Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mordred
Mordred checked the leathers of the sword strapped to his back one more time as Rook danced impatiently beneath him.
The courtyard of the stables was quiet at this midnight hour.
He fervently wished he could absorb the peace of the scene: blue-black night swathing the sky, torchlights orange against the velvet backdrop, the moon somewhere above, hidden by her gown of clouds.
Against his will, Mordred turned in his saddle to peer up at the castle, hunting for the window where Nyneve might be attending to a bed-bound patient or brewing a medicinal draught or perhaps even smiling at someone the way he so desperately wished she would smile at him.
Even the cool night winds brushing his face could not temper the flush of heat.
“Fuck,” he said to no one in particular.
“Is confronting the High Court truly preferable to confronting your feelings, Mordred?” asked Rook, who had explicitly promised multiple times not to speak while within Camelot’s walls.
“Yes,” he replied, closing his legs around the kelpie. Rook ambled off like a noble lady’s palfrey, not a kelpie-turned-destrier. “This has nothing to do with Nyneve. We have no choice in the matter.”
Mordred had been unsurprised to find a High Summons curled up and tucked into the casement of his window upon returning to his chambers after an alarming meeting with Arthur.
Ragrshydan had apparently used Mordred’s confinement as an opportunity to send a courier to the king’s chambers.
All of Arthur’s advisors and almost the entirety of the Round Table were, to put it simply, out of their minds.
Never a moment’s peace. Mordred wondered, not for the first time, why the people who had the most power were usually the least equipped to wield it.
He had not even had the time to greet his aunt, whom he had not seen in a year.
His body moving of its own accord, he turned and tipped his face up again, this time to find Morgana’s window.
If everything were very different, perhaps they would be sharing cider in her chambers.
Guinevere might join, too. He might feel the cold dark in his chest retreat, just a little.
Something inside of him pulled taut. He was not sure how a creature like him could so desperately seek the company of mortals and the glow of hearthlight.
He had been created for violence and war.
His body was a crypt for the Cynosbythrae, where it would lie in something like fitful slumber until the moment the Oracle had prophesied came to pass.
Rook moved into a trot without Mordred’s command, heading down the sloping hill toward the pleasure park.
It was usually the safest place within Camelot’s walls to open a faerie door, particularly after Merlin’s return, but considering a courier had appeared in Arthur’s chambers, he might have to ride out much farther.
Rook trotted down the main path in his long, floating strides.
Mordred had talked him into wearing barding as a precaution.
They both looked ready for a war neither wanted, covered in blackened mail and stiffened leather.
Thankfully, only guards and patrolling knights were awake and out-of-doors at this hour.
He nodded to them in greeting as he passed, hating the way some of the younger boys looked at him with adoration.
He wanted to dismount Rook and grab them by their aketons, shaking them until they understood they were wrong to admire him.
They should not want to be anything like him.
Mordred Pendragon did not even want to be Mordred Pendragon.
His hands tightened on the reins. Mordred Pendragon was a too-small corpse at the bottom of a river, evidence of Arthur’s penchant for brutality. So who, then, was he?
Mordred wanted to be whatever would make Nyneve want him—whatever part of him caused her to look at him strangely, made her fist her hands in her skirts, made a woman as powerful and sure as Nyneve hesitate. Only for the briefest of moments, the slightest of pauses: one, two, three.
“She has you in quite a chokehold, doesn’t she?” Rook asked over the rushing of the wind and the pounding of his hooves.
“Rook,” Mordred said, “I am begging you. Please be quiet.” He pushed out of the saddle in a half-seat, letting Rook stretch his back. He might very well need the kelpie to run as fast as his legs could carry him.
Together, they thundered into the dark, waiting for the moment the world might slip out of its skin and open a door to somewhere else.
The High Court made him wait, as Mordred thought They might, but he found he did not mind.
He reined the kelpie toward the ancient enchantment in the far northwestern wall and slipped out of the citadel.
The quiet communion with Rook was enjoyable, he found.
In the five years they had been together, the kelpie refused to divulge his true name, arguing that since Mordred did not even have one, he certainly had no intention of giving the changeling that sort of power.
