Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Mordred
“He insulted Arthur,” Mordred said with a shrug, setting his goblet down on the deep windowsill. The evening sun turned the mead to a mirror of gold. “I hardly think you would have acted differently.”
The knight at his side let out a scoff. “Please, Mordred,” Sir Lancelot du Lac spat. “You only went after Bellicus once he threw the dagger at Rook.” Lancelot took a long drink from his goblet, his free hand closing into a fist. “Pity that you value a horse more than our king.”
Mordred crossed his arms, leaning back against the stone wall.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
He was not going to punch Lancelot at the Founding Day feast. “Are you the King’s Champion, Lancelot?
” Mordred asked in a low voice, letting an edge creep into his tone. “Or are you his bastard’s governess?”
Despite a great hall filled to the brim with important court members, Lancelot still lunged for him, sloshing his wine onto the slate floor.
Mordred dodged the knight with a laugh, though he knew it was not quite fair.
What chance did even the most exceptional of mortal men have against an immortal Fey warrior born of a wound torn in the midnight sky by divine hands?
“Lance,” came a voice from Mordred’s shoulder—soft, but with an implicit warning. “Mordred. Why am I always finding you two at each other’s throats?”
Lancelot’s fingers tightened around the stem of his goblet as he looked down at his feet instead of answering King Arthur Pendragon’s question. Mordred, however, turned toward the king, taking another long, lazy swig of mead.
“He is irritating,” Mordred offered Arthur, meeting his gray-green gaze.
The king was dressed in his usual feast day finery: imported velvet festooned with shimmering thread, thick rings on nearly every finger, his boots freshly polished.
And yet, Mordred often found himself taken aback by how ordinary Arthur looked.
Middling height, middling build, middling features, hair a forgettable shade of sandy brown, his naturally pale skin deepened by years of riding into the sun.
It was only his eyes, so bright with cleverness and guile, that seemed worthy of the stories people told about Camelot’s regent.
Arthur sighed, though Mordred caught the way one side of his mouth slanted with amusement.
“Lancelot, you are indeed not his governess,” the king murmured, reaching out to grip his champion’s shoulder.
“He is right on that count.” Then he turned back to Mordred, looking up at him.
“And if you were going to pin Bellicus to the tilt fence with an arrow, perhaps it should have been due to an offense against me, not Rook. No matter how lovely a horse he is.”
“Yes, my liege,” Mordred replied with a bow of his head, knowing this was a gentle reprimand, likely intended to calm Lancelot down more than anything else.
The older knight was directly responsible for much of Arthur’s early successes.
Mordred was always willing to acknowledge Lancelot’s skills and talents, which were not few.
But in Modron’s name, the man had been picking him apart since he was barely ten-and-two. It got old.
“My apologies, Your Highness,” Lancelot replied, sweeping into an even lower bow. Would he truly be the King’s Champion if he did not outdo everyone at every moment?
Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Mordred looked over his shoulder and through the tall, narrow window at his back.
Torches lit Camelot’s winding walls, strung with flower garlands.
Most of the noble-blooded citizens and the court’s guests were gathered in the great hall for the annual feast celebrating the day of Camelot’s founding.
Many things could be gleaned tonight if one stayed relatively sober and sharp while the rest of the court devolved into drunken revelry.
“Lancelot, if you would, please smooth things over with Bellicus?” Arthur said, bringing Mordred’s drifting thoughts back to the present. The king tilted his head in the direction of the entrance archway, where Mordred saw the knight limping into the hall, his wife at his side.
“Why would I do that?” Lancelot demanded, bewildered. “I didn’t cause the problem.”
“No,” Arthur agreed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “However, I should hardly think Bellicus wishes to see Mordred’s face. But a personal greeting from the King’s Champion? That might do the trick.”
Mordred watched as understanding dawned on Lancelot’s expression. The great and fabled knight of Camelot was many things, but strategic had never been one of them.
“Yes, my liege,” Lancelot replied with a nod of his head. He shot Mordred one last look before striding away, the crowd parting for the tall, broad knight, easily recognizable by his white-blond curls and striking green eyes.
“I saw you accept a token on the field,” Arthur said abruptly, leaning against the stone wall beside him.
