing directly at me.
“God’s blood,” he said. “Morgan le Fay.”
His voice was oddly calm. How long he had been awake, I could not be sure.
I offered a wan smile. “Who else?”
Upon hearing me speak, he tore his hands away, scrambling upright in evasion.
“Careful!” I exclaimed, but my warning came too late. His shoulder blades crashed against the bedhead and he slumped there, ashen and panting. His pale-blue glare, however, was at full strength—furious, accusing and icy as a northern winter.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded hoarsely, before his mind caught up. “You have been holding me prisoner? All this time?”
Wordlessness had taken hold of my tongue from the fatigue of healing, or because just then, I possessed neither the ability nor the will for a fight. But weakened as he was, Lancelot was still Lancelot, and he would do battle no matter the circumstances.
“Explain yourself,” he commanded.
His tone awakened something hot within me.
“Explain what, exactly?” I snapped. “That I saved your life again, in far worse circumstances than the last time? Look at me—look at you!” I gestured to our bloodied bodies, the stained, damning sheets.
“Not another soul in this world could have brought you back from the grievous state I discovered you in. Perhaps instead of interrogation, you should try thanking me.”
I had never seen a look so wrathful from him. The glow of fury in his eyes could have tempered steel.
“Why did you do it?” I asked. “And don’t say being in my captivity. Until a moment ago, you didn’t know who held you, and being a prisoner hasn’t troubled you at all.”
“What is it to you?” he snarled.
I laughed, but it was a brittle thing. For once, I was too tired to get much pleasure out of sparring with him.
“What is it to you?” I replied. “You are loved and respected, and stand beside a King who adores your very bones, blind to all your sins. You have prowess, accolades, peers who would die for you. What is it about your charmed life that is so agonizing?”
I expected a burst of outrage, but my words seemed to freeze inside of him. He glanced down at his hands, twisting bloody around the ruined linen.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he said.
His voice was low, and he looked so suddenly lost it struck every retort from my tongue.
To stare danger in the eye and keep surviving had always been his greatest skill, but he shrunk from it now, the weight of his sadness like a bull’s heart in my hands, huge and cold and heavy.
Why have you given this to me, of all people? I thought.
I sighed and let my need for answers go. Despite everything, I did not wish to see him this way.
“Lancelot, how long have we known one another?” I said. “You should realize by now that I am never going to let you die. Your fate doesn’t end within these walls.”
He seemed to take in and then accept the notion, pushing himself up to sit straighter. “How did you get here in time? Have you been spying on me?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “Only once before I have come here at night, to see what you were painting. Otherwise, I have kept away.”
“Then why come tonight?” he asked.
“I received some bad news and was angry,” I replied. “At the accepted world and its self-righteousness, the false, barbaric tenets you and your knightly brothers live by. At your paintings of Camelot, daubed all over my walls. I wanted to destroy something.”
He nodded as if he understood. “What news?”
“My sister is dead,” I replied. “Killed in haste and violence by her own son. Put to the sword by those who should have loved her—knights of supposed honour.”
His eyes flashed, and I braced myself for his inevitable justification of whatever knightly purpose stood behind such a heinous act.