‘Oh,’ said Gwen. ‘Oh.’
‘Wait until you get to the part about the feast,’ Gabriel said, sounding slightly delirious. He was standing by the window of the east solar, his arms crossed. It was very late, and by rights they both should have been asleep long ago, but when Gabriel had knocked on the door Gwen had called him in from atop a footstool while a very sour-faced seamstress stuck pins in the blossom-pink fabric that was being shaped into her wedding gown. Agnes was fast asleep in one of the armchairs, and the room was lit in stripes of light and shadow from low-burning candles. Once the seamstress had finished her adjustments – and her furious muttering about ladies who were far too tall – Gwen had sat down heavily on the stool and asked her brother why his neck was sweating.
He hadn’t said anything; he’d just handed her the letters.
‘What?’ Gwen whispered, having reached the aforementioned part about the feast. ‘Sir Lancelot wrote these? The Sir Lancelot? To Arthur Pendragon?’
‘I suppose they might have been forged,’ Gabriel said, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him to do it, just to … toy with me.’
‘Him who? Oh – Arthur gave you these?’ Gwen said, glancing up at him and then turning the page over. ‘No, I don’t think he’d have had the patience or the endurance to fake all of this. They’re so … earnest. Although I suppose I am translating very literally.’
‘I just don’t understand,’ Gabriel said, finally sitting. ‘I mean, Arthur loved Guinevere, Guinevere loved Lancelot, everybody’s made their peace with that particular discretion, but this is …’
‘God,’ Gwen said again, before finally pushing the letters away, which was very difficult to do. They weren’t particularly well written – there was quite a lot of repetition, and Lancelot didn’t seem to have much of a poetic imagination – but they were captivating nonetheless, and actually quite sweet in their sincerity. ‘He’s responding to whatever Arthur wrote to him, so it looks … you know. Reciprocal. And public, too, if they danced all night at this feast. The other half must be out there somewhere, unless somebody had them destroyed. In fact, they must have had to destroy a lot, if they were courting in public for everyone to see.’
‘Nobody’s who I thought they were,’ Gabriel said brokenly, and Gwen sighed, patting him uselessly on the arm as he slumped forward with his head in his hands.
‘I mean,’ she said tentatively, ‘it’s sort of … good news, isn’t it? Here you are, trying to keep up with the great King Arthur, heir to a country where at least half the population thinks he’s going to make a dramatic reappearance, and it turns out we’ve been … well, we’ve been accidentally living up to some of his ideals all along.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Gabriel said, slightly muffled. ‘Because obviously we can’t release them.’
‘What? Why not?’
‘Because it’d be chaos!’ Gabriel said, as if this should have been obvious. ‘Everybody would assume they were fake, for one thing. They’d certainly suspect an agenda, if we ever – but we won’t. And we can’t. For another – well, it’s hardly going to help heal this rift between Catholics and cultists, is it?’
‘You don’t know that,’ Gwen countered. ‘You don’t know for sure how people might react. Catholics love Arthur, even if they don’t worship him. Shouldn’t we just … tell the truth? And let everybody make up their own minds?’
Gabriel made a noise of disbelief and raised his head. ‘I don’t think so. I wish … I wish I’d never seen them.’
‘Why?’ Gwen said, clutching the letters close to her chest as if he might be about to snatch them from her and chuck them into the fire.
‘Because …’ Gabriel cast about, looking hopeless. ‘Everything just got far more complicated, and it’s already complicated enough. Knowing about them means … having to make a decision.’
Gwen bit her lip, hard, to hold back from saying something slightly too unkind for his delicate state.
‘What did Arthur say, when he gave them to you?’ she said instead, hoping that perhaps he might have given one of his infamous lectures on bravery.
‘He just sort of threw them at me,’ Gabriel said, and Gwen rolled her eyes.
‘It’s going well, then.’
‘There is no it,’ Gabriel said. ‘As you well know. You were just being fitted for your wedding gown, for God’s sake.’
