The first few drops of rain fall like a clatter of bullets on the terrace overlooking the jardins à la française, forcing the guests to retreat early into the dining room, where they continue to mingle among the waitstaff desperately trying to set up jugs of water and bread rolls. I count about fifty guests. Perhaps it’s ironic, but the fact they’re all in their finest makes them look more ordinary. They are middle-aged men with balding heads, shaking each other’s hands with enthusiasm, accompanied by women with tanned skin and dyed shoulder-length hair and chunky jewelry.
Lila and Lowen are the only guests who stand out. Him, because of the unruly hair and the hint of a tattoo under his sleeves. And also because of the blue of his suit and the absence of a bow tie. Her, because she is the most beautiful woman in the room.
I’m about to go to them, try to find out from Lila what is happening between her and Maxime, when I get hailed. I blame the black dress, which might have had me confused with the waitstaff, and turn to point out the error. It takes me a second to recognize Charles-Emmanuel, Duc de Lautrec.
“Sorry, you’ll have to ask somebody else to bring you champagne,” I say.
“Ms. Leray, is it?”
“Yes. Good evening.” I don’t know if he expects me to address him in a certain way.
There are no pleasantries. “So what do you make of this?” he asks.
“What, a charity ball? Is this your first time?”
He laughs. What is it with these men and their phosphorescent teeth? “I hear you are selling us a special sculpture tonight.”
I nod, not knowing what to say. He continues. “Come on. I’m sure you secretly agree with me that the man is deluded. Selling a poor relative’s fancy from his attic.”
“Not an art connoisseur, then?” I ask him. “Don’t worry. I’ll ask my dentist to lend you the lithograph of Nympheas hanging in his waiting room, if you wish. Alternatively I’m sure you can purchase some perfectly nice wine here tonight.”
I leave him there. Those men, those ordinary faces, are wolves. They’re not better than the washerwomen, cackling together while weaving the shroud of the world through their bony fingers. As I walk, Maxime, who is busy talking to a group of them, gives the black dress an approving nod.
I’m still a ways from Lila and Lowen when I stop. They’re snorting in unison, attempting to hide their smirks in their drinks. My heart goes from fondness to intense doubt. I’ve committed to being here, in the midst of things. Not to look at everything ironically. I’ve committed to belonging. Could I step out now? Choose to recognize this for what it is—a masquerade, where everybody around me wears the same face, the same outlook? And then there’s Marie-Laure and her crimson mouth, smeared lipstick on her pearly chin, Frédéric’s wringing hands, and Lowen and Lila, alive. They’re outsiders, laughing while we all struggle at the border of the uncanny, the zombielike land of appearances.
For a second, I don’t know which way I’m going to tip.
Then I remember Maxime’s father, my mother, and my hand pressed to Maxime’s heart. The force of both our beats, drumming through everyone’s contempt. He’s right—together, we can dominate this world. Tell them what to believe, force their respect, rewrite history—ours, and Constance’s. I throw Lowen and Lila an apologetic glance, but they don’t notice me. So I change course and join Maxime again.
After dinner, when the stage is set and the last empty dessert plates have been cleared, I stand on a makeshift stage in front of a bored but polite audience. All prizes have been sold, bar one; most guests have lost interest and are playing with their phones or engrossed in conversation.
“I don’t know if this is right,” I whisper to Maxime, as I know we’ve lost their attention. I catch the Duke’s sarcastic grin; Lowen gives me a thumbs-up; Lila is nowhere to be seen.
“Camille,” Maxime whispers back, “we have to know if it can work.” He steps onto the stage, gives them a short brief about Constance, which does elicit some interest, but not much. It’s true this sculpture doesn’t look like much, especially from a distance. It’s Uther and Igraine, my least favorite. It pictures the moment Uther deceives Igraine, making her believe he is her husband, whose appearance Merlin gave him. Together, they conceive Arthur. Maxime did an exquisite job of showing Igraine’s trust, abandon, and lust for him, and hinting at Uther’s duplicity by giving him two different profiles: one turned to her, and the other his true face, hidden from her. It’s unsettling.
I can see, on the side, a door ajar at the lobby of one of the medieval towers. There are cracks in the walls, evidence of water damage, as if the tower has been weeping. I wonder if this is where Maxime’s father made him sleep, if part of his soul is caught there, just like mine in my family’s tiny bathroom.
