No one spoke. A banked fire slumbered in an old-fashioned open hearth in the center of the circle, a thin spire of gray smoke spooling up from it toward the ceiling, where a complicated-looking system of wooden louvers waited to vent it out into the summer morning air. The broad man took out a steel and began sharpening a long-bladed knife with slow rasping strokes.

  He wore armor from the waist down and a thick quilted gambeson with bits of mail sewn into the elbows and armpits. The air smelled of smoke and sweet herbs and spilled beer.

  “Boy.” His head and jaw were frosted with silver stubble. “What do you want?”

  “Boy?” The knight on the table lifted his head. “Magic boy, or regular?”

  He let his head drop again with a clunk and closed his eyes.

  “Regular boy.”

  Collum felt like he was melting into pure radiance. With his curious accent and rich brown skin like tanned leather, the man on the table could only be Sir Palomides, the famous Saracen knight. The Knight of the Questing Beast. Collum had scaled the cliffs of Olympus and was staring at the gods themselves as they took their ease.

  He went to one knee. Gray cathedral light fell around him like sleet. I will not lie, Collum thought. They will look at me and see a nobleman and I will simply do nothing to disabuse them of that notion. Then they will anoint me and gift me with lands and—in a way that will cause almost no actual blame to accrue to me—the lie will thereby become the truth.

  “An it please you, my lords.” It came out a note higher than he’d meant it to. “My name is Collum of the Out Isles. I have come to Camelot to present myself to the Round Table.”

  He’d said it too fast. He should’ve waited. It would’ve been better if Sir Bleoberys had done it, wherever he was. Old Blueberries is gone.

  “The what now? The Round Table?” The grizzled knight kept on sharpening. “Never heard of it.”

  “You’re in luck.” The man with his head on his arms didn’t raise it. “At the present time we find ourselves with several vacancies.”

  He said it like it was a joke, but nobody laughed. Collum walked a few paces farther into the hall, trying to hide his limp, then went back to one knee.

  “God’s bones,” someone said quietly.

  “Gentlemen.” Collum cleared his throat. Years at Dubh Hall had trained him to drop his gaze when dealing with his elders, but now he forced himself to keep his eyes up. “It is the greatest honor of my life to be in your presence! An it please you, I beg you to judge of my worthiness!”

  There was a deep echoing belch.

  “Who’s your f-father, Sir Collum?” the tall blond knight said, not unkindly.

  “Lord Alasdair.” The lie was so repellent that he nearly choked on it, but it wrenched itself out of him. “Also of the Out Isles,” he added miserably.

  “I see.” The tall man had a slight stutter and an aristocratic drawl. “My boy, I’m afraid that through no f-fault of your own your arrival is ill-timed.”

  “What my companion means,” the knight with the knife said, “is that circumstances bein’ what they are, we would much prefer it if at this time you fucked off”—he made his fingers do a little run along the table—“back to those isles you spoke of earlier. An it please you.”

  “That will I not,” Collum said.

  “Eh?” The knight did an actual double take. “No, actually, that will you fucking will!”

  But no. He wouldn’t.

  It had happened again, just like it had that first day in the training yard. The plough had hit the boulder, struck a spark, and stopped cold. He would not go. Maybe it was pride, fatal pride, but he wasn’t leaving before he’d given them a good look at him.

  “With the utmost respect, Sir Villiars, I am your servant in all things but this.” Collum could tell the flowery talk was annoying them but he couldn’t seem to stop. “I will not go until you and your comrades have judged of my worthiness.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Begging your pardon, my lord, but everyone knows your name.” It wasn’t as obvious as Palomides, but by the man’s size, shaven head, pugnacious manner, and thick Northgalis accent, he could only be Sir Villiars the Valiant. “You fought with Arthur against the Eleven Kings.”

  “Yeah, I know who I am. And who I fought.”

  “Whom,” the tall knight said. “You want the direct object. Accusative case.”

  “I have come many miles to swear fealty to the—!”