Amused at the memory, Mordred let his body move in time with Rook’s as they galloped down an increasingly narrow path.
He tried to forget the last conversation he had shared with Morgana before she had departed court last winter, after he had conspired to have a nobleman stripped of his titles and cast out of Camelot.
The man had, after all, suggested Mordred’s mortal guardian be burned at the stake for her abilities.
“You were not made with the capacity to feel love, Mordred,” she had told him, braiding her long hair, the way she always did when her hands might otherwise betray her nervousness.
“I do not shrink back from your love. I want to find a way out of your wretched fate. You know that. But any step you take beyond your nature draws attention, and you have so many eyes on you.”
Mordred had rubbed his eyes, placing his elbows on the tabletop.
Unlike when he was a boy, Morgana did not swat at him and scold him about his posture.
“Why can I feel so much, Morgana?” he had asked her hoarsely, not daring to meet her quick, inquisitive gaze.
All those eyes, she had said, as if the sorceress herself did not see far too much.
“I do not know,” came her quiet reply, though Mordred felt her fingers land on his forearm.
“Why make me sentient at all?” he had asked no one in particular. “Why make a weapon in the shape of a person?”
Morgana had sighed from across the table, the warm weight of her hand the only thing that kept Mordred from drowning. “Because you are meant to chafe against your destiny,” the sorceress finally said.
At that, Mordred had raised his head, finally finding it within him to meet her gaze.
“We all are,” she added, sitting up straighter.
“We are soldiers in Fate’s war, it’s true.
But She is more a function than a goddess, and the future balances on our free will.
The Threads do not sing unless we make choices.
If She simply moved us about our lives like toys, the Oracles would be blind.
Fatespeak would turn hollow. Magic itself might leave us, because as I taught you, there is one thing mortal, faerie, and divine magic have in common: you want something, and then you choose to let yourself have it. ”
Morgana’s voice had grown near-ferocious before she had paused and drawn in a deep breath. “It is choice, Mordred, that makes destiny open like a door.”
He had just watched her mutely, wondering whether it were only the hearth, or if her eyes were truly gleaming with unshed tears. “Then why,” he had asked his guardian, his voice an open wound, “do I never seem to have a choice at all?”
The gleam of an unearthly ghostlight up ahead in the dark of the wood drew Mordred from his reverie. He slowed Rook to a trot, eyes seeking the place in the clearing where the world split at its seams. And then he went toward it with all the agency of a moth to a flame.
“What did you expect me to do?” Mordred asked his High King. “My patience is fraying, Ragrshydan.”
The faerie king lunged forward on his throne, pausing only when he seemed to remember that it would take nothing for Mordred to destroy the entire court.
All he had to do was let go. Ragrshydan had long occupied the position of the High Court’s most powerful warrior.
But that had all changed when Nyx and the Morrigan created Mordred.
Ragrshydan had never quite gotten over it, in Mordred’s opinion.
“I expected you to follow the orders of your king,” Ragrshydan spat, his fingernails digging into the arms of the throne.
“Unfortunately, I have two of them,” Mordred replied sharply.
“And you want very different things.” He could not say it had anything to do with the Druid girl.
Could not say that he cared far too much about her being trapped beneath the hill, ceasing to exist as herself and instead becoming something twisted and sunken.
“Ah, yes, the mortal king who carries an ancient faerie blade corrupted by that bastard Merlin’s magic,” Ragrshydan replied. “I am so glad you hold fealty to him. Enough fealty, evidently, that you would injure your fellow Fey.”
Mordred almost straightened at Ragrshydan’s reveal of Caledfwlch’s origin, but held his body still. “I understand I should be punished, my lord,” the knight said, bowing his head. “Might we please just get on with it?”
Ragrshydan leapt from his throne then, prowling down the first two stairs of the dais.
He clasped his hands behind his back, a look on his face that Mordred did not like.
“You can control the Cynosbythrae,” the king mused, beginning to slowly pace.
“I was led to believe that if the mortals created a weapon powerful enough to end us, it would cleave your chest and release a small apocalypse, from which we might rise again. You never mentioned it can be . . . incrementally released.”