Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s in winter that the old wounds ache as though they’re new again.

On a campaign, they would huddle for the coldest nights, pressed back to chest to side, however they could, to keep from freezing to death. They would watch their breath fog out in front of them in irregular patterns, rising from their strange pile of bodies like steam from a dragon. The nights would seem endless, frozen, bleak. And every morning after, they would be thankful to be alive, just as they would be surprised to be. Bones would ache, old wounds burn as though they never healed at all.

Now the nights are just as cold, bones ache just as fiercely, but there are no campaigns.

Galahad spends most of his time exhausted, arms folded on the rough wooden table so he doesn’t wake up with the imprint of the woodgrain against his forehead. He doesn’t accept Arthur’s offer to stay somewhere more comfortable. Nor the one from Bors to drink to forget and leave what he can’t control be.

Gawain lets him rest, says nothing. Casts concerned eyes over the bags under Galahad’s and simply passes him some bread, or a new pitcher of water.

And so Galahad rests, cold and between sleeping and waking. Dozing by the bedside of the only knight that hasn’t offered him advice on his undeniably fruitless vigil.

Tristan hasn’t moved. Not since Galahad had fallen to his knees by his side on the battlefield, eyes filled with smoke and tears. He’d sat there for a long time, eyes glazed over and unseeing, before drawing his fingers over the man’s stubble-rough jaw, down his throat to rest it over his heart – a final parting.

And he had felt it, with the way his fingers had skimmed the point where, in anyone alive, the pulse would be beating. And it had been in Tristan. Weak, unsteady, but there. Galahad had stared, his own breath trapped in his lungs, before adjusting the pressure against Tristan’s throat, under the jaw where a point would drive any conscious person to movement. And the knight had moved, with a groan, a parting of bloody lips, he had moved. And then lain still again. And Galahad had not left his side since.

No one held hope of the knight’s survival. Even Galahad kept vigil with the terror in his heart that he would wake to his friend finally passed. But every day he lived on, somehow, and every night Galahad fell into fitful rest by his side.

Arthur’s union with the Woad woman had brought at least one conflict to an end. At least their town would no longer be in danger of attack from the forests. It had also brought with it new knowledge, stories and magic, medicine and power. Galahad does not understand the fowl-smelling concoction he makes his friend drink nightly, but he does not question it. Not since the strange people’s salves had healed his wounds after battle and kept infection away from the sick.

He holds Tristan up for him to drink, careful to not choke him, and does not leave him. Not to bathe or sleep, he eats with Tristan in his line of sight. He feels that although he still mourns Dagonet and Lancelot, he will not see his brother die. His heart yearns for Tristan’s eyes to open, to look on his with recognition, to scold him for his lack of care of his appearance and health.

He adjusts his arms on the table and turns his cheek to rest more comfortably. Nearby, the first candle for the night burns hot and bright, tall and new to keep company with him.

Arthur comes rarely, but tonight he comes. Galahad wonders if he can truly be as busy as he says, or if the sight of their fallen brother concerns him so that he avoids this place. Then again, the man is working to make them a place - or at least make himself a place amongst the Woads. Whether or not the others would stay was another question.

Whether or not Galahad would stay was another question. He'd had his fill to sickness of the frigid northern winters, of the snow and ice and the Wall. If not here, however, the question was where?

"I could have them bring in bedding," Arthur comments, standing over the bed. Galahad has barely acknowledged him, feeling exhausted still. "If you won't take sleep in your tent."

Galahad lifts his head and draws in a breath, then looks at the small space that isn't occupied by the table at which he sits, by Tristan himself, or the large, heavy clay stove that he has kept going to keep the space within warmer so that Tristan is not further taxed by shivers or cold.

"I would be in the way," he answers, resigned. "Here is fine."

Arthur glances back at him, over his shoulder, eyes dark and miserable before he steels himself. Galahad thinks he is as much mourning his dreams and bright memories of Rome as he is his lost men. Briefly, Galahad is angry about it, but he does not have the energy to hold it for long.

"You'll join him, you know," Arthur says, and when he turns there is a firm line beneath his chin, tension through his jaw and his profile is so typically Roman and proper that Galahad could laugh. "If you keep forgoing meals and sleep. I've lost enough."

"You've lost one less than you think," Galahad tells him, and Arthur nods, concedes the point, and reaches down to push Tristan's messy hair back from his forehead to check for fever.

Tristan has been lucky - or well taken care of. There has been no fever. Galahad does not know quite what he should make of the elder - Merlin, they called him, or of the way things were folding together. Of the Woads reaching out slowly and taking Arthur into their own. He feels lost to the goings on, hearing his news only second or third hand.

It's hard to remember that any of it matters more than the heartbeat he feels when he settles his hand on his friend's wrist, waiting for it to either slow or speed.

"I'm going to marry her," Arthur says, into the space - as if to make it final. "I must."

The statements seem incongruous. Galahad has some little idea why, and he suspects it's less to do with forging peace and more to do with his own morals, and perhaps Lancelot's honor.

"And then what?" Galahad asks, tired. "Forge a family here, where half will freeze as babes and the other half will freeze as old men?"

"It isn't so bad as that," Arthur answers, but he does not sound convinced. "There is warmth in family, too, Galahad."

A derisive snort is all the younger man can dredge up, and neither speak again for a while. If there is warmth in family, Galahad does not remember it. His had stood up to take his brother’s place to go to Rome, when they had come for him, and his family had let him. No one had spoken a word against their youngest riding out with boys five years older than him at least. He wonders if anyone even remembered that he was part of their family.

Of the only family he had known, grown with, felt warmth with, there stood but four men left. And two now had their own families, taking their warmth with them.

“We will wed in Spring.” Arthur says at length. Galahad remains as he is, eyes out of focus, watching Tristan’s chest rise and fall with shallow steady breaths.

“I would see you there, Galahad.”

The young knight raises his eyes, just enough to show he’s heard, and after a moment he blinks, his head ducking forward in a barely seen gesture of acknowledgment. He cannot fault Arthur for seeking happiness here, he cannot fault him for seeking happiness at all.

“If he wakes.” He says. He’s exhausted, trapped in his own routine and promise no one asked him to keep to or make, staying by Tristan’s side. He would not leave it.

Arthur turns away from Tristan at last, and lays his hand on Galahad's shoulder in reassurance instead. He spares them both the question of what Galahad will do if Tristan does not rise.

Left to his own, Galahad closes his eyes and feels the cold penetrate, pressing on him even with the stove burning low and warm behind him, and he sleeps.
-

His dreams are of cloudy skies and drifting smoke, of the smell and blood and battle. It is an old dream, but colored fresh with the recent battle. He is cold except for where the blood has touched him - warm in bright splashes on his cheek, his brow. Warm through his fingers where they are slick and struggle with the grip of his blade.

When he wakes, the hut is empty, save for him and the low light from the clay stove.

Panic wakes slowly before his mind realizes why that is wrong, and his heart jumps to action dragging him behind its racing pace. Perhaps they had thought it kinder to remove the body while Galahad slept, to spare him some grief - but it feels cruel and twisting as a blade in his guts.

He pushes the leather flap aside and blinks his way into the harsh, reflected winter light. His boots crunch down in snow, and a voice raises from beside him.

"I suppose we won?"

Tristan is seated in the snow, stripped as he had been to be seen to, bare to the waist but with his blankets drawn over him, looking up at the sky with his back pushed against the thatched wall of the hut. He looks exhausted, as if moving the small amount had taxed him, but his eyes are bright and aware behind a fringe of filthy bangs.

Galahad lets his breath out in a rush, a sound that is half sob, and Tristan seems surprised by the depth of emotion. Slowly, he lifts his arm with the blanket over it in invitation, waiting patiently for Galahad to join him - snow or none.

The younger man sits heavily, exhausted as much as overwhelmed, and allows the other to settle a heavy arm over his shoulders.

“We won,” he confirms after a moment, unnecessarily perhaps, but nothing else presents itself to say. Tristan seems to accept it, and let them both sit silent again. It’s colder here than inside, where the stove kept a dry heavy warmth over them, but not cold enough to drive them back.

“Arthur is to take a wife.” He adds, “In spring.”

He can’t bring himself to sit closer, to rest his head on Tristan’s shoulder as he wants, to feel if his heart beats steadier, now.

Galahad can hear, as the blanket closes over him to seal in their shared warmth, like a breath of relief , that Tristan's breathing has changed. He breathes harder, shallowly - careful of stretching his injuries too far. Tristan smells bad, like old injury and inactivity, but the air is fresh around them at least. Galahad supposes he isn't much treat for the nose either.

Baths could wait. They were alive, so a later was implicit.

Tristan digests the information very slowly.

"The Woad woman," he remembers at last, as if the past was much a haze. "Will it drive between him and Lancelot?"

If Lancelot had survived, Galahad supposes it might well have. He isn't certain the exact nature of the situation, nor if there was a betrayal at all, or whose.

"Lancelot is buried over the ridge," Galahad says, and his throat feels dry with the words clogged up hard.

Tristan grunts, and leans a little harder against Galahad - he knows they are not fully in the clear yet, but it feels easier to have faith when there was light in Tristan's eyes again, when he had moved himself, however little, under his own power.

"One last job for Rome," Tristan answers, a mantra, a prayer for the fallen. "Tell me the rest?"

Galahad sighs and does, careful to relay as much information as he can while he still remembers it, while it still somehow matters. He hadn’t seen Lancelot’s death, he had only seen him still and cold on the battlefield after. He had watched Arthur check for his pulse as Galahad had later checked Tristan’s, but his brother had not been so lucky.

He tells of the way the smoke burned thick around them, how it hurt the eyes and filled the nose with ash. He tells of the way the blood looked the same on the ground after the battle, none possible to distinguish as Woad or Briton or Viking.

