“Oh, Art. Forgive me.”
More laughter. “What on earth for?”
“I should have... held on, surely. Waited.”
“I can, usually. Not with you, it seems. Pass me my linen.”
Limbs heavy and passive, as if honey had got into his bones, Lance watched Art clean them up as best he could. “I didn’t know there could be anything as good as that. Not in the whole world.”
Arthur glanced up, a half-smile gleaming. “Oh, there’s all kinds of good things in the world. I would love to be the one to show you.”
“Art...”
“Hush,” he said again, lithely scrambling away. “Stay where you are. I have to get something for you from our rooms.”
Lance and Edern had given the visitors the best of the praetorium’s sleeping quarters, on the leeward side of the building, looking out across the sweep of the valley to the east. He waited, counting his heartbeats, until they blended with the brisk sounds of Arthur’s return. Then he sat up in the stormy wreckage of the bedding. “Oh, no,” he said, when he saw the beautiful thing Art was carrying, held out towards him in both hands. “I can’t take that.”
“It was made for me by master-smiths in Cerniw. You haven’t seen it before because I’m supposed to carry it on state occasions only, to impress and terrify the local chieftains. It’s not ceremonial, though—it’s a battle sword, through and through.”
Unable to help himself, Lance lifted the weapon from his grasp. The hilt and blade had been forged from one beautiful length of bronze, burnished to a mossy sheen in the last of the sunset. Gold and silver chasings glimmered around the pommel and crossguard. He drew it a little way out of its leather sheath, and saw that the groove of the fuller was marked with interwoven dragon’s heads. “This is your father’s sign.”
“Yes, the pen-dragon.”
“What is this metal? The one that glows like gold, but looks like the sun at winter dawn?”
“Copper, they call it in Cerniw. They take it straight from the earth.”
“What would Sir Ector say, if he knew you were trying to give me this?”
“Hetoldme to give it to you, Lance. Considering what you’ve given us—given him—it’s very little.”
“You mean the sword from the lake? That’s a fine weapon, but it’s crude by comparison with this. Why does it mean so much to him?”
Arthur sighed. He leaned to help Lance lay the bright ceremonial blade aside, and climbed back into the bed with him. They subsided against Elena’s fragrant, reed-stuffed pillows. “He wasn’t just ripping strips off me earlier on tonight. He wanted to know, in exact detail, how I’d taken your sword from the rock in the crevasse. He thinks it answers part of the prophecy the Merlin gave him all those years ago.”
“Did the Merlin describe such a sword?”
“Not exactly, and poor Ector was confused when we learned from you that you’d taken the sword from a lake. Alough,” he amended, grinning, before Lance could correct him. “Here, rest your head on my shoulder—it’s good to be like this after love.”
“It’s too good. I can’t go to sleep here, Art.”
“I know. I won’t let you.” Art brushed a kiss to his brow. “In Ector’s words, I didn’t justtakethe sword from the stone—I freed it. And if you avoid the obvious Latin words for stone likepetrusandsaxum, and usecalxinstead, like lime or chalk—which is a bit of a stretch, but are widespread rocks in the south...”
Lance yawned hugely, causing Art to chuckle and prod him. “Sorry. It’s not that I’m not interested—”
“In my geology lesson? I should hope not. The point of all this is, though, that Ector says your sword wasex calce liberatus, freed from the stone. And the Merlin said the sword would be named Excalibur.”
Another helpless yawn. “That’s right.”
“What? You know this already?”
Lance surfaced from the shallow, sunlit waters that fringed the edges of sleep. Excalibur... The word and its strange, blood-deep familiarity dropped away from him into dream’s ocean as he opened his eyes. “Not... Not in any way I can explain. But that’s right. The sword is called Excalibur.”
“By all the gods! Don’t tell Ector, or he’ll have us both up all night with his myths and prophecies.”
“It’s still just a rusted old chieftain’s sword that’s lain in the mud for who knows how long. What you’ve given me is worth a king’s ransom.”
“All the more reason for you to keep it. You might have to ransom me one day. At any rate, you can use it down in Dumnonia, when Ector’s sergeant-at-arms starts to give you proper lessons, and...”
