The autumn that settled over Avalon did so quietly, like a soft-spoken promise. It wasn't the dramatic, romantic kind that slams doors, but the gentle sort that cracks a window open and lets the world breathe. The morning sun was thin and golden, painting the lake with a sliver of gilt. The air tasted of wet wood and distant smoke, and the hills seemed to hum an old, forgotten melody. Leaves, once green and stiff, blushed red and let go, drifting down in slow, quivering sheets to carpet the paths to the cottages.
Perched on a low stone wall by the water's edge, Lancelot was wrapped in a cloak that lay around her like a dark tide. Mia's books were open in her lap, their pages fluttering softly in the breeze. Every sentence felt like a small, dangerous magic. A kiss described so vividly the words seemed to warm her hand; a vow so intense it made her knees feel weak. She read as if she were studying a foreign language of longing, a sentiment echoed by the world around her—the wind sighing through the trees, causing every branch to tremble and every leaf to shiver in time with the pounding of her heart.
It was a silly, thrilling sort of synchronization. A gust of wind would scatter a handful of leaves like paper hearts, and her heart would leap just as the book described some breathless, pivotal meeting. It was absurd, and she loved it. For a few stolen hours, she let herself believe the novel's promise—that love could arrive like a wave, sudden and shining, and transform everything. The leaves trembled in response, as if the whole world was blushing right along with her.
But when she closed the book, reality slipped back into place—the cool air, the familiar weight of the sword at her hip, and the lake's indifferent reflection. In that quiet return, Lancelot felt a familiar ache, the kind you get after a taste of sweetness you know can't last. Yet the dream had taken root. Autumn swirled around her like a waiting audience, and for the first time since she'd laid down her sword, she wondered if there was another art to master: the art of staying, of letting someone else learn your true shape.
Mia had waved her off, a stack of books tucked under her arm and a half-smile on her face. "Read these on nights you get the urge to practice crying," she'd said. "They'll give you an idea of what to expect." Ever the literal one, Lancelot had tucked them into her backpack like talismans and set off beyond the veil of Avalon.
The market that morning was a stage set in everyday clothes. A boy snatched an apple and darted away, a woman haggled over salt, and the sun cut the square into neat, salable blocks. Lancelot moved through it all with the quiet wariness of someone used to a silence she wasn't meant to hear. Mia's books still hummed in her backpack, their promises a distant buzz of bees. She hadn't come to stir up trouble; people used strange weather as small talk and then moved on.
He looked at her the way you look at a new painting in a familiar room—first noticing it's there, then figuring out how it changes the space.
He carried himself with the air of a man who was rarely surprised by flattery. His cloak was expensive but understated; his smile had the easy tilt of a well-rehearsed performance.
"You walk like you could keep a secret and not feel the weight of it," he said when he stood before her, his voice as warm and smooth as molasses.
Lancelot regarded him with the same wariness she afforded any man with a proposition. She scanned his eyes for fatigue or cunning, his hands for old wounds or a telltale shake, and the set of his jaw for honesty.
"And you sound like a man who expects an audience," she replied. "What's your game?"
He laughed—a brief, polished sound designed to put people at ease. "No game, just courtesy," he said, with a bow that was more charm than reverence. "Sam of the Glen. I daresay the gossip will sound friendlier when I tell the tale."
"Lancelot of Avalon," she offered, because occasionally a name is the only honest currency left.
"Is that near the lake with the reeds from the stories? They say the girls of Avalon are all storm and song."
The compliment warmed a place Mia's books had already made tender. For a moment, Lancelot knew the strange, sticky feeling of seeing something almost mythical—the flush at the base of her throat, the world narrowing to the sound of a single voice.
That night, they traded words like currency. Sam claimed a corner table at the inn and ordered wine with a showman's flourish. He plucked a sprig of lavender from the kitchen and set it between their plates like he was buying intimacy. "You have a look of someone who's seen battle," he said, his voice dropping to what he clearly thought was a romantic pitch, but it only brushed against the truth. "How does someone so fierce come to read about love?"