He tells Tristan that his bird is yet to return, that it circles within sight once in a while but never comes when called.

Tristan listens, eyes set on looking on front of him, not veering to take in his surroundings, not turning his head. At certain facts, the arm around Galahad’s shoulders grows heavier, as though tightening around him. At others, it relaxes to simply rest.

“How long have I been sleeping?” the older knight asks when Galahad falls silent, his news and stories finished for the moment. The other looks up, eyes narrowed before turning to look at his friend.

“The moon rises full tomorrow.” He tells him. It has been three weeks.

"It's less time than I might have lost," Tristan allows, looking back up toward the sky as if seeking the hawk that had flown free, or simply to fill his vision with the comforting blue of the sky, after it had been taken so long by the bland thatch roof of the hut.

A shiver passes through him, and on the tail of it, a wince.

"Come inside," Galahad suggests, coaxing and gentle, as he had tried the one time he'd seen the Hawk land in a tree nearby, standing and offering slivers of his own dinner.

Tristan makes a stubborn noise, the sort that suggests he has been inside for three weeks, and that is quite enough, but another shiver stills the protest in his chest before he voices it, and he rises to his feet, but stays hunched, one arm curled tight around his middle.

"Has anyone gone back to Rome?" he asks, when Galahad keeps his free arm over his shoulders, supporting his brother back into the hut and noting the icy chill in his friend's fingers. Instinctively, he turns his mouth against them and blows warm air into the curl they make against his mouth.

"Why?" Galahad asks, finding himself vaguely embarrassed afterward. "Do you want to?"

Tristan gives his head a shake. "I want a bath and a meal that will fill the hollow in my belly, as ever. That's 'home' enough for me."

Galahad thinks of how he could use the same - the idea of hot water against his skin almost too distant a memory, and food similarly so.

"I'll find you a bath, and draw it." he suggests, reluctantly slipping from under the warmth of the blanket and helping Tristan sit down. He's sure a tub is easy enough to find in the camp, the stove will serve well to heat the water to fill it. And yet he finds himself reluctant to leave his friend's side, now that he's awake.

He thinks of how no one had chosen Rome. The fact that Arthur had forsaken his own dream of the city, of a life there, had been startling but in itself not surprising. As loyal as he had been to the ideal of it, he had lost too many of his brothers to that ideal's whims.

Galahad keeps his hands on Tristan's shoulders just long enough for the other to turns his head slightly, observing rather than judging, but it's enough to set the younger man moving.

"Wait here." an unnecessary request but one issued regardless - Tristan had a tendency to wander when restless, and being bedridden as long as he had been - good reason or no - would awaken the familiar instinct in the knight.

Galahad leaves the tent and seeks out Arthur, not waiting for a greeting, not offering one of his own beyond, "He's awake."

"As are you," Arthur answers, looking up from his work. His smile is genuine, when he sees that there is no urgency or extreme worry in Galahad. "How does he fare?"

"He wandered out on his own," Galahad allows. "For at least a few steps."

Arthur's eyes light, his smile turns warmer, hopeful. "Nearly his old self, then."

"Save the need for a bath," Galahad allows. He feels a sigh of relief well up in him, and then ease out, slowly. He hadn't realized he'd been holding it in, perhaps these three long weeks it had waited to emerge either a sigh or a sob.

Arthur looks deeper into the camp, at the intermingling of Woad and Roman. "Are his wounds well enough for it? The people bathe in the river, here."

He rises from the table, where he had been working letters - news of the Saxon's defeat and of his resignation, likely. Galahad does not take the time to read Arthur's business, instead looking at his commander for a more acceptable solution than the river. It was too cold for someone with a weakened constitution, especially with only banks lined with snow to greet them when they left it.

"Bors brought a tub up from the wall, I think," Arthur recalls. "Perhaps ask him for the loan of it, if you judge Tristan's injuries sound enough to survive a soaking... or ask Merlin."

Arthur hesitates, and then claps a hand to Galahad's shoulder. "And make your plans for the wedding, I suppose."

"Too soon till spring yet." He replies, but he's smiling, he remembers his promise. With a nod, Arthur lets him go, leaves him to find Bors on his own to seek the use of the much coveted tub.

Despite appearances, Bors has a way of keeping to himself as effectively and effortlessly as any of the knights. Were he alone, and had Galahad sought him, perhaps, just on the tail end of his mourning Dagonet, he may not have found him. But his children had not inherited his caution, nor his ability to pass through camps unseen and certainly not unheard. All he must do is follow the sound of laughter and the rough voice that calls them to silence - always abrasive, but never cruel.

He thinks, not for the first time, that of all of them, Bors really is the best suited to be a parent.

He finds the man with his youngest on his hip, allowing his wife rest. Or perhaps taking the duties she so happily insisted he take, now that he has no campaigns to hide behind. He looks happier than Galahad has seen him in a long time, despite the bags under his eyes, despite how loud his voice is raised.

He catches a passing child - Millie, he thinks, though the squirming girl could be one of the twins he can never tell apart - and grins when she wriggles, giggling and throwing her arms around his neck, apparently not put off by the fact that he needs a bath perhaps more than Tristan does.

He delivers the child triumphantly to Bors and gets a wide grimace in reply - as genuine a smile as ever from him.

"Well, well," he says, rounding the words off at the end, with his accent that he never seems to have lost, in all the fifteen years, "Have we woken the dragon?"

"Near enough." Galahad grins, letting the girl free to run from them with a shriek of joy when Bors reaches and doesn't manage to catch her. He pauses a moment, watching the children play, then turns to his friend. "Tristan's awake."

"Ah, best not tell the littlest ones," Bors answers, with a grin to answer, and a sigh of relief, before he continues more genuinely. "I thought we'd lost him for sure. I don't know if the magic's good or bad in these savages, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough if whatever's saved him is for good or ill."

He stretches straight. "What are you out here seeing me for, then, Galahad? Shouldn't you be feeding him or tying him in place so he's not gone on the wind like that bird of his?"

Galahad is suddenly aware of the time he's been away - only a few moments, but it feels long enough that Tristan's revival has taken on an almost dreamlike quality. Long enough for the man to have run, he supposes, if he was intent on running at all.

"I need the tub," he explains, and Bors guffaws.

"We'll have to fish children out of it, I should wager," he says, transferring the baby from one arm to the other. The child sucks her fingers and looks at him with dark eyes, dark curls, and then finally Bors deposits her into Galahad's arms where she winds sopping, spit coated fingers around his neck and into his hair and pulls just shy of painful.

He isn't wrong about the tub - set as it is in one of the thatched huts the Woads seemed to move between as the seasons change. Bors pulls no less than three children out of it - not all his own, there is at least one native child amongst his spawn, though Galahad would be hard pressed to point with confidence and say which.

Galahad sets the baby down on the bed, and helps Bors tip the tub up to empty it out.

"Tell Tristan he's damn lucky it's not wash day," Bors growls, helping Galahad roll the metal out the door again. "Or he might as well have given up the whole idea, being stuck at the end of the line. And feed him right, do you, or ma'am will have on me to have on you about it."

Galahad's trip across camp is hindered slightly when the twins insist on putting themselves inside the rim of the tub as he rolls it, walking along the inside as if it were a hoop to roll. Regardless, he makes it back with the tub intact, tips it gently to trap the two under it and sits on top while they laugh and scrabble around under it, pretending to be trapped.

When he lets them out, they run free and quick, back home to play. Galahad watches, a strange tug in his chest as he remembers how Bors had once passed him the twins as he had passed him his youngest now, how they had tugged his hair with sticky fingers too. Now they were eight, fit and dirty, happy children. Time seems to not exist for them.

Tristan is not outside as he had been, but, unsurprisingly, he isn't in the tent either. Galahad tamps the worry down and instead rolls the tub into the tent, setting it near the table that he shifts to accommodate. It will take a long time to fill and he empties what remains in the heavy iron kettle into the tub before leaving the tent to seek a pot.

He doesn't encounter Tristan on this journey either, struggles, instead, with the weight of the water in the heavy container as he sets it to heat before leaving the tent to seek him out.

He finds Tristan only after he's emptied three potfuls of steaming water into the tub, sitting huddled under his blanket watching his bird circle again. Whistling occasionally and getting no response. His shoulders tense when Galahad rests a palm over them.

"She doesn't hear me."

Galahad just shakes his head. "Put off by the smell." he offers, a quiet jest but a gentle one, an encouragement to get Tristan to follow him again. His bird will come, the man has had her since he'd found her half a decade before, she has never not returned to him before. "She circles waiting for you to be presentable again."

It's enough to get an amused laugh, a breath mostly, from him, and Galahad helps him stand.

"Take your bath and I will take one after, while the water is still warm."

Tristan looks up at him, through a fringe of bangs, and gives a smile that suggests he makes no such promise as to the warmth of the water. It was unlikely to be remotely clean after he'd seen to his injuries in it, either. Instead he stands slowly, his hand curled against his middle, protective.

He says nothing, but leans on Galahad as they make their way back.

They have been brothers a long time, and grown closer with struggle and losses and time. Tristan's company is easy, if infuriating at times. He is a familiar irritation, someone Galahad has come to accept will show him up on occasion, just to remind him to be humble. He had been easier to like than Lancelot and his vanity, a better listener than Arthur.

The closeness they shared had extended further, at times, but Galahad had found himself reluctant to put any name, any attribute to it aside from desperation and familiarity and the occasional drunken fumblings in good cheer and merriment.

This time, when Tristan stops him and begins to take his coat it is deliberate, though his eyes do not stay on Galahad's.

Tristan peels his own layers in slow, agonized motions that reveal the pain from the stretch in his arm, his shoulder, the weakness from laying still for so long. There is blood when he at last finds his way through the laces of his shirt, oozing. The wound starts thin, below his heart, and grows wide down his side, sunk deep and dangerous, but mercifully it curls over his ribs and not down into the soft belly where nothing would have saved him.

