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Chatoyant; having changeable lustre; twinkling; displaying a band of light caught off inclusions of other minerals.
The dampness slicking his clothes and skin had attracted a sheen of dust and brittle straw, which coated the back of his bare arms and clung to his sweat-drenched tunic. The mingled aromas of exertion and dirt, hay and rain, stuck cloyingly to the insides of his nostrils like summer. And there was Galahad, of course, stretched out beside him - always too warm and too close and too pale.
Galahad, Mordred had learned over the year and a half or so of their friendship, had no concept of personal space. The older boy suspected that it might have had something to do with his upbringing in a convent, though he hadn’t yet worked up the audacity to ask. Besides, pointing it out might make it stop. Mordred wasn’t sure why, but he knew he didn’t want that.
Galahad was absently tracing a series of invisible crosses in the water droplets beaded along Mordred’s arm, leaving a strange sort of warm chill behind as they slowly evaporated into the humid air pressing down against them. In the single-minded manner of most sixteen year olds, his thoughts had already returned to the topic they’d been discussing before the sudden deluge had chased them from the training grounds. “They’ll be red,” he spoke up suddenly, his thin voice soft and a little breathless. As always, he seemed to take for granted that Mordred would follow his silent train of thought; and, as always, Mordred did his best to comply. “Linet said she’d finish sewing them today.”
Mordred frowned slightly up at the ceiling, tracing back through their earlier conversation. “You’ll look like one of those crusaders,” he tried skeptically. “I think … I think you have to earn a device like that before you’re allowed to wear it.”
Sparrow-thin fingers stilled against Mordred’s wrist, and then there was a soft rustling of straw as Galahad turned his head to one side to look at him. Mordred counted to three, slowly, before looking back. Galahad’s white-blonde hair was plastered in a series of erratic, damp swirls against the too-severe lines of his pale face, bits of straw tangled up in the strands like a madman’s halo. Something about the intense fervor of his dark blue eyes kept him from looking ridiculous, however. Mordred wavered almost daily between envying him that and finding it unsettling. “Do you think that it will make God angry?” he asked seriously. Or at least, Mordred though that he was being serious. With Galahad, it was often difficult to tell.
“I wouldn’t know about your god, but I can think of a handful of knights who won’t exactly be pleased.”
The light flickered somewhat in Galahad’s eyes, and he readjusted his head to gaze up at the ceiling again. There was a leak in the roof distressingly close above them, pregnant to bursting with beaded water; Mordred watched in helpless fascination as Galahad silently debated the odds of an imminent drenching, his thoughts chasing themselves like cloud shadows through his unfocused gaze. “Oh, that’s alright, then,” he mused absently, clearly dismissive. “It’s a tournament, is it not? Everyone goes as a caricature of themselves.” His lips quirked slightly, and Mordred wondered if he was thinking of his father, who was rumored to be going as the Knight of Hearts. Galahad paused to sneeze softly in the drifting dust before adding, “If anyone protests, I’ll tell them it’s a joke.”
But you don’t mean it as a joke, Mordred thought. He said nothing, though. He doubted that Galahad would understand his protest.
Besides, the opportunity for comment quickly passed as Galahad added, “I still don’t understand why you declined your own invitation. Don’t you want to fight?”
Mordred scowled up at the shadows. Of course he did. He was seventeen, and freshly knighted; in between thoughts of meals and perplexing daydreams about kissing Galahad (or maybe the dark-haired scullery maid; things were often confused in that department), fighting was all that he thought about. He spent practically every waking moment training. He had been fed tales of battle and conquest along with his wet nurse’s milk. They all had. It was what they’d all been bred to do. It was just -
darkness and coldness and the screams of dying men, dying horses, blood covering all the world like a fast-rising tide and the knowledge that he had put it there, he had caused it
- complicated.
“Waste of energy, battering around like that against our own friends and allies,” he lied, habit making the words effortless, his trademark disdain masquerading as credibility. “Besides, someone needs to be there on the sidelines, ready to drag you out of the mud.” A beat, and then, more hesitantly, “… I’m surprised they’re allowing you to compete, after last week.”
