The Heir of Logres Read online

  The Heir of Logres

  Pendragon’s Heir, Book Three

  Suzannah Rowntree

  Amica mitis, hic liber multos patronos habuit.

  Sed, Schuyler, tu maximum fecisti.

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  Copyright © 2019 Suzannah Rowntree

  Cover design by Wynter Designs

  Map copyright © 2015 Isaac Botkin

  That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis copyright © CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1945.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses provided by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  1

  Now the day comes near and near

  I feel its hot breath, and see it clear,

  How strange it is and full of fear;

  And I grow old waiting here,

  Grow sick with pain of Guenevere,

  My wife, that loves not me.

  Swinburne

  IN THE COLD PRE-DAWN BLANCHEFLEUR TUCKED knees beneath chin and watched Nerys fold her blankets for the last time.

  “Will you be safe travelling alone?” Blanchefleur spoke in a whisper, for on another couch in a corner of the room Branwen sprawled beneath a pile of bedclothes, dead to the world, and in these last minutes Blanchefleur longed to have her oldest friend to herself.

  Nerys came over to sit on Blanchefleur’s bed while she combed her long black hair. “I think so.”

  “I don’t like it,” Blanchefleur said. “No news from Camelot, and all those stories of disappearing travellers.”

  “I am riding west, not south,” Nerys said, her pale fingers coming and going like moongleams in the dark cloud of her hair. “The road to the Apple Isle is long and chancy, but it will not take me near the Silver Dragon.”

  “They call him Saunce-Pité. He is only one man. Why doesn’t the Table do anything about him?”

  Nerys teased apart a knot, too busy to bother answering what they both knew—that neither of them could tell what the Table might be doing. Blanchefleur pulled the covers closer around her shoulders and said:

  “I wish you were not going to Avalon.”

  Nerys said, “The rest of my people must know what I saw in Sarras. Now that the Quest is done, it is only a matter of time before the King sends for you. You no longer need my protection, or my counsel.”

  “Oh, Nerys,” Blanchefleur said gratefully. “But can’t I persuade you to stay? I will never have as much experience and wisdom as you. And I’m not safely home yet. Perceval went away at the beginning of summer, and we are still waiting to hear from the King.”

  Nerys reappeared from behind the sable curtain of her hair. “Some business must be keeping them. Unless the King’s messengers have fallen afoul of Saunce-Pité.”

  “Your people can open doorways in space and time. Can’t you get me to Camelot, Nerys?”

  Nerys shook her head. “The elf-keys open doors between worlds. I can only take you out of Britain altogether.”

  She raked her hair to the back of her head and fixed it with a long silver pin. “Well! I am ready, and there goes Dame Glynis down the passage.”

  But Nerys lingered, clouding the air with thought. Blanchefleur waited. She knew that look, and braced herself.

  Nerys said: “Blanchefleur, may I give you advice before I go?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you see Sir Perceval again, treat him more kindly.”

  Blanchefleur felt her face grow hot. It was the first time the subject had arisen between them since she first told Nerys why Perceval and Bors had left the castle so soon, six months before.

  “Oh, Nerys. I had to tell him no.”

  “No man can be toyed with in that fashion. Appeal to him, give your reasons, but either let him decide for both of you, or go your own way and let him go his.”

  “I thought it for the best.”

  Nerys saw the look on her face and said:

  “I have pondered whether to say this. But I know you refused him against every inclination, and that you have been silent and melancholy since, and that despite the answer you gave him you still count the days until you see him again. You told him you would not wed him: Be not surprised if he takes you at your word.”

  Blanchefleur stared at her knees, drawn up under her chin. She supposed Perceval might eventually seek another lady. But what most worried her these days were his words at their last meeting in this very room—“Sooner or later, I make no doubt, I will die by the sword, or by the lance…”

  She threaded her fingers together and said in a small voice, “I asked him to wait until I was ready. If he could only be patient!”

  “I know, Blanche.” She felt the wing-beat of the fay’s sympathy in the air. “But he offered you an impatient man. If you wanted him, you should have said yes. If you do not want him, you must cease this pining.”

  Over against the far wall, Branwen shifted and sighed and sat up, pushing hair out of her face. Nerys stood, fastening her cloak at her shoulder.

  “Consider this my last counsel to you, and think on it when I am gone.”

  Blanchefleur looked up, glad to put the conversation behind them. “You’ll come back one day and see us?”

  Nerys hesitated, but then a smile shone across her face. “Yes. I promise it. Look out your window on a morning in spring, ten or twenty years hence, and perhaps you’ll see me coming.”

  “Twenty years! So long?” Blanchefleur sighed, and reached for a warm tunic to pull over her smock. “Oh, Nerys, I grudge every day of it.”

  The three of them went downstairs to say their final farewells in the Carbonek courtyard. And then there was nothing to do but stand in the gate and watch as the fay’s dark figure dwindled on the road up the valley.

  At last Nerys went over the crest of a slope in the road and was gone. Branwen stirred and said, “There are only the two of us now.”

  The words might have been wistful if not for her cheery voice. Blanchefleur felt a quick rush of affection for her. When the world frowned, Branwen went on smiling. There was a heart of steel under all that froth and bubble.

