But always Lancelot kept pace with him. Collum hoped Lancelot was trying after all that because he was never going to fight any better than this.

  Strategy then. Lancelot would never fall for a feint, but if he could offer him something he wanted badly enough…Collum stepped in close, as if he meant to catch Arondight in another bind, but Excalibur’s grip was slick with blood and between that and his missing fingers he fumbled it. Lancelot’s attention flicked to the prize. It was right there, unsheathed, naked and ready. He snatched Excalibur out of Collum’s faltering grip, and for an instant he held it, and his face lit up with ecstasy, the greatest knight in the world with the greatest sword ever made.

  Collum’s left hook broke his nose.

  It had been some time, but Collum hadn’t forgotten the stance: hands up, elbows down, chin down, knees bent, feet unsquare. A bare-knuckled scrap. Now I shall fistfight a knight of the Round Table. Lancelot was holding two named blades, and Collum had only one and a half hands to punch with, but he was inside the great du Lac’s reach and hitting hard, two hard jabs to the solar plexus and a brutal uppercut that rattled that great square jaw. That’s for Constantine.

  Collum grabbed his arms to keep him from doing anything clever with those swords and flattened Lancelot’s handsome nose even further with his forehead, then he kicked his legs out and the great knight went down, and Collum crashed down onto his chest with both knees and all his weight. He snatched Excalibur back and hammered that famous face with its fine silver thistle pommel, one, two, three, four, five times.

  He paused. Lancelot spat a tooth and struggled to rise. Collum bashed him twice more, then reversed the sword and put its point to the hollow of Lancelot’s throat—

  “Collum.”

  The voice came from far away, very far. But it was very firm. It was a woman’s. So not God, probably.

  “Don’t kill him, Collum.”

  “What?” A sword in the dead king’s bloody throat, that was a claim. But his breath started to slow.

  “Do not kill him.”

  The voice was Guinevere’s.

  He was waking from his dream of wrath. He was still straddling Lancelot’s prone body, but the desire to kill was draining away, fading like a fiend at dawn when a church bell rings. As it went the pain came back, quite bad now. He looked down and for a moment saw L’ancelot, the lonely child, under the point of his sword. He clamped his maimed right hand in his armpit and squeezed, which didn’t help as much as he’d hoped, and struggled to his feet.

  There were a hundred staring faces in a semicircle around him, mouths open. The fallen king lay at his feet.

  “Untie them.” He pointed at his friends. His voice was a croak. “Do it. Now.”

  For a heartbeat no one moved, then one soldier, a small man with a week’s worth of stubble, tossed down his spear and went to the prisoners. The dam broke, and more soldiers hurried to obey. Nimue came and knelt by Lancelot and felt his neck. Suddenly exhausted, Collum turned and walked a few steps away, blinking up at the sunless sky. He was still alive. It was raining with a little more conviction now. The whole world was still here, the lapping waves, the tiny shells, just as he’d left it. He would see a few more things.

  Bedivere gripped his right wrist firmly.

  “Told you you could do it.” Grinning, he wrapped a rag tightly around Collum’s hand, linen torn from his own bloody shirt. “I’ve got more fingers than you do now.”

  Nimue buckled the magic scabbard around Collum’s waist to staunch the bleeding, which it did, though it couldn’t staunch the pain. He put his good hand on her shoulder, and then his bones liquefied and he had to put almost his whole weight on her. Bedivere caught him by his other arm.

  The fight was won, but there were still a lot of soldiers on the beach, quite a lot, and their king was very much beaten but they were still wearing Galahad’s red and white. Very soon someone was going to have to tell them what to do. Stretched out unconscious on the sand, without his sword or his cape or his crown, Lancelot no longer looked like much of a king, but if not him, then who?

  The fate of Britain was here on this beach, waiting to be seized. The wheel of fate was spinning like a top. That was when Merlin stepped forward. He had, of all things, a smile on his face.

  “Well fought, young man. Bravely fought.”

  He said it pleasantly and with pure confidence. This, even more than magic, was his element, the decanting of power from one human vessel to another. He must’ve seen a score of kings rise and fall, in stranger ways than this. Probably he’d worked everything out two minutes into the fight. The air around Merlin’s hands shimmered ominously, and the sand shifted and rippled around him in a perfect circle.

  “These moments are delicate ones, the birth of a king, and an expert midwife—”

  A slim dark shape emerged from the front of his robe. At first Collum thought it was part of the magic, but the smile left Merlin’s face. The dark shape was the tip of Arondight. Dinadan had thrust it into Merlin’s back and out through his chest.

  With a sharp tug he ripped the blade back out again and the wound pumped a spray of blood, Tyrian purple, then another. The old wizard stood still with more blood in his teeth, pondering, as if the taste were unfamiliar. The shimmer around his hands faded. He fell forward on his face.

  Life had clung to that body for so long, so tenaciously, that even with a sword through his heart Merlin died slowly. He rolled onto one side and looked up at Dinadan. Half his face was coated in sand.

  “But…”

  “But what?” Dinadan stabbed the long, thin sword point down into the sand, where it stuck. He nodded to someone else, someone Collum couldn’t quite see. “You’re welcome.”

