He bounced nervously on the balls of his feet. Did the ground feel thin? God’s neck, he was an idiot. Just when he was almost there. “Grant unto us, we beseech Thee, O almighty God,” he whispered, “we, who seek the shelter of Thy protection…” He should’ve just gone to bed. He swore a solemn vow that if he survived this he would always, for the rest of his life, if given the choice, go to bed.

  He squatted down in the grass, his head spinning, and prayed to God some more. Maybe they’d get bored and leave him alone. How precarious this world was, he thought, how easily one left the straight path, even with the best of intentions. Or at any rate with pretty good ones. He thought about tomorrow. If he didn’t win a place at Camelot he’d just have to keep going. To Astolat maybe; he’d heard the duke there wanted men. If not there then Londinium. If not Londinium then Rhydychen, Norholt, Caer Loyw, Aquae Sulis, cities he’d never seen, where he would swear service to a lord he’d never met, and fight for him, and kill for him, and die for him. It was nothing out of the ordinary, thousands of people did it, landless, masterless knights like him. But how strange that that would be his life.

  But first Camelot. He didn’t have to be a knight, he’d be a squire, a servant, he would do anything if they would just let him stay, anything! He would work in the kitchens like Gareth Beaumaynes had…

  A footstep crunched behind him in the road. For a moment of total horror he thought it was the recreant knight, restless and owl-possessed, back to take his vengeance—

  But it wasn’t. It was just the big drunk. The one who’d been lying on the grass outside the inn.

  “Evening, friend.”

  He was tall, even taller than Collum, and he had a missing hand, the sleeve tied off short with a piece of twine. An old wound. How did he get all the way out here? But Collum wasn’t all the way out anywhere. He was sitting in the wet road right in front of the inn, right where he started. The whole thing had been some kind of trick.

  “Evening,” Collum managed.

  “You’re from the north.”

  “Mull.” His accent didn’t seem to be fooling anyone.

  “That’s an island.”

  “It is an island.” He picked himself up. His bum was wet with cold mud. Suddenly he was very, very tired.

  “And what brings you all the way down here?”

  “I’m on my way to Camelot.”

  “Camelot? Ha!” The man seemed to find that hilarious. Like Collum was the filthy broken-down drunk.

  “Yes, Camelot,” Collum said, with a heroic effort at manly casualness. “I’m looking for a knight, his name’s Sir Bleoberys.”

  “Oh, you’re too late for that.” The big drunk chuckled some more and shook his head. “Old Blueberries is gone. Long gone!”

  He turned and walked away, still laughing, looking for a better party than this one.

  “Camelot,” he muttered. “Good Christ. Too late for that. Go home.”

  Something about the way he said it made Collum’s mind go still, the way small animals do before an earthquake. The rain was gone now, the clouds swept clear, and bright stars swarmed overhead. In the moonlight the fields and gardens, having drunk in the rain, were breathing out a white fog.

  The moonlight showed him something else too: he was standing in a perfectly round fairy ring of bone-white toadstools.

  Three

  A Yong Knight

  The next morning Collum rode to Camelot.

  He hadn’t slept well. All the way here he’d had actual fantasies about spending a night at an inn, in a real bed, but when he was finally in one—alongside an itinerant ropemaker from Garlot—the mattress felt like it was stuffed with needles, and he couldn’t seem to force his thoughts down into sleep. First there was the disaster of the uncouth knight. Then there was the clever fairy-woman at the inn, and then the giant drunk who said Bleoberys was gone. None of it meant anything, or it shouldn’t have meant anything, but in the Otherworld of the night things had a way of meaning things they shouldn’t. And what they meant to Collum in the darkness of the inn was that something was wrong where nothing could be wrong, where he needed nothing to be wrong. At Camelot, the heart of the heart of the world, something was wrong.

  By the time the sun rose his mood had cooled and stiffened into grim determination. He roused the innkeeper’s daughter—who remembered nothing about any woman in a green smock with short auburn hair, none, never seen or heard of her—grabbed a heel of barley bread, and set off just as the sun pulled stickily free of the rim of the world and began heating the steaming meadows.

