“You have much to answer for, Knight of the Fountain. You broke your oath. You fled battle like a coward. You abandoned your only friend, the only creature loyal to you in this world.”

  On cue the black lion padded silently out of the trees. It was missing the tip of one ear, and an inch or two of tail, but it had survived. It settled on the grass like a sphinx, licking a singed paw with its pink tongue, eyeing him reproachfully.

  “I did. I am sorry.” He apologized to the lion. “I’m glad to see you alive, old friend.”

  “I took you for a knight, but you’re a liar, a thief, and a coward. A bastard and a commoner.”

  Everything Lord Numerius said was true. He’d thought that it would destroy him—that the shame of it would blast him to nothing—but the strange thing was that hearing the truth spoken aloud, dragged into the daylight, was a relief. Nimue was right, keeping secrets cost too much.

  “I own it, my lord.”

  “I take it you’re ready to resume your service, Knight of the Fountain?”

  Collum almost said yes, he was on the absolute point of saying it. He could finish out his days here, and he would be damned lucky to. He looked up at the face of the stone statue, still as beautiful as she always had been. Like an idiot he’d missed her. But now that he was here he realized it wasn’t her that he’d missed at all; she reminded him of someone else, somewhere far away. So many times he’d let time and tide and fate have their way with him. He’d been going round and round for so long he didn’t know who he was anymore.

  But that wasn’t true. He knew, if he wasn’t too much of a coward to admit it. It was time for him to wake up and start his life again, this time for real, and be who he was meant to be.

  “I’m grateful, my lord,” he said, “but I can’t stay here.”

  Numerius frowned.

  “Who else would have you? Where else would you go?”

  “You know where.”

  “But you don’t belong there, you pathetic fool. They’ve made that very clear.”

  “They’re wrong. Or maybe they were right before, I don’t know. They can do what they like with me, but I know who I am, and where I belong.”

  Lord Numerius heaved a sigh and shook his head. The statue in the fountain was no longer smiling.

  “It will cost you everything you have.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “Will you?” Lord Numerius said. “Then go ahead. Pay her.”

  Mutely the statue held out a smooth gray stone hand toward him, the one without the sword in it.

  Collum hadn’t thought the bill would come quite so soon. He had nothing to pay with—he should’ve pocketed some of the gold from the dragon’s hoard—but when he put his hand in his pouch there was a silver shilling in it. It was the one Nimue gave him.

  Somehow it was still here after all these years. He’d forgotten he ever had it. He didn’t want to give it up, but he placed the coin in the statue’s hand anyway. The stone maiden climbed nimbly down out of the fountain, holding up the edge of its stone gown. The water in the fountain was already draining away, sinking down out of view, leaving behind an empty shaft with slick dripping sides.

  Collum walked over. It was a long way down, out of the sunlight, into the cold depths. It wasn’t a fountain anymore. It was a well. He supposed it always had been.

  “They threw you away,” Numerius said. “Just like your stepfather did. Just like Lord Alasdair.”

  “They may do so again if they choose. I can’t stop them.”

  Collum stepped up onto the edge of the well, balancing unsteadily. He couldn’t see the water at all now, not a glint, it was that far down. Lord Numerius was right, he was a fool, but he thought again of that first day he walked into the Great Hall. He would not take one step backward. If he could do nothing else, Collum thought, he knew how to double down on a rash decision.

  Cool air rose up from the depths.

  “Collum,” a voice asked. “Do you know what doomed King Arthur?”

  More questions? He thought he was done with them.

  “It was Mordred’s treachery,” Collum said.

  “Mordred alone could never have brought down Arthur. If you would build Camelot again, you must first learn why it fell.”

  It was only after Collum had stepped over the edge that he realized it wasn’t Lord Numerius who had spoken. It must’ve been the lion.

  * * *

  • • •

  He fell feetfirst, windmilling his arms backward trying to keep himself from turning over. The earth was always so hungry to pull things down to it! Too late he wondered if he should’ve dived headfirst. A roaring wind kicked up and just when it felt like his stomach was going to climb up his throat he crashed into the freezing water.

  The blow shocked his legs and compressed his spine and it was long, long seconds before he made his way back up. He treaded water in a daze. What the hell have I just done?

  He began a methodical survey of his prison. He circled it, groping with fingers that were already shivering. He reached down underwater and then up, slapping the wall as high as he could. Twice he found fingerholds substantial enough that he could pull himself up, but to what end? He’d fallen too far to ever climb out.

  So instead, like the Old Ones, he delved downward. He stripped to his smallclothes, duck-dived and ran his hands over the rough slime-slick stones underwater, over and over, deeper and deeper, poking with the tip of his ancient sword, till he thought he would pass out and drown. He never found the bottom of the well, but he did find what he was looking for. He almost wished he hadn’t.

  It was a round hole in the wall, a yard or so across. He would have to swim into it.

  Collum would never know how long he waited in the darkness, getting colder and weaker, his fingers jammed into a crack between stones, his only support in a drowned world. It was hard to believe that somewhere above him the sun still rose and set and clouds heedlessly roamed the sky. Was this really the way back to the upper world? Could he even face that place again, after they’d flung him down here and forgotten him?

