Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It had been Gawain's idea not to use the Round Table. The Christmastide feasting brought in lords and their retinues, churchmen, hedge knights, and more often than not fey and mysterious maidens from all corners of the kingdom, and as noble as the Round Table might be, it sat only fifty and no more-- though in truth, only twelve brother-knights had been chosen to sit there, and Gawain the youngest of them. To fill the Great Hall with the Round Table, and exclude all those who came to pay tribute and share these holy days with their liege, would be rude, unforgivably, whatever the ideal of the Table might be.

For the duration of the feast, they had returned to the older traditions – a high table on the dais, for the King's family alone, and the rest assembled at long tables that encircled the chamber. It made for a quieter dinner: Gaheris and Agravaine and Gawain, Guinevere and Arthur, Bishop Baldwin and Sir Yvaine, with Merlin lurking like a thundercloud beyond Yvaine, standing back in the corner away from his seat. Arthur, too, remained standing, talking with Merlin over the heads of Baldwin and Yvaine, blind to how half the room was turned to him uncertainly, neglecting their meals and wondering at his example.

Gawain sighed to himself. It was hard to remember, betimes, that the boyish Arthur was four years his elder. The King had been raised as a page and a squire, to expect the most trifling of knighthoods for himself, taught little of the ways of great princes, and he did not understand how his wild enthusiasms and his fresh ideas perturbed the court, kept them off-balance and always awaiting the next fancy. Arthur had sworn, after his first New Years' feast three winters' past, that he would not sit to his meal until another strange adventure had found his knights. It was, perhaps, impossible for the King to understand that to the assembled peers, Arthur's court was already a strange adventure. Now the tables had been laid for an hour and still Arthur would not sit, complaining to his white-bearded tutor that the promised marvel had yet to descend.

More than one of the knights at the lower tables looked abashed – as if it was a failing on their part, that they had not endured a sorcerous ordeal or undergone a holy quest whose telling would sate Arthur's wonder-lust. Sir Kay was grimacing around bites of roast.

When a knocking like the peal of thunder came at the doors to the Hall, Gawain saw no fear in the faces of the assembled knights, but rather only relief and contentment. Arthur began to sink sideways towards his seat, and Merlin glanced at the heavens and traced the sign of the cross in the air. A moment later, before Sir Bedivere the Marshal could rise to open the doors and announce whatever strange visitor had come to them, the doors burst open, and an apparition rode in. His war-horse picked its way in between the tables as though navigating between brambles on a forest path, until he stood at the center of the assembly.

Knight and horse both were green, in variegated shades but untouched by any other color. Though the horse wore no barding, by its build and its step it was plainly made for battle, and its rider likewise – a broad-shouldered man who would stand a head again taller beside any knight in the room. He, too, wore no mail or armor, but fine-embroidered feasting-clothes of emerald brocade, darker and richer than the green of his skin, like the underside of a leaf. His hair and beard, moss-green, veiled his face, hanging in braids that stretched down to his elbow. In one hand, he held a bough of holly, and in the other a great bronze axe, studded with green gems and with its haft enameled in green. The horse beneath him was dappled in lighter greens and darker, and the deep yew-needle green of its mane was plaited with ivy, where twined ropes of ivy made its bridle. A green banner with no emblem hung at the cantle of his saddle. Even the fur that lined his mantle had been dyed green, and it wasn't until his spurs flashed gold that any trace of another hue could be found.

Arthur's smile as he greeted the towering figure was broad and genuine. “Sir!” he said. “You are welcome in Camelot. I pray you, sit to feast with us, and tarry awhile, before discharging whatever errand has brought you here.”

The mounted man did not smile, nor, Gawain thought, give any fit response to an offer of hospitality, but only raised one eyebrow. “No,” he said. “My errand grants me no time for leisure, though it pleases me to hear that your court is as generous as men would have it. If your knights are likewise as worthy as rumor tells, as wealthy in courage and wit and courtesy, then you will have great cause to be proud of them today.”

Arthur stood still a single scant moment in thoughtful consideration, and when he addressed the knight again, his voice was cooler, but still tempered by the heat of his excitement. “If you have come to bring challenge or battle, good knight, you will not lack for eager foes.”

“I ride in peace,” the knight said, hefting the holly-bough he carried for emphasis. “If I came girt for war, with haubergeon, spear, and shield, I think that none of these beardless boys would stand against me. As you see, I am not dressed so, and so my errand is a peaceful one – a jest for a sporting time of year, if you will be gracious enough to grant me a boon.”

Gawain grit his teeth, and Agravaine beside him gripped a carving knife in white-knuckled apoplexy. Yvain, even-tempered as he was, had whitened and begun to push back his chair, and the whole company of knights made a clamor of outrage at the giant's insults.

Arthur held up a hand for silence, and silence came. A spark was in his eye now, the knightly fire roused within him, but he was a courteous king. Being foster-brother to Sir Kay, Gawain thought, would give any man a tolerance for ill speech. “Ask your boon,” the King said.

“I ask that the most courageous of your knights take up my axe – a gift to the one courageous enough to hold it—while I kneel before him, unarmored, as you see me now – and strike him the best blow he can. Provided, of course, that he vows he is willing, in a year and a day, to must meet me at my own home, and submit in a like manner to my blow in return.”

Where before the knights had been loud with their outrage, now they were silent. Gawain lost his anger for a moment – what kind of a fool was the Green Knight, to challenge a king in his hall, insult his knights, and then put himself under the stroke of an axe? He had heard tales of knights who, in black despair, had thrown themselves rashly into battle, or tilted until they died of it, but this would be no honorable death, no knightly suicide, if there was such a thing. Long seconds passed, and no-one stepped forward. Beside him, Agravaine shifted in his chair.

The Green Knight twisted his head, braids swaying, as he glanced about the room, then laughed.


  "These are the worshipful knights of which I have heard so much laud? These are the best men who serve the High King, and defend the honor of his Queen? Where are your pride and your great feats of arms, now wrought false and hollow by a simple request? Who fears to receive a blow, when he may strike one first?”

With a violent motion, Arthur threw himself away from his seat, rounding the table before any could forestall him. “A knight may stand amazed at folly, and not yet fear it,” he said hotly. “If my court gave you a space of breath to repent your request, 'twas grace on their part, but uncouth as you are, it is my boon to give and I myself will grant it you!” He stepped down off the dais, glaring up now at the towering knight rather than meeting him levelly eye-to-eye, and strode forward, one hand rising from his side already to reach out for the bronze-bladed axe. The Green Knight smiled, a broad expression that revealed gem-green teeth, and swung himself down from his horse without relinquishing either axe or bough. Wordless, he flipped the axe in his hand, and presented the King with its haft. As Arthur gripped it, the room still seeming frozen in anticipation, Gawain flung himself up from his chair in an echo of the King.

“Your Majesty!” he called, praying that his tongue might move as swiftly as his mind now did. “Please, I beg you, permit me the honor of exchanging blows with our guest. It is not seemly for the King to have to answer such foolishness, or for this stranger to think your knights less bold. I am the youngest and least at the Round Table. If I may strike him, then it will be seen that any here would do the same. And if, by some fortune, he is able to return my stroke, the loss to the table will be felt the less.” To himself, he continued his reasoning.  If this was sorcery or treachery -- as surely this knight who gave no name, showed no emblem, and carried on him no iron was a fey knight, and no right man at all -- he was the knight they could best afford to lose.  For he remembered hearing tales of such knights, always garbed in a single hue, with wondrous strange arms, from his mother, Queen Morgause, who was well-studied in the arts of witchcraft and the secret lore of the land. If this was any manner of trap, baited for the King, better that he fall into it instead.

“He speaks well,” called Sir Bedivere, and Sir Lucan said likewise, until all the fellowship of the Round Table had put their voices behind Gawain's own, beseeching Arthur. The King's brow furrowed, and beside him the Green Knight looked about him with a lively amusement, but held his silence. “Come, then,” Arthur said after a moment, reluctantly, not allowing his anger to master his reason. “I give you my blessing.” Gawain hurried down to him, and Arthur passed him the axe, saying in an undertone as he did so “Strike well, nephew. Unless your blow falls ill, there is little doubt in me that you can abide any strike he may make in return.” Then Arthur mounted to the dais again, and the Green Knight stepped forward with a chuckle.

“Youngest among the company of these knights, perhaps,” he said. “But not least, I think. Let us make clear the bargain between us. First, I would hear your name.”

“Sir Gawain, King Lot's son, of Lothian and Orkney. As for the bargain, it is that you will submit to one blow from this axe now, the best I may strike, and in a year and a day I will the same – at your hall, unarmored, kneeling. With this same axe, or another?”

“The axe is yours, Sir Gawain, son of Lot, of Lothian and Orkney. At my home I have many others. And it pleases me well that you are the knight to match blows with me, I think. Strike, then, and should I afterward have power of speech left to me, I will tell where you may find me next year, and partake of my hospitality.” So saying, he knelt, laying down the holly at last, and reached back to part his braids and offer clear view of his neck. No fear or hesitation was in his motion, no sign that his death was upon him. Gawain turned the axe in his hands. A like blow, the knight had said, and a Christmas jest. Should he thereby be merciful in his swing, and hope for mercy in return? But there was no promise of it, and indeed, that might be the trick intended. Arthur's mercy and generosity was well known, and this knight had made mock of the virtues of Arthur's court. Better him than Arthur in this place, for certain.

He would trust to the strength of his own arms rather than the mercy of an insulting stranger. He raised the axe high, as he would to split a log, measured his stroke with a glance, and brought it down on the flesh of the Green Knight's neck. He expected to meet resistance, or find that the stroke would rebound, and that he was prepared for – not as much, the ease with which flesh parted, the way that the axe carved smooth even through the bones of the neck, and before he could pull his stroke, the axe-blade rang like a churchbell on the flagstones beneath them. The knight's body lurched, shedding blood like clear green sap – but blood, the same, by the thick smell of it that overlay any scent of roast fowl or fresh-baked bread in the hall. Even as the head struck the floor, however, and the body tilted forward, one hand outstretched and wound fingers in the braided hair. The body was not falling, but only leaning forward to recover its lost member.

It stood, still shedding blood, the drops of which became bright crimson the moment they touched to the floor, and lifted the head high beside it, as a knight lifts a trophy newly won in the joust.

“Well struck,” it said, eyes wandering a moment before they found Gawain. “I shall look for you in a year's time.” The voice was not deep and boisterous now, but thin and reedy. “I am called the Green Knight of the Green Chapel, and by asking after that name will you find me. Stint not your search, lest other men name you a recreant knight, but uphold your vow, Sir Gawain.”

With that, the corpse's other hand found its way to the pommel of his saddle, and, mounting swiftly, rode from the hall, head held before him as if to see the way.

