The Legend of the King Read online

  Mador sent Agrivaine a note about midafternoon, informing him that the letters had been delivered to Lancelot and Guinevere and telling him to gather his knights outside Queen Guinevere's chambers precisely at midnight. Not until he and his companions were assembled did it occur to Agrivaine that Mador had never said anything about joining the surprise attack himself. At any rate, he wasn't there. Never mind, Agrivaine told himself, ten's as good as eleven. He and the other nine knights waited in silence around the corner from Guinevere's rooms until, just at midnight, they heard footsteps approaching. One of the knights gave a faint hiss of triumph—"It's him!"—but he was quickly silenced by the others. The footsteps stopped outside Guinevere's door, as if the person were listening; then the door opened and closed.

  "Come on!" urged Agrivaine.

  "Shouldn't we give them some time?" asked Colgrevaunce. "It'll be better if we catch them in an embrace."

  But Agrivaine shook his head sharply and led them to the door. If they didn't move quickly, Lancelot and Guinevere would have time to talk and discover that their letters were fake. Then Lancelot would leave, and the plan would fall apart. "Isn't it enough that they're meeting at midnight in the queen's private chambers?" he whispered.

  They came to the closed door, and Agrivaine gently pushed it. It was barred from the inside. Agrivaine stared at it blankly; it had never occurred to him that they might bar the door. The others looked at him expectantly, and he said, "It's locked."

  "What did you expect?" Colgrevaunce said, a faint sneer in his voice. "A welcome mat? What are you going to do now?"

  "I didn't know they would ... I mean ... I don't..." Agrivaine felt himself turning red, and he realized that he had never liked Colgrevaunce.

  "Oh, get out of the way," Colgrevaunce said, shouldering him aside roughly. Drawing his sword, Colgrevaunce banged on the door with the hilt and called out, "Sir Lancelot! Come out!"

  There was no reply.

  "We know you're in there!" Colgrevaunce shouted. "We saw you sneak into the queen's chambers!"

  "Who is that?" came Lancelot's calm voice from behind the door.

  "Sir Colgrevaunce. And I have nine others with me. We've caught you, you and the queen, betraying the king's trust. Come out at once and surrender."

  There was another brief pause. Then Lancelot replied, "I have done nothing wrong. And I do not surrender."

  "Done nothing wrong!" Colgrevaunce snapped back. "In the queen's bedchamber at midnight? Who will believe that?"

  "It doesn't matter what others believe. What matters is what is true. I've done nothing to betray the king," came the quiet voice again.

  "Lovers always feel that way," Colgrevaunce sneered. "But we'll see how the king feels about it. Open this door, or we'll break it down and drag you both to the dungeons, which is where you belong!"

  "You will not touch the queen."

  "Open the door, and we'll see!"

  Lancelot's voice remained calm and unhurried as he said, "Go to the devil, Sir Colgrevaunce."

  At that, Colgrevaunce threw himself against the door, shaking it. "Come on, lads! Together!" Without waiting, he hurled himself at the door once more, but this time the door swung open sharply before him. Colgrevaunce sprawled full-length on the floor of the queen's chamber, and then the door slammed closed again, and the bar clunked into place.

  Agrivaine stared, bemused, at the closed door. Nothing was going right, and he had no idea what to do. "Come on!" shouted one of those beside him. "Break down the door and help Cole!" Several knights threw themselves at the door, which creaked but held. Agrivaine was shoved to the side by their frantic lunging, and he edged toward the back. From behind the door came a shout, several loud crashes, and then silence. The knights in the hall stopped hitting the door and listened. There was no sound for a long moment; then Agrivaine heard the sound of the bar being drawn back, and the door swung open. Lancelot stood in the doorway holding Colgrevaunce's shield and sword. Colgrevaunce lay sprawled motionless behind him. Agrivaine glimpsed Guinevere in a protected corner across the room, but his eyes returned quickly to Lancelot.

  "Go away," Lancelot said. "I beg you. Do nothing that I shall regret."

  "He's murdered Colgrevaunce!" someone said.

  "Vengeance!" cried another.

  "Kill him!" shouted a third.

