The Lost Book of Lancelot

Chapter 1

In my earliest memory, I want to know magic.

It’s sunset on the Isle of Women, and I’m standing on the shore where the waves begin to curl.

My feet are bare, my breeches rolled up.

I’m dressed in a tunic I have mended many times.

I can sew a patch, I can skin a deer. Each day I gather firewood and sweep the floorboards and help with the cooking. When I’m moving, my mind is still.

Across the horizon I see the shapes of other islands. I feel the urge to know those islands, to make myself known on them. If I had magic, I could fly to them, like the winged gods I read of. Viviana has taught me many things, but she has not taught me magic. I wonder when she will.

Here she is now, drifting down to the beach. It’s time for our nightly forest walk.

“Come,” she says. “Let’s venture.”

She grabs my hand and we press into the woods.

The trail is dark and cool, the sun fading to the sound of insects.

I love being next to her. I love the coldness of her hand on mine.

Mother is not the right word, but it is the closest. As she points out the wonders around us, the sylvan canopy transforms her.

Her long brown hair shimmers. The sapphire pendant around her neck seems to glow.

She wears gold sandals with thin woven straps, and with each step she takes, I notice moonflowers, opening and stretching towards her.

She shows me rabbits, asleep in their thickets. An apricot, ripe on its branch, traps all the colors of the sunset. We pass a stream filled with precious stones, and I think of the stones I’ve heard tales of, those that grant magic to the most heroic knights.

I want nothing more than to be a knight. They have a place in the world and people who love them. Most of all, they are never lonely. I doubt I am brave enough to become a knight, but maybe if Viviana teaches me her magic…

“I can teach you many things,” she says, pulling me close. “Some of which will feel like magic.”

She cups her hands together, pulls them down to my level. Suddenly, from inside, they glow.

“It’s magic!” I cry.

She unclasps her hands. A firefly dithers out, weighed down by its own vibrant belly.

“It looks like magic,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “But it’s just the world revealing itself.”

With her permission I too clasp the firefly. I wait. When my palms don’t illuminate, I worry I’ve done something wrong. That the world will not glow for me. That nothing ever will.

I open my hand. The firefly lies mashed in the folds of my palm.

The damage is horrifying. A living thing, now in bits. I realize, almost instantly, that what I’ve done is irrecoverable. Even Viviana’s magic can’t bring the firefly back to life. A desperate wrongness rises from my stomach.

Frantic, I smear the remains of the firefly on a tree trunk, but the tension inside me is too much to bear. I curl my hands into a fist and punch the bark, over and over. I need to feel the pain to account for the fact that I’ve killed the firefly.

Startled, Viviana pulls me back. She’s looking at my pulpy knuckles with a knowing fear. I start to sob.

“Deep breaths,” she says, and pulls me close.

It will take weeks for the cuts to heal. I still have the scars.