He will never move quite the same way, and Galahad somehow understands that when Tristan turns his chin up to push their mouths together, that some of what he tastes is desperation and fear that Tristan has lost himself as a fighter.

Galahad is merciless instead, and pushes Tristan into the tub, earning a sharp yelp that suggest it was rougher, perhaps,t than he should have been, but he gets no further complaint. The clean, hot water will do the wounds good.

"Did you stay because Arthur did?" Tristan asks, as Galahad settles in, threatens to overflow the metal tub, unintended for two adult bodies.

He gets a head shake in reply before Galahad reaches for a clean cloth to soak in the hot water, fingers careful to wring it out enough before passing it to Tristan for his wound.

"I stayed to see you wake." he replies, stretching for another cloth to start to wash himself, watching Tristan's hands but not his eyes, to make sure the cleanest water got used on the wound, before they both sullied it with their sweat and exhaustion. He washes quickly, efficient and precise before finally allowing himself to relax in the water, letting the warmth seep to his bones.

"I will stay to see you walk." he adds, "For Arthur's wedding, perhaps."

"And then?"

Galahad's eyes flick up, light against his face. He needs to shave, to run the cloth over his forehead and cheeks, bring some color to his skin where it's pale and dirty now, where dark bags are the only things to decorate it.

"And then you'll leave." he says, brows raised as though challenging Tristan to argue.

Tristan is probing the wound in his side carefully, feeling along the rough join of scab and skin. He moves stiffly, learning the new limits. When he looks up, it's without the curtain of hair that usually veils his eyes, and for a moment there is vulnerability in the darkness of them.

"What if I never walk," he asks, but it is almost rhetorical.

Tristan is not made for stillness, nor inactivity. Galahad realizes the worry in him was a soldier's worry - that he would never move with the grace he had once had, perhaps never again throw a knife or draw a bow.

Galahad does not know how much he hurts, with how well Tristan hides his thoughts and moods, but he can imagine, to an extent, how much worse it is than the man lets on, only from the worry in his friend's eyes.

Tristan wrings dirty water from his hair, and rinses it again, moving gingerly. He repeats his earlier question. "And then?"

They’re quiet, just the sound of water against the sides of the tub as Tristan moves to wash himself carefully, where he can reach. Galahad watches him.

And then? Tristan would walk, he was walking now, he was alive now, beyond all expectation and reason. Trapping him in a sedentary life would be like courting fire in a field of straw. He was not a man to stay still, he was a man of mountains and forests, long treks and freezing waterfalls. If Galahad attempted to keep him, he would lose him as surely as if he had never woken after battle.

“And then I’ll carry you where your legs cannot.” He finishes, one hand up to rest against his lips, eyes up on Tristan’s once more once he’s spoken, his other tapping lightly against the side of the tub.

“If you never walk.”

He realizes, perhaps realized when he’d felt that brief skitter of a pulse, that gentle hope he had gotten in the bloody field, that he will not leave the man’s side again. He will find as much warmth as his ability to connect allows – the rest of his family has gone about their way or passed on. If Tristan does not want him, he will seek elsewhere, but the thought sits heavy on his chest, like a burn.

Gratitude warms in Tristan's eyes, coiling in over the fear like a slow, thick bodied serpent. He doesn't thank Galahad, not in words, but Galahad understands the depth of it anyway. Proximity and effort have given him to better understanding that Tristan is nearly as expressive as any of his more verbal brothers had been.

"Will that please you?" Tristan asks, giving up his efforts when he dislodges more than dirt and winces as part of a scab comes away and leaves a thin red trail of blood seeping into the water. Tristan sets the cloth aside, pushing his palm against the hurt, as if he could undo the mistake, and draws it away tinged red.

He puts his palm to his mouth, works the skin with his tongue.

"You meant to settle, before all this," he observes, after a moment. "Wouldn't you rather still?"

"We are not farmers, Tristan," Galahad murmurs. He had wanted to settle, before all this, before a lot of things. He still does, perhaps, though the meaning's changed.

"Home is a hot meal and a warm bath," he says, watching the blood still seep into the water, but the rest of the wound stays closed for now, "A soft bed and a roof over my head. I will settle for that."

He doesn't mention that home is safe. Home is not fearing if he will wake or if the night will take him. He takes the cloth from Tristan carefully and motions for him to shift, turn as much as he can so Galahad can wash his back, careful with the wound where Tristan cannot see it to clean it.

"I thought for certain the madness had called to you too," Tristan answers, and turns his vulnerable back for washing, leaning himself over the edge of the tub so that his chin rests against the rim. "Everyone else has forgotten we're soldiers."

His chuckle is low, a slow sound that drains away into a sigh of pleasure, before he reaches back and draws his sopping hair off his neck, relaxing completely beneath Galahad's touch.

"We could be farmers," he proposes, without any intent at all to ever follow the statement through with reality. "There is nothing to fight for, here. Unless the Saxons grow another army, or the Woads decide we are their enemy again. What good are we as Soldiers now?"

He gives a shrug, the water moves in the tub. "If we are neither, what are we?"

Galahad doesn't answer. He washes Tristan's back, gently down his sides once the blood has clotted enough to no longer seep thick against his skin. He soaks the cloth and washes his arms, across to his chest, up against his throat, and Tristan allows it. For a long moment, the younger just presses his face lightly to the side of Tristan's neck, just to feel him there, warm, alive, his pulse beating hard enough to feel, steady.

"Come." he murmurs, and gets up from the tub first, drying quickly before offering his friend a hand.

The air hits damp skin much harder than it had dry, and Galahad wonders a moment how long he can keep Tristan upright and warm - he needs to change his reeking sheets, at least, so the wound doesn't get infected. He settles him by the stove, close enough for the heat to register, and dresses enough not to humiliate himself when he leaves the tent.

It's clothes he seeks first, a change for himself and for Tristan, and it's from a very amused Bors that he finds both.

"You'll have me tucking you into bed next." the man laughs. Galahad finds his smile easier to summon, this time.

"You did try, once." he reminds him, "And found your back against the dirt, my blade to your throat, do you not remember?"

Bors guffaws, and then springs into genuine laughter, barking his mirth harshly into the cold in gouts of steam from his breath. He gives Galahad a solid thump on the shoulder.

"You were barely bigger than my oldest at the time, I remember it well," Bors growls, affectionately. "I nearly laughed myself sore. Don't even think of trying it again, or I'll trounce you like I did before."

They'd both sported black eyes out of the conflict, which had dissolved into laughter on Bors' end long before the sting of Galahad's pride had fully healed. He takes his treasures, castoffs as they are - not hardly the spoils of war he had imagined as a boy.

When he returns to the tent he finds Tristan curled quiet and sleeping, and it is a relief and a terror both that perhaps he would not wake again. But he stirs when Galahad rouses him gently, and surrenders the blanket he had wrapped himself in to dress in clothes that aren't torn from battle and soiled from recovery.

This time, when they sleep, they both rest easy and long.

-

It's not a week later when he wakes alone.

They have been moved from the long tent, now that Merlin has judged Tristan to no longer be in imminent danger of death, nor in need of supervision. He has given Galahad a paste and instructions, and seems content that fate has no more sharp turns in store for the Sarmations.

For his part, Tristan has been quiet, but stayed near, and for a time Galahad had allowed the hope to spring that at least for the duration of the man's healing, he would have him close and quick to the touch - in his sight so that the worry would not spring up , as it did on occasion, that Tristan had met his end somewhere alone and far from help. Or that he had simply followed his wings and moved on.

Galahad gathers the blankets to hold their heat and wanders from the tiny hut they had been leant. Guinevere had assured them that come spring, they would be allowed to build their own, as suited them. Galahad hadn't the heart to tell her he doubted they would stay long enough to complete the construction.

To his surprise, in the early light caught and multiplied by the snow, he finds Tristan practicing. Drawing a bow as if to fire an arrow and holding it, eyes narrow with the effort of it, mouth thin in pain. He draws and holds, and he is not - quite - alone.

Three children watch, polite. Galahad recognizes at least two of them, knows they are waiting for the opportunity to see how well their favourite substitute tree has healed, if he can tolerate their antics.

It’s sudden, the space of a blink, but feels as though it spans years. Galahad sees Tristan pull back his arm but he is much younger now, hair still a scruffy mess on his head, rivaling Galahad’s own. He’s teaching him to load an arrow, how to aim at a target. He’s training him to hold the bow drawn until his wrist shakes, his arm goes numb, until he has the strength to hold and wait and only let the arrow loose when it’s time for it to fly.

Tristan makes a small sound of discomfort and lowers the bow again. No arrows in it now, and his hair is longer, braided in messy strings around his face, coming loose in the middle. The children shift by his feet, as though waiting for permission to crawl closer, climb up his legs and hang off his shoulders.

Galahad wonders if he’ll let them, and wonders more, still, if he’ll be able to hold them when he does.

Tristan draws the bow again and holds it, until the sweat stands out on his neck and breath pours from his open, panting mouth in rushes of steam into the air as his arms shake through to his shoulders and his eyes grow narrower still.

The motion reminds Galahad of a broken bird beating its wings to fly again. He moves forward, so that he does not have to see it, puts his hands over Tristan's and pushes them down, lowers the bow. The look he gets is soft and deep, bird black eyes as injured as if Galahad had pulled him out of the snow and intended to break his neck for his suffering to end.

"You would always tell me to be patient," he offers, when the look threatens to break his heart. Tristan's eyes close their gates of misery and memory takes over instead. "So be patient."

"It was advice you needed," Tristan answers, but he lets Galahad take the bow, and instead subjects himself to the children, lifting the smallest on to his shoulders, and letting the others hang at his hips or shoulders, extracting promises that they would be next for a ride.

