Captive Heart (3 page)

Only to my mother did I reveal I was traveling to Camelot, mostly because my heart could not bear her worry and tears if I simply rode out without farewell.

She sighed and crooked her lips into a small and wistful pout. “The summer you grew taller than I, I knew this day would come. As it will come for Mordred in another four or five years. Not that preparing for it makes parting easier, just inevitable. Take with you my love and my pride, and commend me there to my brother when you can.”

“I will. But you’ll be seeing Arthur in November and it may well be I haven’t revealed myself to him by then. So worry not if he doesn’t mention me at Martinmas.”

“A mother’s worry doesn’t bow to the whims of the son newly grown. No matter even if the new-grown son already far surpasses his older brothers in both prowess and humility.”

I blushed at that, which made her laugh.

“See?” She kissed me then, bid me health and Godspeed, and I rode off for Camelot with only a soldier’s sword at my side, those arms and armor more worthy of my heritage packed away on the rump of my palfrey.

Arthur’s seneschal, Sir Kay, was not amused by my persistent pleas for an audience with the king. “Do you know how many good men with titles to their names petition for an audience? No. Because if you did even a wantwit would not be so foolhardy to ask for one.”

After four days sleeping in the stable with my horse, I was up at dawn taking out my frustration on the practice pell in the training field outside the stable yard when a tall and exceedingly fair man paused to watch. “You have some skill against a piece of wood,” he acknowledged. “But can you fight?”

“Better than some, perhaps,” I answered. “Not as well as others.”

“King Arthur demands the best. Most men who come seeking a place in his court would boast that they are. Do you expect the king to grant audience to one who does not, by his own admission, excel?”

I shrugged. “I’ve not yet been tested by the best. How could I say in truth I am better than them?”

The man nodded. “Fairly spoken. Would you care, sir, to test your blade against mine?”

There was a quiet confidence about the man such as I had seen in my brothers once they’d become seasoned fighters. A confidence that came with the inner certainty they were, indeed, better-skilled than the rabble of lesser knights who challenged them. “You are one of Arthur’s,” I guessed.

“I am.”

“Then you do me honor.”

The tall knight stripped off his tunic. Bare-chested as was I, his rolls of hard muscle stood sharply defined in the light of the dawning sun.

We saluted one another, stalked, then closed with a rattle of steel meant only to test each other’s mettle. Steel scraped across steel and the blades sung as we parted. We closed again, hilt to hilt, where the swords could take the focus of our strength as by sheer force we sought to push the other back.

I saw surprise and admiration register on the other man’s face and knew mine must hold the same as heartbeats stretched into minutes and, despite the bulge of our muscles, neither gave even a finger-breadth of ground.

Admiration turned into amusement at our situation. I saw laughter clear in the knight’s blue eyes and choked behind his lips. The muscles over my stomach clenched too in mirth.

“Hold?” he suggested

“Hold,” I readily agreed.

We parted, and when we came together again it was in a dance of blades. The knight’s swings and timing were superb, and I joyed in the rarity of an opponent so equal in skill.

“Hold,” he called again far too soon, though a quarter-hour at least had passed.

I broke off and saluted him with deepest respect.

“Come.” His tunic forgotten in the dust from our workout, he led me through the kitchen ways into the passages of the Castle Camelot. In the great dining hall, knights and lords were breaking fast. Without pause, I was led to the dais at the head of the hall where a dozen men supped.

I recognized Sir Kay, the seneschal, among them. If I did not amuse him before, I certainly didn’t now by the frown he turned my way.

The knight with me ignored Kay and addressed the man seated next to him. “We have a guest, Arthur, who may wish to make his stay permanent. Only Kay keeps turning him away.”

“A hundred petitioners at least come through here every year,” Kay protested. “Of course I turned a lot of them away.”

Arthur!
I wished I’d been warned into whose presence I was being led. “My apologies, Sire, for not recognizing you.” I went down on my knee and bowed my respect.

“Rise up,” Arthur said. “Save the formalities for more public chambers.” I did as I was bade, to find Arthur glancing from the seneschal to the tall man beside me.

“You know this errant knight?”

“Not a knight, Sire,” I corrected, “errant or otherwise.”

“No?” The knight beside me stared my way in surprise.

I shrugged an apology.

“An oversight that needs correcting then.”

“Lance? My question…” Arthur reminded him.

“
You’re
Lancelot?” It was my turn to stare surprise.

Lance shrugged an apology.

Arthur chuckled. “I take it we all need introductions.” He stared pointedly at Lance.

I think it only occurred to Lance then that he didn’t know my name, as he opened his mouth to speak before shutting it again.

“Sire,” I spoke into the silence, “while there are knights of yours who would recognize me by kinship and perhaps a few more by name, I came here to earn a place at your Table on merit alone, not blood. Call me as you will till you would see me knighted.”

“Arthur,” Lance put in, “we dueled this morning…to a draw. If the boy has kin here I daresay his is the blood of kings.”

I bristled at being called a boy. At nineteen, I was older than Gawain had been when he was knighted. But I was wise enough not to press a point that had little bearing on the decision of whether Arthur would allow me to stay.

“A draw?” Arthur repeated. He didn’t disbelieve Lance, only that an unknown might show such mettle. I took no offense from it. At twenty-four, Lance was already legend itself.

The legend nodded. “Happy I’d be to meet him on the tourney field, but I’d rather not engage him on the battlefield. He belongs here. Let him prove himself to you as he has to me.”

