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Gawain stumbled out of the Green Chapel unaware of the day or the hour, and unclear on the circumstances of his escape from the Green Knight. All feeling was at a remove; only distantly did he feel blood trickling down his neck and creekwater soaking his boots. Birds shrieked, and foxes too, but he had survived and was alive, and the dulling shock of it had yet to work through his mind.
If he had braced himself then, he could have recalled the scene prickling with more detail than any poet could ever record: the mossy stillness of the moment when the Knight had cut him with a single nail and then grasped his face in one massive hand and stared into his eyes.
The look on the Knight’s face, the incomprehensible gentleness of his hand. Gawain had stared back, trembling as he saw not the Knight’s dark eyes, but Lord Bertilak’s pale ones, and felt Essel’s fingertips on his cheek, and the scavenger boy’s blood-roughened palm on his jaw. They had looked at him, all of them, and spoken to him in many tongues, and though he felt the words lingering in his bones, what it was they said he would not later remember.
—
As the axe had waited for him to find it in St. Winifred’s desolate home, so Gringolet stood patiently outside the Green Chapel. Gawain would not have recognized his own face at that moment, but the red ears and gold-studded poitrel of his horse he would always know, and his arms fell around Gringolet’s neck with the wet, desperate clutch of a drowning man.
“Home,” he commanded Gringolet, as the voices in the chapel had commanded him, and his everloyal steed obeyed.
Gawain gave no more orders after the first, only fell into a feverish half-sleep and trusted the same queer magic that had brought Gringolet to him to take the both of them home. If the journey to the Green Chapel had taken weeks, the return to Camelot took no time at all. The scavenger on the battlefield never glimpsed them, and even a keeneyed watcher would've seen only a blur of dark hair under a saffron cloak, a red mane flashing in the wind. Bone, rock, river, and branch all broke beneath Gringolet’s hoofs. The sky, dark and piney in the north, opened up wider and wider as they traveled south, until the mountains too were swallowed up by blue, and the horizon lay flat and unbroken except for the silhouette of Camelot, her walls and lights crowning the head of the world.
It was the lights that roused Gawain, and the clatter of hoofs on cobble, and finally his mother’s voice, not the faraway echo he’d heard on the wind so many times, but the thick, real sound of it that carried all shades of love, exasperation, and relief. The courtyard was full of bells and voices, the king’s and Essel’s among them, but Gawain paid them little heed as his mother pried Gringolet’s reins from his fingers. Before she could bade the knights carry him to his bed, he staggered off of his steed and was aided by the crowd into the great hall where the Green Knight had first issued his challenge and Gawain had so hastily spilled his blood. There in the hall, as Twelvetide feasting turned to Epiphanytide, Gawain sat beside his uncle and listened to him speak.
“We shall let you rest, brave Gawain, before you regale us with the tale of your travels. But we trust you do have a tale of yourself to tell, for we see it on your face.”
“I have tales to fill a Christmas day,” Gawain said lightly, though he knew not how he would tell those tales, studded with his shame as they were. “Tales enough to fill a season.”
His tired eyes searched the revelers in the hall for Essel, catching only a face turning away. His mother’s hand rested steady on his shoulder, his uncle’s tired gaze lay heavy on his face. For a moment he felt the weight of his uncle's crown on his own head, a merciless echo of all that could have been and still could be.
Then he looked down to where his waist was bare of the sash and recalled with satisfaction that it lay still in the Green Chapel, and he knew there had been honor and bravery in his journey, if not perhaps in the form he had expected it to take.
He met his uncle's eyes and said again, this time without undue levity, “I have tales of myself to tell.”