Chapter 4 #2
“Thank the gods for that,” he grumbled in response. “The majority of Camelot’s men have not impressed me much.”
“So let us speak no more of them,” Guinevere replied brightly, an effortless change in topic. “The girl, Mordred.”
“You do not wish me to get rid of her? It is the path I would recommend,” he replied. Camelot’s recent peace was tenuous. He had no interest in adding a Druid girl making a claim to one of the great old houses favored by the Pendragon line to his list of problems.
“No,” Guinevere said, drawing out the word. The breeze slipped through the atrium’s open ceiling again, rippling the queen’s long, fluted sleeves that Mordred knew she hated. “You are too eager for violence.”
He shifted to his left, propping his chin on his hand. “’Tis my nature, Your Highness,” he murmured, his voice low and dangerous. It was a tone that the older court members rather dramatically claimed sent chills down their spines and proved that all of Merlin’s prophecies were true.
But Guinevere did not flinch the way the others did.
She only sighed, tilting her chin up to peer into the sunlight pouring down into the space.
“Sometimes I wish you had not told me,” she admitted in a murmur, reaching for her goblet to take another sip of mead.
She used her left hand this time, so he knew he did not need to watch for one of her signals.
And he could not blame the queen for her wish, he supposed. The truth of him was a heavy weight. “You left me with little choice. A secret for a secret,” he reminded her with an arch smile. Then he sobered, considering. “I know it is a burden.”
Guinevere leaned forward on instinct, reaching her hand out for his until she remembered they were in the atrium, surrounded by noblewomen, the guardsmen at the door always watching.
She shifted the movement easily into a straightening of her sleeve.
How fluidly the both of them lied these days. Too much practice. Too little truth.
“Watch the girl, please,” she said instead of all the things they could not say, at least not here. “I do not doubt she is who she says she is, but there is an . . . undercurrent of something else. Something strange.”
Mordred traced the embroidery of Massiele’s handkerchief absentmindedly with his fingers, but he had already forgotten her face. Another girl—the one who had stolen from him, not given—seemed to have planted a seed in his thoughts. Which he resented deeply and would seek to rectify.
“She is powerful,” the knight told the queen, looking up to meet her gaze.
“Is there any chance you might be able to convince Arthur she is not of House Or’Afon?
Then she can be employed in the kitchens or the fields if she has need of a roof over her head, but it would keep her from being part of the court where she might gain influence. ”
Guinevere shook her head emphatically, pressing her lips together.
Her dark curls were held back in an elaborate braid that probably took four handmaidens to achieve, but a few ringlets still tumbled loose from the pearl-topped pins.
“Doubtful,” she said. “I know little of the line, and her father was beloved by Uther.”
The name, as it always did, made the coiled beast in Mordred’s chest thrash. His skin flushed with the heat of its rage. Uther Pendragon, the king’s father, had been a great enemy to his kind, and unlike mortals, his people had an exceedingly long memory.
“She may have Roman blood,” Guinevere said quickly, understanding the source of his tension, “but she is not like them, I don’t think.”
“We thought Arthur was not, either,” Mordred reminded her softly, surprised by the ache in his own voice.
Guinevere’s jaw tightened, but she said nothing. The queen tried to blink the emotion away, tears shimmering in her eyes, the atrium’s light turning them to jewels.
“I am sorry,” Guinevere said hoarsely, shoving her tears away with the back of one hand, the single word nearly lost to the lilting lutesong.
“I am—I am troubled, Mordred. The Druid girl. The Faerie Host rides again. Raiders hound our shorelines. And now Arthur speaks of using force to build his united kingdom.” The queen paused, looking about the room again, smiling at two handmaidens who wandered in, petal-filled baskets tucked under their arms. “We always agreed it was peace that would bring his great vision to fruition. Not more war.”
Mordred blinked at her, canting his head to one side.
Did she honestly expect an answer from him?
He had not been made to keep peace, to hold back the dark.
He was the darkness, the thing to end the Time of Men before it properly began, to unmake humanity, to tear everything they had ever built to shreds with his very, very sharp teeth.