They are gentler with him than Galahad expected, and he wonders if it had been Bors who had told them to be mindful, or if they had slipped into the long tent while Galahad slept to see with curious eyes the extent of the damage carved in Tristan's hide.

Slinging the bow over his shoulder, Galahad pulls the child from Tristan's waist to give him room to walk, hoists the boy - far too old to be carried, but delighted to have a knight to carry him anyway - into his own arms.

"Will you marry?" Tristan asks, from around his mask of palms and fingers, his uninjured arm slung up to steady the girl on his shoulders, and the other supporting to the best of his ability the other child struggling to climb the handholds of his armor and over one of his shoulders. "Now that you are free to, does family call you as it does Arthur?"

"I have had a family, childish as we were. We were brothers and fathers to each other," Galahad answers. "If its children I want, for now I have my choice."

The boy in Galahad's arms wriggles happily, reaching over his shoulder for the bow; the knight simply clasps his wrist securely and dangles him so his feet are barely touching the ground, then he gently lets him down.

When he looks at Tristan again, the other watches him with an expression he can't read, one that isn't even aimed at him specifically, it's too far away. He wonders if the words had gotten to him in a way he hadn't intended. Wonders if he remembers how the older of the party began to care for the younger, when the soldiers training them were cruel and unreasonable. If he remembers how Galahad would stay up with Gawain when he had nightmares, how he had helped Lancelot channel his anger into his fighting and not against himself.

They were the only family he would ever know or remember.

The boy grabs Galahad around the middle in what could as easily be a hug as an attempt to wrestle him down, and he smiles.

"No one would stay with me long enough to remain married." he says.

Tristan laughs, and it doesn't sting Galahad - or at least it doesn't as much as it stings Tristan, who aborts the sound by sucking in air in a hiss.

"I would be your wife, " he says, provoking laughter in the children.

"And me!" The girl on Tristan's shoulders agrees, reaching down below Tristan's shaggy jaw to join her hands beneath his chin, so she can keep him from talking. She giggles. "I'd be a better wife."

"You'd have some time to wait," Galahad answers her. "My hair will be all gray."

"That's okay," she says, before Tristan crouches to let her down, his motions ginger and careful. "Someday mine will be too."

She smiles brightly, lured away with the rest of the children toward the smell of supper cooking, and the promise of more exciting mischief to be had.

Tristan rises to his feet with a groan, and reaches to muss his fingers through Galahad's hair affectionately, ruffling the curls beneath his fingers. "There, two suitors already. More to follow, if the world has not gone blind."

Galahad shakes his head once, accepting the attempts at levity, and glancing up at the sky when Tristan does, seeing the dark shape of the hawk very high above.

"She'll return when I can ride," he resolves, as if to reassure himself. "In the meantime, we shall see how settling and stillness takes us."

At their tent, he strips his gloves, flexes his fingers, and then abruptly sits - dizzy from exertion perhaps, or simply worn out from pushing too hard, too fast.

Galahad takes them from his hands and kneels in front of him. “For now it takes us as far as the tent and no farther.” He murmurs, brows furrowed in concern until Tristan gestures for him not to worry. He’ll worry regardless, but he does stand. He’s careful to remove the bow from across his shoulder and set it aside where Tristan can see it, get it when he wants.

The other recovers slowly, hand going to his wound, teeth grit in either pain or frustration or a hybrid of the two. He doesn’t say anything, Galahad doesn’t break the silence either.

It’s not uncomfortable so much as charged – both know that Tristan’s strength is nothing like it used to be, but both understand that his weakness is also proof of his being alive. He could have been cold in the ground now, or burned on a pyre, and his strength would be meaningless then. This strength will grow, he has time for it to.

“Perhaps take up the sword first.” Galahad suggests, tending to the fire. “Allow your arm to grow used to a weight before it has to pull back an arrow.”

Tristan agrees with a vague noise, laying back in the pile of straw and furs that served him to sleep on. A sword would not put dinner on their table, or endear them much to the Woads, but it might be a gentler start to train with. It left them dependent on former enemies for food and shelter.

Galahad is as curious as Tristan to know how their imposition amongst the Woads is being received - but for the nonce, it seemed they were welcome.

How long they could ride the heroism of one battle, neither is sure.
-

They cross swords in private, more to give them time together and alone, something familiar rather than out of allowance for Tristan's pride.

"You're getting faster," Galahad allows, when the man surprises him.

"On the one side," Tristan agrees, but he is distracted, quieter than even usual.

Galahad can sense the stillness creeping beneath his skin like the injury itself had - healed now on the surface but lingering deeper where the muscles were slow to reforge themselves into something whole. The scars were horrific, big and white and ropey with new skin that would never heal smooth again.

An old soldier's scars, Galahad thinks. On a young soldier's body, or so he would tell himself. He supposes they are all old soldiers now.

Tristan has taken up his sword in his off hand, learning fresh when it had become clear his right arm would always be slower now, that there were holes enough in his side and shoulder that he would always need to compensate for. Winter grows colder and the days shorter, not long now until the Ides of the month.

"Better is better," Galahad scolds, as Tristan sheaths his sword again

Tristan nods, stomping snow from his boots. He grows colder faster these days, and aches, Galahad knows. It is not all physical - some of the ache is in being stuck in one place. The hawk soared overhead less and less, these days.

"Tomorrow is Agonalia," he observes, his breath a cloud of steam in the cold. "Not that it matters here."

“It matters to you.” Galahad points out, his sword point-down in the ground so he can lean against it, part of his training screaming at him to not damage a weapon that way but he doubts he will have to ever take it to battle again.

The festival had been something a few of the knights had observed throughout their years together, and after a while, the rest joined in, regardless of belief. For some, it was the promise of goat meat, roasted over the fire at the end of the day, for others the ritual itself… but Tristan had always found a softness in Agonalia that Galahad had allowed himself to absorb.

Beyond that, it was something familiar for them to have, hold close, where now they had so few memories left that weren’t ghosts. Galahad has nothing but good memories of Agonalia; he had allowed Tristan to put flowers in his hair when he had been warm and pliant with wine, had smiled when he’d stumbled, had hummed, pleased, when the older had finally pressed their lips together in their first chaste connection when he had been sixteen.

Tristan just shrugs off his words, as though it doesn’t matter, as though those memories won’t warm his bones like no fire could. Galahad takes up his sword again, and sheaths it as well. He wonders if Bors would remember, if he would be one to keep up tradition for his children, or if he was happy to let it go as part of a life he no longer wanted to live, one filled with the death of too many brothers.

He wonders if Bors will know where to procure a goat.

Tristan smiles briefly, behind his veil of unruly hair, as if sensing Galahad's thought.

"We're a long way from home," he suggests. "The gods that accept the offering might not be the one we intend."

Galahad chuckles, "Perhaps whichever god does will be a better listener."

Tristan tips his head and acknowledges the possibility, lifting a hand to absently rub at his side, where Galahad knows it ails him worst. The cold is unforgiving, Galahad knows. He can feel it numbing his fingers and the tip of his nose, and knows he will welcome the fire in their small tent.

Tristan elects to wander, his eyes tipped skyward, and Galahad wonders how long they can stay before he must follow his heart.

-

Galahad endures three hangers on and a fullscale snowball fight to discover that the best Bors can accomplish is a Ram Sheep.

"Well you can try up at the wall, might be some goats still wandering," he suggests, eyeing the snow in Galahad's hair with some amusement. "Long way to go for a goat though. Will you do strings in your doorway or flowers? The small ones who remember have been rolling beads for days. How they got the clay unfroze on the river bank I'm not asking."

"Quintus peed on it," a small voice confides in Galahad's ear, a frigid hand clamped beneath his chin. "Don't take his beads. Septa says they'll be the yellow ones."

Galahad keeps the secret from their father, with supreme effort not to laugh. "A ram will do, if you'll part with it."

"Take the old one. If it's a short winter I'll make up the stingy meal with a spring lamb, but for now it's all I can risk," Bors offers, and he points the sheep out amongst the huddled animals, moving slowly to push their mouths into the snow in seek of the dry, brown grass beneath.

Galahad is grateful even for as much as he has been given. He takes four children with him in gratitude and sets them to building soldiers of snow, fashioning for them blunted, careful spears and swords from sticks.

Guinevere returns from hunting to catch them at it, a brace of lean rabbits over her shoulder, her hair wild and free and her warrior's stripes left subdued since one did not go to war against supper. She considers the uneven line of well armed figures cast in snow, and Galahad as the leader of the band.

"Will they come to life and defend us if the Saxons return?" She smiles, and adjusts one of the stick swords to a better angle. "Romans do have magic after all."

Galahad chuckles, and feels the smile stretch his features unexpectedly. An unexpected warmth and contentment blooms in him, settling warmer than the campfire somewhere at his core, the feeling like reaching out in the winter night and suddenly finding your fingers encountering warm air soft against the cold and purpled tips. It's like relief.

Perhaps before that moment he had not truly realized he was alive - or at least he hadn't realized it without the guilt of those who survive and think back on their brothers cold and still in their graves. There is no longer any wonder what luck had done differently, in his case. He knows that luck had done nothing differently, perhaps, simply that he had turned what he could grasp of it in his hands like a snake and managed to keep the business end pointed away from his skin.

"Not magic as such," Galahad says, still smiling. "Just faith, and that not always appropriately placed."

"Faith is a sort of magic," she tells him, and her smile answers his, before she stoops to gather a handful of snow to help with the snow guards.

