• • •

  The next morning Bedivere announced that he was going to visit Arthur again. He wanted Nimue to examine the king herself. Nimue explained that she already had; Bedivere didn’t accept it. Guinevere said they weren’t going without her, and Morgan insisted on chaperoning the three of them, so in the end they all went.

  The mist was thick even around Arthur’s pavilion on the hilltop. Heavy drops gathered and broke and ran down the waxed silk. It was warm and humid inside. Bedivere took a stool next to Arthur’s bed and held the king’s hand. Morgan and Guinevere stood watchfully by while Nimue paced a circuit around the inside of the tent, observing the patient carefully from different angles through a shard of crystal that she kept in a velvet case.

  The lord of Camelot took his slow shallow breaths. His hair was lank and overgrown under the white bandage. No one had trimmed the king’s nails, and they’d grown long.

  “Well?” Bedivere said.

  Nimue just shook her head.

  Bedivere didn’t argue this time. He didn’t say anything. He looked like a boar cornered by hunting hounds. They were all still waiting for something, though Collum didn’t know what anymore.

  “Do you think he dreams?” Bedivere asked of nobody in particular.

  “He might.” Nimue wrapped the crystal in a cloth and put it away.

  “The night after Camlann he spoke about a god of dreams. Her name was Durelas. There was a shrine to her near Little Dunoak.”

  “One of the Great Gods,” Nimue said. “Not of dreams exactly, but close enough. I met her once.”

  Bedivere didn’t seem to have heard her. He kept gazing into Arthur’s sleeping face.

  “I think I understand,” Morgan said. “You want to see what he’s dreaming. I can ask her, but the gods don’t owe you any favors that I can think of.”

  “Durelas will remember Arthur.” Bedivere’s voice was husky. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Even if she’s willing, she’ll only do it once.”

  The old knight nodded. He didn’t trust Morgan, but what trick could she play on him now?

  “All right,” Morgan said. “You must—”

  “Show me too.” Guinevere took her place on the other side of the bed.

  The preparations wound up taking some hours and included the messy slaughter of two lambs outside the tent as well as much lighting of candles and drawing of chalk glyphs and singing in languages Collum didn’t recognize. The ritual wasn’t ready till midafternoon, but everyone waited, even though most of them had nothing to do except stand and watch. There was nowhere else to go.

  Finally Morgan told Bedivere and Guinevere to take Arthur’s hands. Then she told everyone to close their eyes and get ready because the goddess was coming.

  As soon as his eyes shut Collum had an overwhelming urge to open them again because there was a presence in the room. The pressure dropped abruptly, the way it does right before a storm, and he felt something like a million needles pricking his skin, softly at first but then harder and harder, until it was all he could do not to cry out. There was the same sweet smoke as he’d smelled last night. Morgan spoke, odd sounds that barely sounded like words, and a voice answered, not loudly but somehow with such force that something metal in the room rattled.

  Then the presence was gone, and Collum almost lost his balance because instead of darkness he was looking at a winter landscape. It was a wide, flat frozen marsh, mazed with crusted gray ice and hummocks and brown tufts, spread out under a white sky. It was hard to tell what was solid ground and what was water. He could feel cold air and smell snow coming on. He heard the calls of distant crows. The strangest part was that his eyes were still closed.

  King Arthur sat astride a dappled gray courser scanning the horizon, dressed for the hunt in drab greens and browns, with dagged hems and a sharp bycocket hat. His black cloak, sumptuously lined with ermine, was thrown back boldly from his shoulders. This was not the broken sunset king who lay in the pavilion on Avalon, this was Arthur in his prime, lean and strong, color high, back straight, breath puffing out proud and white. This was the Arthur that Arthur dreamed of, good King Arthur in all his power, with his best days still ahead of him.

