Chapter 45 #2
Courteously, he handed me into the saddle, and in a few quick steps he had left me to mount himself. I took a long last look at him before inevitably he turned for Camelot and I lost him again.
Instead, Yvain gathered his reins and nudged his horse forwards until he was by my side.
He glanced about him with a quiet familiarity, perhaps remembering the times he had stood here, at the edge of his mother’s domain, never quite ready to cross that boundary.
Suddenly, he looked at me, tilting his head towards the path between the hawthorn trees, through the sun-dappled shadows that led to Belle Garde.
“Lead the way,” he said. “I’d like to see your home.”
*
Yvain and I rode along the riverbank as if drifting through a myth—a vison that I had imagined many times, but never dreamed could be real.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, as we dismounted on the green before the house’s main door. “I cannot remember when I last heard so much birdsong. To live here must be… ”
He trailed off and gave a smile so natural that I could barely withstand the flood of regret that washed through me.
“This place should have been part of your life too,” I said. “I wanted it, made plans to bring you, but… ”
My words caught and I stopped, but Yvain only shook his head. “I have lived a good life, God be thanked. The past is not for changing.”
Again his grace was humbling, unanswerable. I cleared my throat and gestured to the turret. “Your knee,” I said. “My study is the most peaceful place, but it’s at the top.”
“I’ve been living on this leg until now,” he replied. “I can manage a few stairs.”
True to his word, he climbed valiantly to the summit, though I could tell by his slowing pace he had underestimated the amount of steps. When we reached my study, he threw himself onto the cushioned bench and propped his injured leg on a footstool, as if he had always sat there.
I sat down beside him, finding myself unsure of my healing prowess for the first time in decades. Hesitantly, I pushed up my sleeves. “I will need to lay hands to your skin.”
Without qualm, Yvain prised off his boot and swiftly rolled up one leg of his breeches. His beleaguered knee was crisscrossed with white slashes, cut through by one upraised cicatrix—the cut I had seen all those years ago, badly healed.
He looked at me in expectation, and there I found my courage.
I lay my fingertips to the call of his pain, and immediately his afflictions assaulted my senses, a triptych of injuries in varying layers.
First, I dealt with the inflammation from that day, its heat receding under my hands, brought back into balance.
Then came the jarring twist from his recent fall; palms on either side of his knee, I sent the golden force in opposite directions, causing a harsh corrective twist that he would feel as though the injury had happened again.
Yvain inhaled sharply, and I had to take my own deep breath to steady my rising emotions. The injury yielded well, but not entirely. It would require his stillness, and another painful effort or two.
“Where is your lioness?” I said in diversion.
“She’s with—” he began, then cut himself off, his face sheepish. “It’s just…you might not know. I…I am married.”
I nodded lightly. “I had heard. Your Aunt Elaine told me.”
He seemed relieved, to such a degree he did not feel his joint twist back into place. “The lion is guarding my wife across the Channel,” he explained. “Not that my lady needs protecting—she is ferocious enough. Absolutely refuses to come to court or live in Logres.”
I smiled. “She sounds like a formidable woman.”
“Oh, she is,” he replied. “She ensured I became a man deserving of her so we could be happy. To have met her, to be loved by her, has been the greatest gift.”
His final injury—the older, worse affliction—had now revealed itself: a ring of hard tissue formed by pressure around the inadequate healing of the broken knee; a cage of fault lines grown into an armour of internal scarring, resistant to my exploratory touch.
“And are you?” I asked. “Happy, I mean.”
His face grew soft, even as my healing probed for a way inside the affliction. “Yes, very. Except for our separation, of course. I had hoped to take a long time away from the court soon, have children, learn to run a manor. Truly begin our lives.”
“It sounds wonderful,” I managed, filled as I was with happy pride.
My son had found a strong woman, and he had not sought to crush or denigrate her spirit.
He wanted to be with her; there might be children—a legacy of his own that would in some part be mine.
The thought was so joyous, I had to pull my focus back to his knee and the stubborn rope of scars that refused to uncoil.
I worked at them in silence for a while, unpicking thread by thread, the rhythm soothing, productive.
“My uncle says I should forgive you,” Yvain said suddenly.
I looked up in astonishment, and the force from my hands burst into a spray of light, shattering the carapace of affliction.
Swiftly, I gripped on to the connection, gathering the sparkling strands back under my control as scars immolated into gold dust. Beneath the rush of repair, a final, unseen fracture revealed itself, long and thin along the bone, never fully healed.
My power answered, flowing forth to knit my son’s knee back together, restoring the last of the strength he had lost.
I pulled my hands away, euphoric. “It is done.”
Unusually for a healing act, my son didn’t gasp, or leap up to see if my claims were indeed true. He simply sat and looked at me, his face smiling and assured.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
The thought of his acceptance was overwhelming. My healing had left its feathery, pleasant tiredness behind, but beneath I felt a deeper fatigue, the certainty that all my strength was still not enough to fix all that was irrevocable.
“Yvain,” I said. “You don’t have to forgive me, especially not on anyone else’s say-so. It is no small thing, and neither I nor Arthur have the right to advise anyone in this regard. We have only just considered the possibility of forgiving one another.”
“And will you?” His face lit with hope, defying my solemnity. I felt myself smile.
“I think perhaps I already have, for one good reason,” I said. “You. Whatever else, Arthur sent you to me and brought us together in his most pitch-dark hour. To be here, like this, with you now—it is everything.”
You called me Mother, I wanted to add, but it was too new, too delicate. Yet Yvain’s face was open, so I allowed myself one strike of boldness.
“I am glad you’ve lived a good life,” I said. “Truly I am. But know that I will always be sorry that it was a life lived without me.”
He looked at me for so long that I felt I wouldn’t be able to withstand it. Then, incredibly, he reached out and took my hands in his.
“I know, Mother, and I understand,” he said. “Yet we are here now.”
We sat joined for a long, transcendent moment, then in a brisk shift, he released me and got to his feet, testing the weight on his healed knee in great, fluid strides. I rose and followed his path, looking closely at his gait, checking my work.
“By my head,” he said, giving a brisk hop-skip of demonstration. “Strong as a newly forged blade. As though it never happened.”
We laughed together, and I watched him march around for a few blissful, easy moments. At length, he paused by the balcony door, his gaze shifting outside, as if the great golden city had risen up beyond the trees. We could not keep the world out forever.
“What’s happening?” I asked. “In Camelot.”
“Chaos,” he said. “When I left, Lancelot had absconded, which is as good as an admission of guilt. The Queen was barricaded in her chambers, with Sir Gawain guarding her door. His brother Agravaine was killed by Lancelot in the aftermath, so Gawain is both devastated and furious, which can be a dangerous combination. Where this will lead, I can’t say, but it is nowhere good. ”
I nodded, unsure how to reply; I knew what I wanted, but not if I was brave enough to speak it aloud. But my son had already gone beyond what I had hoped, and he deserved the same strength of heart from me. I would not fail him, or myself, this time.
“You should stay here awhile,” I said. “So I can ensure your injury is truly gone. And, perhaps, for you to see if forgiveness is something you wish to choose.”
To my surprise, my son turned to me and smiled.
“Yes, I suppose I should,” he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.