'Did you really mean that, about being open to – polyarmoury?' Arthur asked, later that night. He and Guinevere lay in bed, naked and relaxed after sex – though Arthur's level of relaxation was limited by the fact that he was lying on one side, propped up on his elbow.

'Polyamory,' Guinevere corrected him. 'Polyarmoury would mean carrying a lot of weapons.'

'Well, Lancelot is definitely polyarmorous. When I challenged him, he had at least two spears by his side to choose from.'

'Nominative determinism?'

'I think it's more the other way round. "Lancelot" is a nickname, strictly speaking, but it's what everyone calls him, so it's the name he chose to be knighted under.'

'What's his original name?'

'Galahad.'

'I think "Lancelot" suits him better. You know, if you lie on your front, I could put some healing salve on those bruises.'

'Yes, please.' Arthur settled onto the bed, propping his head up on a pillow, and enjoyed his wife's ministrations. 'We'll have to have a rematch, soon,' he said. 'I want you to see what he can do!'

'Are you accusing me of being a sadist?' said Guinevere lightly. 'These bruises are quite spectacular for just falling off a horse. Uh – did he treat you with proper courtesy after you surrendered?'

'Of course! What did you expect him to do – put me over his knee and thrash me with his sword? He's far too gentle and well-mannered to do anything of the sort. Though I have known knights to cheat, pretend to surrender and then attack,' Arthur continued thoughtfully. 'I even saw Pelly do that once.'

'Really? That doesn't sound like him.'

'It isn't – most of the time. He's a hunter who's far too soft-hearted to slay the monster he's spent his life hunting – when he found her lying sick in the snow, he insisted on bringing her back to our castle to nurse her back to health. But he gets over-excited in jousts and tournaments. He never meant to kill Gawain's father – but that doesn't make the poor chap any less dead, or his sons any less angry.'

'It's hard to know what people might do, even when you think you know them,' agreed Guinevere. 'Poor Lancelot is convinced that if he sometimes has angry thoughts, it means he's evil deep down and deserves to die.'

'Perhaps nearly everyone has evil in them,' said Arthur. 'Merlin didn't think so, but maybe he was wrong. But I suppose there's a difference between having the potential for evil, and doing evil.'

'What do you think of Lancelot?'

'His physical attractiveness, or his character?'

'Either. Both. Which do you want to talk about?'

'In character…' Arthur considered for some time. 'He reminds me of Cully,' he said in the end.

'Who's Cully?'

'He was a goshawk we had when I was a boy. Well, officially he was Kay's hawk – his eleventh birthday present, when I was nine, and Cully was three months old – but I liked him more than Kay did, so I spent more time with him in the mews, even if I wasn't allowed to take him out without Kay's permission. When Kay was fourteen, he became Sir Ector's squire and Sir Ector gave him a lanner falcon, so he told me I could go out with Cully any time I wanted after that. But I always thought that Cully really belonged to Hob, the austringer who trained him.

'Cully was the first hunting bird I'd ever handled, apart from an old kestrel who was so well-trained that he was almost predictable. Cully was – about as far different as you could get. He was young, and bad-tempered, and never far from going wild. In fact, the first time I met Merlin, it was because I'd gone into the forest to try to coax Cully back after he'd flown off, and Merlin showed me how to catch him.

'Well, as I was fascinated by hawks and falcons, I asked Merlin to turn me into one, and so I spent a night as a falcon in the castle mews. And that was when I realised that it wasn't just that Cully was hard for me to understand because he was a bird, a creature descended from dragons, or because he was a wild animal who couldn't be expected to love me the way my dog did, or even because he was a goshawk and they have a reputation for being stroppy. When I could understand bird language and could hear the way the other hawks and falcons talked about him and to him – and how Cully himself talked – I realised that he wasn't sane even by bird standards.

'Now, mews society is very military and hierarchical, and every new bird who arrives in a mews has to undergo an ordeal before he can be accepted by the other birds. Cully was always kept in a cage by himself, well away from the others, because he was so ferocious, and my ordeal was to stand next to his cage, close enough that he could lash his head or his talons out through the bars and kill me.

'It was supposed to be an ordeal for me, but I think it was far more of an ordeal for Cully. He begged me not to come near him, begged the peregrine not to make me do it, because he couldn't trust himself not to harm me. But I insisted on going through with it. I was sure that I could calm him down by talking to him, just as when I was human I could usually get him into a good mood by petting him. But he was frantic, raving, muttering snatches of poetry. I didn't even know that hawks read poetry, though Merlin says there are songbird composers who travel back and forth between Europe and Africa, collecting local birdsongs from different regions to use in their symphonies. But anyway, I felt more sorry for Cully than frightened of him, and I only just managed to distract him from trying to kill me until the ordeal was over, when he finally made a grab for me and I could fly off, leaving just a few feathers in his claws.

'Of course, in the morning Kay demanded to know where I'd been all night – we shared a bedroom – and I wouldn't tell him, and we got into a fight over it. The cook insisted on giving me a piece of raw meat as a poultice to soothe my bruises, and I meant to take it as a present for a friendly falcon who had spoken up for me, but in the end I shared it between him and Cully. Hob told me off for spoiling them – said they'd get lazy if I fed them treats when they hadn't done anything to earn a reward – and of course I couldn't tell him how much they both had earned it, and especially Cully.

'Cully was the only animal I met who was actively trying to be good – except maybe dogs, but that's different, because they're tame animals who spend a lot of their time with humans. Most wild animals are just animals and act according to their natures, and some of them are lovely, like the geese, and some quite unpleasant, like the ants. But Cully was someone who knew that there was evil in him, and hated it, and was striving to behave well in spite of it, the way a human might. So that was enough to make me love him, and I came to visit him whenever I could. Of course, he didn't know that there was any connection between the human who came to feed him a piece of steak in the morning and the falcon he'd nearly killed in the night, but he learned that even when I didn't come to bring food or take him out for exercise, I had time to pet him and play tug-of-war with him. Hob gave him to me as tribute when I was crowned. He could have sent me the peregrine, as the noblest bird we had, but he knew Cully was my favourite. Cully was seven then. He died just a couple of years ago, not long before you came to Camelot. I wish you could have known him.'

'So do I,' said Guinevere. She liked birds – which was just as well, as Arthur was so fond of animals that the relationship would never have worked if she had been revolted by anything with fur, feathers or scales – but she was more used to falcons than goshawks. 'But – back to Lancelot?'

'Yes. It's not just that he looks like a hawk. There's the same fierceness in him as in Cully, and the same desperation to be good…'

'The same fear of himself.'

'Yes. But – Lancelot is a good person. And the irony that he's worried about whether he can be worthy of me...' Arthur groaned, and sank his head deep into his pillow.

Guinevere put her arms around him. 'Arthur,' she said, leaning over him so that her long black hair mingled with his golden hair, 'What's wrong?'