Chapter Text

The King's good wine saw Gawain through the rest of the feasting. It might have seen him through the winter as well, but for Agravaine and Gaheris. He would not lower himself to drink so before them, not as the knight they served as squires. And had he done so as their brother, they'd have made him suffer for it. Instead he spent his days buried in the affairs of court, attending courteously on the King and Queen, and allowing the season to pass unnoticed, so that he would not go mad in its snowy confinement. Nights when he could not sleep he studied maps, looking to see if any of them marked the Green Chapel, or made lists of well-traveled knights who he could ask. But when he spoke with them he saw the guilty looks in their eyes, and knew them ignorant, and discomfitted by his company, and he forebore from asking.

Once and only once did he ask an audience with Merlin, who granted it, and listened to his question with raised brows.

“That is not the answer you need of me,” Merlin told him. “Where you may find the Green Chapel will be little obstacle to you, and an honest quest that may lend you luck. How to survive the blade-stroke there waiting for you... no, do not glower at me so, young prince. It is neither cowardly nor un-knightly to ask, as you believe. You must meet the Green Knight as he was, true, and that forbids you armor – but it does not forbid you whatever charm or protection he wore to keep him living, if it is something an honorable man could partake in. But I do not know it. Others, closer to you, have made study of the fey, where my magic is drawn from a different well. You know as much of them as I that would help you.”

Others. Like his own mother, he knew, but most especially his aunt Morgan. Before his thoughts could turn him back to the nepenthe of the King's good wine, he sought out his cousin Yvaine. For all that their mothers were sisters, and their fathers were allies and Kings in the North, Gawain knew little of him. He jousted well at tournaments, and fought fiercely at melee, but even in sport kept himself apart – he did not even join the other knights in hunting and hawking. The arms of Rheged contained three ravens, and where other knights trained falcons, Yvaine kept these instead. Yvaine's chambers were in a high corner of the castle, impossible to keep well-heated, but they contained the space he required to keep and train his ravens – something impossible to do in the castle mews, as the other birds saw them not as rivals but as food.

Yvaine was pale-skinned and dark-haired, as if he was knightly enough to take the argent and sable of his coat of arms into his very being. “Cousin,” he said, looking up from one of his ravens. “I've been expecting you. And I would be honored to.”

“Honored to what?” Gawain asked stupidly, before he remembered what he had come to ask Yvaine.

“To ride north to my father's court in Rheged, as soon as the weather will allow, and there question my mother, Morgan, concerning her knowledge of the fey. It is a sensible plan, and I shall be pleased to help, and to see my parents again.”

Though it might be months before the weather permitted them to accomplish it, having an aim restored Gawain's spirits, and he made certain that his brothers had his arms and armor oiled, polished, and well-kept, and his horse and theirs exercised. He tilted against them, or against the quintain when they were bruised and sore, every remaining day of that winter, until in the midst of the thaw he blocked a high blow from Gaheris on his shield and saw what he thought for a moment was a holy vision.

“Is that... the Blessed Virgin, scratched onto the back of my shield with a knife and tincture of indigo? Agravaine, what the devil have you been doing to my shield?”

“You raise it so seldom from your side,” Agravaine retorted. “I've told you. I thought that if I put a fair maiden there to stare at you might raise it more often.”

Gawain scowled and squinted at the image. “Is that Mary, or Queen Guinevere?”

Agravaine shrugged. “I had to use some earthly model for the face...”

The day after Easter they rode out from Camelot on the northern road – Gawain and Yvaine, with Gaheris and Agravaine and a young cousin of Yvaine's, Colgrevaunce, to squire them fitly. Arthur and a great company of knights rode with them a ways, a host of revelers about them laughing gaily in their joy of spring, the promise of adventure, and the splendor of that company, but one by one they stopped by the roadside, until even Arthur would come no further, but gripped his nephew's shoulders fiercely and gave him his blessing. One last rider remained with them – Bishop Baldwin, astride a fine white palfrey with gilded trappings.

“Sir Gawain,” the Bishop said, when Gawain reined in his horse at a courteous distance. “As the King has blessed this endeavor, so shall the church – for it is ill for any Christian knight to be slain, especially as the result of sorcery. That you seek life means you are not stricken with despair, and that I commend as well. But ware you well that you must not use sorcery to combat sorcery, or most unChristian witchcraft. Hold you to your faith, and seek no magic.”

Gawain's hands clenched tightly on his reins, and his horse stirred beneath him at the tension. When he replied to the bishop, however, he inclined his head in respect, and his voice was modest and quiet.

“Your Grace,” he said. “I am a knight of good faith. When your prayers can, of a certainty, vouchsafe that my head will remain on my shoulders, then I will rely on them. In the meantime, I seek other means.”

As Baldwin rode away, Agravaine spurred his horse beside Gawain's. “Ah, brother, I don't understand you. One moment your humors are all a-boiling, the next, you're mild as milk.” His tone made it clear that one of these states he admired, and the other, despised. Gawain paused a moment, to maintain his brother's scorn rather than winning his admiration.

“A knight should be courteous,” he answered him. “By my nature, when tried, I am not. I strive to achieve a knightlier nature. I pray you, Agravaine. Strive with yourself.”

Gaheris nearly fell from his horse in a wheezing fit of laughter.

The road was a broad cobbled Roman track that arched north around the Cumbrian mountains until it found its way to Caer Ligualid, Urien's capital, forested highland that reminded Gawain all too keenly of Lothian. With God's grace, if the road were in good repair, the northern snows melted without flood, and no robbers lurked to waylay them in their journey, it would only be three weeks' ride, and they might be in Urien's hall by May-Day.

The winds were still chill and wet, and at night they crowded their pavilions close around the fire. Gawain was well used to the company of Gaheris and Agravaine, but Yvaine and Colgrevaunce were stranger as traveling companions – sober and thoughtful, spending their nights discussing ought amiss they had seen in the road or weather, as courtly in the wilderness as they had been in council at the King's table. There was no boisterousness in them, none of the wildness of blood that ran so thick in Gawain's family. Still, the cousins did their best to make common ground with one another, which lead to Yvaine's enquiry, one rainy night while the squires polished their armor, as to how and where Gawain acquired his coat of arms. “For that is no heraldry of the Kings of Lothian,” Yvaine said, whereupon Gaheris and Agravaine both undertook to explain it to him.

“When he was squired, abroad in Europe, the Church granted him it, for fivefold virtue,” Gaheris said, primly and proudly.

Agravaine snorted. “Mother painted it for him,” he said, “as a symbol of protection, and to show the endless knot of loyalty tying the brothers Orkney together. Gawain,” he reached over and rapped the top point of the star with his knuckles, “myself and Gaheris,” the points to the sides, “and the babies, Gareth and Mordred,” and the base of the star, at last, drumming his fingers there after he had finished speaking.

Yvaine looked at Gawain, as if trying to divine the true answer from him. “My mother painted the shield,” he acknowledged, remembering the way the brush had looked in her hand, the smooth, precise strokes as she traced the endless knot of the star; the contemplative frown of his father upon seeing his own emblems so overwritten. “But it was His Holiness Symmachus in Rome who confirmed them as my coat of arms, and who assigned their meaning on behalf of the Church, upon my knighting.” that image, too, was clear in his head – the whirl of his head and pounding of his heart as he knelt on the marble floor, dizzy from fasting through his vigil and overwhelmed by the sight of the Pope, sword in hand, staring down at him as if to pronounce judgment while the trumpets blared.

“I understand,” Yvaine said, and Gawain wondered just what it was that he understood. The fire dimmed to embers, and the conversation with it, until both were banked and left for morning, when they rode again.

There were places where the road had been torn up for miles, the cobblestones used to shore up the walls of sheep enclosures, or build hermitages in the hills – in at least one place, a sodden stretch of mud where the track lapsed was studded with cobbles, hurled onto the roadway from above, makeshift missiles used by long-departed bandits. Each evening the shadow of the Cumbrian mountains hid the sun from them, stretching out chill fingers over their camp, until the battered road, half-paved but clearly marked with wooden split rails, curved through the uneven foothills, dipping into glens and slanting unevenly over hillsides that had shrugged their slopes. The north country was lonely, and however abused the road, five armed men traveling along it on horseback found no threat or difficulty past the far-off cries of wolves waking them in the night. At last, they were near enough that Yvaine insisted they press on past dusk, and found themselves caught on a hilltop between moonlight and firelight – it was May Eve, and the folk of Caer Liugalid had lit bonfires on every hilltop around the city. Twenty days' riding came to an end, the great gates of the fort opening to them with glad and welcoming cries, goblets of hot wine pressed into cold hands as the grooms saw to their horses and the seneschal showed them in to King Urien's feasting-hall.

Urien had been King of Rheged before Gawain was born – his hair and beard were threaded evenly with silver and brown, but his face was unwrinkled save for thoughtful lines above his brow, and he was still broad-shouldered and hale, roaring with delight at his son's unexpected appearance and throwing himself up out of his throne to grip Yvaine in a fierce embrace.

Gawain found himself wrapped in a warm cloak and seated at the King's left hand, in an elegant chair stained dark and graven with the same motifs that marked Urien's throne – the chair where his aunt would be seated, were she present. For the moment, he pressed his worries aside – it would not do to be discourteous to his host, and the hour was late. Doubtless the Queen had simply taken herself to bed at an earlier hour, and he could see her in the morning.

When he woke, late in the morning, wrapped in furs in a grand guest chamber with his head aching with the aftermath of wine, Yvaine was waiting for him, more somber yet than Gawain had seen him.

“My mother is gone,” he said. “At Michaelmas lat year she set out with her retinue. She said that she wished to visit her sisters, but my father says Lot and Morgause have seen no sign of her in Lothian. It is possible that she has crossed the Channel to visit Queen Elaine in Garlot – but knowing my mother, it is equally possible she has gone to see the holy sisters she studied under in Cornwall, or that she has taken her progress elsewhere, traveling further, or under pretense from the first. She has little love for my father, and has spent as many years apart from him as at his side, since I was weaned of her.”

Gawain's head ached the more fiercely at his words.

“Despair is a sin,” Yvaine said firmly, observing him, and offered him a hand to haul him from his bed. “Besides, it is May-Day, with a fine celebration, and feast-tables will be laid as richly as my father can manage until after Roodmass is passed, three days hence. Let your spirits stay as high as the occasion demands, and afterward, we may ride to Lothian, or where you will. I will not abandon you, Cousin.”

“Gramercy,” Gawain said, but a dark certainty was on him that they had ridden all this distance for no gain, and that it was his doom to spend the last year of his life in crossing and re-crossing Britain in a search that might leave him with neither his honor nor his life by its end, if he could not find the Green Chapel nor the fairy charm that had preserved the Green Knight.

