CHAPTER TWO
-ARTHUR-
The eastern gate guard didn’t ask questions. Smart man.
I’d lowered my hood even before I left the courtyard, and I now I rode through the darkness, with only the horse below me and the beast in my body that had left me no peace for three fucking days straight. Coiled and restless, the dragon pushed against me as though it was testing its cage.
I let it press, pretended like I didn’t feel it.
We must know who took from her what was ours to take.
Her fucking maidenhead. The dragon never let that particular subject go.
And when we learn of the man’s identity, we destroy him.
The path was empty at this hour, which was the point. I required no escort, no announcement, no chamberlain trailing behind me with a list of the day’s appointments written in that cramped little hand I’d come to despise.
No, this was an errand I was doing alone. Purposely.
The trees began where the path ended, which was sooner than I remembered.
Regardless, the path through the southern wood had always been narrow, but it felt even narrower now, the branches overhead stitching together into something close to a ceiling.
Roots pushed up through the dirt at irregular angles, and Cabal slowed without my asking, picking his way between and around them carefully.
I let him set the pace until the track thinned to nothing, and even he understood we’d reached the limit of what he could do.
That was when I dismounted and tied him to an oak that looked old enough to remember Uther.
Then I started on foot.
All around me, the woods were silent in a way that had nothing to do with quiet and everything to do with the otherworldly.
There was no wind here, no twittering of birds, no distant creak of branch against branch.
There was just the sound of my own boots and the slow, deliberate rhythm of the dragon pulling breath through me as though it owned my lungs.
We must go to her. She rots in our dungeons. She is where she should not be.
I didn’t answer it. I just kept walking.
The lake appeared between the trees without ceremony.
One moment there was undergrowth and shadow, and the next there was open space and a huge expanse of water.
But this wasn’t just water. No, The Lake of Aeloria was something else entirely.
There were no ripples to break the surface, no insects that skated across it, and no fish that swam beneath it.
The lake was wrong in the same way that sacred things are wrong, both operating under different rules.
I stopped at the edge where the water meets the earth and results in mud.
The mud held my boots for a moment, then slowly exhaled them.
Even though I didn’t want to, I remembered the first time I’d seen her here. Guinevere.
How completely taken with her I’d been... Yes, I’d also been shocked and suspicious, but it was the desire that had left its imprint because it was a desire for which I’d never known an equal. And now? Now, I didn’t know what to think of her.
You’ll use her to your own ends, I told myself, and she’ll deliver everything you ask of her; that’s all that matters.
She is our queen, the dragon argued, but I shut it down.
Would I use her body the way I’d wanted to from the moment I’d first set eyes on her?
I wasn’t sure. The fact that another man had spoiled her, had taken her maidenhood from her...
well, it still rankled me. Whether it upset me or it upset the dragon within me, it was difficult to tell as its hunger had become my hunger.
Regardless, part of me thought it a foolish and stupid thing.
I’d bedded many women who weren’t virginal, and I’d enjoyed them, perhaps even more.
But there was just something about Guinevere’s innocence that I’d wanted to take for myself.
It was a crime I didn’t imagine I’d get over any time soon.
And the dragon would never get over it, I was convinced.
I looked down at the surface of the still waters of Lake Aeloria, and only my face looked back at me.
But it was darker than it should have been.
Not only that, but the angle of the reflection was wrong.
The depth behind my face was completely off, which didn’t make any fucking sense.
The lake should have been reflecting the charcoal sky above me, but it wasn’t.
Instead, it showed something else entirely.
Darkness. Not the clean darkness of a moonless night, but something thicker.
Something so dark, it was difficult to make out exactly what it was.
A forest, perhaps? At least there was the suggestion of tall shapes that could have been trees if trees grew without branches, stood too close together, and shifted when nothing touched them.
I crouched at the water’s edge to get a better look.
The shapes behind me moved. Not toward me exactly, but also not away. It was more like they were breathing, as if whatever lived in that dark place was simply existing, unaware of the window it had opened in the reflection. Or aware of it, but indifferent.
I’d traveled every road in Logres. I knew the Thornwood at midwinter, knew the black gorge country east of Penitent’s Range, knew the sulfur flats where nothing grew and the ground cracked open in seams that glowed faintly orange.
