Chapter 26 #2
Mordred’s blood went cold. He kept his head bowed, mostly for the sake of hiding the expression on his face.
“No, my liege,” he said with a firm shake of his head.
“What I felt forced to do earlier today was not the Cynosbythrae. I put a glamour on workings to make it look that way. It was an attempt to frighten the guards away and leave with minimal bloodshed.”
“Hmm,” Ragrshydan said, disbelieving. Mordred stared at the tiles beneath his feet and shoved his anger as far down as it would go. “And what was so pressing that you had to depart immediately? Why could you not wait for your king as he commanded?”
Mordred wanted to ask why Ragrshydan had told a fucking courier to slip past Camelot’s wards last night, but he knew it would get him nowhere.
Perhaps Ragrshydan had intended to hold Nyneve over Mordred’s head as a bargaining chip, keeping her imprisoned until Mordred gave him what he wanted or her time ran out.
In his peripheral vision, he watched one of the creatures that used to be mortal offer spiced wine to Oryane with spindly, withered hands.
A husk. Nausea rolled in his stomach. Were he ever king, he would strip all the faerie hills in the Isles of that old, terrible enchantment.
It was an easy thing to sit back and watch atrocities occur if you could convince yourself you were not directly responsible for any of it.
He had spent the past ten years watching men and Fey do precisely that.
But if the Fair Folk were going to be so terribly cruel, he reasoned, They should at least have the gall to do it with Their own bare hands.
“You know how close I am with Arthur,” Mordred finally said, raising his head to meet Ragrshydan’s gaze.
“On his war council. Often at his side. I have his ear. It is something that must be maintained, my lord. He expected me at an important gathering that I could not miss if I wanted to keep my influence.”
“What about your closeness with me, Mordred?” Ragrshydan demanded, suddenly only a pace away from him. The king’s hand slipped to the hilt of his sword, fingers tight.
“We do not need closeness,” Mordred said as firmly as he could. “We are of the same body, the same blood. You have my undying fealty. You have my oath.”
Ragrshydan’s pale eyes held Mordred’s. He felt the king strum his Threads. The song of the oath Mordred had indeed made to the High Court filled the space, a low melody that sounded like war and blood.
“The courier asked Arthur for Caledfwlch in exchange for the northwestern lands,” Mordred said, breaking the silence, his voice low. “Do you seek the blade, my lord? I am beside Arthur, day in and day out. If it is truly an ancient thing of power, I can obtain it for you.”
From the shadows to the left of the throne came a harsh laugh. Oryane shifted forward in her seat, the jeweled pin in her intricate pile of graying blonde curls winking in the low light. “Could you be trusted to return such a powerful thing to this court, Mordred?” the advisor asked.
The knight sighed, raking a hand through his hair. “Why do you believe I would not? Why do you believe I want one of our storied weapons in the hands of mortals?”
He glanced at Oryane this time, knowing Ragrshydan would grow angry that his attention strayed. The advisor held her ground perfectly, her brow arched, mouth firm. Then he understood.
“You think I would not give it to this Court,” Mordred sighed.
“I cannot imagine it is easy to stomach your fate,” Oryane said, though there was no sympathy in her voice. She rose to stand beside Ragrshydan, making sure she was a half-pace behind her king. “Why would you not seek any path that might lead you somewhere different?”
Something that might have been foolish, damned hope stirred in him. “And how might an old, cursed blade I cannot wield aid that quest, precisely?” Mordred asked, too sharply, too curiously.
“I am not here to discuss such things with you, boy,” Ragrshydan spat.
In his peripheral vision, he caught movement in the corridor leading into the hall and frowned.
A High Summons was almost always a private meeting, the hall empty save for the Faerie Throne and whomever it wished to speak with. “I am here to deliver your punishment.”
Mordred’s frayed patience snapped, and he laughed. “My punishment? For what, exactly, Ragrshydan? Do you truly expect the last of the Tuatha de Danaan, the last Fair Folk forged by divine hands, to heed your demands as readily as a fucking dog?”
The High King’s face turned flame-bright as he stalked down from his dais, reaching out as if to grab Mordred by the throat. At the very last moment, he paused, his hand curled into a fist at his side.
