came a laugh, deep and low, like, a shifting of boulders long at rest. “Not here,” said the shape. “Not in this grove, and not untutored as you are. I have your name, and your father’s. It is clear what you might become; enough, even, to test me somewhat had we met long after this. But tonight you are nothing in this place. You do not go nearly deep enough. It would please me,” it said again, “to hear you plead.”
Darien lowered his arms. He felt his eyes return to the blue he had from neither father nor mother, the blue that was his own; perhaps the only thing that was. He was silent, and in that silence he regarded what had come under the half-moon that rose at last above the eastern trees to shine palely down.
It held to no fixed shape or hue. Even as he watched, the creature oscillated ceaselessly through amorphous forms. It had four arms, then three, then none. Its head was a man’s, then a hideous mutant shape covered with slugs and maggots, then a boulder, featureless, as the maggots fell back into the grass and the gaping hole beside it. It was grey, and mottled brown, and black; it was huge. In all the blurred shiftings of its shape it had two legs, always, and one of them, Darien saw, was deformed. In one hand it carried a hammer that was the grey-black color of wet clay and was almost as large as Darien himself.
Again it spoke, amid the suddenly absolute, fearful silence of the forest, and again it said, “Will you not plead, Circlet-bearer? Give me a voice to carry back to my sleep under stone. They have asked me to leave you alive, tree-burner. They want your flesh and your mind to flay when the Circlet is gone from your brow. I will offer you an easier, quicker release, if you but ask for it. Ask, grove-defiler. Only ask; there is nothing else you can do.”
The face was almost human now, but huge and grey, and there were worms crawling over it, in and out of the nose and mouth. The voice was the thickened voice of earth and stone. It said, “It is night in the sacred grove, son of Maugrim. You are nothing beside me, and less than that. You do not go nearly deep enough even to make me swing my hammer.”
“I do,” said another voice, and Lancelot du Lac entered the moonlit grove.
They were sleeping on the beach just south of the Anor. Brendel had disobeyed Flidais’ instructions to the extent of going inside alone and bringing out blankets and bedding from the lower rooms where Lisen’s guards had slept. He did not go upstairs again, for fear of once more stirring Galadan’s awareness of that place.
On a pallet beside Arthur, a little apart from the others, Jennifer lay in the motionless sleep of utter exhaustion. Her head was on his shoulder, one hand rested on his broad chest, and her golden hair was loose on the pillow they shared. Wide awake, the Warrior listened to her breathing and felt the beat of the heart he loved.
Then the heartbeat changed. She hurtled bolt upright, instantly awake, her gaze riveted on the high, watching moon. Her face was so white it made her hair look dark. He saw her draw a shuddering, afflicted breath. He felt it as a pain within himself.
He said, “He is in danger, Guinevere?”
She said nothing at all, her gaze never leaving the face of the moon. One hand was over her mouth. He took the other, as gently as he could. It trembled like an aspen leaf in an autumn wind. It was colder than it should ever have been in the mild midsummer night.
He said, “What do you see? Is he in danger, Guinevere?”
“They both are,” she whispered, eyes on the moon. “They both are, my love. And I sent them both away.”
He was silent. He looked up at the moon, and he thought of Lancelot. He held one of Guinevere’s hands clasped between both of his own broad, square ones, and he wished her peace and heart’s ease with longing fiercer and more passionate than any he had ever felt for his own release from doom.
“I go as deep as you,” said the tall man quietly as he entered the glade. He had a drawn sword in his hand; it shimmered faintly, catching the silver of the moon. “I know who