He let Gaheris pull him into his feasting-clothes, but neither fine clothing nor rich food nor mead cheered him-- he remained dour, until he went outside to watch the pages fight a fierce melee with willow-switches, driving off the court of last year's May Queen, and guarding the new one as she was crowned by her predecessor – the Princess Morvydd, Yvaine's sister, with hair as dark as her brother's but her father's pale grey eyes.

Laughing maidens danced among the crowd, showering them with hawthorn petals, until it was time for the new Queen to choose her champion, and Gawain found himself pulled from the crowd. The May-Queen's court festooned him with ribbons and garlands of white flowers, and a stick of white birch was thrust into his hand, setting to face the Winter Knight before he fully understood what was become of him. The Winter Knight had been Morvydd's champion the year before – Colgrevaunce, no longer near-sullen in his quietness, but laughing through a thick white beard fashioned of wool, with a clumsy shield covered in sheepskin, and a blackthorn stick as dark as Gawain's birch-staff was pale.

They set at one another fiercely. Gawain responded without thought, but with the simple joy and focus he had always found in swordplay, leaping aside from the heavier blows as he had no shield to block with. This fight, he knew, he was destined to win, as summer always overcame winter – however chill and unseasonable the day might be. Colgrevaunce's strokes were measured, careful to give Gawain the time he needed to respond, and so Gawain grinned and pressed him, slowly speeding his pace, each blow harder on the heels of the last until there was no question of careful sparring, barks and chips of wood flying wild past them or stinging against the skin. At last, a blow hammered on Colgrevaunce's shield drove the squire back to his knees, and Gawain slowed his last two strokes, knocking the blackthorn from his hand and delivering a stern tap to his chest, poking through the long woolen beard with his coup-de-grace.

Then he was again surrounded by laughing and cheering youths and maidens, and the May Queen blushed and kissed his forehead, and it was as though the sun had come out from behind the clouds. Three days of feasting and celebration passed in a glad and careless blur, until the service on the night of Roodmass, when Gawain found himself seated again beside King Urien.

“You have been challenged by a fey knight, my son tells me,” he said. “And you sought my wife so that you might match him, enchantment for enchantment, and so not lose your life to one man's cruel Yuletide jest.”

Gawain nodded to him, his speech suddenly lost as he remembered the weight of his troubles.

“I know more than most men of these matters,” Urien said. “But less than you will require. Still, I can seek answers where you would not know to look, and you have brought me back my son, whom I would keep by me, jealously, for as long as I might. Therefore stay, feast and sport with my court, and I will send out heralds and scholars to seek my wife, and your mother, and what knowledge they might find to aid you besides. If Midsummer finds our questions unanswered, then I will release you to find your own answers, but it seems to me that some help or knowledge may come to us before then.”

Gawain assented, his spirits cheered by the King's words, for the Court of Rheged was a well-favored place to his eyes, some echo in it of both the splendor of Camelot and the rustic, militant fastness of Lothian, both equally dear to his heart. And Valmai, the May Queen was a fair girl, and the King's knights here considered him of great renown, rather than least among their number, and so it was that he went a-maying with the lords and ladies of Caer Liugalid, and forgot his troubles for some small time.

Gaheris and Agravaine likewise threw themselves into the full spirit of the month, easily relinquishing the heavy sense of purpose that had followed them to Rheged and fast becoming admired at court. Gaheris's perfection at sport, as well as his good humor and open, straightforward friendliness made him a favorite companion on any venture, while Agravaine was more sought after at the dinner table for his quick wit and sharp tongue. Gawain did not, perhaps, win quite as much worship as his brothers, but the courtesy Agravaine so despised made him respected by the older knights, and perhaps overly-beloved by the May-Queen's court, both of which were more than satisfactory to him. He told them tales of Gaul, Burgundy, Rome and Ravenna, Byzantium, Jerusalem, even to the edge of the Saracen empire of Eranshahr – though he had done little to earn renown himself, he had traveled across the known world when he was only a squire.  Then, too, he had avoided the shame of the northern kings and all their knights, who had rebelled against Arthur and failed, while Gawain fought infidels on behalf of the church. To the knights, he made little of his accomplishments, but to the maidens he allowed himself to be made much of.

By Whitsunday the restless May itch had made him impatient again – for the road under his feet, for something more knightly and less idle to do. But Yvaine had promised to travel with him, and he had promised Urien not to take his son away before Midsummer. None of the messengers had yet returned.

“A tourney,” Gaheris said, unprompted, over breakfast the next morning. “Caer Liugalid hasn't seen a joust, nor a melee, nor any sort of hastilude or martial game to test their mettle in a year. Urien and his company are solemn and worshipful, but the younger knights are just as hot of blood as we are. And if we send the invitations for Midsummer, near-all the great lords of Logres will be able to attend, and bring with them their knights – one of them, at least, may know of the Green Chapel, or a fey knight may come who can give you your charm.”

Urien consented easily enough, and an air of excitement filled the court, an energy it had lacked before. As the day approached, the King's messengers returned with knights and lords from Norgales, Listenoise, Powys, Cameliard, Sugales, and Lothian – but none from as far as Camelot, and none of Urien's heralds or sages had yet returned with any good answer for Gawain. His father's knights brought word that his own mother was not in Lothian, but in Lot's castle in Orkney, almost surely too far for him to ride and return in time to seek the Green Chapel, unless he was fortunate and it lay somewhere in Scotland.

On the morning of the tournament – Midsummer Night's Eve – Agravaine was nowhere to be found. Gaheris, unworried, professed his cheerful ignorance and assured Gawain that everything was ready for the joust, and a second squire would only get in the way.

Gawain, in turn, did his part, by failing to see that his spare shield and armor had gone missing, along with his mace.

Gaheris attended him, tying on the extra padding all knights wore to tilt, cinching and strapping Gawain into his lorica, and belting his sword at his side.  When that was done, he held up Gawain's helmet -- carrying on it a sprig of hawthorn and a long white sleeve, the signs of Valmai's favor -- and lowered it onto his head. Last, he helped Gawain onto his destrier, nearly as armored in barding and mail as he was. A lance was placed in one of his hands, cornet blunted but as heavy as any warspear, and his shield strapped on the other, polished until it shone.

Then the horns blew, and Gawain spurred forward to take to the field. In Camelot, the fashion had become for knights to tilt one against one, in even lists, where the lords and ladies could watch nearby at no peril to themselves. On the road, too, a pas d'armes with a guardian knight at bridge or crossroads was a strict affair on honor, testing but two knights against one another.

This, though, was a proper tourney, and a nearer thing to war. While many watched from the battlements, or pavilions set far back, here the object was to unhorse as many as you might, a battle-royal and a fierce test of horsemanship, of endurance, as much as prowess with the lance. It was less a sport for questing knights, and more a test for cavalry.

As soon as he had cleared the line of pavilions, a pair of brother knights , untested by battle, charged him. Gawain twisted in his saddle, pulled on his reins so that his horse reared and turned between them. One brother was hit sidelong by the shaft of the lance, and tumbled from his horse, while his own spear glanced at an angle off Gawain's shield, and the other thundered behind him, unable to force his mount in a tight enough turn to strike him. They both turned them again, with twenty yards between them, and charged again – both spears smote firmly on one another's shields, and Gawain rocked in his saddle, while the other knight was flung from his.

Neither stirred on the ground, and Gawain danced his horse past where they lay stunned to plunge deeper into the field.

As in battle, he came to passes again and again, too many times to count what knights he faced. Gaheris would count shields and record arms, when he had the leisure – Gawain broke two spears against Urien's best veterans, and had to split their shields with strokes of the sword until Gaheris could bring him his replacements. The field thinned, and the knights tired, so that a tilt every three minutes became every ten, and he had to roam to find opponents.

When only five knights were left horsed he met Yvaine – face hidden under his helm, but bearing the three ravens and a sable shakefork on an argent field. When their horses first came together, he broke his last spear on Yvaine's shield. Yvaine's spear had shattered as well, but he held to the shaft that remained, two yards in length, and Gawain had to shoulder under its reach on the next pass, hammering Yvaine's shield with the pommel of his sword, and crying out as their horses shoved and jostled, catching his leg between them, scraping it with their barding and half-crushing it. At last, Yvaine's horse staggered, and the next blow caught on his shield forced him to lean back too far, unhorsing him. By the time Gawain was clear and made certain that Yvaine was well, only two knights remained.

He rode at them with sword alone, and shouted greatly as he came close, so that one of their horses shied and threw him. The second knight wore no tabard or favor, unmarked and unpainted armor, and a blank steel shield, well-polished – and for a moment Gawain's heart leapt in him, wondering. Was this a Silver Knight, in service to Faerie? They met in a charge, and the knight split Gawain's shield with a blow of the lance, numbing his arm. On the second pass Gawain again spurred his horse into a turn, reaching out to grip the knight's lance in an armored fist and twist it from his grasp so it fell to the grass.

Rather than draw his sword, the knight pulled off his helmet, and Gawain saw it was King Urien.

“I cannot match a pass so bravely ridden,” he proclaimed. “I concede, nephew, and glad of heart am I to do so against so noble a knight.”

The unhorsed knights were tended to, their wounds dressed, and all were assembled again in the Great Hall of the keep to see the winners lauded. The joust being second only to the melee, it was last, while Gawain saw awards given out for all the lesser games – many an unhorsed knight in the joust who had found his senses quickly had won great renown by adventuring himself in the other games. At last, when the King had presented Gawain as champion, there was only the knight who won the melee remaining – a mystery knight, with a hooded surcoat and a golden shield without emblem.

There was a great outcry among the assembled knights as he knelt before Urien and revealed himself – for, as Gawain has seen by the mace that hung at his side, it was no knight at all but Agravaine, much battered but with a hard, triumphant smile. Urien looked between the brothers, and held up his hands for silence.

“Sir Gawain,” he said. “Will you grant me the use of your sword, and forgive me for taking your squire from you? For he has overcome a dozen good knights and more today, even once with naught but his mailed fists after he was disarmed.” Gawain presented the King with his sword, wordlessly, feeling a swell of pride, and a sudden, strange sense of great age, watching Agravaine's proud acceptance of knighthood, as Urien named him Sir Agravaine of the Hard Hand.

“I thank you, Uncle,” Agravaine said quietly, as Urien helped him back to his feet. “Truly, there is not a knight nor lord on the Isle of Britain whom I would rather have been knighted by.” The words were courteous, but the light in his eye was a great and passionate heat, a conviction as deep and wild as any Gawain had seen in him.

The moment they were not standing in front of a formal assemblage, Gawain fell on him, gripping his arms and laughing. “Sir Agravaine of the Hard Head!” he exclaimed, and butted his forehead against his brother's. “You owe me a mace, a shield, and a squire!”

