Gabriel didn’t seem at all interested in the fact that Arthur’s father had disappeared. In fact, he wasn’t paying Gwen the slightest bit of attention.
‘Gabe,’ Gwen said urgently. ‘Why are you – what are you looking at?’
Gabriel was gazing up at the stands, his eyeline high above the competitors. ‘That’s – I’m sure that’s Morgana.’
‘Morgana?’ Gwen said, momentarily convinced that he had started hallucinating due to extensive sleep deprivation. ‘Morgan le Fay? The witch?’
‘No,’ Gabriel said distantly, still squinting. ‘No. Morgana – my crow. The one I was raising. I released her about a month ago. Look, she’s on top of the competitors’ stands – she has that flash of white, on her left flank.’
‘Are you even listening to me?’ Gwen demanded, feeling rather than seeing her father’s eyes cut across to her as her voice raised in pitch and volume.
‘She looks very agitated,’ Gabriel said, tilting his head to one side in a very birdlike way.
‘Gabe. Look at me. I look very agitated,’ Gwen said. ‘Will you come with me? I want to see where Arthur’s father went. I just want to make sure he’s not—’
‘At the sound of the trumpet,’ the Grand Marshal called, ‘our two teams of distinguished knights – the best that England has to offer – will fight for honour, for the long-held ideals of chivalry, and for their king!’
‘Not what?’ Gabriel said, finally looking away from the crow.
‘I don’t know! Plotting something! Perhaps he’s … Hang on, where’s Bridget? Where does everybody keep disappearing off to?’
‘Ready yourselves,’ called the Grand Marshal. ‘On the count of three. One …’
‘Don’t worry,’ Gabriel said. ‘We’ll speak to Father properly when this is done.’
‘Two …’ called the Grand Marshal.
Morgana the crow cawed, and then set off across the arena. Some of the competitors looked up to watch as she passed just over their heads and then vanished from sight.
‘Three …’
‘Wait,’ Gwen said, her thoughts seeming to accelerate as she watched the front line of the knights to her left ready themselves for battle. ‘That’s the Knife.’
‘Is it?’
‘Gabe, the Knife didn’t qualify! He shouldn’t be there!’ Gwen stood up now, abandoning all propriety, no longer caring if her father was angry with her or if she embarrassed herself. ‘Father.’
‘Begin!’ shouted the Grand Marshal.
Gwen looked at the Knife. The Knife looked at Lord Willard. In the split second before the howl of the trumpets, Gwen saw Willard nod.
Instead of converging on each other, most of the knights turned in unison towards the royal stands.
There were two very distinct seconds of confusion, during which everybody seemed frozen in place; in those seconds, Gwen had done something she had never in her life imagined doing and thrown herself bodily at her father, half succeeding in knocking him out of his chair.
A moment later, a knife that had been thrown with deadly precision from the arena had struck the wooden post just above the throne – and chaos was unleashed from all directions.
Gabriel and her mother were suddenly on the ground next to her. Gwen pressed herself into the wooden boards, her eyes squeezed shut as she braced for the sting of a knife or a sword. Numerous boots thundered past her as her father’s guard moved towards the fray.
‘Move!’ her father was roaring in her ear. ‘You have to move!’
Gabriel had her by the shoulder, was pulling her along as they half crawled towards the exit of the royal stands; there were so many people screaming and shouting that they became a wordless wall of sound, a noise that Gwen couldn’t have imagined in her worst nightmares. She felt a splinter catch in her forearm, her eyes watering in pain as somebody hauled her to her feet; somehow, miraculously, they had made it out before anybody could breach the stand.
‘Bridget,’ Gwen choked out. ‘Gabe, Gabe, I don’t know where she is, I need—’
‘Go,’ shouted her father, more to the guards than to anybody else; at least twenty of them had formed a protective ring around the royal family, but Gwen was still pushing against them, mindlessly attempting to move back towards the violence. She thought of Bridget out there somewhere, with no armour on. Bridget, who would surely rather risk death than walk away from a fight like this one.
