Ruins of Camelot (6 page)

She lowered her eyes further to the front row of the cathedral.  Most of the attendees were standing of course, packed onto the open cathedral floor, but two rows of stone chairs lined the front of the space immediately before the altar.  Here, the royal court reclined in their formal attire.  Gabriella saw Percival, Destra's father, and the rest of the men in her father's council.  In the centre front, two heavy, wooden thrones dominated the floor, much higher and more ornate than the stone seats on either side.  Gabriella's father, King Xavier, sat in the throne on the right.  The other throne was empty save for a small alabaster vase, carefully sealed with a crystal stopper.

Gabriella felt a twinge of sadness looking at her mother's ashes, but it was old sadness now.  It had been many years since the attack and the midnight flight, many years since those frightening weeks when Gabriella had not known if her parents were living or dead or even if she would ever return to them.  Now it was all just dusty memories: a small, snowbound cottage, a red-hooded cloak, long nights of lonely fear.  Now Gabriella's mother was barely a wistful dream, a whiff of perfume, an echo of a singing voice.  Gabriella missed her, but she did so with her buried child's heart.  The young woman that had grown around that heart looked on with only a vague sadness, a pang at the lack of something that she could never know.

Rhyss leant close to Gabriella's ear.  "I hope this does not bore you overmuch," she whispered.  "It may be that you and Darrick will be back here again soon, only then you'll be wearing white instead of black."

Gabriella blushed and poked Rhyss with her elbow.  "You are incorrigible!" she rasped.
  “
You know that t
radition insists I marry royalty.  Darrick is as royal as a
scullery
mop.”

"
Tradition be damned,” Rhyss
suggested with a small shrug
.  “All the eligible foreign princes are in their sixth decades.  You father wouldn’t do that to you.  Beside
s,” she smir
k
ed
, “
I'm graduating at the top of my class in Divinatio
n, you know. 
I'm never wrong."

Gabriella shook her head, still feeling the heat burning from her cheeks.  She glanced furtively aside.  Darrick hadn't heard, or if he had, he wasn't letting on.

There was a rustling of anticipation in the crowd below.  Gabriella looked and saw the school chancellor moving down the centre aisle, parting the crowd.  The cathedral fell silent so that the only sound was the echoing tap of the Chancellor's staff on the floor.  His steely hair was parted neatly, framing a stony face and accenting the stiff grandeur of his formal gowns.  When he reached the altar, he stopped and allowed his gaze to move over the students, resting for a moment on each face.  His rugged features were stern but somehow affectionate.  His pale blue eyes met Gabriella's for a moment, paused, and then moved onwards.  Finally, he turned back to the gathered families.

"This night," he said, his clear voice ringing in the stillness, "your children—these faces you see before you—are no more.  They entered this cathedral as your charges, but they leave as men and women, responsible only to themselves and their king.  Here, you may say farewell to your babies and meet the new faces of your fellow citizens.  From this night forwards, they, like you, are become the Kingdom of Camelot.  Tonight our duty to them ends.  Tonight their duty to God, the King, and themselves… begins."

A rumble arose from the crowd.  Heads bowed and nodded.  Handkerchiefs were dabbed at eyes.  In the front rows, the lords and ladies beamed with stern goodwill.  Gabriella's father met her eyes, and he smiled faintly, proudly.

"And now," the Chancellor said, turning back to the line of students, "you may accept your flame.  You have been preparing for this event since your first day in these halls.  You know what to do.  Come forwards as I call your name."

Then, solemnly and methodically, the Chancellor began to recite the names of Gabriella's fellow students.  One by one, the graduates broke away from the line and approached the altar.  There, the Magic Master, Professor Toph, met them, smiling in his bedraggled peaked hat and flowing burgundy robes.  For each student, he lit a stick of incense from the urn and handed it over to them.  Flame in hand, each student turned and climbed the dais, passing by their fellows, heading into the glow of the transept candle gallery.

Darrick went first.  Gabriella watched him with a nearly absurd sense of pride.  He bowed his head to Professor Toph and took his flame solemnly.  In the rear of the cathedral, a pair of young voices hooted triumphantly, and a ripple of laughter moved over the crowd.  Gabriella saw Darrick's mother scolding her sons in hushed tones, trying to hide the grin of happiness on her own face.  A minute later, Constance was called forwards, and then Rhyss.

Finally, Gabriella heard her own name.  The Chancellor peered at her sternly over his spectacles as she approached the altar.

"Welcome and congratulations, Your Highness," Professor Toph said softly, handing her her stick of burning incense.  Gabriella smiled up at him, pleased and slightly giddy, and then glanced aside.  Her father sat less than ten feet away.  His crown glinted as he nodded towards her, his face beaming with pride.  Gabriella smiled back at him.  She turned, climbed the stairs to the dais, and passed the remaining students.

The glow of the candle gallery was like a constellation, twinkling and flickering with hundreds of yellow flames.  Small, white candles were collected in rows and levels, embraced in complicated iron sconces all along the angled transept walls.  Darrick stood in front of his family alcove, his face solemn, the incense stick in his hand extinguished but still trailing a thread of smoke.  His hood had been pushed back, revealing his unruly dark hair.  Even when he was trying to look sombre, Gabriella noticed, a smile seemed to play on the corners of his mouth.  His eyes met hers, and the hidden smile deepened a little.