‘Yes, and an hour before that I was kissing Bridget in the armoury,’ Gwen said, causing Gabriel to choke on what Gwen could only assume was his own saliva.
She’d had to make all manner of excuses to get away from her mother, and Agnes had been dragged in to help with the complicated logistics, but it had been worth it for ten glorious minutes pushed up against a wall next to one of Gabriel’s many suits of armour, every inch of Bridget’s body pressed into hers – until somebody had walked past the doorway, and she had been forced to wrench herself away and run from the room without even saying goodbye.
‘You’re kissing now? When did that happen?’
‘Um. After that security breach, and then again on my birthday,’ said Gwen. ‘It happened. It … continues to happen.’
‘Well, I suppose … I’m happy for you.’
Gwen snorted. ‘Thanks. I’d be a lot happier if I didn’t have to sneak around. And I never would have thought it possible, but Gabe … these letters could change everything. Not just for us, but for a lot of people. Have you thought of that?’
Gabriel was quiet for a while, apparently trying to process this, and then he sighed. ‘I found some poetry tucked away in the library once. Written by Mordred.’
‘Mordred? He wrote poetry?’ Gwen said, delighted and horrified in equal measure.
‘Yes. It was awful, all about how misunderstood he was and how terrible his father was and … anyway. It was so strange. I’ve seen so many things written about him, by him, but all of it so formal – even his letters.’ He jerked his head towards the ones grasped in Gwen’s hand. ‘Anyway. They don’t seem like real people, do they? Any of them. And even knowing Father as well as we do, he’s never just our father. Not entirely. He’s … untouchable. Different. He can never actually take off the crown, even when he does. But this God-awful poetry Mordred wrote, it was so very … human.’
‘They were real people,’ Gwen said. ‘And Father is a real person. And you can still be a real person, Gabe. You can be king and still be you. It doesn’t have to be a … well, a crown you can’t take off.’
‘I wish that were true,’ Gabriel said sadly. Gwen was suddenly exhausted by everything, head heavy and aching for her bed, thinking that they could untangle this mess in the morning – but before she could say anything, Gabriel’s head snapped up. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ she said, but he shushed her; when she tilted her head and strained to listen, she could hear something. Strange, muffled moans coming from the corridor just outside.
‘I’ll call the guard,’ Gabriel said immediately, reaching for his dagger, but Gwen held up a hand.
‘No, it’s not … Gabe, I think that’s Arthur.’
‘Damn it,’ someone – Sidney – swore, accompanied by the sound of something falling to the floor. Agnes was up and out of her chair, squinting sleepily towards the sound.
‘Sid!’ she said; a second later she was rushing from the room. Gwen and Gabriel exchanged a glance, and then went after her.
In the hallway by the east stairs, they found Arthur collapsed on the rug, Sidney crouching over him while a couple of guards watched dispassionately from their stations, clearly used to Arthur’s antics and unimpressed. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Gwen as they approached. ‘I thought you were in real trouble. Sid, how much has he had to – oh God.’
She had assumed Arthur very drunk, but as his hat fell from his head she saw in the torchlight that he was hurt. There were dark bruises blooming on his face, gashes where the skin had split open, and there was a terrifying amount of blood splattered down the front of his shirt under his jacket; he looked for a moment as if he might be able to open his eyes, but instead Gwen only briefly saw the whites of them before they rolled back into his head.
‘Shit,’ she said, dropping to her knees and running a shaking hand over his hair, pushing it back from his swollen face. ‘What happened? How did you even get him back here?’
Sidney glanced up at the guards and then leaned in towards them, his voice low. ‘He was – attacked. They jumped him outside an inn, he was … I don’t know, he went out there with some boy, I thought it was that blond one from before, Mitchell. When I got out there he was down, and they were kicking him. He was conscious at first, he even managed to do most of the walking by himself on the way back, but then he just …’
Gwen glanced over at Gabriel, whose jaw was clenched so tight he looked in danger of breaking a tooth.
