Eventually Launcelot arrives at a jousting tournament, because it’s just been too long since there was any serious jousting in this novel, I guess.  Five hundred knights are jousting in this tournament, on two teams.  The White team is really giving the Black team a pounding.

Then thought Sir Launcelot for to help there the weaker party in increasing of his chivalry!  He rides in and starts jousting on the side of the Blacks.  He beats up a whole big pile of White knights, as the White knights throw wave after wave of their men at him.  Everyone talks about how awesome Launcelot is.

But the Whites just have an endless stream of guys to throw at Launcelot, and as a man may not ever endure, our hero eventually collapses, and the Whites take him prisoner.

“What the hey, guy,” they tell him.  “You’re what, J. Random Knight, just come in and bashing on our joust?  Who invited you?”

Launcelot doesn’t have a good answer for them, and he’s super despondent, on account of this is the first time ever that he has lost a fight.  So he lies in the prison and feels sorry for himself until the knights let him go.

Sobbing and mired in self-pity, Launcelot rides onwards. Eventually he comes to an apple tree, and you know Launcelot!  Even when he’s unhappy, he’s still a knight who takes lots of naps.  So he lies down under the tree and takes a nap.

He has another dream, in which Nacien berates him for feeling sorry for himself.

“I wonder what that dream meant,” Launcelot says to himself, when he wakes up.  Launcelot does not know how to interpret dreams, you guys.  He rides around for a while and finds a chapel and in the chapel is Nacien!  No, wait, not Nacien, Malory says.  Nacien was in the vision, so it has to be someone else.  It’s a recluse who had a window that she might see up to the altar.  Some anchoress.  (This is an actual thing: women who lived inside the walls of churches, like crazy agoraphobic nuns!)

So imagine our hero Launcelot, striding up into the chapel, looking for Nacien, and seeing zero Naciens but spotting a low window that opens onto a cell in which an anchoress sits.  “Ho there, anchoress,” Launcelot says to her.

“Yes, yes, Sir Launcelot.”  The anchoress is not at all surprised to see him.  She demands to know Launcelot’s most recent vision, so she can interpret it for him.

“Okay.”  And then he told her altogether word by word, and the truth how it befell him at the tournament, which wasn’t actually part of the vision, but it was a big deal to Launcelot.