Pendragon's Heir (38 page)

“Don’t say it,” she cried in distress.

Perceval sighed, unclenched his fists, and turned away, running his hands through his hair. When he looked back, his voice was gentle.

“I must arrive at an understanding with you. For the last time, will you marry me? Say yes if you wish. Say no if you wish. But do not ask me to wait.”

Blanchefleur felt inexpressibly weary. So this was the meeting in Carbonek after the glorious achievement of the Grail for which she had waited so long.

“Please don’t…”

“I am asking you. Now. And I think you want to say yes.”

She was wretchedly aware that she must have made some terrible mistake. But she could not put her finger either on what it was, or on how it could be repaired. So she said the only thing she could think of.

“No. My answer is no.”

28

Now the day comes near and near

I feel its hot breath, and see it clear,

How strange it is and full of fear;

And I grow old waiting here,

Grow sick with pain of Guenevere,

My wife, that loves not me.

Swinburne

I
N THE COLD PRE
-
DAWN
B
LANCHEFLEUR TUCKED
knees beneath chin and watched Nerys fold her blankets for the last time.

“Will you be safe travelling alone?” Blanchefleur spoke in a whisper, for on another couch in a corner of the room Branwen sprawled beneath a pile of bedclothes, dead to the world, and in these last minutes Blanchefleur longed to have her oldest friend to herself.

Nerys came over to sit on Blanchefleur’s bed while she combed her long black hair. “I think so.”

“I don’t like it,” Blanchefleur said. “No news from Camelot, and all those stories of disappearing travellers.”

“I am riding west, not south,” Nerys said, her pale fingers coming and going like moongleams in the dark cloud of her hair. “The road to the Apple Isle is long and chancy, but it will not take me near the Silver Dragon.”

“They call him Saunce-Pité. He is only one man. Why doesn’t the Table do anything about him?”

Nerys teased apart a knot, too busy to bother answering what they both knew—that neither of them could tell what the Table might be doing. Blanchefleur pulled the covers closer around her shoulders and said:

“I wish you were not going to Avalon.”

Nerys said, “The rest of my people must know what I saw in Sarras. Now that the Quest is done, it is only a matter of time before the King sends for you. You no longer need my protection, or my counsel.”

“Oh, Nerys,” Blanchefleur said gratefully. “But can’t I persuade you to stay? I will never have as much experience and wisdom as you. And I’m not safely home yet. Perceval went away at the beginning of summer, and we are still waiting to hear from the King.”

Nerys reappeared from behind the sable curtain of her hair. “Some business must be keeping them. Unless the King’s messengers have fallen afoul of Saunce-Pité.”

“Your people can open doorways in space and time. Can’t you get me to Camelot, Nerys?”

Nerys shook her head. “The elf-keys open doors between worlds. I can only take you out of Britain altogether.”

She raked her hair to the back of her head and fixed it with a long silver pin. “Well! I am ready, and there goes Dame Glynis down the passage.”

But Nerys lingered, clouding the air with thought. Blanchefleur waited. She knew that look, and braced herself.

Nerys said: “Blanchefleur, may I give you advice before I go?”

“Of course.”

“If you see Sir Perceval again, treat him more kindly.”

Blanchefleur felt her face grow hot. It was the first time the subject had arisen between them since she first told Nerys why Perceval and Bors had left the castle so soon, six months before.

“Oh, Nerys. I
had
to tell him no.”

“No man can be toyed with in that fashion. Appeal to him, give your reasons, but either let him decide for both of you, or go your own way and let him go his.”

“I thought it for the best.”

Nerys saw the look on her face and said:

“I have pondered whether to say this. But I know you refused him against every inclination, and that you have been silent and melancholy since, and that despite the answer you gave him you still count the days until you see him again. You told him you would not wed him: Be not surprised if he takes you at your word.”

