Prologue
At last dawns the day when Galahad is ready to go home. Home. It’s such a strange, complicated word after all this time. It feels almost like a concept that belongs to someone else. The sky outside is clear, although the day dawns crisp and cold. Today is a day on the border of winter and spring, a day auspicious for such things. Galahad is dressed in the manner he used to be accustomed to, a manner that now feels strange. The cloth tunic scratches against his skin, and even his trousers feel odd and stiff.
He shifts uncomfortably, trying to adjust the way they lay. The surreptitious movements don’t escape White’s keen gaze. He turns a sharp smirk in Galahad’s direction, neither kind nor unkind.
“Are you regretting that you can’t take it with you?”
And by it, he means the finery that has come to characterize Galahad’s life in Vada-el.
“No,” Galahad says tartly, although it’s a lie. “Just uncomfortable, is all.”
He’s wearing—if not the same clothes that he entered Vada-el wearing, so many years ago when he elected to stay—then clothes that could be their match. They’re made from the same fine linen worn in his father’s house—fine enough for a lord of Somerset and yet nothing compared to the textiles available within the eternal city. He’s used to cloth that whispers like silk, fluid as water against the skin, fabrics that seem to gleam with gold, that seem to trap the soft sheen of moonlight, so beautiful one could weep to look upon it. But such clothing won’t suit him where he’s going, and so he’s had this outfit made in the old style.
He clings to his tartness a moment more—an old habit and a comfort—before at last letting it fall.
“I don’t want to go,” Galahad confides. “Now that I have what I want, I find…” He laughs, low and amazed with a tint of bitterness. “I find I don’t want to leave you.”
“Darling boy,” White says. His lover is a wonder. He touches their foreheads together, breathing in the scent of him. Their hair falls twined around them, the white and the black, poetic.
They rest in each other, rest in this stillness.
“You should go,” White says at long last, thumbing the corner of Galahad’s jaw. “The sands of time will flow backwards if you ask it of them, but not forever. Not once the anchor is gone. If you don’t go, you’ll regret it, I think, and I don’t want you to have any regrets. Not with me. Go.” White kisses him sweetly. Soundly. “Live the life I have stolen from you.”
A beautiful tear streaks down Galahad’s proud cheek, and White wipes it away.
“I will miss you,” Galahad says.
“So young,” White says with fondness, pressing his lips to Galahad’s forehead a final time. “Time flows so differently for you yet. It’s charming, Galahad. Truly.”
The word still tastes sweet on his tongue. Galahad, his love’s true name.
“Will you forget me?” Galahad asks, his voice small and somehow sly.
“Never.”
The vow makes Galahad smile. This spell requires a place of deep magic, and Galahad intends to find it in the sacred clearing of his youth—the one that had showed itself to his family time and time again. He’d considered using the tower at the heart of Vada-el, the place where he’d given his vows and tied himself to White, but in the end, it hadn’t felt right.
This is deep magic, the most complex spell he’s ever wrought and one that will reach deep into the heart of him as well as into the fabric of time itself. He needs to be near to the earth, the rock-above-the-sea on which his family was built.
“Would you have me come with you?” White asks.
It’s a sweet offer, a tempting one, and for more than one reason. It’s true that he’ll miss White terribly and that his mere presence would be a comfort. Galahad is part of the city now, and he feels it with every year that ticks on, but he is still young and still human in so many of the ways that count. He won’t return for decades, and that knowledge is a heavy burden to bear.
Beyond that, though, White is a force of nature in his own right, a font of magic and a learned one. He isn’t the king of Vada-el for no reason. His skills would be a comforting bolster at Galahad’s side. Still, this is something Galahad must do alone—he feels the truth of it, as he felt the truth of his lonely destiny as a child. And so he politely declines, and White must feel it too, despite his offer, because he assents with a bare incline of his head.
Galahad sets off beyond the doors of the citadel that he now calls home, beyond the gates of Vada-el.
From the cool shadows of the doorway, White watches his departing form growing ever smaller as he walks toward the horizon.
In truth, the time of Galahad’s absence will pass in the blink of an eye. White will barely have time to notice him gone, although it feels cruel to speak the truth out loud. His love would take it ill.
Galahad, too, has lived here. Has become a part of this place, as surely as White is its foundation, accepted the eternal city into his bones. Galahad knows the truth as well as he, of the shifting sands of this place. Although in his heart of hearts, White thinks he could pass a thousand years without forgetting. Even on one so capricious as he, Galahad has left an indelible mark. It is a testament to all that he is. Everything he is. White’s strange witch-consort.
Chapter 1
It’s so very quiet without Galahad around. Iseult notices it day by day. She can’t stop noticing.
It’s not as though she’d spent her every waking moment with him, not for a long time now. Their father had put a stop to that when they were yet children, and still Galahad’s absence echoes through the corridors that she walks.
