Fic: Is, Was, Will Always Be
Title: Is, Was, Will Always Be
Author: Soujin
Characters/Pairings: Gaheris, Clarissant, Morgause, Morgan, Mordred, Lamorak, Mordred, Gareth, Gawain, Agravain
Rating: PG
Archive: Yes.
Disclaimer: Copyright has presumably expired.
Summary: When it comes to his mother, his brothers, and his life, Gaheris SUCKS.
Notes/Warning: SO VERY FLAWED. >_>
Erat, est, erit.
All Orkney boys learn Latin. When they play, they speak their own soft curving Gaelic, the sounds like tree spirits and the magic they know is everywhere. Latin is the language of the Britons, sharp and blunt as their swords coming down on their helmets. The storytellers from France say that swords ring, but Orkney boys, who grow up with a sword in one hand and a spell in the other, know it's not true.
Orkney boys know the family is more important than anything else. Honour is all right, and fame wins things, but family is always first. Orkney boys know that one can kill one's King before lose one's brother. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and children; they are all bound up together like the fishnets, sewn over and over so that they won't tear, silver when the sun glints off them in the water. They all know. It's in their Orkney blood. Family first.
Most Orkney boys leave Orkney, but they take what they know with them, their Latin and their Orkney magic, and the wind in the standing stones and the clank of armour smithed from iron in their hills, and blood. They take Orkney blood.
Erat, est, erit.
Gaheris is the middle brother. Somewhere in the muddle, Mordred always says. Gawain and Mordred are older; Agrivain and Gareth are younger. There is his father, his mother, and his aunt. There is Clarissant, but nobody knows whether she's older or younger or middle like Gaheris, not even Aunt Morgan, and Morgause won't tell. Morgause is so proud of her daughter, the only one, she says, with fey blood.
Clar rolls her eyes and tells Gaheris that they all have fey blood. It's just, she says, that the boys are too stupid to use it.
"You wouldn't know a spell if it rolled on you and squished you," Clar says.
Gaheris is a failure with a sword. All the others are good--their father teaches them, and when he's too stiff for that, Gawain takes over. Their father is too young to be so stiff he can't teach his boys, but nobody questions it when they're that young. Fathers get sick, brothers fill the place. Gawain is good with any weapon, and he drills them until they ache.
In the middle of the practises, Gawain throws out short compliments to keep them going. Gawain's clever enough not to make them work without a reward for it. "Mordred, good form. Just do that all the time, and you'll probably not get killed. Good job. Gareth, get your arm back where it belongs! What are you trying to do? Good, like that. Good."
Gareth is too trusting. He doesn't expect anyone to kill him by doing something underhand, so he just blunders on with innocent chivalry. If it wasn't for that, Gawain says he'd be the best swordsman of them all. Agrivain is the one who learns all the tricks by heart. If Gawain teaches something that is sure to catch an opponent unaware, that'll be what Agrivain bothers to get down perfect. Mordred is like a mixture of his brothers' strengths--he knows the under- and the overhand, he doesn't trust but he doesn't go off half-cocked and ready to murder the other fellow.
Gawain is proudest of Mordred. It's easy to be proud of Mordred, and Mordred needs it, too. None of them would tell anybody else in the world about the way Mordred used to cry when he was younger because their father hated him. Gaheris remembers it more clearly than he remembers anything that ever made him cry.
Mordred isn't King Lot's real son. His father is King Arthur. Their father can't stand the sight of him, but now that Lot can hardly get out of bed, they don't have to think about it. Sometimes they pretend their father doesn't exist. Their mother never speaks of him. For all Gaheris knows, he died years ago.
He doesn't care. He isn't shocked to realise this. Their father has been missing for so long that all Gaheris has are the vaguest memories of him, and unlike Gareth, he isn't sorry.
("Family comes first," Aunt Morgan says. "You're Orkney boys, you know that. Mordred is family. You don't need blood for family. Mordred is my nephew and my son and Morgause's son and her nephew. He's Lot's son and Arthur's son. We're all family. Lot isn't good enough to think otherwise." She leans in close to them, five children between ten and eighteen, crowded together at her feet. "Is Mordred your brother?"
"Yes," they say, and mean it and know it with every inch of the Orkney lack of height they were born with.
