Gawain spent the rest of the day before lying in bed. The emotions, intense and varied in the extreme, of the preceding days had brought a formidable exhaustion upon him. And his leg ached terribly.

Shortly after noon, Nimue had risen, dressed, cinched her silver-threaded belt tight at the waist. From her necklace she produced again an herb and brought out powder from a small brown leather pouch inside her shift that Gawain had not seen during the time they had been together over the preceding hours. It was as if she reached into her shift and produced the pouch from a space in which it had not been before, or from which before there had been no space.

Nimue again chewed the herb, held the powder in her hand, and spit into her palm. Once this was done, she poured a cup of water from the table and carefully rubbed her hands together over the open brim, causing the concoction to sprinkle down into it. Shaking the cup for good measure, she handed it to Gawain.

'Drink it,' Nimue said briskly. He did, down to the last bitter and oddly milky drop, and handed the cup back to her. She placed it back on the table and turned to him once more.

'I have tasks to which I must attend. I will be gone for the remainder of the day.'

Gawain nodded but felt a pang of loss at the thought of her leaving him. Their intimacy had turned the spark of attraction he had felt for her since they were teenagers into a bonfire that has grown large and burns with tongues of flame reaching high into the night sky. He had never approached her before, in a romantic way, because he felt it was strange, or at least without precedent, or a non-magical person to be in a long-term pairing with a magical one. Intermittent sex, yes. But a relationship spanning months or even years was simply not done. And perhaps more importantly, he had felt that Arthur would not condone it if he pursued Nimue.

'But,' Nimue continues, 'I will return soon after sundown. To check on you, and to eat. And then to sleep,' she said, the faintest curve of a smile at the edge of her lips.

Now he wakes at least two hours before sunrise, but he is no longer tired. After Nimue left yesterday, he slept through the afternoon, spent the evening with her, and returned to sleep in the late evening when the guards' bell outside signaled change of watch. He lies in the bed, Nimue curled in sleep facing away from him, and then sits up. Carefully, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and puts both feet on the floor, favoring the left as much as he can.

Then he tries standing but reaches the middle of the movement before a sharp pain in his leg pushes him back to the bed. Wincing, he turns to look at Nimue, who against his intention is stirring. She sits up in the bed, hair uncharacteristically mussed, at least in comparison to how he has always seen her, and she rubs one fist to each eye in an endearing way.

'Good morning,' she says.

Looking out the high window where darkness still persists, Gawain replies: 'Is it morning?'

'It is for us, at least today.'

Then he remembers with a sinking feeling in his stomach that she has ordered the executions to occur today. One hundred men out of a total number of one hundred and eleven. He considers challenging her on the matter again, but decides not to, knowing she will not yield.

Nimue brings him his crutch, helps him to his feet, and they begin the walk through the palace down to the courtyard, with their final destination this time being the dungeons. As they progress down the long stone hallways carpeted with deep crimson rugs, Gawain says: 'We did not eat anything before leaving.'

'Never conduct a mass execution on a full stomach,' is Nimue's reply, and despite his best effort, he cannot tell if she is speaking ironically or not.

They reach the courtyard, which slowly awakens as the first rays of the sun barely rise above the eastern horizon, painting the sky a pale lavender. The spring morning is cold, and the wind blows strongly, making it even colder.

The stable master is already tending the horses, feeding them their morning meal. The shepherds are filing the sheep out of their pens to spend the day afield in the higher meadows, and the sheep dogs enthusiastically run at their masters' heels, nipping at a sheep hoof here and there as an athlete might prepare for sport.

The smith has lit his forge but does not yet start his work. He rarely starts this early, but he kindles the fire into the steady glow that he will maintain for most of the day. It takes him a long time to get the fires burning steadily and spread out among the coal, and while they gather their strength, he sits on the fence around his yard and eats a bowl of warm porridge he has gotten from the lower kitchen.

Nimue leads towards the far northwest corner of the fortress grounds, the palace a considerable distance away. Here in the corner, as far removed as possible from the other parts of the fortress, lies the entrance to the dungeons. There is a latticed metal door that lies diagonally angled against the ground, and it is guarded by a squire armed with both sword and spear. As Nimue and Gawain approach, the squire stiffens his stance and turns to them.

'My lord and lady,' says the squire with a bow of his head.

'Open the gate,' Nimue says imperiously. The guard does so.

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Beyond the gate is a long and wide set of stairs, lit on either side by huge torches. If a prisoner escapes, he will do so in blinding light, night or day. Nimue helps Gawain manage each step, finally maneuvering the bottom one that is deeper than all the others by stepping down, looking up at him, and motioning for him to use her shoulders as a solid point off which to balance and descend.

Before them now is a long hallway, also lit with bright torches. The floor of the hallway is dirt, raked meticulously three times per day. Arthur never allowed his prisoners to live in squalor. The worth of a person is separate from the sins and crimes they do, he said. Gawain never knew if he believed that when he was a child. He is not sure if he believes it now.