"I read to learn how to stay," Lancelot answered after a thoughtful pause. "How to be present after the fighting is done."
Sam's smile softened. He reached across the table and touched her hand with a single fingertip. The contact sent a jolt of reflexive warning through her—an echo of a past where cruelty came dressed in robes and rank, not sitting across from her with a charming smile. She withdrew her hand gracefully.
"You're far away," he said, his affection laced with a hint of possessiveness. "I admire that in a woman. A little mystery keeps a man from getting bored."
"Then you should be wary of your kind," Lancelot replied. "Rarity is only valuable if it isn't treated like merchandise."
He feigned injured courtesy. "I'm just a man with an appreciation for beautiful things."
As the days passed, his words began to ring hollow. Sam paraded her through salons and dinners with the tentative air of a collector showing off a prized artifact. He showered her with lavish trinkets, never bothering to learn what she might actually cherish. In private, he asked intimate questions designed to find soft spots he clearly intended to press.
"Tell me one thing that frightens you most," he asked one evening, his tone lowering conspiratorially.
Lancelot thought of burning halls and her father's dying breath and replied softly, "That I'll grow accustomed to being wanted only for show."
"A dreadful fate," Sam said, his pity as practiced as his smile. He took her hand more firmly this time, his grip hinting at a slow, tightening intention. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Lancelot saw not the face of a tyrant, but the manner of one: that quiet, everyday assumption of entitlement over others.
Doubt began to seep in, staining her thoughts like ink on linen. She started to notice the small things the novels hadn't prepared her for: the way Sam's servants flinched when he spoke, how people stepped aside when he passed, and the possessive glide of his fingers over a coin. She saw that charm could be a thin veneer over something rotten.
She met Anna by the fountain in the pre-dawn light, when the square still smelled of ashes and the town dogs were howling. Anna's hands were pale as dough, her apron creased from a baker's life. Her words came out flat, like stale bread.
"They took my child from me like snatching the last loaf from a starving man's lips," she began, sinking onto the step as if the stone could hold her up. "It was three markets back, in the dead of winter. The river had frozen thin. Sam... he came after dark with men who smelled of lime and expensive cloth."
"He promised me comfort," Anna continued, her voice thick with unshed tears. "He promised a ring, a name, and food on the table. I told him my mother was dead and my brother was at sea. I had nothing to give but myself. He touched my cheek, and I believed him."
"What happened to the baby?" Lancelot asked, her voice cold and direct. She didn't need a story; she needed facts she could hold onto, like hard currency.
"It died," Anna said bluntly. "They said it was weak. The midwife—old Maere—said a fever took it quick. One of Sam's men left a little bag on my doorstep with a note that said to forget. Maere kept a scrap of the note; the tailor remembers mending my hem with a blue thread that only Sam's man uses; Jonas the stableboy remembers men leaving Sam's carriage late that night, carrying something wrapped up. I burned the receipts, ashamed."
Anna gave her times and dates—the evening after the third snowfall, between the second and third bells before midnight. She provided small, verifiable details: a torn cuff, a scrap of cloth with that identifiable blue thread, and an apothecary's bill for a tonic bought under Sam's name and returned broken. She held out a brownish piece of paper, the ink blotchy but readable.
"The midwife will swear to it," Anna said, her eyes locking with Lancelot's. "Maere wrote the time in the margin of her book so she wouldn't forget. The tailor will swear. Jonas will swear. I will swear, even if the memory makes me shake."
Lancelot handled the evidence like it was something sacred. The note's language had the abbreviated tone of a man used to making polite threats. It held a time, a place, and a flourish of handwriting the town clerk would likely recognize.
"Tell no one," Lancelot instructed, standing up. "Not yet. Gather what you can. Leave it with me. I'll speak to the midwife, Jonas, and the tailor. We won't move until we have a ledger so full of truth it can't be burned."
Anna nodded. Lancelot sent her on her way with a sense of purpose that felt like a tide charting its course. The testimony was ordinary and human; it would need to be laid out carefully to become law.