I think again about our parents, the nastiness they refused to acknowledge in themselves. I think about all the broken, deceived, and abused children walking the earth as adults bearing the chains that were made for them. I think about Constance, screaming in her cell. Was she the abuser or the abused?
Maxime’s words echo in my brain: I thought I had to choose, and I tried to choose to be good.
Perhaps good isn’t always deserved. Maxime is waiting; his eyes are still soft from earlier, looking at me expectantly.
I give him a brief nod. He moves on to explaining that we are offering a rare chance to step into the sculpture itself. “We hope, this way, if you are brave enough, you might truly appreciate its value.” There are looks of confusion, some snigger at the exaggeration of his metaphor. Then all turn into gasps and expletives when I step forward and the pond creeps in, red at our feet.
I’m alone in the water at first, but I focus on Maxime’s presence across the room and the confidence of our practice, of his convictions to open the path. Come with me. Don’t be afraid. It takes a while for the sound to start of someone else wading through water, but then, one by one, they join me. Maxime was right; I feel all eyes on me, like wolves in the forest. Turns out it’s not so different bringing in a crowd once I’ve opened the passage. At my command, they’re swimming down after me, through the wine-like darkness to Avalon below.
Perhaps I am Viviane, drawing knots of air around their ankles and their minds.
They emerge from the pond after me, in stunned silence, shortly followed by frantic whispers. Now I am a tour guide; I know my role is to make this world attractive, present them with a story they’ll want to keep going back to, while helping the artist to hide from them. I draw them away from the river that runs red through the Val Sans Retour, where Maxime used to sit as a child, dreaming of Merlin and Merlin’s mother and the devil that was his father. I conjure my love for Maxime, how his story touched my heart, to imbue the landscape he drew, give it glitter and relief. I lead the group to a clearing where Uther and Igraine are performing their dance of treachery and seduction.
You’re always away, always far.
And yet I keep returning to you.
Don’t think I’m going to make this easy.
And yet you’re mine.
All those powerful, enthralled guests watch this as if it is the best play they’ve ever seen. The loop goes on and on, Uther pulling down Igraine’s gown, revealing her pearly shoulder. He kisses it. She is both resisting and relenting. I find it uncomfortable to watch them watch it, to know how they lust for her, in a way art has never before reached them. I know some of it comes from Maxime, and some from me: glancing at him, a bit removed from the group, his hair glowing in the supernatural light, his eyes briefly catching mine, I paint the sky peach and gold. It is a scene of perfection, poised between danger and yearning, and I know its addictive properties are working.
They’re so enraptured, they don’t see the hooded figure bent over the river, making small figurines out of its bank’s clay. Shaping expressive, pleading small human shapes, their hands stretched out in supplication.
Just waiting for you to want me, to think I’m enough.
“Do you also feel strange?” The guests are starting to ask each other. Some are pressing their foreheads as if to stifle a headache, or deal with the wrong air pressure. What would happen if we stayed here too long? When I turn, Maxime has appeared at my side.
“You’ve done it,” he says.
“I think we need to go back.”
“Wait, Camille. Please come with me.” I protest, but he grabs my hand. He walks us straight to his father, who is by himself, looking at the hooded figure, smirking.
“So?” Maxime addresses him. It pains me to see, through the layers of detachment and control he’s built over the years, that little boy craving praise.
“So what?”
“Are you impressed? Not bad for an evening’s entertainment.”
Dominique doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look at him.
“Can’t you see what this will do for our legacy? The potential this has? They all want it,” Maxime continues, but when his father’s mouth opens, it is for a scornful rictus.
“This is all show. No substance. You’ve been wasting your time, boy. But you said it yourself. It’s mere entertainment.”
I see it hit Maxime in the chest like a bullet. His face falls.
“Shit.” Maxime turns to me. “I can’t believe I’m still playing his games.”
“Let’s go back.” I put my hand on his arm. “Maxime, leave him be. You don’t need him.”
“No. You’re right. You go and leave me here with him.”
But I have to watch everyone. Like a schoolteacher, I will have to be the last one to leave, or they won’t be able to.
Maxime’s green eyes light up. I’m aware of the others looking for me now, gravitating toward me, expecting the tour to end soon. “My husband is not feeling well,” someone says. Some get hold of my sleeve and pull. “Please take us back.”
I stroke the side of Maxime’s face, trying to make him look at me. He seems possessed, and I’m afraid of what is going to happen.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I tell him.
