Beneath His Blade (The Lady and the Blade #2)

PROLOGUE

In a time before there were kingdoms, before kings and queens, courts and crowns, before men drew lines in the dirt and called them borders... Before all of that, there were just three women.

They weren’t goddesses or any such abstraction that doesn’t bleed, feel, or need. These three bled, wept, and laughed. And they loved each other with a fierce and ruinous love that grows between women who have no one and nothing else, yet none of them were related.

No one knows exactly where they came from, nor how or why. One day they just were; they came to exist the same way that mountains come to exist, the same way that the tide exists. They weren’t made so much as they simply arrived.

Magic in those early days wasn’t something learned.

It wasn’t a discipline that could be taught.

Just as the three sorceresses simply were, magic simply was.

Like the weather. Magic existed in all living things the way wind moves through grass and branches: purposeless and magnificent but arbitrary and random.

Born from the earth, Nymera came first. She came to be without fanfare or thunder, without beauty and all the complexities it encompasses. She simply arrived one day with the knowledge that dawn was breaking over an empty world.

Transformation was Nymera’s heritage. Her instinct.

She gazed on shapeless darkness and saw form, and thus form was given.

This was her gift, and she used this gift to parcel out the world into thirds, just as another woman would divide thread.

She brought forth the land of light, Logres, the half-light of the in-between, Annwyn, and the land that existed below, the land of darkness where the dead went when their lives expired.

The boundaries between all three held because Nymera willed them to hold.

She built the veil as a shroud between the lands of the living and the dead.

She called it mercy. And she believed it was just that, that the living and the dead should never meet because the dead might envy the life they once had.

Nimue came second, and just as she was born of water, she arrived the way water does: not announced, but inevitable.

She rose from the deep places, from still and lightless basins where no sun had ever reached.

And when she emerged, she brought with her the ideal of beauty.

Nymera wasn’t beautiful, owing primarily to the fact that she didn’t know what beauty was.

Nimue, on the other hand, was the most beautiful of the three.

But she was beautiful in the way the ocean is beautiful: vast, cold, and indifferent to the awe it inspired.

Nimue was water and she was memory, the preservation of things in their truest form.

She remembered everything. Every soul that passed through the veil.

Every word spoken over every grave. Every name the living let go of.

Nothing that passed through her was ever lost, and nothing she held could ever be corrupted.

Morganna was last of the three to come into being, and she was born of air and fire.

She arrived into the world like the held breath before a storm breaks.

While Nimue might have existed as the ideal of beauty, Morganna existed as the ideal of sexual desire, of lust.

Her hair was long and black as the space between stars.

And her eyes burned deep green, emerald lit from within, the color of something alive but not entirely safe.

Where Nimue was ocean and Nymera was earth, Morganna was everything that existed between.

She was the charged stillness just before lightning strikes, the heat of a burning flame, and the power inherent in the wind.

She’d been given a form that mortal men would one day find impossible to ignore: full-curved and sharp-boned.

Beautiful, yes, but she was beautiful the way a blade is beautiful.

Where the others worked in substance and memory, Morganna worked in the spaces between.

She dreamed, she saw, and she heard. She pressed her ear to the wall of what was and heard the muffled, urgent voice of what could be.

Her visions came in fire and wind, in images that cracked open behind her eyes.

Together, the three sorceresses formed a system. A balance. And for a very long time, it was enough.

As she carved, reshaped, and perfected her art, Nymera discovered something she was never meant to: that death energy worked its way through her hands like a spider spins its silken web.

She discovered that the power released as souls gave up who and what they were was a rich and potent energy.

Her transformation magic fed on such energy, flourished on it.

And soon she found herself addicted to this power.

She told herself she would be careful, that she would not delve too deeply. She promised herself that she would be cautious. But she wasn’t careful, and she wasn’t cautious.

And soon the realm of the dead began to fill with the incomplete, with souls that had crossed over from the land of the living to that of the dead, but they never quite arrived. Instead, they became stuck, mid-passage, like insects preserved in amber.

