Half Sick of Shadows

by Laura Sebastian

  “I know that,” he says with a lopsided smile. “But I suppose I have to find out for certain. Can you fault me for that?”

  “No,” I say after a moment. “I don’t suppose I can. Have you found anything?”

  Lancelot shakes his head. “A few scraps of leads, but nothing that’s turned up anything concrete. It’s difficult—all I have is a given name and a timeline.”

  “So you haven’t asked Arethusa for more information,” I say, which isn’t surprising. Lancelot has always gone to great lengths to shelter his mother, as if she isn’t an all-powerful water goddess with entire oceans at her beck and call. I’m surprised he even has a name to go on, since he usually tries to avoid all mention of his father around her.

  “She doesn’t need to know anything about it,” he says, a low warning in his voice. “It’s my foolish quest—I accept that—but she doesn’t need to be concerned with it. The whole thing has hurt her enough already, and I won’t add to that.”

  I nod. Though I don’t want to think about it myself, I do know something about protecting mothers, even at great personal cost.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask him. “You must know that my gift will be of little use—”

  “I didn’t ask you in order to use your gift,” he says, before smirking. “I just . . . wanted to hear you tell me you think I’m an idiot, I suppose. I can’t explain it, but you are awfully charming when you’re insulting me, Shalott.”

  I squeeze his arm. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, Lance,” I say softly. “I just think you’re a bit more human than you like to let the rest of us believe. You have a fallible heart, unarmored by immortality.”

  He looks down at my hand on his arm for a moment before covering it with his own free one, linking his fingers through mine. His palm is warm and calloused against the back of my hand, and despite the heat in the air, I shiver.

  “El,” he says. Just a single syllable, but in his mouth, it sounds reverent.

  I wait for him to say something clever, to break the moment with a snide retort or even just one of his smirks. But he doesn’t do any of that. Instead, his gaze holds mine captive, his eyes molten gold in the light from the campfire. And for just a moment, I don’t think about all the ways we will doom each other. Instead, I think of falling asleep beside him with his arms around me. I think of quiet days spent together in a home all our own, with him polishing his swords and me reading, neither of us saying anything at all but not needing to. I think of him lifting a lace veil from my face and looking at me the way he is now, like I am the sun and he is the moon and he will follow me across the sky for the rest of eternity.

  I’ve seen good and bad, yes, but what was it Lancelot said about his father—I have to find out for certain. Maybe he is a fool for that, but maybe I’m a fool too. Because even though I know we are most likely doomed, part of me wants to find out for certain as well.

  I open my mouth, but before I can even utter a word, a shout goes up from near the campfire, jerking me out of the moment.

  “Gareth!” Gawain roars, angrier than I imagined him capable of ever being. I step away from Lancelot, letting my hand slip out of his, but he stays close at my heels as we go to see what the fuss is about.

  Gawain has the cook by the back of his collar, the bandanna the cook wore around his face tossed aside, revealing a smooth-faced youth, no older than fifteen. Even at first glance, he looks like Gawain—the same umber skin, the same pale gray eyes, the same square jawline. But he hasn’t quite grown into his features yet, and now his eyes are large and anxious, darting around the camp.

  “Gawain, let him go,” Arthur says, in the commanding tone I’ve come to think of as his king’s voice.

  Gawain scowls at the cook but obeys. “It’s my brother,” he says, shaking his head. “My youngest brother, who is supposed to be home with our parents, still in school. He’s only fifteen. Do they know where you are?”

  The boy—Gareth—flushes scarlet. “I . . . I left a note,” he says. “They know I’m with you.”

  “Oh wonderful,” Gawain says. “So I’m the one they’ll blame when you get yourself killed.”

  “I won’t,” he protests, looking to Arthur. “I just . . . I wanted to see what court was like—what the knights were like. I’d heard so many stories, and I’ve always wanted to be one. I just wanted to see the Choosing ceremony, I swear, but then they were all such cowards. Not knights at all. And I thought . . . well, I knew I could be better. And you needed men, Your Highness. Why not me?”