A cackle of laughter next to us makes us startle. Dominique, pointing to me. “So she’s something more than the help, then? Another one of your women who wear the trousers?”
My fists tighten. I remember the way I half buried Morgane when she went for Maxime. I could open the ground, entomb Dominique here forever. I feel the power tingle in my fingers.
“Camille. Just. Go.” Maxime’s voice does it; I hold back, but the earth still moves, enough to trap Dominique ankle-deep in mud.
“He’s all yours,” I tell Maxime as I turn away.
I round the others up like children, walk them through the maze of beech trees to the pond. Blackbirds and magpies can be heard, never seen, in Avalon. It is devoid of what makes our world ours, but I thrill to think I can ply the environment to my will. I open the path. It starts from the surface of crimson water and delves deep toward the dimmed electric lights of reality, of D’Arvor’s dining room.
“You need to swim back. Just straight down, to the light of the surface.” And one after the other, they leave. I go last and, when I emerge, I close the path. I shut it, like you shut a moving airplane’s door, struggling against the force of the wind that should be greater than you. But it is not greater than me.
It is eerily quiet in the room. The tables and chairs look vain and ridiculous. I’m used to this sensation of being back to a disappointing, less sparkling world. I look at the crowd of disheveled people at my feet, their eyes shiny with exhilaration. My heart beats in my chest like a fist that is trying to break out.
Anytime now, when the shock has passed, they’re all going to run out, or call for me to be sectioned, for witches to be hunted. But I need to save this, for Maxime. I need to ensure this goes well so I can go back to get him.
Words come out of me, slow and steady. “There was a time when all creatures lived in harmony. There was a time when we believed in the magic within. There was no separation between the world of fairies and the world of men. Then we stopped believing, and we started building walls…”
I don’t try to sell the sculpture. Instead I tell them the story of Merlin, the biblical-inspired conflict of good vs. evil. Then, the story of Uther, of someone who demanded Merlin’s help and got exactly what he wanted. Nobody tries to interrupt. No phones come out.
When I finish, the bids for the sculpture start tumbling in. Tens of thousands, turning into hundreds. I lead it all, eventually having to break up a fight erupting between two couples over who won the auction. Meanwhile, half of my soul is still in that world, counting the minutes that Maxime is spending there. His body is in the room, next to his father’s, on their chairs, their heads hanging low. To someone who doesn’t know, they appear to be resting. Marie-Laure is trying to shake them, her mouth opening and closing in horror, ignored by everyone.
I know that time doesn’t flow the same in Avalon. I need to go back for him.
I nod to Frédéric to deal with the check and tell everyone that it is time to go and dance the night away. They get up from their seats with some kind of appetite for life they certainly did not exude before. I watch them go, wondering how far I could take this. How much suffering we could deal them in Avalon if they refuse to cooperate. I stand watching the room empty quickly, as if a tap has been opened, my hands poised on the sculpture, swearing I can feel Igraine’s heartbeat.
“Camille, that was—I’m not sure—that was wild.” Lowen comes to stand next to me.
“Not now,” I say. I know I sound hard, hurried.
“We need to talk about it.”
“Not now, I said.” His smile drops. I mellow. “I have to go back in. I’ll find you in a bit,” I promise, shutting the doors, seeing Lila’s dark eyes flash with anxiety behind him. You knew he made the forgeries, I think, and you never told me. Betrayal for betrayal.
I go to Maxime’s body.
“You silly girl—what have you done?” Marie-Laure hisses at me. She wasn’t in Avalon; she must have been told to stay away, but Frédéric was. He looks at me with a fear I have never seen on someone’s face, and I think, You will never try to intimidate me ever again.
“Take her away,” I command him, and he nods.
I find Maxime where I left him. I can’t see his father. My God, what has he done? He takes his time before turning to face me, and I’m scared that he’s lost his face, his mind.
But when he does, he smiles, a relaxed smile I’ve never seen on him.
“You’re back.”
“Where’s your father?”
He nods to the river where Dominique is crouching. He glances over at us, and I think he is afraid.
“What have you done to him?” I ask.
“Let’s say we had words.” Then, seeing my face: “You can take him back now if you want.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll wait for you here.”
I don’t try to argue. I nod to Dominique, who scrambles to follow me like a puppy. I open the path for him, watch at the edge as he returns to his body, Marie-Laure’s sobs filling the space between.