‘Come on,’ Gabriel shouted, pulling at her shoulder.
Gwen cast one last desperate glance over at what she could still see of the tournament grounds through the stands – people fleeing, swords clashing, bodies crumpling – and in that moment she saw Bridget, completely impossible and yet entirely real, putting her foot up on to the wooden rail where Gwen had been sitting just moments ago.
In one swift movement she reached over, grasped the hilt of Excalibur Nine and pulled.
The sword slid neatly out, with a ringing rasp of metal on stone that Gwen heard even over the mayhem.
Bridget’s eyes darted across to where Gwen was standing but didn’t seem to see her; she just wiped a sleeve across her bloodied forehead before jumping back down into the fight.
There was nothing more Gwen could do except let herself be borne away, across the drawbridge and back towards the castle.
They were crossing the threshold when it began to rain.
‘They must have been filling up the camps for weeks,’ Sir Hurst, the Captain of the Guard, was saying, as the king was strapped into his armour. They were standing in her father’s war room, his council around him – or at least those who had made it back from the tournament grounds. Gwen knew she was only still in this room – sitting by the door, her hands shaking uncontrollably against her knees – because nobody had noticed that she was in there. ‘No one thought to monitor the attendees, there’s been no reason to suspect in the past … It’s been busier, yes, but the tournament is popular. They’ve been concealing themselves in plain sight. The stands were half full of traitors.’
‘And we’re … sure it was Willard?’ said Gwen’s mother, looking stunned.
Sir Hurst ducked his head. ‘Yes, your highness. He was seen giving orders.’
The king breathed in and out slowly through his nose, clearly trying to keep his temper in check.
‘Hellfire and damnation to traitorous cousins.’
‘We sent him casks of wine,’ the queen said faintly. ‘On his birthday.’
‘And how is it that most of the best knights of the realm also happen to be murderous turncoats?’ the king asked.
Sir Hurst winced. ‘I believe – Sir Blackwood, the Grand Marshal, was bribed. We know he gambles, but his debts must be worse than we imagined. It would have been easy enough for a man in his position to mismatch opponents, overlook lances that had been tampered with …’
‘Damn,’ said her father softly, his hand curling into a fist and then quickly releasing again. ‘All right. Where are we now? And – where the hell is Stafford? Did he make it inside?’
Somebody rushed from the room, presumably to try to find out.
‘When it began,’ Gabriel said, his voice quiet but steady, ‘the knights who hadn’t bought their place in the finale rushed to our aid, and I saw some of those watching from the stands do the same. They haven’t all been turned, Father. Far from it.’
Bridget hasn’t been turned, Gwen thought, a wave of nausea rolling through her. Bridget is out there, fighting for us.
‘How many of our people have made it back into the castle?’ her father said, as his gauntlets were eased over his hands.
‘A good many. They’re gathered in the Great Hall,’ said the Captain of the Guard. ‘We have hundreds fit to fight, not including the castle guard.’
‘And my cousin has?’
‘Impossible to say – they may not have brought their full force to the first wave. I imagine there will be more coming from the campgrounds.’
‘The guard stays here,’ the king said, holding his arms up so that he could be fully equipped with sword and dagger. Somebody else had hurried into the room carrying yet more armour – it was dropped unceremoniously on the table. Gwen tried to place it; it was pale gold, with the royal crest emblazoned across the breastplate.
‘No,’ she said, turning to Gabriel, who was standing with both palms flat against the table. ‘No. Not you as well.’
Gabriel tried to smile at her, but it looked instead like an apology she didn’t want to accept. A messenger came rushing in, his chest heaving.
‘Your majesty, the rebels didn’t succeed in pushing up the hill – they’ve fallen back and they’re regrouping with more forces for a fresh assault.’
Gabriel straightened up, clearing his throat, and the king looked at him. ‘What?’