Agravaine grinned at him, narrow and shark-like. “Urien's no miser with his coin, when it comes to awarding prizes. You'll have the first two in a day, for the third, you can have a second squire again after I've found my first! Always the greedy one, Gawain.”

“Always the foolish one,” Gawain retorted, and before Agravaine could give him the usual practiced return, Gaheris collided with them like a comet, and the rest of the evening was devoted to laughter and wine and a great many toasts, so that the following morning, again, Gawain woke in his room with no memory of retiring there, a crown of hawthorn twigs in his hair and a white scarf wrapped around one arm. He smiled at it, wistfully, and regretted a moment that he had woken alone – but then, for propriety's sake, it was better he had. Summer courtships were best confined to hay meadows, especially so far from home. He dressed, and breakfasted, and went down to the Hall still careless, riding yesterday's glory, until he saw Urien's solemn face, and remembered that it was now Midsummer.

“No word,” Urien told him quietly. “I understand well that you cannot wait, but I have none of the answers you sought – nor indeed, any notion that such answers can be found. But I do know one place where you may ask your questions. In Cornwall, there is a place called Glasswater – there is an abbey there, where the holy sisters devote themselves to the study of grammary – it is there that my wife learned the rudiments of her art, as a girl. And it is said that there is a fairy within the lake there, a great enchantress and water-nymph, who granted Arthur his sword. Nowhere in Britain is the bridge between human and fey lands broader, and if you must wander blind in your quest there is no better destination. Go, tomorrow, with my son, my blessing, and my newest knight. Ride nobly and without fear in the face of death, as you did against me. That will be enough for you.”

Chapter Text

Yvaine's ravens could have flown from Rheged to Cornwall in a day – two, if the wind was against them. Horsed, following the roads where they could and passing through mountains and forest, it was a month. It was an easier journey in summer than the road north had been in spring, but they pressed along harder, riding through rain and thunder, driven by Gawain's determination.

Though they were none of them familiar with Cornwall, nor had they seen Glasswater before, it was impossible not to know when they had found the lake they sought. Its waters were smooth and silvery, a ring-shaped lake around a high, crested island, banks crowded thick with apple trees that overhung the water, half-ripe apples pulling the branches low. From the south bank of the lake, a curl of smoke rose from behind a rough stone wall – the convent, no doubt.

Gawain laughed aloud at the sight, for there was a great release of tension in him. He hoped, he believed, that he was brave enough not to fear death – not when he had replaced his King under the axe, and saved much thereby. But the uncertainty chafed at him, and the delay tasked him. It was because he shared Agravaine's passions that he tempered his words so carefully. That heat in his heart made him suffer now, caught this whole year uncertainly between life and death, honor and dishonor. He wanted to survive, but he needed to find where the Green Chapel lay, and prove himself, whatever the outcome. Here was another chance.

“Where shall we first?” Gaheris called to him, turned on his horse halfway between the near shore of the lake and the swiftest path south to the convent.

“These may be the 'sisters' my mother wished to visit,” Yvaine said. “But...”

“There is no great adventure in speaking to a nun,” Agravaine said shortly. “But to speak to a lady of fairy, one who crafts or hoards magic swords, who might teach her arts to the holy sisters, who has shaped the progress of the Kingdom itself... that is worthy of a knight. Send Gaheris and Colgrevaunce to see if the abbey has a guest-house we might stay in, and a warm meal. But I'm away to the water's edge, and you, my brother, should be beside me.”

Gawain glowered, and cuffed his shoulder for presumption, but he could not disagree. With Yvaine on his left and Agravaine on his right, they spurred their horses onward to a broad, flat bank on the near shore, where a single red apple, fallen early from the tree, bobbed on the mirrored waters. Gawain glanced left at his cousin.

“If the Lady of the Lake is here, how do we summon her?” Yvaine looked at him, wide-eyed a moment, as if surprised by the question – though Gawain had come to realize that Yvaine had learned much from his mother, and was well-versed in secret lore. After a moment of silence, Yvaine simply raised his hand and pointed. It was not Gawain's question that had startled him. Agravaine swore, and Gawain turned back to the lake, to see the water boil and churn, as a shape rose out of it, half a dozen yards past the floating apple.

It was no Lady, fairy or otherwise. A white-clad Knight burst forth from the waters with a wave cresting before him, great enough that all the stillness of the lake would break and shudder.

The White Knight's armor was as fine as his own, polished overlapping scales of metal, his round shield with its blank white field was banded in iron, his great spear lacquered white and tasseled in shining samite. Over his armor was a snowy tabard, hanging heavy with water, but shedding it with unnatural speed, so that by the time his mount first set hoof on shore, he was as fresh as if he had merely ridden in out of a spring rain, and not plunged from beneath a lake.

Unlike the Green Knight, however, his mount was not his match in hue. Instead it was black, with a grey mane tangled in seaweed and eyes that flickered orange as fire. It was saddled, but bore neither bit nor bridle, and the White Knight's boots had no spurs. Gawain's own horse whickered its unease.

“Great knights!” the White Knight called in a ringing voice that carried trumpet-clear even through the helmet that masked him. “You have come seeking my lady, but she is not here. Still, in her name, I am charged to defend the sanctity of the lake; therefore I would tilt with you.”

“Gladly!” cried Agravaine, and wheeled his horse, seizing a spear where it lay bundled on the back of the pack horse trailing behind them. The White Knight surged from the shore, his fire-eyed stallion responsive to even the lightest touch or the shift of his legs, and the two of them came together in a single great crash. The force of the stranger-knight's blow struck Agravaine's shield so greatly that, though he sat his horse firmly, the horse itself was flung backward, losing its footing and rolling before the White Knight, so that his mount had to leap over it. The White Knight laughed, a sound of joyful surprise, and turned again to face Yvaine and Gawain.

“Who will face me next?”

Gawain spurred his mount forward, reaching for a spear, but Yvaine's hand on his arm forestalled him. “Wait, cousin,” he said, with quiet urgency. “Remember how we fared at tourney. If this fairy knight overthrows me, you may yet avenge me. But if he strikes you down, I doubt that I should be able to do the same. Let me ride at him first, and even if the worst happen, I may injure him, or his arm may tire.”

It was cautious advice, and it did not suit Gawain to hear it while his blood boiled and his heart thundered in him, seeing Agravaine lying still and senseless on the ground, still in danger from his squealing, panicked horse. But that Yvaine's words tasted bitter to him did not make their wisdom less sound, and he nodded, once.

“I will cross spears with you, and gladly,” Yvaine said. “But first, if you are a true knight and no recreant, promise me that you will see any of us who are wounded against you safely to the convent, for if you mean to take us prisoner beneath the lake, our quest will not suffer it, and we must both ride to slay you.”

The White Knight stilled. “Boldly spoken,” he returned. “But an easy promise indeed. There are no prisons beneath the water, but a fair palace you should have been glad to share hospitality at. I will not force it upon you. As for me, I am true of heart and word, and my blood is called royal in Gaul, but I confess it: I have yet to kneel before any man and receive knighthood.”

“Then like shall answer like,” Gawain told him. “We three are nephews to the High King, and the knight you unhorsed won his knighthood by felling many great men at tournament. If you defeat us, and are as good as your word, I swear to see you knighted – at my hand, should you consent, or at my uncle's if I am unworthy.”

“Who is worthy, let us discover,” Yvaine said, briskly, and raised his lance to the White Knight in salute. They flew at one another, as swiftly as a falcon falls from the sky, and each shattered a lance on the other's shield. Yvaine fell sideways from his horse, but came quickly to his feet, drawing his sword and standing ready. Wordless, the White Knight swung down from the saddle, unsheathing his own blade in answer, and they met again with a great, bell-like sound of metal against metal. But a minute had passed, neither drawing blood, when the White Knight buffeted Yvaine with his shield, and Yvaine fell to one knee. A strike from the White Knight's sword was parried but weakly, and his blade flew from his hands.

“Yield,” the White Knight said simply, leveling his weapon at Yvaine's throat, and Yvaine nodded, and let himself fallback to the earth, dizzied and exhausted.

When the White Knight mounted again, Gawain rode beside him, and offered him a spear, as he carried no spare. Though he could see no face through the other's visor, Gawain still looked him in the eye, and felt his regard in return.

“I would be honored to be knighted by you,” the stranger said, his voice earnest and wondering. “To offer me a spear to use against you...”

“Courtesy answers courtesy,” Gawain told him, truly enough. “If you had remained mounted when Sir Yvaine was on foot, then I would have shown you no more regard than that. You fight honestly, and I will give you what you are owed. But now, I think, for my brother and my cousin, I owe you something more, so hold fast this spear and make you ready, I pray.”

“Even so,” said the other, and they rode apart, measuring the space between them until it was proper. Then, evenly timed as the steps of a dance, and more skillfully yet, they shrank the distance between them. Narrow as the view through his visor was, Gawain's world narrowed yet more, coming to a focus at the point of his lance, and the line he drew from it to the White Knight's shield. Feeling the movements of his destrier beneath him became like feeling the workings of his own muscles, as smooth and obedient to his will. Then a force like a catapult-stone struck his shield, spinning him about, even as he thrust his arm forward and cracked the white shield in four parts. The world swam, and it seemed to him that the ground itself pounded him upon the back, before he realized that he had fallen.

Struggling, breathing coming hard to him and his shield arm sluggish at his side, Gawain rose. The White Knight had fallen as well, but flung free his broken lance and landed heavy on his knees, clutching at the ground a moment and rising. Their swords came free, and after a sluggish moment Gawain cast his shield aside. A blow for a blow, taken just as it was struck. That was the bargain that should be between all knights. That was the root of courtesy, and courtesy the root of chivalry, and chivalry the strong framework that Logres was built on. He charged the White Knight, as fiercely as if his horse was still underneath him, and their swords struck against each other with a force that shook him, from his arms down to his knees, but he stood fast, then stepped and struck again, and again, forcing the White Knight back. The world had shrunk around him, and the blackness of the threat of failure swam at the edge of his sight, and weighed heavy, an ache in his chest.

Now they trod the wet grasses at the verge of the lake; another blow, and they waded heavily into the water. Each strike came more slowly now, and the White Knight returned them, no longer content to block and retreat. Gawain marveled at the force of each blow. The White Knight was a well-built man, but no giant, no broader of shoulder than Gawain himself. But he hit like a smith at his anvil, and Gawain felt he rang with it, just as surely. While he still had his strength, he gathered it, and shouted defiance at the White Knight, swinging his sword overhead for a great blow, as though it was an axe he swung.

As soon as the breath of his shout left him, the world around him veiled itself in black, and Gawain slept, content.

-----

When he woke in Glasswater Abbey, the nuns told him it was but for the grace of God that he lived. The first blow of the spear had driven his shield against his chest, not only straining the muscles of his arm but fracturing fully five of his ribs, so that they pressed in turn on his lungs, dangerously. It was but a matter of time after that until his breath was shortened so sorely that it could not sustain him, and had not the young knight brought him swiftly to the convent, all breath might have left him.