It’s not the same without him.
Nothing is, and yet she has tasks to accomplish. There are tinctures to brew and supplicants to tend, ashes to read and a dozen half-intended curses to cleanse—a hundred irons in a hundred fires. Iseult is busy and falls into bed exhausted more nights than she doesn’t. When she sleeps, she dreams of nothing.
Galahad had often been plagued by ill dreams. When she thinks of sleep, she thinks of him.
She remembers the way he had thrashed and cried, those nights after Vada-el changed him. His pain had spoken to her across walls and distance, stirring her from her bed. That was the truth of it that Father couldn’t fathom, that taking them from one another did nothing. Separating them did nothing. No heavy stone or thick lumber could shield Galahad’s need from her. She always came when he called. She remembers comforting him.
Iseult hasn’t had a nightmare in years. Her sleep is the untroubled sleep of the dead. It’s a good life—a useful life—and she’s grateful for it.
And yet every hallway seems sparse. Every quiet room feels lonely.
It’s not only Galahad’s absence, if she’s honest with herself. There’s an ache for freedom that burgeons within her, a want for light and wide-open spaces. A yearning to lay claim to a life beyond the restrictions and age-old callings that have consumed hers.
She feels jealous of Galahad sometimes, however unfair it may be, but jealousy or not, she has a promise to keep.
A fire crackles merrily in the fireplace. Iseult takes a long, slim stick from her desk and holds it in the fire until the smoldering end catches flame. She cradles the flickering, dancing little bud of fire within the circle of one cupped palm, walking carefully to the wind
ow. A smooth, white candle sits on the windowsill, in the same place it’s lived since Galahad’s departure. It’s welded flat to a shallow, curved disk of bronze with melted wax.
Iseult tilts it, holding her small flame to the tip of the wick, waiting patiently until the candle catches. Once she’s satisfied the flame will not go out, she puts her lighting stick out with a graceful flick of the wrist and sets it back on the table where it belongs.
Her empty, spacious chamber is lit between these two points of light, the hearth fire within and the candle without. Another mind might call it eerie, but there’s no fear within her. She knows very well the strength of the protections that line this house, those that hold it together. Her room is swept free of evil spirits and ill intent, bathed in seawater and blissfully silent of the buzz and hum of outside intrusion.
People’s histories are often so loud, weaving and branching in a thousand different directions.
She looks out over the walls that guard the manor, into the woods that are nothing more than a black mass of feathered firs that meld seamlessly into the sky. She looks to the east, where she knows her brother still lives.
His life is obscured from her. His path is hidden from her sight while the eternal city yet preys upon him, but she would know if his life were extinguished. Not with magic, perhaps, but she would feel it in her heart. This much she knows to be true.
Iseult says a small prayer for him and stares out the window a while longer. A cold wind blows, bringing strange tidings. She doesn’t like the way it feels against her skin.
On any other night, she would close the window—any night that saw Galahad safe under the same roof as she. Tonight she leaves it open, despite her misgivings. A candle burning in the window, a light against the dark. These things she had promised him. Iseult keeps her promises.
***
The years grow harder, and still Iseult lights her candles. Her father would have long since made her stop, she knows, if only he knew what it is she got up to in her chamber. It’s fortunate in that case that he will never have to find out.
Iseult may go out on her own, although her father mislikes it. In truth, they cross paths seldom. He’s no more present at meals than he ever was, if anything growing more sequestered since Galahad took his leave. A disappearance, he thinks it was. He refuses to consider that Galahad may have left of his own accord, despite the hard way he had been treated. It’s perhaps kinder for all their sakes, though their father is occasionally given to fits of paranoia in which he schemes against their neighbors, greasing the machines of war.
Iseult isn’t invited into Father’s doings, not like Galahad, but there are things she knows, things she sees. The knowing comes to her as true as her own memories, as clouded and strange.
She walks, when she can, across the manor grounds and farther still, into the woods that she’d once shared with Galahad. The quiet green of the trees brings her comfort, a welcoming shade where the laws are simpler. Nothing is expected of her here.
Mother warns caution—the eternal city rouses from its slumber, and the woods are not as safe as they once were—and Iseult accepts her warnings with good grace. It’s a grace that Mother hasn’t forbidden her from entering the woods, having lost one child to them already. Iseult knows this.
And yet Iseult, too, can’t be but what she is. She is careful but not afraid. She returns to the manor well before nightfall and is careful never to lose her way. She knows in a way she can’t explain—not to Mother, not to anyone—that the city in the forest wants nothing from her. It’s a hollow, deadened kind of feeling. That, too, is impossible to explain. Many of her feelings are, so she keeps them locked up tight.
