Then she stopped. In a flash her face and hair and her whole body had turned white. She’d grown a thick coat of frost.

  “Leave this place.”

  Nimue came floating down through the torn-off roof. Morgan was still on her feet but doubled over, rubbing frantically at her frozen face.

  “You can still leave unharmed.” Nimue settled gently to the tiled floor.

  “They wouldn’t even let you in the church!” Morgan managed through numb lips.

  “But it’s not about me. I have treated with your gods, and for that I was kept from entering, just as Lancelot was barred from Corbenic. But I will tell you something about your gods: They are easy to love, because they are like us. They drink and fight and fornicate. My God may be harder to love, but that’s because He is not like man. He is greater.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Lady Laundry,” Morgan spat. “I was educated in a nunnery. They taught me that the world is a dead place, that my body is sin, and the only life that matters is the next one. But they lied. The world is alive, and there is no other life. You know this, Nimue, I know you do.”

  As she said it she flicked the last of the melted frost from her face at Nimue and the drops became a torrent of green water. Nimue parted it easily with an outstretched palm—but even as she did Morgan’s magic was stripping stone tiles from the floor and stacking them around her with a clacking sound. In a heartbeat Nimue was entombed like an anchorite in a marble box.

  “You learned your magic from a man,” Morgan said, “and he taught you much. But no man knows how to fight like a witch.”

  The stone box stood for one long moment, then it exploded in flying shards.

  “You underestimate me.” Nimue raised one hand with something shining and golden in her fist, starfire, blue light streaming out between her fingers.

  “I suspect we underestimate each other,” Morgan said. “We will have many more delightful arguments over the course of my long reign, but for now—”

  Nimue jerked her shoulder irritably. The light in her fist flared and went out. Fairy knights became visible behind her, gripping her arms. Stepping forward Morgan produced a delicate green leaf from somewhere and brushed it across Nimue’s lips. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

  The fairy knights dragged her away.

  The little church was filling with fairies now, crowding in through the door in every imaginable form—beast-fairies and fairy-beasts, tree-fairies, stone-fairies, a fairy made of iron, another of mist, another of parchment. Their armor was green and encrusted with strange, asymmetrical protrusions. Everywhere they stepped green plants burst up under their feet, grass and moss and shrubs, cracking the marble and popping tiles out of their places.

  There were magical creatures among them, too, griffins and wyverns and others Collum didn’t know the names of. Over it all the horn of the Wild Hunt sounded, and it was answered by more horns from all around the church, some higher and some lower, roaring and whistling in a thunderous cacophony. All his life Collum had known the fairies were here, hiding at the edges of things, but now they had stepped forward into the center. The great powers of the world had ceased their endless circling and were finally meeting face-to-face.

  It would be a brief encounter, unless Collum was vastly underestimating Saint Longinus and his spear. He and Dinadan abandoned their cursed swords and retreated back behind the altar to join him, dragging Bedivere’s sleeping body with them. The old saint kicked over the altar to make a barricade. With a practiced air he spun his spear and held it ready, waist height, two-handed.

  “If you want my Lance, come and get it,” he called out. “But I’ll remind you that I stabbed Jesus Christ Himself with it. I won’t think twice about stabbing you.”

  He pounded the floor once with the butt end and a shock wave flashed out, stirring dust and staggering the whole fairy host, shoving back the closest ones against their fellows behind them. At the same moment five stars kindled in the sky and then fell. When they struck they shook the earth, leaving vertical vapor trails hanging above them.

  They were angels: two male and three female, two pure white, two black as ebony, and one that was all the colors of the rainbow.

  They crouched with the shock of the impact, then straightened up, ten feet tall, with limbs thick as tree trunks. The rainbow angel hit the ground and rebounded into the air, wings spread wide, whipping out a fiery sword. She flew at Ysbaddaden’s face like an angry wasp and slashed him across the eyes. The giant’s scream sounded like the roar of a monster deep underground, echoing from a cavern. One arm pressed against his face, he fell backward over the edge of the plateau and down the mountain into darkness.