  “To the what? What? The fuckin’ table? Do you see any fuckin’ table?” Sir Villiars dropped the sharpening steel and tossed the knife over his shoulder; he did it casually but the knife spun in a precise arc and stuck upright in the tabletop with a soft tok. He flowed to his feet in one terrifyingly lithe movement.

  “Of course he can see a fucking table.” Bored, the knight with his head down rolled a bit of spilled green candle wax into a ball between his fingers. “It’s right in front of him.”

  “I’m going to teach him some table manners.”

  Chairs scraped in the silence as people turned to watch.

  “Don’t listen to him, my boy,” the blond knight said. “Villiars’s table manners are revolting.”

  Sir Palomides sat up, blinking.

  “In Sarras,” he rumbled, “we would settle this at the chessboard. But I do not judge.”

  “I meant no disrespect—!”

  “None taken, lad,” Villiars said heartily. “My fist here is just going to judge of the worthiness of your face!”

  Sir Villiars shuffled toward Collum, massive hands raised. And now for my next trick, Collum thought giddily, I shall fistfight a knight of the Round Table. How was this all going so wrong so fast?! Had he really come all this way just to get yet another beating? Villiars had a heavy jaw and pouchy eyes—he must’ve been a quarter-century older than Collum. One eyebrow was warped by a knot of silvery scar. Boulders rolled around in his upper arms.

  Every instinct in Collum’s body told him to backpedal, or better yet just cut and run as fast as he could, back to those isles he spoke of earlier, but he didn’t. He would give no more ground. Instead he dropped into a boxing stance: hands up, elbows down, chin down, knees bent, feet unsquare. At least they would see him fight. Villiars would be expecting him to back up, but in a fight you always did the unexpected thing, so he shuffled forward, too, setting up for a couple of nice neat jabs to the face—

  A whirlwind hook practically knocked him over. It was like being run over by a bull. Collum only escaped with a full-body duck and cover.

  “Shit!” He didn’t mean to say it.

  “Come on, kid!” somebody called, but cracked up at the end of it.

  Collum reset himself, breathing fast and shallow. His pulse was a runaway cart clattering downhill. This was his chance, this was the test. Whatever he did next he would remember for the rest of his life. He took a poke at Villiars’s side, which was as indifferent to his knuckles as a tree trunk, and followed it with a cross that Villiars dismissed politely with a tiny movement of his bicep.

  Villiars jabbed at his face, one, twice, jab-hook. Collum fended off the blows with his forearms, which hurt tremendously. He uncovered, and Villiars’s fist glanced off his cheekbone, but it gave him a hard shot at the man’s kidney. Boom and the joy of the fight flared inside Collum once again! Gentlemen, feast your—!

  Time skipped. He was on the floor.

  His ears rang, his nose buzzed, and one whole half of his head felt hot and twice as big as it should be. It was as though his mind had wandered off in the middle of doing something—but what?—and he’d just decided to lie down for a restorative nap on this pleasantly cool floor.

  There were sweet herbs scattered on it: fennel, lavender, pennyroyal, hyssop. His body felt much, much heavier than usual. A pair of large booted feet stood in front of Collum. He couldn’t remember who they belonged to, but they made him strangely uneasy.

  One of the feet reared back to stamp on his head.

  “Enough.” The voice was deep and infinitely weary of bullshit.

  “Oh, go to hell,” said the owner of the feet.

  The feet rose clear off the ground. Now they were being propelled backward through the air away from him. Was this a miracle—was this that merciful God Collum had heard so much about, finally making Himself useful? At last! All glory to Jesus Christ!

  “Apologize to the boy.”

  Whoever he was, man or god, he’d picked up Sir Villiars with one hand by the front of his tunic and sat him down on the Round Table like a naughty baby.

  “Fuck off!”

  The man pushed Sir Villiars backward and onto the floor with a clatter.

  Collum struggled up onto his hands and knees and a big callused hand hauled him the rest of the way to his feet. His savior was an older man, fiftyish, very big, sharp eyes in a blunt, unsmiling face. He almost looked familiar.