  He turned to the soldiers.

  “Now if it wouldn’t be too much trouble I’d like my fucking clothes, please.”

  But Lancelot’s soldiers were starting to argue with each other. Fingers were being pointed. Worryingly one or two had even gone to one knee in front of Collum. If there was one thing Collum had learned about himself in his short life it was that he was a knight, not a king. He hadn’t come all this way to put a crown on his head. But how did you make a king without God?

  Maybe you didn’t. He pointed with Excalibur.

  “The queen!” he shouted. “Guinevere the Good, God save her!”

  He stumbled over to her, hoping he didn’t look too alarming, and offered the blade to her on the palms of his hands.

  “Your Majesty. Please.”

  Guinevere knew what to do. She might even have been waiting for it.

  “Thank you, Sir Collum.” She took the bright sword and flourished it over her head, her sleeve slipping down her long pale arm.

  “The queen!” Collum shouted. “The Queen of Britain! By God’s heart, I will kill any man here who does not swear it on that sword!”

  A few soldiers shouted raggedly: The Queen! Nimue and the knights joined in. Guinevere raised the sword again, and again, and each time more soldiers joined in till they were all shouting it together. Bedivere went to one knee on the beach before her and bowed his head.

  He was the first.

  Thirty-eight

  Three Witches

  It was a sunny day at Sir Ector’s castle, in the heart of the Weald, a proper baking-hot summer Sunday. Kay had fallen out of a tree that morning and been taken away in a state of howling despair, though Art was pretty sure he hadn’t suffered any really serious injury. Art also knew that after Kay was coddled back to a state of relative sanity, he would be scolded for ripping his good Sunday clothes, and to get out of it he would say that Art pushed him out of the tree, and Art would be beaten.

  He knew it for a certainty. It was coming, and then it would have happened. Time was always stealing away bits of your future and replacing them with memories, and then the memories faded. Like trading real gold for fairy gold, and who thought that was a fair trade? But God must, or He wouldn’t have made time that way.

  He had an hour maybe before his beating, during which he would be pleasantly unsupervised. For a while he threw stones in the stagnant brown moat, choked with masses of duckweed. He imagined being a fish under there, forcing his way through the soupy sun-warm water. Did they know that the world they lived in was a circle? Or did they believe they swam on and on forever, in an eternal green darkness, world without end?

  He peered into the dry well that they threw garbage down sometimes. Even his hair was hot. He balanced across a weir and stopped at the edge of the forest.

  The Weald exerted a powerful fascination over both Art and Kay because it was forbidden, and unlike many grown-up prohibitions that seemed arbitrary, this one actually had some sound reasoning behind it. There were boars and bears and wolves and giants and bandits in there, any of which could and would kill you. Fairies too. Art had seen them once from far away, a fairy-man in shabby clothes and a fairy-woman in a fabulous swirling green gown, dancing together in a meadow.

  They were small, not much taller than he was, and wherever they brushed against the ragged robin it bloomed a perfect pink, even though it was February and the rest of the field was frozen and dead. It would be about half an hour now till they came looking for him.

  Here was a dilemma, though, because there was an excellent stick about twenty feet into the shadow of the wood, just lying there on the ground. When it came to sticks Art had the subtle eye of a true aficionado, and this was a stick of the absolute first water: straight and smooth and altogether swordlike. Aspen, he’d wager.

  Stepping into the edge of the shadow made his heart hammer. He believed the fairies couldn’t cross out of the shadow into the sunlight, though he wasn’t quite sure why he believed that. He set himself, made a mad dash into the gloom, grabbed the stick, and sprinted back out into the sunlight again.

  Made it!

  “Is that him?” A girl’s voice.

  “That’s him.”

  “God’s nails!”

  “God’s bottom!”

  This was followed by hysterical giggling.

  There were three of them. One was a teenager, almost a woman really, one a bit younger than that, and one just a year or two older than Art. They’d appeared out of nowhere. The bigger two were staring at him and laughing and covering their mouths. The small one just stared. They wore dazzling dresses like princesses. At first he thought they were fairies.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Nowhere!” The big one laughed like it was a joke.

  “Camelot,” the youngest one said flatly.

  “Don’t say!” the middle one cut in immediately.

  “Who are you?”

  “Witches!” The middle one bugged her eyes and waggled her fingers.

  “Told you it would work,” said the big one. “I could kill him. Should I kill him?”

  “Can we go now?” the little one asked.

  “We just got here!” The middle one. “You are Arthur?”

  “Yes. Are you really witches?”

  “Yes. I’m Morgan, this is Morgause—”

  “Don’t tell him!” Morgause hissed.

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  “He looks like Elaine, don’t you think?”

  “No, he doesn’t!” Elaine sounded more insulted than Art thought was strictly necessary. “He has Daddy’s hair.”

  “Don’t call him Daddy!” Morgause snapped. “I should kill him now.”

  Elaine sulked off to investigate the weir. Arthur ignored the threat to his life. People said they were going to kill him fairly often, but they never did.