  Arthur’s eyes shift between Gareth and Gawain. “You have to be eighteen to be a knight,” he says finally to Gareth. “Your father was one, and his father before him. And now your brother—I imagine you knew the rules.”

  “I did,” Gareth says slowly. “But that’s why I came as a cook. Not a knight. I didn’t break any rules, but I thought that if you needed me, I could be here to help. I’m good. Gawain knows it too—I’ve beaten him at sparring a few times.”

  “Only when I let you win,” Gawain snaps, but his voice is too defensive for it to be the entire truth.

  Arthur looks at Gawain. “If we were still in Albion, I would send him back,” he tells him. “But there is no going back now, and I can’t spare men to take him home.”

  Gawain shakes his head. “He’s a child, he can’t stay.”

  “And yet we have no choice. I’m sorry, but that’s what it has to be.” Arthur turns to Gareth. “But your disobedience cannot go unpunished. I’m sure your parents will be furious enough, but in the meantime, you’ll be in charge of cleaning dishes and doing laundry. Gathering firewood. Chambermaid tasks and nothing more. If I see you with a sword in hand, I will assign a guard to nanny you, and you will never have the chance to be one of my knights when you are old enough. Am I understood?”

  Gareth nods, his eyes still wide. “Yes, Your Highness. Thank you, Your Highness.”

  That settled, the rest of the camp goes back to their business, but a few feet away, Lavaine lingers. He doesn’t watch the now quietly bickering brothers, though. He watches me, his eyes dropping to where my hand rests on Lancelot’s arm, where his hand covers mine.

  It was a private gesture, a simple comfort I hadn’t thought twice about, but Lavaine’s gaze prickles, and I pull away, jolting Lancelot’s attention back to me.

  “Shalott,” he says.

  I tear my attention away from my brother and force a smile. “Let me know if you discover anything about your father,” I tell him. “If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

  He nods curtly. “I know where to find you.”

  * * *

  ELAINE, JOIN US,” Lavaine says once dinner is served and I’ve collected my plate. He nods toward the patch of grass he’s claimed for himself and Torre.

  I can already guess what he wants to discuss, I am already dreading it, but they are my brothers and I’ve been hoping for the chance to spend more time with them. If this is the only way I will get it, I suppose I have to take it.

  “I’ll see you back in the tent,” I tell Morgana before leaving her to join Torre and Lavaine, sitting down beside them and arranging my skirts as carefully as I can with one hand while holding my dinner plate aloft with the other.

  “I’m glad you both came,” I say, looking between them and summoning a pleasant smile. “Though I’m sorry to have to drag you away from your families.”

  “You didn’t drag,” Torre says, shaking his head. “We offered. And it sounds like good fun, doesn’t it? A quest into monstrous lands to rescue a princess and claim a throne? What could be more fun?”

  Is that how our objective has been twisted as it’s been whispered among the ranks? That we are going to Lyonesse to rescue Guinevere? She wouldn’t like hearing that at all, but I have to admit it’s a good story, one that casts Arthur in a heroic light. It could be far worse.


  “Besides,” Lavaine adds, his eyes finding mine, heavy and knowing, “someone has to keep an eye out for you. You and Lady Morgana being the only women present . . . Father was worried and I think he was right to be.”

  I bite my lip. “There’s nothing to worry about, Lavaine—”

  “What’s his name?” he interrupts. “The knight from earlier, with the dark hair.”

  I pause to take a sip of my ale, relishing its bitterness and the fact that it buys me an extra few seconds.

  “Lancelot,” I say finally. “He grew up on Avalon, we’ve been friends for years. He isn’t a knight yet, not properly, but he’s one of the best warriors I’ve seen, and I’m sure Arthur will knight him as soon as he’s crowned. He’ll be the king’s right-hand man.”

