Sword Stone Table

by Sword Stone Table- Old Legends, New Voices (retail) (epub)

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, I mean, you’re obsessed with this bloke and all you do is pour him coffee. It’s not healthy, Elaine.”

  “I’m not obsessed with him,” Elaine says, and she knows that part isn’t true.

  * * *

  —

  She probably drinks more than she should after that, because her dream that night is even weirder than usual. In that she’s pretty sure she’s dead in it.

  She’s floating down a river in a boat, bedecked with flowers. Her eyes are closed and actually she’s not sure how she’s seeing any of this, given that she’s almost definitely dead, but there it is.

  It’s weird to think it, but she’s pretty sure she’s never looked more beautiful.

  The boat drifts to a stop in front of a glittering pavilion, pennants snapping in the breeze. Horse bridles jingle and lutes play. In the distance there’s a castle with fairy-tale turrets.

  A crowd gathers around her boat, whispering and nudging, but no one says anything until a man pushes through them, led by a page. He’s bearded and wears a gold circlet in his blond hair, but Elaine has no trouble recognizing Arthur from the coffee shop.

  “Who comes so to tower’d Camelot?” he asks, looking terribly sad, and she wakes with a gasp.

  * * *

  —

  She’s bleary and exhausted at work the next morning and barely has the energy to blush when Lance comes in. Again, he’s not alone, but this time he’s only brought Arthur and not Gwen.

  She’d thought, maybe, that Gwen was the reason for his smile yesterday, but here it is again, quick and flashing. He’s lighter than she’s used to seeing him, his shoulders relaxed and his eyes soft. Arthur says something and Lance laughs with his whole body, unselfconscious and gorgeous.

  They reach the register and Arthur sobers enough to order. “Earl Grey, please,” he says, meeting Elaine’s eyes with his own. They’re blue, friendly and guileless, and Elaine’s breath catches as she remembers Arthur looking down at her in the boat, a crown on his head.

  Camelot.

  Arthur.

  King Arthur.

  “No,” she says automatically. It’s too ridiculous.

  “I’m sorry?” Arthur asks.

  “Sorry!” she says back to him like a complete numpty, face flaming. “Sorry, sorry. Thinking about something else. Earl Grey, of course.”

  “Thank you,” he says, smiling as if she didn’t just babble nonsense at him, and hands her his card.

  For the first time, she barely pays attention as she takes Lance’s order. She’s too busy staring at Arthur; at both of them, really.

  Arthur is taller than Lance and broader. He’s not handsome, really, not any more so than Lance—but where Lance is attractive because of all the interesting ways his face diverts from the rules of good looks, Arthur adheres to them so faithfully that he skips handsome and goes straight to simply pleasant. He’s just nice looking, classic and inoffensive and somehow trustworthy with his sandy hair and straight nose and gleaming white teeth. She can imagine him charging into battle alongside Wellington or piloting a biplane against German aircraft.

  He just looks English, as English as a Sunday roast or a perfectly kept garden. If she had ever really thought about how King Arthur might’ve looked, she probably would have conjured up something like him.

  Which is a completely ludicrous thought, but apparently it’s not as ludicrous as she can get, because standing next to him, a dark and slender moon to Arthur’s beaming sun, is Lance, and it doesn’t take much effort for her overtired brain to turn that into Lancelot. Or Gwen to Guinevere, for that matter.

  They didn’t exist, she tells herself firmly. They didn’t exist, and if they did, it was hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you’re being an idiot.

  And a little voice answers her back: Then why do all your dreams take place in castles?

  She makes a disgusted noise and goes to clean the bakery case.

  * * *

  —

  She looks up “King Arthur” online when she gets home, because she can’t not. She still feels vaguely stupid for doing so, but at least there’s no one else in her flat to witness said stupidity.

  There’s a lot on the internet about him, but the gist is pretty much what she distantly remembers from school: a folkloric figure based on accounts of a sixth-century ruler who probably didn’t actually exist. Meant to come again when England has need of him.

