Chapter 18 #2
Without hesitating, Rook leapt into the air and dove into the marshy waters.
They slipped below the surface without so much as a splash.
Thanks to his faerie blood and the kelpie’s magic, his mail did not drag him down to the murky depths below, nor did he find his lungs devoid of air.
Mordred simply kept his balance astride the kelpie as they swam lower, lower—far deeper than anyone would suspect the fens went.
“Hold tight, faerie child,” boomed an immeasurably old voice inside the knight’s head.
He did as the kelpie instructed, but also turned to look over his shoulder. He found no sunlight breaking the water’s surface—only the shimmering, scaled tail that Rook’s back legs had transformed into, driving them deeper into the ancient waterway known as the Rivers.
Up ahead, billowing ribbons of kelp parted like a curtain, revealing two more kelpies: a small, silvery one with a single eye and a second more like Rook, large and powerfully muscled, though its coat skewed greenish-gray instead of black.
“The tribunal,” the kelpie explained in his head.
Mordred tried to press his own thoughts into the kelpie’s mind, but he found no entrance. Instead, he sat astride Rook’s back, desperately waiting for the moment he might return to the surface and fight alongside the two mortals he had been stupid enough to let himself care about.
Beneath the blackened waters, Mordred lost any sense of time.
Even counting his own heartbeats proved fruitless, as his mind struggled to perform simple arithmetic.
Rook fell in beside the other kelpies, so close that the knight could have reached out and brushed the small, silvery one on the flank.
He supposed the kelpies were communicating based on their facial expressions: the flattened ears and bared teeth, the gentler bumps of their muzzles, and occasional people-like nods.
Perhaps only a few moments had passed, or maybe an eternity, by the time Rook was done conferring with the tribunal, as the kelpie had called it.
“Myrddin,” the kelpie spat in Mordred’s head, speaking Merlin’s older name with distaste.
Mordred sat up straight with alarm as Rook swung his enormous tail through the air, turning away from the billowing green and the kelpies hidden within it.
“He has new tricks,” Rook continued, sounding like he had his teeth gritted together. “You must rid Camelot of him. You know this, yes?”
Mordred nearly opened his mouth to speak, only remembering the push and depth of the Rivers at the very last moment. Instead, he nodded, hoping the kelpie understood.
Furiously, Rook made his way to the surface, his tail thrashing like a great beast from the depths. All Mordred could do was cling to the kelpie’s broad back and ask himself why Merlin would help the Northmen attack Camelot.
Unless, of course, it was not about the Northmen at all, but instead a display of how essential a sorcerer like Merlin was to the seat of a city that hoped to become a kingdom.
Mordred gritted his teeth, glancing up to find light blooming at the surface.
He grabbed a fistful of Rook’s seaweed mane and prepared himself.
The next moment, the kelpie broke the surface of the water, leaping from the fenlands and onto the marshy shore.
The skies had since opened, the world little more than gray rain.
Through the sheets of water, Mordred could just make out even more Northmen crawling from the fens and making their way up Camelot’s hill.
He narrowed his eyes, trying to ignore how hard the rain pelted them.
Beneath him, Rook had not quite turned back into the warhorse that Camelot knew him to be.
“Rook,” Mordred warned, one gloved hand flat against the kelpie’s rain-damp neck.
Instead of replying with words, the kelpie turned and snapped his teeth at Mordred, taking off at a gallop for the hill.
The knight let out a long-suffering sigh and drew his sword.
Blood and gore and rain turned his vision to little more than smears of color against a gray backdrop.
Still, he was a faerie knight up against mortal men—no matter the enchantments Merlin had laid upon them.
His sword still found its mark, his heart drumming in his ears all the while.
As he cut down two Northmen at once, Mordred wondered what it meant that he did rather enjoy the violence and the terror, the way that such an open attack like this one allowed him to release some of the endless, hungry darkness that was his essence.
The unrelenting press of the night stitched inside his chest often felt as though it might consume him if he did not feed it someone else’s blood.
