All of a sudden, as if the ether had simply spit her out, Guinevere was there. She looked at me and frowned, then she turned around, her back now facing me. She stood with her arms crossed over herself, and even in the dream I registered the wrongness of her posture: it was the stillness of someone who had learned that moving too quickly brought consequences. She was looking at something on the wall and not moving.
Then Galahad came into the frame in the same way Guinevere had. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next he was. He stood there looking at Guinevere, and his expression was just as stern as it usually was.
A moment later, a scourge appeared in one of his hands. The weapon was short-handled and practical. It was the type of tool used for penitential discipline, the kind I’d seen monks use on themselves in the cold hours before dawn.
He tore the tunic away from her, and along her back, I could see the welts, bruises, and scars. Then he held the scourge above his head and brought it down against her naked and already marred skin. She didn’t make a sound; that was the thing that struck me the most. Even as he raised his hand and brought the scourge down for a second time, and the blade-tipped ends sunk into her flesh, causing streams of red to run down her back, she didn’t make a sound.
My dreaming mind tried to reshape him, tried to give him a reason, a context, something that would make the sequence of events make sense in the way that preserved what I knew of him. It failed. Morgan held the image steady with both hands, and I could almost feel the pressure of her holding it in place.
My sleeping mind had a dozen defenses ready:Galahad wouldn’t, Galahad is holy, Galahad would never, there must be something I’m not understanding... and it deployed all of them.
“Galahad is not the man you believe him to be, Lance,” Morgan said.
It happened another two times while I stood there, unable to look away and unable to move, Morgan’s hand somewhere behind my chest keeping me fixed in place.
Guinevere continued to make no sound at all.
“Now you know,” Morgan said, and the room was already beginning to break apart, the light going wrong again, the stripe of pale window-light widening, then warping and taking everything with it.
“Wait—” I started.
But she was already gone.
I was upright before I was even fully awake.
Both hands gripping the edge of the bed frame, my knuckles white, the wood creaked under the pressure of my grip. My heart was slamming against my ribs with the rhythm of a man in a fight: full sprint, full alarm. There was sweat beading across my forehead and my palms were clammy. The cold air of my chamber suddenly felt as if it was hitting me everywhere at once.
I sat there just breathing.
The room was dark except for the banked coals in the hearth, which had gone mostly gray. It was the middle of the night, then. I’d been asleep for maybe two hours. The candle on the table had burned down to a stub.
I opened my hands and looked at them. The indentations from the bed frame were still red across my palms.
A dream. That’s all it was. Just a dream. It wasn’t real.
I set my feet on the floor and pressed them flat against the stone, the cold of it grounding. Then I breathed out slowly: inthrough the nose, out through the mouth, the way I’d taught young knights to breathe when panic was coming.
A dream. It was only a fucking dream.
Morgan wasn’t even in Camelot. Fuck, she was rumored to be dead! No one had seen her in years. The last time she’d been at court she’d still been Arthur’s intended, and even then she’d been... the kind of woman who treated every room like a battle she’d already won. She’d lasted at court about as long as a candle in a storm. Arthur’s advisors had arranged the betrothal, and Morgan had refused it. That was the version I’d heard, anyway: that she’d refused it and walked away, though some said she was removed by force, and others said she’d simply vanished one night and left a room full of frost behind her.
The point was: she’d been gone for a very long time. Long enough that she could have been dead. The other point was that whatever my mind had just cooked up, all I knew for certain was that it was a dream. It could have been nothing more.
And if not, then the point became that even if Morgan had dream-walked into my sleeping mind, she was a sorceress with her own agenda and always had been. There was no version of this where Morgan Le Fay acted out of charity. So, if she had, in fact, appeared to my unknowing mind, then she was showing me this for a reason that only benefited her. Because that was what she did.
I had no way to know if any of it was real. My dreaming mind could have constructed all of it from suspicion, suggestion, and the particular guilt I still carried about the woman in Galahad’s chambers. Dreams did that: they borrowed faces and turned them monstrous.
It meant nothing.
Right. It meant nothing.
Nothing at all.
Galahad was a man of the gods. A man of purity; he was painfully, deliberately, rigorously pure. He’d taken vows I’d never been capable of. He’d built himself into something incorruptible through sheer sustained will alone. I’d watched him for years. I knew who and what he was.
I told myself this another two times, maybe even three.
Then I lay back down, and I stared at the ceiling.