  That gives her pause for a minute, because she can think of quite a number of problems England could use sorting out right now—but surely worse threats than those would have brought him back sooner? Like the Spanish Armada, maybe, or the Blitz. And if he is here to sort out the latest bout of Tory idiocy, what is he doing faffing about in a coffee shop instead of, well, sorting? And why are Lancelot and Guinevere here?

  Then she realizes she’s pondering the theoretical political strategy of an undead zombie king magically reincarnated to give Parliament a good talking-to, and she says some very accurate and unkind things to herself before moving on to another tab.

  Sir Lancelot du Lac was added to the mythos in the twelfth century, the creation of French writers. Which…well, Lance is French. Which could easily be coincidence—France is just across the channel, it’s hardly inaccessible—but it is weird.

  Unless she’s just reading into things that aren’t there. Unless she’s forcing things to fit into a pattern because she wants them to when, really, it’s just an attractive man and his friends patronizing a coffee shop whilst possessing amusingly suggestive names. That’s probably it.

  And then her eye catches on the word Elaine.

  * * *

  —

  “There’s so many of us,” she tells Anisha. “Them. Me. In the stories.”

  It’s a few days later. She’s very drunk. It was the only way she could work up the courage to share her absurd theory.

  “There’s Elaine of Astolat, which is the one, the one where he wears my token at a tournament and then he’s injured and I nurse him back to health,” she says, ticking it off on her finger. “But he loves Guinevere, so he leaves and I die.”

  “Maybe you should slow down,” Anisha says, eyeing Elaine’s drink as it sloshes out of its glass with her gesticulations.

  “That’s the same Elaine as the Lady of Shalott, except Tennyson changed it because nothing rhymes with Astolat. Except acrobat. And I can’t even do a cartwheel,” she goes on. “But I’m in a tower and I’m weaving and I can’t ever, ever leave or I’ll die. Because of the curse. But then Lancelot rides by, so I leave the tower and I get in a boat, with all these beautiful…with flowers, everywhere.” She makes sprinkling gestures around her with her free hand to show where the flowers are. “And by the time the boat gets to Camelot I’m dead.”

  “Right.”

  “And then there’s Elaine of Cork. Corbic. Corbenic.” Elaine scrunches up her face. “I’m in a tub of boiling water because of a witch did it but I can’t die and then he rescues me and I fall in love with him but he loves Guinevere, so I get a sorceress to enchant him into thinking I’m Guinevere and he sleeps with me.”

  “Well, that’s rapey,” Anisha says.

  “I know!” Elaine shouts, so loud other people in the pub turn to look at them. “It’s awful. I’m awful.” She sniffs. “And I get pregnant and have Sir Galahad and Lance still doesn’t want me, so I trick him again and Guinevere gets mad at him for cheating, which, like, that’s the black calling the kettle pot, right?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “So he goes mad and runs away and becomes a tramp and then I find him under a bush and show him the Holy Grail and it cures him. And we’re happy together for a while with our little baby, Galahad. But Lance goes back to Gwen again and I die.”

  Anish
a takes Elaine’s now half-empty glass and moves it to another table, out of Elaine’s reach. “You die a lot in these dreams.”

  “They’re not dreams!” Elaine says, shouting again and then catching herself. “This is real.” Anisha raises an eyebrow. “I mean not real real, but these are the stories. The King Arthur stories. And I’ve been dreaming about them.”

  “Let me make sure I’ve got this,” Anisha says. “You think the bloke you’ve got a crush on at the coffee shop is the Sir Lancelot, and that his friends are Guinevere and actual for-real King Arthur, and that you’re also in the stories? These fictional stories? Because there’s an Elaine in them?”

  “Lots of Elaines. At least seven,” Elaine says, holding up eight fingers. “But they overlap. Like maybe Elaine of Corbenic is also…also Elaine of…somewhere else, I don’t remember. And also his mom was named Elaine.”

  Anisha makes a face.