‘Why weren’t you there?’ he shouted at Sidney, who flinched backwards as if he were the one who’d been hit in the face. ‘Isn’t that your job?’
‘Why are you just standing there? Go and fetch the physician, now,’ Gwen said to the guards. They had already scrambled away to do her bidding when something else occurred to her. ‘Damn it. Agnes – can you please go too, and fetch the Wizard?’
‘Why wasn’t I tagging along with him into some alleyway?’ Sidney was saying to Gabriel. ‘Why do you think? I was inside, I was making sure nobody followed them out there. By the time I got outside they had him on the ground, and they ran, and I thought I’d better …’ Sidney looked spitting mad, but somewhere underneath it all Gwen could tell that he was extremely upset. ‘It was an ambush. I don’t think they knew who he was, I guess he just looked – wealthy. But they didn’t take anything. He didn’t have anything worth taking.’
Except chunks of his face, thought Gwen. Except a body upright and unbroken.
She gently touched Arthur’s shoulder, trying to see where he was hurt. He had crossed his arms over his torso protectively, as if expecting to be kicked again. Sidney took off his jacket and eased it under Arthur’s head. Gabriel just stood there, staring down at Arthur.
‘Hold his hand,’ Gwen said. Gabriel looked at her, startled, hardly seeming to be awake. ‘Hold his hand, Gabe. Sidney, grab the other one. I want – I need to see if he’s still bleeding.’
They crouched down and did as she asked. Arthur moaned as they gently pulled his arms away from his torso. Gwen gestured for Gabriel to hand over his dagger and then cut open Arthur’s tunic with it; it was so stiff and wet with blood that it fell heavily to the floor, revealing a chest already so swollen and bruised that Gwen couldn’t imagine how bad it would look in the morning. The blood didn’t actually seem to be coming from anywhere on his abdomen, so there was no wound that needed urgent staunching – it must have come from his split chin or temple or cheekbone, Gwen thought grimly as she tentatively touched the swelling at his ribs.
‘Something in there might be … broken,’ Gwen said, thinking of fallen tournament knights and the mysterious internal injuries that sometimes killed them, and feeling very, very sick.
Somebody was approaching quickly from down the hall; Gwen looked up, expecting to see the grim face of the doctor – but it was Bridget. Clearly just out of bed, a thick nightshirt stuffed into a pair of breeches, her hair sticking up all around her face. For the first time, Gwen thought she might cry.
‘What happened?’ Bridget said, striding over and putting a hand on Gwen’s shoulder. ‘Agnes sent someone to fetch me, she said—’
‘Robbers. Outside the inn,’ Sidney said, clearly too exhausted to repeat the story in its entirety. Bridget didn’t seem to need it.
‘Which inn?’
‘The Round Table. The – the smaller one. But they’ll be long gone.’
‘I know it,’ said Bridget. ‘What did they look like?’
Sidney described them, although they sounded so generic that it felt hopeless. Gwen watched Bridget as she took all of this information in, her expression focused and serious.
‘All right,’ she said, giving Gwen’s shoulder a firm squeeze. ‘I’ll be back.’ Before Gwen could react, she glanced around to check that the coast was clear, then leaned down and pressed a kiss into her hair. Gwen closed her eyes tightly and felt hot tears escaping from beneath her eyelashes. When she opened them, Bridget was gone.
The doctor arrived at last with two apprentices and the Wizard in tow, and Gwen saw Gabriel instantly let go of Arthur’s hand. They had brought a makeshift litter, and Arthur’s head lolled horribly as he was hoisted up on to it and then carried up the stairs towards his own room, Sidney at his side.
‘We should go with him,’ Gwen said, looking at Gabriel still sitting on the floor, his shirtsleeve soaked through with Arthur’s blood. ‘Come on.’
‘I can’t,’ said Gabriel. Gwen wanted very much to say something to him then, but she knew it wouldn’t help – so she left him there alone and made for Arthur’s rooms, trying hard not to look at the trail of splattered blood leading the way.