Tristan returns to the work in front of him while Constance acts. Not because he is apathetic, but because it cuts too deep to see the future he fears for himself. You'd have a better shot asking him to stare at the sun and not blink. He has not failed yet, has not needed forgiveness yet, and let Constance do this work that he cannot.

Constance, Tristan

Sir Harold nods, blows his nose into a small kerchief, then nods again. "Lady I, it's not my place, but you...give us all hope. Hope that there will be more tomorrow, in spite of all we've done. In spite of..." He gestures vaguely with an arm. At the castle, the snow, the kingdom, the country. A country of oathbreakers, fearful of what it could be.

"I would that it had been different" he says after a pause. "If I were thirty years younger, I'd demand you grant me that king's blade of yours and I'd ride off to right our wrongs. As it is, it's not mine and never was meant to be. I'll be glad enough that I could offer you a clean castle and cloth enough to make your dress. Yes, that will be enough to leave me satisfied, whatever may come of all this."

He leans back and lets you, both of you, return to your work.

Tell us of the finished dress with its scales and its moltings. And of how it reassures you, of how you reassure each other as you prepare for Robena's return.

Robena
Despite your exhaustion and your stubborn horse, you hunt with endurance and bravery. Liana, for her part, pulls out a small golden harp, made to fit in the crook of her arm that she can set the reins and grasp the harp at once and pluck with her other hand, absurd as that may seem.

Where before there were trumpets and hounds braying, she offers a gentle yet persistent song that nevertheless drives the white hart before you once it presents itself, never allowing it to rest.

Hear now of our hero, on gallant horse riding
Our foreign foes felled, she returned to her land
Now hasped in her harness, though mendicant mottled
She rides to her ruin, knowing not where she goes

Her eyes are looking to you, Robena, and though she plays the role of pure maiden in this hunt, there is nevertheless a knowing in her eyes that says much of the preparations of these knights for your coming. Yet her eyes are wide, and worried, and fear that you will spurn her, and she sings on.

Our king came to Camelot, and thence took his throne
In war never wanting, he took him a wife and a child he sired
But bearing his blazon, all burnished and bright
He defied death and found it wanting

No new generation was near to his knights
He kept them from Camelot, drove them away
He feasted and fought, always fearsome with fury,
keeping the cold and calm away with ever grander building

the king his death did fear
so flung his youth away
He clung to visions dear
Of time held all at bay

She looks at you again and clears her throat. The hart skips behind a tree, the dogs are chasing in hot pursuit as forest leave rustles in sudden quiet. The hart cannot be allowed to rest. "You've perhaps heard that part or something like it from Constance, but you may not know the next" Liana says, striking another chord.

Perchance a prophecy came forth in which the king partook
When an heir to Excalibur emerged, his reign would end
Only a proper heir, pure and puissant,
chosen by the Lady of the Lake in her largesse

She looks again to you, Robena, and sighs.

Though cunningly wrought, the prophet's words,
Neither heir nor hero neared on the nonce
False friends followed a mad king fuming in her furor,
till death in dishonor did her doom declare

What hero cannot hear
the calling of the land?
A father that I fear
who holds his grave in hand

And in the chill of her song, the hart comes at least to bay, cornered by a small pool where it had hoped to drink and catch its breath but it is instead beset by you. Roll to take bold, decisive action and end this hunt.

So it ends.

[Bold: 10]

Should she have shown it mercy? Should she have spared it in its majesty as she might wish that someone would spare her? Would one act of kindness undo a lifetime of hunts? Would an act of gentleness here at the edge of her life somehow indicate that she had learned, that she was ready for change? Or would it be a promise unkept, a larder unfilled, a quest failed?

A priest might know. Robena knows how to hang the deer, cut the throat, drain the blood, flay the skin, remove the organs, sever the antlers, clean the body, and mount the remains on horseback for transportation. Does doing what she knows represent an unrepentant failure to change her ways? Perhaps. But she knows no other way to be. She has lived her life as a knight and to discard the rituals and skills she developed as a knight would be to face death as helpless as a newborn babe. The blood washes away in the pool the deer hoped to drink from. So it ends.