  Somehow Collum had fallen into his dream, or been pulled into it, or was simply put there by the divine whim of the goddess. Bedivere and Guinevere were there too. Collum felt like an intruder, this was too private a thing for him to witness, but he couldn’t think how to banish himself. He tried to wake up but nothing happened. Arthur turned and looked back at the three of them with startlingly pale gray eyes. Collum had never seen them open before.

  “Well met!” he called. “My good queen, and my good friend!”

  The king didn’t seem at all perplexed at their sudden appearance in the middle of his dream-hunt, though he did give Collum a curious look.

  “My king,” Bedivere said, “this is Sir Collum of the Out Isles, and lately of the Round Table. I wonder if you know him?”

  Did he? How could he? Then it came to him: of course. This was why the goddess had put him here. Of course it was. All along he’d dismissed it as nonsense, a stupid fantasy, that he was some kind of long-lost bastard prince, but the goddess had recognized him. She’d seen him for who he was. His back straightened. Scipio was right after all, it was him all along, Arthur’s long-lost son, banished or misplaced or maybe completely unknown but now at last restored to him. Surely his father would know him! His lost fisherman father suddenly felt like an absurdly thin fabrication, and his real father stood before him revealed at last.

  He’d always denied it to himself but that was only because of how violently he longed for it to be true. Arthur’s gaze seemed to pass all the way through Collum like sunlight through glass, meeting no resistance, registering every facet and flaw and bubble. He could almost feel it warming him from within.

  But the king just shook his head and smiled.

  “I know you not, Sir Collum. But you are welcome here.”

  Collum knelt and bowed his head.

  “Thank you, Your Highness. It’s a very great honor.”

  He kept staring at the ground. Bowing your head had the advantage that nobody could see the look on your face. It was the greatest triumph of his life to be greeted by King Arthur himself, but nonetheless in the same moment a little flame of hope went out inside him. He wasn’t a prince. He was just a lowborn bastard after all, like he always thought, and with far more luck than he deserved.

  When he looked up again the king was back to restlessly searching the edge of the meadow. He looked eager to be off, an arrow nocked and drawn.

  “Arthur,” Guinevere said. “My love. Stay with us a while. We miss you.”

  “And I you, my dear, but I mustn’t linger. The game’s afoot—there, do you see it? Look at that!”

  He pointed. Just visible across the marsh, at the edge of a sere and leafless winter wood, were the pale hindquarters and stiff antlers of a great white stag.

  “Shall we ride with you then?” Bedivere said. “And join the hunt?”

  “I wish you could.” Arthur smiled sadly. “But that beast is the king’s alone to hunt, and no other’s, and you still have other prizes left to seek. You all do—you too, Sir Collum.”

  Collum couldn’t suppress a slight smile. He remembered my name. The white stag had turned to watch them. It looked restless, too, impatient to be hunted.

  “In truth I don’t like to leave.” For the first time Arthur seemed troubled. “It has all cost so much, and come to so little. There’s so much unfinished. But I cannot stay here. I thought I could, but I was mistaken. The world is sea-changed now, and I fear I belong to the Old World.

  “But this world has marvels in it too. Never doubt it.” Now he looked straight at Collum. “They are of a different kind now. No one will hand them to you. You can’t pull them out of a stone, the way I did, but they’re still there. It’s not too late.

  “Goodbye, my love.” He leaned down from his horse and kissed Guinevere, awkwardly but with great sincerity, then straightened up again. “Farewell, my good Bedivere. No king could have a better friend than I have had in you. Now a recheat, if you please!”

  Bedivere lifted a brass horn to his lips, smiling through tears. This wasn’t the Bedivere of the waking world either, his face gouged by time and his voice flattened by grief. It was dream-Bedivere, hale and young, the boon companion of Arthur’s glorious prime.

  TRUT TRUT TRO-RO-ROW TRO-RO-ROW!

  At the sound, a pack of dream-hounds appeared, flowing past them across the frozen fen in a bounding, barking mass. An answering horn sounded somewhere off in the woods. The great white stag bolted.