Everything tingles because of the way Maxime said, I’ll wait for you. Because of the way he smiled, like he was free for the first time in his life, and it was thanks to me.
“You did it, Camille. Do you realize how fucking powerful you are?”
When I reach him again, he is different. A magnified version of himself. In a linen tunic Arthurian knights might have worn on a day off. He is as I imagined him in all those feverish nights I have had since St. Andrews. I had so much time to build on my memories of him, to fill in all his gaps with Lancelot and Yvain and Percival. The intensity of his glare scares me for an instant.
We’re alone in Avalon. Now the silence starts crackling, flecks of dust igniting all around like embers. I glance at Igraine as she abandons herself to Uther.
“Have you found the sword, gotten it out of the stone?” I joke, but he pulls me to him. So tight, so hard, as if he wants to merge us together like the stone lovers we saw in Brocéliande.
“You’re a fairy, a creature of below, at the frontier of the two worlds,” he says. “Coming and going as you please. Able to trap us all here at your mercy. Able to hurt us, to sublimize us.”
“You made this world,” I whisper.
“You definitely added the final touches.”
Following his eyes down the length of my body, I realize I’ve walked straight out of the lake, in a white tunic, gorged with water, that is clinging to me.
I’m in charge. Making my wildest imagination real.
“I’m just me, still me,” I say.
He ignores me, his eyes like green flames. “Alone, finally.”
“We need to get you back… I think it’s dangerous to stay too long.”
He peels my wet hair from my neck, and his lips are hot, soft against my pond skin. “I feel fine. Extremely fine, in fact.”
“Max,” I say, swallowing down the moan pressing inside my throat.
“Not just yet. There’s something I need to ask you.”
More homework? is my first thought. But instead of asking me to do more and more, he says: “Camille, I’m offering you my life. My partnership. Come live in D’Arvor with me. Work with me. Sleep with me. God knows I’ve wanted you for years.”
I’m stunned. “Really?” is all I manage to say.
He sighs with mock exasperation. “I even found what uni you were going to, followed you all the way to Scotland, for goodness’ sake. Is that not commitment enough?”
He what? “But—you hardly spoke to me there.”
“You walked away from me,” he says. “That night, outside the bar. I thought you weren’t interested.”
“And the V&A?”
“I spent the whole summer in London, haunting the museums, thinking I had a chance of finding you there. Now I finally have you, and I want to give you everything. But…do you want it?” He whispers against my neck, his fingers cupping it like a choker.
In this moment I know everything makes sense. I’m the heroine of a story. Everything I’ve done has led me here. All the sacrifices were worth it. And I’m going to allow myself, for once, to grab exactly what I want. “Yes.”
His eyes, as he pulls away from me, make my knees buckle. “Come.” He leads me away from the river. I think for a second the hooded figure is going to turn, watch us go, take off their hood, and I will be faced with two Maximes, but that would be a bit much even for me. They continue building.
I follow my Maxime, thinking that any second I might dissolve like solid sand poured on with water, feeling the strong pull not only of his hand but of his body. The magnetism that has finally been set free. We’re not in the real world. Reality doesn’t matter here. It doesn’t have a say. Nobody but you, Camille, has a say.
I will the forest to open on a clearing of moss and ferns. There he stands right in the middle, under the red sky that the trees are not quite reaching, and kisses me until I can’t stand up on my own. Everything is glowing, his locks, the threads of his beard, his skin, the setting sun falling in golden bubbles between the oak branches. And I think the glow is coming from me, because of how he is making me feel right now.
I let him lay me down on the ground, then I come to life. Finally, I am me, grabbing what I want. I am a fairy, the queen of both worlds, coming and going as I please, with the power to hurt and the power to heal, and the power to sadden and the power to spread happiness and lust and joy. I reach for him with all my being, pulling his tunic off, revealing a muscular golden chest that is still adorned with droplets. He must have tried to swim back, tried to find the surface without me, and failed. Here, he is entirely mine. His skin quivers against my fingers as I trace a spell against his neck, his pectorals, then lower.
I—want—you.
He is too slow, we must hurry, so I peel off my dress, pulling him instead on top of me as a blanket, as a source of warmth. When the length of his naked body aligns with mine, a noise escapes me that has been nesting in me for fifteen years.
“Camille, finally.”
“Finally,” I echo, as the river soars.