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In the last days of her life when every morning, winter or summer, seemed pearled with chill dew, she liked to walk in the gardens alone. She wore thick layers of wool in sturdy colours where once there had been red and gold and a key hanging around her neck on a leather cord. She had given up many things; many things she'd been happy to give up - her summer bird colours, her dancing shoes. She missed the freedom, the knowing that she could go anywhere that her horse could take her in a day. Then, she had been the Queen of Camelot, and that key had belonged to a place that no other soul could open, not even the King.
It was her right as the Mistress of that place.
It had been a wedding gift.
Years later, her wild days were long behind her, but the key remained, still hanging heavy between her breasts. She was still one of those women, one of those rare creatures who never quite forgot what it was to be a wild thing. It was as though she carried a flickering flame inside her, where most people have only their heart. The holy women would never understand, so she kept the key and she kept her memories to herself. They called her "Lady" there, if they called her anything but, once, she had been Guenever of Camelot and her husband had given her a key to a garden, tightly walled.
In her youth, two men had called her Jenny, and that garden had been hers, and hers alone.
In the days before his miracles, before Elaine coming to Camelot and five thousand welcomes, she had blindfolded him with silk and taken him by the hands.
"Where are you taking me?" he asked her, gruff as he sometimes was when nervous; some women have a talent for putting men at their ease and those women are often just as talented at unsettling for their own ends. In the shadow of the wall, she took his face in both hands and kissed him. There was nobody to see them; with Arthur away, nobody else remembered that this place existed.
Unfaithful as she had always known that she'd be, it never even occurred to her to be guilty.
"Will you keep my secrets?" she asked him, knowing that it was a foolish thing to ask. He had all her secrets already. He could kill her with a thought; the magic was in knowing that he never would.
"Always," said Lancelot. Jenny turned and slipped the key into the lock. It was stiff but, as always, it opened to her hand. She had that particular talent. She was a finder of locked away things.
The gate opened.
"Come in," Jenny said.
Arthur had chosen well when he made the garden a gift to her. AS a King he was wise and understood the secrets of men's hearts, but women were a different thing entirely; even a woman does not always understand her longings. He was wrong as often as he was right.
The garden, though. Oh, the garden.
The thing was this: it was as beautiful in summer as it was in winter. In autumn, the leaves fell thickly, gold and red. In the Spring, she wore white flowers in her hair. It reminded her of being younger a child in her father's country, a wild thing...a creature of mists and hills. She pulled the pins out of her hair and let it tumble down around her face. She loved her husband but she loved Lancelot as well. Perhaps it was sinful? Perhaps not. It was love, and that can never truly be wrong.
He took her by the hips and kissed her and then he lifted her. She threw her arms around his neck and kept kissing him. The air was heavy with the scent of the white blossoms and the silent growing of the grass. Before she was Guenever, Arthur's wife, she was her father's daughter, Jenny, who learned to ride as soon as she could walk, who swam and ran and knew the wild country where she grew up like a part of herself. If a young girl has something of the storm in her, then a wife has something of the sword. Not then, though. Not in Lance's arms.
In his arms, Jenny yielded like a beating heart.
On her back in the grass, she looked up at the walls, high walls; they were walls that would keep her secrets. Secrets had a way of catching fire and, once, Mark tested with Isolde with fire and God or faith or luck bought her through and, for the rest of their lives, she bore the scars to prove her sin or her husband's mistrust.
Remember: always let them love you more than you love them.
More than once, he'd undressed her among the grass and the flowers and she'd lain naked and waited for him, let her knees fall apart when he leaned over her and the small white flowers caught in her hair. She'd close her eyes and brush her fingers against her skin and she'd feel wild again and remember how, sometimes, a woman's body is not just skin, muscle and bone.
How sometimes, a body makes a map.
That day, though, no time for bare skin and the cool breeze. Instead, there were fumbled layers and wandering hands. She cradled his jaw with her fingers. She kissed the bridge of his nose and his eyelids and the corner of his mouth. She wrapped one leg around his hips and kept him inside her for as long as she could. She never wanted it to be over. She never wanted to go back to being Guenever again. Her secret was that she always wanted to be Jenny, pretty Jenny, with the white flowers and the key warm between their bodies.
He gave her his miracles. She folded a secret into the dark hair behind his ear.
And, years later, after every thing that happened and everything that went wrong, the smell of smoke still clinging in her long hair, she came to stand in the shade of a silver birch. The key was a warm weight alongside the similar weight of her memories. She was old; Jenny still, but maybe not so pretty. Lancelot was long dead. Arthur was long gone. The silent sisters had taken her and let her stand and watch as the boat moved across the brackish, reedy water.
Her King. Her Love. Her heart split into two pieces and nothing in her chest but flickering fire and white flowers, long dried and turned as dry as paper. Camelot had fallen and burned but, sometimes, Jenny liked to think of that garden as still being there, hidden, spiral-walled and safe, as beautiful in springtime as in the dark, nameless days in the heart of the winter.
Somebody was calling her inside.
She turned to go, careful not to tread on any of the tiny white flowers that jewelled the grass like stars.