In an instant Lancelot became a many-armed god of war. His speed was not inhuman but it was the absolute limit of what a human could achieve. With no sign of effort, not the slightest wasted movement, he dropped his poker, snatched the torch in flight by the handle and whipped it one-handed behind his back and straight into Collum’s face. Catching the falling poker on the point of his toe, at its midpoint, like a juggler, he kicked it back up into Bedivere’s forehead hard enough to snap his head back. Dagonet couldn’t have done it any neater.

  He high-kicked Dinadan in the chin and plucked the rebounding poker out of the air. Dinadan staggered and fell down sideways. Lancelot stepped over him and was closing on Nimue when the fire crawled out of the fireplace like a giant spider and embraced him.

  “Go!” Nimue shouted, to the knights or the fire or both, one hand still on her nose. Whatever spirit lived in a hearth fire, she’d somehow coaxed it into joining the fray. Lancelot scrambled back, slapping at his smoking clothes. The fire followed him, expanding, growling with pleasure at being released from its fireplace. Moving slowly, half stunned, Bedivere seized another of the heavy torch stands and slammed it butt-first against the door as a battering ram. The noise was loud enough to wake the whole castle. Collum added his weight to Bedivere’s and when they rammed it again something broke and the door shuddered open.

  “Fire!” Collum shouted. “Fire! Save the king!”

  Bedivere went back in and came out half dragging Dinadan and Nimue, one under each arm.

  “I’m fine!” Nimue said, struggling out of his grip, though she sounded like she had a heavy cold.

  They stumbled down the nearest hallway, then reversed course when they saw guards advancing three abreast and charged down another one. The castle was coming alive. They could hear Lancelot shouting behind them. The fire wouldn’t confuse them for long. Bedivere led them down a punishingly steep spiral staircase, then back up it when they met soldiers coming the other way. They climbed till they burst out onto a high parapet.

  The night was wild but clear, with a cool wind scouring the walkway and a generous slice of yellow moon overhead.

  “Nimue!” Collum said. “Can you fly us out of here?”

  “I don’t think so.” She had a thick, dark purple line of bruise across the bridge of her nose and two developing black eyes. Dinadan was still working his jaw with one hand.

  “Why not?!”

  “Because it’s not that simple! It’s the wrong wind!”

  Bedivere picked up a loose building stone and heaved it back down the stairs the way they’d come. He was rewarded with a distant cry of dismay. He picked up another one.

  “How long will that fire-thing hold Lancelot?” Collum said.

  “As long as it feels like it. So not long.”

  “Soldiers.” Dinadan pointed. There were men-at-arms at the far end of the wall with bows and spears, standing watch, the wind tearing at their torches in the darkness. They hadn’t seen them yet. “Nimue, get us out of here! Somehow!”

  “Let me think!” Biting her lip, Nimue leaned over the parapet and studied the drop to the grass far below with furious concentration.

  They were trapped, Collum thought. And they didn’t even have swords. It was looking very much like the end. But really hadn’t that been true for a while now? He’d done everything possible to keep from admitting it, but this fight was already well and truly over. The king was dead, the Table shattered, the spear broken. They were like sleepy children who begged for the story to keep going, but there was no more story.

  Bedivere threw another stone down the stairs, but this one came flying right back up. Lancelot sprang up after it.

  “Ho there! Traitors here!” He was calling over their heads to the guards at the far end. “Secure the parapet!” And more quietly. “Nimue, my offer stands. Give me Merlin and you go free.”

  “And the others?”

  Lancelot shook his head. He’d doffed his crown and armed himself with his sword. Arondight, Collum thought, that was Lancelot’s sword’s name—a fairy word, he never knew what it meant. It had belonged to a Gaulish king who’d raised it in anger at a dryad, whereupon lightning struck it and killed him.

  “And where would I go?” Nimue’s tone was acid. “To Cornwall? Like Constantine?”

  “That’s fair. Constantine is dead.”

  “He believed in you!”

  “He believed in Lancelot. Not King Galahad.”

