Page 44 of The Quest for Excalibur
I was interested to note that Archfedd, despite being two years younger than Reaghan, surpassed her friend in aptitude, and had she but known it, her brother too.
After a few weeks, we had news, brought by one of the frequent messengers that arrived from all over Dumnonia and sometimes from further afield. Medraut and his friends were working hard and doing well at Dinas Brent, and a new fortress had already begun to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old.
Not that this gave me any pleasure. The knowledge that Medraut had willfully used the rumor about Amhar against him had once and for all removed any vestige of sympathy I might have retained for that boy. Thank goodness he lived far enough away not to hurt Amhar anymore.
Unusually for this time of year, we received no news about coastal raiders. This was the season when the sea was kindest, and they were usually the most active. Yet, this year, we had nothing.
Arthur used the unexpected free time to organize our warriors to work on improvements to our defenses, and to break and train replacement war horses, always an ongoing occupation. When the men had any spare time from their building work, they spent it in training not just themselves but also the younger, upcoming warriors, and the boys, Amhar included.
I used the time much the same way– to improve my sword skills, aided by Merlin and Llacheu. And Archfedd threw herself into educating Llawfrodedd in return for him teaching her to fight. It amused me to see them sitting at the table in our chamber of an afternoon, the lanky fifteen-year-old beside the chubby eight-year-old, heads bent over a writing tablet while she taught him to read.
“It’s easy once you know how,” she said, with all the nonchalance of someone for whom all learning came easily. “And my mami says everyone should be able to read things for themselves and not rely on scholars to do it for them.” She beamed at her large pupil. “She says we can all be scholars. You’ll see.”
He beamed back at her, but I detected an air of doubt when she told him he could be a scholar.
For myself, despite the daily sword fighting, I had plenty of time to think. And my thoughts each day returned to the time I’d been unconscious after my accident, and what I’d seen. Or rather, the sword that Nimuë hadshownme. If it had even been real. More and more now, with the passage of time, I felt inclined to see it as a fevered dream brought on by the blow to my head.
But all the same, I’d still not mentioned it to Arthur. Merlin remained the only one I’d shared it with.
“I can’t tell him,” I said, voicing my fears to Merlin, as we stood on the wall-walk gazing out over the plain toward the marshes surrounding distant, mist-swathed Ynys Witrin. “I don’t quite believe it myself. It feels like it was just my imagination. That because Iknowthe legend of the Lady of the Lake, and because Morgana called her daughter Nimuë, I dreamed it all.”
He shot me a knowing look that told me he didn’t believe me for one minute. Since my accident, I’d recounted the legend in more detail, and together we’d considered whether any of it could have been based on truth of any sort. But he had magic, and so did Morgana, and Nimuë had probably inherited a double dose. Could she really have been there, inside my head? Or could she have physically transported me to a magical lake to show me where the sword lay? I just didn’t know.
I managed a weak smile and heaved a sigh. “What else can I think? It can never come true.”
He remained silent, eyes fixed on mine.
I shook my head. “I know you made the sword in the stone story come true, but that was at leastsortof possible. A woman under the water holding up a sword just isn’t.” I chuckled. “She’d have to be bloody good at holding her breath.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Excalibur is something made up by medieval romance writers, not a real sword.” I gripped the weathered wooden battlements, watching a kite wheel across the sky, its mewing call plaintive. “I’ve thought about it a lot now, and I refuse to believe any of that could be true. It was some kind of trick my brain played on me while I was unconscious.”
He inclined his head. “Whatever you say.”
I scowled. “I can see you don’t believe me.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s that I think you’ve interpreted it wrongly.”
“How? It was just like one of the legends my father used to read to me at bedtime. It couldn’t have been real. For a start the boat moved by itself with no one rowing.”
“Maybe it was symbolic.”
I bristled. “Symbolic of what? The more I think about it, the more I know it was just my imagination. That it couldn’t have been anything else.”
Keep telling yourself that.
He shrugged. “I think you should tell Arthur about it.”
A breeze blew bits of loose hair across my face, and I put up a hand to brush them behind my ears. “You know I can’t tell him things like that. Things about the future. He once told me he didn’t want to know.”
Merlin leaned on the battlements. “You meanyou thinkyou can’t tell him. That’s something quite different.”
I stiffened. “Is it? You think I don’t get the urge to come clean to him over and over again? That it’s not been on the tip of my tongue countless times to spill everything I know? That I don’t wonder that if I tell him, together we can change the future… my past? The history I know? Or think I know.” I shook my head. “That maybe Camlann doesn’t have to happen, or maybe it’s unavoidable and nothing any of us can do will stop it from coming about. Do you think he’d want to know if that were the case?” I paused. “Wouldyouwant to know when you were going to die and by whose hand?”
The bubbling song of a skylark carried on the breeze. The sound of summer. And the laughter of children playing hide and seek wafted down from within the clustered buildings on the hilltop. Maybe one of them was Archfedd.
“You love him, don’t you?”
