I burst out into the night, gasping for the warm, still air. Behind me, the Great Hall’s babble of chatter and jaunty music carried on regardless, mocking my disbelief, my shock, the fact I could barely catch my breath. I shoved the door shut and staggered farther into what I realized was a charming, little-used courtyard, built to resemble the style of the country villas of Ancient Rome, smooth arches leaping over a tiled pathway, lined with pale colonnades. I leaned against a smooth white pillar, letting it bear me up, calmed by the sweet scent of climbing jasmine.
In the centre of the courtyard stood a large fountain, the glassy music of falling water cutting through the breezeless air. I pushed myself upright, drawn towards the sound, and sat on the fountain’s edge. Marble horses glistened white-gold under the warm moonlight beside carousing nymphs and spouting sea deities, throwing droplets into the air like jewels.
A vision of Accolon rose up, lucid and unwelcome. How dare he come here, to my own brother’s court! I had defied the fate he handed me and was contented for the first time in years. He could not simply glide back into my vicinity and disrupt everything, with his face and his voice and his deep, unholy knowledge of me. I was unbreachable, immune; never mind that my heart still beat like the quick wings of a wren.
I sighed and focused on the water, imagining myself far beneath the cool depths. One hand reached down into the shimmering pool until it was submerged, followed by my wrist, my forearm, the edge of my sleeve trailing a bronze streak along the surface. Above, a stream of water sprung from a horse’s mouth, arcing across the wheel of stars. I leaned over, up to my elbow, sinking deeper.
“Nefoedd wen! What are you doing?”
A hand grabbed my dry arm and pulled me upright: Alys, her face pink with heat and hurry. We looked at my dripping sleeve, then at one another.
“I saw you, up on the dais,” she said breathlessly. “Was that…?”
“Yes,” I said. “Accolon is back.”
To acknowledge it aloud brought a shudder of reality, my watery calm seeping away.
“But…why?”
“For the tournament, of course,” I said. “What better reason to saunter into Camelot and disrupt my life than for sport?”
Alys sagged onto the fountain sill. That she knew the enormity of it gave me succour, an assurance that I was not wrong to feel stunned, jilted anew.
“That knave,” she said.
I managed a morbid smile. “So your magpie told it true. Unexpected guests.”
“One could hardly have imagined this. Do you think he knew you were here?”
I recalled Accolon’s sudden motionlessness, his half smile faltering as our eyes locked. His quick, unguarded exhalation of my name.
“No,” I replied. “He didn’t.”
“How did he seem?”
“Indifferent, full of himself, without a care. Apparently he’s been off jousting all these years to great acclaim, before becoming the star knight-captain of duels and battle in Arthur’s wars.”
I looked down at my hands, wishing I held something, anything, so I could throw it at the wall.
“Morgan?” Alys said. “What happened?”
I closed my eyes against the memory, the feeling, all of it.
“He snubbed me,” I said.
She gasped. “What?”
A wave of gall rose up, and I saw it all over again in my mind’s eye: Accolon’s dismissal spoken so matter-of-factly, as if it were an amusing coincidence we had never crossed paths. The sheer sharp-edged boldness of him. Of course, I’ve heard of Lady Morgan of Cornwall.
“He mentioned time in Cornwall, and Arthur asked if we’d met. Before I could even think, Accolon looked right through me and said no. And God help me, I accepted it! I stood there, threw some toothless barbs, then fled.” I stabbed a finger towards the Great Hall. “Now he’s sitting at High Table with my brother and it’s too late for me to do anything.”
“What else could you have done?” Alys said. “You couldn’t have confronted him outright, though he deserves it. Perhaps he’ll think again and leave.”
“I wouldn’t waste wishes on that. He’s been added to the tournament lists, to ride in the joust. The men are giddy with anticipation.”
She tutted. “The nerve of him, coming here at all.”
This time, her venom only left me weary. I sighed and looked back at the water, once more imagining a blue abyss, giving myself over to cool, dark rest.
At length, she said, “What will you do?”
I considered it; seeing Accolon was unavoidable, maybe, but the tournament wasn’t real life, nor was it infinite.
“Nothing,” I said. “Proceed as if everything is the same.”
Alys regarded me sceptically.
“I mean it,” I insisted. “There are the tournament arrangements, Yvain, Arthur has requested a meeting tomorrow—I’m far too busy to think of Accolon. He’s only here for two weeks, and that’s if he lasts the entire tournament. If it’s indifference he wants, he can have it back tenfold. And you shouldn’t give him any thought either.”
Alys smiled, her youthful mischief flashing through. “I suppose you’re right. Though if I see him in close quarters, I can’t promise my reaction will be one of grace.”
I laughed and pulled her close, feeling my bones lighten a little. A sudden burst of cheering echoed from the Great Hall, along with the opening bars of a popular reel.
“Let’s retire,” I said. “You and Tressa can spring me from this cage of a gown, then spend the rest of your evening together. You are kept too much apart as it is.”
Later, as I stood at my bedchamber window before the heat-blurred stars, I thought back to that morning and the errant magpie, my internal calm that seemed so distant now. All at once, it felt impossible that Accolon and I had never crossed paths in nine years, or that I had not sensed him on the air the moment his ship touched the coast.
“Cariad?” Alys appeared in her night robe, silhouetted in the doorway. Her eyes went to my fingertips, plucking at the Gaulish coin’s gold chain at my collarbone. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
She waited for my confession, but I had none.
“Yes, dear heart,” I replied. “Blow the candles out as you leave.”
She extinguished all but one light, then with a last look of doubt closed the door between our chambers.
I had not lied to her, I decided. There were simply no words to explain what I could not articulate within myself: why I wasn’t quick enough to make a fool of Accolon before he made one of me; that since him, in many ways, I had never been fully all right; of the supernova of blazing fury and remembered love that disarmed me when I first saw him again, racing through my body like a flash flood.
That when our eyes locked like lodestones, for a heartbeat it had stopped time.