She didn't make a move without a plan. For Lancelot, flight wasn't about panic; it was about calculated movement—routes, timings, signals, and backups. The kind of plan only someone who had once helped conquer a kingdom could write without her hand trembling. She wrote it all in a small leather-bound book, each line a careful stitch.
For two weeks, she mapped Sam's routines—his evenings at the Blue Stag Inn, his Thursday nights at the Rose and Reed salon, his carriage rides to the noble quarter, and his monthly trips to the hunting lodge at dawn. She used the tavern as one lookout, leaving charcoal marks under a loose stone in the bookbinder's alley to signal her schedule. A chalk mark on the back staircase of the Blue Stag was for emergencies. A coin dropped behind the fishmonger's sign meant a message was waiting.
She assembled a small, quiet team: Anna the baker, Maere the midwife, Jonas the stableboy, a dye-worker, and Rowan the bookbinder—each one a source for a single, verifiable fact. She taught them a code phrase—"The tide keeps secrets"—to end a conversation if needed, and she used empty tobacco tins behind the apothecary as dead drops. Rowan, who understood paper like others understand faces, agreed to compare watermarks and ink in his back room. Lancelot gathered rubbings, seal impressions, and ledger entries. She kept Maere's signed scrap and the bit of blue-threaded cloth in a tobacco tin, the lid wound with a hempen cord. Jonas's testimony was written in his hand and backed up by horse logs.
She practiced disguises—a courier's cloak, rabbit-leather boots, and her hair braided and tucked low. She hid supplies under a sundial in the herb garden, kept a second chest at the dye-works, and stashed a skiff in the reeds by the old mill for a river escape. She buried a small pouch of coins in the south quarter with a drunken-sounding message to throw off anyone looking, and she arranged small diversions—a half-open stable gate, a creaky carriage wheel at two in the morning—to buy herself minutes. Anna even offered to act as a decoy, drawing eyes to the eastern lane while Lancelot slipped in through another gate.
Her plan accounted for triggers: a warrant in the magistrate's window, heralds announcing Sam's version of events, or a red-sealed summons from Sam himself—any of these would mean it was time to move. She staggered the witnesses' schedules to avoid suspicion. Each night, she copied the day's notes and burned the old page. She changed the safety words weekly. Above all, she moved like the tide: quiet, patient, flowing into the gaps that Sam's theater left open.
Viola came into her life in the half-light between the tavern and the marketplace. At first, her interest felt like sunshine—curious, flattering, useful. Viola talked of salons and influence and proposed a surgical, public humiliation for Sam: testimony read aloud, letters revealed, witnesses brought forth. With Anna's story and Rowan's eye for detail, Lancelot saw Viola's plan as a way to break a man who had learned to buy silence.
They began gathering evidence with the focused urgency of miners searching for a glint of gold. Maere would swear under oath; the tailor would produce the blue thread; Jonas would confirm the carriage's movements; Rowan would match the watermarks and handwriting. The conspiracy was slow and deliberate, built to pressure a man whose armor was his reputation right where he was most exposed.
But betrayal arrived like a splinter. A soft-spoken laundress mentioned Viola's visits to the old mill and a cloth scented with Sam's tobacco. A trader, after an argument with Viola, dropped a half-burned scrap of paper bearing Sam's initials. The small hints piled up into an ugly truth: Viola wasn't a friend. She was a dagger Sam had placed at Lancelot's side. She had been feeding him times, places, and confidences, all while smiling her pitiful velvet smile.
That velvet met steel when Lancelot confronted her in a closed room. Viola's smile never slipped. "You're confusing malice with cruelty," she said, her voice as calm as a nurse's. "Sam keeps his world in order. I keep mine intact."
It was worse than betrayal. Armed with Viola's inside information, Sam moved before Lancelot could expose his ledger. He fabricated a crime: a minor nobleman was found dead in his study, a single wound, a scene staged to point to a woman known to frequent the salons—Lancelot. Sam produced witnesses pressed into service by coin and fear, and the magistrate signed the warrant because a tidy story is easier to handle than a messy truth. Sam had turned her accusations into a legal noose; he let the town hunt the face he had framed.