It was, they said, fully ten days since he had tilted, and they were glad that he woke, for his cousin did nothing but interrupt their peace with strange questions, and his brother and the Gallic knight quarreled incessantly, and had almost come to blows, even in the holy refuge. Gawain thanked the sisters gratefully, and asked that they bring him first his kinsmen, and then the White Knight. He was strong enough to speak to them, he swore, and once he did he might be able to grant the sisters the peace they craved.

Yvaine came to him first, half his face livid with bruises still from the blow given by the White Knight's shield, and his right wrist bandaged and splinted. “They have not seen my mother,” he said. “And all of them claim that she had surpassed them in knowledge, even as a girl, but that their lore is also a holy secret: I do not think they know the charm, nor would they share it if they knew. But the Green Chapel they have heard of: no church at all, but a mound of earth raised by the fey: whether a tomb, or a fast place like a small fort, they cannot say, but it is in the wilds, the northeast of Norgales, past any land claimed by Gwynedd.”

Yvaine's expression twisted wryly, then became pained, at his bruises. That was the north of Wales, not far south and west of the land claimed by Rheged – far from any town or any farm, in the deepest and most wretched woods in Britain, but nonetheless, they had passed it twice since they rode from Camelot.

Gawain let himself breathe, calmly, and reminded himself that this was half his quest fulfilled. “Then let the sisters guard their secrets in silence,” he said, gently. “You try their patience, and disturb their peace, when they would mend us as we are broken.”

“Dented,” said Yvaine with a laugh. “But still whole, cousin. And we may yet remain so.”

Gaheris and Agravaine came together, arguing in the loud, good-natured way brothers had, so that he could hear them even as they passed through the garden outside. “I tell you,” Agravaine said as the two of them entered, “his horse was unnatural, his strength no doubt enchanted – if indeed we credit that a knight who rose from a lake is a man.”

“He told you who he is,” Gaheris said, then hesitated. “Was. Gawain! You are his elder, and his senior as a knight beside. Tell our brother to leave off his harangue. He'll do it for you, he's been worrying about you like a hen the whole time you slept.”

Agravaine slapped the back of his younger brother's head, nettled. “We were wronged! And weary from travel while he was fresh. And damn your eyes, Gaheris, you sat vigil every night, and washed his brow. If I have been a hen you have clucked alongside me.”

Gawain laughed, and found immediately that his ribs had not yet mended, and coughed until the both of them were silent with concern. “If that Knight – cease, Agravaine, for by his deeds he is a knight already, the same as you, and will be one rightly soon enough – was dishonorable as you protest, all of us would be trampled beneath his hell-horse's hooves. We were three to his one, and yet he challenged us. Could any of us swear the same?” He continued so until Agravaine was shamed into silence, and Gaheris fairly glowed – praise of the White Knight was sweet to his ears, which spoke well of them both, to Gawain's mind. He secured their promise that they would be civil as long as they remained in the abbey, and then sent them away, a little abashed – it felt wrong, to use the moral authority invalids gained over the well against them so. But he reminded himself that they were his brothers, and he had many other ways of shaming them besides, if he chose.

So the White Knight found him smiling. Unarmored, he was a graceful-limbed boy, not above fifteen, with dark hair that curled at the temples, the faintest start of a beard, and well-tanned skin. His features were strong, but plain, unhandsome – his face was the face of a hardworking churl, no matter the nobility in it. His strength was plain in his arm, and save for the stainless samite of his garb, Gawain saw nothing fey about him – not with the Green Knight as a standard. He was no more unnatural than Yvaine, and perhaps less.

“Sir Gawain,” he said, with a deep nod that only came short of a bow because Gawain saw it from below and not above. “I did not know that you had been so gravely hurt, and I am glad that you have woken. God's grace will see you recovered soon, I trust – your brother has told me of your quest. I did not mean to waylay it.”

Gawain looked at him, and he fell silent. “The road has been kind to me,” he said. “I do not regret its adventures, or where they have brought me.” After a considered moment he realized the words were true. “I am less interested in your apology, and more in learning who you are, and how you have mastered arms so young.”

“The Lady saw to my training, since she took my kinsmen and I under her care, when my father's kingdom fell. I am Crown Prince of Benoic, the oldest son of King Ban, and my name is Lancelot.”

“Prince Lancelot,” Gawain said. “Give me your sword, and kneel.” When he had done so, Gawain held the sword above his head, making certain that his eyes fixed on it. He trembled, though not, perhaps, with fear, but Gawain stayed steady, despite the weariness that had already returned to him. “Swear now to uphold the high virtue and glory of the kingdom of Logres. Do no outrage, nor murder, nor any cruel or wicked thing. Fly from treason, untruthfulness, and all dishonest dealing. Give mercy to those who seek it. Give all help and succor in your power to maidens, gentlewomen, and widows; and turn aside from all else to right any wrongs done them. Never, for love or gain, fight in any quarrel that is not just and righteous. Do you swear these oaths by the Blessed Sacraments?”

“I do,” Lancelot said, and Gawain lowered the blade, turning it until the flat lay pressed against his cheek, before he raised it again, turning it to lay against his arm, and offered the hilt to Lancelot. “Then rise, Sir Lancelot, and take your sword,” he said. “And mind you that no other title you bear will ever be as noble as to be a Knight.”

“I do,” Lancelot said again.

Chapter Text

The ride back to Camelot was slow. It was another fortnight before Gawain could sit a horse for long enough to make any distance, but there were other complications as well – they had now no fresh mounts in reserve. Agravaine's mount was lamed; Lancelot's had disappeared back into the Lake, and their company had swelled by three – Bors, Lionel, and Ector, the kinsmen Lancelot had spoken of, had all emerged from the waters of the lake, and even the pack-horses had been saddled to accommodate them. All were as fresh from boyhood as Lancelot, all eager and chivalrous, but all unused to travel. It was September when they rode in through the gates, and though Arthur declared a great feast, Gawain was quiet, letting Yvaine relate the tale of their summer, as though he had exchanged his courtliness for his cousin's solemnity.

He was planning.

Since he would take no squire with him to his death, he would have to leave behind his lance, and his armor, and his horse's barding, and his pavilion. He would wear mail – it would not strain his ribs, and he needed no-one to strap it onto him. He would take only Gringolet, his finest courser, his sword, his shield, and the great bronze axe, and a small tent one man could erect alone, even amidst a storm. He resolved to leave on Michaelmas, before any could expect it, and make ready to ride with Gawain whether he willed or not. Yvaine and Agravaine and Lancelot were all worthy knights, easy companions who shortened the long hours of the road. They would never abandon him. But with no charm, he would not be riding back, and he wanted none of them to witness his death. Not if it would come with bowed head and bended knee.

At the Michaelmas feast, he could not slip away unnoticed – for the whole of the Round Table came to take council with him, to offer advice, or to console him, to let him know that he would be well remembered. It was like listening to men talk at his own funeral, and it galled him. He phrased all of his travel plans in the vaguest of terms, showing on a map how a man could reach even the farthest points of Norgales in three weeks' hard riding. Let them believe he would wait for December.

His chance came, at last, on the morning of All Hallows' Day, while the court rested from the late night before. His provisions had been long stowed, and though he would not lower himself to hide, to skulk away as if ashamed, he walked quietly to the stables as if only for a day of riding.

Arthur was in the stables, standing beside Gringolet, saddled already, and all his provisions packed neatly on him. They looked at each other in silence a long time, and then Arthur helped him into the saddle.

“Please,” Gawain said. “Grant me leave to go, my liege, and explain this to all whom I leave behind. My words have left me, but if you found me here I should not need them.”

“They will understand,” Arthur said. “As well as I do. And whether I explain to the Table or not, all of them will understand that they are losing the finest knight among them. We will pray for your return.”

Gawain made the sign of the cross, wistfully, and in return Arthur rapped his fist against the star on Gawain's shield. He rode from the stables, and from Camelot, without any further delay – but not without looking back.

In summer, it had been easy to mark the right trail, or follow what remained of the Roman roads. In Norgales there were few roads, and the days had darkened and clouded so that it was only for brief, lucky hours each day that Gawain might mark the position of the sun. Soon it had been a week since he had seen a road, or village, or any sign that he was not the only living man in the whole of the country. He took the Green Knight's axe to a bear that attacked him when he sought shelter in the lee of a great humped oak tree on a hillside. From the bear he replenished his dwindling stores of food, but Gringolet was uneasy at the smell of blood, and all that night he felt watched, and heard hungry scavengers tear at the corpse. But the warmth of that little shelter was a great mercy, and he was grateful for it as he had little reason to be grateful for anything else.

As he quartered the woods, hunting less now for the Green Chapel and more for the light and warmth of the sun, for the blessing of someone to speak with, to smile at, for a sign that the world around him was other than random and mad, he found instead only that which would bring him to despair. A giant in the wilds struck at him with a gnawed thighbone that must have come from a knight, tall and sturdy and healthy before teeth stripped away his flesh. A single crack was left in Gawain's sword from where it had caught on the monstrous cannibal's backbone, and nearly been broken before he could wrench it free and strike again. A gang of robbers fell upon him when he would not surrender horse and arms to them, and only his mail-coat saved him once he was in the thick of them. He rested a day in their camp, tending to the wounds Gringolet had taken – scratches, and no more, but if his horse took fever or infection now he would surely die. For another day no matter how he turned he found, again and again, the track of a great worm slithering through the brush, but the serpent itself he never met.

The tenth day after he had slain the robbers he found the sea, unlooked-for. He stumbled from the woods onto a long shelf of slate, a cliff that overlooked whispering grey waters, quieted by the cold and the out-rolling tide. Across them, he could barely glimpse a long, ragged shoreline of a great island: Listenoise, it must be, where Pellinore ruled as King. He had come all the way to the west of Norgales, far too far for the forest he sought, and found nothing but the direction he must go: he must turn back, along the coast, and enter the wood again. He wept, as he would not have in the sight of any man, and ground his teeth together, and steeled himself, and spurred Gringolet to the east. A river blocked his course, and he rode a day to ford it – and the next day, found it frozen over, and its course and the woods alike choked with snow that had piled as he slept.

He pressed on. Each day was another blow he endured, a stumbling-block to work his way over, until he could not remember even the growling of his stomach, or the sting of the cold, or the tired ache of his muscles. It did not matter that he rode to his death, and every danger he encountered was a welcome thing.  It did not matter that between exhaustion, cold, and injury the world had become dreamlike, so that one struggle gave way smoothly to the next, with no sense of the days or miles that yawned between. He would not give in. He would find the Green Chapel, and if he died in the wilds, it would be a blade that killed him, at the appointed place and hour for his death, and all men would know that he had conquered fear, and died an honorable knight. He would not have it otherwise. He resolved him then that when he saw the Green Knight, he would strike another bargain: that word was brought to Camelot of how he faced his end, and that his bones at least could find their way to a civilized place for their rest.