  Then the angels sang all together, in unison, their voices as glorious as trumpets:

  The spear is not a prize to be won! It is God’s alone to bestow!

  If Morgan felt in any way cowed she didn’t show it.

  “Hear this all of you.” Her voice echoed in the ruined chapel. “The forces of Fairy, the true spirits of this land, deny you sovereignty here. You are invaders, and you are not wanted. You will leave, tonight, forever.”

  The heavy shape of a dragon came stooping down out of the sky and struck the rainbow angel with a resonant thump. It bore her to the ground, demolishing a wall along the way, and spat fire in her face, lighting up the night. Heedless of their fellow’s fate, the remaining angels turned their calm, monumental faces to the front line of the fairy horde. They were unarmored, but they glowed like moons and dark stars. They drew their weapons—two swords, a hammer, and a staff—and golden light played on the walls.

  The horn sounded again and the fairies swarmed them, crowding in out of the darkness, pouring in through the doors and gaps in the walls and gliding down from above. This wasn’t a battle for mortals, but Collum was damned if he was going to stand there while they fought over the soul of Britain. He stepped up behind a fairy with a fish’s head and got an arm round his thick neck, squeezing and squeezing till he dropped his fat-bladed sword.

  You shall not have it, the angels sang together, their musical voices audible above the clamor. They changed from unison to harmony. You shall not have it! Shall not! Shall not have it! Above their heads, turning wheels and rings of letters and other symbols shifted and glinted.

  “You shall not have it!” Collum shouted.

  Morgan was in the air now, shouting and gesturing, and lightning struck an angel, once and then again, scratching a bright line across Collum’s vision. The angel shook and spasmed, his wings smoking, but he didn’t fall.

  Collum moved around the fringes of the scrum, chopping and stabbing with his short, heavy sword. He cracked the blade off a boar-headed fairy’s poleax, and the fairy knight charged him, and he hacked a wedge out of their thick neck. They fell clutching the wound, pale ichor gushing between their fingers. The first wave of fairy infantry was thinning out, but now the heavier fighters came forward. Five more angels shot down to earth, even bigger and brighter than the first five. These were of even higher rank, seraphim and cherubim. One of them wore a golden armor, and another was too charged with power and glory for human form, its body a grotesque mass of wings and faces and musclebound arms.

  You shall not have it! It is God’s to bestow!

  Fire and magic and holy power lit up the snowy night in flashes. The ground dropped and rose under Collum’s feet like a ship in a storm, and he wondered if Creation could withstand it all or if the whole world was about to break apart around them. He glimpsed Dinadan fighting manically against the Green Knight himself in his rusty mail and plate, holding his own better than Collum had. Behind the big fairies came beings even larger, with horns and antlers and triple faces with glowing eyes. One came swinging chains, another a burning branch, another a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other. The god of the chains—a young woman dressed in furs, completely bald—lashed out with one, wrapped it around an angel’s leg, and pulled him down. Smiling, she drew a sword six feet long from a sheath on her back.

  A fairy knight came pushing through the press with long strides swinging a gigantic black sword. Silver sparks chased themselves across its blade. Here’s my fight, Collum thought eagerly, but then he froze: that was no fairy, it was Sir Palomides. Reaching the front he sliced a great circle in the air and slashed at an angel, who blocked the blade with the flat of her own golden sword and grabbed for his throat. Collum’s stomach clenched, but Palomides was wreathed round with fairy sorcery, deep and thick, and he brought up his shield in time, stepped in close, and chopped at one of those wide wings. Chalk-white feathers sprayed.

  Space cleared around them. Collum didn’t even know what he wanted to happen. The angel fought like a swan, beating Palomides with her wings, the wind scattering fallen bodies in all directions. Her oversize sword was wrought in an outlandish shape, strange curves and complex geometrical edges. She parried a cut, stepped close to Palomides, caught the edge of his shield with one hand and ripped it off his arm. She beat him to the ground with it.

