Guinevere laughed, taking Brangien’s elbow. “I fully support that accident.” Brangien was already dressed, so they were ready to leave. It was odd, being the latter to wake up. In the forest, she had woken with the dawn. So many long conversations with Merlin. Lessons. Sweeping the cottage. Running from rain and sheltering in a cave.
She could not quite remember the details of the cave. Or she did not want to. It was as t
hough the girl she had left in the forest had ceased to exist. Just like dead Guinevere. They had both of them been replaced. Perhaps the source of her memory gaps was that simple. She had to fill her mind with so many new things, the old got pushed out. And every magic had its cost. She knotted away tiny parts of herself constantly. What had Merlin pushed out when he pushed in the knowledge of knot magic?
Trying to shake off her troubled thoughts, Guinevere let Brangien escort her down several flights of stairs to the main hall of the castle. Because the castle was shallow and had been painstakingly carved from the mountain, it had been built upward instead of outward. Everything was stone. The steps, the walls. And most of it was seamless. It was not plastered together around openings. Instead, the openings were dug from the stone.
“Who made the castle?” Guinevere asked.
“I do not know, my lady.”
“Does anyone know?”
Brangien shrugged in apology. “It is older than anyone here. Uther Pendragon discovered it. But I doubt even he knew who carved it free from the mountain.”
They entered the great hall. Arthur was there already, standing in conversation with Sir Bors, Mordred, Sir Percival, and a few knights Guinevere did not yet know by name. A slight pang hit her: they spent more time with him than she ever would. She was his wife, after all.
She was not his wife.
How quickly she forgot! Playacting had muddled everything. There was a dangerous magic in pretending. Pretend long enough, and who could say what was real?
But when Arthur looked across the room and his entire being lit up with happiness at seeing her, she forgot again. She beamed at him as he rushed to her and gave her an exaggerated, silly bow. In the space of crossing the floor, he had transformed from conquering king commanding men twice his age to…Arthur.
“I thought we could visit the smithy tents today.” He took her hand and put it on his arm. Brangien walked several steps behind them. The knights fell in as well, orbiting Arthur. If the way they had orbited her on their journey here had been dutiful, the way they orbited Arthur was determined. Purposeful. He was not a task to them. He was everything. “I wanted to have something made for you. You can give the instructions yourself.” He winked at her. Not jewelry for his queen. Iron thread for his secret sorceress.
It suited her better. And it would help remind her that she was not a queen. She was a protector. Protectors, like the knights around Arthur, did not take days off to celebrate trips to the market.
Still, she smiled and waved prettily as they walked down the streets. She had just as much protecting but far more pretending to do than any knight.
Though some horses were stabled inside Camelot’s city, they were very rarely ridden there. The streets were too steep. Brangien had explained the previous day that the horses kept here were ferried across the lake to be exercised. Most people in Camelot had no horses, or the horses they had were stabled on the plains beyond the lake.
Guinevere could see a great flat ferry ahead of them was already packed with horses. The horses were perfectly calm, used to their transportation. Guinevere was not calm at all. She had not considered how they would get to the market.
Her body froze. Arthur felt it. He held up a hand for his men to stop; then he leaned close, putting his mouth next to her ear.
“Trust that I will let no harm come to you.”
She did. She truly did. But who was Arthur to water? Arthur was a king. The wielder of Excalibur. That mattered nothing to the lake. It was dark and deep, cold and eternal. Someday it might dry up, but the water would flow elsewhere. It could not be unmade.
And they were fragile, breakable, one choking breath away from death.
She stumbled numbly forward, Arthur leading her. When they got to the edge of Camelot, the lake gnawing at the shore, she could go no farther. Arthur scooped her up into his arms, laughing brightly to cover the necessity of his actions. He was cloaking it in jest.
“My queen is so light, I could swim her across the lake myself!”
His men laughed as well. A hand was on her back. Brangien. Guinevere buried her face in Arthur’s chest. He talked and joked with his men as though carrying his queen onto a ferry was a perfectly normal action for a king to take. And because Arthur acted as though it were normal, it became normal.
Guinevere stayed curled against him; she was trembling, hiding herself from the water. She felt it in the sway of the raft, heard it in the hungry slapping of the water against the wood. Arthur directed the ferryman to cut to the side of the lake, shortening their journey and meeting up with the horses instead of steering directly to the market. “I would like to ride in,” he explained.
He did not put her down until they were on dry land again. Brangien stepped in front of her, blocking everyone’s view and pretending to fix one of Guinevere’s braids. “Take your time,” she whispered. “Wait until you can breathe again. Wait until you can smile.” She held Guinevere’s eyes. And soon, Guinevere could breathe. Soon, she could smile.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Brangien squeezed her hand, then stayed with Guinevere while the horses were made ready. Brangien’s touch felt like dusk or dawn—something was nearly in view, but Guinevere could not tell whether Brangien would be illuminated or hidden completely given enough time.
“I think,” Guinevere said, making her voice as light and breezy as the summer day around them, “I have found my new preferred form of transportation. I will never walk again. Nor shall I ride horses. I want to be carried everywhere by a king.”
The men laughed.
“The queen has expensive tastes,” Mordred said. “Imagine how many kings we will have to find to take turns so my poor uncle king can rest on occasion.”