The entire household took to Accolon swiftly, as most did, and he took to his circumstances with the easy grace that he brought to all things. He arranged for our belongings to be sent from the inn and enlisted a proxy to manage his affairs in Gaul; he learned the name, occupation and familial links of every soul in Fair Guard; he walked the manor’s environs for weeks, taking an interest in the stables, the kennels, the land, and gaining the trust of those who maintained them, until they turned to him for every concern.
When a hunting hound had a large litter and one pup was small and weak, Accolon brought her home and raised her by hand, taking his long walks with the brachet under his arm, until she was strong enough to trot by his side. At every mealtime, he lifted his cup and gave thanks to the household, referring to himself and me in terms of “we” and “us” with a naturalness that spoke of a marriage long made. He called the place Belle Garde and seemed to let his past life, his fame and success, slip into the wind without a wisp of regret. He shaved his beard off and grew his hair down past his collar again.
We made our bedchamber where I had first lain down with the scabbard on my chest, a long, spacious room with tall windows looking out on forested hills and sky. On the air, the rush and trickle of the river, spring and streams played a constant, tranquil harmony.
“This is the place,” we had agreed, looking up at the rafters we would have painted with songbirds; opening an interior door to a fragrant courtyard garden; regarding the enormous oak bed, soon to be draped with sky-blue hangings, made for two entwined souls who never wished to sleep apart.
There, at first, I held Accolon too hard, too greedily, nerves still afire with the fear of loss. I lay awake as he fell asleep, and awoke before him every morning, heart racing with the belief I would find him gone. It seemed impossible that I could open my eyes and see him facing me, his dark lashes twitching in a dream; or stir in our sleepers’ embrace, his lips hot on the back of my neck, and not think of impending bells, or fear discovery.
We ate and drank together, danced close at long last, and took endless walks through Fair Guard, my trepidation gradually assuaged by his tender, easy presence, until my eyes closed and opened believing he would be there whenever I looked for him.
The only thing that neither Accolon nor anyone else could do was free me from the vault of wrongs I could not make right, the key to which was still trapped within the walls of Camelot.
Soon, autumn came, and so quickly life seemed to move beyond me. The household settled under Alys and Tressa’s efficient management: rooms were opened and painted; furniture found and rearranged; the gardens detangled and prepared for spring planting. Tressa took charge of the orchard and had beehives built for our own honey, while Accolon organized the stables, talking at length about horseflesh and bloodlines, and joining the huntsman on his quests for game to feed us.
At first, they asked my opinion on plans and improvements, forging ahead when I told them they should do as they saw fit. All I could do for them was keep the valley safe, so for that reason I emerged from my bedchamber and rode Fair Guard’s boundaries, casting Ninianne’s silver threads between the trees. Otherwise, I was standing at the edge of a future that others saw clearly, but I could not fathom beyond the burning hollow inside me, filled with the embers of a past not extinguished.
“Where shall I put the Ars Physica?” Alys asked me one day, bending over a trunk in the turret room.
I had kept the round tower as my own, unable to escape the idea that the balconied room was a study, with its good light and the upper gallery’s encircling shelves. In the absence of my final decision, Alys had made the long table that was already there her desk, and had better chairs brought up, with the intention we would sit for hours amongst ink and parchment, as we had in times past.
“Leave it in the trunk, for now,” I said.
“Won’t you need it for our work?” she asked.
“How can I work when there is so much left undone?” I replied. “I cannot sit with books and pretend my troubles in Camelot have disappeared.”
It was only partly the cause: the Royal Decree and its unanswered accusations still smouldered in my mind, but every time I thought of sitting down to study or write, I found the impulse gone. I had so much learning from my time at Merlin’s to put to paper before I forgot, but when I tried to cast my mind back, my lungs constricted with an airless fear, as if crushed again by the sorcerer’s nightmarish snake.
Alys closed the trunk. “What will you do?”
I shrugged. “I won’t stop you, dear heart. Begin the herbal you’ve always wanted to write. Let Tressa practise illuminating manuscripts. Use your time and don’t wait for me.”
“This time is yours too,” she argued. “The freedom to read and work is what you always wanted.”
But I wasn’t free, and they could not see it. She and Tressa tried on other days, in other valiant ways, to draw me into a discussion of our future work, and I couldn’t seem to tell them the truth: that what I once trusted to teach me how to fix things was no help to me anymore. My faith in knowledge had gone.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I would say, and the same the next day, and the day after that, until they understood the time would never arrive and ceased asking.
Oftentimes, it was as if I was outside of a room, looking in. From the doorway of my existence, I could see others settling, living, going about their days; I could listen to their talk and jests, and in turn they could see me. I was visible at the edges, and heard if I spoke, so it was easy for most to believe I was there in the same way as they were, even if my mind was far along the distant road, besieging a great golden castle.