She does not know the rules or the rhyme of these faerie folk, the prophetic nymph whose colt moves with the grace of a unicorn, the enchantment that turns dead women to mist and stars. She knows now that her simple struggles now take place against a stranger background, playing in tune to a song she doesn't know the steps to even if she had the feet to dance. If she had her time again she might not have been a knight. Being a knight, all she can think to do in this moment is conduct herself as a knight ought.

And if she can conduct herself as a knight ought then that, at least, will be change real and true. A sage, a prophet, a mystic she shall never be. But a knight? Perhaps she can manage that. If she is lucky she shall have a few more days to be so.

The dress looks faintly ridiculous in the sunlight. It is made for night, meant to be cloaked in shadow and to shroud Constance in temptation. In the last of the daylight, it does not flatter Constance as she pins her hair in place; it makes her seem gangly and grave-pale, and it was definitely not made to be bunched up while she sits.

But once the night falls, then it will be different. Then she will wear the night itself. Then her paleness will become like marble and its lustre where it flashes beneath the layers will be like the barrow-hoards of the dead kings. Then her make-up will be effective, deep and dark enough to drown Robena, rather than looking faintly like peat.

Artifice, Artifice, all is Artifice— but when the sun lowers her lids, then will that artifice be revealed in its hour and glory. Then she will be Night’s handmaiden, the serpent in the garden, a stone to break Robena’s hull and send her heart spilling into the sea.

“Thank you,” she says, to those assembled, and her sincerity is fine and brittle as chalk. Her heart is a bird in a snare in her chest, and her fingers unconsciously twist at her dress already, as if eager to pull layers away.

Tristan smiles, slumps, is exhausted at once. He's not failed yet. All up until the last he's had doubts of his ability to execute the concept, so perfect in his head, so hard to translate through hands. But no. This will do.

Then, a deep breath. A straightening of the shoulders, his back fixes itself straight again. He has not failed yet, and so he can - must - continue.

"I don't know what else I can do, now." Tristan admits. "I will take any suggestions. Privacy or escort, presence or absence, by your word."

Otherwise, he wants to rest. Tonight fragile things will be broken, it is only a question of which, and there will be work tomorrow in the consequences. Putting back together what needs mending, and discarding what needs to be left behind, and sorting which is which. He wants to be prepared to deal with it, and not chance being another thing that will need putting back together in the morning.

Robena

Do you see it? The moment when you strike the hart and it looks at you and accepts the blow? Your strike is clean, and your subsequent work to prepare the return admirable. There are, as ever, loyal dogs who bounce to your side, and nods from the master of the hunt who now quite clearly respects you. You demonstrate your skill, your experience, your talent for things big and small as no part of the deer goes to waste and the castle will eat well this eve.

The land around you is more alive than you remember as you go about your work. A few birds, those that do not fly for the winter, are up and about and make some noise. A snow rabbit hops by at a distance, wary of provoking the dogs, but curious despite herself. A little snow melts in the lazy afternoon and the nearby stream stirs with the noise of movement.

All Britain ever asked of you was to be a knight, Robena. Nothing more and, crucially, nothing less. Today, you lived up to the hunt, through your pain and the blackness that hung on your mind. Your reward is that Liana gazes on you with admiration. Why it might even be that she wants to be like you when she's older. Or at least like the you she saw today, the knight who hunted the hart.

What is it like, to be the subject of admiration as you make your return journey?

Constance, Tristan

The day is waning and Robena will be back soon. And now you see the true reason why the castellan of the house kept you company. "Unless much has gone poorly, I suspect the ladies will be returning today with venison" Sir Harold says as you finish arranging the many folds of your dress. "Would you or your men care to arrange the evening's festivities? I can have the castle's servants at your beck and call. Do not think any sort of pageantry beyond us. How would you receive your returning knight?"

Different. Robena has had no shortage of admiring looks the world over. Strength and prowess are eminently easy for people to comprehend and her to demonstrate. She has had knights throw their blades at her feet and beg for mercy, children throw themselves at her feet and beg to be her squire, and maidens throw themselves at her feet and just plain beg. Admiration is almost a natural state of being.

She finds it troublesome now. She is not attempting to demonstrate her skill, she is attempting to rediscover a morality that slipped through her fingers like Syrian sands. How is she meant to tell if she is doing correctly if simple strength wins her acclaim and morality wins her none? But then, she thinks, perhaps that is simply the way of things. Nobody who was ever renowned for being just was not first mighty. Perhaps the answer for her is not in fame against humility, but fame against infamy?

