A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  “It was easy enough to put Merlin into the tree. Easier still to whisper to Mordred of his mistreatment at Arthur’s hands, of the need to take hold of his own destiny. And magic is a tricky thing—a spell designed to keep you safe in battle will not turn away a knife slid into an embrace of peace.” She pushed back from her desk, the chair creaking as she turned toward the window, the lake.

  “What I did should have worked. It should have been enough to set things back in order. But Morgan’s spell had woven itself into Arthur’s fate, making itself the new omen Merlin had lied to her about seeing, and things changed.

  “Arthur didn’t die. Not on the field at Camlann, not when Excalibur was cast into the water, not when Arthur himself was set adrift on the lake. He should have floated out past time and memory, should have disappeared, but instead, this.

  “He lingers, and the story lingers with him, and I am dragged through time with him and his interfering sister until someone gets the story right.” Her face, a study in long-held rage.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “To get the story right.”

  “And here I thought you were paying attention. The story doesn’t end unless he does.”

  “Great. So you want him dead and Morgan wants him alive and—”

  “No. His death is a side effect. I want his story gone, and Morgan wants his story to live forever. Too late to make the story be what it should have been, but at least he’ll be out of it.”

  “Whatever,” I said. The distinction was unimportant to me. “Not my fight. What I want is Sabra. Alive. At the end.”

  “Whatever.” She shrugged. “Not my fight.”

  I got up. “It will be.”

  • • •

  “Nirali, you did your undergrad here too, right?” Sabra asked as she shoved her chair against the table.

  “Yeah. It’s a good dance program that doesn’t think it’s weird to cast a brown girl as Odette, so there was no reason to leave. Why?”

  “Is there any sort of campus legend about a giant?”

  Nirali narrowed her eyes. “You mean like an actual fee-fi-fo-fum giant, don’t you?”

  Sabra nodded. “I overheard some of my students talking about seeing some giant-type thing in the woods, but I want to make sure this isn’t them just taking the piss out of me.”

  “I’ve heard about that too. Just this past week or so,” Liam said. “They were describing this huge guy who sounded almost like one of those walking tree things from Lord of the Rings.”

  “An Ent?” Nirali asked.

  “Talks really slow, carries the hobbits around?”

  Nirali nodded.

  “Then sure,” Liam said. “An Ent. Is that what you’ve been hearing about too, Sabra?”

  “Sounds like it. So, probably not just students playing a joke, then?”

  “What else would it be?” Nirali asked.

  “The Green Knight,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever read a version where he looked like an Ent, but huge, like a giant, all in green, even his hair and skin, and carrying a tree for an axe? Definitely sounds like him.”

  “Why would something like that be wandering around campus, though?” She seemed genuinely puzzled, and I reminded myself that not all of us chose to dress up in armor, or were given gifts of swords and magic.

  “Because he’s in this story, or at least the Gawain part, and the story’s not giving you a choice, Nirali.”

  “That’s not funny,” she said. “I told you guys I wasn’t doing anything other than keeping a journal.”

  “I’m not sure that matters anymore,” I said. “Although, I can’t remember—didn’t Gawain volunteer to answer the Green Knight’s challenge? So maybe you don’t have to do anything.”

  “Not maybe. There is no maybe about it. I don’t care what the story wants. I am not part of this.”

  She shoved her laptop into her bag and left. I thought of Nora, who’d also wanted out of the story before it forced her into something she didn’t want, and hoped that Nirali was right.

  • • •

  She walked in a few minutes late, but Nirali did come to the next seminar meeting. Liam hooked his foot around her chair leg, sliding it out, and smiled. She smiled back as she sat down, and it seemed everything was forgiven and back to normal.

  Wham.

  Wham.

  WHAM.

  After the third shuddering knock on the door, it flew open, coming to rest half off its hinges.

  For a moment, we all sat, shocked. The Green Knight. Tall enough to have to bend his head—a head out of which grew oak leaves and ivy as hair and beard—as he strode through the door. Wildness filled the air around him. “Someone has called for a wonder!” His voice the rubble of rocks, the creaking of sap in branches.

  Liam stood up, angled himself in front of Nirali. “I—”

  “Liam. No. I’ve got this,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Nirali nodded. “Thanks, though.”

  She walked around the table, to where the Green Knight (and I could see why students had called him a giant—Nirali wasn’t short, and the top of her head barely reached the middle of his chest) stood. “No one has called you here.”

  “You are wrong.” He slammed his axe onto the floor, and holly branches burst from it.

  I flicked my glance at Professor Link but couldn’t read anything in her face.

  “I’m not. But even if we had,” Nirali continued, “our time is not your time. Things have changed since the first time you were called to this court. Had a wonder been required, your presence alone would suffice.”

  “How can that be?” His voice the rustle of wind in branches.

  “Look outside,” Nirali said. “Think of what you have seen and not seen on your journey here. There are no more great forests, no standing stones to serve as clocks. We do not ride in pursuit of wishes granted by the white hart. You are a thing unique, sole and unexpected. Like nothing any of us have seen. Truly, a wonder, and so you have fulfilled your quest.”

  “Truly?” The boom of his voice quieter now.