Mordred scoffed, looking over at the king with surprise. “With all that is happening, this is what you wish to discuss?” he asked.
Arthur smiled, those clever eyes sliding to meet Mordred’s. Then the king shrugged. “You know that I granted her request for wardship,” he said. “Galen is quite pleased with her. It would do me well to see you married. From what Guin shared about the girl, it seems a fair match.”
Arthur had brought up marriage with him quite a few times recently.
For many years, it seemed unthinkable that any nobleman would offer his daughter’s hand in marriage to a bastard son with a dark prophecy hanging around his neck.
But mortals possessed both short memories and ceaseless ambitions.
More than once, he had needed Guinevere’s help to fend off Arthur’s suggested unions with lesser nobles willing to tolerate the stain of his birth in exchange for the weight of his influence.
But the mere mention of one had never brought heat to his face before. “She does not seek marriage,” he said smoothly, setting his goblet down on the windowsill.
“Oh?” Arthur asked, turning to him with surprise, his eyebrows drawing together.
“She brought some herbs to the stable a fortnight or so ago when Awen colicked,” Mordred explained, waving away his own words with his hand. “We conversed briefly. She feels quite strongly about her position.”
Arthur’s mouth twitched in amusement as he held Mordred’s gaze, forcing the knight to contend with the fact that this mortal knew him, and quite possibly saw right through his feigned nonchalance about the maiden.
Mordred, of course, had no father. Arthur had no living son, though he did not know it; that was, after all, the entire point of changelings.
And so here Mordred was for the hundredth time, trapped with the uncomfortable understanding that Arthur Pendragon was the closest thing he had to a father, and that if he had been capable of such things, he might have even loved the man.
“Perhaps you dance with her tonight,” Arthur suggested, looking into the crowd. Mordred opened his mouth to protest, but the king held up one callused hand. “Only because we know she is not interested, and I have been propositioned on your behalf multiple times already this evening.”
“Ah,” Mordred said, crossing his arms.
“It might get some fathers off my back,” Arthur grumbled amicably. Then he grew serious, setting his goblet down next to Mordred’s. “Beyond your report, what do you truly think of this girl?”
Mordred let out a long breath, grinding his jaw.
He had been trying to answer that question for the better part of a week.
“I do not know, my liege,” he finally said.
“As I told you, she claims to be from a nunnery, and the sisters there corroborate her story, but it is all a bit . . . rehearsed. I do believe she is truly of House Or’Afon.
She is proficient in healing in a way not commonly come by in convents.
” He paused, a strange surge of protectiveness for the girl overtaking him.
He ignored it. “I would not be surprised if she had been taken in by one of the old clans after the fall of her house. Her medicinal knowledge feels distinctly Druidic.”
Arthur frowned. “I promised a few clans some degree of sovereignty within the Isle’s borders when I expand them,” he explained, shifting his weight off his bad leg. “It does not surprise me that they would send a pretty little bird into our halls, like you suggested in your report.”
Mordred nodded. “I imagine you read that she sends messages written in cipher back to her people. So far, they are harmless.”
Arthur considered this, raising his hand in greeting to Sir Bedwyr as the knight walked by. Mordred thought the man utterly wretched at best and Bedwyr knew it, so he offered little more than the slightest of nods.
“I think we made the right choice to let her stay,” Arthur said, turning away from Bedwyr to meet Mordred’s eyes again. “Let them think they’ve infiltrated us. Feed them only what we want them to know.”
“It would be much easier if they would simply send an emissary.” Mordred sighed and took another long swig of mead. Much easier than the fire-crowned girl with an emerald gaze that cut into him like a fine blade.
“Can you imagine?” Arthur laughed. It reached his eyes for once, Mordred noticed. “Deceangli Druids at court, doing strange rituals on the jousting tilt, wandering our halls in their ceremonial robes?”
Unease curled beneath Mordred’s sternum.
He examined the king but did not return his smile.
Quite a bold thing for the descendant of a land’s colonizers to be calling its indigenous peoples strange.
Why shouldn’t the Druids wander the halls of Camelot in their robes?
This citadel’s stones were hewn and carved long before Arthur’s bloodline had even reached these shores.