  I’m not sure why I say it, why I try to bolster Lancelot when doing so will only make them more suspicious of my feelings for him, but all I know is that I don’t like the way Lavaine is discussing him, like a rat that has snuck into our camp.

  Lavaine and Torre exchange looks.

  “You’ve been away for a long time, Elaine,” Torre says after a moment. “There are . . . certain things you should perhaps be aware of when having dealings with men. Certain things that happen between—”

  “Oh, Maiden, Mother, and Crone, please stop,” I manage to choke out before he gets any further. “I wasn’t cloistered away beneath a rock, I was in Avalon. Believe me, the same sorts of things happen there, and people talk about them far more. I know exactly what certain things you’re referring to, so please save us this embarrassment.”

  Torre’s cheeks redden, but he looks relieved as well and nods.

  “The point stands, though,” Lavaine says. “I saw him touch you, and I’ve heard all about the fey, how they take certain liberties—”

  “If you must know,” I interrupt again before he can go into any further specifics about what those liberties are, “Lancelot isn’t the uncouth rake you seem to think. In fact, he asked for my hand. I was the one who turned him down.”

  I don’t tell him about what happened before we came to the mainland, how liberties have been taken and given by us both without much care. They may be little more than strangers, but they are still my brothers, and some things I’d rather die than discuss with them.

  “Just as well,” Torre says with a firm nod. “As you said, he isn’t even a knight—if you were to angle right, I daresay you could marry a duke.”

  “Forget a duke,” Lavaine snorts. “If we make it through this, she could marry a king.”

  “Arthur and I are friends as well,” I say. “And if it would set your minds at ease, I’ve no desire to marry anyone just yet. There is far too much to do.”

  They exchange looks again, like they don’t believe me. I sigh.

  “And, I will have you know, I didn’t reject Lancelot because of his background or his lack of status. He has more nobility in his ear than any duke I’ve met—aside from Father, that is.”

  I expect some arguments about that, but Lavaine only eyes me thoughtfully. “Then why did you?” he asks.

  There is no good answer to that question, not one I can give them, at any rate. “Because I don’t think that’s where my happiness lies,” I say, which at the very least isn’t a falsehood. “But I do wish you would stop focusing on my lack of a love life and tell me about yourselves. When I left, you were two mud-caked rascals chasing each other with wooden swords. And now you’re married. With children. Tell me about them.”

  They exchange yet another look, and I’m reminded how it felt growing up with them, always trailing at their heels while they seemed to exist in their own world. Sometimes it was like they spoke a language I could never hope to understand. After a moment Torre shakes his head.

  “It all started with a greased pig,” he tells me, his eyes brightening as he launches into the story of how he met his wife.

  29

  ARTHUR ROUSES US well before dawn, and judging by the look of him, he didn’t get much sleep before that either. We’re all worried about what will happen with Gwen, but I suppose Arthur has much more at stake than we do. As much as we love Gwen, he’s the only one of us truly putting his heart on the line, facing a girl who broke it and giving her the chance to do it all over again. With an audience, no less.

  “He knows what I’m like when I don’t get my sleep,” Morgana grumbles as we pack up our tent once more in the dim light of the dying fire. Arthur’s tent is already packed, and now he walks around the camp, trying and failing to hurry the others along. “I swear to the Maiden, Mother, and Crone, if he comes over here—”

  “I don’t think you need to threaten,” I tell her, struggling to keep my own body moving. Sleep still tugs at my limbs, and my hands feel useless with exhaustion, weak and clumsy as I try to roll the bedrolls. “I’m sure he was plenty frightened of waking you up this early. I just think in this one instance he’s even more eager to see Gwen again.”

  “Eager for her to reject him?” Morgana grumbles.

  I know she’s tired and peevish, so I don’t correct her. I only make sure Arthur is too far away to have heard her say it. He’s still on the other side of camp, hurrying along my father’s men while rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet, looking more like a child the morning of his birthday and less like anyone’s idea of a king.

