“You can ask me anything, Sire.”
He threw a handful of dust on the embers, dousing a corner of the fire. “I wish to speak of the legend.”
I gulped, glad he couldn’t see my embarrassed blush. Lying beside him, awkward and speechless, was like living in Hollywood, where stardom was always in reach. I’d never known how to reach for it and I was terrified of what would happen if I did. “I’m sorry I don’t remember the legends in detail, Sire.”
“Do you recall anything I’ve left out, anything I should do that the stories say I did?”
“They say you championed chivalry.”
“And that is...?”
“It meant the Knights of the Round Table—your men—were merciful to the enemies they defeated. They treated ladies with respect. They were nice to servants. Slaves, too, maybe.”
“Sounds outlandish.”
“I guess. But that’s what the legend says. And the table was an interesting idea. You and your most trusted men supposedly sat at a round table so everyone was equal.”
“Hm. Equality for my allies and mercy for my enemies. I wonder if you tell me these things because they’re true or because you’re a Saxon spy?” He smiled, waiting for a comeback.
The fire outside spat a spark that landed close and made me jump. Having King Arthur’s smile to myself unnerved me with pleasure. I had to look away.
His voice softened. “No. It’s truth you bring, more directly than my ‘most trusted men’ would dare.” He sighed and rolled onto his back. “Perhaps we can build a round table during the winter, after we fight.”
He lay quiet for a time. I watched the flames die, but he was still awake.
“Whom do the legends say are my ‘most trusted men?’“
He needed to know that, maybe more than anything else the legends had to say. I pictured the large print of my storybook and wished I’d read further on the subject.
“I remember Bedwyr’s name, and Sagramore and Kay. I’m guessing that’s Caius. Gareth and his brothers, I think. I’m pretty sure. And Galahad.”
“And Lancelot?” He rolled onto his side, bringing his face within inches of mine.
“He’s loyal to you, Sire, in all ways but one.”
“Thank you. You’ve been discreet.” The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes came as much from worry as from years. “What about Medraut?”
“He sits at the Round Table, too, Sire. But...” I wasn’t sure how to phrase it.
He waited. The honor of his trust inflated me. It was my knowledge that made me valuable, not some imaginary magic I wielded.
“Sire, the legends say Medraut is your downfall. He must never have proof of Guinevere and Lancelot’s affair.”
“I told you never to speak of it.”
“And I haven’t, Sire.”
“Not even to me.”
“But Sire, your life depends—”
“I’ll not hear it even whispered. There is no proof.”
I hung my head. Why didn’t he have the lovers arrested, or banish them? As soon as I thought the question I knew the answer: because he loved them, because of his pride, and because if his allies knew his wife was unfaithful it would damage his PR and diminish his power. He was a king, but his position was not unassailable.
He heaved the kind of sigh you heave when you feel cornered into explaining. “I can force them not to see each other,” he said, staring into the fire. “I cannot force them not to love each other.”
The pang in his voice crumpled my heart. At the same time it made me bold. I believed I understood him. This was why he’d brought me along, why he’d tented with me, why I’d braved the woods and Lancelot’s unruly cousin for a bath.
He allowed me to stroke his hand. His skin was leather-tanned and rough.
“I am your property,” I said.
His breathing changed, deepened.
“We don’t do this where I come from,” I continued, “—I mean, people don’t own people.” Too shy to face him, I watched in firelight while my fingers moved across his skin. “But I like you. So if you want to mate—”
He stopped my hand with his. “Casey. You’re my wizard, not my woman.”
I looked up to his amused but compassionate eyes. “Being king does not privilege me. Quite the opposite, it restricts me. I must be better than the others.”
“I’m sorry. I misunderstood.” Feeling patronized, I blinked away tears of embarrassment and stared down as though my cloak were the most riveting thing in the tent.
“I’m sorry as well. I haven’t had so tempting an offer in a long while.” With that mixed message he released my hand, pulled his cloak up to his square, stubbled chin and rolled over, turning his back to me.
