He produced from somewhere a silver goblet containing what he said was fairy nectar. It made the rounds—it was magic, apparently, and never ran out. The taste was sweet and tart; Palomides said he thought it was tamarind. They toasted one another, and Arthur, and Britain, and the boat, and anything else they could think of to raise a glass to. Whatever it was, fairy nectar was strong stuff.

  It helped with the pain, too, a lot more than the willow bark did. And after all, Collum was half a fairy. That seemed like grounds for drinking more of it.

  Only Guinevere declined the cup. She was keeping herself to herself, sitting forward of the others, gazing ahead and presumably into the future. (Palomides had taken the tiller; he was the best navigator and unlike Guinevere he seemed to actually enjoy it.) They had no crown to give her yet, her hair was restrained only by a silk cloth, but her back had an unmistakably royal straightness to it, and she held Excalibur resting across both thighs, its blade naked and alight.

  Personally Collum couldn’t imagine anyone looking more royal, but he knew not everybody would see it. It was one thing to hand Excalibur to Arthur’s widow on a beach in front of a crowd of impressionable young men and proclaim her queen of Britain, but it was going to be quite another to persuade an entire empire of fractious kingdoms to bend the knee and pay taxes to a woman. It could be like the Eleven Kings all over again. They’d be lucky if there were only eleven this time. Bedivere had already attached himself to Guinevere’s side, her body man, as he had been Arthur’s.

  They’d talked about waiting, perhaps proceeding overland and letting word of Lancelot’s defeat spread out over the land, house to house, village to village. But the idea of a fait accompli won out: Guinevere would descend on Camelot in a flying bronze boat, with Excalibur in her hand and a battered, bound Lancelot in the hold. That would be her claim.

  “Do you think you’ll keep Arthur’s old laws?” Nimue said. “Or are you going to write your own?”

  “I wonder if even Arthur would’ve kept things the same.” Guinevere traced the fine tangled figures on Excalibur with her fingertip. “He said it in the dream, the world is sea-changed. And seeing Lancelot on the throne certainly made the Camelot of old look a good deal less appealing. It’s a new age, and I suppose even I am forced to concede that we no longer live in a province of the Roman Empire. It’s apparent that Britain is…a more complicated land than I understood it to be. So I suppose I will have to be a more complicated queen.”

  Collum had no idea what that meant, but at this lofty, lightheaded moment anything seemed possible. Guinevere would know what to do. Arthur wouldn’t have died otherwise. He would never have left them if he didn’t know everything was going to be all right. Maybe she could give Morgan back her lands. Bring back the piskies, and the quarter days. That would make for a more complicated Britain. It would certainly go down well on Mull. He hoped it was what Arthur would’ve wanted. But what Arthur wanted was for them to find their own way.

  “We could have British spoken at court,” he said. Victory was making Collum feel generous.

  “And will you be our ambassador to the Otherworld, fairy-child?” Guinevere permitted herself a smile. “Let’s walk before we run.”

  Before they did anything they would have to clear the Saxons out of the midlands and run them back across the North Sea. The wheel of fate hadn’t stopped turning. It hadn’t stopped for Arthur, and it wasn’t going to stop for them.

  “Do you think,” Palomides said from the stern, “that you will still want a Round Table?”

  “What else would we have?”

  “Almost anything. It is a uniquely impractical shape. Even an oval would have been better. Or an ellipse, or a trapezoid.”

  “I don’t believe that all of those are real shapes,” Dinadan said.

  “Or four tables.” Nimue found a piece of charcoal and sketched on the deck to show them. “Still a circle, but you break it into four arcs and turn them around to face each other. That way people won’t always be shouting at each other to be heard.”

  “It would spoil the metaphor,” Collum said.

  “To hell with the metaphor.”

