Half Sick of Shadows

by Laura Sebastian

  Gawain laughs so hard he spits out his tea, covering his mouth to hide it, but of course that makes all of us laugh even harder.

  Well, almost all of us.

  As the conversation continues over poached eggs and toast topped with butter and pomegranate arils, my eyes keep drifting to Lancelot, seated beside me. He stares at his plate, chewing each bite of food slowly, without his usual voracious appetite. When he does look up at Gawain, his eyes are guarded and suspicious, as if he’s searching for his strengths and weaknesses and imagining how those will match up against his own, should it come to that.

  It’s a look I know well—not so different than the way I saw fay girls look at Gwen on Avalon, not so different than the way Mordred looked at Arthur yesterday. Not so different than the way many people look at Lancelot himself, whether he’s riding or fighting or merely standing at Arthur’s side.

  Still, seeing Lancelot jealous is a strange and surreal sight.

  * * *

  AFTER BREAKFAST, I pull Lancelot aside and let the others go out of the room. Lancelot glances after Arthur, but we both know he won’t go too far without him. He’s so deep in conversation with Gawain, though, that I don’t think he really notices that Lancelot is missing.

  “He’s a good person, Lance,” I say, keeping my voice low. I remember how thin these walls are, how sometimes they seemed so thin my mother could even hear my thoughts.

  Lancelot shrugs, his shoulders stiff. “I don’t know him, not really, and I suppose I’m not as trusting as the rest of you are.”

  That makes me laugh. “You think I trust easily?” I ask him. “How could I possibly, seeing the things I’ve seen?”

  Lancelot considers that for a second, but he doesn’t look at me. Instead, he looks everywhere else, his eyes scanning the table with its dirty plates, the windowsill, the stained glass window. I try to imagine it through his eyes, what he sees in this place with his fresh gaze. Maybe he thinks it pretty. To me, though, it is too full of ghosts. To me, it will always feel like a prison of sorts.

  “I think,” he says carefully, tasting the words slowly, “that you seem to trust him after knowing him for less than a day far more than you trust me after knowing me for half of your life. Why is that?”

  I don’t know how to answer that. Arthur and Gwen and especially Morgana have asked questions about my Sight before, even though they know I can’t say anything. Still, they’ve all asked at some point. I don’t even blame them for it. Curiosity, as Nimue liked to say, is as much a blessing as a curse.

  But Lancelot has never asked me about the things I’ve Seen. He’s never come close before. I suppose, growing up among the fey, he understands the rules better. He knows what can come of breaking them.

  Now, though, he’s dancing on the edge of doing just that. He must know it, he must realize exactly what he’s doing. He must understand that I won’t answer him.

  But still, he’s asking.

  “Arthur can trust him,” I say instead. “And so I trust him.”

  “Are you saying Arthur can’t trust me?” he asks, taking a step back.

  I open my mouth and close it again. There is no way to answer that question, no way to respond that won’t break something, in some way. I bite my lip and decide that maybe honesty is truly the only way forward.

  “I don’t know,” I say quietly.

  Lancelot stares at me, his expression unreadable, but I suspect if I tried to dig beneath that blank exterior, I would find a deep well of hurt.

  “Why did you ask me to come, Elaine?” he asks, and it’s the fact that he calls me by my first name that feels like a punch in my gut. There is no playfulness in his voice, no joking, no lightness that is so characteristically Lancelot. “You told me that I was needed here—that Arthur needed me, that you needed me. That’s why I came.”

  “No,” I say, the hard edge in my voice surprising both of us. “You came because you knew your life on Avalon would have bored you. You came here for Arthur, yes, maybe you’ve even told yourself you came for me, but that isn’t the whole truth of it, Lance—you can lie to yourself about this, but you don’t have to lie to me. You came here for you, for adventure, for glory.”

  Lancelot stares at me for a long moment, his jaw slack and eyes wide. It isn’t often that I’ve been able to render Lance speechless, but I take no joy in it. After a moment, he straightens up again.

  “I was wrong,” he says finally, turning and walking toward the door. “It’s no wonder you don’t trust me, Shalott—you don’t know me at all.”

  * * *

  HE’S WRONG. I know Lancelot as well as I know Morgana or Arthur or Gwen; I know him as well as I know myself. But after he leaves, his words stay with me, digging beneath my skin like shards of glass that I don’t think I will ever be able to pry out.

  I shouldn’t have said that about Arthur not being able to trust him. I’m not sure it was a lie, exactly, but it was only one possibility. Still, that one possibility can be enough to drive a person to do unthinkable things. I learned that lesson myself not long after Nimue began training me on Avalon.

  Arthur’s and Gwen’s days were spent in lessons more often than not, learning about various aspects of being rulers. Morgana always called them “crown classes” with a roll of her eyes, but I liked to join in when I had some free time. The lessons on decorum and the complicated forest of Albion family trees were more familiar to me than anything else on Avalon—comforting, in a strange way—but the strategy lessons were my favorites. They were taught by a fay woman named Galina who looked almost human apart from the thin-leafed vines that wound their way over every visible inch of her skin.

