“Say nothing,” he whispered to Collum.

  “Less than nothing,” Dinadan said. “Don’t even think anything.”

  They were ushered into a sparse high-ceilinged receiving room. Collum hung back; he felt like they were besmirching the immaculate quiet of the place with their every move. Bedivere had a word with a lay sister, then a more extensive hushed negotiation with a severe-looking abbess, who though plainly dressed wore a conspicuous gold cross on a chain and a ring with an exquisite sapphire. She shot disapproving glances at Sir Palomides. Finally two nuns brought in a chair and then laboriously set up a heavy red-leather screen around it.

  There was the swish of soft-soled shoes from behind the screen. Collum felt the atmosphere in the room change subtly. Palomides and Dinadan knelt. Collum followed suit, though he didn’t know why.

  “Stop. One doesn’t kneel to a nun.”

  The voice of the woman behind the screen was clipped and slightly nasal. It spoke of generations of wealth and breeding.

  “You will always be our queen,” Palomides said. “Your Majesty.”

  “But I won’t, Sir Palomides. That is precisely why I took the trouble to become a nun. And it wasn’t easy. You should see what they did to my hair.”

  The knights obediently got to their feet. Collum could hardly breathe. That was Queen Guinevere herself behind that screen, barely three yards away. She must have taken refuge here after Camlann.

  “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” Guinevere said. “I do hope Sir Lancelot didn’t send you.”

  “You really think we’d run that treacherous fornicator’s errands?” Bedivere snapped. He alone hadn’t knelt.

  The words echoed in the stone room. Instead of replying, Guinevere let the silence stretch out, tacitly inviting Bedivere to think on his words and perhaps regret them. That must be one of the ways a queen learns to wield power, Collum thought. She would be dressed as a novice, but he could only imagine her on an imperial throne wearing a golden crown.

  “Go on, Bedivere,” she said finally, more softly. “Speak your piece.”

  “We seek a new king,” Bedivere said curtly. “Did you and Arthur ever discuss the succession?”

  “I can’t help you with that.”

  “You didn’t speak of it? Not once in twenty years of marriage?”

  “Did he discuss it with you?” The fallen queen’s courtly tones sharpened. “You may think me a dizzy fool, or worse, but I always believed that God would provide us with a new king. And I still do, though I’ll admit He’s not going about it quite how I expected. In the meantime I am doing my best to ready my soul for the kingdom to come.”

  “Many congratulations, Your Majesty,” Palomides said, “but your old kingdom lies in ruins, and we are doing our earthly best to put it back together.”

  “And what is it you’d like from me, Sir Palomides? In the past year I have been falsely accused of treason, nearly executed, then abducted and finally widowed. What is it you’re hoping I have? A divine communiqué? Secret baby? A coded letter, in Arthur’s hand? When my opinion mattered most no one listened to me, and I feel disinclined to give it to you now. I will tend to my own virtue, since everyone else seems so concerned about it.”

  “You have many years left, God willing,” Palomides’ deep voice rang in the convent hall. “If you were to marry again—”

  “Silence, you revolting blackamoor!” The abbess spoke with such vitriol she had to wipe her chin. “This interview is ended!”

  But the woman behind the screen must have checked her with a gesture. She might be a novice, who had forsworn her earthly station, but some power was not so easily set aside.

  “The past may be gone,” Guinevere said, “but it is very far from forgotten. The people of Britain hold me responsible for my late husband’s lamentable downfall and death, as you very well know. Any cause I support would only be tainted by association with the Whore of Camelot.”

  “No one would dare call you that.”

  “Pray do not patronize me, Sir Dinadan. Everybody calls me that and worse. Some of the sisters in here are quite inventive. I remain devoted to Arthur and all he stood for, but for now I must pursue my own interests in my own time.

  “But think on this. Arthur and I each had a duty to the realm. Mine was to provide the king with an heir. Arthur’s duty was not to fall. We both failed. I loved my husband with all my heart, but if you are seeking another king, do not seek another Arthur.