  He did look familiar. It was the drunk from last night. But he was transmogrified. He’d washed and dressed and shaved. If he recognized Collum he didn’t show it. He was sober now, but along with the drink the light had gone out of his blue eyes. The party was over.

  “We are ill prepared for visitors, but I hope you will accept what hospitality we can offer.”

  Of course. A man that size, missing one hand. How could he not have seen it?

  “Thank you, Sir Bedivere,” Collum croaked. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “By our custom I cannot offer you a seat at the Round Table itself, but please, take one nearby.”

  He indicated an extra, non-sacred chair with the stump of his left wrist.

  “I thank you.”

  “And don’t do the thing with people’s names,” he said, with infinite patience. “Wait till you’re introduced.”

  “Yes. Of course. I thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “My name is Collum of the Out Isles.”

  “Sir Bedivere.”

  Collum sat obediently, like a schoolboy who’d just escaped a whipping, dabbing at his bloody nose with the back of his hand. It throbbed, and so did his head, and his arms, and his ribs, but the pain was nothing. Sir Bedivere was Arthur’s oldest companion, his body man and best friend, there from the very beginning, through all the wars and the quests and adventures.

  By now Villiars had climbed back over the table, but his appetite for violence was temporarily sated. He reached for his cup of wine but it was empty. He threw it into the fire and put his head in his hands.

  Two servants in livery brought in more wine and bread and pickled carrots and radishes on a tray. The other knights drifted over and the unsmiling Bedivere introduced them one by one. Sir Villiars, you’ve already had the pleasure. Sir Palomides. The round-faced man was Sir Dinadan, a minor knight with a reputation as a wit. There was a heaviness to Bedivere—like Atlas he seemed to be bearing more of the world’s sorrows on his broad shoulders than other people did. He wasn’t going to complain about it, but you could see that he’d appreciate it if everybody else could just do as they were told and not add to his burden.

  The tall man with the long blond hair, as shining and pretty as a woman’s, turned out to be Sir Constantine. Collum knew the name: he was a prince, his father was Cador, king of Cornwall. Of them all he was the only one actually dressed like a nobleman, in a magnificent form-fitting blue doublet embroidered with white lilies and featuring a new fashion that Collum had heard about but never seen: buttons.

  “What on earth happened to your face?” Sir Constantine asked. “I mean, besides the o-obvious.”

  “Lost a fight with a hawthorn bush,” Collum said.

  “Ah, yes. They can be vicious when cornered.”

  Sir Palomides raised a cup.

  “Muhammad teaches us that wine is the sweat of the denizens of Hell.”

  “That would explain the smell.” Constantine sniffed at his cup of wine and set it aside. Palomides drank.

  With that the knights of the Round Table appeared to lose interest in Collum, which gave him the opportunity to observe them as a group. They were a curious assortment, tall and short, thick and thin, with accents from all over. Dinadan looked so ordinary Collum could’ve mistaken him for a greengrocer. But there was something in the way they all moved—every gesture had a smooth deliberate precision to it, a sense of speed and strength held lightly in check. Never for an instant was any one of them off balance. There was a secret they shared, which was that they were all members of the most elite military order in all of Christendom.

  Collum just wondered where the rest of them were. Gawain. Gareth. Bors. Lancelot. The heroes. Maybe they were off at Caerleon. Maybe being a hero meant you could sleep in of a morning.

  Dinadan drained his wine and strode off to the far side of the room to practice forms, his blade flickering in the half-light. It was an extraordinary weapon, with a broad chunky blade made of blued steel so matte it didn’t even look like metal. His left hand, his off-hand, was bandaged. Constantine had a black eye too. They must’ve seen action recently.

  Collum wasn’t in such great shape either. Many parts of his body were reporting damage. But he was still here. You couldn’t call it a strong start, but they hadn’t thrown him out yet. He didn’t have to go to Astolat. Not quite yet.

  Maybe some wine would help. He took a sip and set it down.