  They took their stand, three knights and a wizard, but it was no fight. The only man alive who could’ve beaten these odds was Lancelot, and he was on the other side. They would see Constantine soon enough.

  “Hold,” Lancelot called to the men-at-arms. “I’ll take them.”

  Time slowed down and thickened. It took on an almost unbearable intensity—the whole rest of Collum’s life that he would never live, all its richness and meaning, were being compressed and forced into these few heartbeats he had left. He felt everything: the smell of the night wind, the tingling sixth sense that told him Nimue was nearby, the complicated shapes in the stars above, a stand of reeds in the distance on the bank of the river Brass. There was the wall with the heavy dark ivy spilling down it that he’d seen on his first day here. He felt not just the roughness of the stone parapet but the satisfaction of the mason who’d cut the stones, his callused hands, the good meal he’d enjoyed when the day was done, his grateful sleep that night.

  Such was the magic of death. Everything he must do, he must do now or never at all. Everything he must say.

  “Arthur!” he shouted. “King Arthur!”

  “Arthur’s dead,” Lancelot said wearily—God give me patience.

  But he wasn’t dead. In that moment Collum knew it. Bedivere was right, he was not gone, only sleeping, sleeping on the faraway Isle of Avalon. Collum would shout loud enough to reach all the way there and wake him up.

  “Arthur!”

  “Collum.”

  “King Arthur! Arthur!”

  “Collum!” Nimue grabbed his arm urgently.

  Lancelot twitched Arondight, batting something away, a thin stick that clattered on the stones. An arrow. He was staring over Collum’s shoulder.

  Something big had appeared in the night sky, over the towers and peaks of Camelot, coming on fast. It was a boat, scudding out of the darkness, heeled way over against the wind, its sails taut and full. Its keel clipped a rooftop, spilling slate shingles, and kept going. Its lone pilot was silhouetted against the moon. She was steering with her knees and had a bow in her hands.

  Collum thought panic had unhinged him, but the others saw it too.

  “Shoot her!” Lancelot shouted to the guards. He took advantage of the distraction and made a lightning thrust for Bedivere’s side, but the old knight sidestepped, barely—the blade slit his tunic—and Collum snapped out of it in time to snatch up the arrow and try to poke Lancelot’s eye out with it.

  “Get in!” a woman yelled. “For God’s sake, get in!”

  It was the same woman’s voice he’d heard shouting before, in the king’s chamber. He knew it but couldn’t place it.

  “Get in!” the voice shouted. “I’m not stopping!”

  With a solid crunch the boat ran aground on the walkway, crushing a section of parapet ten yards away. Its hull scraped forward across the stone, wood groaning, the wind straining at the sails trying to pull it free again. Collum threw his arrow-sword in Lancelot’s face and broke for the ship.

  “Come on!” Nimue was already vaulting nimbly in, Dinadan right behind her. Collum felt Lancelot’s fingers just graze his elbow. He kept running. The ship scraped free of the parapet and surged forward just as Collum leapt. For an instant he was in empty air, a hundred feet up, then he landed with both feet on the transom and balanced there wide-eyed, windmilling his arms backward, till Dinadan caught his hand and yanked him in.

  Looking back Collum saw Bedivere facing Lancelot empty-handed and had a sickening memory of watching from the steel road as Scipio faced the fiend. Silhouetted against the stars the big knight stepped in past a thrust with unexpected speed, hooked a foot behind Lancelot’s leg and pushed him stumbling back with a hand on his chest. The boat wheeled around, its sails luffing madly, and as it came in for a second pass Bedivere took one running step and hurled himself over the broken battlements. For a frozen moment he hung spread-eagled in midair—

  The ship lurched as he caught the stern with his strong right hand. Collum, Dinadan, and Nimue all frantically grabbed at his wrist and the shoulders of his tunic. Collum took one look down and squeezed his eyes shut. After an eternity of panicky struggling they finally dragged Bedivere up into the boat, and all four of them collapsed in a heap in the narrow bottom, panting.