Galahad stoops to find a stone large enough to serve as a nose, and the snow impacts his back surprisingly. When he lifts his eyes, he finds Guinevere rolling another snowball, and the children are quick to join the endeavor.
-

He returns wet and chilled through to the tent, and finds Tristan sleeping - or meditating, perhaps.
The man is sitting up, quiet and closed-eyed, with his hand clamped to his side and a sort of peace on his upturned features. He leans against the foot of the bed, where the warmth from their small clay stove radiates, the tall chimney directing the smoke out but leaving the heat in.An iron kettle bubbles, the water at a slow roll and leaving the air easy to breathe and moist, though he knows the wetness will not be kind to his skin once he strips his soaked clothes.

Tristan's features seem older, in repose, Galahad notes to himself. Or perhaps it is the firelight, in some combination with the deep, tired set of the eyes and the way all of his weight does not ride on him anymore. He has recovered to the point where it is no longer likely he will relapse or die, but he is not whole yet. The winter settles cold around them and keeps them both in stasis - in a slow moving hibernation, like bears take, only they are skinny and tired and their hurts ache in the cold that no thick bear hide protects them from. Galahad strips as far down as he dares, wraps himself in a blanket from his cot, and settles next to Tristan.

"Well?" he asks, without opening his eyes or lowering his chin.

"We will have a ram sheep and Bors will at least hold to tradition - as much at the whim of his children as they are at his," Galahad says. "His wife is getting round in the belly again."

"Soon, Guinevere will be as well," Tristan observes, and then his eyes slide open, slow, and Galahad can see the glassy pain in them. "Arthur must wait until spring for the wedding, and the baby will be not long after. I wonder how good a thing it is he shares color with Lancelot - in hair and nearly in skin?"

Galahad lets his eyes settle on his friend and wonders if he hears resentment in his tone or if there’s an odd sort of longing there instead.

“The Woads raise children regardless of their parentage,” he says eventually. They’d been taught differently, through training, through the continuous indoctrination from Rome, but living among the people when one is too tired or sick or sore to leave them and finding nothing of the promised brutality and savagery has a way of changing one’s mind.

“I suppose the child could be of light hair and dark eyes and it would hardly matter. There will be blue in it soon enough. Or mud.”

Tristan offers a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, that barely reaches his lips. He is in pain again, brows just gently furrowed, hand still pressed to his side.

Galahad wonders if he longs for the familiar collective they had shared as knights, raising themselves and each other, if he envies Arthur his family as he had never envied Bors – the man had started one over a decade ago when they were still children themselves – if he simply wants to be free.

The bird has not been back for days now, no longer circling the camp. Galahad can feel Tristan’s restlessness in his bones, can feel it in the tiny trembling of his skin as though any movement will break him free of this and set him on his way. He wonders if perhaps the only reason he stays is because he can’t be far from a fire and rest, because he cannot yet lift a bow as he lifts a sword.

"I'm told we should avoid any yellow beads,' Galahad offers into the silence.

In the stove, the cracking timber nearly covers Tristan's chuckle.

It's Galahad that reaches for him this time, though Tristan turns into it easily, anticipating. When they kiss, Galahad's fingers ease against Tristan's pulse and find it as strong and steady as he hadn't the morning he'd found the man alive, reborn by the grace of the gods.

This kiss is not the chaste reassurance of brothers, but it goes no further than open mouths. Grasping fingers only hold while they have the taste of each other, before they fall into bed. It is the first time since the snow has started falling that Galahad's breath feels warm in the cavern of his own mouth.

They sleep pressed close, limbs tangled for warmth, and Galahad's fingers find unblemished skin to rest against, rare territory on Tristan's hide.

-

In the morning, they hang dried flowers from strings in their doorway, which Tristan knots onto the ends that Galahad does not use to hang them without comment.

They have nothing else to offer - no brightly colored scraps of cloth, no beads or bells as they had once seen in Rome. They settle for the faded colors of common stems, long dried and faded.
Poppies, in red. For Rome.

"May we pass through many today," Galahad says, "Agonius of England, bless our efforts. Leave us open doors."

"For this we offer a half dead sheep and our own frozen prayers," Tristan adds, with some small amusement. "Take which parts you like, if you can hear us from so far."

Despite the chill, the day is clear and bright when they pass into it, sunlight streaming to touch warm patches against their skin. Galahad stays very still in it, letting it do what it might for long, sweet moments. It leaves a hot patch on his neck and shoulders, along the backs of his arms.

Arthur's tent hangs blue flowers in the door, the same Woad from which the pigment comes. The natives are a quick study, though perhaps without a full understanding of the celebration.

Bors' entryway is a thick tangle, offering the promised beads and also shells and the occasional pretty stone. It is festivus transplanted, and yet it fits this place, the celebration of passing out of the closing door of winter and into the opening doorway of spring.

Galahad retrieves the old Ram sheep from the flock, small in number and thin but hopeful to take weight when the green of spring came.

"We pass many entries and exits in our life," he tells the animal, examining it. The animal is thin, the eyes impassive and the ears withered, it steps heavily and slowly. He wishes he could offer more, in exchange for Tristan. He supposes the God will understand.

"We pray each leads us someplace better and none will be our last, until we next make a pact together."

The animal crumples without struggle when Tristan opens it's throat. It is a clean death, and quick. The sign is a good one.

They burn the blood and offals, but they cook the meat to share. The children take cooked portions tent to tent, cottage to cottage, and collect beads and flowers and fabric in their hair as signs of their comings and goings within the joined community.

Night still comes quick, but they ward it with their fires, grown great with many hands helping to stoke it, and in the warm, yellow light all are drawn together.

Merlin speaks and it has the air of a story, some old myth or a heroic tale of the past. He speaks in the Pictish language, lilting and engaging, and Galahad finds himself listening without the need to understand. The story ends in a call and response, the woad children lifting their voices in shrill copies of wolf howling. The chorus raises quickly in volume as Bors' kin join the fun, quick to involve themselves.

It suits them, and the wild howling leaves Galahad wondering how long it will be before they blend seamlessly into this new situation. He wonders if either the Romans or their new family will exert more influence. He wonders if in three generations, the result would be recognizable to either culture.

The thought is curious, unusually oriented on the future. It is a warm sensation, like fire touching heat against his skin. A luxury to think outside of the terms of battle and order, rank and file and duty now all served and put away.

Yet, he feels cast off and anchorless as well. It feels like thin ice under the feet, creaking and treacherous, uncertain.

"Won't you howl with the wolves?" Tristan asks, settled next to him with his meal of mutton stew half finished in his lap, flowers, shells and beads moving against each other in his hair.

"You're more wolf than I," Galahad laughs, the sound surprising him after his darker thoughts.

Tristan is warm and solid against his shoulder, and for once the cold winter is at bay in minds and hearts.

"Wolves have no taste for killing either," Tristan observes. "Not for pleasure?"

"Are you restless for it?"

Tristan doesn't answer, quiet for a long moment. It stretches on, until the occasional relapses in howling amongst the children lapses to tired yawns.

Tristan rises first, apparently tired. He leaves a long, friendly touch on Galahad's shoulders. It is a promise, perhaps, to show him what the cause or cure for his restlessness is.

Then he is gone, leaving the circle of light and fading into the black beyond in his old, confident way.

Arthur catches Galahad when he starts to follow.

"I wondered if anyone would remember," he begins, in a way that asks if Galahad is free to speak without demanding his time. Arthur has never yet forgotten he is no longer their commander, but he keeps their respect.

"Tristan remembered," he admits. Galahad found the short winter days running together in his memory, gone too quickly and with too much routine.

"Will he stay?" Arthur asks, finding a lead in for his intention that is not overtly rude.

"I think so," Galahad's guess is as good as any. "There is still a lot of pain, but nothing yet calls him away. Perhaps it does, but not so strongly as what bids him stay."

Arthur looks after, in the direction Tristan had gone. His eyes linger on the hide and thatch tent that Galahad and Tristan s hare.

"I expected him gone a dozen times," Arthur remembers, distantly. "Perhaps a hundred."

Galahad says nothing.

"A hawk can be taught to come back," Arthur continues. "Made to, for a time, with patience and a string round the tarsus, but when you cut the tether, why does a thing with wings return?"

"Love, Arthur," Galahad tells him, finding a smile, "and Kindness."

Arthur's eyes find Guinevere amongst those still near the fire, where she sits attended by those older children still yet fighting their sleep. He smiles, understanding. Galahad claps him on the shoulder in brotherhood, and turns to go.

The night is cool as he moves away from the fire, it's warmth quickly sliding from his skin. Ahead, in the darkness, smoke gently streams from the warm chimney of the clay stove in their tent, promising relief from the cold.

He needs only pass through the doorway.

Galahad thinks of the kiss before they had bathed, casually given and casually accepted. A simple, open joy at the thought of survival, at the idea they were both still alive. A sweet reminder of all that life was - or what it could be, when you shared it with another as openly and easily as the two halves of an old book lay on your lap with one page read and the moment between leaping to the next to see what would happen.

He wants to see what will happen.

He enters their tent with beads and dried flowers and scraps of cloth worn in his short hair, as ready for the next page as he was aware that there were many doorways in life and he had passed through enough today to be aware of their touch, of comings and goings. Absently he reaches up, pulls a dried flower from the abundant gather above the entryway and realizes that not many pass this doorway. Perhaps children, to see if they could coerce their favourite taciturn tree out into the snow for games, perhaps Tristan and he on several occasions, but there are still many left. He ties one dry, soft flower into his hair as his eyes adjust.

The tent is empty, save him.

-

Days pass on. Winter begins to shrivel, melting as snow does in great reluctance. With every disappointing plummet in temperature as night falls, Galahad thinks more and more fondly of the south. He misses Rome for her green and flowers, for flowing fountains that would not freeze as even the river did, here.

For a time, the crust of ice on the water is too thick to break. Then, it recedes, thins, becomes a rime that he punches through to bathe, and when he merges unable to cease shivering he curses Rome for her love of bathing.