But then Gareth says, "You shouldn't say things like that about Father," and Agrivain elbows him, and Mordred pretends not to care, and Gawain, sensible as always, says, "She's not saying anything bad about Father. She's just saying he ought to know about family, and that's true. He doesn't." Gareth shuts up. Gaheris wonders why he didn't do anything.)
Gawain tries to compliment him on his fighting, but since all Gaheris ever does is hold the sword wrong and stand with his feet wrong and put his practise armour on wrong, Gawain forgets in rush of telling him how to do it right.
One by one they leave Orkney for Britain, for the court of King Arthur. Gawain goes first, and then Agrivain, Gareth and Gaheris. Mordred hangs back longest. Gaheris doesn't wonder why.
Gaheris still doesn't know how he became a knight. It was easy for Gawain to prove himself worthy, and innocent little idiot Gareth; and Agrivain could always knock somebody down, even if it was more for the pleasure of knocking somebody down than the rescuing of people in danger. Mordred especially--Mordred is brave, and talented with a sword, more even than Gawain. He can be quiet and sometimes melancholy, but in the company of others he does well, his wit not having the threat of bashing your face in behind it, as Kay's does. But Gaheris, Gaheris can't fight and all he remembers of the day he was knighted was being knocked off his horse a lot.
He remembers Gawain patting his back and saying, "Good job. That was good." Later on Gareth tells him that he did rescue the child from the recreant knight who stole her for a ransom, but Gaheris says that's got to be a lie. What recreant knight would decide to make a name for himself in stealing children? What parent would pay that much to get the brat back? What idiot would be so pathetic that Gaheris could beat him?
Mordred just laughs, ruffles his hair. "You're overestimating your prowess. You didn't beat him. You just kept him busy long enough for Gawain to pick him off."
Erat, est, erit.
In the late summer of some year, Gaheris goes back to Orkney. Mostly it's to see Clarissant. She glares at him, tell him she'd have given anything not to see his face again, and pushes him into the house for soup and fire. He's sure there are spells in the soup: it makes him happy to be there.
"I think I'm going mad," he tells Clar.
"Blather," she says cuttingly. "You were like that when you were little, too. It's because there's nothing special about you, so you're trying to make something up."
"Maybe it's true. I came back here, didn't I?"
"You don't have to be mad, just sentimental."
"What the hell is there to be sentimental about this place?"
"Mother," shortly.
"I hate Mother."
"Then why are you here?"
He doesn't have any answer for that.
"She's gone mad," she says. "Aunt Morgan and she are trying to kill each other."
"Why?"
"She's trying to kill Arthur."
(Morgan is in love with Arthur. It's their secret, a secret they keep in the family, just like everything else. Morgan says that it's blood; you can't go against blood. Family comes first, not love. Family. She hates Morgause for bearing Mordred (but she doesn't hate Mordred. They all know that), for going against the blood that she wouldn't touch. Once when he was young Gaheris wanted to know why love couldn't come just as first when it was for family, and Morgan smiled at him, a smile that made him wish he hadn't asked.
"Do you wonder?" she said. "Would you dare to love your mother openly?"
"I don't understand," he said.
"That's the nature of such things.")
Clarissant was always Aunt Morgan's student. Gareth and Agrivain are their mother's favourites; she never bothered much with Gawain or Gaheris. She used to take Mordred away in her room with her for hours, but he never told them what she said or what went on. Even Gawain didn't know. For all that, though, they knew that she didn't really like Mordred. Gaheris decided that she didn't like Mordred because their father was so angry about him, that she didn't like Gawain because he didn't like her, and that she didn't like him because he was bad at everything.
"Wonderful. Our family is wonderful."
"I always said so," Clar says, deadpan, giving him a Look.
"I suppose, then," he says carefully, "she won't want me to visit."
Erat.
The castle isn't the way he remembers it. So much for the old cliché that thing stay the same, he thinks, quietly climbing the stairs. His mother's room is at the top; the room where she makes her spells and potions, the room where she embroiders secrets. Gareth and Agrivain were the only ones allowed up there to sit on her lap while a lady-in-waiting arranged her hair.
It's too difficult to explain, so he doesn't bother trying. He's never been in this room before, but he doesn't knock. She's his mother. Erat, est, erit--was, is, will always be. Family is blood is inescapable, and Gaheris pushes the door open and walks in without preamble. One shouldn't need preamble with his mother.
--Family. Family before honour, family before life, family before love. Gaheris, who has never struck a blow true in his life, beheads her.