  "Kill them both!" cried yet another. If Sir Mador had been there, Agrivaine would have said that this last voice was his, but he had no time to look around because someone near the back had lunged toward the open door, pushing others ahead of him, and then they all had their swords out and were erupting into the room. Agrivaine thought once, desperately, about slipping off to one side, but he had not made it quite to the back, and there were still knights behind him, pressing him forward. He stumbled through the open door, tripped over a prone figure, then scrambled to his feet. Lancelot was fighting furiously, striking with deadly precision, while his attackers were in confusion. Agrivaine saw his cousin Florence go down beneath Lancelot's sword. Melion and Meliot were already down. Terror tightened Agrivaine's throat; he couldn't breathe; his arm felt heavy and his feet unable to move. He stood, frozen, at the edge of the battle.

  A voice called in his ear. It was Florence's brother Lovel. "Now, Agrivaine! While he's fighting Galleron!"

  Lovel threw himself toward Lancelot's back, but Agrivaine remained frozen, watching. Lancelot seemed to sense Lovel's attack and stepped quickly to one side. Lovel's sword missed. Lancelot threw himself at a clump of attackers, driving them backwards with his borrowed shield, then turned again, parried a second blow from Lovel, then struck back. Lovel fell to the floor beside Florence, and Agrivaine watched, transfixed, as blood began to pool beneath him. Looking up, Agrivaine met Lancelot's eyes and instinctively cringed and stepped backwards, but Lancelot didn't attack. Instead he turned his back toward Agrivaine and faced the other knights. It was clear that he considered Agrivaine no threat at all.

  Agrivaine felt his face reddening and swore with shame and fury. His voice cracked, which only increased his anger. "I'll show you," he muttered. "I'll show everyone." Raising his sword, he ran toward Lancelot. The knight wore no armor; his back was completely unprotected. Agrivaine pointed his blade and thrust.

  He didn't see exactly what happened then. Something jarred his arm and deflected his lunge. His sword passed harmlessly over Lancelot, who seemed to have dropped to a crouch. Agrivaine saw rather than felt Lancelot's sword enter his body, driving up beneath his breastplate. He felt a mild jolt but no pain. Then Lancelot was somewhere else, fighting with another knight, but Agrivaine wasn't interested anymore. Like a flicker of lightning, the thought flashed through his mind, "If this is what it's like to die, why have I spent all my life so afraid?"

  A gray haze, like morning fog, filled the room. Agrivaine opened his mouth and said, "Mother? I..."

  4. The Siege

  Lynet

  For the first time since she had been trained as a sorceress, Lynet regretted that she hadn't learned any curses. Her preceptress, Morgan Le Fay, had been very willing to teach her, and had even forced her to listen to a lecture on the basic patterns behind all hexes and malevolent charms, but Lynet had taken little note and had promptly forgotten whatever she did hear.

  The reason for her inattention was something Morgan had said early in the training. "Every power that you learn," Morgan had explained, "has an opposite power held in balance. As you master one skill, your capacity for the opposite skill diminishes. So, for instance, the better you are at making things grow, the worse you'll be at making things wither and die."

  "So," Lynet had said, "the better I get at curses, the worse I'll be at helping people?"

  Morgan had not seen this as much of a loss, but from that moment Lynet had lost any desire to master curses. Only now, looking from the castle walls at the army that had encamped around them for the past two weeks, did she wonder if she had been a bit shortsighted. It would be lovely to lay some sort of blanket curse on
the lot of them—nothing deadly, of course, but something disabling. "Temporary blindness," she muttered. "Or horrid great bottom swellings."

  "I beg your pardon?" asked her husband, Gaheris, beside her on the wall.

  "Just daydreaming," Lynet said.

  Gaheris raised one eyebrow. "About bottom swellings?"

  "Pustules," Lynet explained. "Hemorrhoids. Boils with scabby bits and oozing drainage."

  Gaheris nodded. "I see." He edged slightly away from her.

  "On them, ninny."

  "Oh, right. That wouldn't be so bad. Say, that's a thought! You're a witch, aren't you? I don't suppose you know how to—"

  "Enchantress," Lynet said shortly. "And no, I don't. Although if they actually had great gaping sores on their sit-upons, I'd know just how to cure them."

