When I was on my last quest—albeit the pretend one for Guinevere—I couldn’t help but think we’d made more initial progress than was the case at the moment. If I squinted quite hard, even after two full days of travel, I reckoned I could still make out the top of Tintagel Castle in the distance.

Part of the problem, of course, was the group's size and its disparate makeup. All in, we were probably the size of a big warband but without the clarity of purpose of such a unit. For a start, Beric remained a monumental dickhead and refused to ever be at the back of the formation. He appeared to have it in his head that the other kings would screw him out of his chance at Caeldfwch unless he were with them at all times. Obviously, the fact that he was probably correct in this assessment did nothing to lessen the low esteem in which he was held.

Then there was the issue that Mark’s retinue moved slowly. Like, fuck me, ‘there speeds by a passing snail’ slowly. His insistence on being carried in his ridiculous carriage – with a man at each corner – meant we were only ever a few minutes from a call to halt and swap over litter bearers. Like Beric, he was jealously concerned about the quest finding success with him left behind, so anytime it looked like the rest of the group was pulling ahead, we had ten rounds of ‘I’m a very fat and important king and I will be respected.’ Which, let me tell you, was a real treat.

In fact, the only remotely reasonably behaved of the kings was Corys, who seemed perfectly content to go with the flow and wait and see what happened next. I still haven’t gotten a handle on the guy from Dehuebarch. Whilst he’d done nothing to make me suspicious of him, neither had he endeared himself to me the way Owain had. Speaking of which . . .

“Where the fuck has he gone now?” Arthur yelled, standing high in Llameri’s stirrups.

Owain of Gwent was being a pain. He had no interest in being part of a stately column, riding slowly through the countryside, and instead had volunteered for him and his men to undertake ‘scouting’.

While, in theory, this might have been reasonably helpful in the circumstances, in reality, it meant that Arthur had a fifty-strong war party roaming around his land with very little oversight. No one was saying Owain was up to anything nefarious, but neither were we comfortable with his regular disappearing trick.

“Morgan, can you get a sense of his position at all?”

Before we had set off, I’d had a play with my map and been able to get a lock on the four kings. This meant I had a little aubergine showing for wherever Beric was, a slug for Mark, a question mark for Corys and a jolly little reindeer for Owain. They’d each had to agree for this to work – we’d explained it in case of an ambush, and I needed to be able to offer the fiery death sort of support – and right now, the reindeer was indicating that Owain was showing to the extreme left of our slow-moving column.

“He’s just there,” I pointed towards a thickly wooded area. “Probably after deer again.” It had not gone unnoticed that the men of Gwent were eating significantly better than the rest of us.

Arthur blew out his cheeks. “This is not how I imagined this going.”

Having been on a fair few school trips in my time, this was pretty much exactly how I had expected this thing to shake out. The journey was basically like herding cats through a maze. When some of them were dogs. And at least one was a shark.

Arthur continued, “Does Merlin have any sense of how much further we may have to go? At this pace, I cannot see us getting anywhere for weeks.”

And this brought us to the final – and to my mind, probably the most significant – of our problems. We didn’t really know where we were going. Of course, Arthur hadn’t told any of the other kings this nugget of information. He hadn’t outright lied, but he’d definitely leaned heavily on the ‘strange and mysterious are the ways of cultivators’ card.

“Merlin is clear he can find the sword?’ Arthur had asked when we were putting the plans for the quest into place. “Because if I invite these very powerful men to my land and then have to shrug and say I have no earthly idea what I’m doing, there’s a chance that this might make me seem less than ideal Pendragon material.”

You can reassure him, my dear, that I will have no difficulty locating Caeldfwch. The sword projects such a strong negation field that I will not need to be too close to it in order to pinpoint its position accurately.”

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At the time, neither of us asked the critical question – which now tumbled from Arthur’s mouth. “He’s not intending for us just to stumble around in the woods for as long as it takes to get a sniff of it, is he?”

“Sounds like a decent question, Big M…”

There was a long silence. A much longer silence than I really wanted to experience, with Arthur glaring at me. Finally, his answer came.

