A Samurai in King Arthur’s Court
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8: After the Funeral
Guinevere found Arthur alone that evening, in the small chapel where Lancelot’s body had lain the night before the burial, standing before the cold stone with a stillness she had rarely seen from him even in his most private hours. Candles burned low along the altar, their light catching the gray already threading through hair that had still seemed entirely dark to her only a few years before, and she found herself struck, watching him from the doorway, by how rarely she truly looked at her own husband rather than simply past him toward whatever business the day required of them both. She had come intending only to light a candle of her own and leave before he noticed her, unwilling to intrude on whatever grief a king allowed himself once the court’s eyes had finally turned away — but he heard her at the door regardless, and did not send her off.
“I keep expecting to feel something closer to anger,” Arthur said, without turning. “He broke his oath to me in the worst way a man can break faith with his king, and still I find myself standing here grieving him as though none of that happened at all.”
“Perhaps both are true,” Guinevere said, coming to stand beside him, closer than she had stood to her husband in longer than she cared to admit. “Perhaps a man can fail you completely and still be worth mourning honestly.”
“Is that what you feel?” He turned to look at her then, and there was nothing accusing in the question, only a plain, tired curiosity that asked for honesty rather than comfort. “I have never pressed you on what passed between the two of you, before. I did not think it my place, or my right, given what this marriage was built from in the first place. But I find myself wondering, tonight of all nights, whether you grieve him as I do, or whether you grieve something else.”
She could have deflected. She had deflected every version of this question for years, in smaller forms, whenever the court’s careful courtesy had come anywhere near the subject. Something in the quiet of the chapel, and in the plain grace with which he had just eulogized the man who wronged him, made deflection feel, for the first time in a very long while, like the smaller and less honest path.
“I grieve the girl I was, before I understood what this crown would ask of me,” she said finally. “I do not think I have grieved Lancelot himself in a long while. Whatever I felt for him ended, in truth, well before this morning did.” She studied her husband’s face in the candlelight, searching it for something she had stopped looking for years ago and was surprised, now, to find herself seeking again. “You could have let this city watch you gloat over a rival’s grave. No one would have blamed you for it. I do not think I would have blamed you for it. And instead you stood before this whole court and gave him back some measure of the dignity he threw away with his own hands.”
“He was still a knight of my table,” Arthur said simply. “Whatever else he became.”
It was, she thought, watching him in a light that made him look both older and gentler than she generally allowed herself to notice, exactly the kind of answer that asked for nothing in return and revealed, in its very simplicity, more of the man beneath the crown than any grander speech could have managed. She found herself, for the first time in a marriage built on obligation rather than desire, wanting to close the distance between them rather than simply endure it.
She did not, not that night. But she left the chapel with something loosened in her chest that had sat tight and unexamined for years, and she was honest enough with herself, alone in her own chambers afterward, to recognize the shape of what that loosening might, in time, become.
A Seed Planted
William found Lady Rosamund alone in the solar three days later, embroidering with the idle patience of a woman who had, until recently, believed herself the likeliest candidate for a foreign knight’s affections before Elaine had settled that question rather thoroughly. He had chosen her carefully, from among the court’s many idle tongues, precisely because her own quiet disappointment made her more receptive than most to whatever doubt he cared to plant.
“You’ve grown fond of him too, I think,” William said, settling into the chair across from her with the easy, unhurried courtesy he reserved for exactly this kind of work. “Everyone has. It is remarkable, really, how quickly an entire kingdom can come to trust a man none of us knew a season ago.”
“He saved the border,” Rosamund said, not looking up from her needle. “Trust seems the natural response to a man who does that.”
“Undoubtedly.” William let the word sit a moment before he continued, careful to keep his tone light, conversational, the tone of a man simply thinking aloud rather than working toward anything at all. “Though I confess it does strike me, from time to time, how little any of us actually know of where he came from, beyond what he himself has told us. A shipwreck, a storm, armor none of our smiths recognize, a tongue none of our scholars had ever heard before Merlin’s spell made it comprehensible. We have taken a great deal on faith, for a man who arrived with nothing but his own account of himself.”
“Merlin vouched for him,” Rosamund said, though something in her voice had shifted, the needle slowing in her hand.
“Merlin vouches for a great many things he never fully explains,” William said. “I do not say this to accuse the man of anything. I say only that a kingdom which prides itself on caution has shown remarkably little of it, where this stranger is concerned — and I find myself wondering, sometimes, in quiet moments like this one, whether that caution will be missed only once it is far too late to matter.”
He left the thought there, unfinished, exactly as he had planned it, and rose to take his leave before Rosamund could press him for anything more concrete than the vague unease he had just settled into her thoughts. A seed did not need tending immediately. It needed only planting, in soil already a little disposed to receive it, and time enough afterward to do the slow work William no longer had any illusions could be rushed.
A Question in the Garden
Tetsuya found Elaine in their garden that same evening, the funeral’s weight still sitting heavy over the whole castle, and though he had not planned to raise the question so soon after a day so thick with grief, something in the quiet between them made the moment feel less like intrusion than like the natural next step of a conversation they had already, wordlessly, been having for weeks.
“I have watched this kingdom bury a man today,” he said, “and found myself thinking, through all of it, that I do not wish to spend whatever years remain to me waiting for the right moment to ask you something I have already decided I want. Grief does not care for good timing. I am not certain anything worth having ever truly does.”
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