The sensual warmth that had pulsed up and down my legs was replaced by a rush of angry adrenaline. What sane man turns down sex? No man I knew. Why did the king flirt with me if he didn’t want me? It’s not like I was in love with him. He was a sexist, for one thing, and his face was too square for my taste. “Being king doesn’t privilege me.” What an evasion, what bull. He was privileged enough to toy with me.
I huddled in my cloak and turned away.
I had never been so insulted in my life.
He was right.
He was right to turn me down.
With Lancelot and Lyonel out there in the night, maybe even listening to our conversation, he had to be prudent. And worse, Medraut, who, at least according to legend, would prove lethal to King Arthur if he got hold of the least bit of dangerous information.
But even if there were no danger of discovery, King Arthur wouldn’t have made love to me. He would not cheat on his wife. He was righteous, virtuous, a man of his time. There was nothing wrong with King Arthur.
There was something wrong with me.
THIRTY-ONE
I awoke in darkness to the clank of metal upon metal. Arthur was gone. I peeked out of the tent. Warriors donned chain mail and hung helmets from their belts in the blue pre-dawn.
Wrapping Sagramore’s cloak around me, I shuffled to the supply wagon. Bedwyr saw me coming. “Didn’t bring your magic hauberk?”
I’d left the chain mail sweater folded neatly on top of my cargo pants beneath the bench in my hut. “I guess I didn’t think of it.”
“I’ll see what I’ve got.” Bedwyr dug around in the wagon and came up with a small pile of steel that turned out to be a shirt of mail, probably made for a boy. He held it over my head and dressed me like a little kid. The mail weighed so much it was a chore to lift my limbs.
“I suspect you’ll need your arms,” said Bedwyr.
“I’d better go without.”
“Try a helmet.” He offered me one and I tried it on. My breathing echoed inside it, muffling other sounds. When I turned my head I lost full range of vision. I would need years of training, like the soldiers had, to feel anything but claustrophobic inside that little prison.
“Thanks, but I’ll need all my senses for the king’s use.”
Bedwyr frowned. “Magic must suffice then,” he said, with a solemn pat on my head.
-----
We knew east by where the sun punctured the forest canopy. Keeping the light ahead, we rode on with but one incident: Medraut and Pawly, who seemed never to do anything separately, had somehow become disengaged from the group.
“We do not need them,” Lancelot told Arthur.
“I’ll have him where I can see him,” was Arthur’s terse reply.
Assuming Medraut couldn’t have gotten far, the king dispatched men in pairs to search in four directions. The rest of us waited an agitated hour, staking out a central location in the thick of the forest. I napped against a moss-covered boulder, taking what sleep I could get. There had been almost none for me the night before.
Lancelot and Hew dragged back the strays. Medraut and Pawly looked like a couple of scared runt puppies who’d escaped from the yard and knew they’d been bad. The episode made Medraut even more unpopular than he already was. He and Pawly
waited astride their horses with shoulders hunched, as though expecting the whip. But Arthur merely shot Bedwyr a look and we set off again, our pups now trained to stay.
In late afternoon we left the wagons and horses at a rocky area abundant with small caves. I found a strong branch and tied Lucy’s reins to it before kissing her nose and begging her to stay put. Dread began to close in on me like a helmet with no breathing holes. I wanted Lucy’s reassuring presence beneath me, or at least at my side. Leaving the horses meant we were close to the enemy. If Arthur thought stirrups would make us “unbeatable,” then why leave the horses behind? It was silence he wanted, in a forest too dense for riders.
When the king ordered his soldiers to “be invisible” my stomach squeezed with guilt. But the men understood the metaphor. From that point we moved more quietly than I would have imagined sixteen people could maneuver, through underbrush, wearing chain mail. Arthur grabbed my hand and pulled me with him as the company fanned out among the trees. Stealth and armor did not slow the warriors’ pace. Keeping up with them winded me, though I was unencumbered.
The more isolated from the others we became, the more my terror grew. Even holding the king’s hand didn’t reassure me. Arthur was unafraid, his sense of direction certain, his steps light on the ground, he was adept at silence and speed. He was never out of breath, whereas I feared the sheer volume of my panting would broadcast our location.