  “I don’t think I’m that one.”

  “Small favors,” Anisha says. Then her expression turns very gentle, and Elaine wrinkles her nose because she knows what’s coming. “Sweetheart, don’t you think this is all…insane?”

  “Well yes, obviously,” Elaine says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s raining the next time Lance comes into the shop, absolutely pissing down. Everyone else is staying at home making their own coffees rather than wading through the downpour, and so Elaine has all the time in the world to watch Lance hold open the door for Gwen, fold up her umbrella for her, pull out her chair for her, go up to the register to buy her coffee.

  No Arthur this time, which shouldn’t be weird. Elaine is a modern young woman in a post–When Harry Met Sally world, and she’s perfectly aware that men and women can be platonic friends. But this is Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere—maybe—and they’re famous for one thing in particular, and so she watches them as she makes the world’s slowest flat white and matcha latte, both with almond milk.

  They’re sitting with their heads very close together, Gwen’s brilliant tresses outshining Lance’s even in the gray light of a rainy day. She’s fairer than Arthur, the white blondness that usually fades by puberty, and so delicately beautiful it makes Elaine want to give up in despair and maybe go live in a rain gutter or under a bridge.

  And she’s crying.

  She cries beautifully, because of course she does. Lance is bent toward her, murmuring something low, her little white hands clasped in his, but she keeps shaking her head, that river of hair shimmering.

  She’s so gorgeously sad that Elaine actually feels bad that Gwen feels guilty about cheating on Arthur with Lance, but then she remembers that she doesn’t approve of infidelity and then remembers after that that she has no idea what the dynamic between the three of them is. If it isn’t that they’re reincarnated mythological figures. Which they’re probably not.

  Lance touches Gwen’s face, so gently, and she leans in toward him for a moment before jumping to her feet. “I can’t—” Elaine hears her say, and then she’s running for the door, snatching up her umbrella on the way.

  “Gwen!” Lance calls, but she’s already gone. Rosina watches the door slam with wide eyes, glances over at Lance, then ostentatiously busies herself with the tea bag display so she can pretend she wasn’t watching.

  Elaine has no such recourse. “I’ve, um, got a flat white and a matcha latte for Lance,” she says apologetically.

  Lance turns to her. He looks miserable. “Thank you,” he says, taking the flat white and reaching for the matcha latte before appearing to give up. “You can throw that away, I suppose.”

  “I’ll keep it a couple moments in case she comes back, yeah?” Elaine offers, and Lance’s mouth approximates a smile for a second before collapsing back into despair.

  It’s rude. It’s rude and pushy and entirely inappropriate, but she can’t keep the words in: “You all right?”

  Lance blinks in surprise. “Oh. Yes. Thank you. We were just trying to decide something.” His gaze goes a little distant. “We have been trying to decide it for a long time.”

  Fifteen hundred years, I know, Elaine doesn’t say. She also doesn’t say: I understand. I’m trying to decide if I’m losing my mind or if I’m the reincarnation of a pathetic stalker who will inevitably die in a boat of flowers over you.

  “That’s always difficult,” she manages instead, bland and unhelpful. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Lance says again, and then seems to actually look at her. “Pardon me. You are at work, I should not be wasting your time with my problems…?”

  “Elaine,” she says, in answer to his questioning look.

  “Elaine,” he repeats, and Elaine’s heart throbs so hard it hurts. “That is the name of my mother.”

  Again, Elaine just manages not to say I know. “And you’re Lance, right?” she says instead, slightly idiotically, because he’s still holding a cup with his name written on it in Sharpie.

  He nods, looks down at the abandoned matcha latte, frowns. He’s so exquisitely, beautifully sad that it gives Elaine a sharp pain right behind her eyes.

  Maybe it’s holding back all the things she can’t say, but she abruptly loses control of her tongue. “Would you like to get a drink sometime?” she blurts, desperate to change his expression even as she wants to stare at it all day.

  Lance looks up at her, clearly startled.

