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What do you think I'm going to do, uncle?
It was the wrong question to ask himself. He knew full well what Sir Kai was thinking, and that knowledge rankled. He ducked his head and lengthened his stride to get ahead of the lady in order to conduct her through the hall.

The great keep of Camelot had been raised by the Romans and restored to glory by the high king's father Uther Pendragon. Arthur himself had seen to improvements in both the defenses and the decoration. The queen's court, where Gareth took the guests, was a space in the center of the keep, open to the sky. The bright sun filled the yard with the light and warmth of spring. Flagged stones paved its floor and graceful pillars supported the arched doorways. A marble fountain made cool and pleasant music in its center and at its base spread a white and sapphire mosaic of swans. Around the edges, song birds added their own music from airy cages of carved wood and ivory. It was a pleasure just to enter the peaceful place.

Beside the fountain stood the queen's chair of dark oak carved with images of swans with their wings spread in flight, or with their necks twined around their mates. On the chair's high back, a swan and a dragon bowed to each other in grave courtesy. Other chairs, less grand, but comfortable, were arrayed before this seat, inviting a guest to rest themselves.

The lady did not do so. She paced to the fountain, and stood watching the fall of the water into the polished bowl. Gareth, still playing his part of good servant, had retired to stand beside a ivory cage filled with finches. In so doing, it seemed he had rendered himself invisible. Lady Lynet did not so much as glance at him. He did not mind. It gave him a chance to watch her. Her face was gaunt, but that was from hard travel, not from nature. Her form and figure were round and full beneath her travel-stained clothing. She looked close to exhaustion in that moment, resting her hands heavily on the fountain's rim. Her boots, he saw below her tattered hems, were torn and her feet oozed red. Gareth bit his lip, knowing well the intensity of such discomfort from after a hard march.

“My lady?” he said tentatively. “May I fetch you a blanket or some other wrap?”

But she shook her head in answer. Gareth had the thought that she might not trust her voice. Despite this, she drew her chin back and lifted herself up proudly.

Gareth found himself nodding in approval. He could believe this bedraggled lady was one of the queen's own. For all she had been honed to a sharp edge by some recent disaster, were she dressed for court she would shine.

A parade's worth of footsteps approached from the corridor, and they both turned as the royal party entered. The high queen, Guinevere, came first, with High King Arthur half a step behind her. Lady Lynet knelt at once. Behind the royal couple came one-handed Sir Bedevere, and Sir Lancelot beside him. Surprise widened Gareth's eyes, and he ducked his head fast, to escape the displeasure in his knight's eyes as Sir Lancelot saw him kneeling there.

But even more surprising was that behind these, walking with his slow and measured dignity came Merlin, in his heavy black robes and carrying his white staff.

With them came a small flood of servants bearing chairs, including the king's dragon-carved seat that was a match for the queen's. They also brought boards and trestles, linens, and platters heaped high with breads, cheeses, a steaming bowl of oaten porridge, jugs of cider and cream. Sir Kai himself carried a jug of wine, and a boy beside him hefted a crock of what was probably water for mixing with it. These things were set out efficiently as the queen gestured for the lady to rise.

“Please,” she said, taking her own chair, with King Arthur sitting beside her. “Sit and be refreshed.”

But Lady Lynet remained on her feet, although she swayed as she did. “Forgive me Majesty, but I will not. My news will not wait.”

This seemed to startle the queen, and her face grew even more grave. “Speak your news then.”

The depth of the lady's weariness told in her hesitation. “Your Majesty … Your Majesties … my father, your steward Lord Kenan of Cambryn, is dead. Murdered at the hands of … of his only son, my brother Colan Carnbrea.”

Gareth's heart toppled over. In a single instant, he was back in the dim hall of his childhood, with Geraint beside him. “Talia's dead, Gareth. She fell from the heights.”

“He pushed her.” That was Gawain, grim and hoarse from the tears he had shed. “She was pleading for her life and our father threw her down to the stones.”

