Lancelot's attempt to help a friend brings them closer together. Ari confronts the power that she'd let slip through her fingers.
As soon as he'd finished wrestling with Tomas' parting words to him, Lancelot took a walk around the forest to clear his mind. Most Fey folk had reverted to looking at him with doubt once more, but it was only due to his recent shift from no one to someone within the camp. He was not one for mingling, able at best to pass a one-word greeting and nod his head to those who he met along his winding route. Most of the Ash had pitched the tents that they had travelled with in a new space that had been cleared of bracken, not far from his own cot, so he headed that way.
At least then he was sure to encounter at least one friendly face.
He did not know many of their names quite yet— there was little difference to their appearances. The women all had the same long and almost raven hair, whether straight or waving. They made up around a third of the group while the rest were all men, elders, and children. Those who remembered the Burning Night and those who didn't fell into separate categories, too.
He'd gathered that there had been a few joinings amongst them, since the young children could not have appeared by themselves. He remembered the little boy who had clung to Morwenna's skirts whilst they were in the valley for the ceremony, and wondered— with what Ari had said of their likely prospect together— for a moment without envy, which of the Ash men amongst them was the boy's father. It was simple curiosity and nothing more.
The eldest Ash was a woman whose crimson under eyes drooped with the rest of her face. More wrinkles were across her skin than there were needle thin veins on an oak leaf. She reminded him of Zurah— that old witch, with her eyes that saw everything and gentle hands that had touched his own with her blessing.
The men ranged in ages and all, except for perhaps Tomas, looked as though they could fell a tree with their bare hands. Lancelot supposed that life in the blistering northern caves will have hardened everybody. Turned those who had lived in the shoreline town of Joyous Gard into survival folk who taught themselves to hunt, fish in the rivers that came from the mountains, and protect their lives and all that they had.
He shook his head as he walked.
They were not the only ones.
Horses and their riders on patrol passed him by with Elyan and Kaze leading the way. Hanna's great horns were unmissable amongst them.
The ash coloured cloth of the sleeping tents that he found blended amongst the dark, flaking tree trunks. A streak of white moved around and scoured, sniffing at the undergrowth. Nira had not moved far from the Ash since arriving, as if she knew that at their sides was where she belonged. Though she slept outside of Lancelot and Squirrel's tent through the night and was gone by the time that dawn broke.
The Ash had arranged themselves as best as they could in a circle around a central hearth that had been built, unlit when Lancelot stood at the farthest edge of the round. Most of the folk were not here, either training with weapons or putting themselves to use elsewhere. But a familiar face had remained across from him, in profile as her body bent forwards over a bucket and scrubbed with a brush at wet, oiled cloths.
He remembered what Ari had said of him not being the only one with strong hearing any more. Under his boot, he cracked a twig, and like he had guessed, the young woman looked up.
Her lips lifted in a delicate smile. "My Lord," she said, and stood from her washing.
Lancelot let out a guttural sigh. Now knowing how Ari feels when she is called by her titles. He wandered passed the unlit logs for kindling in the fire.
"Morwenna."
"Lancelot," she said that time as his approach came to a stop a friendly enough distance away. Then dutifully asked, "Was there something you needed?"
He was not used to that question much and it dumbfounded him for a moment. "No. I just..." She leant forwards in anticipation, but he failed to give an answer.
"You came to check on us?" Morwenna supplied with a gentle smile.
He nodded, unused too to the light weight of doing so without his hood.
"It is kind of you. Most everyone is not here though." Her gaze swept around the drawn to veils of tents as if to check.
Lancelot heard a rustling from between the tent that Morwenna was washing in front of and the one next to it. He tilted slightly to his right to peer and found that it was the boy who had clung to her skirts at the ceremony, carving out trenches of dirt in the ground with sticks and stacking pebbles to make shapes.