It is deep in such thoughts that she returns to the castle, once more locked in the silent tower of her mind.

“The castle will be dark,” Constance declares, not as a request; rather, as if she was relating something that had happened to her on a Yuletide long past, when she was a child. “There will be few welcoming lights. Her footfall will be heavy in echoing halls, without tapestry, without rushes under her boot. There will be the sound of running water from the fountains, the ice-cold water, trickling through the courtyard. And there she will find me, among the dying dark-paned lanterns. There she will take the fruit from my hand, or else cast it aside. When we have done our part, when we have said our words, then let you serve the boar, and make merry with her; and send a plate to my room, if you would. I may not eat it, but I would rather have it there to hand should I wish it.”

"I will take her plate." Tristan volunteers before anyone else can. It's exactly what he wants to be doing. A chance to see the party, and a dignified excuse to leave in a moment without snubbing anyone. And to not show up at all would be to insinuate that he is hiding, or has reason to, which would be unfair to anyone who would suspect themselves the reason. If he was assigned to making merry right now, then he would have to do it to the very best of his abilities. And he would! He would. But there is a yawning chasm of difference between being happy for others, and trying to bring happiness to others. The first is far more taxing.

Carrying a meal is a simple duty that he can do well and be satisfied with. And if Constance doesn't want to eat, then he will be content to not eat with her. Or, if she prefers to be alone, to take the chance to go for a walk and see if he can't find someone else unsuited to festive cheer in these circumstances, someone who feels lonely.

He wonders what it would mean if Sir Coilleghille will be one.

Robena, Constance

It is as Constance dictates. Indeed, the very Winter sun seems to be on her side. The trail is slow going back, deer being a much greater load on squires and horses alike than fox, and the sun takes its opportunity to hide below the horizon before your return. Sir Liana absently plucks her harp, wordless low notes hanging in the autumn air. She is tired and more than a little hoarse. Singing upon a hunt is an experience of air rushing into the throat at speed and the dry winter was already inhospitable to a long ballad without such circumstances. Her gaze is still to you, though she is discreet and has learned in her day with you to leave you to your thoughts.

It is thus that you part at the stables and find yourself, Robena, alone. Alone with your thoughts and your footfalls echoing off the stone of a dark courtyard. A distant lantern sputters weakly, marking the entryway where you ought to head. The fountain runs with chill water. It ought to be frozen, but it has been thawed by servants in your absence and, while running, escapes the chill creeping upon it for the moment. It trickles gently to accompany your footfalls and the sound directs your eye, at last, to the outline of a woman before you, standing before the fountain, arrayed in a long dress outlining her silhouette. She holds herself in the size and style of Constance, though you cannot make out her face as yet.

Constance, you hear Robena before you see her and then see her, tired after a long day, making her slow way towards the lantern upon the castle.

Speak first, whoever is so bold!

Tristan
Your dinner task is assigned to you and none begrudge you the duty. But before that, there is a moment where Constance has arranged her meeting, alone by the fountain. None else are welcome there, for that one place is set for her and for Robena. For you, the trouble is a contrary one. Until you turn to serve Constance, you could be anywhere, doing quite nearly anything you please so long as it is neither too bright nor too noisy. Sir Liana is just returned, tired, quiet, and saddlesore. Lady Sauvage too has returned, though she says not a word and made herself barely known at the back of the hunting party, for the hart was not hers to approach. Sir Hector is tired in her own way, but took the courtesy to bathe and dress in long wools rather than her armor after her routine in the courtyard and is therefore not entirely unapproachable. And Sir Harold is directing the servants to prepare the newly arrived deer for dinner.

The air is cold. The castle is empty. The fountains are freezing. Snowflakes drift down from above.

Melancholy surroundings, Robena has found, do not inspire melancholy moods. Instead they salve them. There's something about seeing the world fading, the candles guttering, and the silence heavy that reassures her. It makes her own feelings smaller by the contrast, smaller and more natural. If she's grieving she's not alone, if she's dying so is the world, and if she prays for resurrection so does every seed sheltering under the ground. Her breath surrounds her in a cloud and memories of childhood fill her and she daydreams of midwinter feasts and heavy boots and lying feverish under blankets sweating out every drop of water she drinks as a priest sits by her bedside and whispers soft words to her as she fades.