  “I mean, only if you want to,” Elaine stammers. “You don’t have to. I shouldn’t—I mean, it’s not a big deal, I just thought—that is—”

  And Lance smiles. Elaine would lie down in traffic for that smile.

  “That would be lovely,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  There are many texts back and forth—she has his mobile number!—before the plans for their date—they are going on a date!—are settled. They decide to see a film before going to the pub, since there’s some historical drama showing that Lance mentions wanting to see. Elaine has no actual interest in it, but it’s the sort of film serious intellectual people see, and she wants Lance to know that she occasionally thinks about things besides espresso.

  (She even pulls out one of her old notebooks so that if Lance asks what she does outside of the coffee shop she can say she writes poetry, but after an hour or so of staring at a blank page she puts it away again.)

  They agree to meet at the cinema, since her flat isn’t on his way. Her skirt is arguably a bit too short for just seeing a film, but Lance has only ever seen her from the other side of a counter, and she wants to make sure that his first sight of her legs is a good one. She spends over an hour on her hair and makeup, but it’s worth it. She looks, to put it bluntly, fucking amazing.

  Or at least so she thinks until she walks into the cinema lobby and sees Lance standing there with Arthur and Gwen. They are all wearing jeans, the shapeless threadbare kind that cost the earth. Gwen’s hair is in a messy bun, and her oversize jumper clearly belongs to Arthur—or, Elaine thinks miserably, Lance.

  “Elaine!” Lance calls when he spots her, ruining her chance to duck out of the cinema and possibly flee the country. “You look very nice.”

  She’s wildly overdressed. She can feel her face going bright red. “Thanks.”

  “You know Arthur and Gwen, of course, from the café,” he says, indicating his friends. “I hope you don’t mind, but when I said we were coming to see this film, they both said they’d been meaning to see it as well, and…” He holds up his hands, cheerfully helpless.

  “Of course I don’t mind,” she lies, smiling broadly.

  “We’ve crashed your date, I know, it’s so shit of us,” Arthur says, so affably apologetic it actually does make Elaine feel a tiny bit better. “But I’m so glad he’s asked you! I’ve been after Lance to stop living like a monk for ages.”

/>   Lance and Gwen glance at each other and then quickly away. Elaine prays for the ground to open up and carry one of the four of them away. She doesn’t care which.

  “Oh, Arthur, don’t start on this again, you’ll embarrass him,” Gwen says, and only someone who was suspicious of her to begin with would notice anything off in her tone.

  “Can I help it if I want to see my best friend happy?” Arthur asks. He puts a hand on the back of Lance’s neck and grins at Elaine. “Seriously, Elaine, Lance is the best bloke I know, no question. I’d die for this lad.”

  “Well, let’s hope that won’t be necessary,” Elaine jokes, instead of saying I’m pretty sure he’s sleeping with your girlfriend, and looks at Lance. She’s not surprised by the flush crawling up his neck, but she is surprised by the way he’s looking at Arthur. It’s familiar, somehow, and it takes her a minute to place it before it’s suddenly obvious.

  It’s the same way he looks at Gwen.

  Elaine blinks. Surely not—but Lance’s expression as he shrugs off Arthur’s hand and elbows him away is…Well. It’s adoring.

  Has she read this whole thing wrong?

  She couldn’t recall a single detail of the film they see if she were held at gunpoint. All she’s aware of is Lance next to her, the warmth of his body, the perfectly imperfect lines of his profile. Gwen is on his other side, Arthur next to her, and every so often Lance leans over to murmur something to Gwen that makes her laugh.

  Which is horrible if she’s cheating on Arthur with him and also he’s on a date with Elaine, not Gwen.

  Or it’s fine if they’re just friends and Elaine is reading way too much into this.

  Or it’s awful but in a different way if he’s actually in love with Arthur.

  Elaine can’t wait for a drink.

  * * *

  —

  “So after all that, the date sucked?” Anisha asks the next night, topping off her second glass of wine. Elaine is well into her fourth.