  “Good day to you all, gentlemen.”

  There was a creak and rustle as the unseen woman rose.

  “Wait.”

  Dinadan spoke in a low voice.

  “Would you give us your blessing?” He kept his eyes on the floor. “Not as our queen, but as a sister of Saint Benedict?”

  Nobody moved. Guinevere was silent again, this time for so long that Collum was sure she’d left. But finally the queen, or the queen that was, uttered a quiet prayer. Collum found himself closing his eyes and breathing deeply, as if to physically imbibe the grace she offered.

  Then there was the retreating hiss of slippers on dry stone. The knights shuffled meekly out, and the abbess slammed the door behind them. Collum supposed that if he was going to go questing with the knights of Camelot he would have to get used to engaging in intimate chats with royalty.

  “Her own interests,” Dinadan muttered. “What the hell interests does she have left besides Lancelot and his holy cock?” He already seemed to have forgotten whatever solemn impulse had caused him to ask for the queen’s blessing.

  “Her cousins,” Bedivere said. “The Eastbrooks must be weighing their options. Perhaps they intend to marry her to someone else, like Palomides said.”

  “It is what I would do,” Palomides said. “I only hope it is not to Rience.”

  “She should’ve had fewer cousins,” Dinadan said, “and more sons.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Never hurrying, never dallying, the Green Knight led them deeper into the south and west.

  Britain felt different now that Collum knew Arthur was gone. Small signs of disorder kept catching his eye: trampled mud, the charred smear left behind by a campfire, a column of circling birds over a field. Britain was like a vast ship that had broached in a storm and was beginning to break up. Helmless and dismasted, its ribs cracking, seams starting and spraying seawater. Midmorning the next day Bedivere abruptly summoned Dinadan to the front of the line. He pointed: far in the distance two tiny figures on horseback were descending the flank of a green hill, leading a riderless third horse behind them.

  They all stopped and stood in their stirrups. Collum could barely make them out as separate figures, but Dinadan said:

  “That’s Scipio.”

  “What?” said Bedivere.

  “That’s Sir Scipio, on the back of that horse.”

  “Are you sure?” Palomides said. “Scipio only ever wore scale, not plate. Also I am fairly certain he is dead.”

  “Not the riders. He’s a prisoner. They’ve got him tied up naked on the back of the second horse.”

  Collum didn’t see how Dinadan could possibly recognize anybody at this distance.

  “Should we rescue him?” Palomides said.

  Dinadan looked at Bedivere, who considered the question for longer than Collum would’ve thought necessary. Sir Scipio was evidently not the object of their quest.

  “Come on,” he said finally. “Principle of the thing.”

  When the riders saw they were pursued they didn’t try to escape. They picked a spot on the road, turned their horses, and waited. It was a double-wide cart track beaten through pastureland, with loose stands of beech trees on either side. Dinadan was right, there was a naked man flung over the second horse like saddlebags, tied hand and foot, his pale back and buttocks burned red by the sun. He must have been hideously uncomfortable.

  “Ho there!” Dinadan called out when they were close enough. “Who are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing with Sir Scipio?”

  The two knights were a mismatched pair, one small with a neat pointy beard, the other tall with a long equine face. The tall one’s shield bore two swimming fish, and his breastplate was etched with fish scales. If they were cowed by the sight of three knights of Camelot—or four, assuming they didn’t know that Collum wasn’t one; or five, depending on what on earth they thought the Green Knight was—they didn’t show it.

  “Well, well, well,” the short one said. “I do believe we’ve found the last leg of the Round Table!”

  “And a lame leg it is too.” The fish knight chuckled.

  “I asked you,” Dinadan said, “who—”

  “We’re two honorable knights of Glamorgan. I’m Sir Germaine and this is the Knight of the Borders.”

