Marriage cultivated Bedivere like rain on thirsty soil. The long, too-taut body relaxed and filled out, the eyes and mouth lost the hard vigilance learned on the Wall. When he brought his bride to Camelot, 1 barely remembered her from childhood, a shy young woman in worn best linen kirtle who lisped “G’bless our king” in a Dobunni accent as she knelt, stiff with propriety. And there she remained until Bedivere took her arm.

“Myfanwy, love, get up. It’s Artos from home.”

He came and went now, with me when needed but always preferring home to Camelot. 1 cherished his visits, but now there was a daughter teething and they’d be up all night with her chafing. And then Bedivere would be off teaching Myfanwy to hunt with hawk or hallooing old friends to show off tiny Rhonda with insufferable pride.

“And already talking.” Bedivere jiggled the damp infant in his arms. “Just one word. Da. Say da, love. Who do you love best?”

“Ging,” burbled the child.

“There, will you listen to her!”

Or he’d be showing wide-eyed Myfanwy the almost-Roman splendor of Camelot, the view from the walls and this and that, and seeing them together, close and turned in to each other, I realized that friend I might be still but no longer first. And no right to ask it beyond duty. Bedivere had something of his own for once. Let be. Still, I missed him.

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Myfanwy turned him out well, Bedivere no longer went about with holes in his seat. She did more, opened the locked places in Bedivere so that my old friend’s scolding mellowed to tolerant wisdom. The moment came when I needed that wisdom, and it was there.

Guenevere lost the child. She wouldn’t stay in bed but insisted on sitting through the councils with me, whose government, especially of the north, was her charge as well as mine.

Yes, I was useless as Nectan. F/iam-custom, I wanted to be with her, but the midwives blushed and never heard of such a thing and the emperor should not even speak of it. I lunged about the anteroom with Bedivere sprawled in a chair trying to make me light somewhere.

“There’s something I can do, Bedwyr. Let her hold my wrists or—”

“It’s not a man’s place; you’d be in their hair. And they don’t preserve birth-strings anymore except up in the hilis. Peace now, sit down and tell me the news. What of Lancelot? Has that horrible woman permitted him to bed her yet?”

Their last letter reported a child on the way, but Eleyne was not too well, suffering from “retention.”

“What in hell’s that?” Bedivere asked.

“A euphemism out of his gallant nature. She’s constipated.”

“Hah!” Bedivere threw back his head and roared with rich, easy laughter. “Oh, that’s Eleyne to her granite maidenhead. She can’t let go of anything.”

He made me laugh, he eased the time. After an eternity, the women came out to say that Guenevere would be fine in a week or two. They never showed me the poor thing taken from her. And I was not to go in just yet.

“What do you mean? Get out of my way!”

Frightened of my anger, the women still held their ground. “Please, my lord, the queen said—she begged that you not—”

“Move aside, damn you!”

A midwife I might cow, but not that iron Mars suddenly blocking the door.

“Get away, Bedivere. I’ll knock you flat.”

“You never could and you know it. She doesn’t want you yet. Isn’t she proud as you and thinking she’s failed? Let her get the handle of that before she has to deal with you.”

He never left my side, though the long hours dragged. When Guenevere did call for me, Bedivere followed me to her door, staying me a moment before I groped for the latch.

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“It doesn’t matter now what you feel. Not a word of it, you hear? Give her all the giving you’ve got. Be a father, a husband, be a bloody fool if that’s what she needs. But give.”

“I can’t. I feel so empty.”

“I know,” Bedivere answered gently. “A woman loses it out of her body, but we do, too. It was a gift that came so close.”

“Yes. And I—” Crumpling against his shoulder. “And I—God damn it—”

My friend held me. “Na, you never touched it, never felt it move in your belly. But you did walk with it in your heart. And when it flies, the women wonder why we’re crying, we never carried it. But we did. Go on.”

When I bent over Guenevere, I was steeled to be a stone saint, but not for what met me. She lay on the pillow like something left by a storm, white as the linen. Behind the exhaustion there was a bafflement and something else I couldn’t name. Her fingers were cold and limp in mine.

“It was a girl,” she managed in a weak little mew. “It tore me.”

A priest hovered by, and a gaggle of solicitous Parisi women with broth to strengthen her. I took the cup and waved them out. No one would tend her but me. With one arm around her shoulder, I fed her the broth in sips, thinking, Frailty and sickness don’t go with this woman. She’s too strong. She’s awkward at needing anything. Where do the strong go when they need to be wqak?