“Good decision,” Mordred purred haughtily. “We might make a king out of you yet.”
“Ragrshydan,” Oryane warned from the dais as Ragrshydan growled and reached for the sword at his waist. “It matters not what the changeling thinks, nor what he wants.” She raised her eyes to Mordred’s, and perhaps he was only hoping for kindness in a world that had none, but he thought he saw a shred of apology in her gaze.
Oryane was the last of a powerful dynasty that had once ruled the High Court, the descendant of a Gentry house that decided to stay behind when Danu left for Avalon, the safe haven the Fey’s creatrix-goddess had constructed between realms. He wondered what it must be like for Oryane to serve the regent who had beheaded her mother, who dragged this court further and further into the mud every day.
“You are correct, Oryane,” Ragrshydan said.
He turned to stride back up the dais and settle onto the ancient throne.
“You used your might against your own kind, Mordred. Just as you made choices based on your own convictions, so must I.” He lifted his hand to the guards at the mouth of the corridor. They uncrossed their spears.
Apprehension building in his stomach, Mordred watched the members of the High Court file in, raucous and already drunk on faerie wine, no doubt craving violence.
He turned back to Ragrshydan, the Cynosbythrae straining against his ribs.
But the king said nothing, simply sipping from a jewel-encrusted goblet as he watched his court assemble.
Mordred stood there alone, doing his best to look as though he was holding his ground.
It was difficult, surrounded by so many Fey twice his age and so desperate to see him humbled.
More like mortals than They would ever want to admit, he realized—such an appetite for power and control that They would happily court the apocalypse itself.
When Ragrshydan stood and offered the traditional greeting for a sentencing, Mordred’s ears rang, the words becoming twisted and garbled.
He could perhaps fight his way out again, even without Nyneve’s help.
Of course, the guards had taken his weapons, but he was the weapon, after all.
The darkness pulled at his seams, just as hungry for violence as the High Court at his back.
“Mordred, your gracious king sees the difficulty of your position,” Oryane announced, directly addressing Mordred in a way that made him snap back to attention.
“Yes, you drew the blood of your own people. Yes, you conspired against the High Court. But you were playing your part in our schemes, were you not?”
His mouth dry, Mordred just watched the councilor, feeling like a fool for not anticipating the severity of Ragrshydan’s correction. He had disobeyed the High King for the sake of the mortal man who had claimed a throne in the heart of an old faerie hill.
No. For the sake of a sorceress with eyes like a spring meadow.
He drew in a long breath.
“So you will be given a choice,” Oryane said, stepping down onto the time-worn stairs, her cloak trailing behind her. “Nyneve Or’Afon, the mortal sorceress you’ve taken such an interest in, must serve this court for a year and a day . . .”
Mordred’s body went numb. The darkness the goddesses had stitched into his ribs exploded in rage. Biting down on his tongue, he wrestled to rein it back in, to stop the night from blotting out the sun. Was this king truly too stupid to see what a dangerous game he was playing?
“Or you receive twenty lashes before your people,” Oryane finished, her voice ringing out through the underside of the hill.
Mordred drew in a deep breath. It was no choice at all.
A public whipping was a serious humiliation among his people.
Any member of the High Court would do just about anything to avoid the spectacle and the ruin of their social standing.
Sacrificing a mortal would be the obvious choice, and that was precisely the issue.
If he chose to save Nyneve, it was just another public betrayal of his king. Oryane was too wily.
He closed his eyes and saw it all quite clearly: it would be an easy thing to lure Nyneve beneath the hill again.
The High Court would have its way with her, harvesting her magic and her mortality until she was little more than a husk.
Desperate mortals were always so quick to take this particular deal, Mordred had found.
What was a year and a day of servitude compared to the cruel, hard world of endless suffering that the powerful had created aboveground?
But mortals did not realize they would never survive more than a night under the hill, let alone a year and a day.
Nyneve Or’Afon would disappear from Camelot as quickly as she had arrived.
It would not take long for humans to forget she had ever been there in the first place.
In another blink of a faerie eye, no one who had known her would even still be alive.
It might be best to excise the wild, beating thing inside him that yearned for her.
He was a weapon in the shape of a person, and he had never known a sword or spear or axe capable of love.