The trap tightened. Lancelot knew the charges were lies, but she felt the town's hunger for a simple story and the magistrate's desire for order. She set her plan into motion. Night fell with a cold rain and a thin mist. She pressed a coin into Jonas's hand, and the stableboy created a clattering diversion with a carriage wheel. Anna, wrapped in a rough shawl, walked the eastern lane, pulling eyes her way. The apothecary's door was still bare of a ribbon—the sign to wait—but the stash in the herb garden was there, a silent friend.
Sam's men were on her trail. They set hounds loose in the alleys. They burned messages. They cornered her in a narrow street while a hired herald loudly proclaimed the charge of murder. Men emerged from the shadows, armed and ready.
The fight that followed wasn't some Hollywood sword-singing spectacle. Lancelot moved with economical grace—a pivot, a wrist lock, and one pursuer was down; another was dumped into a market stall. She fought with the grim efficiency of someone who kills only when she has to. But the crowd was thickening, her attackers multiplying. What she needed wasn't a victory, but an exit.
Then he was there, a figure who seemed like twilight given human form. Young, hooded, with a dark mask shading his features. He stepped between Lancelot and her hunters with a silence that needed no explanation. "Not tonight," he said, his voice low and unassuming. He moved not like a lord or a soldier, but like a man who had practiced the art of neutralizing threats without fanfare. One pursuer dropped, a knife at his tendon; another fell from a precise pressure to the elbow. He didn't linger for thanks; he did what was necessary and then guided Lancelot through a maze of alleys and abandoned courtyards. At a hidden gate leading into a secluded garden, he lowered his mask just enough to reveal a young face and eyes that measured rather than stared. He offered no name—names were dangerous, his silence suggested—but his manner was careful, almost bookish. He gave her a chunk of bread, led her under the scent of rosemary bushes, and vanished as quietly as he had appeared, leaving behind only the certainty that someone had chosen to stand between her and Sam's violence.
Lancelot spent that night under a patched roof, her throat tight and her hands still. Viola's betrayal had stung; Sam's violence had taken the shape of law. But she had seen a glimpse of another kind of player: a scholar who moved like a question and left like an answer. She didn't know yet if he would be a friend, a debt, or just another mystery for later.
The aftermath was slow and messy. Lancelot didn't go back to Avalon right away; she couldn't, not with a warrant and a web of rumors waiting for her like sharpened stakes. She used the time the masked stranger had bought her to quietly reassemble her network. Rowan compared watermarks and handwriting. Maere, Anna, and the tailor gave their sworn statements. The dye-worker watched the Rose and Reed for messengers. Small, concrete pieces of evidence—the blue thread, the apothecary's bill, the stable log—were gathered patiently and put in order.
Lancelot learned the difference between a novel's dramatic climax and the patient, cruel machinery of men who buy silence. She learned how to make a ledger stubborn: a thing that could be held, smelled, and presented until a magistrate could no longer look away. She learned how to disappear and yet persist at the very same time.
By the time autumn closed its gentle grip on Avalon, the dream she'd carried—the pink-tinted fantasy from Mia's books—was still there. But it was different now, like a fossilized petal: whole, yet remade. It had been unfolded and colored in with new hues: grit, patience, and the quirky warmth of the people who had stood by her, cleaning up and repairing the damage beside her. She still carried Mia's books in her pack, but she used them now for what they were—instructors in feeling, not blueprints for action.
If anyone ever asked her later if her heart had been saved by a dramatic kiss or a heroic charge, she would smile a quiet, knowing smile—the smile of someone who had mended more than one broken thing and had no use for drama. She would tell you, simply and without fanfare, that it was fixed—by work, by witnesses, by the stubborn piling up of small, truthful evidence, and by the company of strange friends who walk like questions and stay just long enough to make a change.