‘We could …’ He broke off, swallowed, and then continued. ‘We could bring up the drawbridge. Shelter in place until the nearest troops reach us. Perhaps—’
‘No,’ the king said immediately. ‘That’ll take days. If we didn’t have men out there already, I might – but, no. We cannot protect ourselves and leave them cut off. Camelot does not hide.’
‘Your majesty,’ the messenger said apprehensively. ‘I was told to inform you – Lord Stafford is with them.’
A stunned silence followed this, and then the king slammed a hand down on the table so hard that everybody jumped.
‘But then … that assassin …’ Gabriel said slowly. His father glanced sharply at him. ‘He was so insistent that it was just a lone wolf with some personal, invented vendetta. But it wouldn’t have been too hard for him to have a person with ill intentions hired to the guard. He was constantly throwing us off the scent. He was one of the loudest voices when it came to sending our troops north, leaving us unprotected, but when Willard was sighted he about-faced and told us it was all paranoia …’
‘After everything you did for him,’ Gwen’s mother said. ‘After the trust you put in him, knowing he was a cultist and giving him a chance.’
‘But … he had plenty of opportunities to just kill you himself,’ said Gwen. ‘Why did he not take them?’
‘Because the man is a coward,’ Sir Hurst said. ‘I suppose that assassin was a last-ditch attempt to prevent all-out warfare.’ He turned to the king, shaking his head. ‘This is my fault, sire. I take full responsibility. I should have—’
‘Let’s not waste time on regrets now,’ said the king. Sir Hurst nodded bracingly, then took him aside. The rest of the room lapsed into anxious muttering.
‘Gabe, stay,’ Gwen said desperately, as a page lifted the breastplate of his armour and attempted to secure it. ‘Somebody needs to, in case—’
‘G,’ Gabriel said quietly, fumbling to help the page; the small shake in his voice as he attempted to be reassuring broke Gwen’s heart. ‘I have to go. We need everybody we can get, and besides, Father is right – how would it look if we just sat here and hid, while we sent other men out to fight for us?’
Gabriel was shrugging on his pauldrons so that the page could buckle him into them. With every new piece of armour added to him, it felt as if Gwen were watching him being entombed – his narrow, breakable body gradually encased until she hardly recognised him any more.
‘Gabe,’ she said quietly, desperate now as she felt them running out of time, moving closer so that only he and the boy dressing him could hear. ‘If Arthur’s father – if he was working with Willard this whole time, then that means Arthur must have—’
‘Yes,’ said Gabriel, briefly closing his eyes. ‘Yes, I know. I can’t quite believe it of him, that he could have sat in our rooms and laughed with us, all the while knowing he was working to send us to our deaths, but … I suppose I didn’t really know him at all.’
‘He didn’t deserve you,’ Gwen said tearfully, gripping the shoulder that had not yet been plated. ‘He didn’t deserve either of us.’
‘Well. Nobody does,’ Gabriel said, smiling weakly; a moment later her hand was being waved away so that his armour could be completed, and then everybody seemed to be moving at once. The king signalled for them to exit, and they all walked briskly from the room and down the stairs, a clamour of steel and tense voices and boots on stone. They reached the Great Hall and were greeted by the sight of hundreds of men pulling on armour, swords being pressed into hands, helms placed on heads.
It was all happening too quickly. Gwen felt like a child clutching at handfuls of water, unable to understand why it wouldn’t stop running through her fingers.
‘Gabriel,’ she began, but he had already been pulled into a conversation with her father and Sir Hurst; they were gathering the men around them, shouting instructions, and the queen pulled gently at Gwen’s arm to stop her from getting in the way.
‘They can’t just do this,’ Gwen said, expecting her mother to agree, but she didn’t – because of course they could.
Her father strode over to kiss her mother, his eyes squeezing tightly shut; he pressed his forehead against Gwen’s for one quick moment, and all she could think was that when he walked away, his beard would still be wet with her tears.
Gabriel didn’t say goodbye. He tried – Gwen saw him take a step towards her with a hand half raised – but then there were shouts from the courtyard and her father clapped his hands together.
‘Move out,’ he shouted.
And they did.