  “You must be missing Heilyn,” she said with a twinge of sympathy.

  Branwen sighed. “Oh, Blanchefleur, you cannot guess how much.”

  Blanchefleur thought of Perceval and said to herself: Maybe I can. Aloud she said, “Never fear, he will come back for you one day soon.”

  “I hope so,” said Branwen. “But he has chosen a dangerous life. I would have it no other way, but I fear for him.”

  Blanchefleur thought of Perceval again.

  SHE SAT IN THE SOLAR SPINNING, and the thread humming between her fingers was fine and even, good enough to be dyed berry red or peacock blue and woven into woollen broadcloth for cloaks or tunics. It was the first really cold day of winter, a week or so after Nerys’s departure, and on the hearth a fire was lit. As usual, Blanchefleur’s attention wandered from the thread she spun to the window that looked out on the long pale road. She drifted from chair to window once or twice. The third time, there were two riders.

  “Someone is coming,” she called breathlessly. “He and his man both wear red, bright as blood.”

&nbs
p; “A knight, then,” Branwen said.

  Blanchefleur watched them come closer. She knew the same thought was humming in both their minds, but she said: “If he’s a traveller he won’t come here. He probably stayed the night at Case and had an early start. He’ll keep going, maybe up to the Scots’ land.”

  “Maybe as far as Orkney!” Branwen spoke lightly, but her words brushed close enough to their hopes to silence both of them.

  “He’s coming in the gate,” Blanchefleur cried at last.

  “Do you see his shield?”

  Gold and gules. “It’s Sir Perceval.” Blanchefleur was surprised how normal her voice sounded.

  Branwen flew to the window. Blanchefleur returned to her seat and went on spinning. The thread ran smooth between her fingers for a long time before the door opened behind her. Then the spindle leapt from her fingers and fell with a soft thump into the reeds on the floor. She reached to pick it up, but then thought better of it and rose to her feet and turned, looking at Perceval.

  He had all his lean brown limbs and both his brown eyes. Something that had been pulled tight with worry in the back of her mind slackened in relief. But he was coiled tense himself, and spoke without greeting or preamble: “Lady Blanchefleur, we must leave at once. How soon can you be ready?”

  Blanchefleur gripped the back of her chair. “What’s wrong?”

  He looked around at the others in the solar who sat motionless, staring. Then he bowed his head and said, “The Queen stands trial for her life.”

  For a moment Blanchefleur felt as though the floor had opened up beneath her. In the midst of this she heard her voice saying, “Within the hour, or sooner. Branwen, have Dame Glynis put up food and send to the stable for our horses.”

  “Don’t leave without me,” Branwen was already on her feet and moving to the door.

  “Not if you are ready.” Blanchefleur turned back to Perceval, almost pleadingly, conscious of the pain she had caused him last time they met. “I won’t be long.”

  In her own room, she bundled a change of clothes, her comb, and some other necessities into a saddlebag while Branwen fluttered in and out with questions and suddenly-remembered last-minute tasks. At the last moment, only because it was the strangest and finest thing she owned, Blanchefleur dug into a chest and took out the obsidian knife, and tucked it into the saddlebag. Then she went downstairs.

  In the courtyard they were saddling Florence, and a pony for Branwen. King Pelles was there to bid them farewell, and the rest of the Carbonek folk clustered around them: Branwen’s mother, Heilyn’s parents, Dame Glynis, and others whom she had come to know and love, and must now leave behind for another new life.

  King Pelles said, “Lady of the Grail, in a happy hour you came to shelter under my roof. Go from it with God’s favour.”

  She curtseyed to him and took her leave of the others. Perceval was waiting for her when she turned, and took her saddlebag without speaking, and helped her to mount. Then the four of them turned and went down the valley.

  Blanchefleur turned once to see the tower of Carbonek which she had first seen shining with Grail-light in a desolate valley on a night of fear. Today it stood bare and homely in the winter sun, and the light of Sarras no longer shone in its windows. But it heartened her like a sight of the field of an old victory.

  She urged Florence, sleepy and slow after two idle years, into a trot and drew level with Perceval. “Please. Will you tell me what has happened?”

  He kept his eyes narrowed on the road ahead. “Surely. But let it not delay us. We have little enough time, and the wild is full of dangers. If you can bear it, we must ride through the night.”

  “I’ll bear it.”

  “Good.” His forehead crinkled in thought. “So, the Queen was found with Sir Lancelot in her chamber.”

  Something had plucked her heart out of her chest. “What?”

  “Well, this is the way of it. There was a poisoning. Camelot,” he added, “is not what it was. So many of us never returned from the Grail Quest, and the new generation knows not its father.”

  “A poisoning, go on.”

  “One of the pages tried to poison my father,” he said with a sigh. “God knows why. Some imagined slight. But the dose went astray, and slew a knight of Gaul. This was at a banquet given in his honour by the Queen, and the Gauls blamed her. In the trial by combat, Sir Lancelot fought for her, and won. Only then did the page confess.