The memory of fear, incomprehension, and deep and sudden grief for his sister who had been as a mother to him blinded Gareth for a space of time measured in heavy heartbeats. When he came to himself again, Gareth looked afresh at the lady who stood white with outrage and sorrow before the high king and queen. His fallen heart went out to her at once in sympathy.

The queen too was pale with shock. “What you tell us grieves me deeply,” she said softy. “What occasioned this bloody outrage?”

Lady Lynet swallowed. Whatever memory had risen in her, it caused her to tremble and the skin of her gaunt face drew even more tightly across her bones. “He feared, Your Majesties, that my father was mistaken in his loyalty the high king. He feared that nothing would be done to prevent the war that now looms within the heart of the Dumonii lands, because nothing was done to check the outrage Sir Tristan committed against King Mark, nor to compensate for it once it was done.”

Gareth knew he should be infuriated that a bedraggled country woman would accuse king and queen of neglect to their faces, and then heap shame upon the memory of a knight of the Round Table, but the cold, flat voice with which she delivered these words, the understanding that she spoke them with the last of her strength and nerve, diffused his anger. That silence stretched on so long that Gareth's ears began to ring. Not even Sir Lancelot or Sir Bedevere rose in defence of Sir Tristan.

“We are rebuked,” said King Arthur, at last, inclining his head toward the Lady Lynet. “And it is not unjust. Were I to say there were reasons for what was done and left undone, they would be of little interest and less consolation to you, my lady.” He met Lady Lynet's eyes, and spoke firmly, in a voice that had taken men to battle, and laid down the conditions of peace when that battle was over. “But you have come to us now and you have been heard. You will not go away without all the aid it is in our power to provide.”

“Nor will you go alone,” replied the queen, her voice full of her own power to command and her own deep honor. “I too hear you, Lady Lynet. It is plain from all you have said that I must return with you to help bring matters to a just and honorable close in the lands of my birth.”

These words seemed to drain the last of the strength from the lady. She began to tremble in earnest, groping behind her for some support. Gareth ran forward at once, pushing a chair into place so that she might sit while a servant pressed a goblet of watered wine into her dirty and bloodied hands.

Gareth's heart swelled with feeling too great to be denied. He went down on one knee to the king and queen, and to his own knight who watched his temerity with burning eyes. But he would speak. He could not remain silent anymore.

“Your Majesties, I beg you, let me take up my sword in this lady's cause.”

Lady Lynet stared open-mouthed for a moment, then shoved the cup back into the servant's hands. “
This
is how you honor our plea for help?” she gasped hoarsely. She tried to stand, but she only fell back into her chair. “By letting your kitchen boy mock me!”

The court erupted at once into laughter. A bright red flush that had nothing to do with shame crept up Lady Lynet's cheeks.

With one hard glance, the queen silenced the laughter. “Forgive us, Lady Lynet,” she said, as soon as she could be heard. “This man is my nephew, Gareth, squire to Sir Lancelot, and son of Lot, King of Gododdin.”

Lady Lynet stared, and Gareth bowed his head to her.

She made no apology. She shoved herself back onto her wounded feet, outrage still coloring her cheeks. “I was told this court had a love of games, but I did not believe Your Majesty would make sport of me when I come on so urgent an errand.”

The queen turned her eyes to Gareth and he saw the flash of steel in her gaze. He understood that to do anything other than retire to his former position beside the finch's cage would be to risk true wrath from her. But as he backed away, he glanced at Sir Lancelot. His unforgiving appraisal seemed to have mellowed somewhat. Gareth's chest constricted with hope.

The queen was on her own feet and crossing the court. “Be assured, Lady Lynet, no one here mocks you, least of all myself.” She wrapped Lady Lynet's hands around the wine cup again. “Drink lady, I beg you. Let us give you rest. You have been heard, and will not be misused nor abandoned. I swear it before God most high, and on the memory of my own father.”

Lady Lynet searched the queen's face for a moment, looking for what, Gareth could not tell. The queen released her, stepping back a single pace. The lady then raised her cup, to the queen, and to the king, and drank deeply.

Gareth felt motion behind him. “I think you'd better take your leave,” murmured a man's soft voice in his ear.

