By Ilse Eskelsen
Time works differently for witches.
I am not a witch, exactly, though I’ve often been called one. I am more precisely a magician, but in this world, that is a man’s title, one I am presumed to have stolen. I could have been a faerie, like Morgan, or a princess with a knack for potions, like Iseult. But if I’m a magician I must have done something tricksy and nefarious. They generally say I did it to Merlin, which is nonsense. The only thing I ever did to Merlin was kill him.
But that’s another story.
Time works differently for witches. I am often but not always on the edges of King Arthur’s court in sixth century Britain, rising from my lake to offer him Excalibur—and to take it away again. I do the same with Lancelot, the hot-blooded son I steal from dead King Ban and his somewhat preoccupied queen. Give him to Arthur, take him back, I mean. It’s an endless cycle and a muddled one.
But there are other cycles of many kinds, and I am sometimes also, sometimes never, on my friend Shreya’s couch in downtown San Francisco in the years between 2017 and 2025.
I like San Francisco. It’s warm there. I once spent a week in the Little Ice Age, and I’ve been hungry for sun ever since. And I like Shreya; she’s ambitious and wild, as impressive at a boardroom table—those are decidedly not round in the twenty-first century, by the way—as at two a.m. in a tiki-themed dive bar.
But what I like best is what we do here in her apartment, when I come over after herb-gathering expeditions to Whole Foods and Chinatown. We sit on her couch. She pours a glass of wine for herself and mead for me—she’s very understanding about the time thing; I can’t say the same for Lancelot, or even Arthur—and she turns on my favorite show: The Bachelor.
The Bachelor is a lot like court. There is a central male figure with an athletic physique and assumed leadership capabilities. There are several women in love with him, some of whom may be secretly in love with other men, too, which is always an enormous scandal. There are unspoken rules, like never speaking ill of the king or greeting the Bachelor with a run-and-jump. And it is both utterly refined and very, very ugly.
When I steal my son, whenever I do it, I do it in the daytime, when the sun is high. That way no one can accuse me of creeping in by night. I walk up to King Ban’s camp with bare feet just hidden by my silvery gown. I am dramatic. I am obvious.
No one takes much notice.
The king is dead, the queen consumed with grief. The kingdom fell weeks ago, and the few survivors are now stopped halfway to Camelot and refuge. Everywhere there is chaos: soldiers drifting in and out of position, courtiers knotting together for conspiratorial talks, servants begging the queen to leave her tent so they can air out the smell of death.
No watch is kept over the small prince left crying in his tent.
So I sweep in, ducking my head to fit inside the canvas framework. Lancelot’s dark head is tucked into his knees. His body shakes with sorrow, a half-wrecked thing.
I am a magician, so I see what he can be. All that he will not become if left to this desolate place. That is why I am here.
“Lancelot,” I say, “come with me.”
His little waterlogged face emerges. He stares at me. It’s a story already, and I think of the stories they tell on The Bachelor, the characters made from living women. The producers prod them into place, I know this, but I also know they have a choice. Take the chance, fill the role, or step back from the spotlight. They can always refuse.
I’m sure Lancelot knows by looking at me I am something one might call a witch. He stands, and the legend begins.
I have the choice, too, I suppose. Why do producers do what they do? Why do they make the story play out?
“Entertainment for the masses,” Shreya says. “Bread and circuses. And money, obviously.”
I’ve never much cared for the masses.
But I think often of that little boy, lips chapped, water in his eyelashes. And I think almost oftener about that hard-jawed man, straight shoulders, dark eyes. He is a hero, my Lancelot, as soon as we walk away together. A sinner, too, but he would’ve been a sinner either way.
How long have I loved him? How long has he been my son? Well, time works differently for witches.
Lancelot doesn’t take to the lake right away. At first, it’s filled with secrets, a knot he’s too wary to unravel. But the moment that he thinks he understands, he tells me it’s boring. Always sitting in the silt, trying to meditate. Always watching the light refracted through the water, always waiting for the magic to make sense.
“There is nothing to do here,” he complains.
“There is nothing to do in the Bachelor mansion, but the young women there make it work,” I say.
His brow furrows. “Nothing at all?”
I say, “Well, sometimes one of them brings a guitar.”
Then I have to explain what the Bachelor mansion is. I tell him it’s like how Arthur’s official residence is Camelot but he travels for much of the year to different parts of his land, to check in on his subjects or join important battles.
“So they go to war, too,” Lancelot says, his expression easing.
“Or Croatia,” I say, “to try the street food,” but I can tell by then that he won’t get it.
Shreya gets the thing with Lancelot, though. Her aunt adopted a troubled teen when Shreya was twelve.
“He never really had a functional family,” Shreya says, during an ad break in Peter Weber’s Fantasy Suites, “so he didn’t know what to expect, and he kept expecting the worst.”
I gesture vigorously with my tumbler of mead. “Yes! He always thinks it’s the end of the world. One thing goes wrong, and he’s driven half to madness.”
She makes a sympathetic face. “You’re really brave for taking him in, Viv.”
Tipsily, I admit, “It could be argued that I kidnapped him.”