The blood spills over the young man in her bed, the young man who is caught in the middle of a low, moaning, 'Anna', and Gaheris lifts his sword again, finding suddenly that he can't see, realising later that it's tears. The young man is gone before he can get his helmet off to clear his eyes.
Clar finds him later; he knows only when he feels her hand on his shoulder. Then he looks up, but she's looking straight ahead, not down at him. Their mother's bed is wet with blood, all the blood that Gaheris never knew bodies contained, all the blood that was in his mother.
"I won't tell them," Clar says.
Gaheris cannot speak. He clutches at her hand.
She drags him to his feet, and slaps him, not gently. "You idiot. Wake up and look at me. You killed Mother."
"She--"
"What? She what? You think it'll matter to Gawain what? To Gareth, to Agrivain, to Mordred? Even if Father were still alive, and he's not, he's been dead ten years, what do you think it would do for you to talk about family honour? Besides, you didn't do it for family honour. You killed Mother."
"I--" he says, except that it comes out in just a desolate noise.
"I always knew you were the stupid one." She turns on her heel and is gone.
He spends the night by Morgause's body, holding her hand. Clar wouldn't give him a hand to hold, and his mother never did while she lived. Now he curls near her like he should have all his boyhood, protected by his mother's presence, his fingers met by hers; his armour stained with her blood. It's everywhere.
He is stiff and cold. How did he become a knight? How did it come to this at all? His mother was an enchantress; why didn't she see this before it happened and prevent it? From the beginning it could have been stopped. She could have killed him when he was born by quietly smothering him with his blanket; she could have made him a loyal son with love, the way she had Gareth and Agrivain. She could have seen to it that Arthur kept him busy with quests. She could have locked her door.
(She could have withheld her name from this boy she slept with.)
Est.
The morning comes, and it, too, is stiff and cold. Gaheris leaves the castle and lives wild, casting off his armour, hunting in the woods, sleeping in the hay kept for the Orkney cattle. There is still blood on his clothes, but it's not all hers any more. Half of it is from the animals he skins for food, another part from scrapes and cuts he gets climbing trees and going unprotected in the woods. He doesn't care. Truly he doesn't care.
He doesn't care until his brothers come. He watches them from the safety of the brambles, watches them meet with Clar. He can see from where he is the anger in Gawain.
It makes him want to laugh. She never loved Gawain. Their mother never loved Gawain, and Gawain never loved her, and yet here he is ready to avenge her death. Gaheris stands as tall as he can and walks to them, with short greetings, brusque words. Gareth stares, but Mordred pulls him close in a hug that's rough enough to preserve any dignity Gaheris might have left, despite the blood and disarray.
"Is this where you've been?"
He smiles at them, maybe a little tattered to match his clothes. "All this time."
"There go all his chances of getting married and getting the hell out of the house," Agrivain puts in, raising an eyebrow. "No one will want him now."
"Shut up," says Mordred. "Scruffy's fashionable, remember?"
"What?"
"You wouldn't know." Mordred rolls his eyes. "Lancelot just got back from a quest, after three weeks in the wilderness. He looked like hell, but he's pretending it's the latest from France, so all the ladies are swooning and all the idiots are mimicking. Be glad you missed it. It was sickening."
Gawain cuts in sternly. "Brothers. This demands we stop behaving lightly. We'll pay our respects to Mother, and then we're to start off immediately to find the man who slew her and take proper action." He looks to Gaheris. "Clar says you were there. What happened?"
Gaheris is quiet. Family is more important than anything if you're an Orkney boy. You grow up knowing, knowing from the moment you're born. Nothing else matters in front of it. Family. Not honour, not revenge, not love, not life, just family.
"There was a young fellow. I'm not sure what happened, but he killed her in her bed. They'll know his name in the village; that's probably where he went."
For a moment, Gawain meets his eyes, watches him--and then he turns. "All right. Gareth, Agrivain, you go first. Don't cry, Gareth. We'll make it right with her. Go on up."
Clar is right, Gaheris thinks, watching Gawain nudge Gareth inside, listening to him comfort. Clar is right, as she and Mordred confer aside from the others, too soft to be made out (God knows why. Gaheris doesn't want to know what they're saying, and his other brothers are too busy).
He is the stupid one. Erit.
Erat, est, erit.
(He thinks he understands Aunt Morgan now--only a little, because who can read Aunt Morgan?--just a little. He doesn't understand anything else.)