Blanchefleur stared at her knees, drawn up under her chin. She supposed Perceval might eventually seek another lady. But what most worried her these days were his words at their last meeting in this very room—“Sooner or later, I make no doubt, I will die by the sword, or by the lance…”

She threaded her fingers together and said in a small voice, “I asked him to wait until I was ready. If he could only be patient!”

“I know, Blanche.” She felt the wing-beat of the fay’s sympathy in the air. “But he offered you an impatient man. If you wanted him, you should have said yes. If you do not want him, you must cease this pining.”

Over against the far wall, Branwen shifted and sighed and sat up, pushing hair out of her face. Nerys stood, fastening her cloak at her shoulder.

“Consider this my last counsel to you, and think on it when I am gone.”

Blanchefleur looked up, glad to put the conversation behind them. “You’ll come back one day and see us?”

Nerys hesitated, but then a smile shone across her face. “Yes. I promise it. Look out your window on a morning in spring, ten or twenty years hence, and perhaps you’ll see me coming.”

“Twenty years! So long?” Blanchefleur sighed, and reached for a warm tunic to pull over her smock. “Oh, Nerys, I grudge every day of it.”

The three of them went downstairs to say their final farewells in the Carbonek courtyard. And then there was nothing to do but stand in the gate and watch as the fay’s dark figure dwindled on the road up the valley.

At last Nerys went over the crest of a slope in the road and was gone. Branwen stirred and said, “There are only the two of us now.”

The words might have been wistful if not for her cheery voice. Blanchefleur felt a quick rush of affection for her. When the world frowned, Branwen went on smiling. There was a heart of steel under all that froth and bubble.

“You must be missing Heilyn,” she said with a twinge of sympathy.

Branwen sighed. “Oh, Blanchefleur, you cannot guess how much.”

Blanchefleur thought of Perceval and said to herself: Maybe I can. Aloud she said, “Never fear, he will come back for you one day soon.”

“I hope so,” said Branwen. “But he has chosen a dangerous life. I would have it no other way, but I fear for him.”

Blanchefleur thought of Perceval again.

S
HE SAT IN THE SOLAR SPINNING
, and the thread humming between her fingers was fine and even, good enough to be dyed berry red or peacock blue and woven into woollen broadcloth for cloaks or tunics. It was the first really cold day of winter, a week or so after Nerys’s departure, and on the hearth a fire was lit. As usual, Blanchefleur’s attention wandered from the thread she spun to the window that looked out on the long pale road. She drifted from chair to window once or twice. The third time, there were two riders.

“Someone is coming,” she called breathlessly. “He and his man both wear red, bright as blood.”

“A knight, then,” Branwen said.

Blanchefleur watched them come closer. She knew the same thought was humming in both their minds, but she said: “If he’s a traveller he won’t come here. He probably stayed the night at Case and had an early start. He’ll keep going, maybe up to the Scots’ land.”

“Maybe as far as Orkney!” Branwen spoke lightly, but her words brushed close enough to their hopes to silence both of them.

“He’s coming in the gate,” Blanchefleur cried at last.

“Do you see his shield?”

Gold and gules. “It’s Sir Perceval.” Blanchefleur was surprised how normal her voice sounded.

Branwen flew to the window. Blanchefleur returned to her seat and went on spinning. The thread ran smooth between her fingers for a long time before the door opened behind her. Then the spindle leapt from her fingers and fell with a soft thump into the reeds on the floor. She reached to pick it up, but then thought better of it and rose to her feet and turned, looking at Perceval.

He had all his lean brown limbs and both his brown eyes. Something that had been pulled tight with worry in the back of her mind slackened in relief. But he was coiled tense himself, and spoke without greeting or preamble: “Lady Blanchefleur, we must leave at once. How soon can you be ready?”

Blanchefleur gripped the back of her chair. “What’s wrong?”

He looked around at the others in the solar who sat motionless, staring. Then he bowed his head and said, “The Queen stands trial for her life.”

For a moment Blanchefleur felt as though the floor had opened up beneath her. In the midst of this she heard her voice saying, “Within the hour, or sooner. Branwen, have Dame Glynis put up food and send to the stable for our horses.”