  “Charmed,” Palomides said. “Give us Scipio, and we might let you live.”

  “This man is a thief.” The Knight of the Borders had a raspy voice, as if he’d suffered some kind of throat injury or ailment. “We caught him looting bodies after Camlann.”

  The tied man groaned something unintelligible.

  “But you’ve saved us a trip,” Sir Germaine said. “We were on our way to Camelot to collect a ransom, but you can have him on the spot for—what would you say, Borders?”

  “Ten pounds.”

  “Ten it is. What say you, gentlemen?”

  Bedivere snorted.

  “Keep thyself.”

  He turned his horse away.

  By tradition whichever knight currently stood highest in the unwritten martial pecking order would have had the honor of representing Camelot in the joust, but with so many of the leading lights of the table gone Collum wasn’t sure there even was an order anymore. But there was no arguing or even any discussion about it: Sir Palomides fitted on his helm and accepted a lance from a retainer as one by one the others patted him on the shoulder and muttered a word or two of encouragement or advice. He ambled his horse into the road. His armor was in a fascinating Eastern style, a thick coat of double-riveted mail with heavy steel plates sewn into it, lighter and more flexible than your standard British knight’s gear. The plates were gilded and inscribed with words in intricate, ornate Arabic script. His helmet was a turban sculpted in steel.

  A hundred and twenty yards further down the road Sir Germaine waited alone, looking very small. The arms on his shield were three golden cups arranged above a single disembodied blackbird’s wing. Somewhere a woodpecker knocked on a tree. Off to one side Sir Scipio still hung face down and exhausted over his horse’s rear end, his hair hanging limp, apparently oblivious to the fact that his fate was being decided.

  “Watch this,” Dinadan said quietly.

  Palomides didn’t milk the moment. With no fuss he saluted his opponent and barked a curt foreign syllable to his horse. They were off, accelerating rapidly into a gallop.

  Collum was only a fair-to-middling jouster himself. It was the mental challenge more than the physical one. You had to force yourself to relax because if you tensed up your lance would bob up and down as you rode and you’d never place the point properly. You couldn’t let yourself shy away from your opponent even slightly, because the rules required you to present your body as a target. You had to keep your eyes on your adversary’s shield, because if you let them stray even for a heartbeat to the approaching tip of his lance—and it attracted your gaze like a lodestone—it would look like it was coming straight in through your visor and the urge to flinch would become uncontrollable.

  But the hardest part was simply that at the moment of impact you had to keep your eyes open, because when the enemy loomed up before you, looking like a mirror image of your own terrible armored self, and the lances hit with all the combined weight of horses and men and armor behind them, it was only with your eyes open that you could aim your point with the precision of a master.

  And that was just tournament jousting, à plaisance, with blunt caps on the ends of the lances, and special jousting armor, and a fence between the horses to keep them from crashing head-on. Even then there were accidents; men broke limbs or lost eyes or even died. Out here in the wild—fighting à outrance, with weapons of war—the stakes were higher and the odds much worse.

  None of that seemed to bother Palomides. He effortlessly absorbed the motion of his horse’s strides, reins held lightly in his left hand, the tip of his lance as still as the center of the earth. A lance was too heavy to hold out straight for long so the knights kept them pointed up at an angle till they got close. Sir Germaine lowered his early, but Palomides waited till the absolute last moment, an instant before impact, before he let his point drop smoothly into place.

  Sir Germaine’s spear bent and scraped off Palomides’s shield while in the same moment Palomides slipped his point neatly past the bearded knight’s shield, where it found a mark just inside his left armpit. It stuck fast and wrenched Sir Germaine violently around and back before shattering into a cloud of spinning splinters.

  Germaine flopped backward onto his horse’s rump, then slid limply out of the saddle to the ground. That one blow had hammered all the fight out of him. Palomides rode through the spray of fragments, already decelerating. He tossed aside the stub of his lance and loosened his gauntlets and checked over his tack as if he hadn’t just performed the most gorgeous physical feat Collum had ever witnessed. Some things at least were every bit as good as in the stories.