Arthur nodded. “I trust your judgment above my own,” he told Lance. “Kay, it seems you and he are acquainted already. I’m putting him in your charge. Baptize him and give him something merit-worthy to do.”

“Next you’ll have me naming babes,” Kay grumbled. He licked his lower lip and thought while I waited patiently. “A fair face and quick hands… Beaumains will be his name.” He laughed at his jab, though none other at the table laughed with him. “As for work…one of the kitchen boys broke his arm yesterday. The chirurgeon has him wrapped up for a month or more. Beaumains here can do his work if he doesn’t think he’s ready yet to be a knight. It’s humble work but honest for one of any birth.”

“Kay.” Even I, not knowing Arthur at all, heard the warning in the king’s voice.

I had put myself at Arthur’s disposal, though, and Arthur had put me at Kay’s. I would honor my word, whatever the seneschal might do. “I am yours, Sir Kay. Direct me.”

There was approval in the glancing nod Arthur gave me before saying, “After you’ve eaten is time enough to begin. Perhaps you’ll join us…
Beau
.”

I nodded, both at the goodly name and the invitation. I had earned my way to the dining table.

Now to find a way to earn a seat at Arthur’s Round Table.

The ring of steel on steel in the otherwise quiet of the dawn alerted me first to the two men in the training field outside the Castle Camelot. I circled downwind, so as not to alarm the horses in the stable yard nearby, and crouched behind a haystack to watch the peace duel already underway.

After only a moment observing I knew I was watching two masters of the craft of the like I’d seen only once before when Sirs Tristan and Lamorak took the tourney field together. Would they fight till first blood? Till one fell? Unarmored, half-naked and with unblunted swords in their hands, a single mis-step between them could be disastrous if not fatal.

Blood. Death
. I trembled. It took no more than thought to tempt out my beast mind when I was already in beast form. Animal lust beat against my skull demanding a fight, a kill to sate it. Focusing on the rhythm of the blades and precision of the fight, I forced the beast back deep within.

Some moments into the fight, though, I forgot myself, allowing the bunched muscles and glistening sweat across the impressive expanses of chest and shoulders to distract me. The beast roused itself with a different lust.

Of the two, the mating lust was the hardest to quell. I was a knight, a killer only by training and profession, not by nature. The bloodlust was foreign to me. Not so the other. Before the curse I had never reveled in another’s death. Not even the kill at the end of a hunt had engendered the kind of pleasure my beast took in the spill of blood and life flickering its last. I could feel its every need when it came to blood and death, and while its need might threaten to crush and subsume me, it remained apart from me, strive though it always did to become the very whole of me.

Was there any man, however who did not quicken at the mating lust? Who was insensible to strength and beauty and any hint of the promise of consummation in the form dearest to his heart and loins? In this the beast and I were one, indivisible. Its lusts fed me and mine it, doubling, trebling their intensity. It made me stupid, reckless and impetuous. But more, it made me dominant and demanding, domineering in a way I would never be alone, without the strident demands of the beast within to goad me.

Not that I would be fool enough to approach such superb swordsmen no matter how perfect their bodies or how stupidly reckless the beast’s lust turned me. I valued my life in either form. In any case, I was still panting heavily after them when they broke off the bout before first blooding, headed for the castle and entered through servant doors in the rear.

I followed them at a discreet distance, upwind, for a handful of dogs waited at the entrance for kitchen scraps. And while another dog might not be noticed in a pack of them, my wolf certainly would be. Nor could I simply shift, for one thing more noticeable than a wolf among dogs would be a naked stranger among them.

I squinted. Something I wasn’t remembering clearly plucked at my thoughts.
Naked stranger. The two men fighting half-naked. A folded tunic abandoned on the practice field.

Loping back, I discovered the discarded tunic. Dragging it with my teeth, I retreated back behind the haystack. Once there I willed myself to shift, hating those awkward, painful, vulnerable moments between forms as much now as when I experienced them for the first time less than a month ago.

Back again in my rightful form, I shook the dust from the tunic and slipped it on. The shoulders fit well and, tall as the man was, the length fell easily to my knees. Modest for my needs, the most pressing of which was to now find the fae druid Merlin.

The dogs at the kitchen door snarled and growled, sensing the otherness of the wolf about me. Snarling back, I faced them down, and the hounds, knowing who was master here, slunk away.

Thinking right the door would only be locked and barred during a siege, I slipped through into a mud and storage room that led into the kitchen with its blazing fire and staff of serfs ensuring meals enough for up to three hundred people from the size of the castle and the stories I’d heard told about it.

I caught at a servant girl mixing bread dough, startling her so that the heavy bowl nearly rolled from the table. “I’m looking for Merlin. Where can I find him?”

The girl, panicked, shook her head, “I-I don’t know, m’lord. I work in the kitchen. There’s a dining hall there.” She nodded toward a set of heavy doors hung cleverly to swing as I saw when a water-bearer pushed through them, each hand filled with an urn. “Per-Perhaps he’s at breakfast?”

The dining hall was larger than I expected, though only a quarter full with scattered knots of men and women tearing at bread and sitting over half-eaten trenchers of spiced eggs and sausage. My belly growled. It had been a month since I filled it with other than raw deer, wild grouse and tough hares from the trail. It had been easier to simply let the wolf hunt and eat. But the man missed more refined dining.