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With a deep breath, she dismissed the mermaids attending her, so that they were left alone.
“Come to me, my child,” she said, extending her lily-white hand.
Lancelot hesitated only for a moment before going to her.
This was a powerful being who raised him, taught him the skills he needed to survive and protect. She had never before led him astray.
She held his face in her hands as he knelt before her where she sat. For long, breathless moments, she looked into his eyes, probing into the depths of his soul. What she saw, he knew not, but she appeared to be satisfied when she leaned back, though she kept her grip on his jaw.
“The attachment you have is not yet deep enough to be irreversible. You can still be hurt, I’m afraid, but as you have given your affections freely, there is nothing that can be done about it. What I can do is dull the pain. Mute the desires. The longing. You will remember what you shared, but only vaguely. You will still serve and protect him, but from a distance. I will gift you Excalibur to give to your Arthur but only because the weapon will help protect him so that you don’t have to. You must be cool as ice, my dear. These feelings you are growing do not become you.”
“But…”
Lancelot frowned.
“I don’t want to feel less. I want to feelmore. Arthur makes me feel—”
“And that is the crux of the problem,” the Lady chided. “A creature such as you should not feel as you do now.”
“But…”
“These are my conditions,” she stated with finality, releasing his chin.
Lancelot rose to his feet, and so did the Lady.
She was tall and statuesque, with a terrifying beauty. She was not to be gainsaid.
“Aye, My Lady,” he bowed his head in acceptance and closed his eyes.
In the next blink, he was no longer beneath the lake but next to his horse on solid ground. They stood at the edge of the dark forest as if they never traversed through it.
In his hands he held Excalibur, its long blade glinting in the last rays of sunlight filtering through the trees.
He looked at his reflection in the shiny steel and hardly recognized himself. He looked…different.
Less, somehow.
He felt…colder. As if his heart was encased in ice.
But he recalled his mission clearly, and so he sheathed the sword within its scabbard and mounted his stallion.
He must find and protect Arthur. The King was his Destiny.
Lancelot knew only that.
Nothing else.
~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~
Three weeks ago. South Kensington, London.
The King was shaken.
Lancelot could tell.
They returned early from the museum, ahead of the others. He knew that Arthur couldn’t stand to be in that gallery, surrounded by those portraits, for a moment longer. The other man’s hands had been shaking with the restraint to yank those offending paintings off the wall and break them over his knee.
Lancelot felt Arthur’s helpless fury vicariously.