  One day, before I learned to control or truly understand my visions, I Saw Galina slip off a rain-slicked cliffside and break her leg. And even though Nimue had told me never to tell the subject of a vision what I Saw, I couldn’t put the image out of my mind—the pain in her eyes, the bone-shattering scream.

  All I told her was to avoid the cliffsides in the rain—no more than that. But Galina, like all the fey, knew that I was an oracle. She took the vague warning for what it was.

  Two days later, after a rainy night, her body was found in the woods. Instead of taking her usual route home, along the cliffs, she had heeded my words and walked the long way through the woods instead. It was difficult to say for sure what had happened, but she appeared to have gotten lost on the unfamiliar path and, as the night got darker, tripped over a protruding tree root and struck her head on a boulder.

  Morgana was the only person I ever told about that, and though she told me it wasn’t my fault, I don’t think either of us believed it.

  So I know the consequences that can come of telling someone their future. I know that it wasn’t fair to put even the haziest idea of betrayal in Lancelot’s mind, but it takes me a moment to understand why I did it anyway, why I just couldn’t help myself.

  Because I don’t like being the only one who knows it. Back in Avalon, I at least had Nimue to share my visions with, my fears and hopes for the future, the paths that twisted out in front of us like writhing snakes. And now? Now there is no one. Only me, to bear the weight of everyone’s futures alone, and it is too much.

  Still, it wasn’t fair of me, and I know I owe him an apology. After all, I know better than almost anyone that Lancelot is the opposite of selfish, that even if he keeps most things close to the chest, he cares deeply, loves deeply, protects with everything he has.

  It’s not enough, though, a voice whispers through me. I tell myself that’s why I don’t go after him.

  * * *

  LANCELOT GREW UP half-human, half-fay, with one foot in both worlds but no traction in either. His mother’s blood made him faster and stronger than any human I knew. He could see as easily in the pitch dark as he could in broad daylight, and, as he’d pointed out to me himself, his senses were inhumanly sharp, maki
ng him able to hear a rabbit’s footsteps from a mile away or smell when lunch was ready from the opposite side of the island. Even when I found him insufferable, I could never deny that he was an exceptionally gifted boy.

  The fey disagreed. They didn’t see anything exceptional about Lancelot—to them, he was slow and weak and fragile, hindered by his human blood. He looked human, after all, and he could perform no magic. In all likelihood, they said, shaking their heads and clicking their tongues in some show of mock sympathy, he would live a mortal life.

  He hated that, the reminder of his mortality and his humanity. Given the chance, he wouldn’t have hesitated to trade it to be entirely fay, or at least possess some kind of magic. He never said anything outright, but I knew he resented Morgana, Guinevere, and me. How could he not? The three of us all had less fay blood than he did, but with ours came gifts. Tangible, magical gifts.

  Arthur was the only person on Avalon with less magic than Lancelot. And if the fey pitied Lancelot for his dormant blood and short life span, they despised Arthur for it. After all, his father was the reason they’d been banished to Avalon, the reason they’d lost family and friends in the Fay War. Arthur was a symbol of everything that had been taken from them. Of course they despised him—Arthur never even seemed to hold it against them.

  But Arthur had Nimue’s protection, and so the worst the fey ever did was glower at and ignore him, and the rest of us, as best they could. That was fine by Arthur, and Gwen, Morgana, and I were happy enough with our small group. But Lancelot was different. He never stopped yearning to be accepted by them, to be truly able to stand in their world, tall and proud, despite his innate humanity.

  That was where the Challenging came in. It was a tournament that lasted a full week, but one that took place only once every decade.

  “The fey live for hundreds of years,” Lancelot explained once, when I asked why it happened so rarely. “For them, ten years is nothing.”

  But for Lancelot, ten years was everything. He saw his first tournament when he was only nine years old, watching the string of events at his mother’s side, watching the competitors with hungry eyes.

  “They were heroes,” he explained to me as the next tournament drew close and he began to practice even harder. “The crowd cheered and applauded, and the winner just basked in the glory of it.”

  He pointed out the winner to me at dinner that night, a broad-shouldered man with long white hair tied back from his face with a leather cord. He was surrounded by people, the center of the conversation. He was admired, accepted, even worshipped. And as Lancelot looked at him, I looked at Lancelot and saw the envy there. And beneath envy, there was something else simmering: cold, hard determination.

  Lancelot was going to win the next Challenging. He was going to prove once and for all that he belonged with the fey, that he was one of them, that he mattered.

  He’d practiced for the last decade, trained every day, sometimes all the way from sunrise to sundown. The fey might have been naturally more skilled, but they hadn’t worked to hone their talents as dedicatedly as Lancelot had. He was ready to meet them in speed, strength, and sense. He was ready to beat them.

  And he did, in the first few events. If he didn’t come in first place, as he did in archery and broadsword fighting, he came in the top three. Only in tracking did he falter, and even then he still placed fifth. By the time the last event came around, he was the top competitor and the one to beat.

  Maybe some of the other fey were afraid; maybe they were bitter or petty or just angry about it. Maybe they didn’t care about Lancelot at all and he was merely collateral damage in an attempt to take a rare strike at Arthur. There’s no way to know for sure.

