Unlike Tintagel and her insistent, roaring sea, there was little to wake a person in Camelot. The castle stood proud and encircled in glittering pale gold, rings of high battlements protecting all within from the slightest disturbance.

Silence reigned throughout the chambers, gardens and air, songbirds chased away by falconers on the orders of a Queen who preferred to rest undisturbed. Even the earliest bells rang softer through the cathedral’s spires, confined to church cloisters and servants’ halls, sounding at a distance for most castle sleepers. Beyond the walls, rolling hills dense with woodland cocooned the city in a warm embrace beneath a canopy of sky that rarely strayed from peace.

But in the distance, if I listened carefully enough, my ear would catch it, amid the flowering meadows and in the forest’s swaying boughs; among the tall reeds beside the rivers, shimmering across the surface of the water: a chorus of wild birdsong, crystalline, defiant and free.