We did not find Percival. He found us, walking up from the river with a spear wrapped in cloth like a baby. His eyes were clear and far away at the same time.
Visions spend what time cannot spare.
“You were dead,” Lancelot said, not as an accusation, as if greeting an old rumor.
“I was learning how long a moment can be,” Percival said. He offered the spear to Arthur. “Do not look down its length unless you are ready to see yourself without lies.”
Arthur did not look. He set the spear in the ground. The ledger wrote beside it.
Interest due.
“For what?” I asked.
Percival looked at me as if I were a road marker wavering behind heat-haze, there but not touchable. “For time you borrowed when you thought you were strong enough to carry it.”
Behind him, on the road, a woman’s song drifted like smoke.
Anwyn stood at the bend with a length of pale ribbon in her hand, braid dark, ring bright against her pale fingers. She tied the ribbon to a thorn and let the wind decide whether it should point toward us or away.
She used three turns in the knot and left one tail long, the same trestle code later used by Mordred’s line captains for hold-and-shift lanes. I did not think she knew I knew.
“You could spend less and live longer,” she said without raising her voice. “Accounts off the page do not collect so loudly.”
“They collect forever,” Percival said. He did not turn his head. “I have seen where the road pretends it ends.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Anwyn smiled with her mouth and not her eyes. “Then bring your book where the road pretends,” she said to me. “Let us see whose ink dries first.”
Percival tapped the spear once with his knuckles and the sound came back like a voice that had been taught not to shout. “I saw a tree in a room with no door,” he said. “Its roots drank names. Its branches wore crowns. When I tried to rest beneath it, it asked what name I would trade to stay in its shade.”
“What did you answer?” I asked.
“Enough to stand and no more,” he said. “It allowed me to leave.” At the path’s bend a perfect circle of water did not ripple, as if saving a truth for later.
Percival’s own road notes place what follows later, after the first lines were drawn.
The cave doubled back on itself like a lie rehearsed too often, folding back on itself. Every turn returned us to the same stone with a different shadow. Dinadan touched the wall and came away with a smear that looked like ink and smelled like lies.
“Mocking Echo,” he said, and repeated the cave’s whisper back at it in a voice that made the words sound foolish. The next turn held.
“False footfall,” Palamedes said. He closed his eyes and listened. “Three steps where there should be two.” He tossed a pinch of sand; the extra step stumbled.
Percival held the spear in both hands and looked down its length despite his own warning. The cave offered him crowns. It offered him a throne that never asked him to get up. He shook his head.
Sister Rowan’s staff tapped three times somewhere behind us. “Listen before you look,” her voice carried. “And ask whether the price includes your name.” The ledger agreed in a whisper at my wrist:
Listening is credit.
The ledger wrote one word at the page edge.
Humility.
We reached the heart. A pool as flat as hammered glass reflected a boy with a king’s face. Percival lowered the spear until its point touched the water and the boy turned into a man with empty hands and a mouth that did not lie.
“Enough to stand,” he said. The pool showed him a road and did not eat it.
The cave tried one more trick. It promised sleep with no names on the ledger. He laughed, not loudly, not cruelly. “There is no such sleep,” he said, and the pool stopped pretending to be deep.
Warmth touched the margin and a line formed where only I could see.
Interest posted.
A woman with a white cord tied over her eyes waited at the bend where the road chose the hill over the river. She tapped the spear’s haft with a staff notched three times. “Next time, say your name like you are not a poem,” she said, and smiled in Percival’s direction without needing eyes. “Sister Rowan,” she told me, and then to him, “Listen before you look.”
Then she took the river path and left us the hill road.