CHAPTER TWO #3
They were structural lies. If he’d told me the truth about my parentage, would that information have changed my actions to this point?
No. Whether or not I knew I was born of Merlin and Nimue, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I wanted revenge against Arthur.
At that thought, I had to laugh. But it wasn’t a happy, jovial sound. It was an acidic one because I’d failed. And I’d failed so spectacularly. I’d walked into Camelot with fire in my stride and revenge in my heart, and look where I’d ended up.
I was a failure. A joke. I’d let my feelings and emotions get in the way of my mission, and now I’d suffer for it. I was already on that path of suffering now.
Your suffering started way before this, I told myself. It started the day you were born because all you ever were to anyone was a tool.
Merlin had built me for a purpose, and Arthur wanted to use me for a different one. The only one who had ever truly given a damn about me was Corvin.
That thought settled into my chest like a quake: slow at first, but then heavy, spreading outward until it reached every edge of me.
Gods. I missed his face. Not the idea of him, not the comfort of what he represented, but his actual face.
Those amber eyes, that strong jaw, the dimple set into his chin that made him look almost boyish when nothing else about him was.
I missed the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching, like he was trying to solve something he already suspected the answer to.
I missed the way he was always annoyed with me, and the way I was always annoyed with him.
Don’t do this to yourself.
As if fate were sending me a reprieve from my own thoughts, I watched as a moth, a single pale thing, floated in through the bars of my cell door and pressed its body against the iron.
It beat its wings in slow intervals and then held perfectly still against the iron bar, wings spread flat.
Strange. It appeared to be waiting, as though it had somewhere to be and wasn’t in any particular hurry to get there.
I pushed off the wall and crossed the cell. When I was close enough, the markings on its wings stopped me cold.
It had two pale hindwings, both dusty white and ringed in the faintest silver.
But it was the forewings that grabbed my attention because a pattern sat centered on each one.
The pattern was dark as charcoal and precise in a way that nature rarely produced.
There were two hollowed sockets, a nasal cavity, and a grinning row of teeth.
A skull. Two of them, mirrored perfectly.
My breath left me slowly.
I’d spent three years in Annwyn. In that time, I’d witnessed creatures that defied every category known to man.
I’d seen Gwyllion, shadow wolves, and water spirits that wore borrowed faces.
But I’d never seen anything like this. No moth in any forest I’d walked through, mortal or magical, carried markings this deliberate.
It turned its head and seemed to look directly at me.
I watched it longer than made sense, then I pushed off the wall and paced. Four steps. Turn. Four steps. Turn.
The water in the basin that sat in the corner of my dank cell rippled as if someone had just jumped right beside it. But no one had. I glanced up to find the corridor beyond my cell empty. And yet the water rippled again.
The surface seemed to be moving from within in a single slow pulse, like something below the waterline had exhaled.
It rippled again.
And then something pressed against the inside of my mind. The feeling arrived the way warmth arrives when you’ve been cold so long you’ve forgotten that heat even exists. Instantly, I knew the signature of the magic.
Nimue. My mother.
No words came. What came instead was understanding, arriving whole and fully formed the way a dream arrives, already complete by the time you open your eyes.
Do not come for the sword.
It wasn’t a sentence, and it wasn’t words. Instead, it was just this knowing, as if I could feel her message in the deepest parts of me, a message that was crystal clear: the sword was dangerous. What was more, I could feel just whom that danger was attached to.
Arthur.
Arthur didn’t want me coming for Excalibur. And Nimue was worried that if I did, I’d suffer for it.
The understanding settled into my chest and just sat there.
Then the rest came, but the rest was softer.
That softness began to fill the hollow within me, that empty place where tears should have been, and for one moment the void filled with something that felt like comfort.
It was like a hug that wasn’t a hug but felt like one all the same.
Endure, Guinevere. I am always with you.
The basin went still then, and my mother’s presence began to draw away from me. It was slow, but once it was gone, I was left with even more emptiness because I suddenly wanted her to be here with me, this mother who was never really a mother at all.
I sat with my spine against the wall and my hands loose in my lap and a deep hollow in my chest.
I looked at the basin. The water was smooth now, flat, dark, and quiet, reflecting nothing.
I am always with you.
I could only hope that was the truth.