  The angel raised her foot to stamp on his head—but then she cried out, a sound like a tormented choir, and collapsed backward onto the ground, her leg bent awkwardly under her. Standing behind her, breathing hard, was Sir Dagonet. He held his golden knife in both hands, its blade running with what looked molten silver. He’d cut the tendons at the back of the angel’s knee.

  “There,” he said. “See how you like it.”

  The angel’s lip curled. Pushing herself back up to one knee, she grabbed him by his skinny leg and beat his whole body hard against the ground, once, twice, three times, like wet laundry on a rock. When she was done he lay without moving. The angel picked up the golden knife and buried it in his chest, right through him and down into the stone underneath.

  She struggled to her feet, favoring one leg but already healing, ready to face off against Palomides again. But Collum kept staring at the Fool Knight’s small body. For all the rage he’d felt in life, for all the indignities he’d suffered, Dagonet had probably only ever struck that one single blow in anger. That angel had never felt an instant of the wretchedness he’d lived with. She looked entirely different to Collum now. Grotesque. Angels weren’t so different from the fairies, at the end of the day they were all of them monsters. They would do well to leave us humans alone. A cold rage took him. They would—

  Peace.

  A sun bloomed overhead.

  Someone was descending from the sky. Not an angel this time but a young woman or a being with the appearance of one. Rays of light reached out from her in all directions, a rich, warm solar light different from the sidereal glare of the chapel.

  Peace. A ragged section of wall collapsed. One and all.

  She ceased her descent thirty feet above the battlefield. The fighting had paused. Everyone was watching her. They couldn’t do anything else. Calmly, without hurrying, she extended a hand toward Longinus, and the spear tugged from his hands and floated up, up, up till it hung in the air by her side.

  She put a hand on it as if it were an old friend, then smiled down at the broken chapel below her and all who were in it, wise and sorrowful and calm. Watching her, Collum forgot all about Dagonet and the angel. He forgot everything. He just wanted someone to set everything right. Was it too late for that?

  Peace. We are all of us magic. We are all of us holy. I have come—

  A great fist loomed out of the darkness and struck her full force. The sunlight was snuffed out, and the spear went spinning off into the snow.

  Behind the fist, out of the shadows, came the shape of the blinded giant, Ysbaddaden, crawling, groping like a man who’d dropped a key in the dark. He found the spear where it fell, took it in both hands and bent it, grimacing, like a child with a twig. The air filled with sounds like a great sheet of metal warping and buckling, and a host of divine instruments playing climbing chromatic scales from all points of the compass. Morgan le Fay cried out something, an oath or an incantation or a warning. Longinus howled.

  The Holy Lance broke in half.

  The whole battlefield went white and silent, every crack, every crevice filled with radiance, annihilating all shadow. The flash clubbed Collum to his knees. The earth convulsed as though its spine had broken, and then a hot shock wave threw him hard against a wall.

  His ears rang and his head throbbed. Blue afterimages pulsed in his vision. His eyes were still open but he couldn’t move, his body felt numb and clumsy and drained of all strength. He couldn’t think.

  Then, slowly and uncertainly, his mind began reassembling itself. Thoughts came again. Not that it mattered. He couldn’t remember at first exactly what happened, only that all urgency was gone now. Whatever it was had taken its course. There was peace.

  But no, that wasn’t it. Not peace. Something else. Despair. The peace of lost hope. Something had been carelessly mislaid, that could never be found again. But what? For a long time Collum just lay there with his face pressed to cold grit and stone. Then he tried to move and found that his limbs stirred, and it all came back to him.

  When he could focus his eyes again it was on a scene of cold, blackened stillness. He smelled burned wood and flesh and metal. Dawn was coming on, and the ruins of the church stood out in uneven shapes against the lightening sky. Behind them loomed the rib cage of the dead giant, open to the heavens, like the skeleton of a wrecked ship on a beach.

