I AWAKEN SUBMERGED in Arthur’s bloodline. The stream is in my throat, in my ears, filling my mouth when I gasp for air. I shut my mouth tight and kick up hard toward the distorted red light of the forest above. My fingers claw through ice-cold water, grasping for anything—oxygen, the stream bank, the sky itself—and instead they collide with a smooth invisible barrier. A dull thunk sound greets my nails, as if they have struck thick glass.

I punch this time, with purpose, and pain rockets down my wrist. Again, harder—the pain zings into my shoulder. I scream. A mistake. My lungs fill with water. I flail weak, oxygen-starved arms, muscles protesting. Sel asked if we could die in a blood walk, in our ancestor’s memories. I didn’t know. But can I die? In my own mind?

Black spots enter my vision. The answer never comes. I sink down and down, waiting for the bed of the stream to meet my back….

But it also never comes.

Instead, I land spine-first onto a cold, hard surface. Overhead, arches rise in a bright chamber so tall that, without the sunlight streaming in from long glass windows, I would not be able to see the ceiling. A room, not the stream. Daytime, not night. I recognize this place from the Rite of Kings.

I gasp for air with lungs free of water. The sound is lost beneath a sharp chorus of masculine laughter that bounces off the walls. The joyous uproar after someone at a party delivers the punchline to a joke.

I jerk my gaze to the right. Recognition takes away the breath I just fought for.

Six knights are seated along the curved stone on my right: Geraint, Gawain, Bors, Mordred, Caradoc, Erec. And six are seated on my left: Owain. Bedivere. Kay. Lamorak. Tristan. Lancelot. The Table gathered, whole and hale, smiling at one another, but without a glance in my direction.

I roll, scrambling to my hands and knees—and see that my hands are my own. Solid, brown, covered in callouses from training. Each one half the size of the hands I usually see when I blood walk Arthur. My clothes are mine, too. Thin cotton and denim instead of worn leather and heavy cloth. I lift a hand to my face, my hair—all me. Confusion and fear lift the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

The conversation flows around me uninterrupted. I wave a hand in front of Sir Bors’s face. “Hello?” He absentmindedly strokes his short beard, nodding at Mordred beside him as the other knight regales him with a story. His eyes never turn my way.

None of them see or hear me.