“Aye. That’s what they all thought. Courage or cowardice. Clean miss of it. It ain’t about what love broke. It’s about what stayed behind—emptied out, and no one there to tend it.” His gaze lifted to Darcy at last. “That’s whysheremains. And why he does not.”
Darcy swallowed. “You speak of… the Lady. No name. No lineage or duty or any other identity. She just… arises.”
“No,” Harrowe said. “She’s there already. Been waitin’, one way or another, all this while. Only she’d no equal to answer her.” He bent nearer, thick finger riding the line. “‘No troth unbound.’ That’s the fault. He reckoned a man could divide his troth. Keep what was done for and what was still his to keep.”
“You are saying—”
“I’m sayin’ Bedevere didn’t fail for lovin’ his king,” Harrowe cut in. “He failed ’cause he wouldn’t leave him when there were nothin’ left to do. Couldn’t step off from what was already over. And couldn’t give himself over to what came after—not fully.”
He paused, then spoke more slowly. “Blame him if you must. But to a knight, sir, the oath to his king weren’t one loyalty among many. That was the whole of him. His oath. His purpose. Himself.”
The words pierced with a force Darcy felt rather than heard. He drew himself upright, the room narrowing around him, his breath arrested hard in his chest.
Because he had seen it.
Not a dying king this time—but fire, and water, and a boundary that would not yield. The certainty that whatever was asked would not take a portion of him, or a season, or a sacrifice that could be tallied and survived. It would take the whole of him, or it would take nothing at all.
His hand closed at his side, fingers biting into his palm as though to anchor himself to the present. “You are telling me,” he said at last, his voice carefully level, “that what was required was not bravery.”
“Not as he wanted to shape it,” Harrowe said, turning a fragile page in theLiberonce more. “No man wants to pay that price, I expect.”
Darcy bit his lips together. He could scarcely draw air. Damn it all, he had come here for reassurance! Information—a way to survive, see it all, whatever it was, done rationally and decently. But that was not sounding like an option.
“And the Lady?” he choked. “What of her? Does she… come to an end?”
Harrowe’s frown pushed out in thought as he followed a line with his finger. When he spoke it sounded not as if he were reading, but postulating from memory of a different passage altogether. “What of her? Aye—what of her.” He shook his head. “She ain’t promised a thing. ’Cause she ain’t the question in it.”
Darcy’s voice dropped. “Yes, she is. That much I do know. She is at the very centre of it all.”
Harrowe straightened and pinned Darcy with a look of incredulity. He lowered the book and cocked his head. “You… you know who she is,” he murmured. “You found her.”
Darcy turned his gaze to the hearth and did not answer at once. When he did, it was barely above the level of the fire’s soft collapse. “Quite by accident, yes. And not in‘Cantium,’as some might suggest.”
“Her name…” Harrowe half rose from his chair, his face alight with the awe of a child. “You know her name? And where she is? Then you must have…”
He broke off, the colour draining from his face as the implication caught up with the wonder.
“Then you’ve drawn it out,” he said. “Not made it—no. But fetched it forward. Took what was meant to stand silent and made it answer afore its proper hour.”
He stared at Darcy as though seeing him at last. “If you’ve stood before her—if she’s known you an’ you to her—then the keeping couldn’t bide as it was. Not after that. You’d have set it on the road to reckonin’.”
Darcy closed his eyes and scrubbed his face with his hands. “Toward collapse would be a better word.”
Harrowe stared at him, something like disbelief breaking through his habitual reserve. “Then why in God’s name are you sittin’ here?”
The question tore loose what restraint Darcy had left.
“Because I do not know what I am meant to do!” he snapped. He jerked to his feet, the chair legs clattering behind him. “Every course I can see ends in ruin. When I first came near her, she weakened. Heaven above,Iweaken! She drains my strength like sap from a tree, but she still collapsed in my arms. Whatever passes between us takes from me and gives nothing back to her!”
He dragged a hand through his hair, breath uneven now.
“Yet when I am absent, the world itself begins to fail. The land turns against its keepers. Markets collapse. Men riot for bread. My cousin is called back to war when he has already paid his due. And my own mind has turned against me! Day and night, I see nightmares, visions of her face… And I have had word that she is weakening still more in my absence!”
He snatched up theLiberand made as if to throw it against a wall, but a quick yelp from Harrowe stayed his hand. He clenched his fist around the cover and shook it in Harrowe’s face.
“I am told that I must act—and yet no one can tell me how. If I pledge myself blindly, and it destroys her—”
He broke off, shaking, and released the book back to Harrowe’s eager hands. “I will not be the man who finishes what Bedevere began.”