Author: Soujin
Characters/Pairings: Gaheris, Clarissant, Morgause, Morgan, Mordred, Lamorak, Mordred, Gareth, Gawain, Agravain
Rating: PG
Archive: Yes.
Disclaimer: Copyright has presumably expired.
Summary: When it comes to his mother, his brothers, and his life, Gaheris SUCKS.
Notes/Warning: SO VERY FLAWED. >_>
Erat, est, erit.
All Orkney boys learn Latin. When they play, they speak their own soft curving Gaelic, the sounds like tree spirits and the magic they know is everywhere. Latin is the language of the Britons, sharp and blunt as their swords coming down on their helmets. The storytellers from France say that swords ring, but Orkney boys, who grow up with a sword in one hand and a spell in the other, know it's not true.
Orkney boys know the family is more important than anything else. Honour is all right, and fame wins things, but family is always first. Orkney boys know that one can kill one's King before lose one's brother. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and children; they are all bound up together like the fishnets, sewn over and over so that they won't tear, silver when the sun glints off them in the water. They all know. It's in their Orkney blood. Family first.
Most Orkney boys leave Orkney, but they take what they know with them, their Latin and their Orkney magic, and the wind in the standing stones and the clank of armour smithed from iron in their hills, and blood. They take Orkney blood.
Erat, est, erit.
Gaheris is the middle brother. Somewhere in the muddle, Mordred always says. Gawain and Mordred are older; Agrivain and Gareth are younger. There is his father, his mother, and his aunt. There is Clarissant, but nobody knows whether she's older or younger or middle like Gaheris, not even Aunt Morgan, and Morgause won't tell. Morgause is so proud of her daughter, the only one, she says, with fey blood.
Clar rolls her eyes and tells Gaheris that they all have fey blood. It's just, she says, that the boys are too stupid to use it.
"You wouldn't know a spell if it rolled on you and squished you," Clar says.
Gaheris is a failure with a sword. All the others are good--their father teaches them, and when he's too stiff for that, Gawain takes over. Their father is too young to be so stiff he can't teach his boys, but nobody questions it when they're that young. Fathers get sick, brothers fill the place. Gawain is good with any weapon, and he drills them until they ache.
In the middle of the practises, Gawain throws out short compliments to keep them going. Gawain's clever enough not to make them work without a reward for it. "Mordred, good form. Just do that all the time, and you'll probably not get killed. Good job. Gareth, get your arm back where it belongs! What are you trying to do? Good, like that. Good."
Gareth is too trusting. He doesn't expect anyone to kill him by doing something underhand, so he just blunders on with innocent chivalry. If it wasn't for that, Gawain says he'd be the best swordsman of them all. Agrivain is the one who learns all the tricks by heart. If Gawain teaches something that is sure to catch an opponent unaware, that'll be what Agrivain bothers to get down perfect. Mordred is like a mixture of his brothers' strengths--he knows the under- and the overhand, he doesn't trust but he doesn't go off half-cocked and ready to murder the other fellow.
Gawain is proudest of Mordred. It's easy to be proud of Mordred, and Mordred needs it, too. None of them would tell anybody else in the world about the way Mordred used to cry when he was younger because their father hated him. Gaheris remembers it more clearly than he remembers anything that ever made him cry.
Mordred isn't King Lot's real son. His father is King Arthur. Their father can't stand the sight of him, but now that Lot can hardly get out of bed, they don't have to think about it. Sometimes they pretend their father doesn't exist. Their mother never speaks of him. For all Gaheris knows, he died years ago.
He doesn't care. He isn't shocked to realise this. Their father has been missing for so long that all Gaheris has are the vaguest memories of him, and unlike Gareth, he isn't sorry.
("Family comes first," Aunt Morgan says. "You're Orkney boys, you know that. Mordred is family. You don't need blood for family. Mordred is my nephew and my son and Morgause's son and her nephew. He's Lot's son and Arthur's son. We're all family. Lot isn't good enough to think otherwise." She leans in close to them, five children between ten and eighteen, crowded together at her feet. "Is Mordred your brother?"
"Yes," they say, and mean it and know it with every inch of the Orkney lack of height they were born with.
But then Gareth says, "You shouldn't say things like that about Father," and Agrivain elbows him, and Mordred pretends not to care, and Gawain, sensible as always, says, "She's not saying anything bad about Father. She's just saying he ought to know about family, and that's true. He doesn't." Gareth shuts up. Gaheris wonders why he didn't do anything.)