  The snow had slowed. Collum struggled to his hands and knees, coughed and spat. His chest felt hollow and sore, like he’d breathed in smoke. One of the black angels sat cross-legged on the ground nearby, her great head bowed. Her glorious wings were scorched, most of the feathers gone. She raised her head as he approached.

  It is finished.

  Her voice was still beautiful. It contained neither joy nor sorrow. She fixed him with her strange blank-looking golden eyes.

  The spear is broken and cannot be mended.

  Stiffly, shedding a few more feathers, she got to her feet. The other angels, scattered across the battlefield, rose with her at the same time. One held an extra knife—she was taking the one Dagonet stole back up to Heaven. The rainbow angel was nowhere to be seen. Could angels die? Collum wasn’t afraid or awed anymore. They were fellow veterans, that was all. Fellow losers.

  “What will happen now?” he asked.

  Nothing will happen, now or ever again. All the rest is empty time.

  “But who was it meant for?” Collum called again, hoarsely. “Who would’ve won the spear?”

  Your question has no meaning. That was for the spear to show, and now it never will. We cannot know what would have happened.

  Without flapping her wings, as if she were lifted by an invisible thread, the angel rose silently straight up into the sky. The others went with her. They dwindled to points and disappeared.

  Collum blew into his numb fingers. What now? He found himself struggling to care very much. Britain might still have a king, but not like Arthur, not like it would’ve been. The dead land would not live again. Instead one man would grab a gold hat from another and put it on his head, that was all. The old dream was gone, and the paths forward were winding and indistinct, lost in thickets of darkness and confusion.

  Empty time, like the angel said. There would be no new age, not now or ever. The sun had moved, the shadows had shifted, and they would not move back.

  Wind whistled through gaps in the ruined masonry. He needed to find the others. Dinadan sat propped against a wall, staring into space but apparently intact, with the remnants of what had been the Green Knight all around him, rusty plates and scattered branches. Collum wondered if the polecat had survived and scampered off somewhere. Nimue stood scanning the wreckage and chafing her stiff limbs, a thin, small figure, upright and whole. Thank God. Thank God, or Morgan, or Dame Fortune, whoever deserved the credit. Nimue was not lost. She still mattered. He picked his way through the wreckage toward her.

  “All right?” he called, and immediately started coughing.

  “I will be.”

  She could speak again. Together they went to Dinadan and hauled him to his feet.

  “I guess Morgan won,” he said.

  “Morgan didn’t have to win,” Nimue said. “All she had to do was not lose.”

  It had cost her though, not losing. The bodies of dead fairies were all around them. Even as Collum watched they changed and became clumps of wildflowers, mixed in with discarded weapons and armor. Tidier than humans. Together Collum, Nimue, and Dinadan walked the length of the chapel to the broken altar. Collum found the samite cloth that had covered it, once white but now stained and trodden into the dirt. He shook it out and laid it over Dagonet’s body.

  He didn’t even feel angry. The door to the golden world was closed forever, Morgan had slammed it shut in their faces, but he didn’t see how she could’ve done anything else. How could any of them? They had acted according to their natures. They were all just parts in the blind mechanical engine of the world. Even God was, in the end. And then at the end of time, when the engine ran down, it would all mean something, or nothing, and they would all find out, or they wouldn’t. Nothing he could do would change anything.

  They found Bedivere in what was left of the nave, bending over Saint Longinus. Collum thought he might’ve gone up to Heaven with the angels, but the old man was sitting on a fallen stone sobbing into his hands. He’d stood guard over the lance for all those years, centuries, faithful and dauntless, and now it was all for nothing.

  Bedivere had found a cloak somewhere and draped it over him.

  “There you are, old soldier.” He patted the saint’s shoulder softly. “There you are. You can stand down now.”