As Alys and Tressa managed the household—viewing ledgers, planning improvements and mapping the rhythms of the day—I thought of Camelot and Sir Kay’s organizational fervour, of Lady Clarisse and the women, imagining what was said of me. As Accolon stood on my balcony and declared the river meadow the perfect shape for a tiltyard, and I urged him to build one, I thought only of the Royal Court riding north after Harvest, and whether Merlin would follow Arthur or return to his lair.
As the household sat down to dinner with idle chatter and companionable laughter, talking of the new tiltyard’s progress and how Accolon meant to use it, I thought back to Arthur’s Pentecost tournament, wondering if everything that had befallen me had begun there, or longer ago.
“Jousting season is upon us,” the huntsman said to Accolon one evening. “Your season, so it is said.”
Accolon smiled modestly. “Oui, once upon a time.”
“The stables thought you might enter a few, given some of the fine horseflesh you’ve got. Or are you afraid of men with younger bones?”
“Bold talk for one who only faces fleeing deer from horseback,” Accolon rejoined, and the table laughed. “I’d like to think I can still knock any man from his horse,” he added. “But we’ll never know.”
“I suppose the famous Sir Accolon of Gaul couldn’t just go and joust,” Tressa said. “Unless you wanted to be swooped upon with recognition.”
“Ah, but there are ways,” he replied. “You can enter into the lists with an alias and never remove your helm. Knights of great prowess often compete anonymously to experience the joy of the joust without expectation. I used to consider it.”
Alys raised an eyebrow. “Are you calling yourself a knight of great prowess?”
Another laugh rippled along the table, and I sensed eyes on my face: Accolon, catching me hovering on the conversation’s periphery. Alys’s gaze shifted, becoming watchful, and I knew then she must have done battle with her very nature and told him of my time in the turret, the malaise of purpose I never let him see.
I spoke before he could. “Why don’t you do it? Joust—return to what you love.”
“I could ask you the same question,” he said.
I didn’t respond. Accolon put his hand on mine, turning it over so we were palm to palm.
“Morgan, far be it from me to tell you how to feel. But back when you spoke of this place, it was with such passion, such ambition. There were things you wanted, work you wished to do. It still matters to you.”
“What of it?” I said. “Something can matter yet cease to be.”
His brow creased and it made me ache. “Do you not miss it?”
“Do you miss your life?” I said. “Do you want to go back to competing, chasing the thrill of victory?”
“No,” he said. “You are my life now—this is. It’s not who I am anymore.”
“Then why can it not be so for me?”
“It isn’t the same,” he replied. “I school the horses and ride my tiltyard every day. Whatever has happened, mon coeur, you did not come here to stare at an empty table.”
He could be more forthright with me than anyone, and his words did not go unthought of, if not taken quite the way he intended. The next day, I entered the turret room and found Alys and Tressa working at the table as usual. They looked up at me as if expecting a scolding, but I managed a smile.
“Give me some parchment,” I said. “I’ve thought of something I can do.”
Tressa’s face brightened, and she handed me a sheaf of hers. Alys’s expression remained grave.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m writing to Arthur,” I said. “I must act somehow. If I cannot go to Camelot, it doesn’t mean I should allow my brother to forget me.”
Alys reached out, as if to stay my hand, then thought better of it. “To what end?”
“Because this isn’t fair,” I said. “I am owed more than what he’s given me.”
What good is it? they wanted to say. But either they trusted me or knew saying so was futile, because they handed me a quill and poured my ink, and watched as I made my outrage my work.
I wrote Arthur copious pages every week: words of fury, words of pain, all of my questions, doubts and grief. Memories of times we had spent, our past lives, and the hours talking over Crown and realm; every moment of our bond, committed to ink.
Hours I spent, exonerating myself from the Royal Decree and its claims, explaining to my brother why it couldn’t be true, that I knew it was Merlin in his ear. The decree may have carried his seal, I told him, but I was certain the words were not his. I urged him to assure me he had not meant to commit the damnation of my character to parchment, nor mark it in blood-red wax with the beastly royal mark of Uther Pendragon.
From my quill, words upon words, telling my brother what I could not show him. In return, he sent an icy regal silence.
Not that my mind wished to hear it, nor did my hand want to stop. What else could I do, after all? Any resurgent notion of riding off to see Arthur was cut short by the thought of the sorcerer, keeping guard. As the months wore on, I no longer knew where the court would be, where Arthur now preferred to spend Eastertide, or if he was still in the habit of being in Camelot for Guinevere to go a-Maying. Perhaps that was why he had not written back: he was in Carduel, Caerleon, or hunting his forests around London, and hadn’t yet seen anything I’d sent.
But as autumn’s red-gold procession dimmed into frosted winter, slowly lightening towards the spring equinox, I knew Arthur would not have stayed away from his beloved golden city for so long, that under Sir Kay’s diligent eye his correspondence would not have sat unread, and I swore to give up, as I had many times before.
Yet when I sat alone in my echoing turret, faced with my frustration—when I thought of my mistakes, my failures, of the lost child I never named, and of Yvain with his mother’s face fading from his mind—still I wrote my letters, with the silent, useless fury of unfulfilled purpose and vanishing hope, and still my brother sent no reply.