  He kept saying it under his breath rhythmically as he rode: “going to Camelot—going to Camelot—going, going, going to Camelot.” This was it, the greatest day of his life. He pushed his horse for no reason, his jaw set like cement. It felt like if he didn’t hurry he would miss it. It would all be over, Camelot would’ve collapsed into a heap of rubble before he got there. You’re late as it is, said the woman with the short hair. Too late, echoed the drunken giant. Go home. But that was nonsense. Camelot was eternal. He pasted a smile on his puffy sleepless face. It was time. Today his future would be decided one way or the other.

  Though probably, if he were being brutally honest, it would be the other. He’d been strenuously trying to avoid thinking about it, but it was entirely possible that he was about to be publicly humiliated in front of the greatest men in the kingdom.

  The problem was not that he wasn’t a knight yet. That was easy enough to explain. If anybody asked, you just said that they’d wanted to knight you—they’d begged for the august privilege of knighting you!—but you’d refused to be knighted by any lesser hand than King Arthur’s. The problem was that although in theory membership in the Round Table was awarded on the basis of virtue and chivalry and skill-at-arms, in actual fact every knight at the Table was of noble birth, and most of them were royalty of one stripe or another. Even when they did let someone of humbler origins in, it would inevitably come out after the fact, surprise surprise, that he’d had noble blood in him all along, only nobody knew about it. Like Sir Gingalin, Le Bel Inconnu, who turned out to be Gawain’s son. Or Percival, who was raised in such total isolation that he didn’t even know what a knight was, let alone who his father was. (His father was King Pellinore.)

  But Collum wasn’t bluffing. His father was a tradesman, a wool broker, and while it was true that he was a candidate for knighthood, it was only in the most technical possible sense. Furthermore his father wasn’t even really his father at all. His mother had had him out of wedlock with a fisherman who was lost at sea before he was born, which meant that Collum wasn’t just a commoner, he was a common bastard who had no business showing up at Camelot looking for a place at the Round Table. He knew this and he’d come anyway. He couldn’t stop himself, it was like he craved humiliation, like he had a perverse compulsion to see the greatest in the land and to prove to himself and them and the whole world once and for all how definitively unworthy he really was.

  The whole disaster had begun with Alasdair, Lord of Mull; he’d been the laird of Mull once, but after King Arthur took his conquering armies north of the wall the local clan leadership had been made over in the image of the southern aristocracy. An idle, feckless man, Alasdair had run up significant debts with various moneylenders, goldsmiths, wine merchants, mountebanks, and gambling buddies, adding up to the stupendous sum of forty-five pounds.

  Collum’s stepfather, Peadar, wasn’t noble but he wasn’t poor either, nor was he stupid. He needed some way to dispose of his illegitimate stepson, who wouldn’t inherit his livelihood, so he sent Collum to Lord Alasdair’s household, Dubh Hall, where Alasdair promised to educate him as a knight. In return Peadar would pay Alasdair, in regular monthly installments, enough money for him to service his massive debt. So far as he was concerned he was giving Collum the greatest gift a boy could have.

  Dubh Hall was deep in the countryside, miles from the muddy streets of Mull’s only proper town, but it wasn’t a terrible place to be a little boy. It was drafty and leaky and constantly at war with creeping damp, but at its heart was a massive, double-sided, ever-warm stone chimney stack that supposedly went back to before Roman times—they’d found it standing alone in a field and built the manor around it. One of its stones had a crude image carved on it of a naked woman with her legs apart, and the other boys of the house made jokes about it, but when the older servants passed they always touched it for luck.

  Collum touched it too. But it didn’t bring him luck.