  Some sort of sea eagle was pacing them, white tail and yellow beak, eyeing them as if they might be a rival, or some new kind of fat and tempting prey. Collum wondered if it was the same bird they’d seen on the way out. He wondered if Goose was still in residence at Camelot. They were up and out of the mists of Cornwall now, and the wind and the air were cold but the sun was hot. He pressed his leg against Nimue’s leg next to him, and she pressed back. He still had her green ribbon around his wrist. Great slumbering hills rolled by beneath them, with winding rivers slopping this way and that.

  Only very occasionally could you spot the work of man: a thread of road or wall, a tiny huddled village, a field studded with haystacks. Seen from up here, Britain didn’t look that complicated.

  “There it is.” Palomides pointed.

  From far away Camelot looked exactly the same as when Collum first saw it. There was the Godsfall, there was the tiltyard, and the Bakehouse Tower. There was Merlin’s Tower, thought it was really time they started calling it Nimue’s Tower. You could see the field where they’d fought the Battle of Camelot, the grass lush and green from feasting on the dead. There was the menagerie. Collum was going to ask Guinevere to grant the leopard a royal pardon, so that she could spend her final years growing fat on royal deer in the Forest of Arden.

  It was all beginning. The Age of Guinevere. And how long will this one last? Every age is a dream, but somehow it’s still always a surprise when we wake up at the end.

  “Sir Palomides,” Guinevere called, “shall we descend?”

  Suddenly the sea eagle angled across their path and landed boldly on the deck. With a flapping sound and a few stray downy underfeathers it became Morgan le Fay in a rich gray cloak.

  “Not just yet,” she said.

  Morgan wobbled for a moment, finding her balance on her human legs again. It was funny how she kept turning up, you’d think she would’ve been dying to get rid of them. Maybe she was lonely. Long ago, before Uther and Arthur, she’d loved having a family. Now they were the closest thing she had to one.

  “Oh dear,” Guinevere said dryly. “I hope you’re not having another evil scheme, Morgan.”

  “She is not,” Palomides said. “At least I do not think so.”

  “There’s something I have to show you,” Morgan said.

  Collum was feeling a little tired of being shown things. He’d seen plenty for now, thanks. But Palomides had the helm, and Camelot was already dropping away behind them.

  “If possible I would like to be home for dinner,” Dinadan said.

  “Many things are possible,” Morgan said.

  Dinadan snorted.

  “Hey Palomino, how long are you going to keep on playing sidekick to the Oracle of Avalon?”

  Everybody else looked more or less bedraggled after the events of the day, but Palomides had somehow remained dashing in his spotless blue robes and turban.

  “Well?” Morgan asked. “I think we’d all like to know.”

  “When I left home I told everybody I was an explorer,” Palomides said thoughtfully, “and they all thought I was joking. Even I thought I might be joking. But I have been many things since then, and I have come around to the opinion that I was right the first time. I have more exploring to do, and Morgan makes an excellent traveling companion. And it was ever my way to love incautiously.”

  “At least I’m not married,” Morgan said.

  “And I have a book to write, too, and I am not coming back to Camelot till I finish it.”

  “A book?” Dinadan said. “That is a sadly degrading activity for a knight. What kind of book?”

  “One where I am the hero.” Palomides squinted up at the sail. “It has taken some time, but I am finally ready to write it. It will be about my travels in the obscure and savage backwaters of the seventh clime. I think it will do very well in the paper-sellers’ quarter in Baghdad.”

  Palomides laid on sail and took them up higher where the winds were stronger. Morgan would say nothing about their destination, so to pass the time Bedivere quizzed them on the finer points of two-handed swordplay. They discussed whether Arondight was a cursed sword now, and if not then who should wield it. They gazed down at the miles and miles of trackless forest below them and speculated as to how many bandits and giants and bears and rogue enchantresses they were flying over.

  Morgan took a long look at Collum’s stumpy ring finger, which was still raw and oozing, and at the gray scrap of finger they’d salvaged from the surf, but in the end she shook her head sadly.