  Well, it hadn’t killed him. Yet. He offered a desultory prayer to God, then counted thirty deep breaths and went under.

  Even then it took him three more tries before he could make himself swim into the hole. The last time he just scrubbed out all thought from his head and kicked frantically, mechanically. It was a cramped, crumbling pipe lined with old Roman terra-cotta, with no room to stroke with his arms, so he kept kicking his way along into the black, pulling himself forward with his hands where he could.

  The bubble of air in his lungs began to ache, like it had in the river in the Otherworld, but even worse now, like he’d been speared through the chest. He kicked and kicked, harder and harder. White lightning flashed in his vision, a storm coming on. Phantasmal flowers, blousy peonies and roses. Some part of him must still have been holding on to the dream of turning back because it wasn’t till he realized that he couldn’t, that it was too late and the passage was too narrow to turn around in, that he truly panicked.

  He’d made a terrible mistake. He should’ve stayed in the well. He should’ve stayed at Astolat, on Mull, anywhere but here! He regretted everything. How could he have left behind the paradise of air to drown in the black like this? He thrashed like a burning spider. He groped inside himself for that strength he’d felt in the battle, in the Otherworld, any strength at all, but it was all gone. His need to take a breath and his terror of taking water into his lungs were both absolute, they were tearing him apart. A hurricane raged in his eyes, his head was vibrating, his chest was bursting, he coughed out all his air in one and then—no—he MUST NOT—

  In an instant of agony beyond agony he saw with total clarity a woman’s face, kind and beautiful and forgiving. It was his mother’s.

  His head broke the surface.

  Collum fell forward onto smooth stone and took a long, croaking, spasming inward breath, the longest breath of his life, then choked as he vomited convulsively and inhaled the burning acid vomit and coughed it out again. He slipped back into the water and then scrabbled his way back out again in terror and lay there half in and half out, lungs heaving.

  The air was cool on his wet back. He spat. Bit by bit it came to him where he was. He was in a pale stone church. Candles were lit, but there was dawn light rising in the windows too.

  “Huzzah. It worked.”

  A voice that dull and depressed could only have belonged to one person: the Fool Knight of Camelot, Sir Dagonet. Collum raised his head. They were kneeling in a circle around him, all of them: Bedivere, Dinadan, Dagonet, Palomides, Constantine.

  “Welcome back,” Bedivere said. “Sir Collum of the Table Round.”

  Twenty

  The Twisted Staff

  They hauled him out of the water, which turned out to be a kind of ceremonial pool built into the floor, and stripped him and rubbed him with linen towels. Then they made a bridge with their swords and he balanced along it out of the chapel, wobbling, cold as hell, still coughing up water, still stark naked, his bits flapping in the wind in the soft morning light—a passing maid winked at him. They took him that way all the way from the church up to the castle, through the Rain Gate and across the bailey, Dinadan leading them in a Roman marching song:

  Urbani, servate uxores, moechum calvum adducimus.

  Aurum in gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum…

  He felt like he’d been gone for years, but it was all still here—the grass, the geese, the linens, the gardens, the sleepy blacksmith fussing with his tools. Everything looked raw and new, as if the paint were still wet on it. They had not cast him out. Or they had, but only so he could claw his way back and even further in, all naked and undeserving, into the golden circle itself. It couldn’t be, but here he was.

  The sword bridge ended at the Great Hall, where they dressed him in white samite and plied him with food and wine. They would have bathed him, too, but Dinadan pronounced him wet enough already, what with his sojourn in the well, plus all the tears he was shedding. The chandelier was lit overhead, pale fire in the thin morning light, and he was given another knighting ceremony, a proper one this time, and another oath. Sir Bedivere buckled a set of gold spurs on him, deftly, one-handed.

  When it was all finished a falcon came swooping in low through the open door of the hall and perched on the back of a chair, Arthur’s chair, stamping its feet severely and staring around at everyone with an air of furious self-importance. It was Goose, Arthur’s gyrfalcon. He hadn’t been seen for months, not since the day the king took ship across the Channel to lay siege to Benwick, and he’d shed his bells and jesses somewhere, but now he was back.

  They all agreed it was a good sign.

  * * *

  • • •

  Afterward Collum went up to his chamber and slept like a dead man for seven hours, and in the afternoon they came and took him back to the armory.

  On the way they passed servants and soldiers staggering under bundles of firewood and barrels of grain and wine and sugar and water. Camelot seethed with activity—its brush with a besieging army had awakened it like a fairy-tale kiss. Whitsunday had passed but nobody was going to Glamorgan this summer. Workmen clogged the stairways and courtyards, patching crumbling masonry and whitewashing walls and queuing for garderobes.

  The knights walked Collum down the aisle of the armory again, like a bride being ushered to the side of her steel groom. Even after all the pomp and ceremony he was relieved when they showed him to an actual armor this time and not a wooden coffin.

