Excerpt from Chapter One
I wish I could say Camelot was my first love. Or Guinevere. Most everyone I met after I married her willed me to say I saw her in my dreams as a young man, so I could add prophet to my list of accomplishments. Perhaps I should say equality or magic or bravery or wit. I cannot claim any first loves so romantic.
What I can claim is earth: the feeling of it under my feet, the way it swelled after a heavy rain, or the smell of it around a brook or a stream. I spent much of my adolescence exploring the forest surrounding my home, letting the birds and moss guide me. I scaled thirty-foot trees and scraped every part of my body on bramble thorns.
Then Merlin, his face set in a perpetual scowl. I would follow him around while he mixed tinctures blessed by God Himself for the nuns at the monastery. I was to keep the secret that they were not blessed by anything but hard work and that he also brewed cleansing potions for the wise woman down the road who followed the remnants of a religion as old as light itself. She said she was too old to remember all those chants at Mass, and the constant sitting then standing then sitting again made her knees creak.
“Don’t get old, boy,” she said to me on more than one occasion. “Take it from me. You get old, the sap keeping your body together starts hardening.”
She was a tall but stout woman with large hands and long gray hair. She was my next love, but she passed away before my twelfth birthday. A cough had rumbled in her chest during winter four years before her death and never left. Eventually, she began hacking up blood, bright and red, then dark globs like clumps of dirt. That was when Merlin had looked at her, and she had looked at him. They had had a conversation without words, and she had said, “Long time coming, eh? Spite’s better than any fountain of youth.”