  “I’m sorry. It’s too late.”

  “We’ll bury it with full honors,” Nimue said. But Collum just chucked it over the side.

  “The bears can fight over it.”

  By late afternoon they’d passed the furnace of humanity that was Londinium and were overflying the Fenlands, Dagonet’s homeland, a lacework of glassy black waterways. It was cold in the caravel. Bronze was an impressive thing to make a ship out of, and no doubt advantageous in battle, but it didn’t keep you warm. Beyond the Fens lay the Wash and then the North Sea. Even as high as they were the wind had the smell of salt. Maybe they were going to invade Saxony. See how they like it for a change.

  But when they reached the coast they saw that the shoreline had grown a strange dark crust of some kind. Palomides banked the boat and spiraled lower. The sands were furred with beached vessels, and crowded with human figures, hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

  “God’s holy bones,” Bedivere said. “Who are they?”

  “Saxons,” Morgan said matter-of-factly. “Some of them anyway. And some Jutes, and Angles, and probably others whose names I don’t know. They all look more or less the same from here.”

  They stared down at all the milling yellow-haired heads. Pale faces looked back up at them, too, and pointed and shouted, but they were too far away to make out the words. Collum wouldn’t have understood them anyway.

  “It can’t be,” Dinadan said. “There’s too many of them.”

  The boat didn’t linger over the beach but sailed further out to sea, close-hauled, the water deepening and darkening underneath them. There were more invaders out there, more boats, the ocean was littered with them to the horizon, bobbing like wood chips in the immense expanse, not just longships but cruder vessels too. Some had ragged sails, some struggled unsteadily through the swells pushed by thin oars that flashed wet in the sun. Some of them were hardly more than rafts, crowded with passengers and cargo to the point of swamping. You couldn’t believe they’d made it a hundred yards, let alone all the way across the North Sea. Probably some of them hadn’t.

  For God’s sake, Collum thought. Just when we’ve won. Can’t we ever, ever, ever have a little peace?

  “I wouldn’t have thought Saxony held so many,” Guinevere said under her breath.

  “This can’t be real,” Bedivere said.

  “Go home,” Dinadan said. “What are you doing? Go home!”

  “We’ll stop them,” Collum said. “They’ve always invaded and we’ve always stopped them. There has to be a way.”

  “Not this time,” Morgan said. “Because they’re not invading.”

  “Well, what the hell do you call it?!”

  “Emigrating,” Morgan said. “Fleeing. They can’t stay in Saxony. The sea there is rising and flooding their lands, and the land that isn’t getting flooded is being taken away from them by the Huns, which you’d better hope don’t make it as far as Britain, because you’ll like them even less than the Saxons. These people aren’t invaders, they’re refugees. They have nowhere else to go.”

  Wind was whipping spume off the tops of the swells like smoke.

  “It looks cold down there,” Collum said.

  King Arthur had always stopped them, and King Uther before him, and King Constantine before him, but they’d never faced this. This wasn’t half a dozen keels of Saxons, it was thousands of them. And they weren’t warriors, or most of them weren’t, he could see that even from here. The boats were groaning with women and children, sunburned and rain-whipped and salt-sick, whole families who were only just getting their first sight of Britain after days of seasickness and freezing spray in their faces and the terror of drowning. How could you fight them? They weren’t fighters. It wasn’t an army, it was a people.

  “The damn Saxons,” Bedivere said. “After all that.” He spat over the side.

  “Imagine how Britain must look to them right now,” Nimue said. “They must look at it and see paradise.”

  “They’ve got some delightful surprises coming,” Dinadan said.

  “This is it. This is the change the fairies were talking about.” Guinevere was clutching Excalibur by the hilt like it was a mast in a hurricane. “I thought it was us, I thought we were the change. I thought I was the change! But it was them all along.”

  “What in God’s name are we going to do?” Collum said. She was the queen, she was supposed to know, but Guinevere didn’t answer. He thanked the stars that he wasn’t king.