  “We had it all wrong!” Arthur called. “We were whole all along! Don’t you see? We’d only forgotten! We were always whole!”

  His gray courser took off like a shot across the icy fields, and the dwindling sound of his voice came floating back to them on the thin winter air.

  So how, so how! Sa say cy avaunt!

  He disappeared into the frozen woods.

  The day was still. Collum blinked—

  He was back in the azure tent on Avalon. He was on the ground, looking up at the striped ceiling with the golden sun at the center, and Nimue was standing over him, her mouth quirked to one side as if she were trying to decide whether he needed medical attention. The air felt warm and steamy after the winter dream.

  “You fainted.”

  “I guess I must have.” He sat up, rubbing his head. “I’m all right. I’ll tell you later.”

  Bedivere placed his hand on the king’s cheek and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Goodbye, my king,” he said. “I shall love you all the days of my life.”

  Guinevere kissed Arthur as well, but she said nothing. She and Bedivere each took one corner of the thick linen sheet and drew it up over Arthur’s face. Then, together, side by side, they walked stiffly out of the pavilion.

  Only then did Collum understand that the king was dead.

  He stayed behind for a minute, looking at Arthur’s still features showing faintly through the white sheet, as though he’d been buried in drifted snow. For an instant he was back again in the Great Hall on that first day at Camelot, sick with grief, washed overboard. It had happened all over again: the king was dead, then he lived again, and now he’d died a second time.

  But it was different this time. Collum felt no less empty and bereft, but his eyes were dry. Maybe it was just that having sought him all his life he’d finally gotten to see Arthur, and say a kind of farewell, but somehow something had eased inside him, the silver key had turned, and he could finally let go and start to mourn. Arthur was right, it was time.

  Collum knew Arthur could’ve stayed like that for years, forever, and he would’ve waited for him, wasted his whole life that way, but now he was moving on, and his story could move on too. Maybe terrible things would happen in the future, maybe it was empty, a waste land. But there could be seeds buried there, too, deep down below the dry dust, where hidden springs still flowed. It was deep winter, but there was still hope for renewal. The grail could be found. A new king could rise. The land could live again.

  Collum stepped blinking out of the pavilion into the sunlight. The weather, oblivious as ever to human tragedy, had finally cleared up. Bedivere was on his knees on the grass, but he wasn’t praying. He was staring with wonder at his hands. He had two of them. He moved his ten fingers and made two fists. The right one was old and spotted and callused, but the left was as pink and clean and new as if it were fresh from a hot bath.

  Thirty-five

  The Lady of the Lake

  Nimue or Morgan could have dug a grave with magic but instinctively they all knew that wasn’t what was needed. It had to be hard work, the way grieving was hard. They wanted sweat and blisters and aching muscles.

  After some debate they carried the king’s body out to one of the thin, loose ends of the island, one of the tips of the S. They picked a spot that was high enough that it wouldn’t be washed away in a storm but close enough to the sea that you could still see it when the mist cleared. There were a couple of trees to shade it. They chopped at the matted webs of roots under the grass and then on down into the soft sandy soil. Even in his grief Bedivere obviously relished the feeling of wielding a shovel with two hands for the first time in his life.

  Collum remembered burying Sir Bleoberys under his tree. It was easier digging with a shovel and not a sword.

  As they worked, the others talked about the Arthur they remembered, which over time led to Dinadan doing his impression of Arthur yielding in a tournament, once again amazed that his mediocre swordsmanship had somehow been bested, and it was so dead-on that even Bedivere laughed. Even Guinevere.

  “I used to wonder how Arthur became Arthur,” Bedivere said. “Coming from where he did. I mean, how the hell did he manage it? And I suppose he was trying to please God and atone for his father, and all the rest of it, but I wonder too if he didn’t just make himself up. It was painfully obvious how much Britain needed a King Arthur, and once he saw that he had to become him. He couldn’t give us anything less. It just wasn’t in his nature.”

