After the fight, all of the knights who had been wounded had their injuries treated, and then Meliagrance threw a party for the Queen and her knights.  Once it was time to go to bed, Guinevere insisted that her knights stay in her room, so she could attend to them herself. 

          Meanwhile, Lancelot told Sir Lavaine that he had to go talk to Guinevere, and though Lavaine wanted to go with him, so that Lancelot would not be accused of treason,  Lancelot said he would go by himself.  He gathered a ladder that he had found earlier, and used it to get up to Guinevere’s window.  He then broke the bars off the window, and in the process, cut his hand fairly badly.  This did not, however, stop him from lying with Guinevere, and then leaving at daybreak. 

The night’s events left the Queen exhausted, so she lay sleeping into midmorning.  Meliagrance began to worry about her majesty, so he threw open the curtains on her bed, but upon doing so, saw the blood that Lancelot had left on the pillow.  He yelled, accusing the Queen of sleeping with one of her knights, saying that he would tell his king of her treason.  She denied it, and when her knights heard of the accusation, they all denied it, too.  They told him that he could check every last one of them, to see that they had not opened a wound in the night, and so they could not have been the traitor.  But Meliagrance threw back the curtain again, and showed them all the basis of his claim.  The knights were all ashamed at the sight, and the grin on Meliagrance’s face grew, because he thought that he would be able to hide his own treason in the shadow of the Queen’s.   Alas for him, his plan doesn’t work out quite as well once Lancelot hears the rumors and comes into the room.

Elizabeth Alden