The wild spaces that border her father’s holdings don’t seem dangerous to her so much as they seem sad, and nowhere more than the c
learing where she and Galahad used to play.
The pond is smooth as glass, clear and serene. A scant wind comes and ripples the surface, scattering leaves across the top of the water that float like small boats. There’s a chill here in the shade of the trees, one that makes Iseult wrap her arms around herself. Not a creature stirs, and no bird calls.
Iseult settles herself beside the water, at a place where she can observe its shifting changes, allowing her gaze to grow soft and unfocused. She’d thought to find comfort here, but instead there’s only more of the same—the loneliness that dogs her.
Idly she wonders if she could convince Tristan to come with her here—probably, if she told him she was in need of accompaniment and protection. Tristan has a sweet heart and a generous one. Still, it seems unkind to use it thus, for her own purposes, and she dismisses the idea out of hand. Besides, unhappy memories lurk here. For her, but how much also for Tristan, who loved her brother—who loves him still, she corrects herself unhappily.
Something stirs at the edge of the trees, motion where before there was none. Iseult isn’t battle-trained as Tristan or Galahad, but she has a keen eye, and still, she notices things. A flash of silver in the bushes, a crop of hair, a pair of eyes.
These things she notices out of the corner of her eye, but she pays them no mind, humming a little louder as she combs the grass with her hand, carding her fingers through smooth, blue-green tufts. She believes it still, that Vada-el means her no harm, that the city wants nothing from her. She is fixed in place, a player in the story of all things. One with a role can’t have another.
Still, she keeps her eyes open, and gradually, gradually, a form steps forward from the treeline—a boy neither old nor young, her own age, perhaps. His steps are silent and the language of his body open as he approaches, and what can Iseult say? She has never been afraid of strangers. It was always Galahad who was the wary one among them.
“Hello,” Iseult says, looking up at the boy standing above her. She can see little of his face, shrouded as he is in sunlight, all of it a halo around his head, catching the tips of his hair and staining them golden. She squ
ints against the brightness.
“Hello, fair one. May I sit beside you?”
She thinks of her mother’s warnings, all of them flitting through her mind before she dismisses them out of hand. She doesn’t believe that this boy means her harm, and so she retracts her hand from its restless wandering.
“If you like.”
He does as he says, settling beside her with a soft rustle of grass. They sit shoulder to shoulder, so close she could reach out to touch him if she tried. The smell of his skin is like amber and new leaves—like fresh, growing things.
“I wanted to see you with my own eyes,” the boy says, turning to her. Like this, they’re almost of a height, and she can finally see his face true. He’s handsome, with hair the color of the sand of the shore, with a nose charming and crooked that speaks of a break badly healed.
She feels the fleeting urge to reach out and touch it, although she resists.
“Why?” Iseult asks, fixing him with an unwavering gaze.
“I’d heard tell of a tremendous beauty with a wondrous gift, one raised for the throne of the white court.” He shrugs and turns back toward the water. “I wanted to see if it was true.”
She bites back the immediate denial that wants to spring to her tongue, for all information may be useful. She soaks in his words instead.
“And your verdict?” she asks.
He tilts his head, looking at her. “Undecided, but I'll tell you my true name as a sign of my regard.”
“I don’t want it.”
“It’s ungenerous to refuse such a gift.”
“Then I’m not generous,” Iseult says.
“It’s not very wise, either.”
“And also unwise.”
Iseult holds the boy’s gaze, unblinking, and he meets her eyes and stares right back, gazing placid into her eyes. His eyes are the color of moss, flecked with brown the color of toads’ muddy backs in the middle.
Then suddenly, he laughs, a cool, rich sound that washes over her like a winter brook. His eyes crinkle when he does, and his teeth are strong and white in his face.
“My name is Luca,” the boy says.
It’s true that she didn’t want it, but some things, once received, are impossible to return, so instead, she just says, “Thank you.”
For whatever it’s worth, Luca seems satisfied by her response. They don’t speak any more, and Luca’s quiet presence by Iseult’s side is strange but not entirely unwelcome. They sit side by side watching the water until the chill of the shade grows unbearable and the sun sinking below the tops of the trees heralds Iseult’s time to go.
She gathers herself and sits up with a sigh. “I have to be getting back.”
“Okay,” Luca says solemnly. He’s sprawled on the bank of the pond, sitting back, reclined on his arms. His head tilts carelessly to
the side as he watches her. “Have a safe and pleasant walk.”
She feels somehow discomfited by his scrutiny. He is the most interesting thing that’s happened to her in years, and the least painful. She thinks to ask him if she’ll see him again but bites the words back behind her lips. She only nods instead, hieing away from the charmed glade toward the path her feet know so well.
She can feel Luca’s eyes on her back all the while, watching, watching until she’s out of sight.
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