Rhyss stood further on, next to Constance,
her second cousin
.  Gabriella passed them and approached the very centre of the transept.  The royal candle alcove stood above the others, immediately below the enormous stained-glass window.  Gabriella stopped there and looked at the rows of candles.  Most were lit, but a few were dark, their wicks blackened and cold.  In the very front row, one candle was unlit but clean, its wick white and straight.  This was her candle.  She gazed at it for a long moment, wondering about it, wondering what the candle of her life held for her.

Finally, she raised the incense stick.  She touched its smouldering tip to the unburnt wick, watched it flare to life, and then stood back.  Her candle burnt brightly, its flame tall and straight.  It was good.  Gabriella nodded at it, and then snuffed out the incense stick between her gloved fingers.  She pushed her hood back with her right hand, a sign that her schooling was officially complete.  Finally, she turned to face the crowded cathedral, keeping her back straight and her face sober despite the excitement she felt in her breast, glowing much like the flame on the candle behind her.

There were very few students left.  Most now stood gathered around their family alcoves, their own candles lit, their incense sticks extinguished in their hands.  Dimly, Gabriella realised that Goethe was not present.  She wondered about it, but only for a moment.  Perhaps he had been expelled for his treachery in the dueling theatre.  Perhaps he did not care about the graduation ceremony, especially with his father unable to attend, still locked in the castle dungeons.

Perhaps he simply had better things to do.

For the moment, Gabriella had the luxury not to care.  Already, the incident with the hidden dagger on the battle floor seemed small and unimportant.  She was of age now.  Her whole life was stretched out before her, humming with anticipation, bursting with the promise of good things yet to come.

Outside, the sunset burnt deep red over the mountains, fading upwards to purple and deepest blue.  The twilight stars twinkled.

It was the first day of the last glorious spring of the age of Camelot.

A
s it turned out, the wedding ceremony was to take place in the castle.

Gabriella awoke at dawn and found herself completely unable to get back to sleep.  She rolled over and blinked slowly at the linen curtains that surrounded her bed, glowing pink with the day's first light.

This is my last night in the bed I grew up in,
she thought to herself.  It seemed ridiculous and absurd, and yet she knew it was the truth.  She imagined Darrick lying awake in his parents' cottage on the other side of the village, imagined him thinking of her, and felt a tremor of nervous exhilaration.

Gabriella was a sensible girl.  She knew that marriage did not usually mean happily ever after, regardless of what the fairy books said.  She'd been around enough married people to know that even the best relationships were often fraught with challenges, disagreements, and even that most poisonous of all marital realities, boredom.  She was not like Constance, who had grown up to be rather vain and silly, convinced that matrimony was the cure for all ills.  She, Gabriella, knew that after the thrill of the honeymoon wore off, the work of marriage would occasionally be difficult.

And yet she also knew that, for reasons she did not fully comprehend, she had been granted a luxury not afforded to many princesses: she had been allowed to marry for love and not politics.  After all, Darrick was the son of a common blacksmith, himself from a long line of pot-makers.  There was no royalty in her fiancé's blood whatsoever.  For this reason, Gabriella had spent years refusing to acknowledge what everyone else had known immediately: that they were meant for each other.  As a girl, she had merely seen a dirty common boy, only permitted into the royal school because his parents had made a hefty tithe toward his education.  Despite the sacrificial gesture of his parents, the boy had been insolent and brash, completely unimpressed by Her Royal Highness, Princess Gabriella.  This had infuriated her, of course, and launched a rivalry that burnt (on her part) until they'd been sixteen years old.

It had all changed on the day that Darrick had defeated Gabriella in a practice duel.  This had left her speechless with fury, since none of the other boys had ever bested her before.  She had stormed outside, her face brick red with embarrassed indignation, and thrown her wooden practice sword into the grass.  When Constance had tried to soothe her, Gabriella had nearly pushed her down the brook hill.  Finally, unable to control herself, she had cornered Darrick between the bell tower and the castle wall and demanded that he show her the proper respect.

"I am the Princess of Camelot!" she had rasped hoarsely, leaning into his face.  "Bow to me!  Show me the respect that I deserve!"

She had known even then that it was a pathetic, stupid thing to say.  No true princess ever had to command her subjects to bow to her.  Darrick didn't bow, but he didn't mock her either.

"You want me to let you win the duels every time like all the other blokes just because you're the Princess?" he'd asked, squinting seriously at her.  "Because if I were you, I'd want a better kind of respect than that.  I'd want to be honoured for who I am, not just for my last name."

"How dare you?!" Gabriella had seethed.  "You're just a blacksmith's son!"

"I'm the son of the best blacksmith in Camelot," Darrick had replied, lifting his chin.  "That's no small feat.  There's pride in that, you should know. 
If my father hadn’
t worked so hard to get me into
the Royal Academy, I'd have been content to
be
come
a blacksmi
th like him
and earn the same honour for my skills.  What about you, Princess?  You wish for me to respect you like all the rest, bowing to you in class but laughing at you behind your back?  Or do you want me to honour you for true, for the girl you are and the woman you're becoming?"

Gabriella had not known what to say to that.  It had never even occurred to her that the others had let her win duels simply because she was the Princess, or that their respect for her was anything but genuine.  She'd wanted to argue with Darrick, but suddenly, horribly, she saw that he was right.  As far as the rest of her classmates were concerned, there was nothing to her but a title.  She'd simply stared at him, first with affronted anger, and then with shocked dismay.  Finally, shamefully, she had turned and stalked away from him.