  “Truly.” All around the conference table, faces of awe and agreement. Even—maybe especially—the faces of the students who hadn’t agreed to take cards and names. I wondered what this semester must be like for them, if they regretted their decisions to live in the safety of papers and research.

  A pause. Then he bowed, deeply to Nirali, and walked three steps backward before standing up again. “Then I take my leave of you.”

  He thumped off, through the broken door, and down the hall.

  Sabra stood and started clapping. The rest of us followed, cheering Nirali.

  “You were fucking amazing!” Liam said. “How did you do that?”

  “I knew the story,” she said. “Just because I don’t want to dress up in armor doesn’t mean I wasn’t curious about who I’d been assigned. Arthur calls for a wonder at Christmas, like usual, and the Green Knight shows up. While there, he offers the challenge, which Gawain accepts. That leads to the whole striking heads off with axes bit, which is what I really wanted to avoid—though, thanks for stepping up.”

  Liam grinned.

  “But all the Green Man had to do to fulfill his role in the story was be a wonder. The rest of everything came from Gawain, really.

  “I just figured, if you guys weren’t being collective jerks, and if some weird part of the story was going to show up here, I was going to meet it on my terms.

  “Besides. I mean, it’s not like I was lying. A giant fucking green man just came to our seminar. If that isn’t a wonder, I don’t know what is.”

  We left then, to celebrate with Nirali. Drinks and pizza and feeling invincible. Like we, too, were wonders.

  It wasn’t until I woke, dehydrated and angry-headed in the small hours of the morning, that I remembered one thing: Professor Link had not applauded. She had looked away from Nirali’s triumph.

  And the Green Knight had said he had been called
for.

  • • •

  This time, when I went looking for Arthur, I didn’t use the locator spell.

  My plethora of interlibrary loans had finally come in. As I had suspected, none of them gave any real hints about magic. But like Nirali, I had wanted to know everything I could about the name I had been assigned. So I’d also ordered thick, scholarly tomes on Morgan, and those coughed up a couple of pieces of relevant information.

  Morgan, it seemed, was associated with ravens because one of her original titles was that of necromancer, a magician with power over the dead. Ravens were psychopomps—creatures that carried souls between life and death. Another thing that was said to carry souls was the sound of church bells, which would ring the souls of the dead home on the tide.

  Lake Severn didn’t have tides, and I knew Arthur wasn’t drowned, but if ravens could pass between those two states, maybe they could find a sleeping king who was neither one of those things nor the other. Maybe they were the locator spell I needed.

  But when I looked through the birds’ eyes, they didn’t show me a king sleeping on a glass bier. Instead, I saw Sabra standing on Lake Severn’s shore, a white dog next to her.

  I ended the spell, blinking until my eyes readjusted to human sight. Then I went down to the lake.

  • • •

  “I’ve been dreaming of him,” Sabra said. “Arthur.” Lake Severn’s waves lapped at the shore, crisp in the darkness. “Sometimes I see him asleep, on a bier of glass. But usually, I see pieces of his life. I remember what I did.

  “Sometimes it’s me, on the bier.”

  Cabal whined, pressed against her side.

  “He’s out there,” she said, looking at the lake.

  “Yes.”

  “We can find him,” she said. “But I think it needs both of us.”

  The boathouse lock broke with a word, and Sabra and I carried one of the crew shells down to the shore.

  “Do you need me to wrangle a second set of oars?” I asked.

  “I rowed in high school and undergrad,” Sabra said. “I’ve got this.” And so I had nothing to distract myself with as we glided over the still lake. The cool night air and the dip of the oars in the water, and the smell of apples as we approached.

  “Sabra. There’s an island.” There hadn’t been, before. Not built on bone, but all the same, as she rowed us closer, I felt like we were approaching a graveyard, a dead place.

  The boat fetched gently up against the shore, and we climbed out. The air was full of ravens. “I think,” I said, “we follow them.”

  Sabra nodded, and we walked in silence.

  The scent of apples was stronger now, and I could see them hanging in the trees, ripe and waiting. White fell through the air, and my first thought was that it was snow, but then I realized: blossoms hung on the trees as well, and it was their petals falling, bright in the moonlight.

  From somewhere over the water, bells began to ring, a calling of souls.

  Sabra stopped at the edge of a clearing, and in its center on a bier of glass, so that it seemed he floated above the earth, the sleeping King Arthur.

  Time froze, and we froze with it.

  Having seen Morgan, I could see the resemblance between the siblings. Arthur had the same generous mouth as his sister, the same blade-straight nose. His hands, crossed over his chest where the hilt of Excalibur would have rested, had the same long fingers. But he was red and gold to her dark and pale.

  His clothing looked worn, functional rather than royal, and the left side of his shirt was stiff and stained. I wondered if he was sleeping in the same clothes he’d worn at Camlann, at the end.

  He wore no crown, and he had no scars. Which seemed strange—he had been, after all, a warrior king. But then I remembered: Morgan’s spell. The scabbard.

  The spell to protect him from all injury in battle.

  The reason I was here.

  The reason he was.

  Cabal walked to the foot of the bier, laid himself down, and whined as if his heart was broken.