In response, the veil thinned. And the earth responded in confusion. In the twilight lands between the living and the dead, flowers began to grow with their roots up. Animals were born with their hearts outside their chests. Darkness seemed to invade the light.

Nimue felt it, this wrongness, this accumulating weight.

In fact, Nimue absorbed more than she should have, more than she was meant to hold.

And her edges began to blur. Morganna, meanwhile, dreamed of the end of everything.

She saw visions of destruction, the apocalypse of all that was, of everything the three had built together.

Morganna dreamed of six different raging fires on six different nights.

And within each dream, she watched the veil folding like wet paper.

She watched the dead walking back to the land of the living, though not in resurrection, but in leakage.

She dreamed of the dead not returned, but spilled.

And soon the living were drowning in what had been sent below.

Morganna woke each time with her hands shaking and the taste of ash between her teeth.

“You have to stop,” she told Nymera.

Nymera looked at the youngest of the three with a sense of endearment or amusement but also absolute refusal.

By this point, Nymera’s eyes had changed and the other two had begun to notice.

Her pupils had grown too wide, too dark, with a gray light that was indicative of the threshold of death.

Morganna saw the truth reflected in those eyes: that Nymera had been to a place from which she would not be coming back.

“I am building something,” Nymera said. “Something you cannot see in full just yet.”

“I see everything,” Morganna replied. “That is the problem.”

The war lasted longer than any battle has a right to last.

Yet there were no battlefields, no armies, no flags, and no war songs.

It was just three women in a slow, grinding, agonizing negotiation. A negotiation that wasn’t really a negotiation at all, considering the third now wanted to unmake the world.

Left with no alternative, Morganna and Nimue forged the blade. They did so in The Lake of Aeloria, the two of them working in tandem for the first and only time. And though they didn’t comment on it because they both realized it was pointless to do so, they felt the loss of Nymera.

Regardless, Nimue poured preservation into the steel of the blade: the memory of every true thing, the incorruptibility of truth.

Morganna breathed dream-fire across the edges of the blade, imbuing it with perception, with the ability to see through every glamour, every lie, and every mask.

Together, they crafted a blade that could not be deceived.

Excalibur.

The word meant nothing, yet the thing itself meant everything.

Nymera didn’t fight when Nimue and Morganna came to her. Perhaps she was already too far into the place below to know true fear. Or perhaps somewhere beneath the obsession, she already knew what would happen.

It was Morganna who held the blade. But it was Nimue who pushed it forward. And it was both of them who parted Nymera’s flesh like a knife through butter. Not killing, but containing, severing the anchor that tied Nymera’s corrupted will to the living world.

And in response, the veil slammed shut like a door in a windstorm. Then there was nothing but silence, of absence, of the loss of what once was.

What Nimue didn’t know, standing at the lake’s edge with Morganna by her side, was that Morganna had already arranged everything that would follow.

The youngest sorceress had dreamed of many paths through the conflict, many choices she and Nimue could make.

In all but one of them, she and Nimue bore equal cost.

So Morganna chose the other path.

And in so choosing, Morganna watched the sword bind itself to Nimue.

She watched the lake close over Nimue’s wrists like water shackles, and she watched the sword claim Nimue as mother, guardian, anchor, and keeper.

She knew Nimue would be forever tethered to this lake, to this moment in time, fixed here for all eternity.

Morganna knew Nimue would become a woman transformed into a monument, a woman who would never again know freedom.

And though there would never be another clear moment in Morganna’s mind, though she would be forever reminded of this choice she made, she walked away.

Free and unfettered by the chains of responsibility and destiny.

Morganna walked away, and she didn’t look back.

In the realm of the dead, in the dark below the veil, in the everlasting shadow, what remained of the eldest sorceress pressed her palms against the sealed wall.

She knew it was a cage she had built for herself. Perhaps that was the worst part. Regardless, she could still feel the living world on the other side of the wall. She could still feel its warmth, its noise, and the messy, abundant heat of life.

It was a stark reminder of the emptiness within her: the dull ache of the nothingness she had become.

Soon, her fingers found a small seam, a hole, a stitch undone in the fabric woven between here and there.

And she began clawing.