Chapter 28 #2
The knight only stared at him for a long moment.
“Violence and conquest?” Mordred repeated incredulously.
Furrowing his brow, he examined the king’s familiar features: the closely shorn brown hair, graying at the temples; the tanned face and the laugh lines around the mouth; the short beard, a little less neat than usual.
This was still the same man he had ridden into battle beside, bravely facing impossible odds if it meant this land and its people might one day be safe, was it not?
Doubt bloomed sour on his tongue, and an emotion he lacked the language for crested like a wave at the back of his throat.
“Arthur, Merlin’s monks line our halls and prowl our streets,” Mordred said.
“Always in those damn cloaks, their faces and weapons obscured.”
Arthur considered him wordlessly. For a dizzying moment, Mordred wondered if he knew the man sitting before him at all.
Then the king leaned forward onto his elbows, looking warily at the door before meeting Mordred’s eyes.
“What would you have me do?” Arthur asked hoarsely. “Mordred, what else can I do?”
There was no accusation in his voice, only a yawning ache that made Mordred’s own body hurt. “My liege,” he began. His limbs felt wobbly and strange, the room too warm with the hearth lit. “What could you possibly mean?”
Arthur stood, striding out from behind the table and leaving Mordred staring at a large tapestry behind his abandoned chair. A white stag, blood dripping from its side. A hunting party with too many spears. A crowned rider leading the charge.
“The Northmen still terrorize the coasts, even if they mostly keep away from the citadel,” Arthur said, his back to Mordred as he stared out the tall, narrow window.
“The Fair Folk blithely appear within our keep as They wish. Though we beat back our latest visitors from the east, we cannot guard an entire channel, Mordred. More will come. It is only a matter of time.”
Mordred studied Arthur’s profile, outlined by the dying light. He tried to take a deep breath, but it felt as though a millstone were pressing down on his chest. “Oh. Of course,” Mordred murmured a moment later, barely audible over the crackle of the stifling fire. “You need more power.”
Arthur turned then, his face shadowed. When he finally spoke, his voice was hollow. “And Merlin has power, my boy.”
Mordred moved toward the king without thinking, Guinevere’s words floating back to him in a rush: her insistence that Arthur might be willing to accept Mordred for what he was, and that together, the three of them could usher in an era of unprecedented peace where the Fair Folk and mortals stood shoulder-to-shoulder in their verdant, rain-wreathed and beloved land.
The High Court had tried such an alliance once already, Mordred knew, when the Romans first came.
Together, Fey and mortals had indeed driven the conquerors back.
But then the armies returned, the peace fractured, and now, all these years later, Mordred stood upon Roman mosaic tiles in the heart of an ancient faerie hill.
And so, the changeling knight almost opened his mouth to tell King Arthur Pendragon the Bear, son of the man who had wanted to drive the Fair Folk from the only home They had ever known, precisely what he was.
But then the king turned, meeting Mordred’s gaze, and the truth slipped back beneath the surface.
“You must understand,” Arthur implored, all his sharp and careful cleverness replaced by earnest distress.
“Merlin created me. Molded me. I am just another bid in his long attempt to put a king he can control on a throne of his making. As long as he thinks I am his puppet, Camelot has access to his nearly unfettered power.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Mordred recognized how desperately he wanted to believe Arthur. His throat tightened, an odd pressure building behind his eyes. “My liege,” Mordred murmured. “You are playing a most dangerous game.”
“I am,” the king said, massaging his temples, his hand obscuring his gaze. “But I seem incapable of creating an heir. I know the fault does not lie with Guin. Besides, her skills in governance far surpass mine. I cannot do any of this without her.”
Mordred swallowed, his mouth dry, the heat of the room growing unbearable. He stared down at his feet. Sweat pooled between his shoulder blades, and still, the right words would not come to him.
“If there is even a chance Merlin can keep the citadel safe and remedy my inability to sire an heir,” said Arthur, gentler than usual, his hand brushing Mordred’s shoulder, “I am afraid it is worth the terrible risk.”
Mordred met Arthur’s gaze as the king’s fingers closed around his shoulder.
“Were it not for that damned prophecy and the highborns’ obsession with legitimacy, none of this would be a problem,” Arthur murmured, his eyes never leaving Mordred’s.