“Deliver me, Lord,” he said at last, to the listening forest around him. The stark shapes of the trees and the slinking shadows beyond them seemed intent on his words, but if they could hear him, if anything could hear him, surely God would also. “I have at least one more task to accomplish, to show that a knight in your service need not fear death. But death in ignominy, alone and unknown in a trackless woods, that I do fear, as I fear to fail you. Show me which way I must go to carry out your will, Lord, Merciful Mary.” He crossed himself, and imagined, in lonely fancy, that he could hear Yvaine's voice at his ear, asking if perhaps God's will was something beyond what he understood.

A bell tolled, from somewhere far ahead, and again, and he rode toward it, wondering if he was falling back into the dream of the past few days, or something stranger yet – but then before him was a track leading under the vaulted branches of the trees, white with snow but marked heavy with hoofprints, and where the trees cleared away was a frozen meadow, and rising from it a high and handsome curtain wall, shielding a keep. Hurrying forward he called out, and struck his fist on the gate, until at last a porter came to the wall above him, astonished, and asked on what errand he came.

“Nothing but to ask the lord of this place for his hospitality, and where this place lies, so that I may find my way,” Gawain called up. “And, I pray you – what day is it?”

“It is Christmas Eve,” the porter called down. “And as I know my lord, he would have you welcomed to the castle of Hautdesert. Come, we shall go to him as he attends Mass.”

Chapter Text

There was a creaking of chains as the portcullis was raised and the oaken gate winched open.  As Gawain rode in, he found himself in the midst of a crowd of people, dressed in fine clothes and furs, and chief among them a tall, dark-haired man in his middle age with a small, trim beard and an olive complexion – like the people of Eranshahr, a Saracen, but clearly a Christian lord, leading his retinue to the small church within the walls, whose bell was still ringing sweetly. One and all, the company greeted him with wonder, for it was plain that this was a lonely place, and a visitor so unexpected, coming from afar, was a near thing to a miracle. They helped him from his horse, and took him within the church at once, so that he could sit beside the Saracen lord and his wife, a woman much of Gawain's own age, with a complexion like her lord's and rich brown hair that fell to her waist. She was passing fair – the equal, Gawain thought, of Queen Guinivere, or of his own May Queen Valmai in Rheged, and the more striking because he had not seen any woman who looked as she did since he had returned from Byzantium. They sat through the service in quiet worship, as was fitting, and the warmth within the church seemed to soak through Gawain, even to his bones, and bring back a little of life to him. When the service was ended, the lord of Hautdesert pulled Gawain to his feet, and hugged him as he would a brother.

“All here is your own, as you will,” he said, when Gawain introduced himself, and asked for food, and a place he might sleep for the night, and stabling and provisions for his horse. “But as for myself, I would beg you to stay with us as long as you might, for a friend is a rare and welcome thing to chance upon in these woods, and you have been on a hard, strange journey to come here, which I would fain hear you tell of. I am called Bercilak, and my lady, Beryl.”

“Christ requite you,” Gawain said, heart caught between gladness and heaviness. “I will gladly stay the night and the morrow, but past that, I may not tarry on my quest. On the New Year I must be at a place known as the Green Chapel, but where in these woods it may be found I have not yet discovered.”

“Then I would bid you stay until New Year's Day,” the lady Beryl said, laughing. “For it would be wasteful to make a week's journey in search of the Green Chapel, which lies but two miles from where you stand this moment.”

At her words, and more at her smile, all Gawain's weariness fell away, and he laughed with relief, that he could redeem his honor and carry out his charged, whatever else it might mean for him. “I will stay gladly, then,” he told Bercilak, “the moreso if you can spare a man on New Year's morning to lead me where I must go.”

“For now,” Bercilak answered, his voice gentle, “you must content you to be lead to my table, and thence to bed, for any man might see that you are cold, and hungered, and tired, and I will not suffer my guests to be any of these things.”

For three days they feasted, joyful in the Christmas season, as merry a company as any Gawain had seen, and with jest, and music, and fine conversation he was well content to pass the light hours of the day, and sleep the full span of the dark, recovering the strength he had spent on his journey. Even the weather relented its harshness, so that there was true sunlight for those few bright hours, and the snow began to melt. There was much to wonder at – a castle in so wild a place, well-provisioned and strongly built. Bercilak told him that it had passed to him from its previous lord, who he had served as a squire in the days that the High King Ambrosius had enjoined the lords of the land to take up arms and drive away the Saxons. Nearby there was a watch-tower that overlooked the sea, and had long been used to warn of invasion from northern waters.

Then, too, Gawain marveled at Bercilak's coat of arms – a six-pointed star, argent, on a green field, styled so that it made an endless knot similar to Gawain's own. It seemed the perfect complement to it, and indeed, Gawain thought Bercilak an enviable knight – one point more courteous than he was himself, one point more greatly honored, with his castle, one point better loved, with his generous-hearted lady, free and radiant in her manner. More blessed, more virtuous... and yet Gawain did not resent him, but felt nothing but joy, that he could rest here before his quest came to an end, and see his dreams so gracefully surpassed. And, he admitted, Bercilak and his lady seemed to take equal joy in him, seating him beside them at every meal, speaking light, teasing words to him, praising his own wit and grace as he did theirs.

On the third night of feasting after Christmas, Bercilak invited Gawain to join him tomorrow in the hunt, and Gawain demurred. Even after all his rest, since his trials, a few hours could make his ribs ache with the cold, and he tired himself with nothing more taxing than conversation.

“I would spoil your chase,” he said, ruefully. “And I would not cost you your sport, when you have given me much, unasked-for.”

Bercilak sat beside him, shaking his head and smiling. “You are my guest,” he said, loudly enough to be overheard by half the hall, and Gawain knew he was devising some further jest. “And you share my hospitality, but in truth, as a guest in my home you should be bound by my will, should you not?”

“The least favor I can return you,” Gawain said, bowing, and Bercilak laughed.

“Then I bid you hunt with me,” he said. “But as you may not ride, hunt you here in the castle, while I hunt abroad in the wood. Rest, and grow stronger, and dine with my lady Beryl, that she may see to your health, and make a bargain with me, for a fair exchange. Whatsoever I catch in my hunt abroad, I shall make a gift of it to you. And in return, grant me whatever fortune you find here in the castle, for the luck of a questing knight is said to be a marvelous thing, and without this bargain you may well be the richer.”

“As you will,” Gawain said, smiling, for Bercilak could not know why his words had stung. “I think your luck the better, but that makes me gladder still to consent.”

“Drink with me, then, and our bargain will be sealed,” the lord of the castle told him, and they drank, and after Gawain begged leave to retire for the night.

-----

Gawain woke to the sound of the door to his chambers opening, when dawn but dimly filtered through his window. Silently he raised himself, and glanced around the curtain surrounding his bed, and froze as still as he could, astonished. Lady Beryl stepped softly into the room, glancing behind her as she did, and eased the door closed without a sound. Before she could turn again, and see him, Gawain let the curtain fall back into place, and lay down, closing his eyes, to feign sleep and think his way around the sudden pounding of his heart. As he labored to keep his breath even, she came to the bed, pulling the curtain aside, and sat beside him, still as quiet, waiting for him to wake.

Bercilak, he recalled, has said that his wife would attend him, and see to his health. But at the moment he felt no illness at all, and indeed, feared to show her more of his health than he would. And he scolded himself – dissemblance of any kind was unworthy, unknightly, and it was far better to ask her why she had come. So he stirred, and shifted onto his side, and opened his eyes – and started in surprise truly, as she reached to brush a hand across his brow.

She laughed at his startlement, her smile small and mischievous. “You sleep so deeply,” she told him. “Were I another knight, minded to ambush you, I could have done what I wished before you woke, and keep you now as my captive.”

“My lady,” he answered, “you would need no force, nor subterfuge, to bid me do your will. But if I am prisoner, then I give you my parole, if you will allow me to rise and dress, and we may sit ourselves at breakfast.”

“I think not,” she said lightly, and one slender-fingered hand lit on his wrist, and grasped it, while the other twisted the edge of his coverlet. “This is a fine cell to keep a prisoner in, and if you try to escape, I may bind you to the bedposts to prevent it. Now I have you to myself, where none will hear your cries for help, but I am no cruel gaoler, and for your ransom, you must simply rest here, and speak with me. Besides, this bed is softer than any chair in the castle, and it suits me well to be here.”

“Gladly paid, then,” Gawain said, hoping no hesitation had reached his voice. Surely where her hand was on his wrist she could feel the hammer of his pulse, but it pleased her to jest with him, and he could not disoblige her politely. “Of what shall we speak?”

“Tell me about Camelot,” she said, leaning closer. “You have told my husband how you traveled to be here, but I have seen the wilderness and the road, all of my life and too often. I would hear of the splendors of court – which knights after yourself are best-spoken, and what their victories are, how their feasts are held, and how they treat with their lady-loves. Hautdesert may be a rich place, but it is too far from such things.”

So Gawain obliged her, and told her as clearly as he could of the palace, and its feasts and dances, and of the boasting and noble deeds and competition as the knights vied for the love of their ladies. Yet no matter how grand the tale he told, always Beryl flattered him, saying how his own courtesy and courage must surpass the other knights, and how sure she was that the maidens marked him well, and jealously. She spoke happily enough of Bercilak, as well, and laughed because the castle was too small to hold a tournament, and the ladies and knights were too few and too close to compete so, and increase their honor, nor had she ever had a particular knight as her own champion, but only the husband she had been promised to since her youth.

“I would you were my champion,” she told him, her cheeks flushed with roses. “For there are none here as fair as you, or as noble, or who have as many bold deeds to their name.”

“I would be a poor champion, my lady,” he said, and thought of the axe that was waiting for him. His victories seemed greater from her lips than from his own memory, but however he wished, certainly they were behind him now. “But it pleases me to hear you say it. Come, though, give me your leave at last, poor prisoner that I am – if I do not break my fast soon, I will wither away, and then you will be accounted a cruel jailer after all.”

The lady rose, and laughed, and shook her head, standing beside him, so that her hair veiled them both a moment. “If I am, I will simply cry that my prisoner was an impostor, and not truly Gawain,” she said. Her tone was sweet, but barbed still for all of that, and Gawain feared a moment that he had displeased her, a thought that wounded him more than he would believe.

“What do you mean?” he asked, and she laughed at him again, a little sadly.

“All these tales of chivalric deeds,” she said, “and so much courtesy in you, but you do not beg a kiss before I leave you? Surely you cannot come from the same Camelot you tell of.”