  “Per Aristotle’s Physics,” Palomides said, “the application of violence produces unnatural motion.”

  An embarrassing scene followed in which Sir Germaine wanted to surrender rather than face Palomides on foot with swords, and the Knight of the Borders tried to convince him to keep fighting, whereupon Germaine suggested Borders fight Palomides himself, and Palomides calmly declared himself willing to fight anybody as soon as they decided who that was going to be.

  When it was clear that they were done for the day, Borders went back to insisting that Scipio was rightfully their prisoner.

  “We caught him looting!” he rasped indignantly. “After the battle!”

  “You’re lying,” Bedivere said.

  “We took him fair and square!”

  “Two knights against one,” Palomides said, “is neither fair nor square. It is at best triangular.”

  “If I might be allowed to speak.”

  It was Sir Scipio.

  “Cut him loose, Collum,” Bedivere said.

  Germaine and Borders glared but didn’t try to stop him as he sawed through Sir Scipio’s ropes with his knife. He did his best to ease the poor man down onto the grass as gently as possible, where he lay limp and boneless. A startling amount of his bare skin was covered in whorled blue tattoos.

  “They fell on me when I was sleeping.” Sir Scipio didn’t attempt to rise. His Latin was perfect. “Took me unawares.”

  “You were awake,” Germaine said.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Well, you should have been, it was halfway terce. And we saw you looting after the battle.”

  “I lent a gilt dagger to Sir Gumret le Petit, God rest him. His having died, I took it back.”

  “That is simply false!”

  “Unless you’re prepared to defend your claim more effectively than you have thus far,” Bedivere said, “I suggest you get back on your horses and consider yourselves the most fortunate knights in Christendom that we don’t kill you for the recreants you are.”

  “You know what?” In his weakened state it took Germaine three tries to swing himself up into the saddle. “You know what? Go fuck yourselves!” He was close to tears. “And fuck the Round Table! Where do you think you’re even going? Still a-questin’ after adventure? Grow up! You’re pathetic, everybody thinks so!”

  “We are not too pathetic,” Palomides said, “to knock you off a horse.”

  “Arthur’s dead! The Romans are gone! No one cares anymore!”

  “God cares,” Bedivere said.

  “Does He? Really? You’d better hope He cares when the peasants come for your heads. Except something tells me He won’t.”

  Sir Germaine made an obscene gesture and the two men rode away.

  “ ‘Knight of the Borders,’ ” Dinadan said. “Get a damn name.”

  “I fought him once,” Bedivere said. “Mêlée at Canoel. About what you’d expect.”

  The woodpecker, who’d gone silent during the joust, went back to its knocking. Scipio was on his hands and knees throwing up on the grass, but all he managed was a few strings of bile. He spat. When he was done they gave him water and a piece of bread and an apple. Palomides chafed his ankles.

  “We thought you were dead,” he said.

  “Wished I was.” Scipio spat again. “How many of us are left?”

  “Six. No, five.” Dinadan corrected himself because of Villiars.

  “That’s all? What about Sagramore?”

  Bedivere shook his head.

  “Those pricks were right, we really are finished.” Scipio struggled to his feet, unkinked his neck, and pressed both hands to his lower back. “Right. What’s next?”

  It appeared to have taken him all of about five heartbeats to process the fall of the Round Table and move on. His tattoos really were very striking, whorls and faces and crude runes. A few of the loops even crossed his face.

  “There’s one more of us alive,” Dinadan said. “We don’t know who, but we’re on our way to get him.”

  Scipio nodded as if that were about what he expected. His clothes and armor were in a bundle on the back of the horse, and he carefully, patiently, unpicked the knot. His tattoos gave him the air of a wild man, but now that he was up and about his manner was more that of a fastidiously orderly person whom fate had thrown some disorderly turns.