  He quickly discovered that Lord Alasdair had no intention of training or educating him. He had no interest in Collum at all except as a scapegoat on whom he could vent his anger at the many humiliations of his life, which included being conquered by King Arthur (through base southron trickery) and having to beg a tradesman to get his title out of hock for him. Nobody was permitted to speak to Collum. He was dressed in discarded clothes. A motherless boy—she’d died when he was three—he’d always loved cozy, warm places, but now he slept with the servants on a thin pallet on the floor of the drafty cruck-roofed great hall, with a log for a pillow, listening to strangers all around him, grown-ups, sniffling and shifting and muttering and farting and sometimes—though he couldn’t admit it to himself—having sex.

  Alasdair beat and whipped Collum for the tiniest infraction. He sent him crawling up the chimney to sweep out the soot, where he nearly suffocated. There were other adults at Dubh Hall with a taste for cruelty, and Alasdair encouraged them to indulge themselves. There was a baker who held Collum’s hand over a candle after he dropped a loaf of bread in the ashes, and a chaplain who forced his head underwater in a bucket for no good reason at all that Collum could see. He was locked out of the house at night and kicked down flights of stairs; on one such occasion he broke his leg, and it was badly set, leaving it forever slightly shorter than the other. Once somebody sprinkled lye on his blanket.

  And that wasn’t the worst thing in his bed. There were men at Dubh Hall who wouldn’t scruple to make use of a well-made boy with no powerful protectors, who couldn’t afford to make trouble or throw around wild accusations.

  All he could think was that it was his fault somehow. There was something wrong with him, and this was just what he deserved. He never once resisted, though when he slept outside he sometimes prayed he wouldn’t wake. He didn’t even dream of freedom, or rebellion, or revenge. He despised himself as much as they despised him. Collum worked and ate and slept at the bottom of a dark ocean of misery, head down, lost in the depths where no light reached him. He felt like the weight of it all would crush him. Father Conall called this listless despair acedia and he told Collum it was a sin. If it was, then Collum sinned and sinned and couldn’t stop sinning.

  His one refuge was the smithy, a snug bolt-hole where he would retreat sometimes when it was cold or rainy or snowy out. The smith kept it dark even in the daytime; he explained that it was so he could see the heat in the metal. Sitting in a corner, hugging his knees and rocking, Collum imagined the forge as a demon—the fire was its demon brain, tormenting it with red-hot thoughts. He watched sparks scatter across the stone floor and followed their individual fates as they shone defiantly and then winked out one by one. As his father’s spark had, and his mother’s. As his own spark one day would.

  The blacksmith had come to Dubh Hall from a post at Caerleon, which he had left for reasons he firmly declined to elaborate on, and he brought with him a deep fund of stories about the knights of the Round Table, which he liked to tell as he worked. Most people on Mull dismissed such tales as propaganda for the despicable southrons, but the smith found a rapt audience in Collum.

  Like him, the knights of the Round Table were despised and forsworn, but unlike him they weren’t fazed by it. They were too far away and too strong. They lived in a warm, safe world wrought of old gold, rich with strength and love and fellowship, where evil was great but good was greater, where God was always watching, and even sadness was noble and beautiful. That was the world Collum wanted to live in. Those were his people. It was only after he heard those stories that for the first time he actually wanted to be a knight.

  That meant being a Christian, too, though Jesus was if anything even less popular on Mull than Collum was. Good Gaelic folk mistrusted Jesus as a newcomer who stank of the south. But King Arthur loved Jesus, and God, so Collum resolved to love Them, too, and worship Them, though he had to row across a narrow, icy strait to do it, to a tiny island off Mull that had a monastery on it. Services there were presided over by chipper, bent-backed Father Conall. The few other churchgoers were mostly there to catch up on gossip—which they did during the service, over the persistent objections of Father Conall—and to collect the bits of magic bread he gave out, which were well known to bring good luck.

  And unlike the chimney stone, the magic bread did bring Collum good luck, or something did. On one unseasonably warm morning in April, two years after he’d come to Dubh Hall, it happened that, miraculously, there was nothing for Collum to do. He’d cleaned the other boys’ boots. He’d been shooed out of the kitchen and the stables. Nobody anywhere needed him. So he wandered out to the practice yard.