Winter is about learning to stop expecting a miracle, and then getting one anyway.

And so it is that the moment that Constance reveals herself she is caught clean in the neck with a snowball Robena had cunningly hidden behind her back.

Would that Eve had been so cunning! Had she simply been armed with such a bullet, then perhaps all of her children would have been born in grace. The serpent would have slunk away in shame. Constance, however, rises up in a flickering fury. The candlelight doesn’t quite meet her face, but the offense is clear.

“Are you a child, Sir Coilleghille?” Her voice is something like the creaking of ice on the river, but the warmth of her humanity spreads through the cracks. It is difficult enough not to be angry at the sudden sting, the shock of unexpected coldness, when you are not brooding and anxious and miserable in the waiting all at once.

“Would you rather I left you to what’s coming, then? Do you think miracles grow on bushes ripe for the picking?” Snow trickles down her delicate dress, white lost in the dark, and she writhes like a snake to dislodge it. “You wilful creature!”

Tristan's most interested in finding Sir Hector. Their last conversation had to be cut short to attend to Constance's dress, but that work is done now. She said she was close to King Uther, and that she would be a worse teacher, and he regrets not having had the chance to follow up on either.

First thing's first. The feast that will come later means there are fresh maid-of-honors to be raided from the kitchens, and if he can't beggar two, it's the work of seconds to gaffle them while someone's back is turned. Whenever you seek to commune with a higher power, it's always important to bring a good offering.

She radiated jealousy before, obviously. But he'll need to make her comfortable if he's going to ask a question that feels like it should be just as obvious, but isn't - What makes her so jealous of Robena? Her importance to Britain, or her importance to Constance?

"Ah, now my heart truly does weep for thou, Constance," said Robena in an overwrought tongue learned in the courts of Frankish kings, "for now at last I realize that to become a priestess thou were forced to forswear thy martial pride! It is no longer thine to wield a weapon upon the field of battle as thou did in yesteryear, now thou art at the mercy of any unchivalrous knave who dares to cast against you. Very well, then! Remain here - I go to fetch thou a champion to stand in thy place."

Robena turned her back. One free shot, should Constance desire it - that was all honour demanded.

Tristan
You find Sir Hector in the corridor outside the great hall, opposite the courtyard. All the spaces facing the courtyard are dark at Constance’s explicit direction, but on this side Hector seems to have brought a torch with her and considered it safe enough to set it in a wall sconce and have her hands free to cross in front of her for a proper stance of unapproachable contemplation.

She therefore starts when you approach her with puff pastry and gives you a look that, were it not obviously just a misleading trick of the flickering light, you might briefly have described as chagrin.

“I thought you’d be avidly spying on the courtyard like half the servants” she says, taking the offered pastry. “Even if your lady made certain that nobody would be able to see anything but silhouettes from the windows. But instead you’ve come to find me. To what do I owe the honor?”

That is, as far as you can tell, the most friendly greeting she’s ever offered, and there is no better opportunity to ask pointed questions. How do you ask her of her jealousy?

[and roll appropriately for however you seek to learn such pointed things.]

"I am performing duties I do not understand, for people I do not understand, in a place I do not understand." Tristan laughs. "I'm a lot more interested in talking to someone who wants to be listened to, rather than spying on a private moment." Is it arrogant to assume Sir Hector wants someone to listen to? He hopes not.

He takes a bite of his tart, and etiquette demands that he is careful to swallow it before continuing. "Those duties interrupted me before, quite rudely. You told me," and he closes his eyes in the effort to remember, "that so much should hang on this one knight is unfair." More than unfair, she had hinted at, but he omits that out of politeness. "Which duties would you take from her? To what does fairness entitle you?"

There is no guile in how he asks this, no intended offense. He doesn't see how blunt and heavy entitle is as a word when he swings it with ego-crunching force. An unintended punch is the one you don't think to pull.

Implicit in it is an insinuation; She is acting as if she is entitled something. It is not a comfortable insinuation to hear, even when it is made without malice. Especially when. Perhaps it is only the emphasis that Tristan has put on assuming that Sir Hector should be entitled something that endears him.