Shaggy, raven hair fell into his brows— the sides a touch shorter than the rest. He seemed a little younger than Squirrel, perhaps only ten summers to Squirrel's thirteen, but surpassing the older already in his lanky height. The blue veins of his hands were as though they had been painted, his skin so translucently pale. A child truly born from the north caves.
"The boy is yours?" Lancelot asked, eyeing the child's tact as he placed another stone on top of a pile of six. He made no glance their way and continued on with his make-believe.
The uppermost pebble fell to the earth as Morwenna turned to look where Lancelot was doing, but the boy placed it back on again.
"He is my son, Tristan." Fondness echoed in her voice.
Lancelot should have expected that she would be a mother. Her face was kind, her demeanour gentle. Not the sort of woman to have harmed any person or creature in her life, though he knew better than to assume such a thing in this world.
"Your husband is here with you?" He only meant it as a polite inquiry.
Morwenna flattened down the front of her heavy woollen skirts, as if to magic some colour back into their faded life. Her reluctance drew Lancelot's attention and he read on her fallen face the answer before it came.
"No," she said. Brittle and low.
A thread that had never been there before tied a knot around Lancelot's gut and tugged. The boy was young. There was every chance that he may have had something to do with the unnamed man's demise, if that is what had occurred. Or he was was wrong, and her husband simply was not here with them. Maybe she was not married at all. He would think of her no differently for bearing a son out of wedlock.
Either way, he said, "I am sorry."
A sharp breath drew in the air between them and Morwenna righted herself. "There's no need, he took ill one winter when Tristan was still in my arms." With a sigh of remorse, she turned to face her son. "It is him I feel sorry for. No child should grow up without a father."
Lancelot watched the boy playing by himself. He knew what that was like. To have no one and nothing but himself. He could never forget the bitter nights in his cell, locked away as though he were some wild beast for months. The Between had reminded him of those days and now there was no way to forget.
His face must have fallen more grave than before because Morwenna stammered, "I am— I did not mean to—"
"It's alright." His old wounds were mere scars to him now, forever there but fading.
Morwenna pursed her lips in a rueful, thin smile, before her eyes fell down his tunic. The same blue that had once been in her own clothes. "We forget sometimes that the rest of the kingdom still went on without us," she said. "In the caves, we were alone."
That thread around Lancelot's gut began to strangle him. He looked at the tents around them. How many Fey have felt so solitary like them? Where there more lost deep within caves that Ari's hawks have not found? Or have crossed the Narrow Sea by themselves to start their lives again? It was not right. None of it was right. No person, human or Fey, should have to run from their own lands.
He watched Tristan, who'd never known this kingdom to be peaceful.
This is what he was fighting for. A land for Squirrel and the children where they would not have to grow up with blades in their hands and arrows targeted on their backs.
The boy was engrossed in his game that he was playing, the touch of a smile upon his twisting mouth as he concentrated. Lancelot took a step to introduce himself.
"He will not speak to you." Morwenna halted him with haste and he twisted around. "He does not hear," she said. "He has never spoken a word either."
Lancelot had known of a Paladin who had been Deaf, once— he worked with the scrolls of scriptures and writing chronicles of the crusade.
"How do you talk with him?" he asked, with care to not place a word wrong.
"My hands, mainly." She lifted them as she spoke. "We draw in the dirt, sometimes, too."
Curiosity made Lancelot look to the boy digging trenches in the soft earth with the blunt end of a stick. Most Fey were not skilled with letters and writing, the younger ones especially. He remembered sitting with Squirrel a long time ago in the ruined abbey, reading to him from the holy book. The look upon his face had been pure wonder. And perhaps now, he took his own schooling for granted.
"He can read?" Lancelot shifted that half a pace in retreat to Morwenna's side.
"And write." Morwenna beamed in her own graceful way. "I taught him how."
"You must be proud," he mused, though he could hear it in Morwenna's voice. He would not even know where to begin with teaching Squirrel his letters. Getting him to sit still were a difficult enough task.