“There was never anything taken from me I couldn’t have back or better,” Guenevere trailed on in that faraway voice. “Never lost anything, never got hurt. Even that Pict who tried to take me, I could kill him.” Desperate, trying to understand in a language she knew. “But where do I stab now, Arthur?”

“Rest now. I’ll be here, won’t budge even when you sleep. I’ll take care of you.”

“Was that a priest here? Who thought 1 was going to die?”

I settled her back and pulled the covers up. “He just wondered if you wanted to pray. That’s his job.”

“Pray?” I saw the thing behind her bafflement. It was red and it could kill. Guenevere turned her head away. “I’ll pray to God when I’ve forgiven Him.”

In the end Gareth went to observe what Peredur reported. No better scout existed than the little Leinsterman, who could be

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trusted to take no chances and bring back a clear picture of what he saw. He did.

The Votadini were slaughtered in their beds, horses and cattle run off. No trouble at the WaJI yet, but Agrivaine was doubling the strength of patrols and mile castles.

“Then what’s peculiar?” I pressed Gareth. “They kill each other every day up there.”

“Doom sidhe,” he muttered in his own language. “Not Picts, my lord. Picts steal food, but not extra mouths to feed. There’s only one kind that steals newborn from the cradle. Daone sidhe.

Faerie.1’

That he tracked them was a measure of his courage. The Irish have a fearful respect for Faerie greater than our own. Gareth’s language is rife with tales of folk caught spying on a Faerie gathering. He found their tracks near a crannog and settled down to watch, praying to God and a full company of saints.

“And a few others a priest would not hear of kindly,” Gareth confessed. “But magic’s driven out by magic, and the moment of trial’s not the moment to doubt.”

They rode across the moor to the crannog and disappeared under the hill while the moon swam through swift-moving clouds and Gareth shivered with an ancient fear.

Still it didn’t seem right to me. “Gareth, are you sure of this? Prydn don’t have the numbers for that kind of raid. They’re

peaceful folk.”

My comite drew himself up, pride touched. “Did I not count Agrivaine’s strength for you down to the last stone-siinger? When did I say one thing when it was else? I saw no few but a horde. A hundred.”

Easily a hundred, Peredur’s next report confirmed.

And led by a woman who rides with a small boy. We can’t get much sense out of the tribes, you know how they fear these creatures. When this woman rides, the Picts get out of her way. She leaves nothing alive in the villages. Most curious, there were empty cradles and no dead infants. So the old tale may be true. Children are taken to be raised by these demons and become like them. They call them changelings …

Morgana meant what she said. The enduring was done, the paying back begun. Prydn would live if she had to tear the world to bear her dream alive.

Shadow and sunlight, the wheel turning, days becoming weeks becoming months. April again.

Spring comes early in the islands off the tip of Cornwall, with a burst of flowers the rest of our country rarely sees. The grounds of Camelot at her disposal, Guenevere took up gardening with a vengeance. She sent to the islands for cuttings and bulbs and labored to make them thrive in Severn valley. Dressed all her life for the public, I think she enjoyed mucking about on dirty knees with homespun skirts tucked up in an apron, and she handled the bulbs like children, placing them reverently in the fine-troweled earth and watering with the care of a benediction. This is where 1 found her when news came to please her. Since the loss of our child I hunted for things to make her happy, perhaps to convince myself / was.

“Gwen! Up here on the rampart!”

She squinted up at me. “What is it?”

“Trystan’s alive! He’s coming home!”

The floppy peasant hat sailed high in the air. “H’rah! Hurry, come down and tell me.”

My lost lamb returning to the fold. He was inspecting Maelgwyn’s eastern border for signs of new Saxon encroachment when he sent asking leave to go home on completion of his task. That was the last word or sight of him. He disappeared, presumed de*ad after a reasonable time. Marcus sent lachrymose condolences and must have been vastly disappointed to find them premature.

“There were two sides to Trystan,” Maelgwyn said after my comite disappeared. “One a good soldier and a bard to silence the angels for shame. Is it any less than truth, Arthur?”

The old Catuvellaun prince sighed over his drink. “But there was a sickness to the man. I’ll say it out. Self-pity that wrapped him round like a snake and, once bitten, he stayed drunk. Just staggered about muttering to himself and playing the harp till he fell dead asleep over it. If playing’s the word. Have you ever heard a harp scream?”