  “That was when Sir Lancelot returned to Camelot. After the Grail Quest, he kept clear of us for months. Perhaps it was the shame of not achieving the Quest. Or perhaps he wished to kill his love for the Queen before he saw her again. Nevertheless, when the need arose, my cousin Mordred sent him word of the Queen’s plight, and he returned in the nick of time.”

  “Then she has had one narrow escape already.”

  Perceval nodded. “It was a knightly and courteous deed of Mordred’s to send for Lancelot. During the Quest, they say, Mordred was better than a right hand to the King’s council. Then the King made him a member in the autumn, but the Queen threw all her influence against him. Of course, he may have aided her from policy, not love. But Lancelot defended the Queen, and the truth came out in the end, and all was well.

  “Until, a week ago, my father’s youngest brother Agravain claimed he had heard the Queen and Sir Lancelot in the garden, making an assignation.”

  “And? Was he telling the truth?”

  “We have only his word; the Queen denies it. When Agravain went to the King with the news, privately, the King laughed and told Agravain to take Lancelot in the Queen’s room at the appointed time—if Lancelot was there to take.”

  “Oh,” said Blanchefleur, perceiving the rest of the story in a single flash.

  “Yes. Agravain surrounded himself with a band of knights—for the most part young men, who have joined since the Quest.” Perceval shook his head. “They seem like raw boys to me. Poor lads! Sir Lancelot was there, of course. But even in peace-garb, unarmed, he was more than a match for them. He got a sword and cut his way through them, galloped to his castle of Joyeuse Gard, and left Camelot full of blood and uproar.”

  “And you? Were you there?”

  “I had ridden with the King to Caerleon-on-Usk.” Perceval shook his head. “Agravain could not have chosen a worse moment, or a more lunatic manner. Had he gone alone and unarmed, Sir Lancelot would have treated him courteously. But met with naked blades and armed men? It was folly! And blood was spilled in the city itself.” Perceval glanced at Blanchefleur, grim foresight in his eyes. “It was new blood he shed. But I fear a rift has opened within the Table, one it will be difficult to heal.”

  Blanchefleur shifted in the saddle. The day’s end—whenever it came—would leave her whole body aching. And there were long days of travel yet to come.

  Not that it mattered. Not that anything else in the world mattered except that Logres was trembling and the pale and smiling queen of her earliest memory was in peril of her life. “You say that Agravain claims he heard the Queen and Sir Lancelot speaking in the garden.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Queen denies it, but he did find Lancelot there with her.”

  “She says he came, but she never sent for him.”

  “Then there are only two possibilities,” Blanchefleur said. Her breath hung on the cold winter air like smoke, and she shivered. “One, Agravain is telling the truth, and the Queen is guilty. Two, he is lying.”

  “Yes.”

  “If he is lying,” Blanchefleur said, “then his behaviour was not lunatic. It was subtle—horribly subtle.”

  “And we are dealing with a cunning and dangerous enemy.”

  They rode on a few paces in silence before Perceval frowned and said, “At least, that is what I would say, if this was not Agravain. But I would not have imagined him capable of making and executing such a plot.”

  “You mean, being your father’s brother?”

  “I mean his character.” Perceval
flung up a hand. “He is not subtle. Bursting in upon Lancelot with an army is very much his way, as is being surprised and offended when the operation fails to run smoothly.”

  “I see.” But it was an unconvincing excuse to her ears.

  “I know what you are thinking,” Perceval said. “To tell the truth, I could think so too. But with the blood of the Table soaking the city of the Table, the words of accusation against my own kin go sour in my mouth. Well, and so the Queen stands trial for adultery and, if she is found guilty, will go to the fire.”

  Another dull pang struck her. “And the King allows it?”

  “He must do justice, even on his own wife, Blanchefleur. That is why Sir Lancelot and not he has always been her champion. A judge cannot argue a prisoner’s case before himself.”

  “But Sir Lancelot did the killing. Why do they not deal with that?”

  “They will. In time.” Perceval fell silent. “But this matter has grieved the King beyond measure. I never thought I would see him despair.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “He can’t find her guilty.”

  Perceval said: “If she is, he will.”

  Blanchefleur had not even allowed herself to consider this possibility. She did now. “He will be forced to condemn his own wife to death. Sir Lancelot will never return to the Table. The prophecy of Merlin at my birth will fail. Logres will fall, and no one will be left to mourn her. And he despairs…Oh, Perceval…he believes it. He believes Agravain.”

  Perceval compressed his lips. When he spoke, it was almost in a whisper.

  “Yes.”

  So this was what she returned to Camelot to find: despair and disinheritance. The thought struck another cold shaft through her. “Perceval! Why are you taking me to Camelot? Why now?”

  Perceval said: “I am not. Unless the Queen is already acquitted when we come there, I am taking you further, to Joyeuse Gard.”

  “To Lancelot! Why?” Because she was his daughter? “—Why?”

  “I came to Carbonek without the King’s knowledge,” he told her. “My father said: The Heir of Logres, she should be here. But not at court, not until her position is assured. The Queen will scarcely be condemned, but if she is she will not go to the fire. Lancelot will bear her to La Joyeuse Gard. Take the Heir of Logres there.”