Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Mordred
For all her cleverness, Lady Nyneve Or’Afon still hesitated.
But Mordred did not, despite the distracting way her bust heaved against the bodice of her gown.
Instead, he pressed his advantage. After knocking the dagger from her hands, he tucked into a roll on the forest floor.
When he pinned her down, she let out a furious snarl.
He tried to quell the curl of heat in his chest, catching both of her wrists in one large hand and restraining them above her head.
Her eyes tracked to his sword, abandoned nearby on the ground. With a dark smile, he kicked it away.
“Why were you following me?” Mordred asked.
He needed to gauge precisely how much she had seen and exactly how much she had understood.
A difficult task with someone as clever as Nyneve, no doubt.
Particularly so with his knees on either side of her thighs, skirts tangled around both their legs, the rich meadow-green and damp river stone of her scent sweeping over his senses.
If she knew what he was, Mordred would have no choice but to kill her. A pity, but he had done worse things.
“Let me go,” she spat at him, her eyes filled with hatred.
“Answer my questions,” he replied, tightening his grip on her wrists as she struggled, “and perhaps I will.” Reflexively, he wove his glamour tighter to hide his Fey features from her witchsight.
“I owe you nothing, Sir Mordred,” she hissed at him, her hair fanned around her head like a halo of flame. “Release me at once.”
“What did you see?” Mordred asked, testing the ferocity of her waters.
“Do not patronize me,” Nyneve spat, trying to slam her knee into his groin. In response, he settled more of his weight against her, leaning lower over her torso until his mouth was mere breaths from hers.
“Then tell me, Lady Nyneve,” he whispered, a rain-heavy wind sweeping in from the clearing, the meadow’s pale glovewort blooms trembling like tiny faerie bells. “What gives you cause to wield a knife against the Queen’s Champion? For the second time, no less.”
She stared up at him with a deep, fiery hatred that made his heart do something strange in his chest. “The first time,” she replied, “I thought you were a knight-errant. Why would the Queen’s Champion, a knight of the Round Table, skulk around the woods during a royal hunt?”
Nyneve was distracting him, pulling his attention in another direction. He almost enjoyed the game. “I rather dislike hunting for sport,” he replied, surprising himself with the honest admission.
Even more surprising was the way her gaze softened just slightly, the press of her muscles against his hold relenting.
“You said you were waiting for me,” Nyneve whispered, her eyes gone wide.
For the barest of moments, he glimpsed a vast loneliness in her that sang to his own chasm of solitude. “Why?”
He did not have an answer to that question.
Those words had left his mouth before he had even stopped to think, a rare occurrence.
He paused, considering her: the slope of her neck, the wild glint of her gaze, the slant of her collarbones, the curve of her heavy breasts, the freckles dappling her pale golden skin.
If she was indeed playing the blushing damsel or attempting to seduce him as a means of escape, Mordred had to admit Nyneve stood a far greater chance than all the others who had tried a similar ploy.
“Because, my lady,” he murmured, tilting his head to one side, like he might if he were about to kiss her.
Nyneve’s breath hitched, breasts pressing against his chest for a single heartbeat, though it seemed to last for all eternity.
He loosened his grip on her wrists experimentally.
Without changing her expression or relinquishing the softness in the rest of her body, Nyneve tried to slyly pull one hand from his grasp.
He slammed her wrists back to the forest floor and tightened the cage of his thighs. “You were trampling around like a wounded animal,” he hissed at her. “I had been rather enjoying my peace and quiet in the meadow with Rook before you came thundering through the wood.”
Nyneve smiled up at him, her eyes cold. “Quite keen hearing,” she murmured, one brow lifted, “for a mortal man with no magic.”
Ice-cold horror swept through Mordred. She coupled her words with a buck of her hips, trying to unsettle his balance, though she had to realize she stood no chance against him, a changeling wearing the skin of a human.
“What are you implying?” Mordred asked, redirecting the conversation back to his original inquiry.
His throat tightened as his mind tumbled through all the consequences this single, infuriatingly beautiful girl could bring crashing down upon him.
She knew little of what he had been doing in the clearing, if she’d seen anything at all.