[I have come making an offering to a higher power, to speak of spiritual matters. I roll Weird: 2d6 + 1 = 7. Tristan's an odd child.]

Winter is still and quiet and cold. The serpent curls beneath the rocks and dreams of the sun. Winter is dark and lightless. And Constance is draped in winter. For a moment, she is tempted— the snow crunches under her fingers— and then she lets it fall back to the earth through numb fingers. Its fall is whisper-soft.

She sits in that palimpsest dress by the fountain and lets her fingers drift through the water. It is cold as ice. Later, she will regret this, hand clutched against her breast as she hisses in the agony of feeling returning. But she is not here for herself. She is here for Sir Coilleghille.

The candles are wan. The dress promises skin beneath it, if only a layer or two more was pulled aside. One golden curl rests against her pale cheek. The choice of whether to approach remains in Robena’s hands.

Robena slows and stops. She feels the whisper of something ethereal passing by, and in its passage it leaves questions like winter ghosts. The answers touch points of deep hope and despair, a whole range of possibilities - but there is one thing that is confirmed by Constance's lack of response.

She is not forgiven in the face of inevitable death. If Constance had thought to take pity on a girl about to meet her death by giving her one last happy memory to carry to the reaper she could have faced Pellinore's axe without fear. Now she knew that she was not forgiven, or far more terrifyingly, perhaps her death was not inevitable. The questions coiled around her, snakes of hope and despair, and she could not tell which whispers were more terrible. Should she embrace a dark fatalism or a frantic clinging? Her heart could not settle between the feelings and so she drifted for a moment upon the twin torments.

Enough! She had crossed all of Rome's ancient lands and not found time or space enough to think through as basic a concept as virtue, and she'd freeze to ice before she solved the faerie riddle of this castle. Whatever was to come, it would not come as any result of her wit. So she swallowed hard and tried to pack away her clamoring mind and its temptations, and returned to stand before Constance. In silence this time, and stillness.

Tristan

“Nothing” says Hector sadly, her face like stone. “I am entitled to nothing, least of all that which may be within my capabilities.”

In the dim light of the flickering torch, Tristan, you see a side of Hector that you did not expect. A great mantle that those strong shoulders could have born. Know you of the sword that your lady Constance carries? That ancient blade, decider of kings? These shoulders could have born that scabbard. Not to wield, no, but to bear the weight. You can imagine Hector holding that burden, tending to the well-being of a young king to be, one not unlike the Lady Liana. You can see Hector offering strict tutelage, stern and serious yet with a love that would stay her wrath, the blade upon her back always ready to be a gift when the time is right. You can see, in the strength that rests upon her that she could have raised a king, a great king over Britain, in a time where swords were not given out by mysterious woodland ladies or ancient and inscribed stones or any other such faerie nonsense.

And then, then the vision is gone. Like the flickering torchlight, faded in an instant, and you stare merely at a sad and stern knight. A woman who trains for a battle she will never fight and a role she will never bear. Who knows that at her best, she will pass a torch to Robena and someone will listen to her wisdom, and at her worst she will have trained for nothing and pass away without a legacy to her name.

"But isn't that freeing?" Tristan asks, surprised. He knows the feeling of training for a battle that may never come, a role that might never be needed, and the absence of a legacy - but he finds no sadness in it. "None of what you are is wasted. That you've been prepared for greater trials just serves you to do these duties unfailing and unflinching." Tristan finishes his tart. He's thinking to himself as much as anything, if Sir Hector is kind enough to let him lay out his thoughts like this. "Isn't it better to have a simple task ahead of you that you can do faultlessly, than an immense and uncertain one with such a burden of failure?"

This isn't a Socratic dialogue, asking questions to lead to a desired conclusion. The work ahead guarantees a legacy. It does not guarantee a flattering one.

He thinks back to Sir Hector's disagreement with Robena over what worth there was in hunting a fox. Of the difference between a guaranteed good, and one that can be warped by a twist of fate. Given the choice, Tristan would always pick the fox. When he trailed larger targets, it was always with a mind for absolute mitigation of risk - glory was never more important than that a job needed doing, and that none could do it better.