  “Is King Arthur at Camelot presently?” he said, in an effort at making conversation.

  “The king is dead.” Sir Bedivere’s face and voice were empty of all emotion. His gaze was fixed on the far distance. “He died at the Battle of Camlann along with most of the Round Table. We are all that’s left.”

  Five

  The Tale of Sir Bedivere

  Long ago on a sharp crisp morning in early autumn King Arthur and Sir Bedivere chased a deer deep into the Tamwood, a glittering green forest north of Caerleon.

  The campaigns for Pictland and Scandinavia had ended in triumph that spring, after three years of hard fighting, and Camelot was enjoying a rare and welcome interval of peace. Arthur and his court had spent the long lazy summer in Glamorgan, and nobody wanted to make the long trudge home yet along the old Roman Southway to Caer Loyw and then Camelot. So they lingered, trying to stretch out the season a few days longer. Now it was the eve of the autumn Feast of the Holy Cross, the damp gnawed stub of the season, and the weather had finally and undeniably begun to turn, but the king had wanted one last day out.

  Arthur slowed his horse in a sunlit mat of white yarrow.

  “If I weren’t the king of Britain,” Arthur said, “I might admit that I’m wondering where the hell we are.”

  He shaded his eyes and squinted into the half-light of the forest.

  “But as you are—”

  “Unlike his subjects, the king does not enjoy the freedom to be uncertain.”

  “Well, if we find that damned deer we can ask it,” Bedivere said. They’d long ago dropped any formality between them when they were alone.

  Yellow leaves slipped ceaselessly down through the branches. Arthur was a tall, handsome, black-haired, pale-gray-eyed man, not yet thirty, clean-shaven in the Roman manner—beards were for barbarians. He still had the sharp cheekbones of the half-starved foundling he once was, but otherwise he was radiant with health and goodness and genius and the certainty that there was no problem in this world that he could not solve, whether with laws or with charm or with faith or with an army.

  It took some doing for the king to get lost on a hunt. He hunted in the grand manner, par force, accompanied by Master Huntsman Edward, five assistant huntsmen, three horn blowers, four archers, ten beaters, and a small army of dog handlers handling relays of lymers, bloodhounds, brachets, greyhounds, and so on, shouting at them So how! So how! So how! Sa say cy avaunt!

  “I suppose,” Arthur said, “that from the deer’s point of view this is a great victory. It must think of itself as a mighty hero.”

  “You don’t really think God bothered to give deer a point of view?”

  “Of course He did, He’s a fiend for details.”

  “Well, maybe it deserved to get away. Maybe it’s a virtuous deer. If animals can be virtuous.”

  “I had a cat once,” Arthur mused, “who has almost certainly gone to hell.”

  Bedivere wasn’t much practical use hunting deer—one-handed, he was clumsy with a bow—so lately he’d been practicing hunting calls with a little brass horn shaped like a bull’s horn that he wore slung around his neck. It wasn’t polished bright but instead waxed a dull green for camouflage, one of many details of woodcraft about which Arthur was obsessive.

  He blew it now. There was no echo. The dense fabric of the deep forest absorbed the sound completely.

  “That’s the wrong call,” Arthur said. “You don’t want a recheat, you want ‘straking from covert to covert.’ You know—” With his fist to his mouth the king did a fair imitation of a hunting horn sounding “straking from covert to covert”—but broke off halfway through.

  “Shh!”

  He pointed.

  Bedivere didn’t see anything. The silence was so thick it seemed to roar around them. He stifled a sneeze.

  “Shh!” Arthur took his arm and pointed again.

  Bedivere was sure they’d long since lost the deer—and anyway they weren’t going to bay it without the dogs—but suddenly there it was, maybe fifty yards away, alone in the leafy dusk, staring off at something else even as they stared at it. Without taking his eyes off it Arthur slithered down from his horse and nocked a barbed hunting arrow. He gave Bedivere a look that meant, Stay here you one-handed lumbering lummox.