Sublime

He remembers how Arthur was, in the last few years of his reign. He remembers how things ended.

Hard to argue with a god like Herne, who lives in every bramble thicket, every maggot crawling in every carcass, anywhere in the realm. But he’s not sure it would help these people, here in this camp, to have Arthur back as king. Arthur wasn’t a great healer, a great mender of broken things. He was the one who did the breaking, more often than not.

Riding through the old forests, you could never shake the feeling that there was a quest around the corner, put there by some greater power, whether that power was the Christ King or the Saxon gods or some older goddess of the trees. Arthur never seemed to notice. It seemed natural to him that things of import should occur in his proximity. If

Gildas’s silence on Arthur says one of three things: that he was unknown to Gildas (perhaps his orbit was local; perhaps he was not yet famous when Gildas wrote); that his story came with inconvenient baggage (a reputation for extreme brutality or licentiousness, perhaps, like Gildas’s tyranni); or that he is a poetic figment of later imagination.

This is the same Morgan who once trapped him in the cellar of her castle for three months, back in the old days. The first rumours about him and Gwenhwyfar probably passed as whispers from her lips into Arthur’s ears, to sow discord at Caer Moelydd. He has a glut of reasons to dislike her. But there was always something about her that he faintly