"I am." From beneath her shawl that wrapped around her shoulders and tunic, she lifted out her amulet and ran her thumb across the wood. Lancelot saw that the blue veins of the leaf were much like his own. "I know that his father is too," she said, her voice dipping as though stuck in a memory.
Lancelot drew his mouth tightly and bowed his head. Before now, Adrian had been the only one to speak to him of his father, bestowing his virtues and praise. Lord Hubert had known him, also. And now there was Tomas and these Ash. He hoped that one day he might earn the right for any one of them to say with such solemnity as Morwenna, that he has made his father proud.
He asked, "Might I have known him, once?"
"Everett?" A brief crease formed between Morwenna's brows, her amulet now sitting over her chest. Lancelot nodded. "He was a kitchen boy at the castle— one of Tomas' apprentices," she said, "so perhaps you might have."
Tomas had been a friend, once. And Lancelot thought that this Everett would have been around his age to be working as a kitchen boy. He wished that he could go back through time and see it all again. At least that way, he might remember those who had gone or were here now. The Ash kept on looking at him as if waiting for him to recognise them individually. Perhaps he could have done, once. But he had travelled so far, even beyond these shores, and seen so many faces, it was hard to tell who he may have known as a boy.
He nodded along in contemplation, and as though a bolt of lightening had shot down from the sky and struck him, he flinched and froze. The forest fell silent.
"Lancelot?" Morwenna's melodious voice was distant.
He wished that he could go back in time.
He had done once before. He'd stood in the memories of his past.
Facing Morwenna, Lancelot said rather alarmingly, "I may have a way for you to see him." Everett.
Morwenna blinked and her face pinched with rightful wariness. "I don't understand."
"Stay here and do not go anywhere." He was already leaving the circle of tents.
"O— okay."
It would involve taking a chance on a magic that he knew little of, and seeking the help of an old crone that he would rather not. But Lancelot had never known what the Ash stone was given to him for, and maybe this was the reason.
Through all of the pain that the Stone had brought him, he'd had some sense of healing from seeing that which he had forgotten. His mother and the Sunborn girl— Ari's aunt. He'd seen their faces, heard their voices, and he would never forget them. But he didn't know where the Ash stone was now— having surrendered it to Ari after that night in the cavern.
Like a prowling wolf, he followed her scent all of the way to the valley of floating lights. The place where she had come to life again.
Ari was there as he expected— the Dagger in her unbound hand and the faintest of blackness colouring in her veins. Her eyes were closed and he could see her focussing on controlling her breathing. He did not slow down to greet her, and the crack of twigs beneath his boots made Adrian across the other side shoot to attention, a hand flying to his sword.
They were the only two here.
"Ari."
She startled, but the black in her veins dissolved immediately.
Lancelot barrelled down into the valley. "I need to know where you buried the stone," he said.
Ari's knuckles were returning from white to their normal colour around the Dagger's hilt, her face twisting in confusion. "The Ash stone?" He nodded. She looked him over, saying still with a furrowed brow, "It is in the cavern, beneath that rock where I hid the dagger. Why?"
He stifled a sigh and with still a decent length between them, turned back around.
"Lance, what are you doing?"
He didn't answer her but Ari was in front of him before he realised, her hand at his chest stopping him.
"Lance, if you are thinking of going back there again then do not do it," she warned.
"I need its power."
"Need?" She gasped. Her voice shrouded itself in a berating whisper. "This magic is too dangerous for you to be playing with it."
Lancelot did not try to sidestep, meeting her insistent gaze with urgency in his own. "I am helping a boy to see his father at least once in his life," he countered.
The Dagger she held by her side twisted in her grasp, like a scholar would turn their quill as they considered what to write. Ari's lips parted. "I don't know what's going on but I think that you need to walk away," she said, calmly but firm.
"I already promised her, I won't break my word."