The days pass. Trees reach tentative green shoots into the slowly warming air, Bors' sheep find tender blades of green grass amongst the brown straw. Guinevere grows large and round in the belly as Tristan had predicted. The women gossip in their hunting groups, or as they tan leather.

Galahad would lay his stake on twins, rather than an especially robust male, if he had anything of value that wasn't borrowed.

He misses marching for the motion, for the direction and purpose. He misses it for the distraction, the thought of getting to somewhere the scouts had ranged.

He cannot bring himself to miss battle.

Instead, he finds a place among the huntresses, and pretends that he is not as as much seeking signs of Tristan when he ranges as he is hunting food. He pretends that he does not think of Tristan's low, steady voice every time he draws the bow.

'Be patient,' it warns, in his memories.

Arthur does not seem to hold Galahad's incorrect prediction against him. There are moments when the knights drift together like flotsam at the end of the day, moments where there is a void. Rather, there are several old, empty places and one that feels tentative and uncertain.

They do not yet know whether to wait or to mourn. Galahad cannot tell them.

When he hunts, Guinevere moves silent beside him, and he does his best not to be in her way.

"Forget soldiering," she tells him, and he keeps it like a mantra.

"Soldiers step heavily and go nowhere. If you are a hunter you must go lightly and with purpose. In our tribe, when a child comes of age, he does not eat until he can kill."

Galahad laughs.

She does not.

"Does that make me a child?" he asks, and his amusement fades. "I have killed."

"Men," she says. "They make poor eating."

She lets him sit in his shock, her stoicism a perfect mask until she reveals the joke at last with a smile. Guinevere laughs and holds her growing belly, the sound sweet and unexpected from her fierce disposition.

Galahad joins her in laughing, uncertain if he is keeping time with her joke or taking amusement at himself. The smile stretches his features strangely, unfamiliar, and he realizes he has grown serious in Tristan’s absence.

-

Galahad dreams of a yellow hawk, screaming and screaming in the snow.

He reaches for it again and again, his hands coming up with only fistfulls of feathers and hot, steaming blood. The animal refuses to solidify to his touch.

When he wakes, his hands are grasping the blankets, reaching toward the ceiling, and the air is too thick and heavy to breathe.

He stumbles out, gasping in searing breaths of freezing air that lance into his chest like the tip of a spear. Something ragged and messy, a bunch of sticks or a gather of leaves, protrudes from the he top of the clay chimney and the ringing in his ears still echoes the screaming of the hawk.

He coughs twice, breathing great gouts of cloud into the early dark, and then moves to action.

Galahad breaks the ice on the stream with his bucket, but there is no longer any of the last grasping piles of snow on the bank. Still in his small clothes, he carries the water back, and the freezing earth does not seem to burn his feet - either they have grown more immune to cold or it has become warmer.

He throws the flap wide and drowns the red, licking coals of the fire. They extinguish instantly at the icy touch, turn hard and black before melting to ash. Galahad thinks of blood and lives and battle.

There is nothing to do until the clay cools enough to touch, until dawn grows light enough that he could see what was obstructing it.

Galahad pulls on his clothes in the cold air and welcomes the lingering warmth in them. He takes up his bow, and moves into the woods.

"Forget soldiering," he whispers himself, pulling the quiver tight to his shoulder, and then he moves on. His head is dizzy and his eyes are near tears (from the smoke, he thinks, just the smoke). The deeper he gets, the more alone, and the blood wakes in him like a calling.

He moves into the trees, stretching and pulsing skyward, footing unsure on the heaving ground. Yet he feels silent, a welcome and breathing part of the very forest itself.

The sky bulges and swells toward him, and against the moon a dark shape circles with wings outstretched like hands, like antlers in black shadow against the bright.

“Forget soldiering,” Galahad whispers into the living darkness, moving on.

He keeps the bow to hand, a hunter in his mind, stalking the flickers that move ahead. He will not return a child, a weight. He will pay what was invested in him.

When he looks down, red petals cover the ground, scattered like blood, like bodies in the field. Losses.

Galahad raises his eyes again and ahead there is something so still in the sea of motion that it draws his vision.

The beast seems to vibrate out of time with the resonance of reality, unstirred by the breeze that takes the leaves of the trees lazily, shushing them together in a murmuring plentitude. The long neck extends above a square, graceful body, halcyon in the midst of the seething. The eyes shine with moonlight pulling up the only color in the depths of their darkness, focused.

The legs do not tremble but they are on the verge of turning stillness into flight, ready and strong. Above the brow, a heavy white crown, skyward against the dark trees behind, reaching as the branches did for the stars.

This creature is touched by them, the very color of their pale light. Galahad could laugh if it was not so quiet. He does not dare assassinate the silence.

Instead he raises his bow and takes aim at the Hart. Forget soldiering. Now, in a more real way, in a more tangible way, he must kill to live.

The dark eyes do not find him in the night, or if they do the animal hopes stillness will save it. Galahad wonders how such a creature could survive so long, so close to settlement as it was.

White animals were rare, the hide valuable, the meat just as edible and said to grant favors. Low warmth suffuses Galahad’s belly at the thought of so enviable a prize, such thorough proof that he was not a burden any longer.

Galahad draws the bow with pleasure in the slow tension of it, the low, steady ache in his arm as he aims. One shot, one clean shot, as Tristan would.

I don’t kill for pleasure.

You should try it some day. You might get a taste for it.

The white crowned hart turns his head at last, drawn by some motion of Galahad’s, or some premonition of danger.

He aims for the heart.

After tomorrow...

The animal’s nose flexes wide open to pull in his smell, and then it utters a low grunt, makes a sudden angry motion with its forehoof that stirs the leaf litter on the ground. The points of his antlers sweep a low, warning arc in the air.

...this was all just a bad memory.

Galahad adjusts, readies himself, and then lets the arrow fly.

In the same moment, stillness becomes motion. The stag launches forward with all the power in his long limbs, head lowered to charge.

Galahad does not see the result of his shot before his vision is full of dazzling white hide, until the Hart slams into him in passing, driving his breath from his already aching lungs.

His knees fail under the assault, his bow jamming back against his teeth, crushing his lip between the unrelenting surfaces. The pain is more bright and stunning than the dull impact of his back against the forest floor, the pulling and scratching branches. It wakes throbbing and brings his hands instinctively to his face.

His own breathing is a desperate rattling gasp, an inward choke as air refuses to push past his locked throat.

Beneath it he can hear the stag pulling air as well, in a sound near to a bull’s roar, the low metal scraping sound of ferocity and anger that even peaceful men made when they chose to fight. Galahad scrambles to recover his bow, looking up at the wheeling white form, and finds the string hopelessly tangled in the underbrush.

Galahad yanks desperately, eyes on the flashing hooves, the dark eyes that catch the silver moonlight and reflect it back blue for one clear instant.

What instinct seizes Galahad to throw himself aside instead of letting the animal run him down, he could not name. He scrabbles the ground with his hands and throws himself into the underbrush gracelessly, with no plan save to be elsewhere.

His path arrests suddenly, an agony in his chest and burning lungs, the skin of his palms catching rough bark seconds before his head hits the tree.

Crumpling, ears ringing, Galahad supposes he will die adolescent, unable to kill when he needed. His ears ring like the screams of a hawk, shrill, and the ground touches him in an icy embrace that seems to welcome him into it’s depths as well as those of his own mind.

He sinks deep.

-

When he wakes, he is born aloft, suspended with two iron bands beneath him at the shoulders and thighs. His senses spin, his head feels heavy with weight. He coughs, sighs, sobs protest and tries to find awareness of his own hands at the ends of his arms. Something prevents him from lifting them, something warm and moving against his side, but the light burns his eyes when he tries to open them and all he sees is a close shadow against the burning bright.

-

Galahad becomes aware of the other presence in his tent before he wakes completely. It is not an intrusion, but a sort of alien belonging.

Tristan.

“Did you kill it?” he asks, waking anxious, pushing himself up from the stifling furs as if he still lay in danger’s way.

“Kill what?” Tristan asks, from his place by the clay stove.

He is cleaning the inside of soaking ashes, his hands and face a raven’s dirty black from the task.

For a moment, Galahad is unsure if he is truly experiencing this.

Vertigo crushes him back down to the bed, and he feels his own skull gently with fingers that seem almost deathly cool against the skin of his forehead.

“There was a stag,” he says, as Tristan leaves a further smear on his own nose, watching him carefully. His look holds no recognition for Galahad’s words.

“When did you return?” Galahad asks instead.

“Recently enough to return you where you belonged,” Tristan answers. “We found your tent cold and poisoned and empty.”

He looks back at the chimney, as if divining the source of the trouble.

Galahad feels the black streak of soot Tristan’s hand leaves on his forehead when the scout takes his temperature.

“You had visions?”

Galahad supposes they must have been. Perhaps the white stag had never been.

“Merlin said there was sometimes a madness,” Tristan says, settling beside the bed and keeping his hand on Galahad as if either of them might fade. “Are you mad?”

“Your bird built a nest in my chimney,” Galahad accuses.

“So she did,” Tristan agrees.

“You left on Agonalia.”

The memory only returns slowly, a growing light in the back of his mind shining on the unknowable territory. It validates the steady disbelief growing in his mind that he has left the woods at all.

“I needed to know that I could,” Tristan’s answer contains a measure of unvoiced apology, not for his actions but for how he has come to exist.

Silence grows between them where Galahad knows unforgiveness should lie. Instead it settles down companionably, an unrepentant cat by the fire. He sighs, counts to an odd number and finds himself soothed, relieved.

“Are you mad?” Tristan repeats the question, smiling with one corner of his mouth showing an uneven, but white incisor.

“I missed you,” Galahad answers, and lets the result speak itself in Tristan’s judgment whether his mind is yet sound.