Galahad was lying close enough beside him that Mordred could hear him grind his teeth. “The Lord is testing me,” he said finally, after a long moment of tense silence. “I have to prove to Him - to my fa - to the court that I am not weak.”
Mordred blinked slowly, momentarily tangled up in the memory of pinning the smaller boy’s shoulders to the ground as he convulsed beneath them, watching his eyes roll white in his thrashing head. Like a fish out of water.
“Galahad -” he began carefully. He turned his arm over beneath the faint pressure of Galahad’s fingers so that he could touch the other boy’s wrist, feeling the heat of the fever which burned in him still, and the hummingbird flutter of his racing heartbeat. “Of course you’re not weak. But maybe -”
But though his own hand had adjusted to slide around Mordred’s wrist, loose and sure as a bracelet, Galahad's eyes were already gone, focused on that place he went in his head sometimes where Mordred could not follow.
……
He found it strange, when he cared to think about it at all, that he could be so intimately familiar with a room which was not his. He could tell the hour of the day now merely by charting the shadows on the floor, even when the rest of him lost time and faded in and out of dreaming.
But there was no comfort in that familiarity. He hated how stiff and thin the sheets were on the bed that was not his, still fisted tight in the memory of now-dead fingers, still reeking too strongly of piss and lye from too many hasty washings. His wrists ached knowingly from the pressure of restraints which were no longer there; he could trace his fingernails along the ridges of healed and healing scars if he wanted to. Mostly, though, he did his best to ignore them, the same way he ignored the dry, bitter ash of medicinal root still weighing heavily on the back of his tongue.
Rolling over required a near-Herculean effort, but he did it anyway. What he really wanted was the window, but that was all the way across the room, as distant and unattainable as the farthest star in the heavens. The light that came through the warped glass to hit the floorboards was patterned, slashed through with irregular streaks of shadow. It must be raining again.
Galahad lay still for a while after that, waiting for his ragged breathing to return to normal inside his aching chest. If he strained his ears past the quiet murmuring in the adjacent chambers, he could just make out the faint patter of fat droplets against the glass; and if he closed his eyes, the way he did now, he could convince himself that he smelled it, too, clear and cold and heavy with the darker aromas of earth, wet and waking. He thought about what the destriers would smell like, coats damp beneath their blankets and tack, and about the splattered patterns of dried mud left like clay on their heavy hooves. He thought about the treacherous footing on the melee field, and how it might spell disaster for the best swordsmen and victory for the least skilled. He thought about the eyes of God watching it all, and wondered if such dichotomies and unexpected twists would please Him.
The way I have failed to. The attack had come in the chapel itself this time. He had been kneeling before the altar, lost in silent meditation of the jewel-like tones thrown about his knees by the room’s single stained glass window. There had been no visions this time, the way there sometimes were - only the pain; the helplessness. He wondered if he’d been punished for thinking on such trivial things as light patterns and shadow, instead of asking for grace and promising victory, the way he had intended to do when he’d entered the chapel. But he did not wonder on it for long. The ways of the Lord were ineffable, and certainly beyond his ability to fathom.
The disappointment, however, was harder to contain. It burned like acid caught beneath the curves of his ribcage. All those extra hours Sir Gawain had offered in combat training to prepare him; all that time little Linet had devoted to sewing his colors. This had been his chance to show them all that the King had not been wrong to put him in training with the others - that he was capable, that he could be a knight like his fa - a knight of the Lord.
But he had been wrong. And they would all know it now.
Galahad gritted his teeth hard and turned his flushed cheek for a moment into the cooler fabric of the pillow, because whatever he was or was not, he would not cry, he would not. The fingers of his right hand curled instinctively around themselves, searching for the black ring he always wore, even though his overwrought muscles cried out at the motion. The ring had begun life as a worry stone, a river-rock worn smooth by countless waves, retrieved for him by Mordred the day Morgause’s son had thought to take him swimming. He hadn’t known; swimming was one of the things absolutely forbidden Galahad by his mother, and even though he was tempted to break the rule now that he was out of her sight, some lingering unease kept him on the shore. Another disappointment. But Mordred, who understood such things in his own way, had seen the frustration on his face, and had found him the stone. He’d spent more than a year rolling it between his hands whenever the disappointment threatened to turn into fear, but he couldn’t always carry a rock in his hand, which was when he’d had the idea to have the rock carved into a ring. It was large enough to shift from finger to finger when he needed to fidget, but somehow, the smooth band never fell off.