“Don’t leave without me,” Branwen was already on her feet and moving to the door.

“Not if you are ready.” Blanchefleur turned back to Perceval, almost pleadingly, conscious of the pain she had caused him last time they met. “I won’t be long.”

In her own room, she bundled a change of clothes, her comb, and some other necessities into a saddlebag while Branwen fluttered in and out with questions and suddenly-remembered last-minute tasks. At the last moment, only because it was the strangest and finest thing she owned, Blanchefleur dug into a chest and took out the obsidian knife, and tucked it into the saddlebag. Then she went downstairs.

In the courtyard they were saddling Florence, and a pony for Branwen. King Pelles was there to bid them farewell, and the rest of the Carbonek folk clustered around them: Branwen’s mother, Heilyn’s parents, Dame Glynis, and others whom she had come to know and love, and must now leave behind for another new life.

King Pelles said, “Lady of the Grail, in a happy hour you came to shelter under my roof. Go from it with God’s favour.”

She curtseyed to him and took her leave of the others. Perceval was waiting for her when she turned, and took her saddlebag without speaking, and helped her to mount. Then the four of them turned and went down the valley.

Blanchefleur turned once to see the tower of Carbonek which she had first seen shining with Grail-light in a desolate valley on a night of fear. Today it stood bare and homely in the winter sun, and the light of Sarras no longer shone in its windows. But it heartened her like a sight of the field of an old victory.

She urged Florence, sleepy and slow after two idle years, into a trot and drew level with Perceval. “Please. Will you tell me what has happened?”

He kept his eyes narrowed on the road ahead. “Surely. But let it not delay us. We have little enough time, and the wild is full of dangers. If you can bear it, we must ride through the night.”

“I’ll bear it.”

“Good.” His forehead crinkled in thought. “So, the Queen was found with Sir Lancelot in her chamber.”

Something had plucked her heart out of her chest. “What?”

“Well, this is the way of it. There was a poisoning. Camelot,” he added, “is not what it was. So many of us never returned from the Grail Quest, and the new generation knows not its father.”

“A poisoning, go on.”

“One of the pages tried to poison my father,” he said with a sigh. “God knows why. Some imagined slight. But the dose went astray, and slew a knight of Gaul. This was at a banquet given in his honour by the Queen, and the Gauls blamed her. In the trial by combat, Sir Lancelot fought for her, and won. Only then did the page confess.

“That was when Sir Lancelot returned to Camelot. After the Grail Quest, he kept clear of us for months. Perhaps it was the shame of not achieving the Quest. Or perhaps he wished to kill his love for the Queen before he saw her again. Nevertheless, when the need arose, my cousin Mordred sent him word of the Queen’s plight, and he returned in the nick of time.”

“Then she has had one narrow escape already.”

Perceval nodded. “It was a knightly and courteous deed of Mordred’s to send for Lancelot. During the Quest, they say, Mordred was better than a right hand to the King’s council. Then the King made him a member in the autumn, but the Queen threw all her influence against him. Of course, he may have aided her from policy, not love. But Lancelot defended the Queen, and the truth came out in the end, and all was well.

“Until, a week ago, my father’s youngest brother Agravain claimed he had heard the Queen and Sir Lancelot in the garden, making an assignation.”

“And? Was he telling the truth?”

“We have only his word; the Queen denies it. When Agravain went to the King with the news, privately, the King laughed and told Agravain to take Lancelot in the Queen’s room at the appointed time—if Lancelot was there to take.”

“Oh,” said Blanchefleur, perceiving the rest of the story in a single flash.

“Yes. Agravain surrounded himself with a band of knights—for the most part young men, who have joined since the Quest.” Perceval shook his head. “They seem like raw boys to me. Poor lads! Sir Lancelot was there, of course. But even in peace-garb, unarmed, he was more than a match for them. He got a sword and cut his way through them, galloped to his castle of Joyeuse Gard, and left Camelot full of blood and uproar.”