Gareth bristled. He wanted desperately to stay to find out if his plea would be honored, but he also knew full well he was on a precarious footing. He nodded once, silently, and backed away, slipping sideways under the nearest threshold. He turned, and to his surprise, saw Merlin standing in the corridor, his long, wrinkled hands wrapped around the white staff that never left his side.

“Be careful what you wish for, Squire Gareth,” said the ancient seer. “You may get it, and I cannot see where it will lead us all.”

He left Gareth there, returning at once to the sunlit court to join the council that would now take place. Gareth gaped after him for a moment, the words tolling in his ears like the echo of doom. Then, all thought of doom cleared away. Merlin, whose eyes saw the future and in whose hands lay the power of the invisible countries, had called him
squire
. He would have his place again. He would have his chance to prove himself, to Sir Lancelot, the king, his brothers, and all the world, the lady Lynet included.

All weight lifted from his heart, Gareth strode lightly back to the kitchen to await the reprieve he now knew would soon come.

By the time Queen Guinevere sought her private chamber, night had fallen. The evening meal had passed and gone without attendance from her or the high king. The time had instead been spent in close council with Lynet Carnbrea over how things stood in Cambryn. So much said, so much left unsaid. Guinevere sat down in front of the fire while her ladies bustled around her.

This was a room of warmth and comfort, furnished both to aid her repose and to show the wealth of her rank. But tonight she might have been a beggar in the meanest hovel for all the ease it gave her. Every word Lynet spoke had seemed an accusation to Guinevere, a condemnation of the careful and patient plans she had helped to lay. Patience cost, never as much as rash action, but as Lynet had testified, the price could still be terribly high.

Lady Fiona, a young matron with chestnut hair and a milkmaid's fair skin came around her chair and knelt. “You are exhausted, Majesty. You should come to bed.”

Guinevere smiled a little. “No, Fiona. Leave me be. I will sit up awhile yet.”

“As you will, Majesty.” Her lady bowed her head and retired at once. They were all well used to her habits, these wives, daughters and sisters of old friends and new allies. They did not question her when she asked to be left alone. They instead took themselves out of her line of sight so that she could sit in silence.

Guinevere stared into the fire's white and blue heart, and slowly, as if she must peel back the layers of her own mind, she let herself think on Cambryn.

As soon as she had heard Lynet begin to speak, Guinevere had been transported back to the
castell
whose stones had sheltered her through infancy and childhood. She had played in the hills and the yards, cowered with a child's fear from the storms, shivered through the long winters, and celebrated each spring as the thaw freed up the river so the tinning could begin again.

She stood many times beside her father and mother and both her foster sisters in the great hall, where Lynet said murder had been done. It was at their side on that same dais where she stood when Arthur first came to them, the moment, though she knew it not, her girl's life had ended and her woman's life began. She stood there again to receive the body of her father, brought home from the great war, and again to have the crown placed on her head and to hear the oath of the chieftains and nobles as their queen. She sat on the throne in that hall when Arthur came back from the battle of Badon, but it was in the makeshift bower by the river that he had asked if she would deign to honor her father's promise and consent to become his wife.

She had not been surprised. She had been promised for years, although he had never formally accepted her. But it was more than alliance between them, and she had longed for that moment with all her heart. She had prepared for it, causing the Round Table to be built, the greatest addition to a royal dowry that she could conceive. She did this although one of her sisters had warned her not to hope too deeply for the return of a man who had given no promise, and the other …

The other had warned her it would mean her death, and it was then Guinevere had first seen the cold glow of madness in Morgaine
verch
Igraine's black eyes.

That threat, that promise came back to her with the news that her steward Kenan was dead by his own son's hands. Guinevere closed her eyes. She had never met Colan Carnbrea. He had not been born yet when she left Cambryn to become Arthur's wife and queen. It was Kenan's father, Kanasek, who had been her steward then, and all said that Kenan was the image of his father. So, she had thought, who better to entrust oversight of her home lands to? He had done his job with honor and courage always. How could such a man have fathered a serpent to sting his own heel?