Gawain's thoughts are interrupted as they reach another latticed metal door, this time made with thicker bars of metal but woven less tightly. On either side stands a guard, and the foremost one does not need an instruction to open the gate. Nimue leads through the opening into what Gawain now sees is a long, wide hallway set perpendicular to the first passage, and extending beyond his sight in either direction. And lined along the walls on either side: small cells, capable of fitting around five prisoners, six if they were to sleep uncomfortably.

The cells on the further wall are filled with the traitors, and their number extends some distance down the eastern hallway. They murmur among themselves, but stop when they hear the door opening, and when they see Nimue, a hush deeper than the silencing of speech descends over this part of the dungeon. In the newly pristine silence, an anguished wail echoes faintly from the western hallway, but when Gawain looks behind him in that direction, there are only converging lines leading to a far distant black point.

Nimue lets go of Gawain, steadying him before removing her hand, and goes to the further wall where a series of shelves are hidden by tattered cloths: storage of food bowls, water jugs, chamber pots, and other supplies. But from the back of the top shelf, she raises on tiptoes, pulls down a larger bowl than the others, and from inside this bowl there comes a rattling sound.

Before Gawain can ask, Nimue says: 'Animal bones.'

'What are they for?'

'To decide who the gods choose for death this morning.' Gawain looks into the bowl to see an assortment of bleached white bones each the size of about a human knuckle, chipped off from the larger skeleton of whatever animal it came from.

'How do these bones tell us that?'

Nimue says, 'One hundred of these bones are from animals of prey. The men who select one of these bones will die. The other eleven of these bones are from predators. The men who select those will live, to spend the rest of their lives hunting for their lost honor, living with the weight of their betrayal in their hearts, and the knowledge that even if their families accept their return, the gods will never redeem a traitor.'

'How will you know which bones are from prey and which are from predator?' Gawain says, puzzled.

She looks at him for several moments, saying nothing, until she replies simply: 'I will know.'

Escorted by one of the guards, she goes from prisoner to prisoner, holding out the bowl. Each one selects a bone, on the threat that if they refuse, they will be killed immediately by a sword thrust from the guard. The few men who draw a bone that Nimue identifies as predator fall back against the back of their cells in relief. The majority of the men who draw the prey bones react in varied ways: some wail, some stand frozen with their with faces draining of color, some faint.

Nimue spits at these displays, saying: 'No honor. Even in death, no honor.'

When the final count is made, the guards go cell by cell and bind the ones condemned to die, while the eleven men who will live are rounded up into a single group and escorted unbound, but at spear point, behind the condemned. At the rear, Nimue leads Gawain, hard gleam in her eyes, while Gawain feels resigned and defeated.

Outside the gates of Camlann, at some distance from the walls of the fortress, Gawain sees one hundred stakes prepared for burning. The condemned men begin again to wail and faint, but the guards kick them and beat their heads with spear butts until they rise and continue moving forward. Some of the condemned never regain consciousness and are dragged along by the others.

Gawain wonders if this is what she was doing yesterday afternoon: preparing the execution grounds. Of course he knows it is; one voice asked the question and a deeper, wiser voice answered.

One by one, the condemned are tied tightly to the stakes, standing on small mounds of kindling and logs. When each has been secured, Nimue raises her hand and silence seems to be forced onto each prisoner, their mouths closed and eyes bulging, some breathing heavily, and a few vomiting.

In a voice that projects to the level of echoing off the walls of Camlann, she says: 'Today, for the crime of treason, and the evilest deed of betraying one's lords and those to whom you are oath-sworn, I sentence you to die by burning with fire until dead. The fires underneath you will be lit by the eleven who are spared.'

Turning to the eleven, she says: 'If you refuse, if you even hesitate for a moment to light the fires, then I will kill you myself. Not with a physical weapon wrought by human hands, but with something far worse that I will pull into this world, a weapon that made by the will of a creature so alien to you that even to hear its name whispered into your ear would shatter your mind in both life and death.'

And so Gawain stands and watches as each of the fires are lit by the eleven, one after the other, and the wind blows stronger now so that the fires are not easily lit, and as they burn they blow sideways to prolong the suffering of the condemned.

A young man with a monk's tonsure catches Gawain's eye. He is staring at Gawain, just after lighting one of the fires. And to Gawain this monk has the most peculiar and unnerving look in his eyes: as though some secret knowledge is held by him, and he taunts those around him with it. The monk's gaze is somehow both blank and malevolent. Gawain looks away, but when he looks back, the monk is still staring at him, and he feels a strange prickling on the back of his neck and a tightening in his stomach and groin like he has felt in the forest when he senses that something evil is there, just inside the darkened border of the nearest shadow, just beyond the furthest reach of the campfire light.

Gawain scowls at the monk, but the monk only moves again when it is time for him to light the next fire. He breaks his eyes away from Gawain and relights his torch from the fire before him. The flame whips in the wind as the monk carries it down to the next unlit stake, and while watching his strange and slow steps, Gawain is now unable to ignore the feeling of inexplicably deep dread. When the last fire is lit, and the man tied to the last stake begins to panic, the one tied to the first is still screaming.