  “I found a sword.” Art held up the stick. They didn’t seem to appreciate its unusual fineness, so he demonstrated it by attacking a privet bush. “Yah! Yah! In the thickest of the press he smote him! Doubled his strokes, and dealt him such a buffet as did bear him to earth, horse and man!”

  Trying for a big finish he accidentally hit himself in the face with the stick.

  “He served them all in the same manner,” he finished quietly.

  By this time Morgause had wandered off to look at the turtles with Elaine. Morgan was the only one who actually seemed interested in him.

  “Do you know who you are, Art?” she asked.

  “Course.”

  “I don’t think you doo-oooo!” she sang. She was obviously enjoying toying with him, but without the others for an audience she could risk showing some kindness, and she rubbed at a smudge on his face that the stick left behind.

  “There you go.”

  Art was unused to gentleness, and it made him cry a little.

  “Are you really witches?” He sniffled.

  “Morgause is. She won’t teach me yet.”

  “Morgan, let’s go!” Elaine called from over by the weir.

  “Morgan!” Morgause tried to sound commanding. “You’ve seen him, now come on! And don’t tell him anything!”

  “Can I come with you?” Art asked.

  She shook her head, but not unkindly.

  “Mummy used to call you Little Bear. Do you remember? Little Bear.” Morgan crouched down to be on his level and whispered in his ear. “They’ll tell you Arthur is a Roman name, Artorius, but it’s not, it’s a good British one, and it means bear.”

  She pressed something into his sweaty palm, an old coin.

  “It was Mummy’s. So you remember. I love you, little brother. I hate you, but I love you too.”

  Art looked at her for a long, solemn moment while he took that in. No one ever gave him anything, and the feeling was so intense that he just said “Bye!” and ran away.

  He would have to go the long way back to the castle, down to the causeway, because the other princesses were still on the weir, throwing pebbles at the turtles to make them move, and they weren’t as nice, and he didn’t want to go past them. But then he stopped, because he had the idea of giving Morgan his stick. He was an open-hearted boy, whose first impulse was always to be generous, even if it meant giving more than he had to give.

  But when he turned round to tell her it was already too late. The girls were gone.

  Thirty-nine

  Angle-land

  They were back in their flying caravel. They were sailing home to Camelot.

  They’d buried Merlin on a high headland near the beach where he fell. When they dug Arthur’s grave they’d used shovels, but for Merlin they didn’t bother. No grieving required. Nimue dug his grave with magic, and she dug it deep, twenty feet down, even though it meant chopping straight down into granite bedrock. She was fairly certain that Merlin couldn’t rise from the dead, but just in case she wanted something good and solid on top of him.

  Before they tipped his body in, she took a green stone out of her pouch, pried open her old master’s stiffening jaws, and forced it into his mouth, though she had to crack a few of his old yellow teeth to do it.

  “Serpentine,” she said. “A cursed stone. Can’t be too careful about these things.”

  They left the grave unmarked. Anybody who comes looking for Merlin’s grave, Nimue said, is somebody who shouldn’t find it.

  They’d all spent a good while fishing around in the shallows looking for Collum’s severed fingers, which reminded him of nothing so much as looking for the fastening pin off his armor, in the bushes so long ago, after he fought Sir Bleoberys. He’d never found the pin, and they never found his pinky either, but by lucky chance Bedivere spotted the missing inch of Collum’s ring finger, the top knuckle and the nail, washed up on the sand.

  It looked sadly waterlogged and bloodless, a gray sea slug, but Nimue dried it off and tied it up with some salt in a twist of parchment that had some curious pictograms on it. She gave him willow bark to chew for the pain.

  “I can’t stick it back on,” she said, “but maybe Morgan can. Merlin could have done it.”

  “Merlin would’ve taken the whole arm,” Collum said.

  His middle finger felt naked without its neighbors. He wanted to be healed, but at the same time the idea made him vaguely uneasy, as if getting his fingers back would mean taking back the price he’d paid for victory, which would mean fighting Lancelot all over again. So go ahead, he thought, take it. There’s your druid’s sacrifice, a finger and a half to the gods, plus a pint of bastard’s blood. Not much to pay for the throne of Britain.

  “You won’t need your fingers so much anyway,” Dinadan said, “now you’ve got Nimue.”

  Astoundingly, and very fetchingly, Nimue blushed.

  The soldiers had given Dinadan back his clothes and his weapons, and Guinevere had offered him Arondight, too—spoils of war—but he declined. Dinadan preferred his curious fairy sword, which he dared to hope was still waiting for him in a guardroom at Camelot. Collum had worried about Dinadan at first. He’d paid a price the rest of them hadn’t: his secret was out now, the one he’d guarded so carefully all these years. Merlin and Lancelot were defeated, but there was no taking back what people knew.

  But Dinadan didn’t seem overly bothered.

  “I almost feel like I owe those sons of bitches,” he said. “I’d kept the secret too long, and I knew it, but I didn’t know how to let it out.”

  “It wasn’t even much of a secret,” Collum said. “You’re the same man you always were.”

  “I wasn’t lying. I suppose it was the secret that was the lie. Other people can worry about it if they feel they absolutely must, and I’m sure a lot of them will, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the best thing King Galahad ever did. The highlight of his brief reign.”