He reached out to take her hand, and swallowed, silent a moment, bewitched by how soft her skin felt. “I beg you believe that it was courtesy that prevented me – humility, for I could scarce believe that you would wish the regard of a bed-ridden knight.”

“False humility,” she said, and leaned down over him, so that her face was all he could see, and drew him to her, her hands on his shoulder and his neck, and kissed his lips softly, then drawing back swiftly toward the door, her smile more brilliant than ever.

Gawain rose when she was gone, and asked the chamberlain to draw him a bath, and cleaned himself, and sweated at the heated water, before he dressed and came down to eat. All the castle rose now for the day ahead, and while he sat with Beryl and spoke still, it was amidst company, and she was shadowed now by a hooded crone, with skin like yellow parchment and thinning silver hair, who acted as her chaperone, or as some old nurse from her childhood, for freely and tartly she dispensed her opinions. Gawain was solicitous of her, and once even drew a smile from beneath her wimple, and considered that a victory for the day, before Sir Bercilak returned. He brought with him a brace of deer, a great hart and a graceful hind, and submitted them to Gawain as a humble huntsman to his lord. “Is it fairly done?” he asked, and Gawain laughed.

“Two deer this fine, so deep in winter? Beyond fair, it is the finest hunting I had seen since before I was a squire.”

“And what of your own hunting?” Bercilak said, looking about. “What spoils do you have for me?”

Abashed, for a moment Gawain readied to admit that he had won nothing, for he had been too alarmed by the lady to remember the jest, but then he thought better of it. “One prize only,” he said. “Lean you close, my lord, and I will give it you.” So saying, he rose, and placed one hand on Bercilak's shoulder, and the other on his neck, and pressed his lips to the others gently, for scarce a moment.

Bercilak looked at him a moment in surprise, then burst into laughter with the rest of the court. “A good exchange, a good exchange,” he said. “But where did you capture such game?”

Gawain dared not glance at where Beryl sat beside him, but forced his expression to be grave, and shook his head. “That was no part of our covenant, my lord,” he said. “Let a hunter keep his secrets.” Then he ordered that the venison be prepared for dinner, and Bercilak sat Gawain at the head of the table, with Beryl at his left hand and Bercilak his right, and reminded the company that the bargain would hold tomorrow as well, and they drank from the same cup of wine again to seal it.

The next morning Gawain woke before dawn, to the sounding of a bugle and the baying of hounds as Bercilak rode out, and he made ready to rise.  As before, Beryl slipped into his room, in a fine dress of dark brown samite, moving almost shyly, but not looking away as Gawain pulled his shirt down over his head, all in a rush, but blinded himself a moment as he did so so that next he knew, she was beside him, taking his hand and leading him back to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Today you are my tutor,” she told him. “and not my prisoner.” Then she looked at him, quietly and expectant, while he smiled.

“What is it I am to teach you?” he asked, and her lips twisted wryly, as if disappointed.

“Did we not start our lesson yesterday?” She said. “Come, Sir Gawain, for I am to be the student and you the teacher, not the other way about. From your tales of Camelot, you are surely more versed in courtly love than I, but still a damsel smiles beside you and you do not kiss her?”

“Many ladies may smile, and not intend to bestow a gift beyond that smile,” Gawain said, and his pulse quickened again. “And no courteous knight would presume that every smile is the same, and kiss whenever he sees it, without first asking leave.”

“You have not asked me leave, either,” she said, patient and penitent, and it occurred to him that like her husband, he knew not how far she might carry a jest, and indeed was not certain how much of what she said was jest and what was earnest.

“Then I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said. “Perhaps the both of us are in equal need of a tutor, and it would be best if, as the lady of the house, and I your knight, you remember that I am at your will, and you may kiss when you would be kissed, and not wait upon your servant.”

She read more in his words than he had meant, he thought, for before he could say more her arms were about his waist, and her lips parting his in a deeper, lingering kiss, before she returned to sitting beside him, satisfied.

“I am discourteous,” she announced, “and my tutor is right to be wroth with me, slow student that I am, for he makes me labor to show him what it is I would be instructed in.”

He protested, trying to turn the subject aside, not because the kiss was unpleasant, but because the longer she was beside him, the more his strength returned, and the love of life he had forgotten in the wilds blossomed in him, and he feared very much how deeply he might seek to indulge, while still he might, and thereby transgress gravely against this light-spirited and mirthful lady. “How to hold a sword I could teach you,” he said, “or how to sit a horse, or the usages of war, and I can speak well enough of the ways of court. But I am as poor a tutor as I would be a champion, Lady Beryl, and I pray that you can see it.”

“From the tale of your journey,” she said, “I think that is not so. Were you not champion of the May Queen? Do you mean to tell me that you are so unversed in love that you did not kiss her, or speak sweet words to her, as no knight has ever had to do to me? To be promised is not to be won, and after telling me so wondrously of the fine courtships at Camelot, Gawain, it is cruel not to teach me more of them, and show me how their gentle games are played. You said yourself that many knights may court the same lady, and that choosing a champion is not the same as choosing a husband.”

“My lady,” he said, somewhat more desperately, “I can tell you that as the Queen is fair, the very star of our court, the night sky itself, though dark, is more splendid and beautiful as any star, and so you seem to me. But though I have come from that high court, I cannot teach you. Some men labor at studies all their life, and slowly attain their skill, and to some every venture comes easy and natural, and even if they are untaught, the learned man has nothing for them. You speak love fluently with every breath, milady, where my tongue would stumble, or my heart doubt. I cannot teach you.”

“Spoken fair,” she said, glancing down, the fall of her hair half-hiding the smile she tried to conceal and the blush across her cheeks. “Then I will leave you,” she said, and made ready to stand, but Gawain saw well the trap she laid for him.

“Not, I pray, before you grant me one more kiss,” he said, and she ceased hiding her smile, and bent her head in assent, and he kissed her, firmly but chastely, and followed her down to the hall after but a few minutes, so that he might hide his sighs. Again, all the day, Beryl was attended by the ladies of court, and especially the sharp-tongued old woman beside her, and Gawain found he was grateful to the crone. For the other ladies made jest of him as well, and flirted, until Beryl looked displeased, though they did not see it; but always the crone's tart remarks sorted them gracefully, and gave him space to breathe, and wonder at the strange straits he found himself in.

It was late evening when Bercilak returned, his bearers brought in a great boar, slain by his own spear, and again Bercilak knelt and asked Gawain's approval, and was merry at his praise.

“As for me,” Gawain said readily, before he could be pressed, “my hunting was richer than before, thought not so rich as yours.” Carefully he kissed Bercilak twice, once with open mouth and once with lips closed, for he still wished to honor his bargains exactly, as he felt befit a knight.

They sat to table, Gawain again at the head, and well he was aware that Beryl glanced at him as often as her lord, and it was only by force of will that he did not return her glances. Though both were still pleased to jest, he let some of his unease show, and asked that Bercilak grant him leave from their bargain tomorrow, so that he might not delay on his way to the Green Chapel.

“You are not due until the New Year, and the Chapel is but an hour hence, or less – and a cold place to sleep, wit you well. Nay, Gawain, hold you to our bargain one more day, and rise early the next dawn, if your quest is so urgent, or you impatient. I will send a guide with you, and no man will be able to fault you for whatever meeting you have there, that you keep so secret.”

Out of courtesy, Gawain did not ask again, and out of courtesy, he thought, Bercilak did not press him further about his quest, both constrained by the other. But Bercilak jested with him, asking which on the maidens had been his quarry that day, so that Gawain demurred again, and retired early, and slept but uneasily, and confused as to what it was that he dreaded.

He woke in the morning from a troubled dream where the Lady Beryl bid him kiss the blade of an axe, and showed him a low shining star over them, saying 'it is not what it appears,' and found that she sat beside him on the bed already, dressed in full splendor of silks and rich furs, with her hair piled atop her head and braided, covered over with a golden netting full of precious green stones, and her hand lay on his, fingers laced together. The morning was bright and clear, and she had opened the windows when she entered, sending the cold through him, but it was not the cold which made him shiver, he thought.

She kissed him gently upon the forehead, and spoke with him lightly, her head high, with none of the teasing of the other mornings, of the fairness of the weather; of Rheged, nearby, that she had never seen, and Lothian beyond, and recalled their childhoods to one another in sweet laughing stories, so that Gawain was both joyed and sick at heart, to think him on all that he had left behind, and would never see again. Never had he been more aware of the closeness of her, and the pleasant curves of her body, the warmth of having her near beside him, or that this morning would be the last he might touch or hold a woman, even if it were great dishonor to him to do so, and grieve him sore to so betray the merry Bercilak. Almost he had banished such thoughts, and turned the conversation to the trifling pleasures of the court, and stories of her own home, when she fell upon him, and clung to him sorrowfully, and pressed a kiss against his neck.

“There is another maiden you love,” she said. “I understand it well, though not why you did not speak of her to me before. I cannot but honor you for your loyalty to her, but I envy her fiercely.”

“No!” Gawain cried, dismayed, and found his arms lay comfortingly around her shoulders. “No, it is not so. I have not always been virtuous as I ought, but I have no lady-love, nor think to have one.” He thought of Valmai, with her snowy blond hair and her brightness, whom he had dallied with gladly, but what was between them had been only in May, and passed, like a short-lived flower. And truly everything he had been fond of in Valmai he found redoubled in Beryl, whom he might love, indeed, if he allowed it.

“You will not be my champion, you will not be my tutor, and though you are bound to do my will, you do not make love to me, though you know well that I would have you,” she said.

“It has not escaped me,” Gawain confessed, and laid a cautious hand upon her side. “But I would honor you, as you deserve, and I cannot do that if my own honor is fled, as it would be. Were I a free man, not bound on my quest, I doubt I would leave you, and were you yet a maiden and unwed I would make love to you gladly, but neither is so. As a true champion, or a wise tutor, even for a day, I cannot be your lover.”

The words hurt him as much as any blow he had taken, and he regretted them as much as he did what awaited him on the morrow, but it was not right to speak otherwise, not least if he feared to break her heart when he must leave, and meet his end.

“I love you the better for it,” she said, after a long breath, and slid away from him, standing bravely. “But may I not yet have something of you? A token, a sign that there is love between us, that I might remember when you leave.”

“All the best things that I have, you and your lord have given me as a guest,” Gawain said. “For riding on quest, I took nothing with me that I would not require, no fit token. I cannot give you my sword, my lady Beryl, and you could not keep it as a token if I did.”

“I could,” she said. “And remember how you begged to teach me the sword, instead of love. But if you have no token, then wear mine, as you ride, and I will be sure that you remember me.” She slipped a ring off her finger, rosy gold and set with a faceted beryl, and pressed it into his palm.

