The Knight of the Empty Seat

When the knights came home from the Quest of the Holy Grail, there were fewer of them than had set out, and the Round Table was too large for the hall.

Arthur had the empty seats left as they were. For a year the court ate beside them. The names of the dead knights were still written on the backs in gold, as Merlin had set them long ago, and at every feast the servants laid a cup before each empty place and filled it, and at the end of the night poured the wine out onto the rushes.

In the second spring, Guinevere said what everyone was thinking. "A table with empty seats is a table waiting for something. Either fill them, or let it be known what you are waiting for."

So Arthur called a tournament, and knights came from Gaul and Lothian and the Welsh March, and for three days they broke lances in the meadow below Camelot. On the evening of the third day the king went into the hall with the two best of them, meaning to seat one in the place of Sir Lamorak.

The gold letters on the back of the seat had changed.

They no longer said Lamorak. They named a knight nobody knew: Sir Ederyn of the Ford. Arthur asked the heralds, who had never heard of him. He asked the two champions, who had not either. He asked Merlin's old scribes, who were very old now and went pale and said that the table had done this once before, in the time of Galahad, and that it meant the seat had already chosen.

That night a young man walked into Camelot on foot. He had no horse and no squire and a plain shield with no device on it. He said he was the son of a ferryman on the Severn, and that his father had once carried a wounded knight across the river without asking for payment, and that the knight had told him, One day there will be a place for your son at my table.

"What was the knight's name?" Arthur asked.

"He did not give it, lord. He only said he would not be there to see it."

Arthur looked at the seat for a long time. Then he stood aside, and Ederyn sat, and the gold letters did not change again.

Nobody at court ever learned which knight had made the promise. Gawain believed it was Lamorak himself. Lancelot said nothing, which Guinevere noticed, and remembered.