The queen would do well to remember that.
“Yes, the Host rides,” he conceded, meeting Guinevere’s gaze as she turned toward him.
“But recall that Ragrshydan is a bully and a brute. He enjoys war games.” He lowered his voice, choosing his words carefully.
“The High King of the Fey has given no indication he has an appetite for anything other than feeding his ego.”
She smiled at that, and he should not have felt lighter for it, but he did, a bit of warmth seeping into the expanse of his chest. “Thank you, Mordred,” the queen murmured. Then her expression grew grim again, brows knitting together. “All this and still no heir.”
“Gui—” he began, but her name died in his throat when a handmaiden came too close, scattering the floor with petals from her basket.
Glancing closer, he recognized the girl; her father was a powerful lord whose influence had been built on his wife’s cunning.
“Your Royal Highness,” Mordred said softly.
Heeding his warning, Guinevere launched into a lecture about his marriage prospects and his duty to the kingdom. When the woman turned away, the queen fell silent, her brows raised expectantly.
“I could take you to my people,” he continued, even though he knew what she would say.
He had offered many times over the years, and the queen always refused.
A pity—it would be a wonderful piece of leverage.
But Guinevere was too clever for something so obvious.
“They may be able to remedy such issues.”
“And what will it cost, Mordred?” Guinevere spat in reply, sharper than usual. He studied her: the dark circles beneath her eyes, the nails bitten down to the quick. His instinct to press on her weakness battled with his fondness for her, unwillingly cultivated over the past decade spent together.
“You are correct,” he said. “The price will be high, and They will out-maneuver you at every turn. Morgana is the only human I have seen best Them, and They hold that memory close.”
Guinevere’s expression lightened at Morgana’s name for a heartbeat before her mouth twisted into something sour. “Strange that we call Them the Fair Folk.”
He sighed, arching a brow. “You call us that,” Mordred murmured, turning away from the too-bright glare of the rare spring sunlight, “because you hope it might make us so.”
It was a well-oiled exchange between the two of them, some kind of ritual they had not even realized they were developing. The tension between them eased, and Mordred rolled his shoulders.
“Be decent to the girl,” Guinevere said suddenly, as if the Or’Afon maiden had been lingering in the back of her mind, too. “Unravel her secrets. But gently, if you can.”
He smiled at her. “Gentleness is not one of my virtues,” he said in warning, tracing a line down the curve of the chair’s arm with the tips of his long fingers.
“You have no virtues at all, Mordred Pendragon,” Guinevere teased. “And that’s why I ask you to be thoughtful. She is just a young girl from a nunnery.”
Mordred narrowed his eyes, considering the brief interaction with Nyneve Or’Afon. “She held a dagger to my throat and stole my horse, Guin,” he reminded her, hating the way the memory made his mouth curve into something he did not recognize. “I daresay she is not so simple.”
Before the queen could reply, trumpets sounded from the front of the castle.
A guardsman reacted immediately, striding across the room to approach the queen.
The hunting party must have returned, he knew, and Guinevere would be expected to greet them at the following feast. She rose, weariness crossing her features.
“Make sure she is no cause for worry,” the queen said quietly, though her voice still held the raw power of command. “We have enough worries as it is.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Mordred replied for the sake of the guardsman, rising from his chair to bow to the mortal queen.
Her back to the guard, she winked at him, then followed her escort out of the atrium and toward the great hall.
Mordred was left in the slanting sunlight, trying to tell himself it did not help to remember how strangely intoxicating those brief moments had been this morning, the soft curves of Or’Afon’s body against the hard lines of his frame, the ruthlessness with which she had pressed the dagger into his throat, her complete lack of hesitation when she’d shoved him with surprising strength and galloped away on Rook.
He told himself there was no use in admitting that the Fatesong had strummed across his Threads like an old song he once knew. As if all these long years, he had just been waiting for Nyneve Or’Afon to limp into a clearing and drown him in her tide. Unless, of course, he broke her first.
Which was precisely what Mordred planned to do.