Gawain tries to compliment him on his fighting, but since all Gaheris ever does is hold the sword wrong and stand with his feet wrong and put his practise armour on wrong, Gawain forgets in rush of telling him how to do it right.
One by one they leave Orkney for Britain, for the court of King Arthur. Gawain goes first, and then Agrivain, Gareth and Gaheris. Mordred hangs back longest. Gaheris doesn't wonder why.
Gaheris still doesn't know how he became a knight. It was easy for Gawain to prove himself worthy, and innocent little idiot Gareth; and Agrivain could always knock somebody down, even if it was more for the pleasure of knocking somebody down than the rescuing of people in danger. Mordred especially--Mordred is brave, and talented with a sword, more even than Gawain. He can be quiet and sometimes melancholy, but in the company of others he does well, his wit not having the threat of bashing your face in behind it, as Kay's does. But Gaheris, Gaheris can't fight and all he remembers of the day he was knighted was being knocked off his horse a lot.
He remembers Gawain patting his back and saying, "Good job. That was good." Later on Gareth tells him that he did rescue the child from the recreant knight who stole her for a ransom, but Gaheris says that's got to be a lie. What recreant knight would decide to make a name for himself in stealing children? What parent would pay that much to get the brat back? What idiot would be so pathetic that Gaheris could beat him?
Mordred just laughs, ruffles his hair. "You're overestimating your prowess. You didn't beat him. You just kept him busy long enough for Gawain to pick him off."
Erat, est, erit.
In the late summer of some year, Gaheris goes back to Orkney. Mostly it's to see Clarissant. She glares at him, tell him she'd have given anything not to see his face again, and pushes him into the house for soup and fire. He's sure there are spells in the soup: it makes him happy to be there.
"I think I'm going mad," he tells Clar.
"Blather," she says cuttingly. "You were like that when you were little, too. It's because there's nothing special about you, so you're trying to make something up."
"Maybe it's true. I came back here, didn't I?"
"You don't have to be mad, just sentimental."
"What the hell is there to be sentimental about this place?"
"Mother," shortly.
"I hate Mother."
"Then why are you here?"
He doesn't have any answer for that.
"She's gone mad," she says. "Aunt Morgan and she are trying to kill each other."
"Why?"
"She's trying to kill Arthur."
(Morgan is in love with Arthur. It's their secret, a secret they keep in the family, just like everything else. Morgan says that it's blood; you can't go against blood. Family comes first, not love. Family. She hates Morgause for bearing Mordred (but she doesn't hate Mordred. They all know that), for going against the blood that she wouldn't touch. Once when he was young Gaheris wanted to know why love couldn't come just as first when it was for family, and Morgan smiled at him, a smile that made him wish he hadn't asked.
"Do you wonder?" she said. "Would you dare to love your mother openly?"
"I don't understand," he said.
"That's the nature of such things.")
Clarissant was always Aunt Morgan's student. Gareth and Agrivain are their mother's favourites; she never bothered much with Gawain or Gaheris. She used to take Mordred away in her room with her for hours, but he never told them what she said or what went on. Even Gawain didn't know. For all that, though, they knew that she didn't really like Mordred. Gaheris decided that she didn't like Mordred because their father was so angry about him, that she didn't like Gawain because he didn't like her, and that she didn't like him because he was bad at everything.
"Wonderful. Our family is wonderful."
"I always said so," Clar says, deadpan, giving him a Look.
"I suppose, then," he says carefully, "she won't want me to visit."
Erat.
The castle isn't the way he remembers it. So much for the old cliché that thing stay the same, he thinks, quietly climbing the stairs. His mother's room is at the top; the room where she makes her spells and potions, the room where she embroiders secrets. Gareth and Agrivain were the only ones allowed up there to sit on her lap while a lady-in-waiting arranged her hair.
It's too difficult to explain, so he doesn't bother trying. He's never been in this room before, but he doesn't knock. She's his mother. Erat, est, erit--was, is, will always be. Family is blood is inescapable, and Gaheris pushes the door open and walks in without preamble. One shouldn't need preamble with his mother.
--Family. Family before honour, family before life, family before love. Gaheris, who has never struck a blow true in his life, beheads her.