  “Eager to get it over with,” I say, tearing my attention away from him and going back to tying the bedrolls. “And maybe just eager to see her at all. He’s in love. I don’t think Gwen’s letter did much to alter that.”

  At that, Morgana scoffs and rolls her eyes, folding the tent just a little tighter and smaller than I think she could have without a hint of magic. “I do hope he’s planning on wooing her with more than love,” she says. When I glare at her, she laughs. “I’m sorry, do you think I should have more faith in my brother?”

  “I think you should have more faith in me,” I tell her.

  * * *

  EVERY MUSCLE IN my body aches with each jostle of the horse. Three days of riding have worn me down. One more and I fear my whole body will be reduced to a wilted leaf. When a castle appears in the distance, I want to sob with relief. This far in the middle of nowhere, it has to be the Lyonessian castle. Maps of Lyonesse are tricky things, with few Albionian cartographers willing to venture into the land to chart it, but there are fewer castles here than in other countries.

  It has to be it.

  “Bit nightmarish, no?” Lancelot asks, squinting at it. The sun is high now and it is just shy of noon, I would guess, but the sky is overcast, filtering the daylight and turning it a moody gray.

  The castle itself is, structurally at least, like my family’s in Shalott—the same high towers and stone walls—but instead of the gray stone of Camelot or the white stone of Shalott, the Lyonessian castle is built from stone the color of a raven’s wing, the kind of black that absorbs all the light around it.

  “Just a bit,” I say, which is an understatement. The sight of it fills me with a kind of bone-deep dread I can’t put a name to.

  “It must get awfully hot there during the summer,” Gawain says, coming up on my other side, staring up at the castle in barefaced awe. “What’s on that flag there . . . do you see it? Not the Lyonessian flag. The other one.”

  I have to squint to make it out. A five-pointed star caught between the two points of a crescent moon, circled by a flaming sun. The sight of it makes me smile, as inexplicable as its presence may be. “It’s the symbol of the Goddess,” I say. “The deity of Avalon—she’s a threefold goddess, the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. She takes on different forms, depending on what is needed of her.”

  “That’s sacrilegious,” one of Arthur’s original knights—Percival—says from behind us. “There is only one God, and his work is done through the king.”

  “Not in Avalon,” Lancelot says, shrugging hi
s shoulders.

  “And apparently not in Lyonesse,” Gawain says, nodding toward the castle and the flag. “What’s it doing there?”

  “That,” I say, frowning, “is a very good question.”

  Morgana hears our conversation and rides up beside us, her eyes focused on the flag as well. “Do you think Gwen put it up when she arrived?” she asks.

  Arthur, leading the group, turns and looks at us over his shoulder. “That doesn’t make sense—Gwen was never religious on Avalon. She mostly just used it as a curse, the way Morgana does. Maiden, Mother, and Crone.”

  “Oh,” Gawain says, frowning at Morgana. “I’d heard you say that before, but I didn’t know what it meant.”

  Lancelot nods and, for just a second, looks away from the castle and at Gawain, like he’s still trying to make sense of him. When he catches me watching him, he sighs. “In Avalon, it’s a common expression. But you could never say it in front of the elders, or they’d box your ears for offending the Goddess.”

  “A lesson you learned many times, all too well,” I point out, making everyone laugh and Lancelot’s face redden.

  “Never really learned it, though, did I?” he asks with a sheepish grin. “Besides, Morgana said it three times as often as I did and she never got in trouble once.”

  “That’s because I was smarter about it,” Morgana says. “I always made sure the elders weren’t around to hear me.”

  Gawain is quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “When I was a child, my nanny used to tell me stories about Avalon, but they were always horror stories, meant to scare me into being good for fear of getting sent there,” he says. “She said the fey had pointed fangs and red eyes and they stole children out of their beds to make meals of them, but they would leave one of their own in the child’s place, disguised, so the parents wouldn’t even miss them.”