“I had hoped to give your soul back to you someday, some way.”

“It does not matter, Sire. I thank you.” My thanks were bland. I would be able now to watch and wait and eat heartily at his table—and betray him when it was time. “Nothing matters. Let my soul fly where it will.”

He looked at me for a moment longer, his lips pressed together in a flat, shadowed line. Then he bowed his head and blew out the candle.

That night, or what was left of it, I slept at once, deeply, peacefully, without a dream.

When I awoke, in the middle of the next day, and when I had eaten, I went to find Gawain and Garet. I found them on the practice field and sparred with them and jested with them easily. No longer did I feel any horror of them. On the way back to the keep, I met a damsel, and I smiled at her and spoke to her, for I felt no shame anymore. The damsel looked at me uncertainly but returned my greeting.

I climbed the spiral stairway to where Pelleas sat in the top of his tower peering up at the sky. “She’s dead, you know,” I told him.

He turned to me eyes like mirrors, bright and blank. “What?”

“She’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Nyneve.”

His rapture never wavered. His shining eyes did not cloud. “Who?”

“Your wife. She’s dead.”

“Wife?”

If he did not remember her, who would? Not I. I shrugged. “May I move in? Down below? You’re not using those rooms, are you?”

When I had summoned servants and set them to moving my things out of my dark basement chamber and into Nyneve’s comfortable tower, there was still a little time before supper. I wandered to the kennel. There were four fine young brach-hounds and brachets in there, three spotted and one pure black, like the black hounds I had seen somewhere once chasing some kind of a white deer. Happy young dogs. But when I walked in, they looked at me and trembled and cringed with their tails under them. They whimpered and ran away.

Epilogue

Because he was the True King, he was therefore the most helpless of men. He had to follow where fate and honor led, or the skies would burn. He had done wrong, and he had to take his punishment, or the rain would turn to poison. He had to let it all happen, or the fields would blacken and grow only stone.

When Sir Mordred accused Queen Guinevere of treason with Sir Lancelot, the True King had to sentence her to burn at the stake.

When Sir Lancelot rescued her and became an enemy, the True King had to fight him.

And when Sir Mordred took the opportunity to make a bid for the throne, the True King had to strike him down.