The blood spills over the young man in her bed, the young man who is caught in the middle of a low, moaning, 'Anna', and Gaheris lifts his sword again, finding suddenly that he can't see, realising later that it's tears. The young man is gone before he can get his helmet off to clear his eyes.
Clar finds him later; he knows only when he feels her hand on his shoulder. Then he looks up, but she's looking straight ahead, not down at him. Their mother's bed is wet with blood, all the blood that Gaheris never knew bodies contained, all the blood that was in his mother.
"I won't tell them," Clar says.
Gaheris cannot speak. He clutches at her hand.
She drags him to his feet, and slaps him, not gently. "You idiot. Wake up and look at me. You killed Mother."
"She--"
"What? She what? You think it'll matter to Gawain what? To Gareth, to Agrivain, to Mordred? Even if Father were still alive, and he's not, he's been dead ten years, what do you think it would do for you to talk about family honour? Besides, you didn't do it for family honour. You killed Mother."
"I--" he says, except that it comes out in just a desolate noise.
"I always knew you were the stupid one." She turns on her heel and is gone.
He spends the night by Morgause's body, holding her hand. Clar wouldn't give him a hand to hold, and his mother never did while she lived. Now he curls near her like he should have all his boyhood, protected by his mother's presence, his fingers met by hers; his armour stained with her blood. It's everywhere.
He is stiff and cold. How did he become a knight? How did it come to this at all? His mother was an enchantress; why didn't she see this before it happened and prevent it? From the beginning it could have been stopped. She could have killed him when he was born by quietly smothering him with his blanket; she could have made him a loyal son with love, the way she had Gareth and Agrivain. She could have seen to it that Arthur kept him busy with quests. She could have locked her door.
(She could have withheld her name from this boy she slept with.)
Est.
The morning comes, and it, too, is stiff and cold. Gaheris leaves the castle and lives wild, casting off his armour, hunting in the woods, sleeping in the hay kept for the Orkney cattle. There is still blood on his clothes, but it's not all hers any more. Half of it is from the animals he skins for food, another part from scrapes and cuts he gets climbing trees and going unprotected in the woods. He doesn't care. Truly he doesn't care.
He doesn't care until his brothers come. He watches them from the safety of the brambles, watches them meet with Clar. He can see from where he is the anger in Gawain.
It makes him want to laugh. She never loved Gawain. Their mother never loved Gawain, and Gawain never loved her, and yet here he is ready to avenge her death. Gaheris stands as tall as he can and walks to them, with short greetings, brusque words. Gareth stares, but Mordred pulls him close in a hug that's rough enough to preserve any dignity Gaheris might have left, despite the blood and disarray.
"Is this where you've been?"
He smiles at them, maybe a little tattered to match his clothes. "All this time."
"There go all his chances of getting married and getting the hell out of the house," Agrivain puts in, raising an eyebrow. "No one will want him now."
"Shut up," says Mordred. "Scruffy's fashionable, remember?"
"What?"
"You wouldn't know." Mordred rolls his eyes. "Lancelot just got back from a quest, after three weeks in the wilderness. He looked like hell, but he's pretending it's the latest from France, so all the ladies are swooning and all the idiots are mimicking. Be glad you missed it. It was sickening."
Gawain cuts in sternly. "Brothers. This demands we stop behaving lightly. We'll pay our respects to Mother, and then we're to start off immediately to find the man who slew her and take proper action." He looks to Gaheris. "Clar says you were there. What happened?"
Gaheris is quiet. Family is more important than anything if you're an Orkney boy. You grow up knowing, knowing from the moment you're born. Nothing else matters in front of it. Family. Not honour, not revenge, not love, not life, just family.
"There was a young fellow. I'm not sure what happened, but he killed her in her bed. They'll know his name in the village; that's probably where he went."
For a moment, Gawain meets his eyes, watches him--and then he turns. "All right. Gareth, Agrivain, you go first. Don't cry, Gareth. We'll make it right with her. Go on up."
Clar is right, Gaheris thinks, watching Gawain nudge Gareth inside, listening to him comfort. Clar is right, as she and Mordred confer aside from the others, too soft to be made out (God knows why. Gaheris doesn't want to know what they're saying, and his other brothers are too busy).
He is the stupid one. Erit.
Erat, est, erit.
(He thinks he understands Aunt Morgan now--only a little, because who can read Aunt Morgan?--just a little. He doesn't understand anything else.)