The realization that the words are not only the truth, but the cause of the whole of his suffering to this point wakes anger. Galahad had not been angry upon discovering Tristan missing, just as he had grown to accept he wanted more than the man’s brotherhood. He had not been afraid for him, save in brief instants when the nights had been both long and cold.

But he had never ceased missing the man. It is only the lifting of that lonely burden that makes Galahad truly aware of what a weight it had been, what a pendulum, slowly wringing his neck.

“Tristan,” he repeats, “I missed you.”

In answer, the other stands, rising heavily to his feet though the motion is less pained than Galahad last remembers it being.

“I also missed you,” he answers. “Wandering calls me away when I feel most leashed, and here I felt bound by every extremity.”

An aching fear mixes slowly with hope in Galahad’s chest, oil atop water of an unknowable depth. The taste in his mouth is slick, and he swallows it down, waiting for the rest.

"I thought you understood," Tristan tells him, with eyes drinking light to darkness and unreadable. They are closed doors, entryways that Galahad has never passed through. Now there is the faintest hint of light at the cracks of those doors, a promise that behind them there was warmth and fire.

Galahad’s lungs ache tired and scraped raw by smoke, in wanting for that warm air to fill them.

He had always known there would be fire. Galahad had felt it, on occasion. Once, with his fingers pressed seeking against the pulse point of Tristan's throat and once again, further back in time, with his hands gathered up beneath Tristan's shirt.

He remembers how they moved together, fitting as neither had expected. He remembers the smell of wine on both their breaths, and the knowledge of how much blood a victory costs hot in their minds and bodies.

Of a sudden, he does understand.

Galahad reaches up, lifts his hands seeking in the air, a bird taking wing before a storm. It alights where it was never guaranteed, within the firm branching of Tristan’s fingers.

“And now that you know you can walk?” Galahad asks, levering his strength to pull Tristan back down to him, finding no resistance. “What then?”

“You will carry me where my legs cannot,” Tristan reminds.

Galahad supposes those first steps out of soldiering and into settlement must sometime be taken. He thinks of horses and flames, of how to lead them unseeing from burning barns.

He thinks of them galloping free and then staying at last to the familiar, to family.

He pulls Tristan down and in their kiss he tastes his own smoke, his terror and slow relaxation. It’s new and easy, outside of what has gone before. In this there is a security and sweetness, the new growth pushing past the old.

Tristan settles onto the low, cramped cot with him, and pulls Galahad close.

“When we will wake I will clear the nest from the chimney,” he promises.

Galahad pulls him closer.

“Leave it if there are eggs. We can warm ourselves in this way to sleep, and the days grow more bearable. Let her forget war.”

Tristan’s answer is the soft press of his mouth at Galahad’s temple, the slowing cadence of his breath as sweet as summer’s breeze.

-

There are two eggs.

Warmth slowly returns to the world, beyond the earliest gasps of waking spring. Tristan does not clear the nest, but he calls the bird back to his hand at last and scolds her for the dangers she’d left.

The hawk lifts one wing unconcernedly, then the other, tucking her beak beneath each in turn as if especially prideful. Her tail shakes, a derisive shiver of feathers, and Tristan relents his scolding to touch her softly along her crown, to tip his curled fingers beneath her chin.

It’s all that needs to be said on the matter.

Neither Bors nor Arthur say much on the subject of Tristan’s return.

Arthur catches Galahad on the third day past, when Galahad’s aches and pains have eased.

“Love,” Arthur reminds, “Patience.”

Galahad supposes he might learn to accept that sometimes the bird flew, but intended return.

“The wedding is next market day,” Arthur reminds. “Try and keep him that long?”

“Yours is the command, Arthur,” Galahad laughs, bright and yet still burned. He is not ready, not so soon.

“You would risk a command?” Arthur answers.

“No,”

“Try and keep him Galahad, only that long,” Arthur requests. “Then you can go - both of you, if you desire.”

Galahad’s heart makes a motion in his chest like a broken wing, unsure if he was even allowed to ask such a thing.

He makes no promise, leaves no assurance in the wake of his last failure.

Arthur does not demand one.

-

“How long until they hatch?”

Tristan looks considerate, giving a glance at the clay stove, now long cold and unused until the Hawk has no more need of it. His eyes trail slowly up the round, red chimney toward its fitting in the roof, dark with the stains of old storms and smoke.

“We will find out,” he promises.

It is as closet o an assurance as Galahad will get of his remaining, and yet it lifts a weight from him.

Tristan shifts lazily on the cot, the low slung fabric creaking lewdly in the wooden frame, and in their proximity he shifts sides touching against Galahad.

Lifting himself, Tristan eases over him, holding his weight above Galahad on his stronger arm. There is so little light within the tent that his eyes fall very nearly into shadow, even this close. The morning is warm, bright at the edges. Promising.

Galahad tangles his hands into Tristan's hair and pulls the man against him, shifting his knees, opening to allow the other to settle between. He could not count how long it's been, he decides he will not try. Instead he pulls their mouths together and tastes Tristan's - sleep and old wine sour on his tongue, and yet still worth the venture for how they welcome each other.

Tristan draws back of a sudden, against the tethers of hair that Galahad holds firmly to in his irritation for the teasing. He smiles at his companion, leaving Galahad to know he will have further mischief to endure before they at last indulge.

"Shall we not wait until the wedding?"

Galahad groans, the memory given life by Tristan breathing the words upon it, and he relents his hold, allows Tristan to help him to his feet.

"We had best wash in the stream before it is overrun with youngsters," Galahad allows, surrendering to momentum.

They have long abandoned their armor, taking up roughspun from the village against the wall when they could trade for it, and leathers. The combination is odd, and it suits Tristan far more than Galahad, rough and smooth in alternating places in a way that seemed easily suited to the man.

On Galahad, it felt bulky and bare at the same time, exposed though he was covered more in concession to the chill, because none of it was stiff armor or metal. The clothes were large for him, sewn for larger soldiers, and gathered in strange places on his figure. Today, he will wear the familiar armor, it is the only finery he has.

The stream is cold and rushing, and then quickly filled with children so that they must all endure their share of splashing, and Galahad watches the scar tissue flex on Tristan's body as the other hoists youngsters for their turns to dive into the deepest parts. They are all healing, in their ways.

Celebration has spread wide, easy after the victory and no further threats. The Woads celebrate on a sheer cliff, though the top is overgreen with meadow, wide and sweeping and set with flowers like jewels in a crown.

And yet it feels distant from Galahad, separated by some barrier of time and space. Guinevere is great with child, and Arthur great with importance and fate, his features drawn in serious contemplation of what he has left, what he has gained.

At his side, Tristan leans, watches the proceedings, and produces from somewhere an apple that is mostly green, not yet truly ripe. He eats it in measured bites, his eyes giving away nothing of the sourness, and no joy.

"Will you now go back to Rome?" Gawain asks, leaning to his other side. Of them all, he has remained longest on the fence, impossible to read. "Or Sarmatia?"

"Rome is not her ideal," Galahad answers. "Sarmatia was never an ideal. There is nothing more familiar to return to."

"So you will stay?"

Galahad chuckles, and glances at Tristan. The other rolls his shoulders slowly, his mouth still on the fruit while Merlin pronounces vows that promise to last.

"My bird has chosen to, for a time," he answers for the both of them. "What has suited her has always suited me."

"We are no longer tied, Gawain," Galahad tells him, and claps him against the shoulder. "But what family I know is knights, and what's left of those is here. Perhaps it may change. We are free, now, to change it."

Thoughtful silence answers from Gawain, before he tosses his fair braids off his shoulders, and attends again to the ceremony.

Hours later, Galahad sees him dancing and wooing a woad girl, amongst the rest of the celebrants, and he feels contentment within himself, too, as he stretches back on the grass, belly full and ears full of music, to give fullness to his eyes also with stars.

Tristan stretches next to him, growling the effort of moving. He had eaten some of everything offered, and carried more with him now. Honeyed bread, sticky to the touch and sweet and melting in the mouth. He would hide them away in their hut, Galahad thinks, producing them to eat over the next couple of days.

"They are well suited," he observes.

"Arthur and Guinevere?"

"Gawain and the prize he has eyes on."

"And do you not have eyes on some similar prize? It is unlike you not to be asserting your right to steal something away, Tristan."

Tristan does not answer in words, instead he reaches to curl honey-sticky fingers against Galahad's own, and for a time they watch the stars on their backs, a painted diorama of light that reflects in Tristan's dark eyes the points of mischief that so suit him.

When he stands, Galahad begins to follow, before strong arms curl around his middle and hoist him off his feet entirely, and he finds himself slung over Tristan's shoulder and trying to hold on, to keep his balance without hurting Tristan. For his part, Tristan seems unconcerned with the possibility of wrenching his injuries the wrong way, and carries Galahad in long strides from the party.

He stoops low at the threshold, and Galahad laughs, pushes the curtain aside so there is one less thing for Tristan to navigate on getting them through the low, narrow doorway into their thatched room. The night promises to be cool, but not cold. The spring will never be as kind as those in Rome.

It is enough that when Tristan sets him at last on his feet again in the welcoming darkness and strips the overlarge tunic from Galahad's shoulders that the cool air and anticipation spark his skin to shivering, to forming hard peaks of his follicles and tightening the skin of his nipples until Tristan leans down in a brush of loose hair and hot mouth and warms them again with his tongue.

It does not ease them back from peaking, and Galahad exhales shakily, lifts his hands to make a grab for Tristan's shirt as well and finds the outer layer of it full of sticky rolls that the other struggles to rescue before Galahad can disrupt them all onto the dusty floor of the hut, and he laughs.

It's easy and sweet, soft joy washing against him in a way he has not felt since reaching the Wall. It's like the warm baths of Rome, but singular in solitude, and he leaves off touching for a moment to let Tristan strip himself.