  The last event was a footrace around the entire island, and it was an event Lancelot felt confident in. He ran around the island every morning, honing his speed and agility as he climbed through the cliffsides and jumped over streams. His timing was excellent—most days he managed it in just an hour.

  The race took place just before sundown. Morgana and I were the only two of our group not competing, but we saw the other three off and then sat down to wait for their return. Lancelot had a very good chance of winning, we said while we waited, but Gwen had also had a good showing at the first few events, though she lacked Lancelot’s hard determination. She would likely still be somewhere at the front of the pack. Arthur, though, just wanted to have fun. By human standards, he was a good warrior, a fast racer, a decent archer. By fay standards, though, he was dismal. He’d come dead last at most events, and we had little reason to believe the footrace would be any different.

  But even as the race started, he’d given Morgana and me a cheerful smile and a wave before taking off, amiably settling into the back of the pack of runners.

  I remember the first runners returning just after dark had fallen—a good hour later. I remember my heart sinking when Lancelot wasn’t the first, when he wasn’t the second or third. When Guinevere came in twelfth in the race, fifth overall. When she shook her head and said she hadn’t seen Lancelot.

  In the end, he and Arthur had tied for last place, finally crossing the finish line when all the other spectators had ambled off to celebrate with the victors in the dining hall. Morgana, Guinevere, and I were the only ones left.

  “I was nearly to the end when I heard a couple of fay boys behind me—Cillorene and Tolias,” Lancelot said, like the names might mean something to us. They didn’t. “Cillorene is an illusionist. He was bragging about how he’d cast a charm on the cliffs to change the paths and get other racers lost.”

  “That’s cheating, though,” I said.

  Lancelot shrugged. “It’s not actually in the rules. After all, those charms only work on humans,” he said, his gaze sliding to Arthur, whose cheeks had gone red.

  “There was no reason to ruin Arthur’s chances,” Guinevere said through gritted teeth. “It wasn’t as though he was a threat to them.” She realized what she’d said as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “No offense, of course, Arthur. You were doing quite well.”

  Arthur shrugged his shoulders and glanced away. “I just wanted to finish the tournament,” he said. “I didn’t much care about places.”

  “It was a prank then,” Morgana said, looking at Lancelot, who nodded.

  “A cruel one,” Lancelot said. “I suppose, since no one would be watching and no one would be able to prove it afterward, it was a rare chance to strike out at him.”

  Arthur swallowed, shaking his head. “If Lance hadn’t come back for me, I’d have been stuck in those mountains until morning,” he said.

  “That’s the best-case scenario,” Morgana said, her voice sharpening. “In the dark, you could have fallen right off the cliffs. Arthur, you could have died.”

  Arthur’s shoulders hunched, and his cheeks grew even redder. “Yes, well, I didn’t, did I? Because Lance came back for me.”

  As we headed to the dining hall, I fell into step beside Lancelot at the back of the group. The others were talking among themselves, Morgana threatening all manner of ways to get revenge on Cillorene, and Arthur begging her not to.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him softly. “I know how much you wanted to win.”

  Lancelot didn’t deny it—didn’t say anything at all. After a moment, I caught his hand in mine. I remember the decision to do it, the fear that he might pull away from me. It must have been early on in our romance, when things were still uncertain between us. But he didn’t let go of my hand. Instead, he held it back, squeezing it tight.

  “I did,” he said, the words coming out choked. “There was a moment, El, when I considered not going back. I could have finished the race first, then doubled back and found him. I don’t know that another half hour would have made much of a difference.”

  “But it could have,” I said. “You chose not to risk it. You chose Arthur.”

  He d
idn’t understand why I was making such a fuss about it, but even then I had seen futures where he betrayed Arthur in a number of ways. That glimpse of his heart, the fact that he’d put aside his greatest desire to protect his friend—to me, that was worth making a fuss over.

  “In any event,” he said, shooting me a half smile, “there’s always the next one, isn’t there? I waited a decade before. I can do it again. The next time, I’ll win. Just you wait.”

  I hadn’t known what to say to that, so instead I’d held my tongue. How could I have possibly said that in all my visions, every different path we’d taken, none of us had ever seen another decade?

  19

  IT’S A PRETTY memory, I suppose. A good story I tuck away to use when scrutiny inevitably shifts from Arthur to Lancelot, a tale to show how loyal Lancelot is to Arthur, fay blood or not. It won’t even need exaggerating like Arthur’s stories—it is perfect just as it happened. No one could hear that story and doubt Lancelot’s devotion.

  Except for me, it seems. I lived the story, I know it to be true, but it’s not enough to counteract the visions that cloud our futures, an array of countless betrayals, minute and major, intimately personal and public.

  As much as I try to cling to that version of Lancelot, the one who selflessly sacrificed his own dreams to protect his friend, it grows more and more difficult with every vision of him in the future doing exactly the opposite—betraying Arthur in a million different ways. Betraying me too.

  * * *

  MAYBE IT WILL happen at high summer, when the Camelot heat will be so overwhelming that my gown will be plastered to my skin, my pinned-back hair heavy and itchy with sweat, every step feeling like I’m walking knee-deep in sand.