The late sun deepened to gold. Scattering its filtered beams, we scurried along behind the brush paralleling a path. I was watching Arthur’s feet, trying to mirror his steps, when he froze to listen.
The message came in a chirping sound. At first I thought it was a bird, but the repetition was too rhythmic, too precise. Arthur led me down into a crevice where we looked out from behind a fallen log. He pointed up with his eyes.
A scruffy man sat perched high in a gnarled tree, unaware of us. A Saxon lookout, I guessed. He’d parked himself in the elbow of a branch to put his feet up. The tatters of his pants hung in ragged strips on his legs. His dirty, blond hair fell across his face. None of that seemed to bother him. He hummed, intent on his work. In the fading light I saw the quick gleam of a knife flick. He was carving.
Arthur tugged my arm, pulling me to sit beside him in the crevice. “We’ll await the dark,” he whispered.
“What’ll happen to him? Slave?”
Arthur put his finger to my lips. “No,” he mouthed. His eyes glimmered. Nothing of the previous night’s bemusement remained. He was on the job and this was his vocation.
At first the only sound was the man’s oblivious humming. As darkness grew, an owl joined him. Eventually the hum stopped. My fear pounded around inside my chest as though someone had gotten locked in there and was desperate to get out.
The air cooled, heightening the damp forest scent to pungency. Arthur ate the dried meat in his pouch. I tried to eat the rations in my pack but my stomach wouldn’t stay still. I could only listen to that infernal owl, the terrifying flapping of wings, the crunch on leaves when an animal came sniffing, the pound pound pound of my heart.
After what seemed like hours but couldn’t have been, Arthur whispered, “Make ready your powers.”
I hung my head. The gesture must have looked to him like concentration. He gave me a moment.
“Ready?”
I nodded. I was not ready.
“Shadow me. You know the rest.”
We peered out over the edge of the crevice. The moon was the tiniest bit fatter than the previous night’s sliver had been. The Saxon lookout’s rhythmic snores filled the forest, adding bass notes to the symphony of owl and trickling stream.
King Arthur whistled.
Fwomp!
The Saxon in the tree jerked forward as though awakened by a sudden thought. His hands opened and he released an object to the air. Moon-flash glinted as his knife tumbled from the tree, landing somewhere in the brambles. The Saxon followed in a forward dive, his body bouncing against the tree trunk, cracking branches on the way down and finally thudding to the ground a few feet in front of us with a British axe buried in the back of his head.
Hew appeared out of the black night and retrieved his axe, making a soft, crushing sound when he pulled it out of the dead man’s skull. Two of Lancelot’s men pulled the body into the underbrush to loot it for weapons, while Hew climbed the lookout tree to take the Saxon’s place.
This was where I had come in: blood in the forest, revulsion, fear. I was stiff with it.
“No crying,” Arthur whispered. He pulled me from the ravine with a jerk.
I followed him from tree to tree, him crouching, me wiping my eyes and stumbling, and wishing I had something to blow my nose on. Twice more I heard the fwomp!-crack-thud of a Saxon lookout being removed, to be replaced by one of ours. I dogged Arthur’s heels, hoping proximity would keep me safe. But I knew better. The Saxons knew him. They wanted him dead.
I had known the battle was coming but, typically, had put no realistic thought into what “battle” would mean when I was confronted by it. I’d thought only that I’d figure it out when I got there. I’d hide or pretend, as usual. And now I was stumbling through the woods toward doom. I could pretend I had magic, but an axe was an axe.
Such thoughts only made it harder to keep up with Arthur, to slide down a slope after him or to crawl behind the same log he crawled behind, to crouch among thorns with him while the air around us hissed with British warriors speeding through the forest.
After mere minutes, I followed Arthur up a rise. A bird called. The red-haired boy whose name I kept meaning to ask perched in the black branches above us. Surrounding the fire-lit clearing, British and Belgae warriors peeked from behind tree trunks and boulders.