“You have all the makings of a great king. Certainly a better one than I could ever hope to be.”
Mordred felt a thousand things all at once; a thousand things he should not have been able to feel and certainly did not understand.
His tongue seemed too large for his mouth, his head spinning.
Before he could even form a sentence, the heavy doors to the study swung open.
He and Arthur shifted away from each other in surprise, both of them going for their weapons.
Within the arch, backlit by the corridor’s torchlight, stood Merlin.
Arthur’s hand dropped from his sword, but Mordred’s only tightened around the hilt. Gods, he wanted to kill this sorcerer dressed in fine, shimmering robes, adorned with a garnet-encrusted cross that could have fed a peasant family for ten years.
“Arthur!” Merlin exclaimed jovially, striding over to the king without so much as an invitation to enter the space.
“Come, your men ask for you. And I admit I find myself wishing for your presence during this most interesting evening. A sorceress for the queen—how novel!” Though his tall, thin body leaned toward Arthur and his hand had landed on the king’s shoulder, Merlin’s cunning eyes slid to meet Mordred’s gaze as he spoke the last few words.
The Fey arrow through the window. Merlin’s return. The crazed Northmen. The courier sent to barter directly with Arthur. The senseless beast Nyneve made of him. Everything felt as though it was slipping out of his hands, and there was not a damn thing he could do to stop it.
“Mordred,” Merlin said, suddenly addressing him, his eyes gone sharp. “What brings you to a private audience with the king?”
“Oh, he’s just upset about what happened with Nyneve,” Arthur said backhandedly, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he strode back to his desk.
For a heartbeat, he met Mordred’s gaze imploringly.
“He had little to say about your monks until that scene yesterday afternoon. You see, Merlin, Mordred has always been fiercely protective once he finally allows himself to care about someone.”
Mordred resisted the urge to look at Merlin, keeping his eyes on the king. He hunted for the right words while a distant part of him wondered when he had allowed himself to care about Arthur. Startlingly, it seemed the precise moment had already come and gone without his notice.
“I am upset about it, naturally,” Mordred said evenly. “She is a ward of Camelot, betrothed to a knight of the Round Table, about to be formally titled as the Queen’s Sorceress. And yet she was still roughly apprehended in the street by a glorified priest and accused of wrongdoing.”
Mordred did not have to fabricate anger.
His blood burned at the mere thought: a cloaked monk pulling a shortsword on Nyneve for protesting their arrest of a young boy accused of thieving.
Though Mordred had not seen the arrest itself, Merlin’s monks had no right to exact justice on a citizen of Camelot, especially a child.
And they certainly had no right to touch her.
“Yes, yes, I’ve already spoken to them,” Merlin said hurriedly, brushing his robes with the back of one hand. “Won’t happen again.”
“I appreciate your attention to this matter, Merlin,” Arthur said, picking up his simple circlet from the table and settling it onto his brow.
Mordred watched the king and his sorcerer exchange a few hushed words.
He hoped Arthur understood that if anyone else had grabbed Nyneve by the forearm and drawn their weapon, Mordred would have torn their throat out.
Or held them down while the sorceress did it herself.
But Merlin’s growing influence meant the monks occupied a strange place in the city’s hierarchy, one that no one understood and most were too uneasy to inquire about directly.
The High Court’s courier being able to slip past Merlin’s wards and appear within the castle had rattled everyone, Mordred included.
And that fear made it much easier to enforce a new authority.
A dangerous game, indeed.
Numbly, he watched Arthur stride past him, Merlin at his side, the two of them laughing. Camelot’s king turned to look over his shoulder, met Mordred’s gaze, and winked. Mordred wished it made him feel any better.
He wanted to believe the king. He wanted to believe all that death and strife to liberate Camelot and the surrounding villages had not been for naught.
And most of all, despite the very nature of his creation, Mordred wanted Arthur to genuinely believe he would make a good king. He did not know why it mattered to him.
But it did.
Mordred drew in a deep breath and adjusted his sword belt before forcing himself to walk out of the king’s study. In the corridor, cloaked monks lined the wall like soldiers, their faces hidden under their wide hoods. For Arthur’s protection, Merlin had insisted, offering it up like a rare jewel.