"You could have taken a basket," he laughs, watching the other set them carefully aside atop the cold clay stove.

Tristan leaves them, unwinds the wrappings from his hands that save them the cuts of the bowstring in a deliberate movement, hips cocked. The line of him is visible in the dim, to Galahad's familiar eyes, the slant of shoulder to hip, the working muscles in his arms before he lets the strips fall to the floor.

"Then I could not have carried you."

Galahad chuckles again, settles down at the edge of the bed to untie his sandals, and when he glances up again, he finds Tristan bare and intimate in the space, pulling the wick low in their lamp and lighting it so there is only a dim glow. In the gold, burning light, he is gorgeous. His skin rough and darker than Galahad's own, hair wild, eyes a world of shadows.

Laughter pulls from him again, nervous this time, and Tristan pushes him back on the bed and silences it with a kiss that tastes of honey and wine and this time, urgency.

There is no shyness between them, but this isn't the rushed, drunken encounters they have shared in the past. Tristan touches him, and it seems to connect, to burn their skins together at the anchor points of fingers and mouths, and Galahad hardens quickly in his pants, encouraged by just the pressure of Tristan atop him, moving and vital and alive.
He reaches up and feels the pulse points behind the twin curves on either side of Tristan's jaw, feeling the rate strong and steady, fast, and he thanks the gods for what they have given him, even as Tristan pulls impatiently at the strings holding his pants closed. They give only reluctantly, the thrum of fabric sliding against itself feeling like the current of a river against Galahad's sensitive skin.

Shifting bares them both in quick order, Galahad hooking his hands beneath the waistband of his pants in a rush, shoving as Tristan pulls, and then arching to touch bare skin to Tristan's faster.

"Why did you wait so long?" he gasps, when Tristan curls sword and string roughened fingers around his cock at last, the fingers familiar and the touch with a new gentleness that throws the sensation into a paradox of familiarity and discovery.

His own fingers find rest on Tristan's shoulders, their foreheads bent together. In the low light, he can see the red depths of Tristan's open mouth, as though the man felt the touches he was giving Galahad, and the way Tristan's eyes moved in slow sweeps behind their lids. He is moving faintly, shifting and rocking, sliding his length in lazy thrusts along Galahad's thigh and over the point of his hip, desperate for the touch.

Galahad obliges him, curling one hand at the back of Tristan's neck and reaching between them with the other, and for a time that is enough. Slow, easy pressure, long strokes into a palm that wasn't their own. The air between them tastes of honey, of the warmth of the other, of the slow rising spice of arousal and precum, as Galahad works the lose foreskin over the head of Tristan's cock and feels the motion grow slicker, feels blood fill Tristan's cock to velvet hardness under his touch and the taste of the soft sounds he makes in pleasure in the air.

They do not go still, but by mutual agreement shift, settling on their sides as Tristan hoists Galahad's legs open, pulls the one not trapped beneath him up, bends it at the knee. Beneath them, the cot strings creak, and neither care, not when Tristan is gripping their lengths together, Galahad arching and lifting his knee higher.

"I waited until you were sure," Tristan tells him at last, his fingers sliding along the intimate underside of Galahad's thigh, over the curve of his ass and then down, dipping fingers between to apply a delicious pressure at the swath of skin behind his balls, rubbing slow circles until Galahad wants more, wants everything.

Galahad bites him for his trouble, in the soft skin beneath his chin. "I'm sure," he growls, shifting himself to transfer Tristan's fingers higher, to where he wants them - and eventually Tristan's cock, he thinks.

The other smiles, his eyes opening just a little into the motion.

"I know."

They find the oil where it has been for some months, where Galahad left it on Agonalia and where it has sat since, closed tight and unused. It is cold on his skin, cold under Tristan's warm fingers when the other works him open, and Galahad moves impatiently in the face of the slow persistence, the intent on gentleness.

Tristan does not laugh when Galahad pins him flat against the thin mattress, swings a leg over the man's hip and takes what he wants, one hand guiding while the other pins Tristan's hands above his head, keeping him from slowing them down again, from making this to something slower and lasting. There was time enough for that.

The sounds Tristan makes are soft, sweet, strangely high and without threat, almost like those his hawk makes when she was hooded and sleeping, dreaming of the wind and sky. Tristan, however, is not dreaming. His eyes are open, locked with Galahad's as the other rides him, pressing his other hand low on Tristan's belly once he has found the right angle and moving in shallow, quick thrusts that give neither much time to breathe.

"I will," Galahad groans.

"Continue," he sighs, pushing down hard, grinding until they both sigh with it.

"To be sure."

Tristan pushes up, pulls his hands free at last, and this time when he settles them at Galahad's hips it is not to slow, but to steady.

Release takes Galahad hard, pouring out of him, drawn out from his belly like ropes and strings, and he finds himself in the aftermath with his nails sunk hard into Tristan's shoulders and his teeth bared, jaw tight and sore, and he pulls in breath only in a first gasp, as if he had fallen from a horse.

Tristan soothes him then, when the cold air finally penetrates their haze of exertion and warmth, and Galahad pulls the furs up over them both, and refuses to let go of Tristan until he feels the other's breath ease in sleep, until he is sure the other will be there when he wakes, stirring slowly and rising to face the dawn.

He is certain he will find Tristan eating stale honey cakes and watching the light grow from bruised purple to orange outside, and the thought is one Galahad can sleep to.

-
Galahad wakes, a sea of sweet aches moving through his limbs, along his lower back, and deeper. He shifts slowly, stretching to feel the way his limbs protest the extensions, like bowstrings drawing taut and waiting on the verge of snapping. Even at the extremes of his stretch, he encounters the edge of the raised cot, but no other body.

The blankets are warm beneath, but it may be only his own heat.

He blinks his eyes open into the dim light, morning stealing bright blue and gold fingers of light through the cloth hung in the doorway, through gaps in the thatch.

Otherwise, it is bare and empty, and he feels a weight crush him flatter into the mattress, a swift and sudden fear that stabs upward through his middle like a cruel spike. He shows his teeth into the solitary dim, forces movement against inertia, and stretches again to crawl free of the bed. He hurls the furs back onto it with more force than necessary, finds his shaking rage stirring a lazy hand through his insides and leaving his shoulders tense.

He finds his breeks, discarding the notion of wearing his armor simply to have the familiarity of weight about his shoulders and hips, to feel it constrict him as Tristan's arms had. He had worn the armor as long as he had known Tristan. This new softness of clothes, these new trappings that left behind all of that and the very semblance of Rome.

Shoving the curtain aside he steps out into the early summer, and the light is brilliant enough to blind him, leaving him squinting and seeking in the glare, heat touching where the long rays of the sun fall. It is still cool, the morning early.

Harsh, breathy shrieks, shrill and demanding catch his attention, and he lifts his eyes to the bulge of nest at the top of his chimney. It has grown from the loose gathering of sticks and feathers that had first stoppered the device. Now, the nest is round and full, bolstered by the expectant mother as she waited and fussed over her eggs.

She sits above it now, and two feeble, gray necks extend open mouths toward her, their dark beaks spread wide in demand, their eyes still shut and blind. A month of days have passed since the wedding, he supposes. Since Tristan had climbed carefully above to count eggs and hold them toward the light to see the small, dark shapes within. The resultant hatchlings are grey and unshapely, wobbling and unsteady.

The transformation promises to be interesting, when he looks at the mother's form against those of her young, and she eyes Galahad sagely from her perch, before leaning down to attend the open mouths waiting.

He hopes they will not demand to be fed at night.

The air is warm in his mouth, and Galahad pulls it in counts of half ten until he can begin to feel calmer. Tristan had, at least, kept his word to stay long enough to see them hatch. Galahad resents that the other had not paused to bid goodbye, but perhaps Tristan had not felt it necessary. It was only a parting on temporary terms, in the mind of their Scout.

Instead, a sound pulls at him, steady, repeating beneath the sound of the hungry baby birds. He knows it from the past, a shovel turning earth in slow, measured beats. A grave being dug. His first thought - shuddering and darkly gripping - is of the twins, now not yet a week old but nearing.

They were small and vulnerable, and the world here was harsh, though they were summer babies born in the warmth and light, and loved well, attended by not only their parents but Bors and his flock with their advice. The thought does not stop anyway, not, at least until he rounds the side of his hut, and finds Tristan to labor beneath the trees at the back of it.

He is digging and turning, his horse watching patiently from beneath the green eaves as he works the earth, and the picture is so ludicrous that Galahad must laugh, his relief a rush, a tide of warm water suffusing him.

"I thought you were digging a grave," he observes, and Tristan looks up at him through his messy fringe and spares the hint of a smile.

"If I am, it's early," Tristan answers, and he lifts the shovel again, winces, pushes it into the earth anyway to lever out a hard stone. "Arthur suggested Romulus and Remus as names for his boys."

Galahad takes it in for a moment, the suggestion inherent in the names.

"Has he forgotten how Romulus murdered his brother?" he asks. It does not need an answer. "What are you doing?"

"A boy is not a man here until he can feed himself," Tristan ventures, tumbling the rock free at last and shifting it to a pile of others like it - hard, bland grey stones, the like of which this country had a plentitude, waiting to turn the foot of your horse or your own on the march. "I see some give in that rule."

Galahad laughs again, and steps into the turned earth, feeling the spongy brown layers compress beneath his sandals. He lifts his hand, stilling the next motion Tristan makes with the shovel, and curls his fingers around the back of the man's neck, drawing them together.

"Farmers?" he asks. The image is not so humorous anymore, the work and stillness not so daunting.

Tristan pulls his lips back from his teeth, realizing at last what he was proposing by his actions, and then he shakes his head, leans forward and presses their mouths together slowly.

"Gardeners, for a time. We will wander yet."