“I would mourn to take it,” he said, “something so fine, and give you nothing in return? No, my lady. I do not need a green stone to remember you by, but I swear in truth that you shall be foremost in my mind for so long as I live.” He hid the blackness of the jest, though he was certain of its truth, and gave her back the ring, and refused it when she bid him take it again, holding up his hands.

“Then have this,” she said, and untied the green girdle from about her waist. She placed one hand on his chest, and lifted the hem of his shirt, and knotted it around him so it lay hidden under. For all that he willed himself to stop her, her touch on his skin was something he could not make himself forbid, and so he suffered it.

“There,” she said. “My prisoner, bound and subject to my will as I threatened, and my student, perhaps, who would be shrewd not to refuse me. For that girdle was given to me by a learned woman, who crafted it with high art, and it better suits a knight than a damsel. There is virtue in it, that whosoever wears it may not be slain, not even by falseness or enchantment. Take it as my token, and remember me, and I will know that you ride protected by me.”

Then Gawain consented, and nearly wept, and would almost have broken his determination and made love to her despite his resolve, for he saw in the girdle his hope of deliverance, a blessing many times over in all that it meant for him. He thanked her, gracefully, before his throat would have closed with emotion, and took her in his arms and kissed her, as thoroughly as he might, rejoicing in her.

When she had gone, he made certain that all was ready for his departure tomorrow, and took himself straightway to the priest in the small church, confessing his sins and his quest in full, and doing all the contrition that was asked of him. Afterward he went out, blessed all who he encountered with good cheer, and sang carols with the ladies of the court until Bercilak returned. He met him gladly in the courtyard, and told him that today he would discharge his debts first, and embraced him, kissing his forehead, his neck, and last his lips, with great fire and passion, to the mirth of all who saw them.

“Today you are the greater hunter,” Bercilak said, “For all that I have to even the ledger between us is this.” And he presented Gawain with the skin of a fox.

“It matters only that the debt is paid in full, and not the price of it,” Gawain said.

“Verily,” his host replied, and they went in to feast. All the company there said how they sorrowed to see Gawain go, and commended him to Christ, and in return Gawain made Bercilak swear that he would go to Camelot for the feast of Pentecost, and tell of the strange adventures that had brought Gawain hence, and receive hospitality as good as he had given. “If God is kind, I will greet you there,” he said. “But peradventure I may not return from my quest, and my uncle should still know what became of me, and that such good lords dwell even in the furthest corners of his kingdom.”

Chapter Text

He did not sleep that night, but laid awake, fear and eagerness and hope warring in him, and impatience for the year to have finally passed. Before dawn he rose, changing from his feasting-clothes to warmer garb suited for traveling, and his mail over it. His sword at his waist, and the great bronze axe upon his back, he met Bercilak's guide at the stables, and together they rode out facing into the dawn, turning on a circular track, choked and disused, that wound through the woods and down toward the sea, until they reached a craggy slope with no sure footing, and his guide stopped.

“The Green Chapel lies at the base of this cliff,” he said. “And you descend, you will readily find it, but I would advise you otherwise. They say that the knight who lives there is half again as large as a man, and well known it is that he will make war on whoever passes by, whether knight or churl or man of the cloth, and he is fearsome and fey beyond all measure. Ride you south, and let neither of us speak of it, for it grieves me that my lord's noble guest should ride to his doom so.”

“That you would keep faith with me, and wish me well, puts me gratefully in your debt,” Gawain told him. “But though no man might know of it, still I will be no coward, but meet whatever fate is appointed for me.”

His guide seemed then to sorrow, looking at Gawain as one would a man already dead, and turned and rode him back toward Hautdesert as swiftly as he might. Carefully Gawain picked his way down the rocks, and through the bracken that hedged in the base of the slope, until he reached a high-domed mound of earth, covered over in grass that was green despite the winter, beside a stream that bubbled over the rocks in a white froth. He dismounted, and tied Gringolet to a branch, and peered in at the dark and sunken cave within, as round and regular as the outside of the mound, but before he could enter, he heard a rising squeal of metal, and knew it for a blade on a grindstone – and an axe, if he guessed correctly. So he circled the mound, cautious still, a hand upon his pommel, until rounding the curve he saw the great green figure he expected, wild-bearded, wearing now a half-helm that shadowed his face and similar warlike garb, green as before, but fine armor with many overlapping scales, so he looked a dragon as much as a man.

“Well timed!” the Green Knight called to him. “For I have just finished making ready for you!” So saying, he brandished an axe, larger even than the last, double-bitted, ground sharply, with a spearhead at either end of its haft, and that long enough that it might be held as a spear in truth.

Gawain bit his lip, straining against a hot reply. “You have had a year to make ready,” he answered at last. “As have I, to think on our bargain, and a hard journey here to uphold it.”

“You knew the bargain you made,” the Green Knight said shortly. “And why you made it, as well. Regret it not, unless you regret only that your fellow-knights were lacking in the courage you showed. But come, we are not here for speech, but to discharge our covenant. Kneel at this stump, and pay the debt you owe me.”

In the night he had worried him greatly over the girdle, which still seemed a simple green cord, knotted about his waist, and no great enchantment such as could be recognized in Arthur's shining sword Excalibur, or any of Merlin's strange works. But it mattered not. He had been willing to come and submit when there was no hope of life in him, and to shrink now because his hope was better would be worse than to fear before. He remembered the moment he chose to strike off the Green Knight's head, rather than a more merciful blow, not knowing how his exchange would be met. He remembered that without his assent to this bargain, it would be the King now in this place – and surely Arthur had more fear of dishonor than death.

His limbs shuddered once, and he knelt, with no more use for words, and bent his neck. He stared sideways at the massive knight, lofting the axe high, and as it was brought whistling down at him he flinched, and made as if to spring away. The axe fell too swift, and would have cut halfway through his neck regardless – but the swing of it was purposely high, a feint, and as he drew back from it the Green Knight checked his stroke and roared his displeasure.

“Where is Gawain?” he cried, wondrously wroth. “Gawain is a valiant knight, as all men witness, and has stared at death bravely. “Who stands before me now shrinking cannot be him, the courteous knight who would match me stroke for stroke, even in the same condition, unflinching as I was though he severed my neck at a single blow.”

“Gawain cannot place his head back on his shoulders!” he replied, and shook now not with fear but with anger. “Strike again, and I swear to you, I will not stir.” He bent again to the stump, and forced his muscles still and his eyes to be open, facing his fate. The Green Knight's face twisted as with a rise of anger, and the great axe rose again, and came down at him, and whistled over his head without touching even a hair.

“There now,” the Knight said, well pleased. “That is how a knight ought meet his fate. Now that I am sure thou art Gawain, and no false knight, stay still for the swing, and we both shall be satisfied.”

“I taunted you not, nor doubted your courage, when you knelt before me,” Gawain said through gritted teeth. “Therefore strike, unless it is your own courage that falters, and hold you to the terms of our bargain.”

“Verily,” the Green Knight quoth, and the axe sang down through the air, biting deep into the stump so that the earth shook, and splinters of wood flew far in all directions – but only the whisper-thin edge touched Gawain, wicking red with blood but doing no more than cut the skin at his throat.

Gawain sprang to his feet, and found them steady, his heart fearless. He slung his shield from his shoulder, and seized the bronze axe from his back. “One blow I have withstood!” he said. “And you wish to strike a second time more truly, you will have to endure another blow first, and I will not kneel to you again!”

The Knight threw back his head and laughed, setting no hand on his axe. “All our bargains are complete, good knight, and paid in full – be not so hot, for I have not done you wrong, nor seek to. I struck truly as I wished. The first blow missed you, for a bargain truly fulfilled, the first day of the hunt, and the second as well, for you paid me honestly. But the girdle about your waist is mine by right, and was about my waist when you met me first, though like all fairy spells it has no virtue against cold iron. See, Gawain, I have been friendlier to you than you might believe.”

As he took off his helmet, the tint of green left his flesh, and as he ran hands back through his hair, it became short and straight. He still stood taller than Gawain, but by no more than a head, and his face was well familiar to him, as Bercilak of Hautdesert. Looking at him, Gawain was struck dumb, and Bercilak laughed again, kind and merry as before.

“You should have taken my head,” Gawain said, and uncinched the green cord from his waist, letting it fall between him. He could not look at it, could not think of the merry lady who had offered it to him. But Bercilak, solemn now, bent down to pick up the girdle, and offered it to him again.

“Am I to spite you because you did not fall to despair, but clung to hope for your love of life? You are no spotless knight, it is true – but you have said as much yourself, and I did not think it was false modesty. Make confession to a priest, if you will, but I hold that no other knight would have been even as faithful as you, my friend. For I tasked you hard, and tempted you sorely, but you did not turn away when you might, or fail in any bargain but one. Keep the girdle as a reminder of this adventure, and come back with me to Hautdesert, in true friendship.”

“I cannot,” said Gawain, still more bitter than grateful for his life, and as he looked at the cord, understanding better why. “But I will count you as a friend, and look for you in Camelot come Pentecost. But I do not understand this adventure I have been on, and I would fain you would explain to me what has befallen me this past year, and why.”

“It would be better,” Bercilak said, “to explain it in warmth and in comfort, and for another to do the explaining. But I see by your face that it will not be so. Know, then, that the crone who has sat beside my wife is no more what she seems than I have been. She is your aunt, Queen Morgan, and it is at her bidding that all of this is done. She has not received courteous welcome at her half-brother's court, and all manner of black rumors have been spread about her, but still she wishes him well, and would be certain that he was served by worthy knights. This, I was sent to test, in the guise you saw, and because of you alone did she deem the court worthy. Her design it was to make your journey here as much of a trial, but she is proud of her blood, and now your deeds are worthy, that you might be called the greatest knight at the Round Table, and all know the truth of it. She has watched you closely while you dined with us, and the fey damsel who promised you the safety of the girdle, and disported with you, was in her service. She would see you now, and speak more, if you would?”

Gawain said nothing a long moment, but wrapped the green cord around his wrist and clenched his fist tight about its end. He had seen no fey maiden, he almost said – it was Beryl who had given him the girdle, Beryl who his heart had raged at, when he thought all her attentions a pretense.  Now his heart softened and hurt at the thought of her again, unable to unravel the mystery of it.  Was this some further contrivance of his Aunt Morgan's?  A deeper game?  Or had all Beryl said to him and asked of him been true?  Had she willingly come to him, substituting herself for Morgan's agent?  If so, why would Morgan stay silent, misleading Bercilak?  And what, now, should he tell the lordly knight about his wife?

But silence was often courtesy, and the secrets of a hunter had been no part in their bargain.

“Bid my aunt accompany you to Camelot come Pentecost,” he said instead. “You have my word that her welcome will be warmer then, and you know that my word is good.”