We had surrounded the Saxon camp.
Our victims had no inkling of us. Their fires blazed like beacons and they conversed in full voice, though I didn’t understand a word. A slim man stirred a pot over smoking embers. Three others squatted around the fire, their clothes as ruined as those of the lookout. More men stood talking by a huddle of sagging huts. I counted eight men, no women. More could be in the lean-tos, but not many. We had fifteen strong, well-fed warriors, and me. It was going to be a massacre.
Arthur scoured the camp. He was counting, too, strategizing—noting where the weapons were, judging elevations and low places, casing out the hiding spots, choosing what to use. When he raised his arm and whistled I cowered, furious at myself for not having used my precious time the same way he had.
It was too late. The king donned his helmet and ran into the clearing. With wild shouts, my friends descended on their victims in an avalanche of flashing weapons. I stayed on the rise, digging my fingers into the ground as if to bury myself in the dirt.
The red-haired boy leaped past me to take on the first Saxon he met. That Saxon may have been a straggler but he was also a veteran, and he saw a rookie coming. In a quick motion he pulled off the boy’s helmet, tossed it aside and slit the freckled throat.
The nameless boy twirled. I gasped, and tasted his blood on my tongue. He seemed to see me in his last moment, then all knowledge left his face. His legs gave out and he fell, blood pouring from his neck and soaking into the ground.
The killer didn’t have time to see me. Two of Lancelot’s men immediately set upon him. More interested in victory and revenge than honor, they each stabbed him once in the back and moved on.
The boy’s death released me from the panic that had gripped me. Death took seconds. I had to move. I had a job: to protect the king. My eyes watered, making it difficult to see across the clearing. But there was no time for crying, and Arthur had ordered me not to. I sought him amid the chaos of fire and fighting, and finally found him on the other side of the clearing, crossing swords with a big, unarmored Saxon who was holding his own.
Creeping outside the reach of the clearing’s light, I crawled bloody patches into my knees and brought myself to crouch behind the trees nearest the king and his opponen
t. I watched, wondering what to do, until the enemy staggered. The king was tired, too. Their battle was winding down. Someone would end it soon.
I would end it. I would throw things at the Saxon. I would distract him. I would protect King Arthur. I would keep my promise, even though my promise had been a lie.
The nearby rocks were too big to lift, much less throw. Sticks wouldn’t deter a warrior. I had to be careful. I had to distract the Saxon without distracting the king. I found my opportunity in the campfire. A fallen branch had caught fire, leaving one end cool enough to handle. I crawled to it through the forest floor decay, staying out of the ring of firelight and ducking behind a lean-to.
Arthur and the Saxon moved around each other, stalking. The king came so close to me I could hear his jagged breaths. The Saxon was in my view beyond him. Though wearing no armor he was a younger man, stronger than King Arthur. A few weeks of deprivation had not weakened him much. He panted through his nose, glaring at the king, determined and ready. He raised his sword and began to circle. In seconds they were clashing swords again.
When the Saxon came close to me I pushed the burning end of the branch toward his feet, dislodging a rodent who ran squeaking. I stiffened, but the fighters carried on. The branch was too heavy to lift so I inched it toward the Saxon’s legs, hoping neither warrior would notice. When it scraped the ground at the Saxon’s feet, he stepped into its flames and yelped.
Hands covered my eyes and mouth. Someone grabbed me from behind and swept me up over his shoulder like a sack. I struggled, but he had my legs in a tight hold. The beating I gave his back didn’t deter him. He carried me for several circuitous yards. When he put me down, something like a cloth sack went over my head. Someone held my arms behind my back. I made the beginnings of a noise. A hand stuffed the sack into my mouth.
Frantic whispers. I guessed we were inside one of the huts. They laid their hands on me. I didn’t think they would rape me, not yet, not in the midst of battle. But they wanted to tie me down, control me. I kicked and scratched. I tried to shout, and I kept trying until I finally managed to free my mouth and let out a grunting noise before I lost my breath when one of the Saxons threw his crushing weight on top of me .
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