For several weeks, Accolon rode out to tournaments within a few days’ travel, guarding his anonymity closely, and collecting victories under a helm he didn’t remove until he had accepted his prize and galloped away from the jousting arena. When he came home, his reports of various escapades and the intrigue surrounding the nameless knight sweeping the southwest tilt fields brought laughter to Fair Guard’s dinner table.
One afternoon, I was idly reading on the turret balcony when one of the magpies gave an alerting caw and I saw Accolon returning, still ahorse and halfway up the riverbank. It took me the entire journey down the stairs and out onto the front green to realize he had not ridden alone.
“Morgan, viens ici,” he called. “I’ve brought someone to see you.”
He dismounted near the spring, allowing his chestnut stallion to drink. Behind, a stout brown cob carried a lanky figure, face lit up under a nest of red curls.
“Robin!” I exclaimed.
“Lady Morgan, it’s you!” Robin said, attempting to bow and dismount at the same time. “I hardly believed it when Sir Accolon told me.”
I embraced his slight frame, all limbs and points where it was finding height faster than breadth. “Goodness, you’ve grown! How old are you now?”
“Fourteen,” he said quickly.
Accolon regarded him with a wry amusement. “Maybe in a year. Not quite thirteen, this one, and too young to be riding the roads alone.”
Robin blushed and made no protest.
“Where did you find him?” I asked.
“No, mon coeur—he found me,” Accolon said. “Apparently, he was hovering around the tournament, then appeared at the riverside tree where I had stopped to disarm. He came upon me so quietly he’s fortunate he didn’t end up thrown in the water.”
I laughed at the image of their mutual discovery, the roving free-lance ways Accolon had easily returned to. He was a knight-errant at heart and always would be.
“He won,” Robin said. “I didn’t know who it was, but I watched and thought, If only I had the chance to serve such a knight. When he rode off with no squire, I thought it was Providence. When I saw it was Sir Accolon, I was certain it was a holy miracle.”
“You see the difficulties of my position,” Accolon said archly. “How is it possible to refuse one who regards you as a gift from God Himself ?”
“How indeed?” I replied. “So you’re no longer at Camelot, Robin?”
“No, my lady, since this Eastertide past. My father fell ill and died last winter.”
“I’m very sorry. That must have been hard.”
He nodded sadly. “The physic said it was expected, but I often thought of you, Lady Morgan, afterwards. That maybe you could have helped him, like you helped me.”
The sentiment caught on my heartstrings, memories of my own father’s sudden, preventable death playing their long-echoing chord. Robin’s mother, I knew, had died when he was so young he had no memory of her. “I would have done all I could. I deeply regret your loss.”
Accolon put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I said Robin could stay with us at Belle Garde. I will train him to be a fine squire. If Lady Morgan agrees.”
They both offered beseeching looks, making me laugh. “Only after I take our new guest to see Lady Alys, and he submits to a hot meal and a long rest. You look like you haven’t slept in a three-month.”
“She is the mistress here, so I would heed her,” Accolon told him. “I’ll see to the horses.”
He took the reins from the beaming boy and left us to make our way inside.
“What happened in Camelot?” I asked him. “They didn’t force you to leave?”
“No, my lady,” Robin said. “They took Papa’s quarters and put me in the bunks with the other stablelads. I didn’t mind that, but things had…changed.”
“In the castle?” I asked.
He shook his head, looking around Fair Guard’s entrance hall. Accolon’s dog heard us, bounding across in expectation of her master. Upon seeing it was me, she feigned her usual ignorance, but her curled hound tail wagged curiously at the newcomer. Robin bent down and rewarded her with a scratch behind her silky ears.
“More the people,” he said. “It was as if King Arthur was always the sun, but a cloud had suddenly come. Then, just before I decided to leave, it happened, and night fell.”
I frowned; we heard little news of Camelot, aside from stories of an ever-increasing number of knights on quests. “What happened?”
“I didn’t see it, but everyone knew right away. King Arthur and the court were at the evening meal when, in the middle of the thanksgiving prayer, the entire room fell to darkness. The ladies screamed and knights rushed to arm themselves—some thought it was a raid, or the Devil himself. They said a gust of air swept through the room like a restless spirit.”
My heart gave an anticipatory jolt. Profound darkness in Camelot’s Great Hall could mean only one thing. “The wall of candles.”
Robin nodded. “Went out all at once, along with the rest of the light. After that, the bells of St. Stephen’s started ringing in lament, and they told us to ready a state of mourning in solidarity with the High King.”
“You don’t mean…” I dared not utter the words.
“Yes, my lady. Merlin the Wise is dead.”
How had I not known?
The strangest thing was I hadn’t sensed it. To be bound by magic was no small matter, and though our disastrous deal was immutable beyond death, the fact that I didn’t feel Merlin drawing his final breath was almost as great a surprise as the news he had died at all. What I did feel was relief, and the darkest rush of triumph, for which I carried no shame. In this, I had defeated him.
His influence hadn’t breached Fair Guard’s world. Not one word from souls on the road or passing through the valley mentioned a cave, or entrapment, or the death Merlin had foreseen that would reverberate throughout the kingdom. In time, the sorcerer would be recorded in the chronicles not as a man with a hunger for knowledge, demonic heritage and an unquenchable desire to control, but Britain’s agent of royal glory, without whom its High Kings would never be the same.
Where was Ninianne, I wondered; were the rumours true that she was involved? Did she still serve Arthur, as she swore she always would? What of the house in the forest, the moat, the snakes; the stacks of manuscripts, scrolls and pages? What of the mysteries Merlin kept locked in his tower: records of his prophecies and the country’s greatest secrets; the miraculous Shroud of Tithonus, Arthur’s deliverance from death?
What of Arthur, trapped in the web of lies the sorcerer had wrapped around him? Camelot had not been the same, by Robin’s word, the light of the Crown darkened since its High King had thrown in his lot with Merlin’s avaricious hunt for glory, leaving him isolated and untrusting.
There was so much he did not know, lost beneath the sorcerer’s insidious lies. Arthur no doubt believed he had lost his route to resurrection, when in truth, it was me who could have been his salvation. Too late now, any regret he might have had; I had chosen my future and was free of it all.
Then it came, one morning in early autumn, as if summoned by the sheer subversive force of my wanting to be left alone: a note left at the chapel, marked private, my name written in a hand rarely seen but I knew intimately, from the memory of letters sent between new siblings discovering their mutual affinity, before I ran to live within his golden walls.
Morgan, it said. Meet with me. Choose anywhere, but come. Your brother, King Arthur.
To any promise, no matter how boldly sworn, there is always an exception. The outside world I would not let find me, unless it was him, my brother. Only Arthur could undo what had been done.