  No one said it but they could all feel the wound of Arthur’s death, which had been open and festering for so long, being drained and cleaned and properly dressed at last.

  “He went back in his dreams,” Guinevere said. “In his dreams at least the prophecy came true.”

  They placed a rough gray standing stone at Arthur’s head, and Morgan inscribed it using an enchanted knife that cut the stone as easily as if it were cutting soap:

  HIC IACET ARTHURUS

  REX QUONDAM

  †

  Bedivere blew a mournful call on his hunting horn. Then they walked back to the castle with the sun going down over the wide, flat glittering sea. They weren’t so deep in the Otherworld that the sun didn’t set.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night Nimue took a bath in a copper tub; Collum sat on a stool nearby and enjoyed the steam.

  “I’m sorry you’re not his son,” she said. “After all that.”

  She looked if possible even more beautiful with her dark hair wet and smoothed back and her face glowing pink from the heat.

  “I never really believed it. Or maybe I did a little, but not for long.”

  “Somewhere you had a father, Collum. Maybe he was a king, maybe he was a fisherman, I don’t know, but whoever he was he missed his son. And he wished he knew you. And he would’ve been proud of you if he did.”

  Reluctantly Collum looked at himself in a mirror, a disk of polished silver in an ivory frame, searching for the traces of his father’s features in his own face. It was like trying to read the secret scraped-off underwriting of a palimpsest.

  “I’m just sorry Arthur’s not coming back,” he said.

  “Honestly I don’t know what to believe in anymore.” Nimue looked if not exactly hopeless—she was temperamentally incapable of true hopelessness—then getting ever more thoroughly resigned to disappointment. “Maybe I don’t have to know. I can be a good person without God, or fairy either. I guess I’ll just believe in myself for a while.”

  “Well, I believe in you.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Did you really used to work in a laundry?”

  “Yes. And so you know, whatever happens I will never wash your shirts. Not ever.”

  She was dabbing her face with tartar oil to keep her skin smooth. In the mirror Collum saw the wings again, over his shoulder, deep iridescent-blue butterfly wings, just like he had in the Glass Castle. It was an unpleasant, uncanny feeling, like he’d spotted a large spider clinging to his back, and he couldn’t reach it to brush it off. He forced himself to hold still and study them in the cloudy metal, like seeing himself through sheets of driving rain. He had to keep wiping the steam away.

  He showed Nimue, and she studied them, too, tilting the mirror different ways, while Collum waited for the inevitable grim diagnosis.

  “What do you think?” he said, when he couldn’t wait any longer.

  “You definitely need a haircut.”

  “I meant about the wings! What does it mean? Am I a fairy?!”

  “As much as I relish the idea of having a secret fairy lover, no, I don’t think so. Or it’s not exactly that. But there’s something more to you that we haven’t seen yet, and it’s past time that we found it.”

  They went to bed not long after that, together, but they didn’t do anything, just slept. For tonight sleeping was enough.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the morning nothing obvious had changed—the apples still hung heavily on the trees, the green sea still rolled up onto the sand, the mists still wrapped everything in quiet—but the mood had subtly altered. It was time to go, and everybody knew it. Lancelot would be tightening his grip on Britain, and Collum wasn’t looking forward to it but somebody had to fight back.

  Morgan didn’t try to stop them—Collum doubted she was especially sorry to see them go—but as a concession she did offer them a bigger boat this time, a two-masted caravel half again as long as the Errant.

  “Guinevere couldn’t have handled this one alone,” she explained.

  “Also I stole the last one,” Guinevere added. “Or did you think it was Morgan’s idea to come save you?”

  The extra space would come in handy because Palomides was coming this time.

  “I am still a knight of the Round Table,” he said, “and I fear that you will screw things up without me.”

  “Are you sure?” Bedivere rumbled.

  “I am sure you will screw things up.”

  “I mean are you sure you’re still one of us?”