  “Morgan,” Sabra whispered, “can you wake him?”

  “Are you sure he needs to be awake?”

  “Yes.”

  I stepped forward, then halted, my hands curling at my sides. “You’re linked. If I fuck this up, you could wind up like he is.”

  “I could wind up like that anyway,” she said. It was the closest I’d heard her come to directly acknowledging the expected end of things.

  “Sabra—”

  “Morgan, wake him.”

  But nothing I did worked. As I tried, as I stood for what felt like hours, weaving magic out of air and words, the temperature dropped. The wind picked up, and the smell of the lake mixed sickeningly with that of the apples. Hackles rose on Cabal’s back, and he started to growl, low and terrible.

  I stopped mid-word. “Sabra, we need to go. Now.” I didn’t wait for her to agree, just grabbed her arm and ran back to the boat.

  “Hang on,” I told her.

  Instead of sitting, I stood. The buffeting winds tore my words from my mouth as I guided us back over the water.

  We hit the shore with a crash that spilled the three of us out.

  “We left the oars,” Sabra said after we’d hauled the shell back to the boathouse.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Other things on my mind.”

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “A sign we were on the right track. Sabra, you’re sure he needs to be awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then he will be.”

  She grabbed my wrist. “Soon, Morgan. It needs to be soon.”

  Once

  VIVIANE’S MAGIC FALLS AWAY FROM my island as they leave. I go to the clearing at its center to see what they did to make her so angry. I step through the trees, and my heart stops beating.

  My brother. Arthur. Here.

  My heartbeat an ache in my breast as it starts again. I stumble to his side and I fall, landing on knees turned to bird bone and unable to support my weight. Arthur. I press my face to his folded hands.

  Weeping, because what else can I do? I wasn’t even the one to bring him back.

  My brother’s hands in mine are pliant and unmoving as clay. Scenes of his, our, life play out in the glass of his bier: all the branches, all the fates, all the choices that led us here.

  I was supposed to say goodbye to him, long and long and too long ago. But it would have been too soon then, and who agrees to that? I didn’t care if he became a legendary king; I just wanted him alive, and my brother. But now that he is as he is, I will not let her unwrite him.

  All he has left is his story.

  In the darkness of the glass, white moths flutter, like apple petals, like falling stars. And then they, too, fall, and my brother lies sleeping on their stilled wings, white as death.

  — 9 —

  “And, of course, those of you participating in the journal option must turn in those journals in person during the last class meeting of the semester,” Professor Link said.

  “The last class meeting? Not during the finals period?” Liam asked.

  “Well, it’s not precisely a final project, now is it?”

  “It has to be in person?” I asked. “We can’t just leave it in your mailbox or give it to a friend?”

  “In person. During the class meeting,” she repeated. “If you’re feeling charitable, perhaps you might tell your less-attending fellow students.”

  She smiled, and I understood. Nora. She meant Nora. Who was the only one of us who didn’t attend. Whatever name she had been assigned, Link wanted her here, to put her desired ending in motion.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

  I emailed Nora. Five minutes later, her response pinged.

  “Thanks for the warning. Don’t worry. I’d rather fail.”

  • • •

  The next day, I got another email from Nora.

  “Link’s done this before. We ne
ed to talk.”

  She asked me to meet her at one of the less popular coffee shops on campus that afternoon. Shadow-eyed, she slid into the bench across from me, clutching a mug of the largest possible mocha, extra chocolate drizzled across the top. Not bothering even with “hello,” she opened her laptop and slid it across the table. “I started wondering, after you emailed yesterday, and did some research. It’s all here.”

  I read the opening of the article, then looked up in shock. “How did you find this?”

  “Like I said, I know how the story goes. So I ran a bunch of searches, using every string of terms I could think of that might pull up any relevant information. I’m getting my master’s in information science. This is what I do.”

  We hadn’t been the first group of students. Of course we hadn’t—I was an idiot for not realizing it sooner. This was a story that retold itself. A story she wanted retold. Professor Link had a different name then—Elaine Lac—but it was definitely her, directing a class of theater students performing Camelot. The article included pictures, and the only thing different about Link, or Lac, or whatever her real name was, was her wardrobe.

  There had been, it seemed, a love triangle, and not just the one onstage. The paper spoke in language cautious enough to hide exactly how many points in the love triangle had been involved with each other, but the one thing that was made clear was that on opening night, the actor playing Lancelot had stabbed the actors playing Arthur and Guinevere, and then had slit his own wrists. Arthur and Lancelot had died. At the time of the writing, Eliza Williams, the actress who had played Guinevere, had been in the hospital with significant injuries.

  “That’s awful, Nora. I mean, really fucking awful. But I don’t know how that changes anything for us.” I slid her laptop back to her.

  “Read this one.” She clicked something on her screen, then shoved the laptop back.

  Eliza Williams had never recovered. The doctors hadn’t been sure why—infection, maybe, from something on the blade. But her wounds had never healed. She was unable to leave her house, unable to have anything like her previous life. The article went on to mention that she had inherited a collection of art—historical objects from the medieval and Renaissance periods, some even earlier. She lived in a house that was like a museum.