  "Wouldn't that be nice of you?" Gaheris said.

  "I wouldn't, though. I'd let them fester."

  "That should teach them a lesson," Gaheris said. "Shall I send them a threatening message telling them that if they don't lift their siege at once, my wife won't cure their scabby bits?"

  "It's as useful a plan as any other I can think of," Lynet said soberly. "Oh, Gary, what are we going to do? All these people..." Turning, she looked over her shoulder at the main courtyard of Orkney Hall, where nearly a hundred men, women, and children lay clustered under makeshift shelters. When the White Horsemen had swept through the north, burning farms and slaughtering livestock, all the Orkney tenants who had escaped the first attacks had fled to the shelter of the hall, bringing their families and precious little else with them. The castle food stores had lasted barely a week, even on short rations, and now they had butchered and eaten all the livestock except for the fastest horses and a few milk cows that they kept to feed the youngest children. Now the animals' fodder was gone, so even the milk would dry up.

  "I don't know," Gaheris said. He squinted to the south, then said grimly, "That'll be the oats."

  Following his gaze, Lynet saw a haze of smoke rising just above the level of the forest and then hovering low over the ground in the oppressive air. "The new field," she said.

  "All the fields, I should imagine," Gaheris said, "with that much smoke."

  "Why are they burning crops?" Lynet asked. "It makes no sense. We have no fighters here, no army. We're a knight, a lady, and a castle full of farmers. They must know that we have no hope of driving them away. Why destroy the land?"

  "I've been wondering that, too," Gaheris said. "If they were trying to steal the estates for themselves, they'd take care to keep the fields in good condition. But as far as I can tell, they're setting out to make them worthless." He shook his head. "Twenty years of good husbandry gone. Every barn burned, every fence torn down, every field torched, every animal butchered and left to rot on the hills. There's something evil here, something personal."

  "You mean someone's trying to get at you? But what have you done to anyone?"

  "It might not be me," Gaheris said. "After all, the estates officially belong to Gawain. Someone could be taking revenge on him."

  "Or on me."

  "Or all of us. I don't know. But we need to find out. We can't stay here to starve, and we don't have a chance in battle. I'm going to signal a parley."

  "Can't we wait a few more days? They might realize that they've already destroyed everything of value and move on."

  "If it were just us, maybe. But what about those children?"

  "Arthur might send help."

  "We don't even know if our messengers got through. If they had, Arthur would have sent someone by now."

  "Then we should send more messengers. Listen: you call a parley. Hear their terms and ask for time to think about it. While you're keeping them busy talking, I'll send one of the young men out the back on my horse to take a message to Arthur. We'll use the Ivy Gate."

  Gaheris considered this briefly, then nodded. "All right. If he gets away, I'll stall a few more days to give him time to look for help and guide them to us." He left the wall, then reappeared ten minutes later with a white cloth tied to a stick. He waved it from the wall until there was a shout from the siege camp and an answering flag. Then he set down the flag and waited.

  They had more than enough time to find a volunteer messenger and get him ready while they waited. It was almost an hour before a knight in black armor strolled nonchalantly up to the wall. "Why isn't he on a horse?" Lynet asked. "I thought knights always conducted battlefield negotiations on horseback."

  "They do," Gaheris said. "It's a calculated insult."

  "What do you want?" called the black knight.

  "To whom am I speaking?" Gaheris shouted back.

  "Sir Breunis Sans Pité," the knight replied. "Who are you?"

  "Sir Gaheris of Orkney, fellow of King Arthur's Round Table."

  Sir Breunis snorted loudly. "Former Round Table, you mean."

  "No," Gaheris replied. "I'm pretty sure that wasn't what I meant."

  "The Round Table had its day, and now that day is past. What do you want, Gaheris?"

  "I was about to ask you the same question. What do you want?"

  "Oh, is the knight of the proud Round Table asking for terms?" Sir Breunis sneered.