  The woman at the helm surveyed her passengers coolly. Arrows rattled against the hull, and one glanced off the mast.

  “Ready about.” She shoved the tiller hard to port, the boom swung over, and the sail filled on the other side. The ship curved sharply away over the treetops.

  “And away we go,” said Queen Guinevere.

  Thirty-three

  The Queen

  It wasn’t a big boat, maybe twenty-five feet long, curved up at prow and stern, with a single mast. The fishing boat that took Collum to the mainland from Mull was bigger. This one looked like it was built for lake sailing, or at best hugging the coast. It definitely wasn’t built to fly or be shot at with arrows, but somebody had ensorcelled it into the air by main force.

  Collum managed to climb out of the bottom and onto a seat. He was panting like a fish fresh from the net, dizzy with the fact that he was still alive, still alive and looking up at the sail and at the stars in a magnificent mess above them. He laughed, a little hysterically.

  Guinevere hauled on a line and the ship nosed up even higher into the sky. Wind gusted and tore at the rigging, snapping and rattling it. They’d doubled back, and the roofs and towers and courts of Camelot were pouring past below them. A few more arrows rapped and scratched at the hull, but they were too high up for any real danger. The queen hiked out fearlessly on the windward side, a tall, thin woman in her early forties, all long arms and legs. Collum took an unsteady knee more or less in front of her and bowed his head.

  “Your Majesty.” He remembered too late that she’d told them not to call her that, but they were the only words that felt appropriate. “My name is Sir Collum of the Out Isles. Thank you, we owe you our lives.”

  “You are welcome, Sir Collum.”

  She sounded like she was presiding over a glittering drawing room and not sailing a boat two hundred feet above the countryside.

  “But if I may ask,” he said, “how did you come to be here to rescue us?”

  “Possibly by an error of judgment. But all in good time. We have a long voyage ahead of us.”

  She went back to trimming the sail and studying the stars, and Collum made his way unsteadily back to his place. Gripping the wooden seat with white knuckles, he summoned his courage and looked over the side.

  The fabric of Britain was laid out under them like a counterpane—the stuff of the world looked so much softer and smoother from here. Woods were dark coarse wool, fields a lighter velvet with its nap brushed different ways. A road wound through them like a seam, and there was a darkened village for a button. Camelot had already dwindled to a twinkling jewel in the distance. The Brass was a squiggle of dull silver in the moonlight, with whiskery tributaries branching off it.

  Oddly the moon looked no nearer from here than it had from the ground. A mystery. He would have to ask Palomides about it, if he ever saw him again.

  “In the matter of addressing me, I’m neither a queen nor a nun now.” Guinevere tied off the mainsheet and shook out her fingers, which were tired from gripping the rope. She had a lot of unruly light-brown hair, barely restrained in a knot at the back of her head. She wore no jewelry, and she’d exchanged her habit for a practical brown dress and a woolen mantle. “My tenure at the convent was only ever a matter of a convenience. I needed somewhere safe and quiet to hide. It did cross my mind that I might find God there, or that God might find me, but somehow we managed to miss each other as usual. Ships in the night. As it were.

  “Mostly I was there because I knew that sooner or later Lancelot would make a move for the throne, and when he did he would send someone to kill me, if he didn’t come himself.”

  “He said you didn’t sleep together,” Bedivere said.

  “Lancelot is a damned liar, but that much happens to be true. I’m going to tell you the rest of it too.” From the way the queen announced it this was evidently a decision she’d been thinking over for some time. “Not because I have anything to confess, or because any of you have a right to know. Any of you. I did not save all your lives so that I could submit to an interrogation. But we will have a great deal to discuss when we get where we’re going, and it will all go much quicker without a lot of tiresome mutual suspicion.

  “And perhaps you do have some right to know. I know you all loved Arthur, too, in your different ways, just as I did. We are all that he has left. And he loved you too. He found it easy to love other people. He even loved Mordred, and that took some doing.

