I swayed on my feet.
And then, a hand circled my wrist, tugging me toward the edge of the crowd. At first, I thought it was Arthur, but when we pulled through the crowd I found Lancelot instead, his grip on my wrist surprisingly tight.
When we were clear of the crowd, I yanked my arm from his grip and he cleared his throat, glancing away from me uncomfortably. I looked down and realized that in the whir of the dancing, the shoulder of my gown slipped off, causing the neckline to plunge lower than even Morgana wore it. Hastily, I yanked it back up.
“Easy there, Shalott. You looked ready to pass out,” Lancelot said, his voice calm and aloof as it always was when he spoke to me. “If you got trampled by that crowd, I don’t think the others would ever let me hear the end of it.”
“I’m fine,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I suppose I should thank you,” I added after a moment, but I didn’t actually say the words, and I think a part of him was glad for that. I doubt he’d have known what to say in response.
He surprised me by taking hold of my hand again and pulling me close to him, letting his other hand come to rest on the small of my back.
“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed, even as years of dance training took over and I brought my hand to rest on his shoulder.
“Dancing with you. I would have thought that was obvious,” he said drily as he began to guide me to the music. This far away, the music didn’t have as firm a hold on me. My mind stayed my own, which made the situation feel all the more absurd.
“But . . . why?” I asked.
“Because you seem determined to,” he said, as if it were obvious. “And at least here you aren’t in danger of being trampled to death.”
As we turned, I caught sight of a girl lingering on the edge of the crowd, watching us. A cloud sprite with a mess of silver curls and a white gown that clung to her skin like a dense fog. Her name was Eira, maybe, but it was hard to say for sure. Lancelot went through girls so regularly that it was difficult to keep their names straight.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told him. “And besides, you’ve got someone waiting for you.”
Lancelot followed my gaze and sighed, giving me a rare smile that disappeared before it reached his eyes.
“Well, in that case you might be doing me a favor. I’ve been looking for a way to end things with her.”
I laughed. “Again? Just two days ago, you were saying you were madly in love with her.”
He shrugged. “I was then.”
“Your feelings change like the tides, Lance,” I said, and though I was mostly joking, he must have heard the part of me that wasn’t.
“At least I embrace mine,” he replied evenly.
He didn’t say it cruelly, but I felt the sting of the words all the same.
“You embrace a lot more than your feelings,” I snapped.
For a moment he didn’t say anything. “You know what the biggest difference between humans and fey is?” he asked finally.
“Magic,” I said, without hesitation.
He shook his head. “It’s the life span. The way humans live, it’s as if every moment is their last, because you have so few of them that they very well might be. But fey see life like a long chess game. It isn’t about their next move, it’s about what they’re going to do in ten moves, twenty, thirty. There’s no end in sight for their lives, and so their actions are largely meaningless in the scope of things.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” I said.
“Because, Shalott, I have one foot in each world, neither human nor fay. I’ve been raised fay, with this idea of a great sprawling life full of everything, and I want that . . . but I will, in all likelihood, have a human life span. A hundred years, if I’m lucky. Why shouldn’t I fill those few years with what I want?”
I wasn’t used to Lancelot being so candid, and it took me by surprise.
“Because there are consequences to your actions,” I told him after a moment. “There are real people who get hurt by them.”
“Like Eira?” he asked, laughing. “She’s immortal. Years pass like breaths for her—in a few she won’t even remember my name.”
Even though he tried to put a smile on it, there was a wound hiding beneath the casual words. A wound I had never realized he carried. I looked up at him, feeling like I was seeing him truly for the first time. Lancelot was not the sort of person who showed his vulnerabilities. He was not the sort of person to look at someone with openness and understanding and an intense searching—at least not in the present. But that was exactly the way he looked at me that night, and there was something familiar about it that worked its way beneath my skin. It was the way he looked at me in my visions, the way he would look at me in whatever future came our way.
“Thank you,” I told him, to break the silence. “For getting me out of the crowd. For staying with me.”
The heaviness of the moment grew to be too much, and he looked away from me, his usual sardonic smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He stepped back so we weren’t so close, opening up a narrow chasm between his body and mine. “Is this how they dance in Camelot, Shalott?” he asked.
I cleared my throat and reached down to adjust his hand, moving it farther up on my back and widening the space between us even more.
He laughed, but there was no morose undercurrent to it now. It was just his usual laugh.
“That’s not as fun,” he told me, his voice low in my ear. It sent a shiver down my spine that I tried to ignore.
I felt heat rise to my cheeks, which made him laugh harder.
“I swear to the Maiden, Mother, and Crone, Lancelot, if you don’t stop laughing at me, I will shove you into the fire myself,” I murmured.
The threat was hollow, and he knew it. He looked down at me with lifted eyebrows and an amused smile.
“I can’t promise anything,” he said. “But if you decide not to throw me in the fire, maybe you’d like to keep dancing with me.”
I almost laughed before I realized he was earnest. I swallowed and nodded my head.