  “I can tell you something of what will come to pass,” Morgan said. “Or as much as the fairies have told me anyway. Nothing will stop the Saxons, you can be sure of that, they’ll keep coming and coming and never stop. Some people will fight them and others will flee to the west to get away from them. The Saxons will rename those fleeing Britons Wēalas and later Welsh, which means foreigner in their language. They’ll become foreigners in their own country.

  “But then others will welcome the Saxons. Yes, you can make that face, Guinevere, but it’s true. There are people in Britain who would rather be ruled by the Saxons than by Camelot, and if that surprises you then think about how your lot sucked up to the Romans when they got here. They’ll trade with the Saxons, live with them, marry them, have children with them. They’ll learn the Saxons’ strange language and forget their own. A time will come, not so long from now, when few people in Britain will speak British at all, or Gaelic, or Latin, and the land all the way from Dover to the Solway Firth will be known as Angle-land, and then finally England. And they’ll forget they haven’t always been here, and they’ll make King Arthur their national hero.”

  Morgan was obviously relishing their bitterness—see how you like it—but she was equally clearly feeling plenty of it herself. This wasn’t the future she’d dreamed of either. She’d wanted the old times back.

  “It could be worse,” Palomides said. “Remind me to tell you about the Mongols sometime.”

  “Well, I’m not learning Saxon,” Dinadan said. “Or Angle-ish, if that’s even a language.”

  “I already know Saxon,” Palomides said. “Ƿes hāl!”

  “I only just finished learning Latin!” Collum said wearily.

  “No, you haven’t,” Nimue said. “I wonder what language their gods speak. I’ll have to ask them.”

  “We’re not going to give them Camelot,” Bedivere said grimly. “We still have that. We have to get ready. God’s blood, what a disaster. What would Arthur have thought?”

  “Oh, Arthur. You remember what he was like.” Guinevere smiled sadly at him. “He would’ve thought of some clever way that it was all all right. That Britain with the Saxons was still Britain, it was just a different Britain, no better or worse than the old one. Or something. He would’ve quoted Heraclitus or someone of that ilk. Panta rhei. Change is the only certainty.”

  “He would have, at that.” Bedivere looked down at his hands. The left one was getting rougher and less pink, so that by now they were almost the same color. “He was absolutely insufferable that way.”

  “You do realize that we arrived exactly like this?” Morgan said. “It was only a thousand years ago, give or take. I don’t know what we were fleeing, or what we were looking for, but it can’t have been much different. The Old Ones must’ve been absolutely appalled. They would’ve watched us arrive over the sea—Morimaru is the old name for it, the Sea of the Dead—and shaken their hoary heads and said Now fucking what? We stood up all those standing stones for nothing!

  “And now they’re gone and forgotten, and the Old Ones are us. Even the fairies were strangers here once. We’re all of us refugees from somewhere, we just don’t like to admit it.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to be brave,” Collum said. “Though I’m getting pretty damn tired of being brave.”

  “You could always whine like a lot of giant babies.” Nimue held out her hand and he took it with his good one.

  Time to go back to whatever we were before this, he thought, like Bedivere said. Ordinary men. Were we ever anything else? Looking down at the ocean, carpeted with Saxons and all the rest of them, he could feel the old specter of acedia beckoning him with its seductive coils, waiting to welcome him back into its melancholy embrace. It was tempting.

  But he pushed it away. He didn’t want that. What he wanted was to live in a timeless castle, a world wrought of old gold, where everything was noble and glorious and nothing ever changed. He wanted the battle to be over, he wanted to win and have won and be done with fighting forever and ever.

  But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.

  Till the Last Day, and maybe not even then. Who knows what stories they tell in Heaven.

  “What are you going to do with Excalibur?” Collum asked. “Your Majesty?”

  “I could throw it back in the sea for you,” Bedivere said. “It would make quite a splash from here.”