  Though at first he did have to hide a little disappointment. It was a plain armor, no fancy velvet or filigree or enamel or damascening. Not even any paint, just smooth bare steel. But the longer he looked at it the more it grew on him. It wasn’t flashy, but the workmanship was of the very highest standard. The maker’s mark was a running leopard, sigil of the oldest armoring family in Milan, home of the greatest armorers in the world. This was proper fighting harness, case-hardened, not just for show. There were no gaps or showy fluting that might catch a point or an edge. The gauntlets were delicately articulated—you could’ve threaded a needle wearing them—and the work around the shoulders and armpits, a perennial weak spot, was an intricate play of gardbrace and pauldron and vambrace. Collum found and tested every stud and spring and hinge, and they were all set precisely in place and snapped and clicked just as they should. It was perfect.

  The helm had a steel crest running back to front like a fighting fish. Its visor was a full-face steel plate pierced with dozens of tiny crosses, large enough to see through but too small for any blade or missile to penetrate. It was fastened in place with a neat sprung stud, and when not needed it could be swung upward on tiny hinges.

  He smiled. The helm gave him back a cryptic, intimidating stare. Do you mean to be my next occupant?

  “Try it on,” Bedivere said. “It should fit, our man does it by sight.”

  “There’s a hauberk too,” Constantine said. “Riveted rings. Mail of p-proof.”

  The door at the far end of the gallery banged open.

  “They told me there’s a new knight of the Round Table and he’s not drunk yet,” Scipio proclaimed, “but I didn’t believe it!”

  “I only thank God,” Palomides bellowed, right behind him, “that Arthur did not live to see this shameful day!”

  Two servants followed them rolling a rumbling, bumping ironbound barrel of wine.

  The knights sat down right there on stools and boxes and on the stairs and on the floor and started drinking. While Collum got out of his clothes and into his new armor, they made learned conversation about the quality of the wine and debated whether it really was from Bayonne or if the merchant had cheated them. They discussed court cases involving their cousins who were accused of poaching, and hunting prospects for the fall in the Wychwood, and memorable feats of archery performed by women, and the unpleasantness of crossing the Channel in March. There was nothing to hide and no appearances to keep up anymore. He was one of them now. Probably he wouldn’t be if most of the Table weren’t already dead, probably he never would’ve got through the door, but there they were, and here he was. He could breathe, really breathe, for the first time since he got to Camelot. Had it fixed him after all, like he’d hoped? It was a start.

  Collum told the others what he remembered of his time in the well. It felt like years to him but up here only a day and a half had passed, and the details were already fading like a dream. But he still had the scars from the coffin nails, that much was real, and the sword he’d found was still stuck in his belt. There were letters engraved on it, neither Latin nor Ogham. Palomides studied the script for a long time, tracing it with a fingertip.

  “I can read many alphabets,” he said, “but that one I have never seen. We should take it to the House of Wisdom, though if we did the caliph might not give it back. I can tell you it is old, older than it should be—men have not known how to make steel for that long. So perhaps it is a fairy blade, though that is not any fairy script I know.”

  “Is it magic?” Collum would dearly have liked to wield a magic blade.

  “Not that I can tell. Maybe Nimue could.” He shaved a few hairs off his forearm with it. “Very fine edge, though.”

  It came out that the initiation was different for everyone, but they’d all made it through, even Dagonet; the sole exception was Sir Scipio. It came out now that Scipio wasn’t actually a knight of the Round Table at all, which was why he hadn’t been part of the circle when Collum came out of the well. He was a regular guest at Camelot, well known as a good fighter and a basically solid fellow, with a rough edge or two, but he was too erratic to ever quite make it onto the Table. They’d put him up for membership a few times, but he always found a way to sink his candidacy at the last minute by blaspheming or breaking something or offending somebody.

  “We did actually put him through the initiation once,” Dinadan said. “Down the well. We waited and waited, but he never came back up. Then a month later he turned up at the Rain Gate riding a donkey.”

  “It spat me out of a tin mine in Cornwall.” Scipio was flushed with drink. “I left a shoe down there.”

  He didn’t say it with his usual bravado, and Collum realized he was actually embarrassed. Some part of him must really have wanted to join the Table, but he couldn’t quite let himself do it, he couldn’t give himself that gift, like a stray cat who came to the door to be fed but was too wild to go in the house where it was warm and dry. Some deep defensive instinct, either of self-preservation or self-destruction, made him slink away instead, back out into the cold.

  “You’re probably wondering if you should be embarrassed about all those things we learned about you,” Bedivere said.

  “You definitely should,” Dagonet said.

  “Nobody cares,” Dinadan said. “We all have plenty to be ashamed of.”

  “I coveted another man’s wife,” Palomides said.

  “A lot,” Dinadan added.

  “But can you really let somebody in with my—background?”

  “People have come in with a lot worse sins on their hands,” Dinadan said. “If God can forgive, shouldn’t we?”

  “Big if,” Dagonet said.

  “It’s not us who decides anyway, it’s Camelot. But in my experience the question isn’t so much about whether you’re lying to us, it’s whether you’re lying to yourself.”

  To go with his armor they presented Collum with a new shield that had a golden sheep on it.

  “The sheep’s for—” Constantine began.

  “I get it.”