As Rook took him closer to the base of the hill, Mordred yelled out instructions to the other knights, warning them in a coded language of both the raiders’ numbers and directions, and also that there was an enchantment afoot.
He would have preferred not to; many mortals, particularly noble-blooded knights, lost their good senses in the presence of magic.
But they had to be prepared in case Merlin had more planned.
A Northman launched himself at Mordred from behind, trying to unhorse him.
With a snarl, the knight reached back and wrapped his free arm around the man’s neck, choking him.
Rook slowed his pace as Mordred dragged the raider from the back of his saddle to the front, tightening the vise of his arm as he sliced at another Northman with his sword arm.
Only once he felt the man go limp did Mordred grab him by his braided hair, lift him into the air, and neatly slice his head off.
Wheeling Rook, he threw the Northman’s head at a nearby raider, who instinctively caught the projectile, and then screamed when he realized what he was holding.
Tilting his chin back and staring into the skies, Mordred dared to work faerie magic for the second time that day, just a stone’s throw from Camelot’s walls.
“Glawaros,” he whispered, closing his eyes for a moment, letting the Cynosbythrae—the Eternal Dusk imprisoned by his skin and bones—seep into his command.
The rain bucked against him, another magic-worker’s enchantment trying to slither out of his grip.
Jaw clenched, Mordred pressed harder, letting a second glimmering black Thread of the Cynosbythrae weave into his working.
And just like that, the rain abruptly slowed to a mere drizzle, as if cut by an invisible blade. With a sigh of relief, Mordred opened his eyes, ready to scan the area anew and turn the gentle, sloping southern hill into a killing field.
But all he saw was a deep, endless black, pitch-dark and shimmering with twilight-gray around the edges.
His heart leapt into his throat, fingers closing around his sword in a desperate attempt to rein the Cynosbythrae back into submission.
But the darkness bloomed, its endless power keening, a horrible, eldritch screech building in his ears.
“Mordred,” Rook said, but the kelpie’s deep, flat voice sounded leagues and leagues away, as though he had left the knight floating in the underwater realm of his people. “Mordred, no.”
The faerie knight felt his body fade away, the cage of bone and blood and viscera that had kept the Cynosbythrae caged these past three-and-twenty years succumbing to its sweet, shadowed song.
“Mordred!” someone—not the kelpie—shouted, their voice imbued with power.
Somehow, it banished the endless twilight, like the spark of a flame in a long, cold night.
He flexed one hand, feeling the hilt of his sword between his fingers.
Then the warmth of the kelpie beneath him, the cool air on his face, the smell of blood and steel in his nose. Mordred’s eyes fluttered open.
An axe swung down, far too close for him to parry, even with all the power of the Fey and the luck of the goddesses.
The only thought in his mind was that the raider would never understand it was her blow that opened the world’s oldest wound to the low, hidden place where all shadows came from.
Instead of blood, the End of Days would burst forth from beneath Mordred’s skin and all would bow to the first king this world had ever known: the dark.
Rook screamed the strange, lilting screech of his kind, his muscles bunching in an attempt to escape the danger. But Mordred knew it was too late, even as he reflexively pulled his sword up to meet the axe, which was already wet and shimmering with blood.
And then, at the last possible moment, the eclipse that strained at the edges of his being halted.
An arrow sprouted through the raider’s left eye, the momentum of her axe unnaturally halted, the weapon drooping like a faded flower.
The Northman collapsed to the ground beneath Rook’s hooves.
Mordred heaved air into his lungs, wheeling the kelpie away from the worst of the fighting, his gaze searching the ramparts for answers.
There, standing atop the wall, forgoing all the protection of the hulking stone, stood Nyneve Or’Afon.
Even from here, he could see she was breathing hard, her hair plastered to her skull with rain, blood smeared across her cheek.
Her eyes met his with what he could only call unerring inevitability.
Mordred was not surprised to see that in her shaking hands, the sorceress held a bow.