The pinch in Ari's expression softened. "Lance—"
Lancelot raised her hand from his chest to his lips and kissed her palm, well aware that her father was watching. "We will speak later," he said in a whisper, dipping his chin to look through his lashes. "I promise." All that he was asking for were a little trust that he knew what he was doing this time around.
He listened to the reluctance in Ari's heavy sigh, then she nodded.
The heaped stones by the cascading water of the cavern he'd first brought the Ash to, where he had sat many times with Ari, had been shifted since he'd last needed to dig beneath one of them. Lancelot did not explain to his onlookers why he pushed aside one particular rock and dug up a bundle of cloth from out of the earth.
He had almost forgotten its ethereal beauty. The almost black, glass-like stone of his ancestors. Blue, white, and yellow flecks beneath its surface looked akin to a summer night sky, and shifted near motionlessly as he held the Stone within his palm.
He knew that he should keep this magic to himself, but not for being selfish. In the wrong hands, all power is dangerous.
But when he looked at Tristan, all that he saw was himself. A boy with a father that he would never know. If he could give Tristan once memory to last his lifetime, then secrets be damned.
Lancelot closed his fist around the Stone and moved back to where Morwenna was waiting, feeling her eyes on his every step. Tristan peered at his fist with a young mind's inquisition. He stopped in front of them both and with a hazardous breath, revealed what was in his grasp.
"Oh my," Morwenna gasped in awe as his fingers uncurled from his palm.
Tristan tugged on his mother's skirt. She hushed him, just for a moment.
The beads of colour swirled like a gently lapping tide. Morwenna looked down at the Stone between them with wonder and Lancelot still held back his breaths. Trying to judge in her expression what she was going to say.
"It's beautiful." Morwenna gaped. "What is it?"
"I do not have the time to explain." Nor the patience. He said, "But it helped me remember things that I had forgotten." Morwenna lifted her eyes from the Stone and joined them to his, her brow creasing with his vagueness. "I do not know if it will work but maybe it could allow you both to see your husband, and Tristan will remember it."
Her brow creased further. "I don't understand."
Lancelot still didn't either. Secrets be damned.
"There is a realm within magic called the Between. It takes you to your memories." Her eyes looked so lost. "I have been there," he said. "I have stood as a man months ago within Joyous Gard. I saw my mother, and the castle, and... things I had not remembered."
Tristan tugged on his mother's skirts again. What is it? He asked when Morwenna looked down to him. Her throat bobbed, seemingly not knowing what to say for a moment.
Magic, she replied.
When Lancelot held her eyes again, they were set heavily with scepticism. He did not blame her. Twenty five summers in the isolation of caves might have meant that there was a whole world of possibility forgotten to the Ash.
"This—" she said with doubt, flicking her gaze to the ever changing stone— "will show us Everett?"
Lancelot hoped that he was right. He nodded, and Morwenna took a large enough breath that caused Tristan to curl his hand into hers.
It was a large leap to ask of her to suspend her disbelief in such magic. Lancelot knew that he would have given anything to see his family again before this stone came into his grasp. But the decision was Morwenna's and her son's alone.
"You do not have to," he said to her more quietly, hooking his thumb over the Stone. "I can walk away."
Morwenna's mouth twisted with her uncertainty, her eyes locking onto the Stone for a long moment. Then she looked down to her son. Lancelot did not even know this boy and he was anxious for her to accept his help. Wishing that Morwenna would say yes. The Between hadn't shown him his father, but if there was a chance that it could then he knew he would take that chance.
Tristan smiled up at his mother. Seeing her worry, he reached up and traced the line of her brow as though to smoothen it out. A silent gesture between them.
Morwenna decided then.
"Do it, please," she said to Lancelot, her voice thick.
He nodded.
__________
wc: 3.2k
Lance stepping into his Ash leader role 🥰 but what on earth is he up to now 👀 ...
I've never written a d/Deaf character so I hope I did Tristan okay.
Also, Lady Morwenna Bluemeadow aesthetic: