Chapter 40
It took a moment for reality to come flying back.
My senses ground to a halt, scrambling to readjust between where I stood now and the lingering vision until my thoughts felt blurred, exhausted.
Staggering back, I put a hand against the willow trunk and drew a deep breath, taking in the rasp of bark against my fingers, the lake’s quiet lapping of the shore, and the scent of sweet, dewy grass.
It was no good; the entire world had been turned inside out.
Accolon’s death rushed back in vivid detail: the clashing metal and growls of effort; the mutual shock as he and Arthur discovered who they had been fighting; my brother’s desperate call for a bier, trying to undo what he had done.
Arthur cradling my Gaul’s dying body, insisting they be saved together, risking himself. The blood; so much blood.
To my losses, it meant nothing, but against the darkness I had lived within, it was a sliver of light, threading through my cracked heart.
My brother had not killed Accolon out of spite, or even intentionally.
Nor did Accolon lie in the abbey, alive and in agony for four days, awaiting my healing.
He was already dead. I never could have saved him.
Accolon’s death at my brother’s hand wasn’t a rageful, unjust act of war upon his estranged sister—it was an outright, devastating mistake.
Why Arthur claimed he had murdered his knight and friend as my punishment, I did not know.
To wear such cruelty when he was innocent, while carrying his guilt and grief, was so far beyond what my brother had led me to believe that everything I had learned seemed suddenly inefficient, a bare accounting at best. I didn’t know anywhere near enough.
I looked out across the lake, now an afternoon like any other. Rich sunlight danced off the water like diamonds, mingling with Accolon’s essence. After the length and intensity of the memory, it would be several days before he reappeared.
Regardless, he could not tell me more. Accolon had knowledge only of what occurred up until the moment of his death, not why my brother had chosen to seal our fate with a different story, nor what he lived with in private.
This life-altering truth had been given to me by another, one who observed what came after.
He who had seen the scars within Arthur and myself, and offered what now felt like an act of mercy.
And I had to know why, even if it meant admitting he was right.
Now, more than ever, I needed to see Lancelot.
*
The scene when I reached the long chamber was not as I expected. For one, the doors were wide open. Secondly, Alys and Tressa were inside, but Lancelot was nowhere to be seen.
“You’re back, thank goodness,” Alys said. “There’s been…a happening.”
I looked around the room. The bloodstained sheets had been stripped from the bed, but it was otherwise free of signs of disruption.
“Sir Lancelot is gone,” Tressa clarified. “Escaped this morning. Left the house and took his horse while the stable boys were distracted.”
“Escaped?” I echoed. “But how? He was locked fast—utterly secure.”
“Apparently not,” she replied. “He never was.”
She gestured at one of the barred windows nearest the courtyard door. Or at least, it had been barred. Now it was bare, the iron struts torn free and discarded as if they were kindling. I picked one up and it was solid, without fault, just unable to withstand Lancelot’s incredible determination.
“Where the Devil did he get the strength?” I said.
The two other fortified windows were still intact, but in the illumination of day, there was something amiss: the slightest bowing in the iron bars in the middle embrasure, where it had been tested, then left alone.
For his entire captivity, Lancelot had been aware that he could escape, and had chosen not to.
I turned to the wall of paintings facing the bed, where he had sketched the death I had snatched him back from, the trail of painted blood stark as stigmata in the sunlight.
Now it struck me, in the echo of his absence, what he had done.
Lancelot’s revelation in our final, heated exchange was not argument—it was a reply, a settlement; an oath repaid.
In sharing my own honesty—about my brother, Camelot, in telling him of his miracle blood—I had given him the key to himself, so he had given me the same.
You know me, he had said, and I know you. Lancelot had recognized the grief, fury and deathless love that made Morgan le Fay, and honoured our night-dark bond with the truth I most needed. He had set me free.
“Where do you think he’s gone?” Tressa asked.
“I know where,” I replied. “He’s gone back.”
Back to Camelot: to her, his Guinevere, and Arthur, his King, the woman and the man he loved best. He could not be made whole any other way.
I accepted it then, suddenly, completely: that for Lancelot to submit to his heart, to bestow his entire self upon those he loved, was his own form of freedom. Whatever I did not understand about the three of them, I never would. It was not mine to know.
“Take the tapestries from the old Great Chamber,” I said. “Hang them over the paintings until everything is covered.”
Tressa nodded and hurried off, leaving Alys and me looking at the longest wall, full of colour and skill; the great du Lac’s lengthy confession.
“What about him?” Alys asked.
“Let him go,” I said. “Sir Lancelot does not belong here.”
Eighteen months he had been at Belle Garde, and there would be no resolution to what suddenly made him leave. More than that, I never knew why, for so long, he chose to stay.
*
Though madness was a waning possibility, there was still no absolute proof that Accolon’s shade and the story of his death were not inventions of my imagination.
With Lancelot gone, ridden off with my ability to question what he knew, I was left with a need for answers, yet few avenues of knowledge.
Arthur had sworn never to speak to me again, and regardless of what I had just learned, I remained too proud to ever set foot back in Camelot.
But he wasn’t the only person who had been there that day. What I sought lay, as it so often did, within the water.
After a trip to the kitchen well, I returned to my study with a full ewer in my hand, reached behind the Hecate tapestries and drew out the silver bowl. The metal sang as I poured, playing its strange note.
“Show me Ninianne of the Lake,” I said.
The water quivered in answer, and barely had time to settle before the surface stilled, reflecting the same white arched ceiling as before. Ninianne’s face appeared in the glasslike surface, gleaming with intensity.
“Do you have my son?” she demanded. “Lancelot is missing. Is he with you?”
“No,” I said. “At least, I don’t have him anymore. He’s on his way back to Camelot. We are finished with one another, Ninianne, I promise.”
She scrutinized my face, reading me for the truth. At length, she sighed and her light softened. “Then why are you contacting me?”
At the question, I suddenly wanted to pull away, unable to bear the chance that she might scoff at my wrongness and inform me my new truth had been some self-made fever dream. But either way, I needed to be sure, and Ninianne was all I had.
“I know Arthur didn’t mean to kill Accolon,” I said. “What happened, the circumstances. Everything. I just need to hear whether what I’ve learned is true.”
Briefly, her eyes widened, then she sat back, rolling a swan quill between her fingers. “Tell me what you know.”
I reached up and clasped the Gaulish coin in my palm.
“I know that when Accolon and Arthur duelled, they didn’t realize who they were fighting,” I began.
“I know Accolon was winning, and Arthur wouldn’t yield even when he lost his sword.
That it could have been very different until you came and took the scabbard. ”
My voice burned in my throat, raw and painful as the truth could be.
“I know that Arthur was horrified when he found out what he had done, and Accolon perished on the battlefield, long before he reached the abbey. I know there was no time, no way I could have healed him. I know that Arthur held him as he died.”
“Morgan,” Ninianne said, but I held up a halting hand.
“I know there were times when you tried to tell me,” I forged on. “And so did Arthur, I realize now, in his stubborn way. It didn’t matter—I was never going to hear it until I was made to listen by someone who had no reason to speak of it at all.”
Until Lancelot sacrificed himself to give me the truth and refused to let me look away.
“How do you know all this?” Ninianne asked.
I shook my head. I would not tell her—not of the magical means of my discovery, nor who had sent me looking for a revelation.
What had occurred between Lancelot du Lac and Morgan le Fay I would never be sure of, but our dark, enlivening connection, whatever it had meant, belonged only to him and me.
“Is it true?” I asked. “Is that how it happened?”
I felt her quiver, but she didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Everything you describe.”
It felt as though a weight had been lifted from my bones, but the relief was too quick, leaving my body untethered, flailing, like a bird caught in a gale. I staggered backwards, landing in my chair.
“Morgan? Are you still there?”
Ninianne leaned closer to the bowl, her aspect seeking mine. I pulled myself upright and looked down at her again.
“That day,” I said, “how didn’t you know it was Accolon?
His helm meant Arthur could not see his face, but what of your fairy intuition?
In Tintagel, you told me that you felt my presence about him immediately, and that I carried his when I came to Merlin’s.
Why didn’t you sense him on the battlefield? ”