  Lynet didn't hear the rest of the exchange. As soon as Sir Breunis appeared, she slipped away and ran to the stables, where the volunteer waited. "Go as fast as you can at first, Douglas," she said. "Put the county behind you. The mare will last longer than you think. After you're well away, you can rest her. Stay near the Great North Road; if the king has sent help, it will be coming that way."

  "Ay, milady," the youth said. He smiled, clearly looking forward to doing something, instead of waiting around inside the walls.

  "Take no chances, Douglas. This isn't a lark." He nodded, and she led the horse out of the stable to the back wall of the castle, which was covered with a mass of ivy. Lynet glanced wryly at young Douglas. She had always been careful not to do magic in front of the people of Orkney, not wanting the name of enchantress, but there didn't seem to be any way to hide it this time. "Don't tell anyone what you're about to see, all right?" she said.

  "Milady?"

  Lynet uttered a few guttural words, and the ivy began to coil and curl and writhe like snakes, slowly pulling away to reveal an ancient wooden door set into the wall. The door swung open. "Through there, and fast. You'll have a furlong in the open before you reach the woods."

  Douglas showed no particular surprise at Lynet's spell. He simply grinned again and booted the mare into a run. Lynet watched for a second, then spoke again. The door closed, and the ivy slithered back into place. Hurrying up the nearest stairs, she looked over the open field behind the hall. She saw no movement; Douglas had gotten away.

  A minute later, breathless from running, she arrived back at the front wall of the castle just as Gaheris was stepping down to the courtyard. He looked a question at her, and she nodded quickly. Gaheris almost smiled. "Good."

  "What does that Sir Breunis want?" Lynet demanded.

  "He says he'll let all the women and children go—you included—as well as every man who's not of noble birth."

  Lynet frowned. "But none of the men are of noble birth, Gary."

  "Except for me."

  Lynet blinked, and something jolted inside her. "You."

  "It seems that I was right: this is personal. Someone has taken a keen dislike to me."

  "So ... you give yourself up and everyone else goes free?"

  "If you can trust his word, which I don't. Still, it's more chance than they'll have, waiting inside here to starve."

  "Gary, no!"

  "Fortunately, we have a few days. We'll give young Douglas a chance to find help."

  But the next morning, after a restless night, Lynet was roused from her bed by a cry from the front wall, followed by a shriek and a wail. She hurried to the main gate, where Gaheris was already directing some men to raise the portcullis just enough to drag a shapeless bundle under the gate. Lynet knew what i
t was even before they turned it over. It was Douglas, dead.

  Gaheris shook his head. "No," he said. "Stalling for more time only makes sense if you have something to wait for. Since we've no reason to think there's any help coming, then stalling is just putting off the inevitable and making people hungry in the process. If it's to be done, then let it be done, and 'twere well it were done quickly."

  "What does that mean?" Lynet snapped in a surly voice.

  "I don't know. It just sounded dour and cryptic. It's not my fault; I'm Scottish. But I have to do this anyway, lass. You know that."

  Lynet stared over the wall at the siege camp for a long minute without seeing it. "I know," she said. "Why do you think they want you?"

  Gaheris shrugged, and Lynet forbore to ask the next question, What will they do to you? She didn't want to think about that.

  Gaheris placed the shaft of a white flag into a slot on top of the wall, to request another parley. There was no immediate response from the camp, and Gaheris shrugged. "I'm not going to stand here and wait for them again. They're getting their terms; let them wait for me. Come on, lass. I need to go talk to our people."

  He led the way down from the wall to the main courtyard. At one side a carpenter was putting together a rough box to serve as a coffin for Douglas, and on the other, Douglas's mother and a young woman kept silent vigil beside the young man's body. "My friends!" Gaheris called out. "I need to speak with you." The huddled crowd rose and gathered at the foot of the stairs where Gaheris stood.

  "I have negotiated a truce," Gaheris said.

  There was a murmur of relief and excitement, but in the midst of the hubbub a village elder named Daw raised his voice. "What terms? What do they want?"

  Gaheris smiled crookedly. "You all go free, back to your homes."

  "What's left o' them, ye mean," Daw said promptly.

  "Ay. But you'll be free to rebuild."

  "And what do they want?"

  Gaheris sighed. "Me. I give myself up, and you go free."