This was none of those places. So what in the hell was reflected above me?
I reached toward the surface of the lake.
As if in response, the darkness shifted and then it was gone.
All that remained was the outline of Thornhallow Forest just behind me, where it should have been.
I stood up again and shook my head. Whatever I’d just witnessed, it didn’t make any blasted sense.
Of course, this was an enchanted lake, so perhaps it was to be expected.
Well, never mind. Now it was time to address the reason I’d come here, and that reason had nothing to do with strange shadows.
I took a deep breath, but I didn’t call out.
There was no point. She’d known I was coming from the moment I’d left Camelot.
Probably since I’d woken at two in the morning and lain on my back in the dark, feeling the dragon breathe, thinking about violet eyes and white hair and the particular way she’d looked at me before I knew what she was.
The surface of the water rippled.
Then she was standing there, floating on the water.
Nimue. The Lady of the Lake.
The dragon exhaled inside me.
Reverence. That was what this feeling was. Or, at least, it was the closest thing to reverence I’d felt from the beast in years. And the dragon’s reverence toward this woman, this goddess, this mother of my biggest enemy, irritated me more than I could say.
I held my ground at the shore and looked at her.
And then I saw it: the shape of her jaw, the way her mouth was slightly fuller at the lower lip.
I saw the high architecture of her cheekbones, both severe and elegant all at once.
And that particular quality of the light that seemed to gather rather than reflect off her skin.
Then there was the shape of her eyes and the tilt of her nose.
I’d been staring at a very similar face for months.
Across the training yard, across a table in the Great Hall, in the war room, on horseback, the list went on.
And now that face, that beautiful fucking face, was in my dungeon. Where it belonged. Where she belonged.
The tightness in my chest had nothing to do with the dragon.
“Arthur.” Nimue’s voice moved across the lake’s surface without disturbing it. Three layers deep, it was like listening to a chord played on an instrument. She looked at me in a way that was both patient and absorbing.
The dragon shifted, though not in an aggressive sort of way.
This was something slower than that, more of an acknowledgment really.
That acknowledgment surprised me. Whatever history existed between the creature in my bloodline and the woman standing on the water, it predated me by centuries and would survive me the same way.
“You are angry.”
No, I was beyond angry. I didn’t have the word for what I was standing in. Anger was a fire you could bank and direct, but this was something that had burned cold for days and showed no sign of burning out. It was the king’s fury and the dragon’s possessiveness combined.
“You knew,” I said.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t calculate, didn’t offer me the sliding, diplomatic deflections from men who feared me. But Nimue feared nothing and no one, so I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“You knew who she was.” Each word was cut to its exact weight. “You knew she was an enemy inside Camelot’s walls, lying to my face while feeding secrets to my enemy.” I paused. “And yet you said nothing.”
“I did not know the entire time.” Nimue’s hair drifted around her shoulders, though no wind touched the lake. “I suspected that my daughter could be near. But suspicions are not the same as facts.”
“They’re close enough that you should have told me.”
“I will not apologize to you.”
“I didn’t ask for an apology.”
“You came here expecting one.” She looked at me the way deep things look at surface things.
“You came here expecting my guilt. Or supplication, perhaps. The mother of the spy, laying herself open to your mercy.”
She let that sit for a moment. “But I am not a subject of your mercy, Arthur. I am not a subject of yours at all.”
“I thought—”
“—my reasons for what I did, for the knowledge I kept, predate you.”
Her voice dropped again, and that was where the grief was, there in the lower tone, smooth and patient but with something hard underneath it.
“Those reasons predate your reign, and they predate your birth. They predate this kingdom and all the men who have come before you.”
Those ripple-shaped irises moved over my face, and there was no amount of regret in them at all.
“There are forces at work in Logres that you do not understand, Arthur. Guinevere is part of those forces. She is part of something larger that exists beyond the boundary of your wounded pride.”
My hand tightened on Caliburn.
“My wounded pride has an army,” I spat the words back at her. “Her ‘something larger’ has a cell.”
Nimue stepped forward, and the distance between us shrank as she studied me for a long moment.
The light shifted beneath her skin, then the lake trembled.