Otherwise, he had no doubt she would be interrogating him on every detail.
A shame, really. If only Nyneve had tracked him through the woods just a bit quicker, she might have seen him threatening his own people.
Might have watched his eyes go dark as he held the Fey arrow aloft in his violent hands and told the faerie guards to pass his warning along to King Ragrshydan—or else he would have an audience with the High Court himself, and the results would be considerably worse.
A strange voice deep in his bones told him that Nyneve might have liked to see the breadth of his darkness. But no. She had been too late.
“Let me go, Sir Mordred,” Nyneve demanded instead of answering his question, “and neither of us need suffer the accusations that the other could bring.”
He laughed at that, full-throated and near-genuine. “Lady Nyneve,” he replied, purposefully condescending. “Please. You are new to court with a just-granted wardship. Do you truly believe your claims would hold the same weight as mine?”
“Oh,” she said with an exhale. “Well, then, it shouldn’t be much trouble to release me. It shouldn’t matter if I run to the king and queen, weeping about the terrible truth of Sir Mordred, should it?”
He considered her, wintry claws raking at his intestines.
If Arthur believed Nyneve, no matter how small the chance of such a thing was, Mordred had little doubt the fated war between Man and Fey would start.
And his death date would arrive that much sooner, leaving him with less time to find a way out of destiny’s stranglehold.
“No, your claims would not matter,” Mordred replied, narrowing his eyes at her. “But I can hardly have you making such a commotion, can I? Besides, how might such claims impact your role as the physician’s apprentice? Certainly such a person must be of sound mind. Would you not agree, Lady Nyneve?”
Any playfulness seeped out of her expression, face gone pale beneath her freckles. He thought perhaps his threats had found fertile ground, but instead, Mordred realized a moment too late that he had finally angered Nyneve Or’Afon.
The forest around them went preternaturally silent. Everything held impossibly still for a long, stretched moment. Then a gale rushed in through the trees, nearly flattening him to the ground.
“A storm grows in the west,” she snarled, voice humming, eyes gone silvery-blue. “A river runs not a hundred paces off. Do you wish to see precisely what I can do with such meager means, Sir Mordred?”
His throat tightened as warmth pulsed low in his body. How deeply and wildly he wished to whisper “yes.” To taste her currents even if it drowned him.
“I have no desire to disrupt your place at court,” Mordred replied instead—the strategic move, he told himself, unrelated to how much he enjoyed playing this game with her. “But I must have assurances you also do not seek to disrupt mine.”
Nyneve studied him. She was far too relaxed and at ease with herself, even when pinned to the forest floor by a faerie knight.
She took her time considering, biting her lower lip in a deeply distracting way.
Most of his prey snatched at the first out he offered, scurrying into unfair bargains with glee.
Nyneve, however, was the furthest thing from prey.
It thrilled him in a way he fervently wished it did not.
“You propose mutually assured destruction?” she asked, savoring the words like some fine, foreign fruit.
He smiled at her, baring all his teeth. “Say what you think I am, Nyneve,” Mordred entreated in a low purr. “Say it, and perhaps we will have a deal.”
Her gaze bored into his, all rushing tide and dark, bottomless currents.
Her mouth parted, breasts pressing against his chest as she took a long, measured inhale.
Heat pooled in his groin. “You have made a bargain with the Fair Folk for magic, Sir Mordred Pendragon,” she replied after what felt like an eternity, “and gods know what else.”
For a moment, his mind went blank and formless. Then he managed to process her words, and relief flooded him. So she did not think him Fey, or at the very least was unwilling to voice such an accusation.
He should still kill her, he knew. She would wield this discovery, even though it was not the full truth, like a battering ram against him at every last turn, waiting for the right moment to slide it between his ribs with a well-aimed strike.
But, oh, how he might savor such a tryst.
“So?” Nyneve asked in a barely-there whisper. “Am I correct? At least have the decency to tell me the truth before you try to end my life.”
He tightened his grip around her wrists with one hand, reaching for his sword with the other. He would drive his blade into the freckle-dappled skin of her chest and forget she had ever existed.