Her face shifts into forehead-wrinkling surprise, but by then the show is starting up again.
Lancelot gets harder to manage as he grows up. Noble, but headstrong, quick to follow foolish impulses. But he will soon be a knight; he is meant to be a knight. He knows it, and I know it. Besides, I think Arthur might sort him out. Arthur has that effect on people.
Because I am the Lady of the Lake, Excalibur’s guardian, arguable witch, I am granted a private audience with Arthur. He is leaning on his throne with those red-gold curls around his head, thinner than I remember, shadowed with duty.
“Lady Viviane,” he says. “I am honored that you would trust me with your son.”
“It is his destiny,” I reply, standing there in front of him. My dress is not quite long enough to hide my unshoed feet. He is polite enough to take no notice.
“You have a request,” he says.
In that moment, I feel like I have gotten to the night date portion of the episode, the part where the contestant shares her deepest trauma to ensure she receives a rose. “Do not let him die, sire. He is my only son.”
Arthur nods. “I will do what I can.”
I add, “By that I mean he is the only one of his kind. You will not have a knight like him again.”
He nods again, gravely. He has met Lancelot by now. He knows.
Despite Arthur’s promise, I know that I am leaving my Lancelot to his death. Time, after all, works differently for witches. I don’t know specifics because it’s hard to be precise with things that matter; I can make it to March of 2024 so as not to miss Joey’s hometown dates quite easily, or even to the coronation of Elizabeth I if I concentrate. But the time of death of your only son is a trickier thing. When you care in a way that cuts deeper than who’s going home to try their hand as an influencer, that cut starts to bleed.
I know he will die, and I know he will kill, and I know this is the start of it. But more than that I leave to fate.
Perhaps this is why I love The Bachelor. It is so refreshingly low-stakes. No one’s head gets chopped off. No one’s organs get trailed across a hall. And no one’s heart is well and truly broken, not really, not in the way that Lancelot’s is.
On The Bachelor, you get a lot of twenty-four year olds crying about how they’ve never been chosen. Well, Lancelot is chosen twice over, and a lot of good it does him. It is a little like Clayton’s season, when he sleeps with both Rachel and Gabby but Susie doesn’t want him afterwards and, as it happens, all he wants is Susie. Except replace Rachel and Gabby with one deceptive princess, and remember Lancelot only ever loved Susie—Guinevere—and consider that the princess disguised herself as his one true love. (I tell Shreya about this, and she says Lancelot is a “survivor.” “Yes,” I say, “if he’s anything, he’s that.”)
My son is prone to fits of madness, but this is, by far, the worst of them. I’ve healed him before—magicians can do that, and mothers can, too—but when he comes to the lake with bloody foot soles and wet cheeks, I know I have nothing I can offer him.
He is still far from me when he calls, “I am riddled with holes, oh mother my mother. I am an empty thing.”
I call back, “What would you have me fill you with?”
Lancelot shrugs, his whole body contorting with the motion. His steps are loose. “The most wonderful mothering magic, of course.”
He is closer to me then, and I can see the glaze in his eyes, a perfect mixture of madness and tears.
“I’m not sure I have enough of that,” I say.
He smiles at me, as empty as he’s claimed. “You have healed me before.”
I whisper, “Oh, but this is beyond me.”
His smile does not falter. He says, “Then I will wander again. Until she comes back to me.”
I do not move to him, but I stretch out my arms.
I am thinking about my mind-wounded son. I am thinking about how Susie agrees to love Clayton again, for a time, though it doesn’t last. I am thinking that the age of Arthur must come to an end. It gives me no end of sorrow to know my son will be a part of it. These twists of time. This bleeding cut.
I say, “Stay with me, Lancelot. Stay with me a while.”
He shakes his head, and I watch him as he goes.
No, I cannot heal Lancelot. It takes a magic greater than mine to do that, but it is done. The Holy Grail. I hear that Merlin had a part in that, before I killed him. It’s a pity; I hate to be grateful to that man.
I cannot be grateful for long. It is only a matter of time before Guinevere breaks him again.
Well, that’s not entirely fair. Shreya calls me out all the time for my imperfect feminism. Lancelot and Guinevere each play their part, and then it is all those broken oaths that do it, and then it is all that blood.
I take back Excalibur, like I said, at the end of it all. When Arthur falls, I reach a hand out from the lake, and it is mine again. I am dramatic. I am obvious. No one takes much notice.
Not even Lancelot, who is on his knees, weeping. I look at him, but he has turned away from me. He has become all that he was destined to become: a hero, a sinner, an abandoned child curled up in a tent.
My love for him is vicious. I cannot bear what it has done. I lay out Excalibur on the bottom of the lake.
Perhaps I’ll get another try, someday. After all, time works differently for witches. And magicians. And faeries. And princesses with a knack for potions, if you can find one. I’ve heard Iseult was something of an exception.
I leave the sword and go to Shreya. Zach Shallcross’s finale is all lined up, Kaity and Gabi dressed in fine gowns and awaiting their fates. I drink my mead. Shreya sips her Merlot.
I watch Zach break Gabi’s heart, and I cry.