  “But of course everybody loved Arthur too. They all wanted a piece, so I suppose it’s no wonder he was torn to pieces in the end. I often think that if Arthur had loved himself a little more, and the rest of us a little less, this whole disaster might have been averted. He would’ve stuck to the business of governing Britain and fighting off Saxons, and this would be the mightiest nation in the world.

  “But he had to be good, on top of all the rest of it. I can remember the very first day that he sat at the Round Table and called for a marvel, and it appeared—it was a bird that spoke. A wagtail. Do you remember, Bedivere? Everyone was in transports of wonder, and I suppose I was, too, but some part of me also thought, well, that’s it then. I’m just a woman, how the hell do I compete with a talking bird?”

  The air around them felt still but they must have been traveling at enormous speed, faster than any horse or ship, because up ahead Collum could already make out what he took to be the estuary of the Avon River, and beyond that the Severn Sea. They were four days’ ride from Camelot. He could feel the warmth of Nimue’s shoulder pressing against his. He thought of kissing her by the woodshed at Dubh Hall. Her warm lips against his in the cold. Now that he was alive for at least a brief time longer he wanted to do it again.

  “But I shouldn’t pretend I was better than anybody else,” Guinevere said. “I had no children, and with the Round Table Arthur had a hundred of them, so I had a great deal more free time than I knew what to do with. I dressed impeccably. I greeted emissaries, or more often their wives. I prayed, I advised, I chose among shades and patterns. And occasionally I flirted.

  “Lancelot was a skillful flirt, because he did everything skillfully. He was handsome enough, and I, like every other woman at court, found that the idea of seducing the greatest of knights, the preux chevalier, that most exalted and forbidden of men, was fantasy enough to beguile the occasional hour or two. I am ashamed to say it now but in my innocence I even imagined that Lancelot and I…shared something.” The words came with difficulty. “I was in love with a king, you see, and Lancelot was in love with God. Neither of us could have all of our beloved. Some part of us was alone with our love and always would be.”

  Aerial sailing was in some ways better than the regular kind. It was certainly drier, and so far, knock wood, Collum had managed not to be sick. For a while they kept pace with a large aquiline bird that coolly ignored them. They were starting to feel their wounds: Nimue’s nose had swelled up dramatically, and Dinadan was feeling his chin, and Bedivere his forehead and his arm. Collum had gotten off easily, and he spent his time thinking about poor Constantine, and poor Sir Melehan too. And Dagonet, and Scipio. Their little band had gotten away once again, they always managed to scrape through, but every time they did it cost somebody everything they had.

  “But all that—as you knights like to say—is as it may. Please understand that when Lancelot arrived at my door that night, I was not at all pleased to see him. Not at all. There is such a thing as taking the joke too far. I need not explain to any of you that the first principle of courtly love is that it remain unconsummated.

  “Lancelot wasn’t even meant to be at Camelot, he’d gone hunting with Arthur in the Old Weald. He must have come back early.”

  “You didn’t send for him,” Dinadan said.

  “No.” Guinevere adjusted the jib, which didn’t need further trimming. Wide, pale moonstruck beaches slipped by below them. “I had no idea what he was doing banging on my door. I told him to leave immediately. Immediately. I did not mince my words. There was no misunderstanding.”

  “He said that too,” Collum said.

  “Really. Did he tell you that he forced his way into my chamber? That I bit and scratched and tried to scream? But there are few men in the world physically stronger than our King Galahad. He held me down and bound and gagged me. Even then I didn’t understand; I thought he was there to rape me.

  “But there was no lust in his eyes. Understand this, too: he cared nothing for me. He didn’t even desire me. Once I was immobilized Lancelot did nothing further, just took off his clothes and then sat down to wait. He was waiting for Mordred. Lancelot knew he was coming.”

  “He said someone told Mordred he would be there,” Dinadan said.

  “He would know, he did it himself. He made sure we were caught. And Mordred was punctual. It wasn’t long before he was outside with his righteous dozen, crying treason and lechery and shouting all kind of filth. Like me they had not yet grasped the nature of their roles in the drama. Only Lancelot knew that.”