Chapter 2 #2
The guards led Nyneve into a vestibule of sorts—a wide space between the outer wall and the first inner one—which was old and made of stone, not preserved wood reinforced with wrought iron.
They’d barely stepped inside before the gates began to swing closed.
The air felt dry and overly warm, prickling her lungs.
She tried not to flinch when she heard the locks latch, feeling too much like a mythic stag cornered by a mortal man’s slathering hounds.
“My lady,” the older guard said, his mouth turned down into a frown, “the knight you wish to thank is Sir Mordred.”
Even with her pained ankle supported by the strength of a young guard, Nyneve faltered. Clouds gobbled up the sunlight, pitching the courtyard into gloom. Her stomach fluttered as she bit down on her tongue and straightened.
“Thank you, Sir Guard,” she said in a harsh exhale, her heart throwing itself against her ribs. Sweat pricked her palms, and she forced breath into her lungs. So she’d managed to steal a horse from not just any knight of the Round Table, but Sir Mordred Pendragon.
King Arthur’s bastard son, who had been prophesied by the great sorcerer Merlin to destroy the very city within whose walls she now stood.
The noble seal dangling from the chain about her throat afforded Nyneve Or’Afon many things she was not used to—not from this kind of place, all orderly and proper on the outside but ruled by conquest and violence at its bloody, beating heart.
The older guard took Sir Mordred’s destrier back to the livery, while the younger man left his post to escort Nyneve to the castle.
To an audience with the queen.
“I do not wish to cause trouble for Her Highness,” she demurred even as the guard continued up the wide, cobblestoned path.
Nyneve hadn’t been expecting this—most petitions were made to one of the king’s men.
It was the Roman-Briton Pendragon line her family held strong connections to, not the queen’s Moorish-Cymraes dynasty.
And it was to the king and his men whom she’d prepared herself to present a tale of why a noble girl had disappeared into the wilds only to return a decade later, seeking the comforts of the citadel and her family name.
“’Tis no trouble,” the guard reassured her kindly. “The queen agreed to take on petitions today. We have court visitors, you see, whom the king wished to entertain properly with a good hunt.”
Nyneve ground her teeth. She wasn’t prepared for the queen; the Druid Elders had chosen today for her arrival specifically because it was the single day each month when Camelot’s king accepted petitions from anyone. And the man had decided he needed to go out and kill something instead.
“Of course,” she replied, swallowing back a grunt of pain as the path’s incline increased.
She tried to rehearse her story in her head, but her stomach roiled.
Instead, she looked around, taking in the houses.
They were crowded too close together and of varying heights, reminding her of broken teeth lining a jaw.
The fluttering pennants of the market stalls were dyed in nauseatingly bright colors, and the smell of greasy, roasting meats made her stomach turn.
This far into the citadel, any rays of spring sunlight were devoured by the castle’s shadow, its gloom stretching as far as Nyneve could see.
“I’ll summon the physician, of course, for your injury,” the guard told her. “But the queen needs to approve of you being here first, you understand.”
Nyneve hummed in response, nodding her head, her mind swimming with pain and anxiety.
Should she try to run, she wondered? Yank her arm from the guards and sprint back through the gates toward the only home she’d ever really known?
Throw herself at her priestess’s feet and yet again beg to take her leave for Tintagel?
Promise she’d pay for her mistake some other way?
“The paths of Fate are often meandering,” Eirys had told her, blackberry-stained lips pressed into a firm line.
The smell of woodsmoke and burnt herbs and crisp moonlight crept onto the edge of Nyneve’s senses.
For a moment, Camelot’s bustle slipped away entirely, leaving her adrift in memories of the night that had changed everything.
She startled, pulled back into the present moment as two knights came trotting down the hill—on significantly less impressive destriers than Sir Mordred’s, she couldn’t help but notice.
Their chainmail glimmered in the low light, the sight making her uneasy.
She’d spent most of her life avoiding knights-errant and the king’s men, sinking deeper into the wood whenever the warning bells rang or the air changed, and now here she was, walking deeper and deeper into the very thick of the hornets’ nest.
When they finally reached the top of the hill, Nyneve wanted nothing more than to reach into her rucksack and pull out the jar of dried willow leaves.
But she wasn’t sure how that would look—a wild-haired girl in homespun garments, seeking an audience with the queen, chewing on leaves like a heathen.
Nyneve was a heathen, but that was beside the point.
“Here we are,” the guard said, as if she wouldn’t notice the giant mouth of the castle.
A cluster of knights stood at the towering stone archway that led into the keep’s organs, their spears crossed over its dark maw.
The castle’s gloom seemed even heavier here, like a low-lying fog, thick enough to choke on. Nyneve swallowed hard.
It wouldn’t do to lose her nerve now. The Druids wouldn’t take her back, she knew. Not until she proved herself.
That was the thing about being an outsider. She’d thought she’d grown accustomed to it, but as she limped into the shadow of Camelot’s castle, that old wound stung, fresh as the day the truth of the world had cut into her flesh and tasted her blood for the first time.
Nyneve Or’Afon did not have the luxury of failing.