“Alright,” I said. “But I reserve the right to throw you into the fire after we dance if I still want to.”
He smiled. “That sounds fair, but since we’re in Avalon and not Camelot . . .” he said before pulling me closer so I was flush against him, and moving his hand down low on my waist.
I felt my cheeks heat up, and I tried to ignore the way dancing with him made me feel. It was like being back in the crush of the crowd, with the fay music loud in my ears and heavy in my bloodstream.
Both terrifying and intoxicating, I thought. Too much and not enough.
It was hard to ignore how close he was, the smell of smoke and honey and lavender clinging to his skin. It was harder to ignore the feel of his calloused hand in mine, warm and tight, like I might slip through his fingers. His other hand was pressed against my back, anchoring me. It was impossible to ignore his face looming over mine, moonlight turning his hair silver. It curled around his ears, just slightly, annoyingly too long.
I wondered suddenly what it would be like to run my fingers through it.
It was his eyes that undid me, though. They held mine, and all of that irritating arrogance was gone from them. He looked unsure, tentative for the first time since I met him, but there was a frantic energy there as well. He was nervous, I realized, though he looked as surprised by it as I was.
That first kiss was inevitable, but it still took my breath away. I wasn’t sure which of us moved first, who kissed whom, but one moment we were Elaine and Lancelot and the next we were sinking into each other, a blur of hands and hair and skin, of lips and tongues and teeth.
Our breaths became one.
Somehow, we remained standing.
Somehow, the world kept on moving around us, the same as before.
It wasn’t the same, though, because even when Lancelot and I broke apart, dazed and breathless, he was still looking at me with nervous topaz eyes, dark and bright and intense.
The world shifted, but we were the only ones who felt it.
* * *
THE VISIONS BEGAN after that, tapestry after tapestry woven showing all the ways we could bring each other pain and misery. Sometimes I saw him walking away from me, sometimes I was the one who left him. Sometimes I saw his heart breaking, sometimes I saw mine, sometimes I saw the things that would spiral from that heartbreak—other decisions and betrayals that would feed one another and grow larger and larger.
In some versions of our future, I saw how our story would play into the larger story of both Arthur’s triumph and his ruin. I saw the small part our own story would play in the future of Albion.
Every time I saw these things, I swore to myself that it wasn’t worth it, that I wouldn’t let it happen. Every time, I ended things with him. I told him that it wouldn’t happen again. But at each bonfire, I found myself in his arms, kissing him until the sun peeked over the lake and painted the sky in streaked pastels.
And then it wasn’t just bonfires anymore. It became stolen kisses in the woods and alibis for our absences that our friends only pretended to believe. It became nights spent together in my cottage, limbs entwined and hearts beating together. It became lunches with his mother and long languid talks. It became the slow peeling back of layers, the revealing of vulnerabilities, the acceptance of each other, inside and out. It became love.
As a child, my brother Lavaine had taunted me by telling me there was a python loose in the castle. He told me if I weren’t careful, it would wrap around my neck and strangle me, and that the more I struggled against it, the tighter its grip would become. It was a lie, of course, a fancy Lavaine had made up to torment me after reading about pythons in some book or other. Still, the idea of it had never left me.
That was what it felt like, falling in love with Lancelot. I knew how it would end, but the more I tried to resist it, the harder I struggled, the stronger the hold he had on me. There was never going to be any fighting it. In that, I suppose, I never had a choice.
But marriage? That was a choice. That wasn’t something that would happen by accident. That I had a say in; that I could still control—and I intended to do just that.
17
I DON’T SEE WHY I’m needed at the Choosing of the Knights,” Morgana says with a heavy sigh. “And all of that pomp and circumstance make it so incredibly, bone-achingly boring.”
Though the sun has been up for two hours already, Morgana is still in bed, in her nightgown, her hair loose and messy around her shoulders. It looks like she hasn’t brushed it in a week at least. And the more I look at her nightgown, the more sure I am that it’s the same one she wore yesterday, and the day before that. And as I rack my memory, I realize that I haven’t seen her in anything but her nightgown since we arrived here.
“You’re Arthur’s sister. If you aren’t there, people will talk,” I say, riffling through her wardrobe for something presentable. I find a cream dress with embroidered roses, but when I hold it out to her, she makes a face and shakes her head.
“I don’t care if people talk,” she says, rolling her eyes and falling back against her mountain of overstuffed white pillows, her jet-black hair radiating around her, making her look like a painting of some long-forgotten deity.
“I do. And so does Nimue,” I say, diving back into her closet and pulling out a spring-green muslin dress, trimmed with white lace and pearl buttons. It’s a cruel card to play, her desire for Nimue’s approval, but Morgana has forced my hand.
“Ugh, no,” she says, scowling at the dress. “That looks like something Morgause would wear.”
