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But the moment passed, giving way again to numbness.

The numbness, the dullness, persisted. She spent days just sitting in the church or beside the lake, or at the Cauldron Well. If someone gave her something to eat, she ate it; if not, it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter; not only her heart was broken, so was her spirit, and she was nothing but a hollow shell where once there had been a warrior with her name.

And so the days passed.

And then, one day she woke, and woke fully, and her mind worked again. She sat up and dressed quickly, feeling almost as if she had been very sick, and now the fever had broken.

Yet once she had dressed, she was at a loss for what to do. She had no idea what was going on beyond the boundaries of the Abbey. Had the Saxons overrun the country at last? Was there any resistance to them at all? Was there anything out there, beyond the deceptive peace of this place, or was it all a chaos of warfare and blood?

At least she could find the old queen, maybe, or Abbot Gildas, or one of the Ladies, and ask some sensible questions.

She ventured out into the morning sunlight, and that was when she saw him riding in along the path that led to the Abbey, looking worn and weary and as broken as she.

“Lancelin?” she faltered.

And although he could not possibly have heard her, he looked up, straight at her.

But his expression did not change. And although he dismounted, tethered a horse that looked as beaten and weary as he, and walked toward her, there was nothing of joy and nothing of love, in his face.

“Gwen,” he said, stopping a little too far away from her to have taken her hand. “They told me you were here.”

And there it was. That love, if love it really had been, had burned bright and guttered out. When she tried to find it in herself, all she could sense were cinders and ashes and regret. She nodded. “I have been ill,” she said, and she released that dead love to fall to pieces in the aching void inside her. “I have heard of nothing since—”

“Ah.” The silence hung awkwardly between them. “They never sing of these things, in the tales. Never talk about what happens after everything is over.”

She swallowed. “And what does happen?” she asked.

His eyes held the wisdom of terrible sorrow. “Life goes on. Planting and harvest, birth and death, sun and rain. The world does not end for everyone. Just for a few.” He sighed. “But you don’t want to hear philosophy. The Saxons took a terrible beating, and no, they have not overrun the countryside. There is no High King, and things have broken down into squabbling among all the petty kings again. Most of the Companions are dead. Those that survived have retreated to their estates or taken places in the courts from which they came. Even Celliwig is mostly deserted, except for Kai and the few men that limped home from Camlann. Rumor says that you are dead, you are turned Christian and gone into retreat, or you have followed Arthur into Annwn, where you will both await a day that you are needed.” He shrugged. “I came to see if the fourth rumor was true, that you were here, and if you were, to say farewell.”

She stood awkwardly, hands dangling at her sides. Once she would not have been able to stop herself; she would have reached for him, begged him to take that farewell back. Now?

“Then do fare well, Lancelin,” she said. He forgave us, she wanted to say. But he probably would not believe that. He was the sort that flogged himself relentlessly with his faults. “What we did or did not do changed nothing. Medraut did not conjure up that army out of nothing. He had this planned—for years, I think. If it had not been now, it would have been soon.”

Lancelin’s lips thinned a moment; then, reluctantly, he nodded. He looked up at the stone tower on top of Yniswitrin. “Do you know,” he said at last, his tone too casual, “What it was that caused the fighting to break out?”

“I was too far away to see. Only, there was a shout, and I think someone drew a sword—”

“When your sister struck