  Collum had seen the other boys there, training with swords. There were three of them, Alasdair’s son, Marcas, and two fosterlings from other islands. At first he just watched. Nobody looked at him. The boys weren’t fighting one another, they were just cutting and thrusting at the empty air in response to the barked commands of the marshal, a slender, dark-skinned Frank who looked like he had more than a dash of North African blood in him.

  This was what Collum had been promised. This was why they’d sent him here. He’d almost forgotten. The boys were red-faced and sweating in their lumpy padded clothes. They complained about the heat. When they stopped for a rest Collum cleared his throat and spoke. It was like a voice spoke through him, he didn’t know how or whose it was. It was like a wonder from the stories—a sword offered up from dark water.

  “May I start my training now?”

  The boys burst out laughing. The marshal looked at Collum with heavy-lidded eyes: a ragged child, desperately thin and ill-kempt, with a sore on his dirty cheek.

  “Not today, boy.”

  “But when may I?”

  “The hell would I know? Take it up with Lord Alasdair.”

  “He won’t say.” Collum’s face was on fire, but he couldn’t let it go. “He promised my father!”

  He found he couldn’t say “stepfather.”

  “A lord always keeps his promises, but till he does it’s none of my business.”

  Every instinct told Collum to slink back off to the smithy. But somewhere inside him, somewhere even he couldn’t see, he had come to the end. He’d waited and suffered as much as he could. It was like a plough hitting a buried boulder in a field, and the blade striking a secret unseen spark underground and stopping dead.

  He stepped up to the nearest boy, a wide-eyed, jug-eared child whose name he didn’t even know, and yanked the sword out of his hand. The boy was so surprised he didn’t even resist.

  The others grinned and hooted. This was going to be good.

  Collum didn’t hear them. He was looking at the sword in his hand. He flipped it round and grasped it by the hilt. He’d never held one before. Branches, broomsticks, any number of pretend swords, but never a real one.

  Even this one wasn’t real, it was just a wooden training sword—wasters, they called them. It was surprisingly heavy; later he would learn that they were weighted with lead to be heavier than the real thing. But to Collum it felt like he’d grasped a lightning bolt directly from the hand of Jupiter himself. He had a dizzying, rising feeling, as if he were shooting up from the very bottom of his ocean of acedia, from the black depths all the way to the sunlit surface in one glorious go. The crushing weight was gone, all the colors were bright again, and he could breathe sweet air. It was like waking from a terrible dream.

  The jug-eared boy tried to grab his sword back but Collum wasn’t ready to let go. He scurried back out of reach. Jug Ears then made the mistake most boys do in a fistfight, and a lot of men, which is that he reared back to throw a great big punch, which meant that Collum saw it coming a mile away. Before he could throw it Collum whacked the boy on the side of the head then quickly jabbed him in the eye with his free hand. The boy put his hands over his face; Collum punched his face through his hands three more times and then kicked him in the balls.

  He wasn’t weak or a coward. He’d just had the bad luck to be in the way when Collum discovered the one single thing in life he was good at.

  Now Marcas and the other fosterling closed in, swords held in both hands in front of them. They had him two to one, but Collum understood instinctively that he had several advantages in this situation. They had the numbers, but that made them overconfident. It also meant they had to avoid each other, and that each of them was waiting for the other one to go first. Collum noted that he was the only left-hander in the yard, which made him an unfamiliar challenge, and even though the other boys had always seemed like giants to him, he saw now that he was actually spotting them both a couple of inches. Also unlike them, Collum was untroubled by any inconvenient notions about the correct way to use a sword.

  Circling to the left, so his adversaries were lined up in front of him, he batted Marcas’s blade aside with his own, then bashed him on his hands so that he dropped his sword, and rushed in and kicked him hard in both shins, one-two, and kneed him in the nose when he doubled over.

  The third boy’s fighting spirit was rapidly deflating. Collum screamed at him and charged, and he turned white and ran for the safety of the house.