Mordred’s expression had turned strangely when he’d first seen it. Galahad was worried that he’d displeased his friend with the transformation of the gift, but the other boy had just shook his head, and refrained from comment forever after, even though his sea grey eyes - almost as dark as the onyx-colored stone - often dropped to the bauble whenever Galahad became restless.
He was not sure how long he laid prone like that. Time slipped away as he faded in and out of consciousness, and each time he awoke again, the room remained unchanged. The distant murmur of far-off conversation continued to swell and ebb around the walls of the room like the ocean, and the rain continued to fall softly against the glass. Eventually, the light began to fade, and the shadows in his dreams spilled out across the floorboards.
When he opened his eyes and saw the knight standing in the doorway, he was unsure whether or not he was still dreaming.
But then, it had to be a dream, for the knight was wearing his colors: a red cross on a field of white, or rather, a field of once-white, now torn and stained with mud and grass and a rustier color that might have been blood. He was looking at himself, but his true self - not the self that currently laid weak and helpless on the infirmary bed. Before him stood the Crusader Knight of God, and he was holding Guinevere’s flower crown; the sign of victory.
“Only for the melee,” the Knight warned. He left muddy boot prints on the shadowed floorboards with each heavy step he took across the threshold of the room. “And only for the amateur round. There’s no need to, um. Don’t look at me like that.” He was limping. There was a bruise above one sea-grey eye, large and swollen and beginning to discolor, and his dark hair was matted to his head with sweat and rain. He stopped beside the bed, and Galahad weakly held out a hand for the wreath, which the knight passed to him. Both of their hands were shaking; with exhaustion, probably. Maybe with something else. Galahad blinked up at him slowly with bruise-colored eyes.
“I was dreaming,” he said finally. Mordred settled wearily on the edge of the mattress. Someone had struck his left gauntlet hard enough to drive the edge of the metal through the sleeve and into his flesh; Galahad traced his fingers lightly across the livid crescent, thinking of the half-moon Agravain sometimes took for his device.
“Dreaming of what?” Mordred lifted his free hand, and for a moment, he seemed about to brush the sweat-damp strands of straw-blonde hair away from Galahad’s face. But he dropped the hand again without touching anything.
“Drowning.” He didn’t sound perplexed or upset about this. Neither boy seemed sure if he was meant to be.
Mordred looked at the half-crushed petals in the flower crown for a long moment, then leaned forward slightly to brush a bit of dirt away from them with his dirt-encrusted fingers. “I dream about drowning, too.”
“But not today.”
“… Not today, no.”
Galahad lightly touched the rusted red cross on Mordred’s chest. “Because you were victorious. You wore God’s colors today.”
“I wore your colors today.”
“Did the men not think that strange?”
“The men do not know.”
Galahad blinked up at him again, that same sleepy, slow, underwater look. “Then I was right,” he said slowly. “The knight in the doorway … you … was me.”
“Yes.” Mordred reached forward again, this time to fold Galahad’s fingers more securely around the wilting blossoms. “Congratulations on your hard-won victory, Sir.”
Galahad smiled faintly, faraway but sure. “And was He pleased? Was He … proud?”
“Indeed, he was very proud. I heard him say as much to the king myself.” Mordred returned the smile. Faintly.
Galahad’s eyes slid closed, already the better part of asleep again. Maybe that was why Mordred risked leaning forward one last time to press a kiss into the curve of the other boy’s pale mouth. They were both surprised - faintly; distantly - when Galahad’s mouth slid open beneath his, and slightly more so when the hand which bore the river-stone ring lifted to tangle in Mordred’s dark hair. The scent of crushed flowers surrounded them, the blossoms trapped between their sweat-damp chests.
And the thing of it was, neither of them even thought about coming up for air.