“Say what you will about your sister, she always dresses fashionably,” I point out, but I hang the dress back up and try again. I doubt I’ll find anything she’ll like. They’re all court dresses—pastels and lace, flounces and ribbons. It’s hard to picture Morgana in one at all. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t left the tower.
“If Nimue cared, she would have been in touch,” Morgana says after a second. “If she cared, she wouldn’t have banished us from Avalon in the first place.”
Nimue’s words come back to me. You will always be safe here. But you were not raised to be safe, you were raised to be heroes.
It was enough for me, but Morgana is different. She has never wanted to be a hero, never craved glory or admiration. She cares about her own happiness first and foremost, and there is something admirable about that, especially in a court where women are happy to fold themselves up tight to be more easily manageable, to swallow arsenic to be thought of as just a little bit sweeter.
Though I worry it’ll lead to a fight, I take a steadying breath and ask the question I’ve been dreading.
“When was the last time you left the tower?”
She doesn’t answer right away, instead burrowing further beneath the covers, as if she might disappear into them altogether.
It’s strange. In the years that I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her try to disappear. That’s always been me, trying to fade into the background or fall away into the pages of a book. Morgana has always been the one who pulls me out and forces me into the world. I don’t know what to do now that our positions have switched.
“I don’t know what the point of that would be,” she mutters. “There’s nothing for me there. There’s nothing for me here, either, but at least it’s quiet. At least I don’t have to worry about those people, whispering behind their hands about every breath I take.”
“And here I thought you didn’t care if people talked,” I say.
“I don’t,” she says quickly—too quickly to truly be believed. “They’re welcome to talk all they want, about whatever they want. I won’t try to stop them. But that doesn’t mean I have to hear it. It doesn’t mean I have to feel their judgmental eyes staring at me. It doesn’t mean I have to smile and pretend I don’t notice that they’re all plotting how best to bring me to ruin.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re so dramatic,” I tell her. “And they aren’t that bad anymore, for the most part. Teenage girls are always vicious, but they grew up just like we did.”
Morgana glowers. “Girls like that never grow up,” she says. “That ugly meanness is always lurking under the surface. They’ve only grown smarter about it—biding their time and waiting to attack.”
I can’t help but snort. “You overestimate them,” I say.
“Or you underestimate them,” she corrects.
“I don’t underestimate anyone,” I say, though her words wriggle under my skin. I pull out another dress for her inspection. Like the others, it has a flounced skirt and lace trimmings, but it’s dove gray, without any other embellishments.
She doesn’t reject it right away, but her gaze is distasteful.
“There’s nothing black?” she asks.
“Not before sundown,” I tell her. “Pastels only. It’s customary.”
“Says who?” she mutters, but she climbs out of bed. I suppose she didn’t actually expect an answer, but that’s just as well because I don’t have one.
There are so many silly rules for women in Camelot—pastels only before sundown, necklines above the collarbone, never lift your skirts high enough to show your ankles, hair up unless you’re a maiden, never dance more than twice with the same man unless he’s your betrothed, avoid being alone with men who are not familial relations. I don’t know where they came from, and before, I never really questioned them—it was just how things were. But none of those rules existed in Avalon, and after living without them for so long, I can’t deny the restrictions are chafing.
Morgana takes the dress from me and stalks behind the painted screen to change into it.
“Do you know how the Choosing
will go?” I ask her.
“I imagine a good many speeches about bravery and valor?”
“Just the one, really, and it’s Arthur’s. We’ve been working on it for days now. Then he’ll name the knights he’s chosen, they’ll accept and swear fealty to him, and it’ll be done. Only fifty, which is intended as a laughable challenge, but Lance has watched them train, and he’s given us a list of the best. We’ll make do. Then that’ll be followed by a feast to bid him—bid us—goodbye.”
Morgana snorts. “That’s kind. No doubt most hope we won’t return.”
“So you’ll come to the Choosing then,” I say. “And the feast.”
“I would rather swallow rat pus.”
“Do rats have . . .” I trail off and shake my head. I haven’t even had breakfast yet—it’s far too early to be discussing rat pus. “Never mind. But you should come. Just because you aren’t around to hear the whispers doesn’t mean their whispers don’t touch you.”
Morgana steps around the screen again, wearing the gray dress. It looks strange on her, and not just because it’s unlaced. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so covered, or so restricted. I don’t think she could lift her arms over her head without the silk tearing. She looks miserable in it as well, tugging at the skirt uncomfortably as she looks at her reflection in a tall looking glass.
“You look lovely,” I tell her, but she only scowls at me, gesturing for me to lace up the back.
“What are they saying?” she asks me, her voice quiet. She doesn’t want to care what people are saying about her, but she does. There’s some relief in that, in knowing that she’s as human and vulnerable as the rest of us, even if she likes to pretend otherwise.
I tighten her laces, earning a groan from her, though I leave them loose enough. Not the way my mother used to tie mine, so tight that I could scarcely breathe. Some nights, there would be bruises on my rib cage when my maid stripped off my dress, a watercolor of blues and purples and greens.
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