I wouldn’t want to quantify what we are doing as ‘stumbling’, my dear. In many ways, this is a reasonably professional grid search we are currently conducting.

Arthur could obviously read my expression. “Fuck’s sake. This is a shambles. How have I allowed myself to hazard my throne on such a ridiculous endeavour.”

“Is there anything for us to go on other than blink luck?” I asked the wizard.

Again, I take issue with that being a fair or accurate characterisation of what we are doing. However, moving past that, I am working on the principle that there are a few precedents, scrolls, and examples I am using to guide us in the right direction.

So, that seemed a little more promising. “And they are?”

Firstly, Caeldfwch never appears in the same place twice. So, we are not heading towards any area where it has already manifested itself. Secondly, we know the bearer will be a neriad, so we are trying to locate an appropriate water source. Thirdly, it would appear that being unrelentingly lost is a crucial aspect of the starting moments of the search.

Once we do not know where we are, other signs will appear. Merlin’s voice changed as if he were now quoting from something before him. There are three steps to finding the lake. The first is of blood, the second is of faith, and the third is a betrayal of all that is good.

I relayed all of this to Arthur. “And he didn’t think it would have been wise to share some of this before we set off? Call me cynical, but ‘a betrayal of all that is good’ sounds like something it would have been wise for all of us to talk over before setting off on a fucking quest in the woods!”

Tell him to stop his whining. There was a time when he would have lived for a mysterious quest. I miss ‘fun’ Arthur.

I sensibly declined to tell King Arthur that Merlin considered him to have become somewhat of a mood hoover.

We were – finally – on the move again. Mark’s latest litter-bearer seemed to have a bit more oomph about them, and the break had been much less than had been the case recently. As we turned a bend in the path, there was a palpable change in the density and height of the trees. It would be fair to say that, before long, it felt like we were comfortably in Hansel and Gretel territory.

Although it must still have been mid-afternoon, the reach of the forest blocked out the sun, and we were moving in almost total darkness. If it wasn’t for the torches that had been hastily lit, I doubted we’d have been able to keep moving too freely.

My dear, Merlin began and then stopped.

“What?” I don’t know what instinct was speaking to me, but I’d drawn Drynwyn.

I’m reflecting on the wording of ‘if you do not know where you are’. It’s pretty interesting, really.

My heart was suddenly racing and a sense of overpowering wrongness was filling my every sense. It was like I was under assault from all sides. “Is now the time for a semantics lesson?”

I fear it might be. You see, in reviewing the information I have gathered from various sources, several essential things come to light. Although most largely agree that the way to find Caeldfwch is first to ‘get lost,’ it occurs to me that this may have been a lazy shortcut of a translation.

Something flew above my head, wings flapping in the dark. “Dude, if you’ve something to say . . .”

It’s just that the rune for ‘lost’ is actually pretty distinctive. And, now I look at it, that’s not actually what is written in the original. However, when you think about it, what is ‘original’? It could be seen that what is there is just as wrong as in later sources. We should not become hung up on the veracity of primary sources. Indeed, at times, those who have come after have a great context and understanding of . . .

“Mate, I’m this close to exorcising you again.”

How rude. Look, my dear, what I’m saying is that “do not know where” has a number of different interpretations. And I’m no longer confident that ‘lost’ is the most accurate. Indeed, in other circumstances, the rune would mean ‘foreign’, ‘alien’ or even, and I’m sure this will turn out not to be the case, ‘fae’.

I was all ready to give him a mouthful and probably would have held forth at length over not recognising the possibility that our first step towards recovering Caeldfwch was to journey into the realm of the fae. It was one thing to embark on a quest around Cornwall for a wet fairy carrying Excalibur. It was quite another for us to deliberately seek to enter a different – and from everything I had read – malign plane of existence.

Arthur, Bors, and I had spent a very uncomfortable time in the Enchanted Forest when seeking to recover Guinevere, and I don’t think any of us would have been especially gung-ho about this quest had we known that we might encounter the supernatural again.

Arthur, in particular, had been rather – shall I say ‘intimately’ – disturbed by the experience.

Merlin would have heard all about this – and more – if I had not become rather caught up in events.

Namely, being knocked from my horse by a dragon attack.